Maddox, recovered from his humiliation, risked a snicker. And without arguing, grateful to be reprieved, Tony and the students pressed together through the doors out into the rain.
“See how nice I can be,” Booter turned to me, “when people don’t—”
From behind the lobby doors a cry wailed sharply, “Oh, Dear Lord.” It was Mrs. Thurston.
“What’s going on?” Booter snapped hurriedly, then from the inner doors Ferrell came, rolling down his sleeves. “Where’s the phone?”
I pointed at the box office entrance.
“What’s going on, doctor? You got some trouble here?” Booter wanted to know.
“Got a dead man back there.”
Seymour sucked in his breath as though he’d been hit, while adrenalin rushed through me.
“Who?” snapped the sheriff. Maddox jerked erect, ready.
“The old guy. Wolfstein. I’m calling Fletcher’s.”
“Jimmie, go to the car, call Saul Fletcher. Tell him to get his ambulance over here. Go on, Jimmie!” he added, as the deputy appeared reluctant to miss anything by leaving. “Killed?” Booter then asked.
“Not by anyone else.”
“Shit. Another one of those suicides!”
Ferrell looked annoyed. “No. Natural causes, Gabe. His heart stopped.”
“Hospital?”
“No. No, he’s gone.” Booter started back inside with him, as Ferrell snapped at his daughter, Bonnie who slunk behind the concession stand. “Get out there in the car and stay there!” The door shut.
Bonnie looked up at Ronnie, who told her, “I guess you better do what your father says.”
• • •
“For Christ’s sake, Gabe, enough’s enough. I don’t have time now to play games,” Leila told him. But the sheriff arrested us anyhow.
After Saul Fletcher Morticians came on his crepe soles through the rain and helped Dr. Ferrell arrange Nathan on a wheeled stretcher, which they slid quickly through the opening of the black hearse, and after the doctor drove his daughter away, the rest of us were taken too. Leila, Kim, Sabby, Mrs. Thurston, and the children in the patrol car with the sheriff. Joely, Seymour, Pete, Ronny, myself, and Rings in a van that Maddox brought over.
“Your two pals?” I asked Morelli.
He was leaning easily back against the side of the smelly van, still smoking. “Business,” he explained. “They couldn’t stay for the end. Went out the back.” He added politely, “They thought it was real good, though.”
There would have been more of us crowded into the sheriff’s waiting room, but Mrs. Thurston had simply refused to take the babies out into the rain again, telling the sheriff tersely that he would have to drag her and the children physically across the wet lawn of the courthouse if he wanted her in there. He left them in the patrol car. The rest of us waited silently to be charged. The magistrate released us without bail, told us to show up for a hearing Friday, the 30th, the day after tomorrow, told us Maddox would drive us home, told us he was sorry our friend had died, and maybe we’d listen to the sheriff next time.
“Hick town. Hick law,” Morelli summed up on the sidewalk. “What else’s he got to do to feel big? The mayor pushes him around, he pushes you.”
At home we sat silently in the cold living room, Leila quiet in the old corduroy chair—like before. Finally, Joely absently reached over and turned on the little television set. A voice spoke dryly behind blurred pictures of a frantic, moiling crowd loud with screams of, “Hell, no! We won’t go!” and shots of smoke and reeling signs scrawled, “The Whole World Is Watching,” “Welcome to Prague.” A blurred picture of, as Verl had said, chaos. The voice said, “However, those charges have been vigorously denied by Mayor Daley, who has repeatedly defended the actions—”
“Oh, turn it off, Joely darling. Dear Lord, child, turn it off!” Mrs. Thurston left the room, her white gloves pressed to her eyes.
Chapter 30
Return
Leila spent Thursday trying to find someone Wolfstein belonged to. He didn’t seem to belong to anyone anymore. She called each number in the initialed address book we found among his pills and drink glasses beside his bed. Of those she could reach, most had not seen him in years, though they were sorry he had died. His former lawyer was sorry too; his former banker; his former insurance agent. The former superintendent of his former apartment in Los Angeles was sorry.
