by Daniel Klein
“We should probably get dressed,” Lila is saying. “They’ll be coming home soon.”
“But first I must say goodbye to all of you.” Hector slithers down to the foot of the bed. He kisses the soles of her feet and says, “Mas tardes.” Lila wiggles her toes and trills back in a TV cartoon voice, “Mas tardes, Hector.” He repeats the game at her knees, her thighs, her mound of Venus, her navel, her breasts, her neck, her lips.
There is only one part of Lila that baffles Hector, and that is her insistence that before she met him, there was no tenderness in her at all. In fact, she says, she hated this town and everyone in it. But Hector does not believe this could be true; he believes her sweetness was always there, if only waiting for him to taste it.
“Mas tardes.”
“Mas tardes, Hector.”
“Sodomy, Fellatio, Cunnilingus, Pederasty
Father, why do these words sound so nasty?”
Babs Dowd cuts off the singer, Ned Shields, and the rehearsal pianist in mid-song. The racket outside the theater is simply too deafening to get through “Sodomy” with any finesse. She calls for a ten-minute break.
Staging Hair for the Phoenix’s grand re-opening was a brilliant inspiration—Babs’s own, actually—and securing a name TV actor, Brad Doleman, to play Berger was one hell of a coup, but so far the rehearsals have been one little fiasco after another. For starters, there are electricians, carpenters, carpet layers, and plumbers all over the theater day and night. Even that imported, two-hundred-dollar-a-day Italian still lurks around the place, brushes and palette in hand, slapping on what he calls, “touches brilliante.” Never mind that the workers are a good month behind in the completion schedule; they simply cannot get it through their heads that Babs and her cast need some semblance of order if they are ever going to get this show up for opening night. Add to that the fact that some of the Grandville Players in the production are simply out of their depth, God love them. Like Sally Rule. The only age-appropriate role for Sally was the Tourist from Ohio—Ohio, for godssake, not London. You cannot play Lady Britomart in every damn show we put on, old girl. Even sweet Ned is lost. Miscast, to put it generously. He begged to play Woof and Babs gave in, convincing herself that a wooly wig and some heavy foundation would cut the requisite twenty years off his on-stage appearance, but there was nothing the makeup artist could fashion to disguise Ned’s forty-something body and its forty-something ungainliness. If Babs had not been completely convinced of this in their private run-throughs, it was painfully obvious the first time Brad Doleman showed up for a rehearsal. Shuffling alongside twenty-two-year-old Brad in the ‘Hashish’ production number, Ned looked positively geriatric, more stone than stoned. But what could Babs do? She could not hire an entire out-of-town cast. Not for this show, at least. For that matter, not ever if every New York and Hollywood actor turned out to be as precious as young Mr. Doleman. The kid had missed three out of the first five rehearsals for reasons on the order of ‘my dog ate my homework.’ Damn it, if he thinks he is too good for Grandville, he should bow out now. Heaven knows, he would regret it later after the Phoenix was right up there with the Long Wharf Theater and the Louisville Playhouse in the pantheon of great American regional theaters.
Babs walks up the aisle and out the Phoenix’s front door, offering a stoic face to the workers and technicians she passes along the way. Outside, she lights up a Virginia Slim, her renewed old vice. As usual, the actors gathered out here in groups of twos and threes give her wide berth. The first few times they did this, Babs assumed it was a gesture of professional courtesy, giving the producer/director some personal space to think creative thoughts. But a few overheard conversations set her straight on that: The actors, along with just about everyone else in this town, feel sorry for her, the brave wife of poor, broken Michael Dowd. They are leaving her alone in her despair.
Well, they are right about that—she does feel awful about poor Michael—but nonetheless she resents their solicitousness. If there is one thing she will never be able to tolerate about this little town, it is its sticky sweetness. Pity comes too quickly to Grandvillians. It is not exactly that Babs suspects them of reveling in their compassion, but the people here do take an unseemly amount of pride in their picturesque American virtues. It is supremely cloying.
