Mother Gibbs shook her head. “Fifteen minutes,” she shouted back. “I want to dry off and put my underwear on.”
Lee was sitting there on a beach towel the size of a picnic blanket, watching us swim.
“So what happens if you end up having to play Emily?” I asked her.
Pallace gave me a squint. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just wonder how it would work.”
“Tuesday night Our Town, Wednesday night, Cabaret, Thursday night, Our Town, Friday night, Cabaret, Saturday, Our Town matinee with Cabaret at night, Sunday is Cabaret at night but no Our Town matinee, so there’s a break. Monday I sleep.”
“That’s not possible.”
Pallace disagreed. “It’s possible, not optimal. I’d like to play Emily once or twice, only if you had a UTI or something, but other than that I pray for your health.” She was looking back at the shore. “Do you know who that is?”
Mother Gibbs was gone and in her place a man now stood at the edge of the water, waving his arms over his head. “Peedee,” he called. “Peedee!”
I looked over my shoulder to see who he was looking at—-Duke on the swim platform was wet and shining like a god. There should have been a golden trident in his hand, a crown of seaweed and starfish in his hair. He waved his arms wildly in return then dove into the lake. It was straight out of a movie, the elegance of his dive and then his swimming, clean and fast, none of the splashing around he’d been doing before.
“Must be his dealer,” Pallace said. “We should go in anyway.”
Off she went, but for a moment I stayed behind treading water, watching all the actors and dancers as they swam to shore. Lee folded up his towel and walked away. I wondered if anyone had ever prayed for my health before. My grandmother, probably. She would have done that for me.
“It’s Saint Sebastian, isn’t it?” Emily says. She is Emily again, fully restored, taking cherries down at twice the clip of the rest of us.
I nod. “He used to drive up when he had days off.”
Maisie looks at Emily. “How could you possibly know who it was?”
“I like reading interviews, that’s all. Sebastian was always there. Don’t you remember when Duke won his Oscar? The first word out of his mouth was Sebastian.”
None of us remember that, but I’m more than a decade into convincing myself that Emily’s attention to the details of Duke’s life isn’t something to be alarmed about.
“So even if you know he was close to his brother, how do you know that his brother’s come to Tom Lake?” Maisie asks, pushing. “Break’s over, time to get back to work. Why don’t you just think it’s Gene the A.D. calling him in?”
Emily sighs and I worry that Maisie’s going to set her off. “Sebastian was the only one who called him Peedee. Peter Duke. And Duke was the only one who called him Saint Sebastian.”
“The first part is right,” I say. “But pretty much everyone who knew Sebastian called him Saint Sebastian.”
“To his face?” Emily asks.
I nod, picturing Sebastian’s face in my mind, as restful as Duke’s was restive.
“I’ve been looking forward to Saint Sebastian ever since Dad told us about him playing tennis,” Nell says, as if Sebastian were a character who had just made his entrance in the play. “Where did he live?” It’s Emily she’s asking, not me.
“In 1988 he would still have been in East Detroit.”
“Wait,” Maisie says. Maisie could not care less about her sister’s mood. “First off, what the hell is East Detroit? And secondly, is there a biography of Sebastian Duke that I failed to get my copy of?”
Maisie wouldn’t have known the details of Sebastian’s life, and she surely wouldn’t have heard of East Detroit, seeing as how it was renamed in 1992, but Emily knows everything, and she lays out the facts like a state historian: East Detroit renamed itself when Detroit proper was circling the drain; the city council of East Detroit tried to bolster eroding property values by changing its name to Eastpointe, that fancy silent “e” at the end an indicator that the white people lived over here and the Black people lived over there, on the other side of Eight Mile. Emily’s obsession with a movie star had given her this particular knowledge. In her role as the living archivist of Duke, she is also the archivist of the vanished East Detroit.
“You’ve just been walking around with this in your head all these years and you never told anybody?” Maisie asks.
“You’ll be surprised to know that this is the first time it’s come up.” Even though Emily’s face is impassive, I think she’s pleased we’ve finally knocked on the door of her vast storehouse of data.
“Was Saint Sebastian still a tennis player then?”
Emily looks at me.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“He was done,” Emily tells her sisters. She never stops picking cherries, her hands on autopilot. “He’d made the National Sixteen and Under in Kalamazoo. He played the Future Challenger circuit, but he didn’t make the pros. Tennis costs a lot of money and their family didn’t have it. But he was still coaching then. Duke used to say Sebastian couldn’t have been much of a coach if he couldn’t even make a decent tennis player out of his own brother, but Duke was pretty good, wasn’t he?”
“Duke was a great tennis player,” I say. “He just wasn’t as great as his brother. And Sebastian was a very good coach. He taught me how to play.”
“You can play tennis?” Emily looks at me, surprised. They’re all surprised.
“I played that summer. Pallace and I both played. Sometimes we played doubles with the boys but that was a joke.” What Pallace and I never did was play each other because what would have been the point in that?
“It was just the two of them, right?” Nell asks. “Just the two boys?”
Emily shakes her head. “They had a younger sister.”
“There wasn’t a sister.” Only Duke and Sebastian, raised by wolves, but even as I’m saying it, my mind is scrolling backwards: late nights, rehearsal breaks, floating in the water holding hands. What did Duke ever tell me? That he was hungry, that he wanted me to take my swimsuit off in the lake, that he needed a drink? For as much as the feel of Peter Duke’s hair slipping between my fingers is mine, the facts of his life more accurately belong to my daughter.
“Sarah was the youngest,” Emily says. “She died of Ewing’s sarcoma when she was four.”
Was it possible? Duke was always saying he’d take me home with him, back to East Detroit, so he could show me where he came from. Surely the little girl’s photograph would have been on the mantel in their parents’ house. I would have asked who she was.
“Sarah Duke,” Emily says.
“I didn’t know.”
“He never talked about her.”
“But you knew,” Maisie says, because it was starting to feel like Emily had gotten Duke’s number after all, that she had somehow called him from her bedroom when she was fourteen.
“Some journalist went through every piece of information in the public record about his family. I think it was for Vanity Fair. Anyway, he found the death certificate and then he sprung it on him in the interview, just to see how he’d react. Apparently Duke walked out. He wouldn’t finish the interview, wouldn’t sit for photos.”