Stages (11 page)

For Kathy summer stock was being on a Broadway limited to matinee ladies in frilly cotton dresses. The stars of any beach resort are the sun and the sea, so the theater, such as it was in Ogunquit, was supported by the middle-aged women who came out from under their beach umbrellas to see Van Johnson.

There was not much for Kathy to do outside the theater, either. Southern Maine in the summer had a climate like the far north of anywhere else, and Kathy was acutely aware of it when she tried swimming in the ocean, which made her ankles feel like the rails of the brass bed she slept in at night.

The crew working at the playhouse was mostly young. Kathy was friendly with all of them, especially Jack, a curly-haired twenty-three-year-old lighting man from Vermont. Jack wore pants baggy enough for a clown and red suspenders over his T-shirts. Always easygoing, he was a perfect partner in making do. He and Kathy would combine their wash, Jack pouring in the detergent because it made her sneeze. They also shared pots full of pasta, beach blankets, and bicycles. Their beds they kept to themselves, though.

At night Jack would sometimes talk about his girlfriend back in Rutland. She was a serious first-grade teacher who thought the theater was something you were supposed to leave behind in high school, like baton twirling and the Eastern Star—which, Jack explained to Kathy, was a sort of benign Ku Klux Klan for Protestant girls, the resemblance being that the ceremonies of both organizations involved milling around in white.

Counseling Jack about his future with Miss Prim and Proper did not prevent Kathy from noticing the flock of freckles on his big, square shoulders, or his smile, but her maternal feelings quickly pulled a quilt up over desire when it peeped out. By the middle of the summer her attitude toward life in general had become quite grandmotherly. Her legs wrapped in a towel, she would spend her off hours at the beach writing postcards and letters to everyone. She would write every week to her cousin in Vietnam—the only one in the family other than his mother who did, he said in one of his return letters.

Kathy had always liked her cousin Walter; he had a keen sense of the ridiculous. He’d gone to Notre Dame and made a lot of money with a deli sandwich business that he’d franchised, a student with a cart marked WALTER’S HEAVY LUNCHES hitting every dorm every night of the week. After his graduation a year ago, he’d joined the coast guard.

Unexpectedly, Walter had wound up in Vietnam, on a gunboat patrolling the Mekong River. But he wasn’t taking the war very seriously. He thought that he might yet get a corned beef and pastrami concession going because the Vietnamese as a race had not yet developed eating habits. What they had been doing as a substitute, Walter wrote, was “fidgeting with rice.”

In one of his letters to Kathy, Walter said that he’d learned about courage. In those moments when something was happening that made the sweat stand out on your brow, you started using language that compromised Jesus sexually, and that was called courage. Death, he said, was the ultimate violation—of your own ass—which you had to keep covered constantly.

Not knowing quite how to respond to these observations, Kathy would reply with family news items and local color from around Ogunquit.

She sent her letters to Walter faithfully, and made them as encouraging as she could. Kathy was living in a rented room under the eaves of a four-story house with a bistro on the ground floor. A triangular floor-to-ceiling window had been added to her room for light and air, and Kathy had placed her mattress next to it. In her little room, lying on her bed beside the stars, the music from the restaurant floating up, she felt like a nesting swallow. She had her niche for the summer, and from it in little blue envelopes she sent her letters smoothed and sealed with truly heartfelt care.

One afternoon in late August, as the sun reclined in the sky and the crew at the Ogunquit Playhouse sweated with a canvas Oklahoma wheatfield as big as a mobile home, Jack called out to Kathy, “Telephone.”

It was Kathy’s mother.

“Oh, Kathy, I have terrible, terrible news,” she said.

“What is it?” said Kathy, swallowing.

“Kathy, your cousin Walter has been killed,” her mother said.

“Oh, my God, no,” Kathy said weakly.

“He volunteered,” her mother went on plaintively. “His father told him, whatever he did over there, just not to volunteer for anything. But he did anyway. Oh, why couldn’t he have listened to his father?”

