“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” Nell says. “You know how glad I am that Uncle Wallace pulled through.”
“He only pulled through until the fall.” Just saying it makes me catch my breath. So many years ago! Dear, stupid, intractable Uncle Wallace.
“He had cirrhosis as well,” Joe says. “He didn’t stop drinking.”
“They put a balloon in his esophagus and he kept drinking?” Emily asks.
Joe and I nod as the girls sadly shake their heads.
“Was that his last performance?” Nell asks. “That night with you?”
Funny how we never know. Uncle Wallace didn’t go onstage thinking it would be his last night. When my last night came I didn’t know it either, my last time to play Emily, my last swim in the lake. “I guess it was, the shape he was in. He went home after he got out of the hospital, back to Chicago.”
“Nell’s right,” Emily says. “Tell us about Lee. You can finish up with Uncle Wallace later but I need a break if I’m going to eat dinner.”
Joe sighs, tents his fingers. “Talking about Uncle Wallace bleeding out onstage will ruin your dinner but talking about Lee will ruin mine.” He looks at me but I shrug. I’ve done most of the telling around here. If Joe is forced to reminisce about Lee, so be it.
“Okay,” he says. “First off, this wasn’t my problem. I had gotten the play to opening night. That was my contractual obligation. Lee was Gene’s problem now.”
“Whatever happened to Gene?” I ask.
“Children’s television,” Joe says. “Last I heard he’d made it to Sesame Street. Gene was a talented guy, but that didn’t mean he was up for Lee. He went to find Lee as soon as the ambulance pulled away. They were still mopping up the stage when Lee had gone back to his house. It must have been eleven o’clock at night by the time Gene got to Lee’s and started knocking on the door.”
“The only person in the company who left the theater was the understudy,” Nell says.
“That’s a bad sign,” Maisie says.
Their father nods. “Gene doesn’t stop knocking. That’s what I liked about Gene. He came across as very mild but he was tenacious. He’d been there maybe fifteen minutes when finally a light goes on upstairs.”
“Tell me he didn’t send his wife down.” I’ve never heard this part of the story.
“He sends his wife down.”
The girls do their unison groan.
“She opens the door six inches, tells Gene it’s late and Lee has gone to bed. He’s very tired after the performance.”
“He wasn’t in the performance!” Nell cries. I can see now that her dinner will be ruined as well.
“Gene tells her to please wake him up, tells her it’s important, a man is very sick. She wants to know if he’s dead, and when Gene says ‘No, Missus’—-” He looks at me again. “What was his last name?”
I can’t remember. I’ve blocked it. Joe nods. “Missus says if Uncle Wallace isn’t dead then Gene should call in the morning after ten. Gene tells her that Lee can just open the door at ten because he isn’t leaving.”
“I’m assuming there was a . . .” Emily pauses, searching for the correct word, “a dynamic at work here.”
“Black man, white woman, huge house, middle of the night,” Joe says. “Yes, there was a dynamic. In fact I would hazard to say it was the dynamic that sent Gene into a career of directing puppets. But into that dynamic walks Lee himself, glasses on, fully dressed, asking his wife who had come to see them so late. Oh, Gene, goodness, I didn’t know it was you, so then they have to go through all of that.”
Maisie pushes away her plate.
“Lee sends his wife back to bed and steps out on the front porch, closing the door behind him. Gene tells him he’ll have to go on as the Stage Manager, day after tomorrow. Then Lee asks if Uncle Wallace is dead. When Gene says no, Lee completely relaxes. He claps Gene on the shoulder. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘It might not seem like it but trust me, I’ve known this guy a long time. He always goes on. If he has to walk here from the hospital, he’ll do it. He won’t miss a show.’？”
I pound my hand on the table. “He’s missing the show!” I say this as the person he bled on, the person who went to see him in the hospital.
Joe nods again, a marvel of restraint. “They go in circles for a while, Gene explaining and Lee demurring until finally Gene, who doesn’t feel like he’s been hinting at anything, becomes explicit: The company will not allow Albert Long to return, and as his understudy, Lee will perform the role on Thursday night.”
Then suddenly I do remember. Joe told me this story eons ago. I remember all of it. “This is the best part!”
“Lee just stares at him and finally he says, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Then he goes inside and closes the door.”
“Bartleby!” Nell shouts. “He Bartlebied him.”
Her sisters, smart women both, stare blankly.
“？‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’？” Nell says. “Herman Melville. Look it up.”
“How do you remember these things?” Emily asks her sister.
“Trust me,” Joe says. “It was unintentional on his part.”
“So what happened?” Nell can scarcely stay in her chair. “Who played the part?”
“Your father,” I say, beaming.
“You were the Stage Manager?” Emily is incredulous. They all are. I think Joe is the obvious choice but if we’d made them guess all night they wouldn’t have come up with the answer.
“Gene drove up here the next morning. He said I had to do it, which meant driving down to Tom Lake and back three times a week for the rest of the run. Poor Gene, I wanted to punch him but it wasn’t his fault.”
“Why you?” Maisie asks.
“I knew the part.”
“You knew the whole part?” Nell is in love with her father, her actual father who has saved the play.
Joe gives the back of his head a ferocious scratch, the way Hazel would have scratched her own head with her paw. “I played it in college and then with a summer rep outside Chicago.”
“You wanted to be an actor?” Emily asks.
“For about ten minutes,” he says.
“So wait.” Nell looks at me. “You dated George, and then you dated Editor Webb, and then you married the Stage Manager.”
“I never thought about that.” I look over at my husband and smile. “I married the Stage Manager.”
The hospital was small and cheerful in the way hospitals never are anymore: red brick, red geraniums. I asked for Albert Long’s room number and the woman at the information desk could not have been happier to give it to me. I found Uncle Wallace lying flat on his back and sound asleep, wearing a blue and yellow University of Michigan football helmet. Not a jersey, a helmet. A fat red tube was coming out of his mouth and the tube was tied to the face guard. Had it been a brain tumor that had caused him to bleed? Had they scooped the contents of his skull into a football helmet for safekeeping? I tiptoed to the edge of the bed to see if it was really him.