So that left him and me, Sabby, Seymour, Ronny (who stayed because he was having an affair with Dr. Ferrell’s daughter, Bonnie), Pete, Barney, and Leila. Seven out of an original company of thirteen—fourteen, if you counted Buddy Smith.
Late on the night of August 20th, Sabby and Leila were going over the confrontation between the mother and the girl about the son who had been killed in the war. Someone started banging on the door. It was Kim, and with her was Rings Morelli. Kim always came to our plays, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him in the theater before. When Seymour let her in, Kim yelled up to the front of the house, “Is Leila Stark here?”
Her eyes shaded by her hand, Leila called back, “Is that you, Kim?”
“Yeah, and Rings here is with me.” They walked up to us. “Listen, Leila, ’scuse me for busting in on you like this, but I just found out something’s going on, and I thought you oughta know. I don’t usually meddle in other folks’ business, but you been so good to me and my boy over at the day camp. Well, shit, I think it’s lousy, what they’re trying to pull.”
“What is it? Should we go outside?” Leila jumped down from the stage.
“Naw, it’s nothing to hide. Well, they think so.”
Morelli prodded Kim in the back with a finger. “Stop gabbing and tell her.”
“Yeah, okay. I heard this phone call, Leila. Well, before that I heard Tony and Lady Red arguing. That Mr. Stark, your husband’s dad, I guess, he wants this place shut down pronto.”
“I already know that. The lease runs out at the end of this month,”
“No, honey, no.” She shook her head dramatically. “Now. As soon as he can get it done. Lady Red calls up Sheriff Booter, and they’re going to close it down on some kind of town violation—fire hazard, or you know what I mean. They figure they can do it quicker that way than evicting you on a lease.”
Joely groaned, “Bastards.”
“I just wanted to let you know, Leila. And anyhow, if there’s anything I can do to help, I mean, like packing, or watching the kids, or something, you just let me know, okay?”
Leila said, “There is something you could do, Kim.”
“Just name it, honey.”
And to our amazement, she then and there persuaded Kim to take the part that Suzanne Steinitz had refused to play. Lady Red was closing the bar and discotheque in a couple of weeks anyhow, Kim said, so it was just a question of being out of a job sooner or later. Why not sooner?
“Look here,” said Morelli when Kim was through. “I don’t know what your plans are, but how’d you like to go into business with me? I’m talking straight, you know what I mean.”
Leila smiled. “No. What?”
“A cabaret-type place, see.” He waved his arm contemptuously around the theater. “You’re never gonna make any dough with this kind of stuff. This is peanuts. No insult intended. I’m sure you do a good job, but let’s face it, you can only sell one ticket to a customer a night, right?”
“If you’ve got any customers to sell them to,” Joely added.
“Right. There’s no percentage in putting on plays.” So far, Morelli and Mrs. Thurston shared the same bleak view of drama in America. “But a night club, now, you can put on two, three shows a night. Sell a lot of drinks. How ’bout it? I’m thinking of expanding out of the dance hall business. You take care of the shows. I’ll take care of the business.”
“I don’t know a thing about night club shows,” Leila told him.
“Who gives a damn what’s up on the stage?” he pointed out.
She laughed. “Well, I don’t think so, Mr. Morelli. But thanks for the offer.”
“Look here,” he persisted. “The Menelades are pulling out. Now, that place was always strictly peanuts, and look at the dough they were raking in hand-over-fist. Why not us? See, I don’t like outsiders moving in around here. This Stark guy. What’s he planning to do with this property?”
“I don’t have any idea,” Leila said. “But I doubt he’s going to open a night club.”
“Well, I don’t like it anyhow. I tell you something else I don’t like. The way the sheriff’s been acting. Now you, I like. You got brains. Business brains, I can tell. But you’re decent, too, know what I mean? You’ve been decent to Kim and the kid. I like that.”
“Thank you,” she nodded.
