God, she was bored. But a few months later she invited me again, and I sat in the kitchen while she cooked a stew. And as she worked away, stirring the big pot, she looked for all the world like a large rodent.
Most evenings, I stayed at home, made some food, played some music. But one night—it was not too long before Joan died—one night I actually ventured into the city, and I went to see a play—The Stone by Lebowitz. I must say, I really loved it—and Lars Helbig especially, in the role of the doctor. That whole day I thought about the play. But then the next night, I had dinner with Joan. She’d seen the play the week before and had found it sentimental, and Helbig’s acting she’d found very broad. When she said those things, the performance that was sitting in my memory was poisoned. It died. Every moment of it died on contact with her words—every moment’s hopeful little face turned purple and died. In the days that followed, it was painful to revisit what had become of the memory I’d had. Finally I emptied the whole evening out my mind like trash.
JACK
It was one of those weeks when loose ends, apparently, were being tied up. You know, once the people who do cause trouble are gone, then it’s time to get the ones who might cause trouble, or the ones who might once possibly have been able to cause trouble twenty years ago—oh, you know the whole story. Eventually it’s a matter of tying up loose ends. Tying up loose ends, or cutting them off, is just an inevitable part of the process, obviously. And so, of course, is the perennial parallel campaign for the betterment of humanity, or whatever you want to call it, in aid of which we were being treated now, every week or so, to demonstrations of a very new approach to executions, in which eight or ten people would be taken into a room, seated in these chairs that made their heads bend way back, and fitted up with brightly colored tubes in their mouths which supposedly did away with them with very little pain in this rather odd ceremony—somehow with music or God knows what. So, anyway, as I sat there in my apartment one morning, slowly reading in the newspaper about this latest attempt to elevate our moral and aesthetic taste, I was looking at one of the photographs accompanying the article, and I happened to notice that among the bedraggled-looking people sitting in those chairs being fitted with tubes were those rather tiresome moralists whom Howard had found so boring, Tom and Eddie—I quickly scanned the row for their former friend Martin, until I somehow remembered that he’d recently been appointed Minister of Supplementary Tugboat Rewiring or something of the sort—and then I happened to notice that the woman sitting in the very last chair with her head at that rather odd angle was obviously Judy.
Well, I was lost. Where was I? Blinded, you know, like a caught fish jumping about on the floor of a boat. And the funny thing was that aside from sweating and sort of panting—well, more or less exactly as people say when they speak about such moments, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, literally, what to do—stand up, remain seated, stay in, go out? I reached for my naked friends in the plastic bag, because there they were on the table right next to me. I looked at them all in the midst of their playing, and their hopeful smiles made me wonder if a more compassionate world might not perhaps come about one day.
I went out—it was a black afternoon—and I wandered through the streets, oppressed, somehow, by a terrible sadness. I had an awful feeling of something left undone. Everywhere I went the leaves had turned—traitors! I mean, had they no shame? Oh well, that had been going on, you know, for quite some time. One noted the usual golds and oranges and browns amidst the green. I went into the park, sat on a bench—I seemed to have developed some variety of what I believe is sometimes called “hysterical” coughing—and then it suddenly hit me that everyone on earth who could read John Donne was now dead. They were all dead. And as I turned this odd fragment of information around in my brain, I realized that I was the only one left who would even be aware of the passing of this peculiar group, this group which was so special, at least in their own eyes, and my mind went back to a book I’d read when I was very young about a boy who belonged to an ancient tribe in a distant land. And in the course of describing all the customs of the tribe, the book explained that, within the tribe, there were many different sub-groups or clans, and that whenever the last surviving member of one of these clans would die, well, there would naturally be no one from their family around to mourn them, so then someone who had known that last survivor—and if there was no one left who had known them well, then it would simply be someone who had known them a little—would be appointed to mourn, publicly, in a sacred spot, the passing of that whole extinguished clan—the designated mourner. And I recalled how the boy in the book had performed that function on a certain occasion, lighting a magnificent sacred fire, weeping and remembering.
Well, very close by in the center of the park stood that rather dark, cavernous, and always overcrowded café to whose allure all visitors to the park would eventually succumb on even the nicest days, despite the well-known quality of its ambiance and food, and I wandered toward it, went inside, found a table, and ordered a cup of tea from an overworked waitress. Well, along with the tea, and of her own volition, apparently, or maybe it was the policy of the café’s management, the waitress brought a plate which held a small pastry, a sticky kind of cake whose bottom rested on a bit of paper. And as the waitress left me, I saw my opportunity. First, obviously, I ate the cake. And then I grabbed some matches which sat nearby me, and I glanced around, and I lit the bit of paper. “I am the designated mourner,” I said.
The bit of paper wasn’t very big, but it burned rather slowly, because of the cake crumbs. I thought I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floor—plummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell. His name, once said by so many to be “immortal,” would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting: forgetting his name, forgetting him and forgetting all the ones who remembered him.
A few patrons and waitresses looked over at me irritably until the fire went out. Then I left the place, and I was back in the park.
Would you believe that things were already more peaceful ? Well, they were, frankly. I could even feel myself breathing more easily and deeply. Everyone I saw looked calmer than before. We all were simply doing much better in every way without the presence on the earth of our nerve-jangling friends, the dear departed mournees, if that’s the right word.
I sat once again on the bench I’d been sitting on before. The sun was going down. And I have to say that the colors in the park were quite extraordinary—almost edible, one would have to say. The air was a kind of rose color, and the light which ran through it was a twinkling yellow.
What were we waiting for? The appearance of the Messiah? Was all this nothing? I was quite fed up with the search for perfection. And rather amazed by all that I had—the lemonade stand with its lemonade, the café with its irritable customers and staff, the carousel, the squirrels, the birds, the trees. I’m sorry, Howard, your favorite grove was cut down. But so much remains. This light, so beautiful and warm, was not cut down. The flowers at my feet, with their petals that kiss my ankles like little lips, were not cut down. The trembling air and the trembling sky were not cut down. My sympathy about the loss of your favorite grove is fading out at the end of the day. It said in the newspaper that there will be fireworks tonight above the carousel, and, right nearby, a parade of young dogs, including some of the newest breeds, some for sale.
I sat on the bench for a very long time, lost—sunk deep—in the experience of unbelievable physical pleasure, maybe the greatest pleasure we can know on this earth—the sweet, ever-changing caress of an early evening breeze.
END
The Designated Mourner is copyright © 2010 by Wallace Shawn
The Designated Mourner is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018–4156
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews
, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: George Lane, Creative Artists Agency, 162 5th Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10010, (212) 277-9000.
The Designated Mourner was first published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1996.
This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shawn, Wallace.
The designated mourner / Wallace Shawn.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-559-36656-4
1. Man-woman relationships—Drama. 2. Fathers and daughters—Drama.
I. Title.
PS3569.H387D47 2011
812’.54—dc22 2010043423
The Designated Mourner Page 6