Mike blushed and seemed embarrassed. Marge understood – her son was discovering the attractions of the opposite sex. Everything was as it should be. Doc would be pleased.
Mrs Finucane had no hesitation in picking Mike for the role of Patrick. His voice was good – there was no doubt about it – but his brooding good looks were his trump card. ‘Film-star looks,’ she told the head of English in the staffroom after the audition. ‘All the girls will swoon to see him up on stage. If I were twenty years younger myself . . .’
Picking a female lead had been harder – there had been many more girls at the audition than boys – but there was one whose beauty and charm had brought her enormous popularity at Boylan High, and she didn’t have a bad voice either. Her name was Charlotte Inhelder.
As usual when big things were in the air, Mary was Mike’s first confidante. She was fifteen and full of enthusiasm for her brother’s exploits.
‘So I guess you’ll be wearing lots of fancy costumes?’ she whispered excitedly. The rest of the house had gone to bed and they were sitting in Mary’s room, dimly lit by a little table lamp. ‘That’s real neat, Mikey. Do you get to wear glitzy make-up and all that stuff?’
‘I guess so.’ He shrugged, trying to play it cool. ‘My character, the hero’ – he stopped to give Mary a saucy wink – ‘is a young guy called Patrick from Des Moines, and I go on this big adventure to New York, where I get to stay with my Auntie Mame, who’s rich and moves in high society. Then I fall in love with two girls and stuff, so I’m sure to get some cool costumes to wear and make-up and all.’
Mary looked at him.
‘So who plays the two girls, Mikey?’
He laughed.
‘Aw, just a couple of girls from eleventh grade. The real big role is my Auntie Mame, and she’s gonna be played by Charlotte Inhelder.’
Mary gave a little gasp. ‘Oh, Mikey! Charlotte Inhelder’s soooo beautiful!’ Her eyes grew misty. ‘I wish I looked like her. She’s so popular – and you’re gonna get to know her!’
Suddenly Mary felt oddly frightened.
‘I bet you’ll fall right in love with her.’ She laughed, but her eyes were serious. ‘And then . . . you’ll run away together and forget about your stupid sister.’
She gave a strange little giggle, which sounded more like a sob.
Mike put his arm around her gently.
‘Oh Sis, don’t be so silly. You know it’s me and you forever. I’d never dream of leaving you – and definitely not for Charlotte Inhelder! You and me, we’re two peas in one pod, and that’s how it’s going to stay.’
Rehearsals took place after school each evening for an hour or more in the Bishop Boylan auditorium. Mrs Finucane marvelled at Mike’s enthusiasm and application: he didn’t just learn his own part, he knew everyone else’s too and could sing all the big numbers in the show with a startling, flamboyant theatricality. His love duet with the beautiful ingénue, Pegeen, was charmingly sweet and moving, but the musical’s central relationship was between Patrick and his Aunt Mame.
Charlotte Inhelder had blonde hair that reached to her shoulders, pale blue eyes and the lithe figure of a gymnast. For all her intimidating beauty, she spoke in the hushed, respectful tones her Bavarian parents had taught her were proper. But when she burst into song, she was transfigured, absolutely believable as the booming, iconoclastic heroine bent on shaking up the dull proprieties of hidebound America. Mike was excited when Charlotte sang with him. He was intrigued by the boldness of her gaze and the message she seemed to be sending him. He liked the brash, noisy, vulgar music and he liked the theatrical dame Charlotte turned into when she entered her role.
Mrs Finucane said she wanted the show’s main relationship to have chemistry and vitality, and she asked Mike and Charlotte to come for one-on-one rehearsals.
‘The first thing to bear in mind,’ she told them, ‘is that Mame is older and more worldly-wise than Patrick, but there’s definitely a spark of sexual attraction between them.’
Charlotte stifled a giggle and Mike felt his cheeks burn at the mention of the S-word. Mrs Finucane pretended not to notice.
‘Mame is a great beauty and a very sexual being; Patrick’s just an innocent young country boy in short pants, and when they first meet Mame’s way of speaking to him is actually pretty risqué. Over the course of the play, though, Patrick becomes a man, with his own . . . manly desires.’