Right there is one reason Babs chose Hair for her opener—as a little wake-up call for the town. Those old time values are sweet, but they are totally out of sync with the gritty realities of today’s world. Show compassion to that Bush-Cheney bunch and all those Washington megalomaniacs see is another opportunity to pull a fast one. Babs’s mission is to inspire her audience with the rapture of rebellion, to remind them what it feels like to be contrary and proud of it. Of course, she never mentioned this rationale for Hair to the Phoenix’s board of directors. She was more than happy to let the seat counters embrace the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical for their own purposes, namely that it would pull in the baby boomer second-homers and retirees by the SUV-load—those folks were perfectly ripe for some ’60s nostalgia about long hair, free love, and pot. Whatever, as Daphne would say.
Down the Melville Block on Main Street, the Memorial Day paraders are closing ranks in front of the Shays’ Rebellion Monument. Even right on top of one another, each contingent persists in blaring its individual anthem, but suddenly—for just one second—the randomness of the universe conspires to put Whitney Pierce, Jr.’s piccolo, the horn section of the Grandville High School marching band, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and The Tombstones, on a single note—D sharp. Without quite being conscious why, the surrounding people smile in unison. Babs cannot help but smile too. There is hope for these people yet.
Pushing her father across the intersection, Daphne Dowd glimpses her mother smoking a cigarette under the Phoenix’s marquee. She reflexively turns the wheelchair sharply to the left so her dad will not see her. At least once a day Michael says he is glad Babs has a project to keep her busy during this difficult period in their lives, and Daphne is inclined to believe he really means it—the accident has turned him into a regular pussycat—but Daphne despises her mother’s selfishness and wishes her father did too. Not to mention her mother’s hypocrisy; the woman actually thinks putting on some old-fashioned, feel-good musical about hippies is going to start a revolution. Yeah, right—the old farts will charge out of the Phoenix and head for the barricades, humming those stupid ditties as they go.
Both her parents are so out of it they do not have a clue the whole town is talking about them. One thing about going to public school is it plugs you in to the town where you live. The kids at Hotchkiss do not really have a hometown; when they slog to their parents’ homes for vacations, it is like visiting some foreign realm, one that happens to be peopled by substandard human beings. Daphne hears every Grandville rumor the moment she clambers on to the school bus in the morning. And so she knows that her parents are the last two people in town who actually believe the person who ran over her dad was just some random motorist who did not stop because he was afraid it would jack up his insurance premiums.
The kids on the school bus do not attempt to shield Daphne from the gossip about the accident. Actually, her willingness to engage in the gossip with them has elevated her status considerably. She knows there is something seriously perverse about the source of her sudden popularity, but she cannot help but enjoy it. Anyway, she would give anything to know who the hell ran over her father, and that had nothing to do with gossip or popularity.
The first suspect Daphne heard mentioned was Lila’s mother. Everybody knew the Dowds had stolen the Phoenix from Franny deVries and her father, and everybody knew Franny was a crazy who had tried to burn down the theater. It took Daphne to point out that Lila’s mother was still in the mental hospital that night. One kid then suggested it was Lila herself who did it, an act of payback for her poor mother. There was no way in hell Daphne could believe that; she knew Lila well enough to know how she felt about her mother, and it definitel
y was not a feeling that inspired revenge on her mother’s behalf. Sure, Lila had changed since she took up with that Spanish pretty boy—and dropped blogging, smoking pot, and their incipient friendship in the process—but that was after the accident anyhow.
The next candidate was Ned Shields, the drama teacher at the community college and an actor in the Grandville Players. The kids were a bit more circumspect about bringing up Shields’s name in front of Daphne, never quite saying straight out that Daphne’s mother was obviously having an affair with him, and that jealous Ned wanted her all to his own so he tried to kill her husband. People are weird that way: They have no problem talking in front of you about who had a good reason to try to kill your father, but they get all shy and giggly on the subject of your mother’s sex life. Daphne truly does not give a damn if her mother screws the entire male population of Grandville, but she does not believe for a minute that her mother has a lover. The only thing Mother fucks with is people’s minds—that is her sex life.
