“Okay, people,” he said, clapping twice even though he had our full attention. Pallace and her partner let go of one another’s hands. “We’re going to get started. Albert will be here momentarily. Let’s go ahead with the understudy. I want a full day. Lee?”
A man in a light--blue golf shirt raised a tentative hand.
“Do you need a script?” Gene asked.
We were all looking at him. “I—-” he said, then stopped and held up his script.
“That’s good,” Nelson said.
“I don’t know the part yet,” Lee said.
“It’s early. You’ll be fine. Hopefully you’re just going to read for a few minutes. Nothing gets an actor out of bed like the knowledge that the understudy is reading his part.”
Everyone laughed politely except the man in the golf shirt. We were meant to sit in the row of chairs on either side of the stage whenever we weren’t in the scene. We went to sit in them now, leaving Lee out there alone. When the moment came for one of us to talk at the kitchen table or the drugstore soda fountain or in the cemetery at the end, we were to carry our chairs across the empty stage and put them in places marked with gaffer tape on the floor, but for now everyone was sitting on either side, waiting. When we had taken our places, Nelson told the understudy to begin.
Lee was in his sixties, his hair gray, his glasses heavy. He had the sunburnt look of a man who took his golf shirts seriously. When the play opens, the Stage Manager is alone. “This is a play called Our Town,” he says. “It was written by Thornton Wilder.” He then goes on to name the director, the producer, the actors in major roles, but Lee read the script exactly as it was written. “Directed by A,” he said, and then later, “In it you will see Miss C . . .”
I’d seen a lot of people read the Stage Manager, but I had never seen anything that approached this. I wanted to go back to New Hampshire and tell those men with their handkerchiefs and pipes what a good job they’d done. Surely Spalding Gray was speaking these same words in a rehearsal now. I willed myself to hear his voice, even though I’d never heard his voice before. Here in Michigan, the words were clearly painful for Lee to say, and they stuck a needle into the confidence of every person in the room. Maybe I wasn’t the adult who’d won the lead at an important summer stock in Michigan; maybe I was a talentless kid who’d been hustled out of the room because I was taking up too much of the air. “Send her to Michigan!” is what they’d scribbled on their notepads during my audition. “She won’t know the difference.”
Duke, in the chair next to mine, ran one finger lightly up my thigh while looking straight ahead, slipping past the hem of my daisy dress like a spider on a mission.
Things were just about to get better in Los Angeles, that’s what Ripley had been trying to tell me. I was supposed to stay true the course, be patient. I had failed.
This was what a bad reading of the Stage Manager could do to the room.
So when Uncle Wallace miraculously appeared at the very end of the first act, I once again loved him the way I had loved him as a child: In the face of tragedy our uncle has come to save us. What did I care that he looked like an unmade bed, or that he was walking the line between hungover and still actively drunk? He was there to lead us into Act Two, and I would no longer have to listen to Lee in his golf shirt telling me that the sun had come up over a thousand times.
“Alarm clock malfunction,” Uncle Wallace announced, applauding generously for the man who had made him look like a Barrymore. “But I’m here now. We can begin.”
“Aren’t you being awfully hard on Lee?” Emily asks. “It was only the first day. He wasn’t planning to go on.”
Nell agrees. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, and anyway, they wouldn’t have hired an understudy who was that bad. We know Nelson’s too smart for that.”
It is already hot. I am already tired of cherries. “Funny you should say that, because the understudies were great as a rule. The company was very rigorous about the understudies. Except for Lee. Lee was horrible.”
“Why would they hire someone horrible to cover the lead?” Nell asks.
“Because Lee owned a trucking company. His family had a big house right on the lake. They hosted fundraisers—-real money, major donors. Lee loved the theater, god bless him for that. He didn’t want to be an actor, he just wanted to hang out with us. Maybe it was strange. He used to bring popsicles and prosecco to rehearsals sometimes. Everybody loved him then.”
“So they sold him an understudy part?” Maisie asks.
“That would be a crass way to put it, but yes. They sold him the part.”
“Nelson?”
“No, no,” I said. “He wasn’t given any choice in the matter. Of this I am certain.”
“But why did he have to be the Stage Manager?” Nell says. Nell, who takes all injustice to heart. “The Stage Manager is too important.”
Joe and I have taught our daughters how to grade a plum and pick a stone from a goat’s hoof and make a piecrust, but I fear we have taught them nothing of the world. “Because you don’t go around at a cocktail party telling people you’re the understudy for Constable Warren.”
“Wasn’t he at least smart enough to be afraid Uncle Wallace might get sick?” Maisie asks.
“Lee was talentless but he wasn’t stupid. Uncle Wallace had been at Tom Lake for fourteen consecutive summers and had never missed a performance. That man was like a dancer. He always went on.”
“He went on drunk?” Emily asks.
Big old blustery Albert Long, red--faced and red--haired. My heart seized with unexpected affection at his memory. “Drunkish. He found a way to make it work.”
“And what about the George?” Nell asks.
“The George? What about him?”
“Was he bad?”
“Forgettable,” I say.
“As bad as Lee?” Maisie asks.
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m sure he was fine. I only mean that I’ve forgotten him.”
“Which means what? You can’t remember his performance?” Nell is concerned that this is further proof of my diminishment. To my children I am unimaginably old.
“I mean the kid who played George is gone,” I say, but they don’t understand what I’m talking about. Duke is as close as the cherries on the tree, as is Uncle Wallace, for reasons that are no doubt connected to how things ended. Lee I remember less as a person and more as a story, and George I do not remember at all. There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart--stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.
9
Yes, it was true that Uncle Wallace was a drunk, and his understudy hid in the farthest corner of the theater where not even the light could find him, but plenty of other things were true as well, such as the fact that Albert Long embodied the Stage Manager as completely as he had embodied that long--ago bachelor uncle. Duke might have made fun of him—-dinner theaters, bombastic speeches, lecherous asides—-but when he was onstage there was nothing to complain about. Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him, just the way Emily’s were written into me, the difference being he’d found a part he wouldn’t age out of. When, in the third act, Uncle Wallace took me back to my mother’s kitchen, he looked at me with so much compassion it stung my eyes. So what if he smelled like gin? So what if he went out for a cigarette and wandered away? The A.D. always managed to find him, guiding him back like an errant lamb. On the stage he was able to bring himself into focus, so that even as the people who knew him said he was different this year, said he was so much worse, we continued to bank on the fact that he had never missed a show. Why wouldn’t the past be the future as well?