by Daniel Klein
“And how time flies while bodies are being dismembered.”
Wendell offers his daughter a smile touched with both pride and reproach. He has always thought Franny over-dramatized things—a trait of her mother’s exacerbated by her Ithaca theater training. But he also admires that pungent mouth on her; she is what his father used to call, “a firecracker.”
Franny scribbles a few grocery items on a note pad, then rips off the page and hands it to her father.
“Jesus, tofu again?” Wendell says.
“She’s got to get some protein in her,” Franny replies. Last spring, when she turned sixteen, Lila declared that she was becoming a vegetarian, and although Franny approves in principle, she is worried sick that it is the first sign of anorexia, a condition that is currently sweeping Grandville High School.
“That stuff puts my bowels in an uproar,” Wendell says.
“So get yourself a steak.”
Wendell shrugs and stuffs the list into his back pocket. Both of them know that he will not buy himself a steak, and not because of the annoying complication of cooking two separate dinners. Rather, Wendell will not buy himself any red meat because of the sickened expression in Lila’s eyes it would elicit. It does not really matter to him anyhow. He looks forward to his once-a-week dinners alone with Lila, even if lately she does not have much to say to him. Wendell is more than content simply to look across the kitchen table at his granddaughter. That act alone suffuses him with gratefulness.
After he leaves, Franny—honoring the new town ordinance—steps outside her shop for the first of her self-allotted, six cigarettes of the day. A few leaves have turned yellow on the tops of the poplars that line Melville Street. That, and the sudden absence of vacationers, put her in an inward mood. Franny is devoted to the change of seasons and to the changes of temperament that accompany each of them. She believes that people who live in single season climes, like the tropics, must lack a living sense of history. True enough, but then September is here again so quickly that it feels like last fall’s melancholy never completely vanished. Franny smiles at the distinctly autumnal cast of her thought.
CHAPTER TWO
For the twenty-six years since Sally deVries passed away and Emile retired, subsequently selling the family home and moving to Arizona, Wendell deVries has been the projectionist and sole manager of the Phoenix Theater. But the tasks and routines that thrilled him as a boy and young man no longer do so. One reason is that in 1987, the heirs of Jay Cosgrove, Isaiah Smith, and William Watts, along with Emile himself, sold the theater to a chain headquartered in London. In itself, that would not have troubled Wendell—unlike his forebears, he never had an appetite for ownership. But along with the deed, the London group also took remote control of the basic operation of the theater: what films it would run, when, and for how long.
Yet Wendell still cherishes the place. He has a dog-like dedication to familiarity. The walls of the projection booth are his personal museum: a framed, hand-colored photograph of the original Melville Block investors; posters for All About Eve, The Court Jester, and Flame Over India; the instruction manual for his first projector, the Brenkert BX-80; several Vitagraph cards; a good twenty out-of-date calendars; half a dozen pictures of Franny growing up, plus a half-dozen more of Lila. Layers. If at times, idly peering out of the booth’s six-inch window, Wendell glimpses a patch of paint hanging from the Phoenix’s vaulted ceiling or a tear in the back of a velour-covered seat, he sees it as natural history—maturation, not deterioration.
Without informing the Phoenix’s overseas owners, Wendell does not show films on Tuesday nights—which, in any event, are slow nights at best. He simply subtracts a few ticket sales from Saturday and plugs them in on Tuesday on his weekly receipt report. On Tuesdays, the Grandville Players take possession of the theater while Wendell feeds and, if she is in the mood, talks with his granddaughter. Later, Wendell is likely to pull a book from the shelf in the living room, there to read and smoke until Franny comes home.
* * *
After buttoning a denim work shirt over her T-shirt, Franny sets up ten folding chairs in a circle on the stage. The few footlights still operable are on, as are the cyclorama floods illuminating the stage’s brick rear wall. The lighting secludes the stage from the rest of the theater transforming it into an intimate space, although obviously anyone lurking about in the dark could plainly see what is happening onstage. Live drama depends on this pretense—intensely private moments shamelessly exposed to public view—and Franny often wonders if this fundamental deception is theater’s main allure for her. God knows, she is packed with hidden thoughts and feelings she yearns to expose.
