Having known him for all of an hour, I assumed Duke would be a ham, but his Editor Webb was perfectly restrained, a dignified, matter--of--fact man, even when he had to say words like Satiddy, likker. It’s hard not to make hash of those things, but Duke was the kind of natural Ripley would have liked. Not only was he natural, he remained present for the whole reading, unlike George, who managed to check out the very instant his lips stopped moving. Duke paid attention to the other actors, and I flattered myself by imagining he paid the most attention to me.
If it was my gift to play younger, Duke came off older than he was. He was twenty--eight that summer, but as my father, anyone would have thought he was on the other side of forty. Over the course of his career, Duke played older, then for a stretch he played his age, then he played younger, all the while staying in the same exact place. I never knew how he pulled that off.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever. That’s what I was thinking at the table read, how I would lose her.
I said my lines with my script closed. I thought that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb were teary, though their voices held. Even George, who doesn’t have a line of dialogue in the third act, turned to look at me. If this was going to be my last time in the part, I was, as Veronica would say, going to kill it. Plus, I held out a flickering hope that if I did my very best work at Tom Lake, word would get back to New York, and that the Emily they’d chosen for the Spalding Gray production would be gently done away with, and even after this I’d have the chance to play her one more time.
When we finished, Mr. Nelson smiled. “Friends, let us breathe an enormous sigh of relief. We’re going to have a play after all.”
We clapped for one another, and the swings and the understudies clapped with us. The people who’d shaken my hand three hours before came back to shake it again. My mother--in--law, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d been especially good in her part, held onto me a minute more. She told me she’d been Emily once. “Probably before you were born,” she said. “I was nothing like you. You’re one of those Emilys that people will talk about for years. They’ll say, ‘I saw Lara Kenison at Tom Lake when she was a child’ and no one will believe it.”
Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.
“Sure,” Maisie says, stepping into the kitchen while we listen. “No, no, it’s fine. We’re finished. I’ll come over.” She ends the call and looks at us. “The Lewers have a calf with intractable diarrhea.”
“Does it ever occur to you to try to protect us while we’re eating?” Nell asks.
“Protecting you means putting my clothes in the wash and taking a shower before I come into our room. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you what happened.” She turns to me. “Pause the story, will you? I don’t want to miss the part about Sebastian.”
Emily stands up from the table. “If you’re stopping the story then I’m going home. You just reminded me I haven’t done laundry in two weeks.”
“Then I’m going to go to help Dad.” Nell stands as well.
“Good night, ladies,” I sing. “Good night, ladies, good night.”
“Keep Hazel here, will you?” Maisie asks. “I don’t want her getting into this.”
“Understandable. The three of you go. I’ll clean up.”
They stack their dishes in the sink and head out the door together, Maisie holding the end of Emily’s braid the way one elephant will use its trunk to hold another elephant’s tail. Nell slips her finger through Maisie’s belt loop. Joe and I used to say that if lightning struck one of these girls all three would go up in flames. “How did you never tell us Duke had a brother?” Nell says to Emily.
“At the time in my life when I found out about Sebastian I wasn’t speaking to you,” Emily reminds her.
Hazel rushes the door just as it’s closing and Maisie turns and pushes her gently inside. “Stay, stay. I’ll be right back.”
But Hazel doesn’t believe her. When they’re gone she scratches and cries until finally I crouch down and pet her ears. “Hazel,” I say to her very quietly. “Hazel. She’s coming back. I’ll stay here until she does. Hazel, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something important, you need to be brave.” I then explain to the dog how I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn’t any good, but now I’m starting to think it all fell apart because I had ceased to be brave. “If this were a movie, I’d be drowning in regret now. But I’m telling you, Hazel, it doesn’t feel anything like regret. It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.”
The entire life span of summer stock is four months—-four months birth to death—-so time must move faster now. Duke was the person I knew best at Tom Lake. We had been alone together in my room. I had seen him act and felt moved and surprised by what he was capable of. He had seen me act and so waited for me at the door while the others said good night. We had known each other for a matter of hours, but they were summer--stock hours, which in the outside world would have translated to a solid six months.
“I promised I’d show you the lake,” Duke said.
“Did you?”
“I know it’s a lot to manage,” Nelson said to me at the door, “getting thrown in this way. Let me know if I can help. Not that you need help.” Nelson had a thick brush of hair that must have been blond when he was a child, and his eyes behind his glasses were blue and bright. Directors as a rule did not lead with such friendliness, and I was interested to see if it could work.
“She doesn’t need help,” Duke assured him. Duke who was now my agent. “Unless she needs help finding the lake.”
“I think we’ll all remember the switching--Emilys--debacle as a lucky break.” Nelson shook my hand again. “My number’s on the schedule.”
I thanked him. I told him good night.
“？‘My number’s on the schedule’，” Duke said once we were well out of the building. “As if that isn’t the oldest line in the book.” He shook his head in disappointment.
“No,” I said, “？‘I promised to show you the lake’ is the oldest line in the book.”
If the implication was that the director was trying to pick me up, I had missed it. Duke was trying to pick me up, and that was all that mattered. Uncle Wallace had given it a shot as well, saying that he knew a lot more about where the lake was because this was his fourteenth summer here. “Let me show her the goddamn lake,” he said.