The issue on comedy was just on the newsstands, and on Sunday morning the McWilliamses lay around the great room reading aloud.
In the kitchen, Noli was making blueberry pancakes on the griddle of the industrial stove her grandchildren had recently given her, as if her days of serious cooking were just beginning. She was eighty-three and losing her sight, but her capacity to flee into a world of the imagination had given her a kind of immortality. She patted the Virginia sausage into small flat circles, stuck her finger in the Vermont syrup, and, licking it, strained to overhear the conversation of her grandchildren.
“Read the beginning again,” Oliver was saying to Charlotte.
“The McWilliamses live in New York City,” Charlotte began, “but they spend their holidays in Bluemont, Virgina, on a farm they share with their grandparents.”
Oliver looked over her shoulder, reading along with her.
“They are living the way they have always lived since their parents were killed when a bomb exploded in the lunch car of the Espresso from Milan to Rome in June 1974. The children were seven, five, four, and one.”
“Psychic trauma obliterates children of vagabonds,” Julia said, assuming a thick accent.
“Your parents were not vagabonds,” Noli called from the kitchen.
“Your father was a painter and your mother was…” An old memory flickered across William’s face. “She was going to be a doctor. She would have been a doctor.”
Sam leaned against the table, his arms folded tight across his chest, uneasy listening to his sister read.
“Plum and Jaggers, the invisible parents of this comedy team, may as well be dead,” Charlotte was saying. “Like others of their generation who grew up hooked on the issues of the sixties, they have opted out of family life. The kids are in charge and the spirit of the day is chaos on the edge of disaster.”
“Does it say anything negative about the set?” Oliver asked.
“Nothing negative. Just a description.” Charlotte sat up with the magazine in her lap, leaning against the couch, reading. “The story takes place in the dining room of a row house located in an imaginary neighborhood in a city which could be New York or Los Angeles or Chicago but is referred to as the City of Brotherly Love in honor of the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia.”
“What does it say about us?” Julia asked. “Especially Sam.”
“Sam McWilliams, not only the writer of Plum & Jaggers but its centrifugal force, is mute.”
Noli carried a tray of butter and syrup in from the kitchen, setting it on the table, stopping to listen.
“With the exception of an occasional facial tic stretching his mouth into an exaggerated O, Sam’s demeanor is that of an intelligent guard dog.”
“Does it happen to say we’re any good?” Oliver asked.
“I haven’t gotten there yet,” Charlotte said, looking over at Sam. “But we are very good, aren’t we?”
“We’re good enough,” Sam said softly.
“Very good. Excellent,” Oliver insisted. “Say it, Sam.”
“Very good, then,” Sam said, in spite of himself.
And they burst into applause, filling the room with laughter.
“But also lucky,” Sam added, when they had finished clapping. He was anxious about good fortune, with its ultimate promise of extinction. “We’ve been very lucky.”
After the success of Photo Album at the Atlantic Theatre Company in the fall of 1993, Plum & Jaggers appeared a few times on David Letterman and twice on Saturday Night Live. They did a show in Chelsea that ran most of the winter of 1996, and that was followed by a short-run holiday show called The Last Thanksgiving, which played at La Mama to wonderful reviews. Except for a trip to play at the Edinburgh summer festival, they continued to live in New York City, mostly in SoHo, subletting place after place, six months at a time, always temporarily.
In early 1997, NBC Television asked Sam to write a half-hour pilot for Plum & Jaggers. Pleased with the results, the network requested thirteen more episodes to air live for half an hour after Saturday Night Live, beginning in late October. By the time the article was published, Plum & Jaggers was a critical success, with a growing audience of mostly young adults. In early winter, Sam was asked to write nine more episodes, which would continue the series into the middle of the spring and likely promise it a place in the fall 1998 season.
“Plum & Jaggers is rare comedy,” the reporter had written, “hyperbolic episodes at the far edge of sanity, combining the psychological strangeness of David Lynch with the plasticity of cartoons.”
“I don’t exactly understand what he’s saying,” Julia said. “I thought there was supposed to be something sweet about the show.”
“There is,” Oliver said. “Cartoon characters have a kind of innocence.”
“Like dogs,” Julia said.
“I’ll read how the paragraph ends,” Charlotte went on. “At the corner of the street where comedy turns ultimately serious, these dark stories are about a family of children, forever in exile, turned inside out.”
“Perfect,” Julia said, standing in the center of the room. “I welcome you to the Plum & Jaggers Family Freak Show.” She bent in an exaggerated bow. “Broadcast live Saturday at midnight from our living room to yours.”
They were at Bluemont Farm, where they spent time whenever they could. The place, with its old clapboard farmhouse and two-story barn in the process of renovation, was on fifty acres of rolling hills an hour outside of Washington, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, close enough for the smoky hue of the mountains to form a soft line of color above their house.
