Imagine braiding the tails of three mice and then throwing in a cat. I don’t think he realized their heads were fastened, or that they would all begin to scream and claw so violently in an attempt to separate themselves and get to me. I don’t think Joe was thinking. He had seen Duke dancing on popcorn as often as the rest of us, but for whatever reason on that night he offered commentary. One of the girls, I’d bet it was Maisie, thought to tug off the rubber band, and in a matter of seconds they were apart, their long hair flashing into shields. They were loud in that piercing way of girls, and Joe, as if to amend his poor judgment, picked up the remote and paused the movie, thus silencing not the children but the topic of discussion. Duke froze there, the bowler nearly slipping off his loose, dark hair, his mouth open, his eyes half--closed in a moment of mock--sexual ecstacy I could have done without. Emily said that Daddy was making it up. Nell wanted to know if Duke and I had gone to school together. Maisie asked when he was coming to our house, the very thought of which lit the three of them from within, their favorite movie star soon to arrive on a winter night because why else would their father have picked this moment for the great reveal? When is he coming? they cried.
What was it Lear says at the end? Never, never, never, never, never.
We might as well have cut each girl a heavy slice of chocolate cake soaked in espresso, then stood back to watch them lick the plates. They were relentless. How had it happened, they wanted to know. Why hadn’t I married Duke instead?
On that long ago night our girls were still years away from having boyfriends of their own. I tried to remember what I thought dating meant when I was their age: ice cream, movies, walking home from school, the dread and desire that surrounded the mystery of kissing. In summer stock, Duke slept in my bed because I had the infinitely superior room—-a closet, a dresser, a window that looked out over Tom Lake, my own tiny bathroom with a shower we could just barely fit into together. We lay in that double bed and ran each other’s lines. We lay in that bed. When ambition overcame us, we played tennis or swam in the lake. We got drunk after shows or got high. We ate the pita bread I kept in the nightstand for the times we were hungry and couldn’t bear the thought of getting up. Sometimes he would go for coffee and bring it back to bed, or I would go. We were on the stage or in that bed, forgotten cigarettes burning down to the filters in the ashtray. We were dating.
My three little girls stared at me, paralyzed by expectation. Winter, and they had seen every movie in the basket three dozen times. It appalled them to think there was a story in this house they didn’t know.
“We were in a play together,” I said. Truth. And they already knew that for a brief time when I was young I had wanted to be an actress. We had a VHS of that as well.
“So you didn’t date him,” Emily corrected. “You knew him.”
I shrugged. The girls believed we were so old then, their father and I, that they took into account we might not remember our own lives. “We dated while we were in a play.”
He carried my books. He walked me home. We kissed.
When they finally went back to watch the end of the movie, Duke was no longer just the Popcorn King. He was the man who had once eaten ice cream with their mother. “Don’t you want to watch with us?” Maisie asked.
“I’ve seen it,” I said.
“That doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It’s good.”
“Maybe it’s upsetting to her,” Emily said in a stage whisper, though it was Emily who insisted they start the movie over once it had ended because she wanted to be able to think about Duke as someone I knew in the first part of the film as well as the last. In the beginning, Duke is the banished King of Popcorn who returns in disguise so that he might overthrow the interloper and reclaim his rightful place. That always struck me as the most ludicrous part of the story, the idea that, despite the newsboy’s cap and ragged jacket, anyone would fail to recognize Duke.
Nell looked away from the screen to see how I was holding up. She mouthed the words I love you, information not intended for anyone else.
Joe said it too, when, after more and more of the same, we at last wrestled our children into bed.
“I may have to kill you just to make sure it never happens again,” I said to him, pulling my sweater over my head, that terrible moment when the warmest article of clothing comes off.
“I don’t think a mistake of that magnitude could be made twice.”
“Let’s not find out.” I was shaking with cold and he took me in his arms.
“I had no idea they would care,” he said. “Or at least I didn’t think they would care that much.”
“Or you didn’t think at all. You just said it.”
I could feel his chin nodding against the top of my head. “That’s what it was.”
The high tide of Duke hung around the house for weeks after that, and while it slowly receded, it never went away. The girls began spending their allowance on People magazine, Duke being a reliable fixture for paparazzi: at the opening of the Met season, coming home from the gym with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, with an admirable mutt on the beach, with an admirable starlet on the beach. The girls started watching his cop show, Rampart, in reruns. They devoted themselves to the Duke movies that were already in the basket because I refused to buy more. Their favorite was a boneheaded remake of The Swiss Family Robinson called Swiss Father Robinson which featured a mostly shirtless Duke on a gorgeous desert island, his snug pants tattered just above the knee. His wife claims that Duke, an internationally famous architect, scarcely knows his own children, and so she stays in Zurich while he takes their four adorable offspring on a sailing adventure by himself. After the brief inconvenience of a shipwreck, he builds his family a chalet in the trees, with a slide that drops the plucky little ones into the bay when they need a bath. A bright red parrot with a yellow breast sits on his shoulder while he splits open coconuts for breakfast, the toddler secured to his back with a sarong. Despite his complete lack of experience, Duke turns out to be a miracle of a father, teaching the children to read and love the land and master carpentry. The most disappointing scene in the movie is when his wife finally shows up to rescue them from paradise. Disappointment, the children learn early on, is embodied by the mother. Two years later, Emily decided Duke was her father, Maisie decided Emily had been possessed by Satan, and Nell decided she wanted to be an actress who would never come home again, though that might have happened anyway. Thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the world, the man I’d spent a summer with took up residence in our home, and still I thought of him remarkably little.
4
Hazel’s yellow head pops up in the tall grass. She’s come back to wait for Maisie but when she sees me she decides I am enough. Together we take the dirt road past the wall of hemlocks and white pines to the barn. The cherry trees are so burdened that I don’t know how we’ll get the fruit picked before it rots. Most of the crew trailers are empty, three families down from the usual ten or twelve. Joe has divided the acres and given everyone their parcel to work. We wave to each other at a great distance. I leave a tray of sandwiches at the sorting table in the morning and pick up the empty platter at night. Emily’s ever--helpful boyfriend, Benny Holzapfel, is no help at all since he is working sixteen--hour days on his own family’s farm. Holzapfel—-meaning crab apple, or the crabby people who hang out near sour little apples—-is a selling name but does not suit our warm and generous friends. You could spend years in a New York apartment never knowing the people who live two feet away from you, but live on an orchard in Michigan and you will use the word neighbor to refer to every person for miles. You will rely on them and know their children and their harvest and their machinery and their dogs. The Whitings have an old German shepherd named Duchess, though she could have just as easily been Princess or Queenie. Despite her wolfish appearance, she is a sweet girl. Duchess has been known to walk all the way to our back door in the summer. I give her a bowl of water and some biscuits, and after a nap on the warm flagstones, she heads off again.