“Did you like him?”
I can see my husband remembering. Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer. “Everybody liked Duke. Everybody including me.” His eyes wander back to his plate. He’s starving, and I’ve made potato salad, potato salad being my husband’s truest love.
“You ‘liked’ him?” Emily asks. “There has to be more than that.” The girls’ need for information is voracious, limitless, and Nell has just tapped what they had assumed to be a forbidden line—-did their father like their mother’s boyfriend?
Joe smiles. “Okay, something else about Duke.” He thinks about this and then comes up with the necessary detail. “He could stand on his hands.”
I look at my husband in amazement. “Oh my god, how did I forget that?”
“He could hold on to the seat of a folding chair and go up straight as a ruler. You’d be talking to him and the next thing you knew he was fully inverted. He even pointed his toes. I’d never seen anyone do that before and I haven’t seen anyone do it since. Duke was an athlete, you know. It’s all over his films.”
Duke used to say it was better than caffeine for waking up, all that blood rushing to the brain.
“If it hadn’t been for Sebastian, I bet he wouldn’t have gone for acting at all,” Joe said. “I think he would have played some sort of sport.”
“Sebastian?” Maisie asks.
“Duke’s brother,” Emily says.
“How do you know Sebastian is his brother?” Nell asks.
We are so tired and still, here we are, amazing one another.
Emily fixes her sister with a look and then we remember, of course, that even if she’s outgrown her condition, Emily is still the clearinghouse of Duke information.
“Sebastian was a tennis player,” Joe says. “He was ranked for a minute, wasn’t he?”
I nod. “Juniors.”
“Wait,” Nell says to me, “you knew about Sebastian?”
“I knew Sebastian.”
The girls all begin to speak at once but Joe ignores them, shaking his head at the memory. “To see how good Sebastian was and to know he didn’t make the pros, it always made me think how good the pros must have been. The only person who could ever make Sebastian break a sweat was Duke, and Duke could never beat him. Never. Do you remember that?” my husband asks me. “How hard the two of them went at it?”
I nod. What I hadn’t remembered was that Joe came to watch them play. Everybody came to watch them, which was one of the countless reasons Duke hated to lose.
“Duke had a great game, but he wasn’t good enough to beat his brother, and Sebastian wasn’t good enough to beat, oh, I don’t know, whoever beat him. We all take our place in the food chain.”
“So what did Sebastian do if he wasn’t a tennis player?” Nell asks, though whether the question is meant for me or Joe or Emily isn’t clear.
“He was a schoolteacher, wasn’t he?” Joe asks.
“History,” I say. Saint Sebastian.
Joe nods again, smiles. He has redirected the topic of conversation so deftly that the girls have no idea he’s done it. He crumples his napkin, picks up his silverware and plate. “Good man,” he says. “Good men. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I have a few things left to do in the barn while it’s still light.”
We don’t remind him that he says this every night. We don’t tell him that he’s too tired already and that whatever it is he thinks he needs to do can wait. We don’t tell him because he doesn’t listen to us.
Emily pushes back from the table. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t be crazy. I know how to check on goats.” He puts his dishes in the sink. “You’ve got your story to listen to.”
There was only one table read on the schedule, and even that, I think, was for my benefit. They’d been cooling their heels in Michigan waiting for the new Emily and now that I was there they were ready to work. Duke was out of his chair the minute I came into the rehearsal room, guiding me around the table like it was a cocktail party. “Emily,” he said, “this is your mother, Mrs. Webb, and your brother Wally.” He leaned over and gave the woman who would play his wife a fleeting kiss on the temple. Mrs. Webb was faded and soft, old enough to be my mother had my mother started young, which she would have in Grover’s Corners.
“How do,” Wally Webb said, and offered his hand. He was an actual child, maybe ten or eleven, with straight brown hair and freckles, though the girl playing Rebecca Gibbs was probably sixteen and got the part for being small. I met Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs and George. Georges were bound to disappoint me, and this one was no exception. He was a good--looking guy with a string of Pizza Hut commercials and a Saturday morning Disney show that was about to be cancelled. Instead of trying to hold my eye, he lifted himself halfway from his chair and halfway shook my hand.
Uncle Wallace though, he was another story. He leapt to his feet and planted both hands on my shoulders. “Look at you!” he cried. “Look at our Emily! Thank god you’re here. I’m going to have to hug you.”
Hugged by Uncle Wallace! Oh, but I had loved him as a child. The gruff and tender caregiver of his sister’s orphaned brood. The carefree bachelor, dashing in middle age, had risen to the challenge, leaving children all across America to wonder how much better their lives might be if only their parents were dead.
Uncle Wallace put a rinse on his hair to keep it in the neighborhood of red, and his face had the slightly pulled--back quality I’d come to accept in women when I was in California but still found disconcerting in men. He pressed me to him a beat too long.
“This is Uncle Wallace’s eleventh production as the Stage Manager,” Duke said. “He’s hot off a smash success at a dinner theater in Tempe.”
“I can do it in my sleep,” Uncle Wallace said, giving me a wink. I would have laughed had Duke not squeezed my upper arm, moving me along to meet Constable Warren and Howie Newsome and Mrs. Soames. The smaller parts went to people in the community, a strategy that resulted in good will and unexpected fund--raising opportunities. I liked Duke for taking every bit as long introducing me to one cast member as another. Apart from Uncle Wallace, none of us were famous, after all. We were on the way up or on the way out. Our audience for the table read was a collection of swings and understudies who sat at the far end of the room with their pens and scripts. The actual stage manager, as opposed to the actor playing the Stage Manager, sat with the assistant stage manager. I waved to them collectively and they waved back.
“We should get going,” one of the men at the table said patiently.
“Andthis is our esteemed director, Mr. Nelson,” Duke said, holding out his hand. “Our fearless leader. He’s the one who has no business being here.”