Entr'acte (3 page)

Cliff stood up, and surveyed the yard. “My colleagues and I feel strongly that the laws of physics are self-consistent. That if traveling backward in time is possible, the changing of history is not.”

20

Joyce drove past the Tidal Basin shortly before 4 p.m., after accepting the Collins’ offer of overnight accommodations.

Although she had done only an hour of driving total, Joyce preferred to face New York fresh the next day.

She parked in a downtown garage and walked to the Wadsworth-Longfellow House on Congress Street. From a few blocks away she could see her boyfriend, his thin, lank hair in his eyes, waving to her.

“This is going to be neat,” Doug said when they were together.

“I love house museums.” He had the kind of boundless enthusiasm that can get on people’s nerves, and Joyce found herself gritting her teeth.

But she did enjoy the visit to the poet’s boyhood home.

Although she had been in Portland many times she had never walked through the house before.

Doug asked so many questions of the docents that they ended up recommending he buy the book in the gift shop. In an upstairs bedroom a fireplace screen had sparked a discussion about bee’s wax makeup so long and involved that the rest of the tour group began shifting their weight from one foot to the other and harrumphing at Doug.

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Outside in the walled garden at the rear of the house, they sat together on a wrought iron bench. Joyce tried to summon up the nerve to begin her task.

Her boyfriend pressed his thigh against hers, and began rubbing the nape of her neck. Joyce shifted uneasily away. She hated this kind of scene, what she and her friends called PDAs, or public displays of affection.

The girls in her house had always laughed at what they considered the height of tacky behavior, until Joyce met Doug.

When he pawed her in front of them, everyone just stared in amazement.

“There’s something I have to talk to you about. I know you’re not going to like it much, but I want you to listen until I am through, okay?” Joyce began.

Doug searched her face with his eyes, but she kept her gaze steady and there was nothing for him to read. He nodded.

“I am going to New York tomorrow morning,” she got out, and Doug suddenly stood up and turned toward her. “That’s wonderful! Are the three of you going? What are you going to see?

How long are you going to be there?”

“I’m going by myself, Doug. I’m moving there. I’m leaving school and I don’t think you and I should see each other anymore.”

The wind rustled through the Japanese maples at the back of the garden lot and a small knot of people leaving through the gift shop murmured remarks among themselves, but otherwise there was silence.

“Why?” Doug finally said. His voice was flat and dull, almost disinterested.

“I’m going there to study acting and to try living on my own.

I need to get some independence, and I’ll never get it here. My grandmother left me some money and I’ll get a job—I don’t plan on coming back.”

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“So you want to see other people?” he said, suddenly brightening. “Test the water, see what’s out there? We were each other’s first serious relationship, I know, but I’m sure Sweetie.

“I can go with you if you want. At least for the summer. I can stay down there, see if maybe I can get into an engineering firm.

Maybe work-study at school could arrange it.” Doug was getting excited.

“Sweetie,” Joyce said gently. “There’s no room in my life for a relationship right now. It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us.”

Doug paced up and down on the flagstones in front of the bench, trying to absorb the news. After a minute, he brightened again.

“Have you told your parents yet? What did they say?”

“They’re not happy,” Joyce admitted, and Doug grinned in spite of himself. “But they are not stopping me. They can’t. It’s my decision to make.”

Doug asked for the opportunity to change her mind about breaking up with him. He claimed Joyce owed him that. She cringed inside, but they had planned all along to have dinner and she could not back out gracefully.

They found a French restaurant with an “early-bird special”

menu they could afford, and settled into a deep upholstered banquette.

“Let me do the ordering,” Doug said earnestly. “I want this to be a special dinner, your good luck in New York dinner.”

Joyce nodded and closed her menu. Doug pushed his aside with a flourish and rattled off a string of French words. The waiter scribbed furiously, and when Doug was through he put the pad and pen in his vest pocket.

