Greene’s impersonations in the second half of I Dwell in Possibility ranged from Eleanor Roosevelt to Sylvia Plath to Mother Teresa, but her great finesse in all of them was lost on Mays. Bernhardt herself would have stood only even odds of breaking his absorption. He worked at rearranging; given this new piece of evidence, his recent past once again required reinterpreting. Mays sat in his seat and reinterpreted as if his life depended on it. Two opposing theories explained recent events. He named them loosely the Conspiracy and the Coincidence angles. In the first, all the confusing trail of motifs—Veterans’ Day, the war, instrumental music, the exchange, Bernhardt, and now Ford—secretly conspired to mean something. In the second, they did not, but only happened to occur around the same time.
He found the second camp infinitely more attractive and consoling. Whatever connection the string of puzzles seemed to imply he must have read into them himself. Perhaps, as Bullock liked to say, he suffered from the number two killer of modern times: boredom. As the foremost living case of an uneventful life, he had had every right to spice things up with a little exotica. He’d fabricated an interest in the distant redhead because of her otherworldly manner. The whole chain linking Greene to the Great War to Nijinsky to Bernhardt was then an ironic by-product of the way history was structured. The Trading Floor’s allusion to the same time merely reflected the present’s fascination with nostalgia. The lies and dodges of Brink, Delaney, and Bullock had been random or unintentional. At the theater, pressed by reality, finding all the fascinating avenues of possibility dead-ending in an accomplished actress’s stage performance, he must have made one last clutch at intrigue and concocted a vague resemblance between himself and someone long ago dead. Anything to keep busy, to stay with the search.
He would have been content to buy this explanation, to settle down for the rest of the act, to make the acquaintance of the delightful Alison if it hadn’t been for one ugly detail: that bit of Mays family folklore. Continually as he was growing up, usually when bills came due or following some heavy, unusual expense such as a broken leg or hot water heater, in short, when the precarious Mays socioeconomic position tipped toward the pinch of poverty, the young Peter watched his mother push her scarf higher up on her head, take a breath and say:
—What Ford might have done for my family.
The saying was proverbial, simply something his mother did, like roast beef on Sundays and cards at Christmas. Peter found the phrase so familiar that for a time he even thought it was universal, akin to “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” He used it himself in young adulthood when money got the upper hand of him. But his friends had always commented on the phrase’s quaintness. Realizing that the expression belonged solely to his mother—a way of complaining that her ancestors might have done better by way of cash—Mays paid no more attention to it than he did to, say, his geometry teacher, who, when frustrated by his students’ total inability to get from A to B using proof, invariably exclaimed, “I should have gone into embalming.” But the Ford photo changed the old expression for good.
The Conspiracy camp, on the other hand, had God, Conan Doyle, or someone equally nefarious dealing him a hand as an exercise in deducing what cards were out. He rejected this possibility, though not on grounds of implausibility: he felt no virtue or logic in being a skeptic. Mays dismissed the God option because if it were true, he’d be led to water whether he believed or not, but if it were false, he’d never be able to prove it so. Best declare metaphysics irrelevant at the start and get on to checking other angles. After eliminating those, he could come back and tinker with scripture.
A notch below diety, there remained the chance that history—an unconscious, forward-moving sum vector—conspired to drop a revelation in Mays’s lap. Again and again, a turning on the same concern: the Great War, the opening decades of this century. But his being singled out for a private connection with the long-forgotten past, or the past making itself known through him struck Mays as unlikely. He flossed conscientiously, took public transportation, and never filed anything but a short form; destiny did not sit well on him.
