TWO
THE GALLERY WHERE SUSAN worked opened an hour after the start of the St. Albert’s school day, so Eddie usually beat his wife out the door. But she was already dressed to go when she woke him the morning after his reunion.
“Did you have fun?” she asked.
Eddie tried to piece together the later reaches of the previous evening, but the only fruit of this effort was a throb against the backs of his eyes. Had his brain been capable of generating a response, he would still have been unable to break his tongue sufficiently free from its surroundings to articulate it. He offered instead an affirmative cough.
“Was Blakeman there?”
Eddie remembered with some regret offering Susan as an excuse for his disappearance from Blakeman’s life. In fact, Susan liked Blakeman, and she didn’t understand why they saw so little of him. Eddie couldn’t tell either of them that Blakeman belonged to his old life with Martha.
“He invited me for dinner tonight,” Eddie managed after working his mouth into functioning order.
“That sounds nice. It would be good for you to get out a bit more. Maybe I’ll see if Annie wants to do something.”
Annie was Susan’s best friend from childhood. They’d moved together from Ohio to New York after college, and Annie had introduced Susan to Eddie, with whom she’d worked at St. Albert’s until leaving the year before, after the birth of her first child.
“See you this afternoon?” Eddie asked before Susan left.
Each year since their engagement she’d taken half a day off work to join him at graduation. She liked seeing the faces of the boys whose names she heard all year, chatting with the other teachers, feeling fully immersed in Eddie’s life.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
Eddie fell back to sleep after Susan left, and it was almost noon by the time he got across town to pack up his things at school for the summer. Rounding the corner, he saw Stephen McLaughlin sitting on a fire hydrant with his handmade sign propped up beside him. Eddie couldn’t read it from where he stood, but he knew exactly what it said. “Make St. Albert’s keep its word. Don’t evict a disabled man.”
Since its founding, St. Albert’s had occupied a mansion on Eighty-ninth Street between Madison and Fifth, donated by one of the rich Catholics who’d started the place, mostly third-and fourth-generation Irish who’d finally arrived in the higher reaches of society and wanted their own version of the private schools where rich Protestants sent their sons. The school had eventually expanded into an adjacent building, converting all the apartments into classrooms except the penthouse, where the young headmaster lived with his family. He’d stayed in the job for almost five decades. Shortly after his death, St. Albert’s went about taking possession of the apartment and found it still occupied by his fifty-year-old son. For three years now, Stephen and the school had been locked in litigation. For the last two, he’d camped outside the building every day, picketing while parents dropped off and picked up their sons. Despite the message on the sign, Stephen had no disability that Eddie could discern apart from a fairly encompassing pot habit. Since taking up his place outside the school, he’d grown out a thick red beard, as if to appear slightly menacing or to give off a hint of indigence—though he’d refused an offer of three-quarters of a million dollars to vacate the apartment.
“Handsome Eddie,” he said. “It’s been a slow day.”
Eddie’s mother had started working at St. Albert’s as Mr. McLaughlin’s secretary, and Stephen—then in his twenties and unemployed—often babysat the infant Eddie. Apart from Eddie’s parents, Stephen had known him longer than anyone alive.
“School’s out,” Eddie told him. “Graduation starts at the church in a few hours. You ought to set up shop over there.”
“Thanks, Handsome E.”
Stephen rose from the hydrant and picked up his sign while Eddie let himself into the building. He had a key to the rickety elevator, but he still thought of it as vaguely off limits to him, as it was to students, and he rarely used it. He walked up the back stairs to the faculty lounge on the second floor, which was already stripped almost bare. Most of the other teachers had cleared their things out the day before, while Eddie had been at his reunion. Eddie went through the papers in his small cubby with dutiful care before throwing the entire pile out. He left the lounge and walked up two more flights to the black box theater that held his drama classes.
Looking up at the stage, Eddie imagined himself playing Gayev in The Cherry Orchard or Eugene in Biloxi Blues. He didn’t usually get nostalgic at school. It was the place he worked every day, a fact that generally overwhelmed any memories of that earlier time. But the reunion had put those days in his mind, and with the building empty the weight of the present was not enough to suppress the past. The first time he’d been in that theater as an adult, he’d been shocked at how small it was, since it had seemed enormous when he’d performed there. He’d never felt nervous or excited before the performances, just enveloped in the thing he was doing. The curtain would go up, and for a few hours he felt more real than he did anywhere else.
Before acting, he’d never had something the other boys envied, as he envied their wealth and their easy sense of entitlement. His first years at St. Albert’s had not been particularly happy ones, and his unhappiness was made worse by the fact that he could never criticize the place at home. His education had been his parents’ second great gift to him, after their prenatal move to America. They’d held out great hopes for the transformative possibility of Eddie’s mere presence at a school that had educated the sons of mayors, governors, senators, and one president. At home, they spoke of the place in the respectful tones they usually reserved for Cardinal O’Connor or the Clancy Brothers. When a St. Albert’s graduate strangled his girlfriend with her bra in Central Park during Eddie’s childhood, even this incident brought an odd credit to the place, since the pages of Newsday and the Post insistently contrasted the Preppy Murderer’s lurid crime with his refined pedigree. When a parochial school kid killed his date, it didn’t make the front page.