“Jesus!” Joely said. “He didn’t have anything. I mean, he was living at point zero, Devin.”
“It must be we don’t know where to look,” Seymour said. “Everybody’s got, you know, something. A family or friend or money or something.”
Leila called Calhoun Grange. They said he was filming a war picture in Spain.
“Do you think he’d come?” I asked her. “I don’t think he thought Nate was his father.”
“I don’t think he gave a good goddamn one way or the other,” Leila replied, her hand still on the phone receiver. “Good old Cal, he just doesn’t care.” She stood up. “I hate people who don’t care. And I hate the fact that they seem to be the ones who win. Because it’s easy if it doesn’t matter. It’s all so easy.”
“Why bother to call him, then?”
“I want to make it a little harder.”
• • •
Friday morning it was still raining, when, accompanied by Rings Morelli’s Denver lawyer, we appeared before the magistrate, who found Leila guilty of violating Section 2B of local statute 35, fined her a hundred dollars, then suspended the sentence. Charges against the rest of us were dropped, and we were released. After all that, that was all. Rings’s lawyer knew the mayor, and the mayor knew the magistrate, and Rings said Sheriff Booter probably wished he’d never gone to so much trouble just to be mule-headed. If he’d done it to save face, his plan had backfired. Of course, he was sure Booter’d still be sheriff twenty years from now, and still a horse’s ass, too. We thanked him for helping out. “Forget it,” he said. “If Kim here wanted to play that stage part, I sure wasn’t going to let a couple of hicks put her down, you know what I mean?”
“Thank God for love,” Joely said.
At home Leila received a telegram from Spain: SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT NATE. FINE TO SEND BILL TO BERT SILVER. GREAT COUNTRY OUT HERE. HOW ARE THINGS THERE? GREAT, I HOPE. YOURS, CAL. Bert Silver was Cal’s agent. His name and address in Los Angeles were enclosed.
That afternoon we buried Wolfstein in the small plot behind the Chapel of St. Lucy’s, where I had found Leila and Verl the night Mittie died. Saul Fletcher fixed Wolfstein up in a nice casket and sent the bill to the name and address in Los Angeles Leila had given him.
So we stood together for the last time of the summer, there across from the rich dark mahogany of the silver-handled casket that Leila had chosen for Cal to pay for. On the other side stood a small, very old priest whom none of us had ever seen before, except Leila and her mother—one or the other or both of whom had persuaded him first to perform the ceremony, and then to receive the body of Nathan Wolfstein, who had said he had no religion, into his graveyard.
The rain was only mist now as we stood among all the roses and carnations and lilies and chrysanthemums Leila had bought for Cal to pay for. The old priest lowered his head, saying with us, “Forever, Amen.” And Leila pressed her hand against the casket top and said, “Good-bye, Nate.”
“The Lord rest his soul, now, and let him be at peace. Sabby, darling, you walk on back to the car with me, and give me your arm up this hill.” Sabby could not stop crying, and Mrs. Thurston held her to her side.
On the way to the airport that night, she sobbed again. “He wrote for me, Leila. Last week. He wrote to Julliard. In New York. He told them they should take me, give me a scholarship. Oh, he can’t be dead! Why should he be dead?” she cried.
I thought of Leila’s light in her room as she read Shak
espeare. “…Oh, let him pass!”
“I hope you’ll go, Sabby. Be what he knew you could be,” Leila told her.
We piled out of the Red Bus at the airport in Denver—suitcases, souvenirs, and all of summer’s passage. Ronny, Seymour, Sabby, Pete, and Joely had the tickets Leila had reserved for them. In Chicago, all but Joely would change planes. We drank coffee while we waited.
“Oh, shit, can you believe it?” Joely came back to the booth with his Chicago newspaper.
“Don’t tell me anything else,” Seymour winced.