“Kath,” said Jack, who had seen her face turn stricken, “Kath, are you okay?”

Onstage, someone yelled, “Hey, this cereal scenery is
ripped.
”

Two weeks later, Kathy flew back to New York for her cousin’s funeral. Nobody in the family saw the body.

“There wasn’t much left of him to bury,” Kathy’s mother said. Kathy heard one of her uncles say that he’d been ripped apart like a rag by machine-gun fire. The coast guard’s letter said that Walter had done what he’d done “courageously.”

At the Jewish cemetery by the highway, as crowded with the dead as the nearby apartment buildings were with the living, Walter’s father fell on his son’s grave, sobbing. Walter was his only son; he would never have grandchildren bearing his name. In Jewish history, there was one less page to turn.

Kathy stood there asking herself the meaning of this, and got no answer. Her cousin no longer existed. Although his remains were being lowered into the ground, Kathy had no sense of his physical presence. She didn’t believe, either, that he was up there watching out for them all now, as an aunt had said. No, what this all meant, simply, was nothing. Robert, her older brother, who was an accountant now, had always said that when you die it’s just like before you were born.
Nothing.

Later, at home in her mother’s kitchen, Kathy helped put the clean dishes back into the cabinets. She couldn’t help but think how deceptive stacked dishes were; still warm from the drier, their pattern so familiar, they were the idea of order itself. Humble and useful, always arranged the same way, like the lives of so many ordinary people. Until they encountered chaos, and were shattered, and swept away.

“I wonder if they’ll send the family some posthumous medal,” Kathy said. “And if they do, I wonder where Aunt Joan will put it. In with her silver, maybe?”

“If I were your aunt, I wouldn’t want to know from medals,” her mother replied. Wanting to change the subject, she said, “What are you going to do in the fall? About your acting career, I mean.”

“I was going to see if I could get into some regional company,” Kathy said. “But now…I’m not sure.”

“Do you think you might be able to find something around New York?”

Kathy didn’t respond right away.

Her mother said, “Kathy, you seem way off somewhere. I know this has been hard on you. It has been for all of us. But when something like this happens, you just have to learn to live with it. It’s got to be incorporated into your life somehow, because after all death is a part of life.”

“Walter’s death wasn’t, Mom,” Kathy said. “If you die a natural death, that might be a part of life. But Walter’s death was unnatural. He was just…chewed up, by a machine gun.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” her mother replied.

“Have you ever heard the line, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’?” Kathy asked.

“What was that, something Kennedy said before he was shot?”

“I had this friend—well, sort of friend—at school,” Kathy said. “He said I wasn’t just a German Jew, I was Viennese. And by that he meant that we’re the kind of people who were still in the hotel dining rooms with the fresh-cut flowers listening to string quartets while the Nazis were already starting to round up people.”

“That one sounds like an anti-semite to me,” said her mother.

“No, he isn’t an AS,” Kathy replied. “The worst thing you can say about him is…that he’s part of his own problems. But it’s me I’ve got to worry about, not him. Mom, I just feel that I
have
to do
something.
”

21

David’s local draft board had ruled that his acting classes did not qualify him for a student deferment. He was in the process of appealing their decision to reclassify him 1-A when he met Sandra Sackett.

She had been attending the evening workshops for two weeks. Her first three nights she’d propped herself against a wall like a mop left by one of the cleaning women. Then, toward the end of her second week, she reluctantly participated in a scene that demanded of her only four lines.

The classes were being held in a loft above West Forty-fourth Street. Seen from the street, the actors appeared to be moving silently through a murky aquarium. And inside this greenish pool in the night, Sandra Sackett’s four lines, when at last they were spoken, emerged from her mouth like tiny air bubbles rising to the surface.

“Can’t hear you,” someone yelled.

“A little louder, please, Sandra,” said the coach.

