The sun set behind the circling mountains, and down in their valley, night fell with almost a frost, then a slow, cold rain. One by one, throughout the afternoon, we had come quietly into the theater. After dark, Mrs. Thurston, dressed in her flowered summer frock, a hat with roses on it, and even her white gloves, drove up in the battered Austin and brought Wolfstein, Maisie, and Davy crowded beneath her umbrella into the theater.
From Slough Lane, Kim—a plastic raincoat over her costume, which she and Sabby had chosen—brought her son, Cary. “I told Lady Red tonight I quit. She docked me the week’s pay I’m due, but I said to her, ‘Fuck you, Red, add it to my liquor bill.’ Kim gave a rich belly laugh. “Listen, Leila…Rings, you know, he wonders if you’d mind if he came and saw this play. Told me he’d never seen one in his life, and said if I was going to keep on yapping about being on the stage, he might as well come see this one when nobody could catch him doing it.”
“Sure, of course,” Leila laughed.
“I told him I didn’t think you’d mind. And he’s going to bring along a couple of friends of his too, if that’s okay. They’ll come to the back door at eight.”
“You like Rings a lot, don’t you, Kim?”
A blush livened Kim’s dough-white cheeks. “Tell you the truth, honey, I’m crazy about him. Thing is, you know, I’ve been slammed down pretty hard in the past. But this time I think it’s gonna be okay.”
Leila pressed her hand. “I hope it works out for you.”
“Oh, me too, Leila, me too. We’re gonna try and make a go of this nightclub idea. Guess I never will get to California.”
“What for, anyway?” Leila smiled. “Let me help you with your makeup, why don’t you?”
“Mother of God,” Joely muttered as we went to check the lightboard for Pete. “Seymour’s getting a little carried away, nailing all the windows shut! And did you see those friends of Morelli’s? Looks like we’re under the protection here of some sort of local underworld! Life! Life!” He laughed and jerked on his hair ’til it stood out like a halo of fire.
Seymour hurried into the booth. “Somebody’s knocking on the front door! Joely! What’ll I do?”
“You don’t have to whisper, Seymour. There’s nobody around but us lunatics. Go look through the blinds and see who it is.”
“I did. It’s seven kids. Look like college kids. Maybe they’ll go away. Couple of other people did when they read the sign. It’s raining harder.”
“I’ll go see,” I told them. I went out the stage door in the back, around the creek side. They were still there. Three girls and four guys, about my age or younger, huddled under our narrow awning. “Can I help you?” I asked.
One of the girls, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt like my own, answered for them. “We came to see the play. There was a poster in the U.C. Student Union that said you were doing All My Sons tonight?”
“‘Starring and directed by Nathan Wolfstein’? Is that true?” A guy asked suspiciously.
“Yes. But we’ve been shut down, They revoked our permit.”
“Awh, shit,” they said. “Can you believe it?” “What for?” “We came all the way from Boulder!”
I looked around the parking lot. No one was near the cars but a couple hurrying out of their station wagon and covering their two children with their panchos. People were rushing into the Arcade. Over the shadow of mountains, the lightening pulsed in the sky.
“Come on around this way,” I told the students, starting back toward the creek.
“What for? Are you opening then?”
“It’s a private benefit,” I told them, and led them through the stage door.
“See,” said the guy who’d asked about Nathan, “a couple of us are film majors, and so when we read that, we wanted to check it out.”
• • •
“Shit, well that’s it!” Joely peeked through the box office curtain. “It’s Tony Menelade.” It was 8:00, and we had just bolted the front doors from the inside. I looked out with him. Tony was gesturing at his chest with both hands and shaking his head vigorously. He motioned for us to open the window. The rain splashed off his hat.
“I think he’s trying to tell us something,” I said. “Open the window a minute, Joely. What do you want, Mr. Menelade?”
“Is Leila here? I called the house.”
“What did you want to see her about?” I asked him.