One morning, the cop, Flip Morris, was the suspect du jour. Any student of popular culture could have seen that one coming; it followed the predictable American pattern of trashing yesterday’s hero. Flip is the one who found her father in the road that night, then lifted him into his cruiser and sped all the way to Baystate Hospital in Springfield. He may have saved Dad from bleeding to death, and he surely is the main reason Dad stands a good chance of completely recovering the use of his legs. Flip’s face was on the front page of the Eagle the next day and the weekly Chronicle the day after. It is undoubtedly why he landed that solo turn in today’s parade along with the Girl Scouts—just his speed, according to Lila’s appraisal of him. The revised story goes that Flip was drunk, ran over her father by accident, and then took him to the hospital so nobody would suspect him. It was his cover-up that gave him away. Yeah, right. That theory did not play any longer than fifteen minutes in the yellow bus.
Last week, a new candidate emerged from the back of the bus. A senior from Stockbridge, who hardly ever said anything to anyone, declared with absolute authority that a hit man did it, hired by an irate New York investor who had lost money in Dowd’s mutual fund. The senior allowed that his own father, an investment banker, knew this as a fact. This scenario had a lot going for it, starting with the fact that a senior proclaimed it, but closely followed by its artful mix of a TV crime drama’s staple plot line with a villain based in the very city that—every local knew—was bent on destroying everything that was sacred in Grandville. At school, Daphne had tried the theory out on her new friend, Stephanie, but Stephanie dismissed it the way she dismissed all the others, saying it was just gossip with no way to prove it. “Let’s just think about your dad getting better,” Stephanie said.
Daphne positions her father’s chair as close to the front as she can so he can have an unobstructed view of the goings on. The music draws to a ragged, unceremonious conclusion as Dr. Armbruster, president of the Grandville Historical Society, steps to the microphone set in front of the Shays Monument. He holds an old, hardboard, loose-leaf binder in his hands and within a minute after he opens it, all the onlookers are silent.
“Abraham Hart,” Armbruster reads. “Isaiah Pickens and Samuel Troy.” He turns the page and continues, “Anthony Woodruff, Philip North, Thomas Elkins, Winfred Porter, Taylor Cookson, Robert Nation, Theodore Timmerman, Blake Forester, and Clive Filks.” Again, Armbruster turns a leaf. “Arthur Finnegan, Arthur Murdock, William Ashman, Daniel Flowers, and Ralph Mapes.” A new page, “David Love, Antony Armbruster, Paul O’Mara, Mark O’Mara, and Philip Wiggles-worth.” A new page. “Michael Simmons, Hans van Ardsdale, Meredith Locke—”
Franny deVries swings her feet onto the floor and stands in front of Herb’s couch as she listens to old Dr. Armbruster recite the names of the war dead from Grandville, Massachusetts, starting with the three who fell in King Phillip’s War, and moving on to the Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, the Barbary wars, the War of 1812. As always, Armbruster’s tone is a dull drone.
“Lyman Hicks, Peter Gladwell, Lincoln Redmonds, Archer Keith, Simon Heath—”
Herb is at the open window, his hands braced on the sill as he leans out, cocking his head in the direction of the reader of names who has now turned the page from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War.
“Elliot Pierce, Adrian ten Hooven, Brian Nowak—”
Walking soundlessly in stockinged feet, Franny comes up behind Herb. His face, generally boyish and innocent looking, appears even more so just now. To Franny, it looks like the face of a rapt schoolboy straining to understand the meaning of words that are just beyond his grasp. Indeed, the words Armbruster speaks are beyond her grasp too—names without faces, deaths without mercy. One after another after another.
Franny wraps her arms tightly around Herbert Blitzstein’s waist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In autumn, winter, or spring, it is not surprising to hear a native Grandvillian say, “Meet you in front of Vanderwinkle’s,” by which she means Vanderwinkle’s Five & Dime, a Main Street shop that has not existed for fifteen years. Since that time, Vanderwinkle’s address has been occupied by a high-priced French restaurant named Le Bistro; yet during the off seasons Le Bistro is open only on weekends and so, despite its snappy red and blue Art Deco sign, it remains ‘Vanderwinkle’s’ to those of us who walk Main Street daily. But come the middle of June, the bistro opens seven days a week for both lunch and dinner and, taking advantage of a new town ordinance, places chairs and tablecloth-covered tables on the sidewalk in front of it. For the summer, Vanderwinkle’s withers into history.
