“I’m assuming there was a . . .” Emily pauses, searching for the correct word, “a dynamic at work here.”
“Black man, white woman, huge house, middle of the night,” Joe says. “Yes, there was a dynamic. In fact I would hazard to say it was the dynamic that sent Gene into a career of directing puppets. But into that dynamic walks Lee himself, glasses on, fully dressed, asking his wife who had come to see them so late. Oh, Gene, goodness, I didn’t know it was you, so then they have to go through all of that.”
Maisie pushes away her plate.
“Lee sends his wife back to bed and steps out on the front porch, closing the door behind him. Gene tells him he’ll have to go on as the Stage Manager, day after tomorrow. Then Lee asks if Uncle Wallace is dead. When Gene says no, Lee completely relaxes. He claps Gene on the shoulder. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘It might not seem like it but trust me, I’ve known this guy a long time. He always goes on. If he has to walk here from the hospital, he’ll do it. He won’t miss a show.’?”
I pound my hand on the table. “He’s missing the show!” I say this as the person he bled on, the person who went to see him in the hospital.
Joe nods again, a marvel of restraint. “They go in circles for a while, Gene explaining and Lee demurring until finally Gene, who doesn’t feel like he’s been hinting at anything, becomes explicit: The company will not allow Albert Long to return, and as his understudy, Lee will perform the role on Thursday night.”
Then suddenly I do remember. Joe told me this story eons ago. I remember all of it. “This is the best part!”
“Lee just stares at him and finally he says, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Then he goes inside and closes the door.”
“Bartleby!” Nell shouts. “He Bartlebied him.”
Her sisters, smart women both, stare blankly.
“?‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’?” Nell says. “Herman Melville. Look it up.”
“How do you remember these things?” Emily asks her sister.
“Trust me,” Joe says. “It was unintentional on his part.”
“So what happened?” Nell can scarcely stay in her chair. “Who played the part?”
“Your father,” I say, beaming.
“You were the Stage Manager?” Emily is incredulous. They all are. I think Joe is the obvious choice but if we’d made them guess all night they wouldn’t have come up with the answer.
“Gene drove up here the next morning. He said I had to do it, which meant driving down to Tom Lake and back three times a week for the rest of the run. Poor Gene, I wanted to punch him but it wasn’t his fault.”
“Why you?” Maisie asks.
“I knew the part.”
“You knew the whole part?” Nell is in love with her father, her actual father who has saved the play.
Joe gives the back of his head a ferocious scratch, the way Hazel would have scratched her own head with her paw. “I played it in college and then with a summer rep outside Chicago.”
“You wanted to be an actor?” Emily asks.
“For about ten minutes,” he says.
“So wait.” Nell looks at me. “You dated George, and then you dated Editor Webb, and then you married the Stage Manager.”
“I never thought about that.” I look over at my husband and smile. “I married the Stage Manager.”
The hospital was small and cheerful in the way hospitals never are anymore: red brick, red geraniums. I asked for Albert Long’s room number and the woman at the information desk could not have been happier to give it to me. I found Uncle Wallace lying flat on his back and sound asleep, wearing a blue and yellow University of Michigan football helmet. Not a jersey, a helmet. A fat red tube was coming out of his mouth and the tube was tied to the face guard. Had it been a brain tumor that had caused him to bleed? Had they scooped the contents of his skull into a football helmet for safekeeping? I tiptoed to the edge of the bed to see if it was really him.
“It’s disturbing,” the woman in the next bed said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it.”
In fact, it was so disturbing that I’d failed to register the room’s second occupant, a smartly dressed blonde holding an open copy of Architectural Digest. Her bed was cranked to the angle of a chaise longue, poolside.
“Hello!” she said in a stage whisper, then smiled. She was wearing lipstick. She looked so familiar I wondered if she was an actress. We have an ability to spot one another.
“How is he?” I whispered back, not entirely sure I wanted to know. Uncle Wallace was a smaller man in a hospital bed, in a Wolverines helmet. He looked old.
“I don’t know,” she said. “No one around here can tell me much more than he isn’t dead.” The steady beeping of the heart monitor confirmed this.
“Why the helmet?”
She nodded as if to say, Oh, that. “As best as I can understand it, the tube coming out of his mouth is connected to a balloon inside him that’s keeping his esophagus from bleeding. They have to tie the red tube to the face mask of the helmet to keep everything in place.”
I nodded, putting my hand on his wrist. I didn’t like to think about tubes and where they went. No one does.
“Were you at the play last night?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“Turns out one of the doctors from this hospital was in the audience. He said it was a mess. Poor Albert. I’m Elyse, by the way.” She gave a little wave. “Second wife.”
Uncle Wallace had a wife, two wives? “I didn’t know he was married,” I said.
She reviewed me then with an entirely new level of seriousness. “The two of you? What are you, fourteen?”
I held up my hands. “No, no! I’m Emily in the play. We work together, that’s all.”
She closed her magazine and then, for a moment, closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t always make the best choices.” She looked at me again. “Which isn’t to say you wouldn’t have been a delightful choice. It’s just—-”
“I understand,” I said. I didn’t understand, but I was tired.
“He’s got a young wife now, or she’s younger than me but she’s nowhere near as young as you.”
“Is she coming?” The second and third wives in one hospital room, that would be something. For all I knew the first one would be showing up as well.
“They’re in the process of disentangling, Albert and his third wife, which, I’m guessing, is why he put me down as his personal contact. Or maybe Tom Lake just never updates their intake forms. Anyway, I got the call and so here I am.”
“Do you think the other wife knows what happened?”
She shrugged as if to say that wasn’t her problem, which I suppose it wasn’t. “My plan is to get him out of here as soon as I can, take him back to Chicago and get him into a grown--up hospital. No disrespect to Tiny Town here but I think he may need something more advanced than a football helmet.”