Leila spent Thursday trying to find someone Wolfstein belonged to. He didn’t seem to belong to anyone anymore. She called each number in the initialed address book we found among his pills and drink glasses beside his bed. Of those she could reach, most had not seen him in years, though they were sorry he had died. His former lawyer was sorry too; his former banker; his former insurance agent. The former superintendent of his former apartment in Los Angeles was sorry.
“Jesus!” Joely said. “He didn’t have anything. I mean, he was living at point zero, Devin.”
“It must be we don’t know where to look,” Seymour said. “Everybody’s got, you know, something. A family or friend or money or something.”
Leila called Calhoun Grange. They said he was filming a war picture in Spain.
“Do you think he’d come?” I asked her. “I don’t think he thought Nate was his father.”
“I don’t think he gave a good goddamn one way or the other,” Leila replied, her hand still on the phone receiver. “Good old Cal, he just doesn’t care.” She stood up. “I hate people who don’t care. And I hate the fact that they seem to be the ones who win. Because it’s easy if it doesn’t matter. It’s all so easy.”
“Why bother to call him, then?”
“I want to make it a little harder.”
• • •
Friday morning it was still raining, when, accompanied by Rings Morelli’s Denver lawyer, we appeared before the magistrate, who found Leila guilty of violating Section 2B of local statute 35, fined her a hundred dollars, then suspended the sentence. Charges against the rest of us were dropped, and we were released. After all that, that was all. Rings’s lawyer knew the mayor, and the mayor knew the magistrate, and Rings said Sheriff Booter probably wished he’d never gone to so much trouble just to be mule-headed. If he’d done it to save face, his plan had backfired. Of course, he was sure Booter’d still be sheriff twenty years from now, and still a horse’s ass, too. We thanked him for helping out. “Forget it,” he said. “If Kim here wanted to play that stage part, I sure wasn’t going to let a couple of hicks put her down, you know what I mean?”
“Thank God for love,” Joely said.
At home Leila received a telegram from Spain: SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT NATE. FINE TO SEND BILL TO BERT SILVER. GREAT COUNTRY OUT HERE. HOW ARE THINGS THERE? GREAT, I HOPE. YOURS, CAL. Bert Silver was Cal’s agent. His name and address in Los Angeles were enclosed.
That afternoon we buried Wolfstein in the small plot behind the Chapel of St. Lucy’s, where I had found Leila and Verl the night Mittie died. Saul Fletcher fixed Wolfstein up in a nice casket and sent the bill to the name and address in Los Angeles Leila had given him.
So we stood together for the last time of the summer, there across from the rich dark mahogany of the silver-handled casket that Leila had chosen for Cal to pay for. On the other side stood a small, very old priest whom none of us had ever seen before, except Leila and her mother—one or the other or both of whom had persuaded him first to perform the ceremony, and then to receive the body of Nathan Wolfstein, who had said he had no religion, into his graveyard.
The rain was only mist now as we stood among all the roses and carnations and lilies and chrysanthemums Leila had bought for Cal to pay for. The old priest lowered his head, saying with us, “Forever, Amen.” And Leila pressed her hand against the casket top and said, “Good-bye, Nate.”
“The Lord rest his soul, now, and let him be at peace. Sabby, darling, you walk on back to the car with me, and give me your arm up this hill.” Sabby could not stop crying, and Mrs. Thurston held her to her side.
On the way to the airport that night, she sobbed again. “He wrote for me, Leila. Last week. He wrote to Julliard. In New York. He told them they should take me, give me a scholarship. Oh, he can’t be dead! Why should he be dead?” she cried.
I thought of Leila’s light in her room as she read Shakespeare. “…Oh, let him pass!”
“I hope you’ll go, Sabby. Be what he knew you could be,” Leila told her.
We piled out of the Red Bus at the airport in Denver—suitcases, souvenirs, and all of summer’s passage. Ronny, Seymour, Sabby, Pete, and Joely had the tickets Leila had reserved for them. In Chicago, all but Joely would change planes. We drank coffee while we waited.