“About all this.” He waved, I suppose, at the placards condemning us. “It’s none of my doing, you know. It’s my wife owns the place, and once she sold out to Mr. Stark, and he said he wanted the plays stopped right away, you see. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I mean, I’m sorry it happened this way. It’s her. There’s nothing…I just wanted to apologize to Leila, that’s all.” He looked at us earnestly.
“Come on around to the back, Tony. You can talk to Leila back there.” Joely motioned him with his head to go around the side. With a furtive look toward the bar, Tony did so.
At 8:15, the house lights dimmed on Mrs. Thurston seated with Maisie, Davy, and Cary in the front row, center. Nearby in a group sat the seven summer school students from the University of Colorado. Off to the side, Tony Menelade hunched down in his chair. And in the back row, one left, one center, one right, sat Rings Morelli in his bright blue suit and his two friends—both wore ties and looked very ill at ease.
“Who’s that sitting by herself?” Seymour asked as we looked out at the house from behind the main curtain.
“Bonnie Ferrell. She came in with Ronny,” Sabby explained. “One. Two. Five. Six. Seven. Fifteen,” she counted the house as she always did.
“Why, that’s not bad at all for a week night,” Joely joked. And hand over hand on the rope, “Here we go, folks,” he called, as he always did, and raised the main curtain.
“I’m so scared, I could pee in my pants,” Kim whispered.
Leila squeezed her arm. “I am too, every time,” she said, and then walked out on the stage.
We huddled in the wing.
“Sabby, you’re gorgeous,” I told her.
“Isn’t she?” Wolfstein smiled.
“Oh, it’s not me,” Sabby blushed. “It’s Leila. She made me up so I’d look the part.”
“You look the part,” Seymour said.
“You’re on, Nate,” whispered Joely.
When Wolfstein made his entrance, first one, then the rest of the college students began to clap. The noise cracked sharp and loud as a storm in the empty theater. He stopped, startled, then slightly bowed. Sabby burst into tears.
“Stop sniffling, Sabby. Blow your nose,” Joely told her.
By the end of the first act, we all agreed we were doing the best we had ever done. “Y’all are all so good,” Kim kept saying. “I just hope I’m not messing it up for you.”
“Oh, you’re doing wonderfully well,” Sabby promised. “Just can I say one thing? Just a little thing I always find helps me. When you don’t have any lines, but you’re there on the stage, you know, Kim? If you concentrate on what the other people are saying, like you really would, I mean, then I think it helps.”
“I got yuh, kid,” Kim told her. Sabby beamed; she was a teacher now of all Wolfstein had taught her.
So far, the outside world had left us alone. We took only a five-minute intermission (the concession stand was closed) before Joely rang the bell, the lights went down, and the curtain went up on Act II.
We were even better in the second act.
“Who would have thought that old geezer could get his voice to project like that. It’s amazing. He’s not even coughing,” Ronny whispered.
“He’s drinking brandy,” Joely said.
“He shouldn’t be doing that,” Leila frowned. “Look how flushed he is.”
“He’s okay.”
“No he’s not,” she shook her head.
At the second intermission, Mrs. Thurston announced she was serving doughnuts and coffee to anyone who would care for them. Rings Morelli and his associates sat on the lobby chairs with her saucers and cups on their laps, her miniature doughnuts on paper doilies in their hands, staring silently ahead, while the seven students stared at them in polite puzzlement. Once her guests were settled, she brought “a little refreshment” backstage for us too.
“That Amanda!” Joely chuckled.
“Hey, Verl’s out there!” I hadn’t seen him come in.
I went down the aisle to where he was standing, rain still shining in his black curls.
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh, a little bit after you got started. Mrs. Thurston let me in. I’d called the house. You’re doing fine up there.”
“Hell, I’m the worst of the bunch. It’s been a long time since the senior play.”
“The girlfriend, the sister.”
“Sabby?”
“She’s good, isn’t she? And Wolfstein. I didn’t know he was an actor.”
“This is a one-timer.”
“I heard about all the shit, the sheriff and all, from Mrs. Thurston. Looks like Leila didn’t let it stop her, though.”