All this talk about the privilege of attending such a place had accentuated the feeling that he didn’t quite belong there. But that had changed when the drama teacher, Mr. Carlton, started casting him in plays. Eddie wouldn’t even have auditioned without the twisted ankle that kept him off the basketball court one winter with nothing to do after school. His success had solidified his long-standing but intermittent friendship with Blakeman, the most popular kid in the grade. The two of them and Justin Price formed the nucleus of an “artistic” clique—Blakeman the writer, Eddie the actor, and Justin the musician—that came to dominate their class at St. Albert’s through their high school years. It was then that Blakeman began calling him “Handsome Eddie,” and the name caught on. Eddie understood it wasn’t entirely a compliment, but who didn’t want to be handsome? Another member of their circle, Eddie Doyle, became “Bright Eddie,” because he was in the honors sections and Handsome Eddie was undistinguished in the classroom.
Now Bright Eddie was fighting in Afghanistan and Handsome Eddie was a teacher. He expected his old friend to appreciate the irony of this, but no one seemed surprised when he first took the job. The mediocre student was precisely the one destined to stay in the classroom, the unspoken assumption seemed to go. The smart ones earned enough money to send their sons to the school.
Graduation started at three, and it was after two thirty by the time Eddie had finished boxing up his papers and the props he used for acting exercises. He went straight downstairs and crossed the street to St. Agnes Church. Susan had already found an open pew inside, and she knelt with her eyes closed. She wasn’t ostentatious about her faith—they’d dated for weeks before he had any idea how important it was to her—but she couldn’t enter a church without saying at least a short prayer. Eddie always wondered what went through her head at these times. He didn’t much understand how prayer worked, though of course he could recite various standards. Wh
at Susan did was more in the way of improvisation, Eddie imagined, and he’d never had much talent for that.
As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him. Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage, and it might have been more than a matter of logistics that had led him to give up altar service just as he started acting in his first play. In the decade after he graduated from St. Albert’s—the years of his life with Martha and his acting career—he went to church no more than twice a year, at Christmas and Easter with his parents. If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.
His teaching career had brought religion back to his life in a superficial way. School days opened in the chapel on the second floor, which had stained-glass windows, wooden pews, and a small pipe organ. The sessions began and ended with a hymn, but what passed in between was more assembly than religious ceremony. Each morning a different teacher gave a “chapel speech,” not a sermon or homily so much as a general didactic pep talk. Every faculty member was required to give at least two of these a year.
Eddie did the minimum. He didn’t think he had much in the way of advice to give, having come back to St. Albert’s because he’d made such a mess of his life. The best he could offer were cautionary tales. But he found that the boys appreciated funny stories from his own student days, which he could shape in a way that suggested some moral, usually not one the events had suggested at the time. He never brought up God or faith in these talks. He didn’t have anything to say on those subjects.
He’d been dating Susan for a few months when she invited him to mass one Sunday, and he’d been going with her ever since. He wasn’t sure he believed the story the church was selling, but he liked about it the same thing he’d liked about acting: the understanding that someone was watching, that every action had a purpose and a meaning. Like Susan herself, it had come into his life at a time when he needed it. She had brought him back from a desperate place. What’s more, she had not even known she was doing so. She’d done it just by being herself. When things weren’t going well between them these days, he tried to remind himself of that.
Susan rose from the kneeler and opened her eyes just as the organ in the back brought the crowd to attention. The fifty-three members of the graduating class processed up the center aisle, singing the school song. Eddie watched them take their seats in the front three pews. They had been in seventh grade—little boys really—when Eddie started teaching. They’d been completely altered since he’d first met them. As had he, Eddie thought.
He remembered his own graduation, his mother’s pride at the idea that he would be the first in his family to go to college. Many more firsts were expected to follow. After he left NYU as a sophomore to act, his parents used the rest of the money they’d saved for tuition on a down payment for a house in Florida and took to expressing relief, when he called them there, that at least he hadn’t killed any girls in the park.
The pastor, Father Seneviratne, gave a brief blessing before welcoming Luce to the lectern. Hungover as Eddie was, he found it mercifully easy to ignore the man’s drone while dancing on the fuzzy edge of consciousness. Susan’s elbow brought him to attention when necessary. Luce finished by calling up Patrick Hendricks, the class’s valedictorian.
Patrick was Eddie’s favorite student, the only one in five years to show genuine, if modest, talent for acting. Eddie had tried to encourage him within reason, but he’d been glad to learn that Patrick was going to Dartmouth next year, which seemed far enough away from the temptations of professional work. He would be in a few student productions before finding other interests. After the usual introductory business, Patrick described his pride at representing his class, his love of St. Albert’s, which he’d attended since first grade, and his excitement for himself and his classmates as they embarked on the next stage of life. Eddie only came to real attention when he heard his own name.
“When I was a freshman, Mr. Hartley cast me in The Skin of Our Teeth. The very night the casting list went up, I went home and saw him on TV, in an episode of Murder Squad.”