Polite as a prince in his bright suit, Morelli nodded back. “If I was you,” he went on, “I wouldn’t mess with Booter over those old women. Flower-hawking! That’s peanuts. You come into business with me. People’ll bust a gut to hand over their money, you play it right.”
“I’ll think it over. Anyhow, thanks for thinking about me.”
After they left, we wondered whether there was any point in going on with the rehearsal, since we probably weren’t going to get a chance to put the play on if Kim was right and Booter was planning to evict us. “He hasn’t done it yet, has he?” Leila told us. “Where were we, Sabby?”
Joely shrugged his shoulders and read Sabby her next line.
When we got home, we found Mrs. Thurston still up in her bathrobe, seated in Mittie’s chair, reading Nicholas and Alexandra.
“Mother! It’s 2 A.M.”
“Yes, I know. I could not sleep. Well, I hope you’re satisfied, Leila Stark. You and all these liberal young people setting fire to our institutions and raving about China, and socialism this and socialism that.”
“What are you talking about, Mother?”
I thought Mrs. Thurston must have just been reading about how the Bolsheviks took the Czar’s family down into the basement of the Winter Palace and shot them. But it was much more current. “I heard it on the television,” she said. “I’ll have you know that the Communists have invaded Czechoslovakia with tanks. They have simply bullied their way in, just like they always do, and overturned Mr. Doobchick and his entire government. That, Leila, is what Communists do.”
“Dubcek’s a Communist too,” Joely put in.
“Oh, that’s awful,” Leila said. “When? Tonight?”
“I turned on the set, and poor little Shirley Temple Black was there with a microphone in Czechoslovakia, and she was crying right there on television—it was so horrible what the Communists were doing to the people!”
“Stupid. Stupid. Why the hell did they do that? Now! Well, that does it for McCarthy, folks. Damn,” Joely went downstairs cursing.
Leila sank slowly down on the couch. “I guess a little freedom scares other people. They think you will want more and more.”
“You will,” I said.
Later that night, I got out of bed to see if Mrs. Thurston had left anything to eat unlocked. Leila’s light was on again. This time I knocked. “Still reading Shakespeare?”
The sheets were still blue; over the brass headpost, the poster of Robert Kennedy was still smiling. Coat hangers were still stuck in the chain strung across one window, but Mittie’s clothes had been taken away. She looked up from a large, crumbling cardboard box laid across her lap. Photographs were piled around her on the bed. There were a lot of Mittie. Studio portraits, theatrical poses, Mittie as a child on a pony, Mittie wearing khaki shorts in Israel, Mittie in a cap and gown, Mittie as a Boy Scout. He was always alone, and his smile was always uncertain. We looked silently at them all spread across the bed. “You can see the unhappiness there, can’t you, even when he was a child?” There was one picture of Mittie sitting next to his grandmother Strovokov with Maisie standing between his legs and Davy on his lap. Leila set it aside. Most of the other pictures were of the two children. There weren’t very many of Leila.
“Do you have any of you when you were a baby?”
She handed me eight yellowing snapshots; they had all been taken on the same day in the backyard of the Earlsford duplex, I thought. Leila was six, and very skinny, and very blond. In most of them she stood shyly beside her uncle, Ethan C
lyde. In one colored print, she appeared in the background watching with a puzzled look her stepfather, Jerry Thurston, light a cigarette. There was also, in the box, a full sheet of those little school pictures, twelve of them, each row complete.
“Pretty pitiful, hunh?” she said.
I fished through the cardboard box, took out an old torn photo. “Who’s this?”
“My father.”
“He’s very handsome. He looks like one of those old movie stars from the twenties.”
She didn’t say anything.
I found a picture that startled me. “Spurgeon? Is this Spur?” It was a guy with a pompadour haircut leaning with a cocky smile against a big motorcycle. If it was Debson, he certainly had changed his style.
She looked at it. “No. That’s Link. Link Richards.”
“The guy you used to go with? That guy?”
“Yep. My first true love.” She smiled. “That makes you my second.”
