Tom Lake(7)

“And Jimmy was George?” Emily asks.

“Clearly, Jimmy was George,” Maisie says.

“Jimmy was George,” I say.

“Was he as good a George as Duke?” Emily asks. Oh, the look that comes over her when she says Duke’s name. I wish I’d had the wherewithal to lie about everything, continuously, right from the start.

“Duke never played George.”

Maisie raises a hand to object. “Who was he then?”

“He was Mr. Webb.”

“No,” Nell says. “No. At Tom Lake? Duke was George.”

“I was there. None of you were born.”

“But all three of us can’t have it wrong,” Emily says, as if their math outweighs my life.

“You remember it that way because it makes a better story if Duke was George and I was Emily. That doesn’t means it’s true.”

They mull on this for a minute.

“But that means he played your father,” Maisie says.

As if on cue, their own father walks in the back door, his pants bristling with chaff. Hazel raises her head and barks until Maisie shushes her. Hazel barks at the entrance of any man.

“Workers,” he says to us, clapping his hands. “Go to bed.”

“Daddy, we’re old,” says Nell, the youngest. “You can’t send us to bed.”

Emily, our farmer, Emily, who plans to take all of this over when we are old, looks at her watch. “Mom was just about to switch to montage.”

“What’s the story?” he asks, pulling off his boots by the door the way I’ve asked him to for years.

The girls look at one another and then at me.

“The past,” I say.

“Ah,” he says, and takes off his glasses. “I’ll be in the shower. No excuses in the morning though.”

“Promise,” we all say.

And so I endeavor to take us through the boring parts as quickly as possible.



My senior year I signed up for drama club. I played Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker with a very small seventh grader named Sissy who had to be reminded not to break the skin when she bit me. We slung each other all over the stage. The big spring musical was Bye Bye Birdie, and I played Rosie DeLeon. No one would call me a singer but I didn’t embarrass myself. I got into Dartmouth and Penn without financial aid. I went to the University of New Hampshire, where the yearly bill, including tuition, room, board, books, and fees, came to just over $2,500 after my merit scholarship. In college, I was no closer to knowing what I was going to do with my life than I’d been in high school. The University of New Hampshire didn’t offer fashion design and I still hadn’t signed up for chemistry. I kept the application for the Peace Corps in my desk. My grandmother had given me her beloved black Singer for graduation, a war horse, and I made pocket money shortening the corduroy skirts of sorority girls. The days filled up with British Literature and Introduction to Biology and piles of sewing. I fell asleep in the library, my head turned sideways on an open book. Acting never crossed my mind.

Or it didn’t until my junior year, when I saw an audition notice for Our Town tacked to a cork board in the student center. I was there to tack up my own notice: Stitch--It, Speedy Alterations. My first thought was that it would be fun to register people for the play, and my second thought was that I could try for Emily. There would be so much pleasure in saying those words again, and I understood the metrics by which one’s social sphere was enlarged by theater. Even as a junior, most of the kids I knew in college were the kids I’d gone to high school with.

In any given year more girls who had once played Emily attended the University of New Hampshire than any other university in the country, all of us thinking that we had nailed the part. What I wouldn’t have given to be in the room for their auditions, but this time I lacked a plausible excuse. I waited in the hallway with my number, wearing my brother’s Wildcats sweatshirt for luck.

Luck was everything.

Bill Ripley was in the audience on the night of the third performance. He was a tall man with perpetually flushed cheeks and a premature edge of gray in his dark hair that gave him an air of gravitas. He sat in the fifth row with his sister, his voluminous wool dress coat draped over his lap because he hadn’t wanted to wait in line for the coat check.

I called him The Talented Mr. Ripley because I’d seen the paperback once in a bookstore and liked the title. I thought of it as a compliment. Everyone in my family referred to him as Ripley--Believe--It--Or--Not. Both sobriquets contained an element of truth, which is not to suggest that Ripley was a sociopath, but rather that he had an ability to insert himself in other people’s lives and make them feel like he belonged there. The believe--it--or--not part was self--evident.

People don’t get scouted in Durham, New Hampshire, and Ripley was no scout. His sister lived in Boston, and he’d come to visit for her birthday. What she wanted, what she’d specifically asked him for as a present, was that they drive up to Durham so that he could see his niece, her daughter Rae Ann, in the role of Mrs. Gibbs. Ripley’s sister believed her daughter had talent, and she believed her brother owed her the consideration of a look.

I hadn’t known Ripley’s niece before the play, and even after a slew of rehearsals and three performances I still wouldn’t say I knew her. She played my mother--in--law, and like every other girl in that production, Rae Ann had wanted to be Emily and so held my success quietly against me. That she won the role of Mrs. Gibbs spoke in her favor, and that she was completely flat in the part was hardly her fault. It’s tough for a nineteen--year--old to be successful as a middle--aged mother pantomiming the feeding of chickens. Ripley cut her plenty of slack and still, he never turned his eyes to her. He hugged her after the curtain call and told her she was magnificent, then sent her off to the cast party with her mother, saying he would be along shortly. He loitered in the hallway with his coat, and when a girl came along he asked her where he could find Emily.