Tom Lake(65)
Joe, who had come in late to the story, put his arms around her. “They won’t take Nell,” he said. “Not if they’re looking for you.”
“Daddy, they’re trees,” she gasped. “They don’t know the difference.”
So Joe got up and brought back her sister, sound asleep. We made a space for both of our younger girls in the bed. We didn’t think of Emily because Emily had her own room and surely, pear trees knew better than to mess with her. It all comes back as I walk through the orchard at night, the four of us in bed, and how quickly we fell asleep.
When I crest the hill it’s Duke I see, his enormous face rising like a moon in the distance. Across the Otts’ field the farmers and their families and the pickers all sit apart from one another, one family to a blanket, maybe two dozen blankets spread around, the light of Duke pouring over them. I’m too far away to hear what he’s saying but I can make out the sad cadence of his voice, which blends into the soundtrack, which folds into the evening saw of crickets. He is a movie star, an actor. He is incalculably more than the person I knew, and he is that person as well.
I don’t remember exactly what part of the movie we’re in. He’s staring out at a barren landscape. He says something to the woman beside him without facing her. Her hair is long and tangled and it blows in her eyes. I saw The Promised Man ten years ago when it first came out and I never wanted to see it again. I don’t remember the character’s name, but everything we need to know about the trouble he’s in is there in his face. He loves his wife, his two beautiful daughters, of this I am certain. His family doesn’t know he’s lost his job. They don’t know how much he’s been drinking. He’s been making mistakes, then stealing to cover them up. The action of the film takes place in the brief window of time between the people Duke is working for finding out what he’s done and his family finding out. He’s trying to give his family a few perfect days before it all goes to hell, or he’s trying to maintain his denial for as long as he can. Even this far away I cannot bear to see how afraid he is. That had always been Duke’s magic, that with all his beauty and charm he was able to let the audience see how small he was, how terrified, how deeply in love.
We never had time to go to movies when the girls were young, or not the kind of movies that required a babysitter. The concept of date night had yet to reach northern Michigan, so the few movies we saw in the theater revolved around singing cartoon dogs. Because Emily was at the height of her fervid misconceptions about her paternity then, she insisted on seeing Duke’s new film, and since it was rated R, we said no. Every morning she’d leave another review on the kitchen table that she’d printed off and highlighted so I would know that not only was it Duke’s best film, it was a culturally important film. He was long past his stints in cop shows and family features by then. He was a serious actor, and this was the picture that would forever cut his ties to that earlier career we had all enjoyed.
I told Emily she wasn’t going.
“How can you tell me not to see it when you don’t even know what it’s about?”
“That’s why there’s a rating system, because parents don’t have time to see every single movie in advance of their children.”
“I’m not asking to see every single movie. I’m asking to see this one.”
Around and around. I used to wonder if this was what parents felt like trying to shield their daughters from Elvis. Duke was everywhere: His picture in the paper, his voice on the radio, his reruns on television, his movies in the movie basket. I don’t know why I tried to fight it. Maybe I should have taken her to the theater and bought two tickets, because I had no sense of whether I wanted to keep her from seeing an R--rated movie, or if I wanted to keep her from seeing another Duke movie, or if I just wanted to prevent her from having something she wanted because she tortured me every minute of the day.
“Let’s just go and find out if it would be okay for her to see it,” Joe said finally, the two of us in bed. “It wouldn’t kill us to go to a movie.”
“That movie?”
Joe folded me in his arms. “We’ve seen Swiss Father Robinson seven hundred times and it didn’t kill us. At least this one is supposed to be good.”
And so we drove to Suttons Bay for a noon matinee on a Tuesday when the girls were in school. You can do things like that when you’re the ones who own the farm, and anyway, it was winter. We thought our biggest risk was that a foot of snow would fall while we were inside and bury the car. We never considered that the movie might destroy us. I started crying halfway through and kept up a steady weeping until the end. Joe handed me his handkerchief in the dark but then later took it back. We stayed through all the credits, the closing song, trying to pull ourselves together before walking back out into the blinding winter sun.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Joe said, using a stack of thin paper napkins he had taken from the concessions stand. He gave half to me and I mopped my eyes.
“Was it sad because we knew him or would anyone have been destroyed by that?”
“Both,” he said.
What I had felt, standing out in front of the Bay Theater with the wind whipping off the lake, was that I had seen Duke’s end, his shame and his failure, his letting go.
But of course that wasn’t it at all. It was a movie, an incredibly convincing performance in a movie. Duke was nowhere near his end. He was an actor at the top of his game, and the fact that he could make me so believe him when I knew better only proved how good he was. This was the role he’d win his Oscar for. Viola Davis opened the envelope and said his name. He took the stairs two at a time and embraced her, whispered something in her ear that made her laugh, then turned to the audience, holding the golden statue above his head.