The most likely conspiracy was among his friends and new acquaintances. From the start, he’d been put and kept on the scent by others’ deliberate miscues. After he’d given up the Vets’ Parade for lost, Delaney had called him back and pointed out Greene, who had appeared ex nibilo, red hair gleaming, as if by prearrangement. Later, Delaney had deliberately intruded on Mays’s private search, kept it alive with the musical instrument angle. Doug tipped him to Caro, Caro to boyfriend Lenny, who just happened to have a photo of Bernhardt hidden behind his Standard and Poor’s. Lenny tipped him to Greene via Alison Stark; even the old guy, Arkady Krakow, seemed implicated in an elaborate scheme to issue Mays a date and ensure his appearance at the Your Move. Finally Greene, as if part of her act, tipped him to the Ford photo. An impossibly elaborate, cumbersome solution, but one that fit each twist of the script.
Where was the denouement, the final tip? What lesson did this conspiracy of equals intend for him, and why choose such a gothic tactic when they might have manipulated him more simply? He looked again at each link in the chain of intrigue: never had anyone forced his hand. The others simply suggested; he had taken the ball and run on his own volition. They had perhaps stretched rules once or twice: Brink’s pressure, Bullock’s lie about the exchange holiday. But no one had interfered with Peter’s free agency. The thought nauseated him.
Mays awakened from this reverie with the vague sensation of being attacked by Alison. The last twist of the knife: strangled noiselessly in a theater by an Edwardian masquerading as a modern-day working woman. She struggled with his hand, saying:
—You’re hurting me, Turk.
Worked up over the Conspiracy theory, he had clenched his entwined fist tighter and tighter until Alison squirmed in pain. He extricated his hand.
—No, I didn’t mean for you . . .
But he fought her attempt to take back his hand. He checked it to see if she had taken a skin sample or left a secret mark of Cain in ultraviolet ink. Then, in a rare moment of lucidity, Mays understood that if he were not yet over the edge, he would be shortly if he kept to the primrose path he now trod. The Conspiracy theory came down to pure paranoia. The machinations were too top-heavy, too susceptible to breakdown. Too much effort would have to go into the chancy prospect of convincing Mays he was an unwitting millionaire. And for what? What could anyone stand to gain?
Besides, the collaborators could not have known about his mother’s pet expression, on which the whole scavenger hunt now hung. Peter took a peek at Alison’s profile: the most beautiful brow ridges since Piltdown Man. He could not suspect Miss Stark, at least, of any duplicity. He dropped the whole Conspiracy angle, and with his freed hand, once again took Alison’s.
Clearing his head, Mays focused on the stage, where Kimberly Greene, again in the New England severity of Dickinson, the prophetic hermit, delivered those lines about possibility being a better place to live than prose. Mays had his doubts, but the minute the footlights were doused, he rose to his feet with the rest of the house and applauded vigorously. This put him about four feet closer to Ms. Greene, the better to scrutinize her face. He had some questions for that face, up close.
The audience continued to applaud, stomp, and whistle until Mays grew disgusted with the whole narcissistic demonstration. After the eighth curtain call, he looked at Alison, who rolled her eyes to heaven, also fed up with the conquering hero racket. They slipped, by common, unspoken agreement, out of the rioting hall.
In the foyer, Mays looked for the entrance into the wings. Alison tried steering him streetward.
—I’ll give you a quarter if you take me home.
—In a minute. I’m trying to find . . .
—Come on, don’t be shy. I won’t make any passes you can’t catch.
—It’s not that. Only . . . don’t you want to do the receiving line?
—What on earth for? When the bull
fighter kills the bull, everyone gets to go home. I didn’t think you were the type to go in for idol-worshiping.
—Not to worship, just to . . .
—Get a good ogle? What does she have that I don’t have, aside from looks, face, figure, talent, and mystique?
Mays wondered why Alison was so averse to his meeting Greene, but refused to sink back into paranoia. Sheer rivalry, perhaps. He overruled her objections, and soon they stood in the queue of admirers, the conga line that by theatrical convention always forms outside performers’ dressing rooms. Nor were they, despite having slipped out in mid-ovation, the first in line. Half a dozen stragglers—a good cross-section of Middle America if ever there was one—beat them to it.
—They must have come out at intermission.
—Hell with the show. Give them greatness.
