but I held his weight for him, his cold sweat soaking through the shoulder of my dress. We both said our lines as perfectly as we ever had, and maybe we were better, because when we turned to go back to the cemetery on the other side of the stage it was death we were thinking about.
Why did we do this, both of us? Why didn’t we simply pass the row of chairs and keep walking? In a sold--out house of four hundred, some small percentage of the audience were bound to have been doctors. But we soldiered on, stopping in front of my empty chair. I looked at the woman playing Mrs. Soames and mouthed the word up. She got up and moved to a chair in the back. Whatever was happening, we were all in it now. Not the audience, they were too far away, but all of the actors onstage were with us. I helped Uncle Wallace sit and he kept his arm around me. This was not the way the play was meant to be staged but people told me later it was very affecting, the Stage Manager sitting there among us, saying his final lines. And he did say the lines, every last word of them, even though the electrical current I had seen before had him in its teeth now. I didn’t move, none of us did. We used the full force of our lives to listen to what he was saying, as if the purity of our attention was holding him up. Uncle Wallace talked about the stars and how the earth was straining, straining to make something of itself and how it needed to rest. In all my life I had never heard anything spoken so beautifully, and I felt certain I never would again. No sooner had the curtain come down that he pitched into my lap, bringing up an endless convulsion of blood. Blood poured from his mouth and pooled in the fabric of my white wedding dress, spreading, soaking. I had no idea how a man could lose so much blood and still be alive. I did my best to hold his head up while the rest of them ran to call for a doctor in the house.
An ambulance was called but even if they drove flat out the hospital was still fifteen minutes away. Uncle Wallace and I were sitting in those same two chairs with two doctors in front of us. One took his pulse while the other asked him questions, mostly as a way of making themselves feel useful. Uncle Wallace was able to remark on his level of pain between retching up another mouthful. He was holding on to me with both his bloodied hands. When the ambulance arrived I said I wanted to go with him. The stage manager—-which is to say Pete, the actual stage manager for the show—-said no, and the doctors said no, and the paramedics said no, until finally Uncle Wallace let go of me and they took him away. The entire cast was still on the stage, plus the deck crew and runners. Cat, the wardrobe mistress, was shaking when she came back to the dressing room to help me get undressed. She poured hydrogen peroxide on the dress. She had bottles of it, and in the end she got the stain out, even though the stain was more or less the entire dress. I wouldn’t have believed such a thing was even possible.
People told me later how well I had handled the situation but I remembered it with nothing but shame. I could see him sinking and I let him go down. He said his lines, I said my lines. I did nothing to save him.
“How do you think you could have saved him?” Duke asked that night in bed. I had spent twenty minutes in the shower, the water as hot as I could stand it. Even after I took my costume off I had blood all over me. I scrubbed out my bra and underpants with bar soap.
“I could have walked him offstage and driven him to the hospital.”
“Which would have bought him what, twenty minutes?” The lights were off and the moon was reflected in the lake. The moonlight spread across the clean white sheets of our bed. I had finally done the laundry the day before. “He didn’t start vomiting blood because he spent an extra twenty minutes onstage when he didn’t feel well. He started vomiting blood because he’s been an unrepentant drunk for his entire adult life.”
I shook my head, unwilling to relinquish my responsibility. “I should have made him stop. He shouldn’t have kept going.”
“He shouldn’t have kept going, you’re right about that, but it was his decision. You couldn’t have gotten that man off the stage with a crane.”
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
“Nothing against Uncle Wallace,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Nothing at all. But he was teaching you a lesson you’d be wise to learn: you can’t save them that won’t save themselves.”
And the thought of that stark reality, for whatever reason, was the thing that finally got me crying.
No one mentioned my poor performance in rehearsal the next day. They thought I was stiff and halting because Uncle Wallace had vomited blood all over me the night before, not because I’d been stiff and halting all along. Fool for Love only has four characters and really, only two, Mae and Eddie. Me and Duke. Pallace was my understudy again, and a guy named Nico was the swing for all three of the male parts. I wanted to go swimming at lunch. I wanted to stay under the water for as long as was possible. Cody, the director, came with us and I wished I’d worn the one--piece. He swam around behind me, telling me about the other Maes he’d seen over the years and how they’d played the part. He recited different lines in their voices so that I would have clear examples of how he wanted me to sound. I wanted to learn, I desperately wanted to be better, but all I could think of was what a good director Joe had been. When we were finished swimming and heading back to the theater, Cody said he was calling off rehearsal for the rest of the day.
“Just go,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
It was so shocking to me, so shaming, and still I was grateful.
Pallace gave me the keys to her Honda and I went back to my room to change. She couldn’t come with me because it was Cabaret night, and while it might have been nice if Duke had offered to ride along, we both knew Uncle Wallace wouldn’t care about seeing him.
“Which brings us to the subject of Lee,” Nell says over dinner.
“Wait, who’s Lee again?” Maisie asks.
Joe nods solemnly. “Who is Lee, indeed.”
“The understudy?” Emily scoops green beans onto her plate. “The rich guy?”
“The talentless, unprepared understudy,” Nell clarifies. “He’s like one of those crazed axe murderers who’s hiding in the basement. I’ve been waiting for him to reemerge this entire time.”
“Are you serious?” Maisie says. “Poor Uncle Wallace is in the hospital having practically bled to death on our mother and you’re thinking about the understudy?”
“He was something to think about,” Joe says.
“Stop it!” Emily says. “For all we know, Uncle Wallace is dead.”
Joe and I shake our heads in unison.
“What happened to him?” Maisie asks.
“Esophageal varices,” I say. “It’s a rupture in the vein that runs along the bottom of the esophagus. Truly, something you do not want to happen.”
“How do they fix it?” Maisie asks, and I know that before she goes to sleep tonight she will be looking up esophageal varices to see if it can happen to dogs, to pigs, to rabbits.
“They put something called a Blakemore tube down the throat. There’s a balloon on the end.” I stop myself. “Forget it. You don’t want to know.”
Emily puts down her fork.