A week later, Rhodora Potts sublet Theo’s house for the summer. The day she moved in, he left for New York, surprised to hear himself telling people that he was flying home.
Chapter 16
A Banquet Is Prepared
The course of true love never did run smooth.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Indifferent to June, as to so many other things, Manhattan was cold and rainy. All the taxis had gone on strike, which made little difference to those in need of them; the cabs would only be bouncing derisively in and out of potholes, splashing desperate, waving customers with filthy water. Manhattanites, considering rain an imposition, were crankier than usual. Annoyed purveyors of stolen watches and sunglasses shut up their portable shops and scurried home. Sidewalk three-card monte sharps threw their soggy aces away in disgust. Under awnings, beggars and bankers cursed the weather and each other while the city shook off wetness like a giant put-upon cat and went scrambling about its business. Only Theo Ryan was whistling as he stepped out of the lobby of his childhood home, spryly dodged a green mountain of plastic garbage bags, and apologized to the woman whose three foul-tempered poodles had just tangled their leashes around his legs.
Theo’s parents lived in an old-fashionably large apartment in the Upper West Side, where they were periodically mugged, on an “iffy” block, and out of which he could not persuade them to move. They were native New Yorkers, for whom being robbed from time to time was one of the acceptable costs of life in the world’s greatest city. The Ryans were theater people, and for theater people, the rest of the United States was simply a three thousand–mile stretch of sticks.
This evening, the Ryans were hosting a welcome-home party for their only child. He didn’t want a party. “Oh, sure you do, Pooh Bear,” his father, Benny Ryan, promised in the sweet throaty voice that had changed no more with the years than his Black Irish good-looking face, though both had slightly thickened. “We’ll have a B.A.L.L.” (hugging him, dancing him in a circle). And that was the way it had always been.
Darting from room to room like a swarm of hornets, Theo’s mother, Lorraine Page, small, slender, and as strawberry blond as she’d been decades ago on Luster Playhouse, didn’t know why she was bothering, when they were no help, parties were no fun, most of the guests owed them, and she was still so mad at Theo, why hadn’t he just flown straight to England without deigning to drop by for two lousy days, two lousy days, which wasn’t even, thank you very much, worth it, even if he’d given them decent notice, which he hadn’t—not that he ever told them anything about his life, not even a goddamn starring role in a play!—and then taking off for ridiculous London after that stupid playwright jerk, so why was she killing herself for him to have this party in the, naturally, rain, when he obviously didn’t give a, frankly, shit, about it, and she wasn’t—move that table against the wall, no, over there, what was the matter with them!—wasn’t, frankly, sure he was welcome home. And that was the way it had always been, too.
The party was for Theo, but the guests would be his parents’ age—which was also the way it had always been—with the two constant exceptions of “the youngsters”: his dull cousin Dan, a forty-year-old data processor who still lived at home with his mother; and Bette, the interior decorator daughter of the man who’d written both of Benny Ryan’s biggest hit songs, “Prom Queen” and “Do the Duck.” Benny had been telling Theo and Bette to get married since they’d been toddlers. They’d never liked each other.
Other than the youngsters and Steve Weiner (with whom Theo was angry anyhow, for having blabbed to the Ryans that their son had starred in Guys and Dolls without informing them about it), all the other guests were from fifty to seventy, and all of them were in show business, or living on pensions, or doing something else “temporarily” (even if “temporarily” had lasted ten years) until another break came along. Another “Prom Queen,” another Luster Playhouse. His mother’s cousin, Buster McBride (Ike Schneider), would be there, a ventriloquist who had appeared twice on the Ed Sullivan show. And Catherine Cassell, who’d played a long-suffering mother on a soap opera for eighteen years until her character had been run over by a drunk driver. And Sweets Pudney, half a century ago, a tiny child movie actor whose gap-toothed black face had grinned its way through a hundred M.G.M. movies plus one scene of Gone With the Wind. And Benny’s brother, Arthur, a professional contestant on fixed game shows who’d gone to jail. And twenty or thirty more old friends whose presence through Theo’s childhood had made home feel much the same as hotels, a bustle of people “in the business.” Anyone not in the business, as his parents had often told him, was a “civilian,” to be (unless in an audience) pitied and borrowed from. Anyone who was in the business was “family,” to be loved, but not loaned money to. The Ryans had invited family to this party.