Alison and Peter broke off bantering when the star made her appearance. Gasps and polite applause rippled through the line when Greene opened her dressing room door in her Bernhardt getup. Mays drew up short: she had finished as Dickinson; why resuit as Sarah? She’d gone to great lengths to get back into the stays. Theatrically demented, she doubtless believed in transmigration of actresses’ souls. Then Mays checked himself, remembering his own mission of transmigration.
Greene dismissed her admirers one by one, politely but perfunctorily. The ritual burdened more than it gratified her. But each fan was too starstruck, too self-conscious at being in proximity of greatness to notice being clicked off like groceries by a cashier. Systematically, Greene knocked off the first half dozen in line. Then she reached for, took Mays’s hand.
And for the first time it fell to the star to be nonplussed. Greene’s face lit with recognition, and for once, the easy words did not come. Mays, actually touching the flesh of his phantom, stayed remarkably calm. He no longer felt himself in the presence of the talented Greene, the fabulous Bernhardt, or even the enigmatic redhead; instead, he stood three feet from a woman who could give him a definite answer, a solid lead on the long-hinted-at legacy. He would not budge from the spot until she handed over the facts.
Flustered, Greene removed herself from his grip and walked to the back wall of her room. She favored one leg, limping, a nervous habit doubtless adopted on donning her Sarah duds. Mays craned his neck, making out her destination. The far wall, from floor to ceiling and flush to corners, was papered with clippings and photos, a vertical archive documenting not, as Mays first thought, Greene’s career, but the general career of the last hundred years: the Hindenburg explosion, “Dewey Beats Truman,” Dust Bowl migrants, the River Rouge plant, Lucky Lindy. Many were the sources of the slides in Greene’s play.
As Bernhardt stood wavering in front of the collage, Mays could not believe that she meant to pick one from out of the overwhelming scrap heap. The altar of history, put up for her own amusement, had grown out of control, too big to sift through. Yet Greene stood in front of the document-wall, a weaving, hooded cobra, lifting one hand gingerly to strike the board. She limped back and pressed her quarry into Peter’s hand.
—Here. This is yours, I believe. This is what you’re after. Take it.
Mays looked down superfluously, already knowing what he held. The photograph of himself and Ford, from which the transparency had been mechanically reproduced, bore a short news sidebar.
—But where did you find it?
—God only knows. It’s not dated, and the source has been clipped off. There’s no telling where it’s from. You know the man?
—Ford?
At Mays’s ridiculous rejoinder, Kimberly Greene at last broke into a grin. Her features showed under the pancake.
—I mean the other fellow. If it’s really you, you carry your age remarkably well. You can keep that, if it will do you any good. Thanks for coming backstage; when I first looked up at you, I had a lovely jolt of synchroneity.
—Pardon?
Mays felt acutely his total inability to say anything remotely intelligible. He wondered if a body could be sued for not holding up its end of the conversation. Things had strayed irretrievably from the scripts he had prepared for use in meeting this woman, and he could not ad-lib.
—Synchroneity. All times at once. My hobby.
She indicated the Bernhardt clothes, apologetically fanned her skirts, and curtsied lightly. Just as he took his eyes off her to look again at the yellowed newspaper scrap, the line of well-wishers moved him along inexorably. When he looked up, Greene was gracefully accepting the enthusiasms of two hockey players. Urged on by Alison, who stood impatiently on the sidelines, and by a baleful usher waiting to pounce on loiterers, Mays beat a retreat. The woman was too addled on the past to help him much anyway.
On the street, Mays crouched over the clipping. Alison nuzzled up for a look.
—Let’s see what the pretty woman gave the nice little boy.
Both accused the other of blocking the light. Neither thought of bringing the scrap closer to a streetlamp. Mays read aloud:
—“Our on-the-spot cameraman took this snapshot of the industrial wizard Mr. Henry Ford and a friend after their emergence from a two-hour closed conference following the recent Peace Ship fiasco. Mr. Ford, cornered by the press, said, ‘Europe does not want an end to war. I came to help ten million boys. One will have to do.’ Well, Readers: would you care to change places with that ‘one’?”