Sandra half covered her eyes with her hand and muttered her lines a second time.

“Can we mike this scene?” a woman suggested.

She projects like a hummingbird because she’s not much bigger than one,
David thought. He kept watching her in spite of himself. She was a waif, with the chest and legs of a quail, and she was wearing clothes David thought he had seen in photographs of women relatives taken during the Depression. She had on a belted blue dress with white polka dots that hung down below her calves, and black shoes with laces and thick, blunt heels. David
knew
that dress, white saucer-shaped collar and all. It was exactly like the dresses his Aunt Selma used to wear and hitch halfway up her ass in the hallway on her way to the toilet.

So why did he find this Edith Piaf without the voice attractive? He reminded himself that he wasn’t going to ask that question anymore. He’d decided that Melanie Chisolm had been right when she’d said, “Analyze your attractions and you’ll come up with a perversity.”

She’s a timid little rabbit,
David told himself,
and I bet she fucks like a bunny too.
That ended his moment of turmoil.

When the class ended, he walked over to her.

She was putting on one of her shoes; somebody had suggested she take them off in order to be “more in touch with the texture of the floor.” David had assumed it was West Coast for “If she gets a splinter, maybe that’ll get a squeak out of her.” Still, he couldn’t keep himself from saying, “I liked the way you did that scene.”

“You did?” she said, her face filled with wonder.

“Yes,” David said. “You underplayed it wonderfully, I thought.”

“But people couldn’t hear me,” Sandra said.

“It was hard to hear anything with everybody getting in their two cents,” David said. “That moron from San Francisco that wants everyone to experience
tactile sensations.
You should have been here the week we were working on laughter and he tickled Elsa Smith’s feet until she threw up.”

“He could have been right,” Sandra replied. “At least about me. Probably Laura Wingfield did walk around their apartment in her stocking feet, what with her club foot and all.”

They talked about Laura Wingfield and Tennessee Williams and the Coast. Then David said he was going to grab a cup of coffee at the Chock Full of Nuts, and he asked her if she would like to come along.

Sandra said, “Why thanks, I’d like very much to.”

In the restaurant, Sandra undid a small black portfolio tied with string and showed David some of her work. He’d wondered about that case; she’d always had it with her. In it were drawings, David now discovered, and they weren’t the work of some hopelessly sincere little fawn, either. The pages were peopled mostly with leprechauns and elves, whimsical creatures in shoes that curled up at the tips and long, flowing stocking caps with bells on the ends. Hand-lettered story lines floated out of their mouths in curlicues, like pipe smoke, and their serpentine paths led from castles decorated like wedding cakes to rooms of stubby, toadstool-like furniture in the trunks of trees. Among the elves David encountered a skinny carrot in ballet slippers and a potato head, bald except for the fringe of parsley around his ears.

David recognized the potato head. He was a well-known agent. And the carrot was dancing with the American Ballet Theater and reputedly sleeping with a Broadway producer. For a moment David wondered if he was having coffee with a practicing witch or an enchantress.

Swallowing his coffee with a gulp, he said to Sandra, “Hey, this is absolutely incredible stuff.” She smiled.

“Have you ever tried to get this stuff published?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sandra replied. “I saw a literary agent. She told me there’s no money in children’s books. She said to me, ‘Rather than write children’s books, why don’t you just get married and have a baby?’ But I don’t want to be married and pregnant right away, so that’s why I’m trying acting lessons.”

David leafed through Sandra’s sketchbook until he found a jellyfish with about fifty tendrils, all of them in spike heels. The jellyfish’s face was being pulled like taffy by three effeminate-looking crabs.

“Is that your literary agent?” David asked, pointing.

“That’s her,” said Sandra. “At Georgette Klinger’s.”

They had another cup of coffee and, after talking for another half hour or so, left the restaurant. They walked together all the way from Times Square to East Eighty-second Street, to David’s apartment.