“Well, the usual custom is for the bride’s father, or both her parents, to walk down the aisle with her. Then she joins the groom. That’s all. Pop and Nana gave me away when I married Daddy. I’d like you to do the job this time.”
I thought of the wedding picture on her dresser, of the album of pictures Celia, Grace, and I still went through once in a while. Everybody looked so young then, so different. Grace always asked, “Where was I?” In the last picture, Daddy and Ma are waving goodbye from a doorway, and there’s rice flying all over the place, like a blizzard.
“There isn’t any aisle in our living room,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that. Will you do it?”
“Will I have to say anything?”
“Nope, it’s just a walk-on part.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s okay.” Now I had something else to worry about.
“Thank you, dear,” Ma said. “It means a lot to me.
We heard a car door slam, and then Celia letting herself into the house. As soon as she came in, she began talking about the rehearsal, telling us how everybody screwed up their lines, and dropped things, and that Mr. Rooney almost had a French fit. For once, her non-stop mouth didn’t bother me. It helped to take my mind off myself.
The Play
SCHOOL LOOKED DIFFERENT ON Saturday night—bigger, and more important, like a museum. There were mobs of parents, teachers, and kids hanging around outside the auditorium, waiting to get in.
The people in the cast were in a large art room down the corridor. They’d been there for hours, putting on their costumes and makeup. I wandered away from my family, in that direction.
A couple of senior jocks were standing guard near the closed door to the art room. “Whaddya want?” the bigger one asked.
“My sister’s in the play. I have to see her.”
“What for?”
“I have to give her a message. It’s really important, like life and death.”
They looked at each other.
“Ah, let him in,” one of them said, and his partner opened the door.
It was a madhouse in there. Everyone was talking at once, really shrill and loud, as if they were already on stage and playing to the back rows.
The actors’ faces were so plastered with makeup it was hard to recognize some of them at first. They were like painted dolls, or clowns. Ruth, who was wearing an eyepatch, had smudges of charcoal on her forehead and cheeks. She’d been fattened up with pillows under an oversized housedress and apron. Another girl kept adjusting the pillows, so that the huge bosoms they made shifted from one place to another. Gary had bright patches of rouge, as if he had a fever, and he was wearing lipstick. Why did they have to put makeup on someone playing a little boy?
Then I saw Celia and she saw me. She was loaded with rouge and lipstick, too, and blue junk on her eyelids. She was wearing a Mexican hat, an old shirt, and a pair of cutoffs. “What are you doing here, Bernie?” she asked. She wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see me.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just came to wish you good luck.”
“Don’t you dare wish me good luck!” she cried. “That’s bad luck!”
What was she talking about now, and what did she want me to say? I hope you forget your lines? I hope it’s a big flop?
Gary was standing next to her, putting on a pair of wire-framed glasses that didn’t have any glass in them. “You’re supposed to say ‘Break a leg,’ ” he told me.
Oh, sure, I thought, that’s all I’d need. Celia would probably break both of mine.
Mr. Rooney came into the room and shouted, “Well, team, this is it! Do me proud now, and break a leg!” Kids called out, “Thanks, Mr. Rooney!” and “You, too!” and a couple of girls ran over and hugged him.
Show business is nutty, I decided, going back to the auditorium. They had opened the doors, and some of the people had gone inside. A girl took my ticket and handed me a program. My mother yoo-hooed from where she was sitting with Nat and Grandpa and Grace. We had good seats, in the fourth row of the middle section. Soon Nana and Pop arrived, greeted all of us, and sat down, too. Pop stared through a pair of binoculars at the closed curtain, and then down at my sneakers. Nana fanned herself with her program. I opened mine and read the feature called “Who’s Who in the Cast.” It said that Celia Segal’s last major performance was as a radish in her third-grade Spring Festival.
Grace had a bunch of red roses on her lap to give to Celia after the play. She was very restless. She kept standing up and sitting down, turning to look behind her at the crowds coming in. The roses were taking a terrible beating.