Mrs Finucane paused for a pensive moment and Charlotte’s eyes met Mike’s with a twinkle of amusement. At the end of the rehearsal, she took his hand.
‘Old Finucane’s a saucy one, isn’t she just?’ Charlotte laughed. ‘Bishop Boylan must be turning in his grave to hear all that in his school!’
Mike blushed, but he didn’t pull his hand away.
‘I’ve fallen in love with Michael A. Hess,’ Charlotte declared. Lucy, her best friend, gaped at her from across the table where they were sharing a soda in Don’s Café.
‘Lucy, he’s the most beautiful, sensitive boy in the world,’ she said, staring rapturously at the tablecloth. ‘He’s perfect – tall, dark and handsome! And he’s German too, thank the Lord, so my parents are bound to like him. I’m going to take him to the prom this year, just you see if I don’t.’
Lucy sighed enviously.
‘Those Hess boys are all pretty cute,’ she said, dreamily, ‘but Mike’s definitely the nicest. And he’s so mysterious – no one knows what he’s really like.’
‘Well, guess what,’ added Charlotte, glowing with pride and excitement, ‘Tomorrow night I get to put my arm round him and hold his hand. And . . . he’s going to be wearing short pants!’
When he told Mary about the rehearsal, Mike was agitated and he didn’t know why. He paced the room as he spoke of Charlotte’s beauty and the friendly way she had treated him. Mary sat watching him.
‘Mikey . . .’ she said after a while. ‘Could I maybe come see you rehearsing with Charlotte sometime?’
Mike was delighted.
‘Sure, you can come tomorrow night. We’re rehearsing the start of Act One and we’re trying out our costumes for the first time. It’s gonna be so cool, and the music is so lovely you’ll just die!’
The following evening Mary sat at the back of the Boylan Auditorium. Mike appeared onstage wearing an old suit jacket that was too small for him and grey pants that didn’t reach to his knees. He was carrying a suitcase and looking bewildered. A woman in a ragged linen skirt and faded blue blouse was holding his hand and leading him through the streets of New York. She was evidently Patrick’s nanny and it seemed they’d got lost looking for his Auntie Mame’s mansion on Beekman Place. To keep their spirits up in the cruel new world they’d tumbled into, Nanny Gooch addressed a trembling musical prayer to the litany of Catholic saints: ‘Saint Bridget, deliver us to Beekman Place, / Away from the wicked and depraved; / [. . .] Mame’s dear arms reach out for his embrace.’
Watching from the semi-darkness, Mary felt herself shiver: she hadn’t realized her brother was playing an orphan and was surprised he hadn’t told her. His arrival in the fake New York of the painted stage set seemed a mocking mimicry of the real trauma they had lived through, and, worst of all, Mikey was about to find salvation in the arms of a beautiful woman.
What if Mike falls in love with Charlotte Inhelder? What if he leaves me all alone? she thought as she watched them meet on stage. He can’t keep his eyes off her . . . She screwed up her eyes and huddled deep down into her seat. She wanted to crawl into the darkness and never come out.
ELEVEN
1968
In the midst of the upheavals, in the sixth year of the US war in Vietnam, with tens of thousands on the streets of American cities and black power challenging the established order, Michael and Mary Hess became US citizens. Twelve and a half years of alien status, during which their Irish passports had to be renewed and registered annually with the Immigration Service, came to an end on 3 October 1968.
Doc Hess arranged for their
naturalization to be held in the Rockford courthouse under the auspices of US Circuit Judge Albert O’Sullivan. Judge Bert was a regular at Doc’s urology practice, and both men belonged to Rockford’s great and good, so O’Sullivan had agreed to bend the rules and give Mike and Mary a private ceremony while thirty-five other applicants were lumped together for a communal oath-taking afterwards. Mike and Mary were singled out for coverage in the following day’s Rockford Register under the headline IRISH HESSES BECOME AMERICAN CITIZENS:
Michael and Mary Hess, Boylan students, became American citizens at a ceremony at the courthouse on October 3. Michael, who was born in Tipperary, Ireland, came to America at the age of three and a half. He remembers little of his native land and lost his brogue soon after arriving. Mary Hess was born in Dublin and came here at the age of two. Chief Circuit Judge Albert S. O’Sullivan presided over the ceremonies. Mary Hess said, ‘It was a beautiful and moving ceremony, one that I will never forget.’ Michael remarked, ‘I’ve felt American ever since coming here twelve years ago, now I have a right to claim it.’ Thirty Italians, two Englishmen, two Swiss, and four-year-old Rickey McDowell of Castlepollard, County Westmeath, Ireland, were naturalized later.