“Not much can,” I agreed.
“It’s interesting what you’re doing up there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like when it takes place. I mean, in 1940 our fathers were sons. And they didn’t wanted to accept what we don’t want to accept.”
“Yeah, well, but they did, though, didn’t they? Aren’t they the ones that own the companies and build the planes now? And when we’re the fathers, we’ll be the ones building them and saying, ‘But I did it for you!’ when our sons spit in our eyes! And their sons spit in theirs, and then go out and build planes too, until finally the last sons blow it all away.”
“Boy, you just don’t have no faith at all, do you?”
“Who’s changed it, Verl? Who’s made a difference?”
“Everybody.”
“You’re the one they’ve just arrested! And you still think ‘the big change is gonna come.’”
“I suppose I figure the only way I can be, just me personally, is to keep wanting to see it happen. It’s not happening now, though, you’re right.” He looked sadly off toward the stage. “Did you see what’s going on in Chicago tonight?”
“No. But I guess they gave Humphrey the nomination.”
“They’re beating the kids. They’re really beating them this time. Clubs. Mace. Some of the delegates tried to get the convention called off, but the whole place has gone crazy.”
“You know what Mrs. Thurston says, ‘lock, stock, and barrel’? The whole world ought to be committed to an insane asylum lock, stock, and barrel.” I had to get backstage. “Let’s have a drink after the show, okay?”
“Wish I could. I’m leaving right about now, taking a plane out of Denver.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, there are some people still in Washington from Resurrection City I want to get a chance to talk to before they leave. Mostly church people…the left wing of the church, I guess you’d call it.”
“Can you leave?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. They won’t get around to our trial for three or four months. Then we’ll appeal. Question is now, can I leave after my trial! Listen, I’m gonna go backstage and say good-bye. Stay here a second, okay?”
I had finished my coffee when he came back down the aisle. “I’ll be in touch. You too, all right? Are you going back to Earlsford?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not sure, but I tell you one thing, I’m not going to carry any more signs, or sit down, or march, or yell any more slogans. I mean, you can have your five hundred thousand students and workers holding hands and singing songs in the streets of Paris all you want, but it’s over, Verl. You say you don’t want to preach, but you do. I don’t.”
“Lots of different ways for people to make a difference. Preaching and teaching, remember? Write me.”
“Same address?”
“I hope so.” We laughed, and then he squeezed my shoulder. “Well, the summer’s over. You stuck it out here. I wasn’t sure you would. Leila just thanked me for bringing you over. She said you’d helped her get through it.”
“Shit, I just made everything worse.”
“Why do you want to think so, you jerk?” He cuffed me.
The house lights dimmed, the bell rang, and our small audience moved back from the lobby to their seats.
“Good luck, Verl.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said in his slow, quiet voice. I held out my hand, he, his. We shook hands solemnly. “You too,” I said.
When I got backstage, I looked from behind the curtain. He was still there, leaning over the back rail, watching. Onstage, Leila, as the mother, talked to the girlfriend about her two sons—one whose death she cannot accept, the other whom she fears will be destroyed if he learns the truth of his father’s perfidy. Somehow Leila had stripped her youth away, broken her youth on sorrow and knowledge, so that now she seemed in her carriage and in her face to be that mother of those sons. And so I could see how she would be when Davy was as old as this woman’s dead son. I felt an ache quicken in me, a stir that rushed through my body in a heaving wave, so that to let it out as quickly as it came, I had to sigh aloud.
I turned aside and looked back out into the audience. The door to the lobby was closing. The light on the floor thinned to a line, then went away. Verl had gone.
We told Wolfstein about the students in the audience. “Twenty-five years later,” he whispered, shaking his head with a faint smile. “My God.”
The play moved to its end.
“Well, this is the big one, Joely,” Wolfstein said, handing back to him the towel he’d been wiping his face with. His hair was as wet as if he’d just showered.
Joely nodded seriously. “You’ve got ’em in your pocket.”