Franny is sitting in the chair nearest the back wall munching on a Milky Way when the newest member of the Grandville Players arrives, Babs Dowd. She is an angular woman with straight, shoulder-length, auburn hair who wears wool sweaters and tweed skirts undoubtedly bought at the same Lenox dress shop Franny’s mother fancies. As Babs mentions at virtually every meeting, she joined the Players the very day she and Michael moved up permanently to Grandville. She says that she always dreamed of being a part of what she calls “a small regional theater” because it has so many more possibilities than the money-driven theaters of Manhattan. Franny is fairly sure that this is just another way for Babs to say that the theaters of Manhattan never expressed any interest in her, but Franny is not bothered by that. She likes Babs’s verve. Most of the other members of the troupe are long past verve.
“How’s Lila?” Babs asks, striding down the center aisle with a calfskin attaché case swinging at her side. Babs memorized the names of every family member of the Grandville Players on her first day.
“Good. Last time I saw her,” Franny replies. She knows that Babs has two children of her own, young teens boarding at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, but she can never remember their names so she is unable to reciprocate the pleasantry.
“I guess I’m early,” Babs says, seating herself directly across from Franny.
“Right on time. The others are late.”
“But it does give me a chance to ask you something,” Babs goes on. “A favor, actually.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, I know we’re kind of casting about for our next production.”
“That we are,” Franny says. In truth, Franny has a play very much in mind for the next production—Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Although it requires a large cast, Franny is sure they could pull it off. She is drawn to the play by its pertinence to the current political climate, now even more relevant than to the McCarthyism that was gripping the country when the play was originally produced. But choosing productions is a democratic process, even if in the past Franny’s choices have always prevailed.
“There’s a new play I was hoping we could consider,” Babs is saying as she snaps open her attaché and withdraws a bound manuscript. She stands and delivers it to Franny.
The title is How’s Never? and the author is one Barbara Perkins. This playwright is new to Franny, but before she can inquire about her, Babs says, “I cannot tell a lie. It’s my maiden name, the name I write under.”
Franny smiles. “I didn’t know you were a playwright.”
“Only for about twenty years. It was my major at Brown.”
“That’s terrific.” Franny knows better than to ask what other plays Barbara Perkins has written and where they were produced. She opens the manuscript to the second page, the settings and cast of characters. The entire story takes place in a bunker deep below the White House, and there are six characters—the President, the Vice President, each of their wives, a Southern evangelical preacher, and someone identified as “Clown/Angel.” It is this Clown/Angel that distresses Franny right off the bat; it strikes her as both avant-guard and derivative, a perilous combination. But she cautions herself not to prejudge the play. “Maybe we could give it a reading some evening.”
“That would be wonderful,” Babs says. “I’ve never heard it re
ad out loud.”
“How about tonight?” a voice in the dark calls out. It is the operatic voice of Sally Rule, a Stockbridge matron who was one of the original Grandville Players. Sally is a popular amateur actress in town, even if her range is limited to uppity ladies of a certain age. People still stop her in the street to rave about her portrayal of Lady Britomart in Major Barbara four years back. Sally Rule and Franny’s mother, Beatrice Cosgrove deVries Hammond, both belong to the Lenox Garden Club.
“Actually, I have something else planned for tonight,” Franny says as Sally approaches the stage. “But let’s read it next week for sure.”
“Oh dear, why do I get the feeling you’ve got something grim and politically correct in store for us?” Sally says to Franny, smiling grandly as she seats herself next to Babs Dowd.
“The Crucible,” Franny says. “Arthur Miller.”
“As I said,” Sally says, winking broadly at Babs.
But Babs, as earnest and well-mannered as her husband, counters with, “I’m afraid mine’s political too.”
“And grim?” Sally asks.
“Well, it’s supposed to be funny,” Babs replies ingenuously.
“Thank God for that,” says Sally. “Three cheers for funny!”
Franny already can feel the evening slipping away from her.