The Rappahannock River flowed through the northern section of their land. Oliver, always drawing landscapes on the backs of Sam’s scripts, was planning to design houses for each of them, which would be built on a hill overlooking the Rappahannock, backing onto the dense evergreen woods. There was the barn, reconstructed as a lodge with an open kitchen and great room on the first floor, an office in the loft above. There was a small one-bedroom cottage where Noli and William lived, which Noli insisted reminded her of Grand Rapids, but that was a matter of wishing and insufficient memory, since the house in Grand Rapids had been brick, built in the twenties, a conventional center-hall colonial. And the ramshackle farmhouse, where the McWilliamses slept, though most of the time they were working or eating or simply talking out stories for Plum & Jaggers in the barn.
When William wandered into the open kitchen, Noli was stacking the pancakes and sausage on a platter, humming along with the music.
“The radio’s too loud,” he said.
“I thought you were losing your hearing.” She picked off the edge of one of the pancakes and ate it.
“I can hear perfectly well,” he said, carrying the coffeepot to the table.
“Grandfather’s hearing is selective,” Oliver said.
They slid into their chairs at the table, and Noli tapped her glass. She loved to tap her glass, and then she’d fold her hands, looking over the table at all of them as if she had a significant announcement.
“What I want to know is why you all have glasses in the picture in the magazine when you don’t need glasses to see?” she asked.
“Except Charlotte,” Julia said.
“But Charlotte has always worn glasses,” Noli said.
“Charlotte got glasses before James and Lucy died,” Sam said. “We were in Israel, and the glasses had heavy black rims.”
“They wear glasses to give the impression of intellectuals,” William said.
“And to suggest that with glasses we see into the heart of things,” Oliver said. “That’s Sam’s idea of it.”
“The glasses are a metaphor,” Sam said.
Noli nodded happily. She didn’t know much about metaphors. She wasn’t even interested in glasses or why her grandchildren wore them on the tele
vision show when they could see perfectly well without them. She had only wanted to hold her place in the community.
“Well, I for one very much like the idea of glasses,” William said. “You have an eye for the particular, Sam. It must be genetic.”
After breakfast, they walked along the river. The weather had been unseasonably cold and dry, the river, running low over its rocky bed, the bright noon sun streaked gold across the water’s surface. A perfect winter day. The sky was high and cloudless, the air clear. The river meandered in a narrow ribbon through the bottom of the property. Walking single file, the McWilliamses followed the path to the end, where the next farm began. Black Angus cattle, clustered against the fence, stared dumbly across the split rails, mildly curious about their arrival.
“Shall we go to the dance hall?” Julia asked.
“Dance hall?” Oliver asked.
“The vegetable garden, idiot brother of mine.” Julia grabbed his hand.
“Why not?” Oliver said. “It’s a nice day for dancing.”
“Although a little cold,” Charlotte said.
And laughing at nothing at all, they ran up the hill to the middle of the property, where a horse barn, falling in on itself, divided what had once been hay fields on one side and corn fields on the other, the residue of stalks still evident, and a vegetable garden with a wire fence to protect the vegetables from deer.
“Do you ever think what you might have been if we hadn’t done Plum & Jaggers?” Sam was asking Julia.
“A stripper. It’s in my genes.” Julia laughed. “A rockstar groupie.”
“Not a chance,” Oliver said.
“I know I wouldn’t have been anything that required school,” Julia said. “And I wouldn’t have been a mother. That’s Charlotte’s job.”
“Charlotte would have been an English professor,” Oliver said.
“Or a translator or a linguist,” Julia added. “Something serious.”
“A fifties housewife putting out frozen dinners in front of the TV,” Charlotte said. “The stay-at-home suburban mother drinking white wine, watching the soaps.”
“That’s the mother I’ve always had in mind,” Oliver said.
“How can you be a mother if you’ve never had one?” Julia asked Charlotte. As the youngest, Julia was the mascot, the beloved pet, allowed to roam on a long rope, but watched over like a child in a kibbutz whose economic principles of sharing extend to children. She didn’t think about mothers in the way that Charlotte did. She didn’t miss her own mother or long to be one herself.
“I dream a perfect mother,” Charlotte said, slipping her arm through Julia’s. “Lucy sitting on the end of my bed at night watching me while I sleep.”
“I suppose when I think about my perfect mother, I think of Sam.” Julia laughed.
The office, which they called the viewing room, where the McWilliamses watched videos of past Plum & Jaggers shows looking for their mistakes, was on the second floor of the barn. The room was large, the walls painted a rich ocher, with soft old couches and chairs, and books stacked randomly on the worn Oriental rug. Sam’s desk, where he wrote his scripts, working first in longhand, overlooked the river. There was a long table in the center of the room where they had script meetings and rehearsals for the next show before they returned on Tuesday mornings to New York.
The room was lined with framed newspaper accounts of the terrorist explosions that had taken place since 1974, Sam’s collection after years of saving the stories from the papers. On the walls, written in black in Oliver’s elegant hand, were the names of the people who had died, including James and Lucy Lucas McWilliams, as if Sam’s memorial to the dead were a public record of names, like the memorial to the Vietnam dead in Washington, and Sam the designated historian for terrorism.
