“Aren’t you being awfully hard on Lee?” Emily asks. “It was only the first day. He wasn’t planning to go on.”
Nell agrees. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, and anyway, they wouldn’t have hired an understudy who was that bad. We know Nelson’s too smart for that.”
It is already hot. I am already tired of cherries. “Funny you should say that, because the understudies were great as a rule. The company was very rigorous about the understudies. Except for Lee. Lee was horrible.”
“Why would they hire someone horrible to cover the lead?” Nell asks.
“Because Lee owned a trucking company. His family had a big house right on the lake. They hosted fundraisers—-real money, major donors. Lee loved the theater, god bless him for that. He didn’t want to be an actor, he just wanted to hang out with us. Maybe it was strange. He used to bring popsicles and prosecco to rehearsals sometimes. Everybody loved him then.”
“So they sold him an understudy part?” Maisie asks.
“That would be a crass way to put it, but yes. They sold him the part.”
“Nelson?”
“No, no,” I said. “He wasn’t given any choice in the matter. Of this I am certain.”
“But why did he have to be the Stage Manager?” Nell says. Nell, who takes all injustice to heart. “The Stage Manager is too important.”
Joe and I have taught our daughters how to grade a plum and pick a stone from a goat’s hoof and make a piecrust, but I fear we have taught them nothing of the world. “Because you don’t go around at a cocktail party telling people you’re the understudy for Constable Warren.”
“Wasn’t he at least smart enough to be afraid Uncle Wallace might get sick?” Maisie asks.
“Lee was talentless but he wasn’t stupid. Uncle Wallace had been at Tom Lake for fourteen consecutive summers and had never missed a performance. That man was like a dancer. He always went on.”
“He went on drunk?” Emily asks.
Big old blustery Albert Long, red--faced and red--haired. My heart seized with unexpected affection at his memory. “Drunkish. He found a way to make it work.”
“And what about the George?” Nell asks.
“The George? What about him?”
“Was he bad?”
“Forgettable,” I say.
“As bad as Lee?” Maisie asks.
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m sure he was fine. I only mean that I’ve forgotten him.”
“Which means what? You can’t remember his performance?” Nell is concerned that this is further proof of my diminishment. To my children I am unimaginably old.
“I mean the kid who played George is gone,” I say, but they don’t understand what I’m talking about. Duke is as close as the cherries on the tree, as is Uncle Wallace, for reasons that are no doubt connected to how things ended. Lee I remember less as a person and more as a story, and George I do not remember at all. There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart--stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.
9
Yes, it was true that Uncle Wallace was a drunk, and his understudy hid in the farthest corner of the theater where not even the light could find him, but plenty of other things were true as well, such as the fact that Albert Long embodied the Stage Manager as completely as he had embodied that long--ago bachelor uncle. Duke might have made fun of him—-dinner theaters, bombastic speeches, lecherous asides—-but when he was onstage there was nothing to complain about. Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him, just the way Emily’s were written into me, the difference being he’d found a part he wouldn’t age out of. When, in the third act, Uncle Wallace took me back to my mother’s kitchen, he looked at me with so much compassion it stung my eyes. So what if he smelled like gin? So what if he went out for a cigarette and wandered away? The A.D. always managed to find him, guiding him back like an errant lamb. On the stage he was able to bring himself into focus, so that even as the people who knew him said he was different this year, said he was so much worse, we continued to bank on the fact that he had never missed a show. Why wouldn’t the past be the future as well?
After rehearsal, Duke and I stretched out on the grass beside the lake, sharing a cigarette and a beer. “The man takes every bit of joy out of alcohol,” Duke said, tipping the bottle back. “I could hate him for that alone.”
“Somebody told me he plays Lear at another summer stock at the end of the season, that he’s always trying to get them to do a production of it here but he can’t get anybody at Tom Lake interested in Shakespeare.”
Duke lifted an eyebrow. “He’s the one who told you that.”
“Maybe.” I took another drag. One week and my smoking had already vastly improved. “I think he’d make a wild Lear, stomping around screaming. He’d be completely heartbreaking in the end.”
Duke sat up and pulled me into his lap. “And you’d be his little Cordelia, is that what you’re thinking?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Put down the cigarette.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re dead. You’re Cordelia and you’re dead and I’m going to show you how Uncle Wallace plays Lear.”
I twisted the cigarette into the grass and died right there in his arms. Duke held my lifeless body against his chest, rocking me gently as his hand snaked up under my T--shirt. “Never, never, never, never, never,” he whispered in my hair, squeezing my left breast gently with every declaration. Truly, it was all we could do to make it back to the room.
Our Town contains a single kiss and it’s not between Emily and George but between Emily and her father, the newspaperman. She pecks his cheek in the first act. There’s also exactly one erotic moment in the play, in the second act, just before George and Emily marry. Emily begs her father to run away with her so that they can build a life together, just the two of them. “Don’t you remember that you used to say—-all the time you used to say—-all the time: that I was your girl! There must be lots of places we can go to.”
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d planted that kiss, said those words, and never given any of it a thought.