* * *
That morning, Wendell spent an entire half-hour in the food co-op garnering tips on palatable ways to prepare—and disguise—tofu. Wendell has been intrigued by the co-op from the day it opened across the street from the old, abandoned grammar school. He likes the retro feel of the place, especially the barn board corner that displays rice, dried beans, and nuts in wooden barrels. And he particularly likes the women who work there, open-faced, unmade-up women in their thirties and forties who favor flannel shirts with the top three or four buttons unfastened. Even if many of these women are relocated urbanites, for Wendell they exude a rustic sexuality that he finds lacking in Grandville women today, even in those who are pretty. That includes his sometime bedmate, Maggie Bello. Maggie definitely turns Wendell on, but she hardly ever inspires affection, and never poetry.
A forty-something redhead in produce enthusiastically recommended smoked tofu in sesame marinade stirred into Bangkok Temple Instant Pad Thai Noodle Mix. “My kids love it,” she told Wendell. “And it feels so good in the mouth. Slurpy.”
Slurpy? For reasons he could not account for, that word—and the delight with which the sexy, middle-aged redhead uttered it—made Wendell, a man approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, feel whimsical. Following her to the Asian packaged goods shelf, he asked her name.
“Esther.”
“I’m Wendell deVries.” Here, Wendell executed a modest bow while holding his container of smoked tofu above his head in both hands, a maneuver he had seen Keanu Reeves execute in Little Buddha.
Esther laughed. “I’ve seen you at the Phoenix. I’m a movie nut. Now that my kids are old enough to stay home alone, I sneak over whenever there’s a new film.”
As he made his way up the hill to Mahaiwe Street with Binx jogging at his side, Wendell replayed the little encounter in his mind several times, including the hints that there was no husband in Esther’s home. It was unlike Wendell to muse in this way. Decades ago, he had stopped thinking of women as candidates for anything more than casual friendship or dispassionate sex. And indeed, by the time he reached home, he had completely stopped thinking about the redhead in produce.
His Thai tofu extravaganza was a big hit with Lila. “Far better than anything Mom makes,” she declared. Wendell is dishing out her second helping, when Lila says, “Who are the deVrieses anyhow? I mean, way back.”
Not only does the question come from out of the blue, but it is posed with more animation than Lila has exhibited in weeks. Like her mother, Lila is tall and slender, with fair skin and luminous blue eyes, a pretty girl in the estimation of everyone in Grandville, but particularly the boys of Grandville High School. Yet in contrast to Franny, Lila’s facial expressions rarely vary. Her countenance is generally blank, almost stony. Not surprisingly, she has never evinced any interest in the dramatic arts.
“How far back?” Wendell replies. “Before the Phoenix?”
“Way before that,” Lila says. As if she has caught herself being overly spirited, she delivers these words in a monotone, looking down at her bowl of noodles.
“Well, they’re Dutch, for starters. Came over in sixteen hundred-something and settled in Rensselaer. Indentured servants.”
“That’s like slavery, isn’t it?”
“They certainly had a thing or two in common. Like you couldn’t run away or they’d go after you. And their masters—Patroons, they were called—weren’t above giving them a few lashes if they didn’t hoe the line.”
Lila seems pleased with this answer, so much so that the corners of her bow-shaped lips rise ever so slightly. “Any blacks?”
“How do you mean?”
“In the family. The deVrieses.”
“Not that I know of,” Wendell says. He grins, then immediately regrets it when he sees Lila’s eyes narrow. “But it would probably be a good thing if we did. Mongrels have more spunk.”
“We’re doing a black history unit in social studies,” Lila says seriously. “Some guy from UMass came in and gave a talk about Berkshire blacks. There was a black family named deVries in Grandville.”
Wendell is amazed. His father never mentioned this, nor had any of his college-educated siblings. “Could be that deVries was a common name back then,” he says.
“It’s a slave name,” Lila says. “Slaves took their owners’ names because they didn’t have any of their own.”
Wendell nods, still astonished. “Could be even closer than that, I suppose. Slave owners were known to father children with slave women. Maybe we are related.”