“Is that all, monsieur?” the waiter said with a smirk. “Monsieur has ordered a flight of stairs.”

Doug reddened and Joyce snapped at the waiter, “Oh for God sake. Bring us two of the trout if it’s fresh and leave us alone.”

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The unctuous waiter bowed deeply in fake humility and murmured “very good, Mademoiselle.”

While they worked their way through the bread basket, Doug made his pitch. “I love you, and I know you love me. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?” He had taken Joyce’s hand around the candle in a woven plastic holder.

She looked across the table at the first serious boyfriend she had ever had. Doug was a pleasant-looking but unremarkable young man, with a thin moustache, wire rim glasses and rounded shoulders.

What first attracted Joyce to him was his eyes; they seemed to dance when Doug was excited about something, which was often. He enjoyed things so much, everyone around him did too.

There was a canoeing trip down the Allegash where it rained constantly and no one could get a fire started. Doug had prepared a supper of cheese, crackers, Campbell’s bean and bacon soup without the added water and convinced everyone that it was a feast.

“Everything tastes better outdoors, doesn’t it?” he practically insisted, until it did seem like they were dining like royalty.

She remembered how, soon after they’d met she had gone on and on to Doug about how she had given up a meal and had the money donated to a charity to feed the homeless. It was part of a campus-wide observance of World Hunger Week.

It was only later that she learned accidentally that Doug volunteered every day at a soup kitchen, serving up food to the homeless before having his own supper in the Commons.

He was a good man, as her father often told her. The two men in her life had a lot in common, Joyce realized with amusement as she half-listened to Doug.

Doug was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. He was a practical person, and analytical by nature. His approach to life gave Joyce’s needed balance.

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Although he was much more willing to try new things, even to look foolish, than her father was, Joyce saw that Doug would eventually become just like him. And although she loved her father deeply, she wanted to share her life with someone who could dream big.

The waiter reappeared again with their plates and sneered at Doug, “Perhaps Monsieur would like to choose a wine?”

“Bring us a California chardonnay,” he said confidently.

Joyce fixed the waiter with a challenging stare until he shrunk back like a vampire shown a Crucifix.

“It’s important that you understand that I’m not breaking up because you are not a wonderful guy—you are, and everybody in my family knows that,” she turned back to Doug.

“But we’re very different, you and I. I don’t think you could ever be comfortable with me earning a living performing, and that’s what I want most of all.”

Doug clearly did not know what to say, and Joyce watched him wrestle with it, part of her heart going out to him. If he admitted he didn’t want an actress for a wife, the subject would be closed.

If he said he thought she’d be a great actress, whether he believed it or not, he could appear patronizing.

The silence extended into minutes while Doug folded the straw wrapper into an accordion shape and played with it. “Your father told me what your grandfather said to your grandmother when she left for New York,” he began finally.

This was not good, Joyce knew. Joe Waszlewski had been a shy but ardent suitor of Muriel Pettit virtually all of their lives. He voiced no opinion either way when Muriel announced she was going off to seek her fame and fortune.

“No, Doug,” she interrupted. “The situation is not at all the same.”

“When she was boarding the bus, your Grandpa Joe went up 25

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to her, shook her hand and said, “Muriel, I’ll be here when you get back’.” Doug had a faraway look in his eyes.

“He didn’t know then that she would ever be back,” Joyce pointed out. “She may not ever have come back if her sister didn’t get killed. My grandmother did not come home to get married.”

Doug was still daydreaming. “That was his whole proposal:

“I’ll be here when you get back.’ I would like to say the same thing to you.”

“Doug, no. Try to understand this. I am not breaking up with you because I am moving. I am doing it because I don’t want to see you anymore.”

That pretty much put a damper on things, and a few minutes later they paid the check and mumbled awkward goodbyes.

26

When Joyce got back to the Collins’ condominium, she found Cliff in his study, poring over some old books. He motioned for her to come in, and Joyce flopped into a heavy green armchair sharing a cone of light with Cliff’s chair.