“No. No. Listen. Not politics. This is under Arts and Leisure:
The new show Tuesday at the highly successful Gallery of Contemporary Arts on Harriss Street shocked the critics but apparently delighted a crowd of popular art lovers who eagerly purchased the entire collection of so-called “PopPoop Art” on display. The vulgarism is quite accurate, for Spurgeon Debson, the artist responsible (or irresponsible) works primarily in human excrement. Victor Falz, owner of the Chicago gallery (as well as others in New York and San Francisco), said that he was pleased with the public’s reception of “a vital new force in modern American art.” He added that reproductions of Mr. Debson’s sculptures (?) and poster designs (?) would soon be available. Caveat emptor.
“I don’t believe it!”
But we saw the picture. It was, in fact, Spur. He stood beside a giant version of the plastic rockets we had seen him making in Floren Park, and the smiling Gucci-Porsche modster had him in a warm embrace.
• • •
The players walked away, straddled with knapsacks, dragging suitcases, shoving boxes ahead of them. At the end of the gate they turned. We had said each kind of good-bye, promised to write, to remember, until the last; they had told Leila their plans, asked her advice, hoped she would not lose touch. She said she wouldn’t, and I think they knew it was so. Sabby cried.
Joely raised his arm, made a V that turned into a fist, then to a wave.
“Blow your nose, Sabby,” I yelled, and they were around the corner.
I offered to do some more packing at the theater.
“It’s midnight, Devin. Just come on home. Well do it tomorrow.”
I told Leila I didn’t think I could sleep, so she dropped me at the parking lot. “Go on to bed.” I asked her to promise, and she waved as she left. Her face was gray.
People still came and left the Red Lagoon Bar, but the Red Lagoon Theatre was dark, a long dark shape beside the creek. The lock popped as I turned Leila’s key. With a squeak that cut loudly into the quiet, the door opened. I was scared and ran back to prop the door ajar when it shut me in the black space of the lobby, so dark I couldn’t find the light switch that I had turned on a hundred times.
In the box office, I found a flashlight that would get me down the shadowed side aisle to the lighting booth. From there, I made my way backstage. Behind the curtain, the stage was still set for All My Sons. In the costume room, the tie I had taken from Wolfstein’s neck was still on the floor. I went to the scene shop and started to pack up the paints, tools, nails, brushes, that somehow had been collected and put to use over the summer. When my fingers began hurting, I realized how cold I was. And hungry. Still cold and hungry, though Wolfstein was dead. Back in the lobby, I found a white sweater, dusty and soiled on a shelf of the concession stand. I put it on. There were some of Mrs. Thurston’s miniature doughnuts on the counter still. I ate them. They tasted like dust.
From the wall, the bright shine of our pictures reflected the lights. We all looked out with the same smiles we had had in June and in the pictures, would always have. Mittie and Nate, too, who were already dead. And Buddy, who had never arrived. I brought a box over and took each of the pictures down, pressed each smoothly on top of the one beneath it. I took them off in the order in which they had left us. First Mittie. Then Jennifer Thatcher and Ashton Krinkle. Last I took me, and Leila, and Maisie and Davy, and Mrs. Thurston, and laid us on top, and closed the box.
That left the portrait I had painted of Leila on the wood floor. I knelt down to look at it, wet my palm with spit, tried to wipe it clean. It would be nice, I thought, to keep, but there was no way to save it. I couldn’t even get it clean now, after three months. I kept rubbing the arm of the sweater across the paint, harder and harder. Then all of a sudden, I burst into tears, and, like Sabby Norah, cried. I kept thinking, “This is crazy,” but I just couldn’t get myself to stop. I fell to sleep, still crying.
“Wake up, Devin.”
The light from the opened doors shined sun bright in my face.
“Are you awake? It’s me. Leila. It’s morning.”
Chapter 31
Liking Life on My Own Account No Better, I Form a Great Resolution
“I must have fallen asleep.”
“I guess so,” she smiled. She knelt over me, and I felt easy just to stay there, the sun coming between us into the room. “You must be pretty sore sleeping in the cold on the floor all night.”
“No. I feel good.”
“You took the pictures down.”
I leaned on my hand to look at the empty squares of darker felt on the wall. “I took them down in order.”
“In order?”
“Of when people went away.”
“Oh. Where did you find that sweater?” She touched my arm. “It’s Mittie’s.”