“Leila, he looks just like Spur. I mean it’s kind of blurry, but I thought it was Spur.”
“You did?” She was making stacks of pictures of Maisie.
“Yeah. Look at it. Look.”
She glanced at the photograph, nodded, “I guess so,” and went on with what she was doing.
“Well, that explains a lot,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what.
She closed her eyes, leaned against the brass post. I looked back down at the picture. “Why did you get involved with Spur, Leila?”
“Oh, Devin, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Mixed motives, I’m sure. When Mittie and I met him, he hadn’t gotten so…angry. He wanted to be a playwright, I’m sure that was part of it. That he was trying to say something, even if he said it all wrong. And, well, I thought he must be very hurt to be so unhappy, and furious at life…And I guess I was tired of failing at trying to fill Mittie’s holes, make him feel safe. I guess I thought I could succeed with Spur. Maybe a part of me wanted to help him to hurt Mittie. To get back at Mittie for letting me fail him. Selfish—selfish ‘goodness.’ Thinking I could make up for his not succeeding with the acting, make up for his father. After he was…killed, I think I let Spur move in just to punish myself…to keep reminding me I’d let Mittie die.”
“Leila, don’t be stupid. You didn’t ‘let’ Mittie die.”
“Yes, I did. That night, when Spur was there, when I turned away, I stopped loving him. And he knew it. He saw it. When he hit me, I stopped.”
“But that didn’t make him die. Mittie didn’t even tell you he knew Bruno had quit on the theater. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Her eyes were still closed. There was one tear caught in the lashes.
“It’s been a rough day, Devin.”
I stood up. “Do you know what ever happened to Link?”
“No, he left Earlsford, I guess. Went off someplace—maybe he joined the army…and I don’t know what happened to my stepfather, where he went. Or my real father. I think he did join the army. They all just…wandered off, sailed out to sea. Sailed out to see the world I guess. Don’t men think they can figure things out by going off someplace they’ve never been? If nothing makes sense where you are, go someplace else?”
“I guess so, I don’t know.” Why was I in Floren Park?
“I’m going back home,” she said, scooping up the loose pictures to put them back in the cardboard box.
“Yes, your mother told me.”
“I think it’s time, not space, where you figure things out.”
“What does that mean?”
“The past. I want to find out what happened.”
“What happened to you?”
“For a start.” She reached up to turn out the light. “Good night, Devin. Thank you for saying what you did.”
“Don’t thank me, please. Try to go to sleep.”
Chapter 27
Tempest
Kim learned her lines quickly. She was enjoying herself. “I always used to daydream about being a movie star,” she told us. “But musicals, you know. I never thought I’d be acting in a serious play.” While we rehearsed, Mrs. Thurston brought over our food, rounded up boxes from the local stores, even—with noblesse oblige—from the ones that had canceled their ads. When we weren’t working on All My Sons, we packed equipment, costumes, all the myriad residue of Mittie’s desire to be an actor. “I’m not leaving it for Bruno to toss on the funeral pyre,” Leila said.
Kim and Cary helped with the packing too. “Y’all are being so nice to me,” she kept saying.
By the beginning of that week, everyone had his part memorized.
Seymour would play Sabby’s outraged brother. Ronny was the idealistic son. Pete Barney would take tickets and seat people and run the concession stand and work the lights. Everyone would be stagehands when they weren’t onstage. Joely would run the production. Somehow, Wolfstein had wrestled wholeness out of all the pieces of our talents, feelings, voices, gestures. “I’m proud of you,” he said the night of the dress rehearsal, said for the first time that summer. “I didn’t think I could do it,” he added, for the first time, too, I imagined, in a long while.
We argued out approaches. “If you read it that way, Nate, it elicits sympathy for your character, doesn’t it? I mean, the audience is going to feel sorry for him.”
“The man is not evil, Joely.”
“Bull.”
