“The four of you can sort this out. I’m going for a swim.” Joe pulls off his boots, his shirt, his jeans. He had gone to the house and put on his swim trunks before coming to the beach, proving once and for all that these girls are his.
13
Duke was somewhere. He was getting his hair pinned, or he had already gone outside to read over his obsessive Editor Webb notebooks and smoke a final cigarette and then stand on his hands. He said it cleared his mind before a performance and I wouldn’t doubt it. All the actors were in costume, swinging their arms around, trilling through scales. Only Uncle Wallace and I were still. If we were not exactly standing together we were very near one another. We were waiting to begin.
“I still get scared,” Uncle Wallace said. He was looking straight ahead and his voice was so quiet I barely heard him. I don’t think he was talking to me anyway. Backstage was dark and the houselights were up. From where we stood we could see the people milling around, looking for their seats. They always made me think of chickens, like a truck had backed up to the theater door and emptied four hundred chickens into the house. They pecked and clucked aimlessly, found one place to roost then changed their minds and went off in search of another. Our Town does not have a formal opening; when the audience enters the theater the curtain is up and what little set there is is in place and soon Uncle Wallace would wander out and wait for the chickens to settle, even though the very fact of him standing there, the much beloved television star of another era, impedes the process considerably.
“You’re the Stage Manager,” I whispered to him, “same as I’m Emily.”
He reached down and took my hand in his large, warm hand and we didn’t say anything else. That will always be my memory of Albert Long, the two of us holding hands in the dark until it was time for him to go on.
Nothing about going out onstage as Emily scared me, but playing Mae in Fool for Love made my feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single word No! all the blood in my body surged to my heart in an act of self--preservation. My heart needed the blood in order to survive, and so my bloodless extremities were left to freeze. Fear would be another name for it. I was told the last Emily—-the one who’d dropped out and made a space for me—-had had to audition for both parts. Her Mae, from all accounts, was searing. Pallace had auditioned to understudy both of the parts, and I had no doubt she had been searing as well. But I had never been asked to audition for anything at Tom Lake. I’d been asked to plug two holes in the summer schedule. “Look how good she is!” was what the management said when they came to those first rehearsals of Our Town, not realizing there was a difference between a first--rate Emily and a first--rate actress.
We had started rehearsals for Fool for Love the week before Our Town opened, and now I had some sense of what Pallace had been talking about. During the day I played a grown woman who was damaged and clear--headed and afraid, then three nights a week I was Emily again. The result was whiplash, and not just because the characters were so wildly different, my ability was so wildly different. I’m not sure Duke fully understood how bad I was. He was a full fathom five into his own performance. Duke was Eddie through and through, swinging his lasso, walking like he’d just come off a horse. He radiated his talent and intensity all over me but it did not make me better. The director, a Sam Shepard enthusiast named Cory, saw my failures clearly enough, as did the other two actors in the play, but it was still very early. Everyone regarded me as talented so maybe it was just taking me a minute to shift gears. But I didn’t have another gear. Ripley had told me not to take acting classes, but he’d also given me a part in a movie in which I was essentially Emily again, and a part in a sitcom in which I was essentially Emily. Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do. I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.
But one of the very best things about playing Emily was that, at least for the duration of the performance and for maybe an hour or two on either side, she was all I thought about. After opening night Joe had gone back to Traverse City for good. Gene the A.D. was in charge of us now but we all knew what we were doing. We were well--trained horses: the starting gate flung open and we ran the race.
More and more I had seen Uncle Wallace struggling, not in any way the audience would have noticed, and truly, the cast might not have seen it either. He never dropped a line but he often missed his marks by a foot or more and the light board op had to scramble to keep the light on him. His voice was good, maybe he lacked his usual boom but we were all wired so it didn’t matter. On the night of his disaster I saw him clenching and unclenching his teeth, like he was taking in an electrical shock. I even looked down to see if he was stepping on something. In the second act, just before Emily marries George, and Duke and I were having our moment—-Duke holding me too tightly; Duke’s hand on my ass in a way that was not visible to the public—-I really thought Uncle Wallace was going to cry out.
I tried to find him at the second intermission but he was nowhere. He had stepped into the wings and vanished. I couldn’t ask Duke because Duke stayed in character between acts. He would have answered me as Editor Webb and I would have killed him so I just skipped all that. I wished Joe were there.
Somehow I felt that going to Gene would have been ratting Uncle Wallace out, saying that something was off about the job he was doing when that wasn’t it at all. If Joe had been there I could have told him I was worried, that’s all, just worried, and he would have searched Uncle Wallace out and found some way to gentle him. Joe was no doubt with his aunt and uncle now. I bet they’d already finished dinner and washed the plates and put them away.
When the call came for places, Uncle Wallace reappeared as mysteriously as he had left. He looked better, pinker. I stepped towards him but he held up his hand and looked away. Not here he was telling me, so he knew I had seen him. I nodded and stepped back. He was holding it together and I needed to let him do that. He was a professional, Uncle Wallace.
The third act of Our Town takes place after Emily’s death. She has died giving birth to her second child, though there’s no mention of whether the baby has died, or if her father--in--law, Doc Webb, had been the doctor in attendance. The dead of Grover’s Corners sit in straight rows across the stage, and when Emily joins them I couldn’t help but think about the cemetery at the Nelsons’ farm—-the shade and the breeze and the stones that were very nearly rubbed clean of names. Duke had been right, the place had a peace that made a person want to stay. I had never thought about a cemetery that way before, and it helped me. I sat down next to Mother Gibbs and we both stared straight ahead, though in that moment I was remembering her getting out of the lake to put on her underwear.
The nice thing about having an entire script tattooed inside your cell walls is that you can pretty much play your part regardless of circumstances. Uncle Wallace and I went through the third act same as always. But when he brought me back to my mother’s kitchen so that I could see how blindly the living go on, he didn’t step away as he should have. In fact he tucked me into his armpit like a crutch. He was a big man, and I am small,