It was Theo’s party only in the sense that he was the main dish, like the great spiral of slivered turkey flanked by pyramided breads; like the capers around the immense length of smoked salmon; the shaved almonds atop the towering mocha cake. In the sense that on the marble breakfront in the hall, Shakespeare’s Clowns: Improvisation and Textuality by Theodore S. Ryan was propped up for display, centered between his bronzed childhood tap shoes and his Ph.D. diploma from Yale. In the sense that, thanks to that idiot Steve Weiner, his parents would undoubtedly be running, right there in the living room, the damn videotape of Guys and Dolls Steve had brought them that guests would wander over to watch whenever someone yelled, “Quick! Theo’s back on!”
At which point, his mother, whisking by so fast with the heaped platter of fat pink shrimp that her jangle of earrings shook, would call out, “I could care!”
And his father would sing over his broad shoulder, “Oh, Rainie, now, come look! Pooh’s singing! That’s my boy!”
And all of it would be the way it had always been.
Theo Ryan made these predictions about his parents (whom he loved, he reminded himself) as he swayed in the steamy crush of the downtown subway, poked by random elbows and umbrellas on his way to the Russian Tea Room to meet with his publisher; at least his former publisher, as soon as Mr. Mahan learned that the Official Life of Ford Rexford had, as far as its biographer was concerned, come to an end. As much as Theo dreaded this meeting, its necessity had provoked his whistling. For it had gotten him out of the apartment, where his father was following his mother from one big, junk-crammed room to the next, driving her crazy by trying to cajole her into a good mood, as his father had been trying to do for forty years, until he inevitably ended up baffled and hurt, “back on the shit list for some reason, and I wish you’d ask your mother why, because I’ve had it! I’m never opening my mouth to that lady again!” His father, inevitably unable to sustain such vows of eternal silence for more than an hour—being constitutionally incapable of solitude—soon slamming in and out of the long hall of high-ceilinged rooms until he found her again and was bellowing at her, “We can’t go on like this! Let’s get a divorce.” She inevitably shouting in reply, “Call the lawyer, you stupid son of a bitch!” And the two then going busily back to their favorite pastime, which was fighting with each other about their complete incompatibility.
Not that they were wrong to think so, mused Theo, stepping over smelly heaps of rags left by panhandlers on the subway steps. Lorraine Page (born Rosie Schneider) was quick, anxious, and negative. Benny Ryan (born Benedict O’Ryan) was slow, complacent, and sanguine. They were thoroughly incompatible. And utterly inseparable. They couldn’t leave each other alone. Theo had never had a long-distance phone call from them—or indeed an answering-machine message (and he’d received one or the other at least twice a week for fifteen years)—that didn’t end up with the two on different lines, contradicting whatever the other said until they’d spiraled into some satisfying argument, often on the subject of their marriage and why it should never have taken place—with Theo forgotten, sighing into the receiver; his periodic interj
ections (“Mom,” “Dad”) ignored.
Down Sixth Avenue he walked, or was shoved along with the crowd by the blustering wind, everyone shuddering and snarling as packages were knocked into gutters, buses pulled heartlessly away from those racing toward them, and umbrellas blew inside out, flying around intersections like black tumbleweeds. His father had given him maddeningly detailed instructions on how to make his way to the Russian Tea Room; his mother had shouted contradictions from the library, where she’d set up the office of her new “Help for Hire” service—finding out-of-work actors temporary jobs as servants at yuppie parties. “I know, I know! I know how to get there!” Theo spluttered, pulling away from his father’s efforts to button his raincoat.
“Don’t take the local. Get off at fifty-ninth!” screamed his mother.
No wonder, thought Theo as he glanced into the lobby of Carnegie Hall, no wonder he’d fled into libraries and the quietness of books. He had always been exhausted by his parents’ endless energy for emotional chaos, for what when he was a child his father would explain (finding the small Theo hidden in the bathroom, hands over his ears) was “just the human side of life, Old Bear. Why, I love your mother more than the world and all its gold. She’s my queen. I don’t know exactly what’s set her off this time, but let’s just lie low ’til it blows over. Hey, I know, why don’t you go ask your mother if she wants to go to the movies with us, Pooh? Give her a hug, see what the matter is. Don’t tell her I asked you.”