The audience was as noisy and excited as the cast had been in the art room, and I wondered if they’d ever calm down. Nobody looked like a talent scout to me.
The play was supposed to start at eight o’clock, but by ten after, nothing had happened. I saw Pete and Barry in one of the side sections, and Mary Ellen a couple of rows behind them, with a group of girls. I waved to her, and she waved back as the lights faded.
When the auditorium was completely dark, it got quiet. The curtain went up and the stage lights came on slowly, the way the other ones had gone out. There was the Addamses’ kitchen, and their back yard. The scenery wasn’t perfect (most of it had been made in art class and shop), but it had a nice overall effect.
Ruth was in the kitchen, doing something at a cardboard stove. Gary, Celia, and a few other kids were in the yard. Their makeup must have been toned down, because now they looked pretty natural. “That’s my granddaughter,” Nana whispered to the guy sitting next to her. “That’s my nephew,” he hissed back.
The Players began saying their lines, and at first my lips moved along with theirs. I remembered every word from the times I helped Celia rehearse, and I felt I was still helping, even if no one heard me.
Then I got interested in what was going on, and I just sat there, watching and listening. Ruth and Gary were as good as they’d been at our house, but Celia was okay, too. She finally forgot about herself and was being Frankie.
The audience laughed at the funny parts, and was real quiet in between. Only a couple of things went wrong. One of the actors blew his lines, and once, a little kid in the front row stood up and yelled, “Hi, Joey!” to his brother on the stage. The actor was cued, the kid was shushed, and the action continued.
Mr. Percell was great as Honey Camden Brown, fooling around and being very angry at the same time. When he played his horn offstage, it was the best sound I ever heard. I began to worry, like Berenice, that something bad would happen to him.
After the curtain came down at the end of Act One, there was a lot of applause. Nana asked why they gave Celia such an awful wig to wear, and none of us had the nerve to tell her the truth.
There was a beeline for the bathrooms and the water fountain. “I’ll be right back,” I told my mother, and I rushed up the aisle looking for Mary Ellen. I found her in the hallway near the main entrance. Some kids from S.O. were selling lemonade and candy, and doing terrific business. “Don’t you love it so far?” Mary Ellen said. “I think your sister’s very good.”
Some guy bumped into me, spilling his lemonade on my sneakers. “It’s crazy in here,” I told Mary Ellen. “Do you want to go outside?”
It was almost warm out. Spring was finally here, and I felt free without my jacket, standing under the stars.
Mary Ellen asked if Celia was going to become an actress after she finished school. I said I didn’t think so, that she’d always talked about doing something with math—being an engineer, or working with computers.
“How about you?” she said. “What do you want to be?”
All my life, when adults asked that question, I tried to give them answers they wanted to hear. I’d say I wanted to be an astronaut, or a doctor, or a science teacher like my father. The truth was I didn’t know what I wanted to be, until right then. “A director,” I said, surprising us both.
Mary Ellen blinked. “A movie dir
ector?” she asked.
“Maybe. But mostly for plays, I think.” As I said it, I had this picture in my mind of a tremendous stage and people standing around holding scripts. I was there, too, a medium-sized man with a real mustache, saying, “That was fine. Now let’s run through it one more time.” I felt kind of thrilled. “What are you going to do?” I asked Mary Ellen.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Be a vet, maybe. It seems a billion years away, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Say, listen, do you have a ride home?”
“I’m supposed to call my father when it’s over.”
“Well, why don’t you call him and say you’re going with us?” I asked, and she smiled and said she would.
The lights flickered twice, which meant the intermission was over, and we went inside. “See you later,” I said, very pleased with myself.
Nat was standing at the end of our row. “There’s this girl I know who needs a ride,” I told him. “Can she come with us?” He said sure, just as I knew he would, and we sat down.
As soon as the second act began, I let everything but the play go out of my head. I leaned forward and became so involved it didn’t even seem like make-believe. It was like being able to listen in on someone’s secret thoughts. When the curtain came down again, I was sort of surprised to see where I was, and everyone sitting around me.