“No, no. Don’t be so hard and self-righteous. It’s the easy way. Try pushing your compassion where it doesn’t want to go. Extend it to a man who loved his wife, who loved his sons, who tried to give them everything he had been taught to think they ought to want and have…a house, a nice yard”—he held his arm out to the set now put up on the stage—“security. This is an uneducated man who feels inferior to people like his son, but he’s the one who gave the son a chance for an education. All he has to offer is his success.”
“A man who purposely, callously sells machines that are no good, that fall apart and kill people—for money. For a fast buck, Nate!”
“Yes, you’re right, Joely, he wasn’t strong enough to be stronger than what he had been taught to think he was supposed to do: succeed. But he wasn’t bad enough, either, to be able to live without his son’s respect… He fell, he morally fell, and if you live out your life without ever falling once, you’ll be a rare man, Joely, and without need of others’ compassion… Excuse me, I think I’d better go lie down.”
I took his arm. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, thank you, yes,” he coughed. “I’m just going to lie down in the office for a minute.”
“He’s not okay at all,” Sabby said anxiously. “I think Dr. Ferrell ought to see him. Do you think he’ll be all right for the performance tomorrow?”
On the phone, Dr. Ferrell said we should bring Wolfstein in on Friday. He told Leila also that if he saw Ronny Tiorino with his daughter again, and if his fifteen-year-old daughter was doing what he didn’t want to find out she was doing, he was going to have the book thrown at Ronny. It was the first time we’d heard Dr. Ferrell take a serious attitude toward almost anything.
“Well,” called Joely from his bed that night, “there goes the last of the gang that was getting any this summer! Good old Ronny hung in there as long as he could.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure hasn’t been a summer of love.”
“Come on, now. I didn’t have any runaway wife at my fly either.”
“Awh, one night. That’s all. Big deal.”
“Is that all it was? Well, don’t knock it, kid. At least you’re good-looking. What I’ve mostly had is the old personal hand-job. My person, my hand.”
From his mattress on the floor between us, Pete giggled.
I laughed. Joely laughed. And Pete said, “What about Seymour and Sabby?”
“Them?” Joely snorted. “Forget it. Sabby
screwing?”
“On the other hand,” I said, “nobody thought she could act either.”
I dreamed that Verl and I were sitting on the creek bank talking, and he told me Leila was over on the other side of the water past the woods. He said she wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want to go over there because that was where Mittie had gotten killed. But Verl said I ought to. When I got halfway over the bridge, all the woods were on fire. The trees were shafts of flames. So I started back. But he kept waving his arms at me, telling me to go ahead, go ahead. “You’re crazy,” I said. “I’ll kill myself.” “No, you won’t,” he kept saying. “Go on. Go fast.” I ran. I could feel myself on fire—my hair seared, my face burning. I kept running. When I came out on the other side, I wasn’t hurt at all. My face, hair, clothes, shoes were just the same. I was in a meadow, and Leila was picking some of the periwinkles Verl and I had seen in the field that first evening when we drove into Floren Park. She didn’t notice me, and then the dream faded.
• • •
That morning, I got up before the others and walked down to the creek. I took my notebook with me so I could reread what I had done. The poems to Jardin seemed—maybe it was because I was outdoors in cool, new air off the sharp mountains—like an old, embarrassing diary. Verl had been right, just too kind—they didn’t even have technique. I tore them into small squares, let them fall to float either to the Atlantic or the Pacific, whichever it was.
• • •
“We need to get the keys to this place, boy.”
“Well, sir, I don’t have them. You’ll have to see Mrs. Stark.”
“You reckon she’s at home this time of the morning?”
“Yes, sir. I’m going back there now.”
“Why don’t I give you a lift, boy?”
I didn’t want to ride in Sheriff Booter’s car again. When I’d seen him in front of the theater on my way home from the diner, I had tried to cut a wide arc around the parking lot. But he’d spotted me. With him was a plump and sour man in a short-sleeved white shirt with a thin tie who carried a clipboard.
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