“I’m assuming you were kind,” Cliff said. “But that he got the message?”

“It’s taken care of, let’s leave it at that,” Joyce said. She picked up one of the books and saw it held old photographs—small, blurry black and white snapshots with scalloped edges.

Cliff smiled up at her guiltily. “I was enthralled by both of them; I don’t know if you were aware of that. But Muriel thought I was endlessly amusing, and Connie didn’t know I was alive.”

Muriel and Connie were best friends as well as sisters, “an unusual thing in any family, let me tell you,” Cliff said. “Your grandmother was always pretty much the way you remember her.

She met life head-on. She had what we called a low b.s.

tolerance.”

Joyce prodded him to supply the details of how the worlds of Broadway and academia had collided during the winter of 1938-39. It turned out to be Connie of all people who had friends 27

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among both groups and who had brought them together for parties.

“What was she like?” Joyce asked, gingerly picking up a photo of Connie boarding the Staten Island Ferry. “My family hardly talks about her at all.”

“She was wild, unknowable,” Cliff said. “There was an aura about Connie; somehow you knew she would come to a bad end.

You also had the feeling that she was acting all the time; that she was a different person to everyone she dealt with.”

Joyce stared closely at the picture. The woman beamed back at her, the wide-set green eyes and the upturned nose strangely familiar.

“She looks a lot like me here,” Joyce said in wonderment.

“Except for the blonde hair.”

“Peroxide,” Cliff smiled.

* * * *

Joyce mentally matched the performer to the towns as the green highway signs whizzed by the car. “Milford: Dan Patrick of ESPN; Westport: Paul Newman; Greenwich: Mel Gibson,” she intoned to herself.

Amelia had spent most of the trip curled up on the passenger seat, but when she began whining Joyce got off the road and snapped the leash on her puppy’s collar.

As soon as Joyce opened the car door, Amelia bolted for the tall grass, dragging Joyce behind her. The dog daintily kept its hind-quarters above the grass, a strangely intent look on its face.

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“Amelia, you look like you’re really concentrating on what you’re doing,” Joyce laughed. The puppy sniffed the air and then began running her snout along the ground, like a pig rooting for truffles.

She flushed out a few starlings, which flew maddeningly just beyond Amelia’s reach. Joyce jerked back on her puppy’s leash and glanced down.

There on the ground was a crumpled piece of yellow paper with the words “Want an exciting career?” printed on it in bold, black letters. Joyce idly picked it up, smoothed it out and read what turned out to be an ad for a correspondence school.

Far be it from me to laugh at any one else’s dream, Joyce thought, but what is so exciting about motel management or diesel engine repair? And how do they teach those by mail?

As she walked back to the edge of the highway she saw a car attempt to pass another in the far left lane by going around it on the shoulder.

Joyce held back on Amelia’s leash with all her might and watched in horror as the car came within inches of slamming into the back of her Volkswagen, then cut back in front of the car in the left-hand lane.

The driver of that car had to slam on his brakes, nearly setting off a chain collision. Both motorists blared their horns and made obscene gestures, and one of the drivers threw the remains of a fast-food meal out the window as he roared by.

Joyce had to sit in her car a few minutes and collect herself. She thought back to what Cliff had said late the night before, that people are generally more thoughtless and even cruel than they had been in the past.

“It’s the breakdown of the family,” he said, several rounds into a pitcher of gin-and-tonics. “If they are married to each other at all, both parents work nowadays. When they get home they are preoccupied with a million other things.

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“The kids are basically raising themselves. No one is teaching them values, morals or respect. Who is going to do it? The schools? They can’t seem to teach the basic reading, writing and math skills.”

Millie had poked her head into the study at that point, glanced at the pitcher and then sympathetically at Joyce. She waved goodnight to her guest and then padded down the hall to her room.