I bought two cups of lemonade and went looking for Mary Ellen. This time I couldn’t find her. Maybe she was in the girls’ room, or calling her father. Pete and Barry found me, and they kept taking sips of the lemonade until it was all gone. Then the lights flickered. When I got back to my seat, I saw that Mary Ellen was in hers.
In the third act, I found out why my mother had said John Henry was “tragic” that first time I looked at the script. I wished Celia had let me read it all the way through, so I’d have been more prepared for what happens. John Henry and Honey Camden both dead. And Frankie changed in ways that are supposed to be normal and good, but that I couldn’t stand. I felt like Berenice when she said, “Got every reason to be sad.” Why did anything ever have to change?
The applause at the end of the play was loud, and it got louder and louder, like a train coming toward you. People stood and cheered, and whistled with their fingers between their lips. Some of them were crying. The curtain went up, and the whole cast stepped forward, holding hands, and bowed their heads. John Henry and Honey, returned from the dead. Berenice and Frankie—my sister!—bending to take the flowers handed up to them. Their arms overflowed with flowers. The curtain rose and fell, and my hands stung from clapping, but I didn’t stop until all the lights in the auditorium came on, and the magic was over.
Mary Ellen went backstage with us. It was like Penn Station during the rush hour. The actors were congratulating each other, hugging and laughing and crying. I heard somebody say, “You were great!” and somebody else answer, “No, I stank, but you were great!”
Everybody’s relatives told them they were perfect, and no one got tired of hearing it. “Thank you, thank you!” they said.
Celia greeted me like some long-lost friend. When she threw her arms around my neck, her skin was burning hot. I introduced her to Mary Ellen, who told her she was wonderful, and Celia said, “Do you really think so? Thank you, thank you!” Grace held out the roses. They were all wilted and very dark. “Oh, flowers!” Celia cried, as if she didn’t have a load of them already.
There was a cast party at Gary’s house, and Celia was going there in his parents’ car. She blew kisses to us on her way out, like a Broadway star.
Nat stopped the car near Mary Ellen’s house, and my family waited while I walked up the front steps with her. The porch light was on.
“I really loved it, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. We were standing pretty close and I touched her sleeve. We moved together just out of the light. I leaned toward her, and her hair brushed my cheek. She didn’t wear perfume. When we kissed, her lips were soft, and her breath was chocolatey and warm. I had that same slow, melting feeling I’d had that day in Celia’s room when I thought about girls, about Mary Ellen.
“Oh,” she said, so I could hardly hear her, and she pulled back a little. “Well...good night, Bernie.”
“Good night, Mary Ellen,” I answered, but I didn’t go anywhere, and neither did she.
Then another light went on, behind her in the house, and she said “Oh” again, and opened the door and went inside.
Bernard Martin Segal
ON MONDAY, I HAD to get dressed up in a shirt and tie, my good blue slacks, and a sports jacket. My grandfather inspected me, making me walk around the room twice. Finally he removed one tiny piece of lint from the jacket, and we went downstairs.
Grace was sitting at the table, eating a slice of toast in fast angry bites. “Hiya, Gracie old girl,” I said, patting her head, acting a lot cooler than I felt. The night before, I’d stayed awake for a long time, staring at the snowflakes that never fell, and imagining how it would be to have an extra name.
Now Grace shrugged my hand off. “Amanda Belinda Smith,” she reminded me.
“Oh, right, right,” I said. “I forgot.” I shook some cereal into my bowl, and Grandpa’s. A petal from a vase of daisies on the table fell into my orange juice. Celia’s flowers were all over the house. Celia herself was leaning against the wall in a kind of coma. She’d spent most of Sunday that way, when she wasn’t on the phone with her friends.
I went to the refrigerator for the milk, and there were even flowers in there, drooping over the shelves. I put a rose behind one of my ears, and another between my teeth, and I danced to the table with the milk. I didn’t know why I was horsing around like that.