Mays flipped the scrap over, desperate for clues. Brittle flecks of aged newsprint came off in his hands. The flip side showed a partially obscured gramophone ad and an article quoting a Morgan broker as saying that certain investments had been rendered extremely attractive by the war, and as this was likely to be the last European War, the small investor would do well with spot buying. Again, Mays flipped the scrap over to see if the photo or caption had changed since he read it.
—Look here. It looks like it’s been penned in.
Indeed, the early reproductive process showed traces of carbon litho.
—I don’t get it. This is supposed to look like you, is that it? I can’t see it.
—Come on. Really? Here, look. Seriously. Look closely and tell me you don’t see a resemblance.
Mays crouched down to Alison’s eye level and held the photo up to his ear. He tried to assume the precise facial expression of his double in the photo. He was strongly conscious of being on a rain-emptied sidewalk with a strange woman, long after the ball was over, taking the final dive into absurdity. Yet he did not much miss his sanity. As he awaited her verdict, he looked over her features with reciprocal intensity.
—Nope. Sorry. I just don’t see it. For one thing, the guy on the left is only two inches tall.
Mays grinned, despite himself. Whether Alison was teasing, lying, or blind, he was glad she could not see a likeness. It restored the healthy aura of speculation to the venture, the element of doubt that, as a child of midcentury, was his familiar inheritance. The time had come, he deliberated, to do something impulsive. For thirteen seconds, during which period Mays formulated the working hypothesis that moist, warm things were more pleasurable than cold, dry ones, he postponed asking Alison if she’d ever heard the expression “What Ford might have done for my family.” At the end of the evening, he was twenty-five cents richer, but no closer to an answer.
In the morning, he decided against going to work. He called Caroline, saying he had some family business to attend to. She was remarkably solicitous, saying she got more work out of Delaney, and thereby Moseley, when Mays didn’t show. Mays suggested a parity program: every day he didn’t come in, he’d get paid double. Brink said she’d look into it. In a husky voice, she asked him how he’d liked Madame Bernhardt.
—How do you know about that?
—Lenny told me the whole story. He also said he suspected you did not go to the show all by yourself. Any rumor to that truth?
—I want to know why my private life is turning into a round of “Telephone.” Tell Lenny there’s still a couple over in Charlestown who don’t know how far I got wit
h his waitress. And while you’re at it, ask him if he can recommend any good books on Ford.
Immediately on doing so, Mays realized the impropriety of yelling at and hanging up on one’s boss. He didn’t care; Micro could go hang. He didn’t see how they stayed in business anyway; the other two trade rags must subsidize it, to preserve the balance of power. Mays put the place out of his mind and commenced packing.
Through years of exhaustive research, Mays had reached the inviolable conclusion that sneaking up unannounced on his mother’s home in Chicago represented a physical impossibility. He’d given up trying some time back when, as an earnest computer science undergraduate (like Alison, he too once believed the way to true contentment lay in technical know-how), he’d made the five-hundred-mile trip home on a Wednesday morning in mid-February, even coming up the back way, only to find his mother outside in a down parka, seated on a lawn chair, saying, “I knew you’d never make it through the semester.”
She always knew, either through maternal resonance or eternal vigil. Perhaps she subscribed to a network of homeowners who, like the freedom fighters of the French Resistance, kept one another posted on the slightest disturbances of Chicago’s South Side. In any case, he long ago ceased bothering to inform her about his visits. She’d only resent the early warning anyway, preferring to rely on her gift of precognition. Anticipating the infrequent, unannounced visits of her son provided her only entertainment. This time she met him midway between the front door and the point on the block where a body first becomes visible from the house.
—My Jesu, Petje, are you dead?
Mays never knew how to answer his mother’s questions. Somehow a simple no didn’t seem emphatic enough. But if he said more, his mother would look hurt and say, “I was only asking a question.” Of several hundred rejoinders, he settled on:
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 26