Tom Lake(60)

“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.”

“That’s so nice of you.” All I knew about divorce was what I’d seen in movies or read in novels. I couldn’t remember any cases where the second ex--wife steps in to take her former husband home from the hospital.

Elyse turned on her side to watch his labored respiration. “We’ve got kids,” she said. “They’re in their twenties now but they’re still kids, you know? They love him. They grew up watching Uncle Wallace. They think he’s a fantastic father because he played one on TV.” Why should I know this? Why should I know anything? Because we’d spent six weeks standing so close together, saying the exact same words day after day? I knew how naive it made me look to be shocked by everything. Uncle Wallace didn’t have kids. He had his sister’s orphans, and the Stage Manager, well, the Stage Manager didn’t have anyone because he was essentially God. I asked her if I could do anything to help.