At that same time, grand nineteenth-century houses as near to town as the bottom of Mahaiwe Street are suddenly unshuttered and come to life with entire young families who look to the unknowing eye like quaint villagers in their pastoral skirts and blouses, faded, threadbare denim shirts, straw hats, and long-billed farmer caps. But to us, of course, they are easily recognizable as second-homers from large cities east and south of Grandville, come to the countryside for the summer to indulge in alternate lives of rusticity, their annual emotional realignment. Quaint is new, then is now.
But it is the upcoming reopening of the Phoenix Theater that tricks past with present most delightfully. No one is alive to remember that first grand opening in 1899, yet it remains an indelible event in Grandville consciousness along with the misty figure of the anonymous arsonist who made it possible. And gazing up at the restored and repainted marquee on Melville Street, it is easy to mingle the enthusiasm incited by the debut of the comic opera, Happyland, with the buzz of anticipation surrounding the opening of Hair this very night.
Posters and newspaper advertisements for Hair have turned up as far off as Keene, Boston, New Haven, Albany, and even New York City, where a two column-inch ad was spotted in the ‘Escapes’ section of the New York Times. “Good Morning Phoenix!” is the ad’s headline. Before the curtain goes up tonight, Babs Dowd, the theater’s artistic director, plans to preside over a dedication ceremony that includes the reading of a proclamation issued by the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts declaring this ‘Phoenix Theater Day.’ Tonight’s performance was sold out ten days ago.
This also happens to be the day Lila deVries begins working both the lunch and dinner shifts at Nakota for the summer season. This in itself is hardly remarkable, but what is extraordinary is that Lila and Hector are leaving for work this morning together, having spent the night together in Lila’s bed—with everybody else at home! This new arrangement was not Lila’s idea and certainly not Wendell’s; it was Esther and Emmanuelle’s. The two women brought their plan to Wendell with a well-rehearsed argument that began with the premise that Lila and Hector were already sleeping together, so the question was not what they were doing, but where and when and—most critically—how they were doing it. From here they assembled a catalogue of reasons why allowing Hector to take up residence in Lila’s bedroom made infinitely better sense than any alternative, in
cluding the utterly ridiculous charade they were all engaged in now.
Under the influence of Esther, Wendell deVries may have waded onto the shoals of modernity, but the idea of giving his blessing to his seventeen-year-old granddaughter’s carnal relationship made him feel irresponsible bordering on degenerate. Even when Esther and Emmanuelle threw down their trump card, their stipulation that the young people would have to promise to practice birth control (the two women would personally take Lila to a gynecologist in anonymous Albany to be prescribed birth control pills), Wendell reserved his consent. He said he would have to think about it. But two days later, upon returning home from the shop, Wendell surprised everyone by announcing that he gave the plan his full approval.
Lila is giddy about the new setup. It instantly inspired in her a heretofore invisible streak of domesticity: She cannot stop thinking about ways to decorate their room. It should reflect both of them—his world and hers—tying them together poetically. As for Hector, he has very earnestly and ecstatically decided that this turn of events means the two of them are married.
Watching the long-limbed beauty sail down Melville Street on the crossbar of a bicycle, her blonde hair fluttering behind her and flapping against the narrow chest of the handsome, angular young man who is peddling the bike, we might think for a moment we had slipped back to an earlier Grandville, say, of the 1950s, when young people on Schwinns and Raleighs could be seen on virtually every street of town on a day like today. Often as not, a young woman such as this one would be riding sidesaddle on the crossbar, one hand pressing down her skirt lest it fly up. Or, rolling right down Main Street, a pair of cyclists in tandem, each steering with one hand while holding hands between them, the driver of the Nash Rambler jammed behind them rolling his eyes. Over there, a pack of eighth grade boys rambling up Board Street on Triumphs, shouting and joking and jostling to take the lead. And the inevitable tricksters, one high school boy peddling madly while his buddy balances precariously on the handlebars, his arms and legs stuck straight out like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Bikes then were as much a part of Grandville’s landscape as convertible cars and dogs romping free of leashes on the sidewalks in the middle of town.