I sat up. “Oh, I’m sorry, Leila. I’ll take it off. I got cold. It was over behind the concession stand.”
Her hand closed softly on my sleeve. “Don’t be silly. He…” She brushed her hand across the shoulder. “It’s fine.” She stood up and then walked quietly around the room in her long white robe of loose woven linen, the small leaves embroidered green about her wrists and throat, her hair like goldenrod moved in the light, Leila Dolores. Leila D’Or.
“Leila…” I began. My voice faltered.
“Your mother called this morning. I talked to Fitzgerald.”
“Is something the matter?”
“No, I don’t think so. Everything seems okay. Your brother James has gone to France for a month. With his wife.”
“Oh.” All that seemed so long ago. A remark of Mrs. Thurston’s came back to me: “I don’t know why I bothered to delude myself.” It seemed applicable.
“She wants to know what your plans are.”
I looked past the door at the mountains where fall had already touched scattered aspen. “First, to go home.”
“I told her I’d bring you, tomorrow.”
“Leila…”
“How would you like to take me to lunch, Devin?”
“Sure. Help me up.” She gave me her hand.
• • •
In the parking lot a large sign was stuck in the dirt to tell us that by August 1969, there would be on this site a Memorial Shoppers’ Mall tastefully designed to blend with the environment, and that Mr. Stark with certain other investors would be responsible. A ski shop, a liquor shop, a gourmet shop, and a record shop already planned to be there. The Red Lagoon Theatre, as a result, was gone for good. Nor the Red Lagoon Bar, which now announced in magic marker: “Closing in Two Weeks.”
“I don’t think he was trying to punish me so much,” Leila said, “Though in a way he does blame me. I think Bruno hates this building itself. He wants it destroyed for destroying Mittie. He wants there to be no more acting. Because Mittie insisted he could be an actor, and Bruno couldn’t stop him from wanting to. And now he’s dead.”
“Do you think he really loved Mittie?”
“Oh God, yes. I think he loved Mittie like his own arm. And if you cut off your own arm because it won’t do what you want it to, or if you lose the arm, it’s painful. It must be agony.”
“But don’t you think all parents do that? See their kids that way? Extensions of themselves?”
“They have to give it up. I’m sure goin
g to try to just let Maisie and Davy be.”
I took Leila along the road winding beside the meadow up to the restaurant Verl had brought me to that first evening. Cervantes. The proprietor brought a carafe of wine to set beside the clay pot of wildflowers that turned toward the slant of sun.
We sat in silence while Leila looked out the window. Finally she spoke. “There’s a hummingbird. They’re so small. Don’t they ever perch?”
“Well, they have to sleep.”
“Maybe they don’t sleep. Maybe they just die. Devin, thank you for this. I think I was…tired.”
We ate our lunch.
“Kim told me she had a letter from your friend ‘Tanya.’”
“Don’t rub it in, okay?”
“She wondered if Kim could send her some things she overlooked when she left the cabin—rather quickly, you may remember. And she said she was bored.”
I supposed she had been bored in Floren Park too. And me? Something occurred to me. Though I had wanted to, had figured I would sooner or later, I had never slept with Jardin. Then I couldn’t, and so the possibility froze into desire, desire nourished, aggrandized by imagined loss. Tanya, without knowing or caring, melted the fantasy.
“You ought to thank that lady,” Leila said, startling me. She must have been inside my head, following beside my thoughts. “I gather you got it out of your system,” she said, as if to explain her magic, “from what you told me when I came to bind the wounds.”
“Leila. I love you,” I heard myself say.
“I love you too, Devin.”
“I feel…like it was when…”
“Love’s old sweet song,” she smiled.
“No. I’m serious. I’ve always been in love with you.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, but gently.
“No. Listen, please. It’s true. It’s always been true.”
“Oh, Devin. You tell the truth. Last month, when you went around here sulking and snarling at me thinking God knows what you were thinking, were you in love with me then? Or last year? Or the year before? Did you sit up in Cambridge and say to yourself, ‘I love Leila Beaumont, whom I haven’t really thought about recently, but nevertheless…’ Confess. Were you?”
The Delectable Mountains Page 31