Sabby put her hand on Wolfstein’s forehead, “Nate, you’ve got a fever. You’re burning up.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “I’m fine, sweetheart.”
Onstage he begged his outraged son to understand why he’d done what he’d done. Beseeched him, cursed him, begged him to forgive, to love. Let the son throw the money in the sewer if he thought it was dirty. But why ask him to go to jail? Didn’t everybody do it? Should the whole goddamn country go to jail? Joely, Ronny, and I stood together in the wing and listened to the son say, no, no I cannot accept what you’ve done.
“Something’s the matter. Did you hear that? Nate didn’t say ‘Tom,’ he said ‘Cal.’ He just said, ‘If Cal was alive…And he’s shaking!” Frowning, Joely put his hand on the curtain rope.
“He’s supposed to be shaking,” Sabby said. “He’s supposed to be in despair.”
“You’re right, Joely,” I said. “I heard it too.” And the revelation exposed seemed too intimate for strangers to overhear. Wolfstein’s face was scarlet, sweat ran down his thin hair, and he was holding onto Leila’s arm as his living son read him the old letter from his dead son. The letter saying he knew what his father had done, and, knowing, wanted to die.
Joely started waving for Someone to lead Wolfstein off, but I stopped him. “Let him finish, he’s almost finished.”
We caught him when he came offstage. Joely and I half carried him to the small dressing room behind the wing, laid him down on an old couch that seesawed on three legs. I pulled his shirt loose and took off his shoes. His breath sounded like the rasp of a bird. He was trying to talk. “Get him some water!” Joely stuck a coffee cup under the faucet.
Onstage, I could hear Leila and Ronny and Sabby ending the play. “Are you trying to kill him?” Leila asked the son. While I held Wolfstein’s head, Joely put the glass to his mouth. He whispered something.
“What?” Joely asked.
“Gun,” he rasped.
“Crap! His suicide gun! He’s right, it’s supposed to be going off!” He ran out. I counted to ten. The shot fired. Wolfstein spoke so faintly I couldn’t hear him until I put my ear against his mouth. Even then the words were slurred and strangely mispronounced. “Not like…last time.”
“What Nate?”
“Hedda…Gabler.” His eyes smiled.
“No. A lot better than last time.”
“Cold,” he whispered. I pulled off my coat and jerked all the costumes from the clothes rack to cover him with. His hands were chilled white; the veins stuck out. I put my hands over each of his and rubbed them; I kept rubbing them back and forth, but they didn’t get warmer.
Joely was back in the room. “Call Dr. Ferrell,” I told him. He ran out.
Wolfstein breathed, “Curtain?” and tried to lift his hand to motion toward the stage.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Ronny’s on the curtain. Everything’s going fine.” Wolfstein did not cough or even tremble. He lay quietly, patiently, just as we had placed him, as if he were waiting to understand what he was feeling.
I heard the applause. The fifteen people clapping. Someone, one of the students, called out “Bravo!” and Maisie repeated it, “Bravo!”
Wolfstein’s hands tightened under mine.
“We finished it,” I said.
The corner of his mouth lifted, then he closed his eyes. Frightened, I squeezed hard on his hands, and his eyes opened again. Horribly, one of his eyes had rolled up toward the eyelid. He didn’t know it, and that helpless vulnerability of his not knowing terrified me.
“Nate? Nate?”
Finally his finger moved beneath my hand.
Leila was there. She caught her breath silently when she saw him, but then came quietly over to the couch. Behind her Sabby and Seymour stood in the door.
I moved aside and she sat pressed against him. “It was true,” she murmured. “It was a true thing, Nate. We did it. I’m grateful.” She did not ask him, or me, how he was, but sat for what seemed forever, but was less than a minute, with a look that was somehow more valuable than a smile, a look almost as if they were soldiers together, and almost as if they were old, old lovers.
And the eye that could see looked back at her with a long, grave intensity. Then a word fell softly from his mouth on a breath that rasped in a slow sigh to its end.
“What did he say?” She turned to me.
“He said, ‘Thank you.’”