Reading the newspaper the next morning, Mike and Mary were outraged.
‘“It was a beautiful and moving ceremony”? Yuck! Who says that kind of sentimental stuff?’ yelled Mary . ‘How can they put stuff in that we didn’t say? He didn’t even talk to me!’
‘And who says I can’t remember my own country?’ asked Mike as the article was read out at the breakfast table. ‘Who says it? That’s a lie!’
He brought a clenched fist down on the table that made the coffee cups rattle, and his brothers chorused in amused delight, ‘Put yer dooks up! Put yer dooks up! Do ya wanna fight, boy? Put yer dooks up!’
Doc smiled, ignoring the ruckus. ‘This is the way of the press,’ he said wryly. ‘You must never trust what you read in the newspapers.’
But Marge was delighted by the article and particularly pleased with the photo that accompanied it. It featured Mike standing in front of an American flag in his new tweed jacket and dark brown tie, his thick hair glossily combed in a neat side parting and his wide smile and gleaming white teeth making him look for all the world like one of the Kennedy boys, while at his side Mary was standing with a ribbon in her hair and a Bible in her hand looking up with admiring eyes at her brother. The caption underneath read, ‘Mary and Mike Hess, who came to America from Ireland at the ages of 2 and 3, are glad to be American citizens now.’
Another photo, taken by Marge after the ceremony, showed Mike shaking hands with a stern-looking Judge O’Sullivan in his long black robes and Mary in profile looking on with a half-smile on her lips. It was this photo that Mary studied with rapt attention for many days afterwards, for she noticed something that others did not. She had never previously realized it so clearly, but here was incontrovertible photographic evidence that her nose was big, long and crooked. With a teenager’s uncompromising self-criticism, she decided then and there that something must be done about it – something to improve herself, she told Marge.
‘Oh honey, you don’t need your nose fixed. Lots of young girls feel that way.’
Marge knew all about teenage insecurity. ‘I remember being a teenager and hating every part of myself! You’ll grow out of it. You have a lovely nose. The most important thing is to go out and have fun. If you love yourself, others will love you too!’
But Mary was furious. Was nobody listening? Her problem was that she couldn’t love herself – she hated herself. Eventually, unnerved by the ferocity of her daughter’s apparent self-loathing, Marge told her to go ask Doc about it.
Mary was stumped. She knew that, of all the people in the world, Doc was the least likely to sympathize with her feelings, but she also knew that nothing could take place in the Hess household without his approval. She approached him when he was at his most malleable – as he smoked a cigar in the den, following The Liberace Show. She told him her nose embarrassed her and made her feel bad; she could never be happy until it was fixed. She told him he was a doctor and he ought to find her someone who could straighten it out. But Doc laughed his annoying laugh.
‘Doctors are for curing people who are sick, young lady. And having a crooked nose don’t make you sick. Many folks have much worse things to deal with, so don’t you go making a fuss about your nose, OK?’
Mary stamped her foot and stormed out, feeling more alone than ever.
When Mike and Mary became US citizens, they had been amused by the arcane paperwork, the fingerprinting and the exaggerated solemnity of the ponderous ceremony. They had smiled complacently as they swore to ‘support and defend . . . the United States of America against all enemies . . . and bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law’. It had all seemed academic – Mike was a juvenile and Vietnam was a long way away – but no sooner had they become Americans than the draft became the defining issue of Americanness. Suddenly it was the touchstone people were measured against: you were for it or against it and all the rest followed on behind.