His mother would corner him at the breakfast table, ignoring the schoolbook he held up against her like a shield. “Theo, I married a moron. A self-centered, self-indulgent, thick-headed moron. And go ahead and say it; that makes me a moron, too. Please tell Benedict O’Ryan the next time he signs a dumb contract like that without discussing it with me, he should just stay in L.A., just stay there!”
From his earliest memory, Theo had served as messenger between his parents, racing back and forth with challenges, negotiating settlements. He was their confidant, their marriage counselor. And he realized, though they loved him with (provoking) intensity, he was not nearly as important to either as they were to each other. He learned that while they’d been onstage together in dozens of shows (sometimes singing entire duets glowering with rage), their favorite roles took place on the grand stage of their marriage, and that was basically a two-character play, with Theo in a very minor part.
During his boyhood, his allegiances shifted back and forth, but finally he settled himself on the pivot of the balance, at each end of which his parents furiously seesawed, as if determined to bounce each other off. It was transparent to the boy that Benny Ryan adored his wife, admired her beauty and her talent, bragged to everyone about her “steel-trap mind” and her “will of iron.” It was equally transparent that these same metallic qualities nonplussed, terrified, and exasperated him. As a child, Theo thought that Rainie, his father’s nickname for his mother, derived not from her stage name Lorraine, but from the sobbing temper that blew like a rainstorm through their lives.
That Lorraine loved her husband was not as clear until Theo grew older and could take less literally her claims that she’d like to blow the stupid s.o.b. away with a machine gun. “He drives me mad,” she would confide to her son as he sat on the floor beside her vanity table, watching in fear and pleasure as she yanked the comb so savagely through the red curls that it broke and she flung it at the mirror. “Listen!” (And Then would obediently listen to his father’s voice like warm syrup being played loudly on a record in another room.) “In there moping. And how long was I in Chicago? Ten days! Who’s the one who just announced he’s playing two weeks in Las Vegas and he’s leaving tomorrow?”
“Mom, I think maybe Dad’s crying.”
“Oh, he cries when a fucking flag goes by. He loves to cry. I hate it,” and she would burst furiously into tears, glaring at her face in the mirror as if she hated herself, too; studying herself cry.
As Theo grew older, he came to see what was so maddening about his father. He came to see what was so impossible about his mother. That their marriage never should have taken place seemed a logical conclusion—one that in his adolescence, he’d occasionally encouraged them to act on. “Will you two please just get a divorce and shut up about it!” Now he knew that divorce was no more likely than harmony. Some chemical amalgam of strength and weakness, permanently unstable, met in them and bonded.
They were as addicted as drunks to what they claimed was ruining their lives, though their lives—after forty inseparable years—showed every sign of vitality. They were always up to something—from signing on as singing waiters at McMullin’s Tavern around the corner to backpacking in the Badlands, driven into life by her whirring metabolism and his stamina for new experience. Their phone rang incessantly; they’d both run for it every time, calling hopefully, “It’s for me!” As he grew older, Theo came to (almost) envy them. And he loved them. They just drove him crazy.
After two days back home, the impersonal hostility of the streets of Manhattan was a relief.
Chapter 17
Enter a Gentleman
To see and to be seen, in heaps they run; Some to undo, and some to be undone.
—Dryden
“Theo? Adolphus Mahan, Theo. Sorry you had to come out in this miserable rain. Wonderful to see you. And rather more…sartorially resplendent than when we last met.”
Theo smiled. “Thank you. You’re looking as distinguished as ever, Mr. Mahan.”
“Adolphus, for heaven’s sake. Here, let’s get rid of this foul weather gear, shall we? Over here. Frances, hello!”