“Oh, shit, can you believe it?” Joely came back to the booth with his Chicago newspaper.
“Don’t tell me anything else,” Seymour winced.
“No. No. Listen. Not politics. This is under Arts and Leisure:
The new show Tuesday at the highly successful Gallery of Contemporary Arts on Harriss Street shocked the critics but apparently delighted a crowd of popular art lovers who eagerly purchased the entire collection of so-called “PopPoop Art” on display. The vulgarism is quite accurate, for Spurgeon Debson, the artist responsible (or irresponsible) works primarily in human excrement. Victor Falz, owner of the Chicago gallery (as well as others in New York and San Francisco), said that he was pleased with the public’s reception of “a vital new force in modern American art.” He added that reproductions of Mr. Debson’s sculptures (?) and poster designs (?) would soon be available. Caveat emptor.
“I don’t believe it!”
But we saw the picture. It was, in fact, Spur. He stood beside a giant version of the plastic rockets we had seen him making in Floren Park, and the smiling Gucci-Porsche modster had him in a warm embrace.
• • •
The players walked away, straddled with knapsacks, dragging suitcases, shoving boxes ahead of them. At the end of the gate they turned. We had said each kind of good-bye, promised to write, to remember, until the last; they had told Leila their plans, asked her advice, hoped she would not lose touch. She said she wouldn’t, and I think they knew it was so. Sabby cried.
Joely raised his arm, made a V that turned into a fist, then to a wave.
“Blow your nose, Sabby,” I yelled, and they were around the corner.
I offered to do some more packing at the theater.
“It’s midnight, Devin. Just come on home. Well do it tomorrow.”
I told Leila I didn’t think I could sleep, so she dropped me at the parking lot. “Go on to bed.” I asked her to promise, and she waved as she left. Her face was gray.
People still came and left the Red Lagoon Bar, but the Red Lagoon Theatre was dark, a long dark shape beside the creek. The lock popped as I turned Leila’s key. With a squeak that cut loudly into the quiet, the door opened. I was scared and ran back to prop the door ajar when it shut me in the black space of the lobby, so dark I couldn’t find the light switch that I had turned on a hundred times.
In the box office, I found a flashlight that would get me down the shadowed side aisle to the lighting booth. From there, I made my way backstage. Behind the curtain, the stage was still set for All My Sons. In the costume room, the tie I had taken from Wolfstein’s neck was still on the floor. I went to the scene shop and started to pack up the paints, tools, nails, brushes, that somehow had been collected and put to use over the summer. When my fingers began hurting, I realized how cold I was. And hungry. Still cold and hungry, though Wolfstein was dead. Back in the lobby, I found a white sweater, dusty and soiled on a shelf of the concession stand. I put it on. There were some of Mrs. Thurston’s miniature doughnuts on the counter still. I ate them. They tasted like dust.
From the wall, the bright shine of our pictures reflected the lights. We all looked out with the same smiles we had had in June and in the pictures, would always have. Mittie and Nate, too, who were already dead. And Buddy, who had never arrived. I brought a box over and took each of the pictures down, pressed each smoothly on top of the one beneath it. I took them off in the order in which they had left us. First Mittie. Then Jennifer Thatcher and Ashton Krinkle. Last I took me, and Leila, and Maisie and Davy, and Mrs. Thurston, and laid us on top, and closed the box.
That left the portrait I had painted of Leila on the wood floor. I knelt down to look at it, wet my palm with spit, tried to wipe it clean. It would be nice, I thought, to keep, but there was no way to save it. I couldn’t even get it clean now, after three months. I kept rubbing the arm of the sweater across the paint, harder and harder. Then all of a sudden, I burst into tears, and, like Sabby Norah, cried. I kept thinking, “This is crazy,” but I just couldn’t get myself to stop. I fell to sleep, still crying.
“Wake up, Devin.”
The light from the opened doors shined sun bright in my face.
“Are you awake? It’s me. Leila. It’s morning.”