The undertaking Mike had sworn before Judge O’Sullivan seemed distinctly less academic when Congressman Alexander Pirnie drew 30 April out of the lottery pot and James Hess, the eldest of Doc’s three boys, found himself drafted on the random chance of his birth date into the US Army. Mike’s cohort, those born in 1952, was scheduled to enter the draft lottery in three years’ time.
As the election campaign unfolded and Nixon harried LBJ over Vietnam and the draft, Mame’s American razzle-dazzle filled the rehearsal room with energy and noise. The show was a glitzy re-creation of an earlier age when the gulf between America’s haves and have-nots could be bridged by a champagne party and a brassy song from a camp musical dame. On stage Charlotte was loud and brash; the costume and the make-up turned her into a splendid forty-year-old – her teenage sexuality was attenuated, her maternal qualities enhanced – and Mike found it reassuring and attractive. The hours they spent studying each other’s expressions taught them to read the meanings that flickered hesitantly in each other’s faces; if one of them stumbled over their lines, the other would be there with a timely prompt.
After rehearsals, they took to drinking sodas together in the parlour of Don’s Café. Marge and Doc were thrilled. They shrugged their shoulders knowingly and mouthed, ‘Teenagers!’ to each other. But Mary, who was used to sharing her evenings with her brother, brooded and fretted in her room.
Mike felt an ambiguity about what was happening to him: he loved the big show tunes, the make-up and the glamour of becoming someone else in the blaze of the footlights. Onstage he felt safe – he loved his role and he knew it would carry him smoothly forward on a sea of music to a preordained happy ending that no one could take away from him. On top of all this, maybe – maybe – he was in love with Charlotte Inhelder. Charlotte had already starred in Boylan’s previous musical, The Pirates of Penzance. She guided Mike and fussed over him, and he was flattered by her attention. Charlotte didn’t hide the fact that she liked him and he felt a sort of obligation to return her devotion. It worked that way onstage, and Mike vaguely sensed that was how it should work in life; by the eve of their opening night, they had already exchanged kisses in the leafy privacy of Oaks Park, over the road from the school on North Main Street. But Mike was finding that he loved her more when she was in character than when she was in the tricky unpredictable seas of real life. Mike had fallen in love with Charlotte as Mame; he didn’t know if he loved her as Charlotte.
TWELVE
1968
Mike paced and fretted backstage, but Charlotte squeezed his hand and told him he would be great. In an auditorium packed with parents, teachers and students, Mary closed her eyes as the curtain went up. She knew what was coming and she was worried what Marge and Doc would think about Mikey playing his orphan role for the whole world to see. But as Nanny Gooch warbled on about ‘dear St Bridget’, she sneake
d a glance at her parents and saw they were entranced. Mike was the focus of attention and they were revelling in his performance. By the time orphan Patrick sang his first big number, Mary was excited and thrilled by the smiling faces and ripples of applause. She basked in her brother’s success.
In the second half of the show Mike grew into a dazzling society beau, his short pants swapped for an elegant, tight-fitting tuxedo, his glossy black hair gelled into place with one cute curl strategically placed on his whitened forehead. Rouge on his cheeks and a slash of red across his lips gave him the surreal, impossibly perfect air of a 1930s movie idol. When he sang, his voice welled from deep within him and filled the auditorium with lilting harmony. Mary and 300 others fell under the spell of this magnificent creature they knew to be but refused to believe was Michael Anthony Hess.
The reception in the school hall after the show brought Mike his first taste of adulation. The boys pumped his hand, the girls sought to catch his eye. In the back of Doc’s Cadillac on the way home, Mary welled over with love and pride.
‘It was just so neat, Mikey! You were just so fantastic! How does it feel to have all those people clapping like crazy every time you open your mouth?’
Mike ruffled her hair.
‘Well . . . it’s a buzz. When all the lights go up it’s pretty scary, but when the music starts it’s like you know exactly what to do and how to behave. You don’t feel like some insignificant little nobody any more; you feel like some big time hero or something, and you know everything’s going to work out in your life.’
Mary nodded, transfixed by the thought.
‘And when you kiss Charlotte and tell her you love her, are you acting it, like you do onstage? Or are you being yourself?’
Mike looked at his sister in the shadows of the back seat and didn’t know how to answer.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 13