This story was new to Eddie, and he wondered whether it was strictly true or altered somewhat for dramatic effect. His few guest spots on television didn’t make the air much, though this was the second time in as many days that someone had mentioned seeing one.
“Here was this real actor,” Patrick continued, “a professional actor teaching me how to do this thing. And I thought, I want to be like Mr. Hartley.”
By now Patrick had found Eddie’s pew, and he was looking at him as he spoke. Eddie smiled weakly back at him before looking down. Patrick was completely serious, in his way. But of course he didn’t really want to be like Eddie. He wanted to be the person Eddie had wanted to be at Patrick’s age, the person Eddie would have been if things had turned out differently.
Eddie gazed at the worn marble of the floor beneath him. Someone watching might have thought he was simply flattered or moved by pride, but his chest was tightening and he felt suddenly out of breath. The feeling didn’t subside as Patrick went on to other things, thanking his family and dropping a few inside jokes for the benefit of his friends, before ending on an earnest note of thanks.
After the ceremony Eddie looked for Patrick out on the sidewalk. He was standing near the corner, with a tall, pretty girl with light brown hair. Eddie thought he’d seen the girl hanging out in front of the school a few times.
“Thanks for the plug,” Eddie said.
“I meant it. It’s been a great experience learning from you.”
“You remember my wife?”
“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Hartley.” Patrick shook Susan’s hand. “This is my girlfriend, Melissa.”
“You must have been proud to see how he did up there,” Susan told the girl.
“Melissa’s graduating from Melwood next week,” Patrick said. “So we’re both proud. And she’s going to your old school, Mr. Hartley.”
“Did you go to NYU?” Melissa asked. “That’s so cool.”
“For about fifteen minutes. But that wasn’t the school’s fault. I’m sure you’ll have a great time there.”
“You know, I really owe you,” Melissa said, smiling almost flirtatiously. “I met Patrick through your plays. I mean, I went to go see one of my friends in one, and when I saw him onstage, I made her get me his number.”
She laughed a bit as though at her own boldness, though conversations Eddie had overheard in the halls suggested that girls her age were capable of being quite a bit bolder than this.
“I take full credit, then.”
“And Patrick really looks up to you. We’ve watched some of your commercials and stuff on YouTube. I’m trying to act, too, so it’s really inspiring.”
“My parents are just getting the car,” Patrick said. “They’d be happy to give you both a ride to the reception.”
“I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to make it,” Eddie told them.
“You’re not?”
“We’ve got a family occasion we just can’t get out of. But I was really proud to see you up there making that speech, and I appreciate the things you said about me. I hope you’ll come by the school when you’re home on vacation, so we can catch up and I can hear all about how you’re doing.” He had a sense that he was speaking a bit manically now. “Congratulations to you too, Melissa. I’m sure you’ll stick longer down at NYU than I did.”
“WHAT WAS ALL THAT about?” Susan asked when they got back to the apartment.
Eddie couldn’t say what it had been about. He had still not quite recovered from the feeling that
had locked on to him during Patrick’s speech.
“I had some kind of attack.”
“You had an attack because a kid complimented you?”
“He complimented a version of me that doesn’t exist.”
Eddie suspected that Susan might find this beside the point, but she appeared to find it instead precisely the point.
“But you wish that version existed. Because you’re not happy with our life.”
“And you’re happy?” Eddie asked. “You don’t wish things were different?”
He shouldn’t have said it—not because it was cruel, but because it invited a conversation they’d already had too many times.
“I do wish our life was different,” Susan said. “Because I wish we had a child—together. You wish you were rich and famous so you weren’t stuck with me. So you could go win back Dr. Drake.”
“Martha has nothing to do with this conversation.”
“Isn’t she what you think about when Patrick calls you an actor? That’s why you get so sick you have to run away.”
They’d hardly mentioned Martha before trying to have a child. She hadn’t been all that famous when Eddie and Susan started dating, and Susan wasn’t impressed by that kind of fame anyway. She didn’t watch much TV. She read novels and books about art and what she called “theory,” which Eddie took to mean books that belonged on a college syllabus, not in a civilian home. She made it most of the way through The New Yorker each week. That a person Eddie had dated was on her way to being a star had interested her only abstractly. What had mattered to her about Eddie’s past was that it had ended by bringing them together. This was part of what he’d first loved about her.
All that had changed when they started pulling the money together for their first attempt at in vitro, and the full extent of the debt Eddie had built up while living with Martha became clear to her. After the failure of that first try, he’d made the mistake of expressing some ambivalence about undertaking another. If they couldn’t even afford to conceive a child, how would they manage everything that came with it? They lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, and they had no obvious way of getting more space on their current salaries. Not to mention food and diapers and whatever else was involved. If the child was a girl and couldn’t go to St. Albert’s, there would be school to worry about. They should have discussed money sooner. They’d avoided it precisely because they hadn’t wanted to talk about the past. But it was unavoidable now. Eddie was broke, Martha was extravagantly wealthy, and suddenly the difference mattered. Susan had responded to Eddie’s hesitation by suggesting for the first time that Eddie had never quite gotten over Martha, that he dreamed of running off with Dr. Drake.
Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Page 2