“Dapper” was the word Ford Rexford had always used for Adolphus Mahan, but “distinguished” was better; “dapper” implied an acquired skill, a forced effort, and Mahan gave the impression that he’d been born in his three-piece suit and small dotted bow tie, born wearing round horn-rimmed glasses, with his gray hair perfectly trimmed over his small perfect ears. Born running the publishing firm of Mahan and Son (as indeed he had been, for his father was Son before him). Born knowing everyone at the Russian Tea Room, for in addition to his own power in the American arts, he was married to a woman descended from a family of illustrious theatrical producers—she herself in fact, in partnership with Morris Schwinn, had produced five of Ford Rexford’s Broadway successes.
“Ah, Mr. Mahan, such weather,” said the cloakroom lady.
“Mr. Mahan, what chaos, your booth,” said the maître d’.
“Adolphus, still on for tonight?” said a man all in beige.
“Dolly! Call me!” said a glittery-eyed woman leaning out from her table to squeeze his arm as they passed.
“Mr. Mahan, blinis and champagne?” said the waiter.
“I seem to eat here a lot,” confessed the publisher with the polite pretense of anonymity with which he’d come forward in the entranceway to introduce himself to Theo Ryan.
Theo grinned. “I don’t blame you, I used to love to come here with my parents. It always sounded so loud and happy.” Yes, how much louder here, he thought, than in the Cavendish Faculty Club back in Rome, where one went on special occasions in one’s best suit and quietly complained to a few of one’s colleagues about all the rest of one’s colleagues, or sat stiffly serving anecdotes to visiting speakers when signaled to do so by Norman Bridges. “I mean, the sound of success,” said Theo to Mr. Mahan, “is noisy in a very pleasant chinkling kind of way.”
“Quite true.” His host smiled. “I never thought of that.”
Yes, in the Russian Tea Room there was a humming hubbub of rich noises—the tinkle of crystal, the clatter of silver on china, outbursts of laughter, and eager overlapping gossip among a hundred people who were all enjoying good fortune at hand and all sanguine of more good fortune to come. Here were dozens of men and women in the arts who were as well known in Rome, Italy, as in Rome, North Carolina. And all the celebrity academics who expounded
on the arts to one another, all those academic stars whom Theo could at times not help but envy, here in the Russian Tea Room it was unlikely that anyone had ever heard of the most famous of them. “So?” Theo could hear Ford Rexford saying. “And a lot of genius African woodcarvers and great Burmese dancers never heard of the Russian Tea Room. So what does that tell you? Do it ’cause you love it. Or fuck it.”
“Champagne?” asked Mahan.
“Please. Good Lord, is that who I think it is?” Theo gestured toward a famous film actress.
“I believe it is.” Mahan offered a cigarette from a slender case, smiling as if with envy when Theo said he no longer smoked. “Yes, you can always tell the movie stars in here because they’re wearing T-shirts with baggy trousers. Agents and publishers look like bankers.” He pointed at his suit. “Film producers look like teenagers, and often are.”
“Mr. Mahan—”
“Excuse me. Charles, wonderful to see you! Amanda sends love to Beryl.” Settling back against the plump red leather booth, Mahan lowered the glasses on his straight slender nose. “Now, Theo, until coffee, we’ll do what was once called civilized conversation but is now known as schmoozing. And then I’ll begin to badger you about The Book, how’s that?”
That was fine.
“How is academe? I gather you’ve been bought by the Japanese.”
“No, not Cavendish. You’re thinking of Waldo College. They’re our rival across the mountain.”
“Yes, of course. The Japanese have bought most of my rivals, too. Much more sensible approach to conquest than Pearl Harbor. I remember once lunching in Tokyo with—excuse me—Ali, Harrison, how are you?”
Adolphus Mahan told charming stories, knew that he did so, and spared his companion the burden of reciprocating without making him feel either dull or slighted. Throughout the meal, these stories were interrupted by a stream of visitors to their booth. While Mahan was preoccupied with them, Theo ate his crepes and eavesdropped on the other guests as they floated about to neighboring tables. (The show-business equivalent of Publish or Perish was clearly Be Seen or Vanish.) Two novelists apparently had been married to the same woman (judging from their remarks at her expense). An actor Theo recognized kept drifting off in the direction of the men’s room for long stays. At the table next to their booth, a beautiful young woman with wild blonde hair periodically checked her reflection in a mirrored compact as if afraid she might have disappeared. She smiled at him.
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