These names were the ones Sam used for the characters he developed, the extras who came in and out of the McWilliamses’ dining room in Plum & Jaggers, acquaintances of theirs—delivery boys arriving on the set with pizza and an order of live parakeets, solicitors in drag distributing religious pamphlets, an elementary-school teacher tied and gagged under the dining-room table, the town policeman stripped to his undershorts and dumped into the stockpot simmering on the stove. Walk-on parts in the show—Amy and Saul and Marigold and Mavis and Marshall and Samantha and Gloria and Serena. Sam’s personal memorial.
Photographs of James and Lucy and their children hung on the walls as well, but for the article in Currents, the photographer had selected a close-up of a photograph of James and Lucy taken before they were married, standing on the bank of a river in Scotland, which Sam recognized from one of his father’s shoreline paintings. They were wearing Wellingtons and heavy parkas and bright-colored scarfs around their necks, like bears, their arms around each other. The white-capped river in the distance splashed over rocks in a sea-spray umbrella, ocean swells of river over the black rocks.
This particular photograph hung next to the large window facing the river. In the reproduction in Currents, the frame included Lucy and James and, beyond, the view over the Rappahannock, the spread of evergreen, the rocky bluff in the distance, the sometimes gentle river wandering through the northern counties of Virginia.
In the morning the viewing room got full sun from the east. At night, the shaded, winter moon spread silver light and the room took on a mysterious hush, a feeling of isolation—like the bomb shelter Sam had in mind under the garage promising their small family an escape in the event of nuclear disaster.
But this shelter, high over the river, seemed to extend into the heavens, above the ordinary traffic of daily life. In this place surrounded by his treasures, his photographs of James and Lucy, his family, his scripts, the whole of his life collected in a barn near a village that was not even marked on a map of Virginia, Sam felt, maybe for the first time, a kind of tenuous safety.
Late on Sunday, before their daily script meeting, Sam was rereading Currents when Charlotte came into the viewing room and closed the door behind her, sitting down in a chair across from him.
“Noli loved the picture of James and Lucy in the magazine. We’ve made them immortal, she says.”
“How can she see it?” Sam asked. “She’s blind as a bat.”
“She sees what she wants to see.” Charlotte rested her chin in her hands.
“She’s getting old and sentimental.”
Sam shrugged, putting the article facedown, looking off into the distance. “Did you like the piece?”
“I did, very much. Didn’t you?”
“I thought the reporter did a good job.” He got up from the couch, pacing, his hands in his pockets, settling finally at his desk. “But when I actually saw the piece in print, I was afraid I’d made the wrong decision by agreeing to the interview.”
Sam had been amazed and flattered that Plum & Jaggers was chosen for a piece in Currents, pleased with the reporter particularly and the photographer the magazine had sent. But at that time he had failed to imagine what it would be like when the article was actually on the newsstands, on the kitchen tables of strangers who would discover where the McWilliamses lived, who could form opinions. He felt a sudden unease, a draft of cold air as, taking the manila folder of ideas for new shows out of the top drawer of his desk, he looked over his notes for the meeting.
Charlotte was watching him, the way his dark hair fell over his face, the way he turned his head at an angle when he was thinking.
“Don’t you ever wonder about getting married?” She had just reread the section of the article referring to the absence of their personal life. “I mean, have you ever considered a normal middle-class existence?”
“I haven’t,” Sam said.
“Sometimes I do,” she said. “I’d like to have a boyfriend or a house. Maybe even a baby.”
Sam looked up from his notes. “You’ll have that chance,” he said, an edge in his tone
of voice. “We’ll keep doing Plum & Jaggers until it fizzles out. Everything on television fizzles, and we will, too. Then we’ll live our normal middle-class lives.”
But he couldn’t imagine a time when the four of them would set up separate lives.
After Charlotte left, Sam called Rebecca Frankel in New York. It was close to four, the sun falling quickly, darkness spreading through the room, the weight of winter bearing down. At first the line was busy. When he phoned again, hoping to complete the call before his siblings arrived, a woman answered, her voice familiar, almost a lilt, ending on a high note. “Hello?” she said, and he hung up.
Sam had never spoken to Rebecca Frankel, but he had often called, sometimes listening to the machine—“Hello. You have reached 496—6050. Please leave a message”—sometimes hanging up after her breezy “Hello?” Occasionally, in years past, her daughter, Miriam, would answer in a voice that alternated between sullen and bad-tempered. “ ‘Lo,” she’d say, and Sam would put down the receiver. He imagined Rebecca as Noli had described her the evening she saw her at the Atlantic Theatre Company. Dimpled cheeks, thick, curly hair, dark eyes. He liked to think of her as thirty-two, his age, stalled in the year he first learned about her, a pretty woman, Semitic, with fierce brown eyes and fine wide cheekbones. Her voice on the telephone was girlish.
I loved the show, she wrote in the postcard she sent after the performance at the Atlantic Theatre Company. It’s subtle and heartbreaking.
She got in the habit of writing postcards once or twice a month, and Sam wrote back, taking hours to compose a paragraph, hoping to communicate everything between the lines.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 11