“Infant,” Celia said, coming back to life. She picked up her books and turned to Ma, who was standing at the sink, drinking coffee. Ma was wearing a hat, but she didn’t have her shoes on yet. Celia said, “Why can’t Grace and I go to the synagogue with you?”
“I’ve told you that we’re not making a big production out of this, Celia,” Ma said. “And I don’t want you or Grace to lose any more time from school.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s fair that he gets another day off,” Celia said. But when I sat down to eat, she leaned over me and whispered, “I’m really glad you’re doing it, bonehead,” and left.
After Grace was gone, too, Ma put her shoes on, and she and Grandpa and I drove to the synagogue. It was a gray, cloudy day. Ma parked the car, and we went into the building through a side entrance. We passed the office, where someone was typing. Down the hall, the nursery school was in session, and I could hear a piano, and the high voices of the children singing.
Grandpa knocked on the door to the library, and Rabbi Stein opened it. “Shalom,” he said, and we all answered “Shalom” and went in. He told us to sit down while he rounded up a few witnesses.
It was a pretty ordinary room, and the lousy weather didn’t improve it any. I thought of the main sanctuary with its high, carved ceilings and its stained-glass windows, and how the sun had poured in on my bar-mitzvah day. I stood and looked at some books on the shelves, and then out a window. “It’s starting to rain,” I said.
“That’s good luck,” Ma said. She’d probably say the same thing if it was sunny, or if we were having a tornado. She was just trying to make me feel good.
Rabbi Stein came back in with a gang of people. He’d brought his secretary, Mrs. Spalter; one of the nursery-school teachers; three old men I didn’t know; and Mr. Werth, the custodian. Rabbi Stein asked everybody to face east. There was a desk in front of us, with an open book on it, and a tall silver goblet. Even with the door shut, I could still hear the typing, and the children singing.
“Today,” Rabbi Stein said, “we are honoring the memory of our beloved relative and friend Martin Segal in a unique way. His son, Bernard, will accept his father’s name, in Hebrew and in English, as part of his own. Martin Segal’s Hebrew name was Menachem, which means ‘comfort,�
�� something I hope this small ceremony will impart to all of us.”
Then he raised his hand and held it over my head. “May the One who blessed our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, bless this young man with life and health. May he live to bring honor to the House of Israel, blessing to humanity, and glory to the name of God. Now, in the presence of loved ones, we give to Baruch, known also as Bernard, the additional name of Menachem—Martin. Let it become a name honored and respected for wisdom and good deeds. May God’s blessing rest upon this young man, now and always.”
Rabbi Stein picked up the silver goblet and said a blessing in Hebrew over it, to which everyone responded “Amen.” Then Grandpa, Ma, and I each took a sip from the goblet. The wine was sweet and thick, and yet my throat burned a little when I swallowed it.
“Mazel tov,” Rabbi Stein said, smiling for the first time since we’d arrived.
“Mazel tov, good luck to you,” the others murmured on their way out.
Grandpa squeezed my arm, my mother kissed me, and it was over.
Outside in the parking lot, I realized that I didn’t feel any different. Although I hadn’t exactly expected a miracle, I was disappointed. Maybe it was a dumb idea, after all. Going to the synagogue for the naming didn’t make it more official, either, in spite of what Ma said. And I didn’t even get to take the whole day off. We stopped at home for a snack, and so I could change my clothes, and then Ma drove me to school on her way to work.
I had missed homeroom, math, and phys ed. I bumped into Pete in the corridor, and he said, “Hey, where were you? Jacobs sprung a quickie on us. Can you believe it, so soon after midterms?”
Maybe I should have told Pete about my name. Maybe that would have made it seem more real. But he was gone before I could say anything, and I was headed for science, in the opposite direction.
Mary Ellen was there, wearing a fuzzy yellow sweater. Had I really kissed her on Saturday night?
There were a few minutes left before class started, and I quickly told her where I’d been that morning, and what happened.
Wish You Were Here Page 12