There is nothing subtle about Lila’s smile this time. Obviously this is what she was hoping to hear—that there could be African blood coursing in the pale blue veins that are visible on the undersides of her long white arms. Wendell wonders why this intrigues her more than her connection to her father, a man from Paris whom she never met, nor ever showed any interest in knowing.
“Why don’t I try to look it up?” Wendell says to his grand-daughter.
Without responding, Lila takes their plates to the sink and rinses them. Then she heads for the stairs and her bedroom, her thin shoulders hunched forward.
* * *
Around the corner from the Phoenix, where the Grandville Players are now venturing into a cold reading of the new Barbara Perkins play, How’s Never?, Michael Dowd is sitting at a window table in Santorini’s, having a drink with Terry Cyzinski, tennis coach and guidance counselor at Grandville High School.
Michael went to Harvard and, like many of that college’s graduates, has incorporated those four years in his late teens and early twenties deep into the core of his middle-age identity. This, in spite of the fact that at Harvard he had been a middling student who might very well have learned as much or more at a state college, and the fact that he was far from a social success in Cambridge. Although he possesses a British surname and lineage, Dowd comes from a long line of undistinguished petite bourgeoisie, so Harvard, Fair Harvard, feels to him like the pedigree that was otherwise denied him.
In Manhattan, Dowd joined the Harvard Club of New York City where he became a member of the Speaker’s Committee and signed on as an alumni interviewer of Manhattan applicants. The latter responsibility was particularly gratifying. He would interview nervous prep school and high school seniors in an alcove off the club library, waiting patiently as they formulated answers to his questions—answers that they desperately hoped would set them apart from the others. The process brought out something warm and paternal in Michael. He felt magnanimous, even wise. When fellow interviewers compared notes in the club dining room, they would marvel at how smart and accomplished the new crop of applicants was, and invariably someone would sa
y, “Lucky I’m not applying today, I’d never get in.” Michael would join in the laughter that followed, but the observation always made him feel more lacking than lucky.
When the Dowds decided to move to Grandville, Michael made inquiries at the club about Harvard’s presence in western Massachusetts. He was told that there was a Harvard club in Springfield, but no building, so it met—twice a year—in a banquet room at a Marriott hotel. But, as luck would have it, the college’s admissions committee was just now actively seeking alumni interviewers in the area, except they were not calling them ‘interviewers,’ they were calling them ‘recruiters,’ a designation that Michael found inspiring.
It is this inspiration that has paired Michael Dowd with Terry Cyzinski this evening. Michael phoned Cyzinski at Grandville High just yesterday, identifying himself as the new Harvard recruiter for the area. Cyzinski had laughed and said, “You got to be kidding—since when does Harvard need to recruit anybody?” A perfect response, Michael thought.
In person, Cyzinski looks more like a linebacker than a tennis coach. He is at least six-foot three, and broad of chest and shoulders with a double hump of belly ranging just above his belt line. He has a large, open face and a hail-fellow manner that is not quite offset by a hint of wariness in his eyes. For the meeting, Cyzinski is wearing a blue, button-down Oxford-cloth shirt, a navy blue tie embroidered with pheasant and quail, a brass-buttoned blazer, and gray flannel slacks. Michael Dowd, on the other hand, is wearing corduroys and a sweatshirt he picked up at his twentieth reunion. The sweatshirt’s only ornament is a single, crimson, capital ‘H’ over the left breast, a touch that Michael treasures—Harvardian understatement.
The waitress is taking their drink orders. She is one of the Ukrainian belles who seem to work in every bar and restaurant in town to pay their way through the local two-year college. Dowd recently heard that a dean at that college, Grandville Community, discovered this source of full tuition-paying students through a cousin of his in the foreign service. These Ukrainian kids just wanted to get anywhere in the USA for a year or two; Grandville Community College was running at a substantial loss, but had an underused quota of student visas at their disposal. Zip, zip, the connection was made and everyone seemed delighted, including the restaurant owners and patrons of Grandville. The tall, young blonde hovering at the side of their table is certainly delightful to behold.
