Chapter 4

The news came over the P.A. system one morning in mid-October during Leo’s senior year, stunning him and making him feel like his thoughts were in his mother’s kitchen blender.

“This year’s musical will be Carousel,” Mr. Campbell began announcing. “Interested students are invited to try out Friday, the 21st between 4 and 8 in the auditorium. Mimeographed tryout sheets may be picked up at the front desk in the library anytime over the next two weeks, and copies of the play itself may also be checked out there as well. Because there are a limited number of copies available, students may only check them out for one day. We hope for a great turnout and that Carousel will be as successful this year as Oklahoma! was last year.”

Leo could hardly wait to get home that afternoon and tell his mother that he was going to try out for the role of Billy Bigelow. Nothing less would do.

“Ever since you bought the cast album for me, I’ve wanted to sing those songs on stage,” he continued. “I can’t believe I’m gonna get the chance now, can you?”

Louisa trotted out a smile for him and said, “It’s wonderful.” Then she thought for a moment. “Do you know who else will be trying out?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter. I just know I’ll get the part.”

“Your father and I’ll be pulling for you, of course,” she said. Her tone sounded cautious.

“You’ll see. I’ll get it,” he said, with a finality that could not be denied.

In the days before the auditions, Leo practiced the assigned tryout song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over and over, both by himself and with Mrs. Mosby at the music school. That part was easy enough, but he decided there was more to consider. He was nothing like Billy Bigelow in that he didn’t understand the entire proposition of pursuing girls earnestly and always getting his way in the matter. That was for athletes like Coy. True, his vocal talents would be on display for all of Beau Pre, and that was what he wanted most—to showcase the voice that had appeared out of nowhere to his delight.

As for the acting part, there was a built-in default that no one else knew about. Again, he was hardly the swaggering, macho, sometimes wife-abuser that Billy Bigelow was. But he had a lot of submerged anger because of the fact that he couldn’t be who he was in the real world. To get along, he had chosen therefore to play a game, and there was a part of him that was distressed about having to resort to that. He knew he could bring that sort of resentment to the part, which he felt sure would come across as “being macho” to the audience. He even practiced a “handsome scowl” in the mirror. He felt it would pass muster and would be interpreted in the right way. At any rate, it was the best he could offer under the circumstances.

When the time came, the actual audition went well. He was surprised at his lack of nerves. His voice had never sounded better, he hit the high notes without straining, and he thought his dialogue contained the proper amount of swagger in the brief scene that had been chosen. There was only one other boy, Duane Clement, trying out for the lead, and his singing voice was not nearly as good as his was. Duane, however, was known as quite the ladies’ man, so Leo wondered if the committee might lean his way because of that.

Before classes began the following Monday, Mr. Campbell announced the entire cast of Carousel over the P.A. system, thankfully ending a stressful weekend for Leo. The nerves that hadn’t appeared during the actual auditions showed up on a delayed basis, which annoyed him to no end. He knew he cared way too much about winning, but he couldn’t help it. When he finally heard his name called, he remained surprisingly restrained as classmates around him offered their congratulations. Interestingly enough, neither Duane nor Rebecca nor Coy were in first period with him, and he did find himself thinking of all three in entirely different ways when the victory was won

Rehearsals began in November for the early February run, and word soon began to spread in a way that Leo had not considered. Although none of the rehearsals were open to the student body, the girls in th e chorus turned into unpaid publicists about Leo’s singing and acting. Not to mention that some of them kept coming up to him and asking if it would be okay if they ran their fingers through his bright auburn hair. He didn’t get their fascination with it, but he let them do it anyway. On some level, he realized he still thought of himself as that “redheaded, freckle-faced woodpecker” that his classmate had mocked on the seesaw at recess way back in elementary school.

Nonetheless, there was an explosion of flirting to deal with all the time. Leo had also decided that somewhere along the line, he might want to pursue writing stories the way his father had done professional ly, since he did get great grades in English on his essays on Wordsworth and his book reports on such literary masterpieces as Catcher In The Rye and The Return Of The Native. So he took typing his senior year—one of three boys who seemed decidedly out of place among all the girls. He quickly found himself playing the game again when one of the boys named Willie with a bad case of acne whispered in his ear that the reason he was taking the class was just to ogle Miss Paula Graves, the shapely young teacher with long legs who wore tight skirts and who was fresh out of college.

“Wudd’nchoo like to nail her?” Willie tacked on at the end. “Hot little piece. She’s got a pair a’ legs to wrap around ya.”

Without hesitation, Leo said nothing but nodded, even though he did not like the way that made him feel immediately afterward. Like someone straining to understand a foreign language. Like he had done something wrong.

As it also happened, one of the girls in the class was Coy Warren’s little sister, Cammie, just a grade below them both.

“This is for you,” she told him with a shy grin, handing over a bag lunch she had prepared just before the class began its first timed writing one morning. “It’s just a tuna sandwich and some potato chips just in case you get hungry before lunchtime.”

Leo wondered if his eyes were widening as much as his brain was straining to remain calm and focused. “Thanks very much,” he told her, taking the bag and quickly taking a peek. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to. You’re working hard in the play, I hear. You have to keep up your energy.”

The irony was not lost on Leo. Cammie was a smaller, female version of her brother in that she was fit and had an ingratiatin g smile that attracted people to her. But she wasn’t Coy. She wasn’t a boy. And she certai nly didn’t know his secret. For her considerable trouble, all Cammie would get, however, was the initial “thank you,” even though Leo knew she was obviously wrangling for a date. What she couldn’t have understood was that it would have been soul-crushing for him to appear at her house to take her out, possibly even catching a glimpse of her brother there in the process, who would then occupy his every thought every second of his date with Cammie. Leo simply did not want to put himself through that, and Cammie was left guessing as to why her thoughtfulness was not returned in kind.

The flirting started to take other forms as the weeks passed. There were phone calls from girls at random hours at home, some boldly identifying themselves and asking for dates outright, while others did a lot of sighing and giggling anonymously. At one point, he complained to his mother about it.

“Be polite about it, but hang up and tell them you’re not interested,” she told him. “After all, you have Rebecca to think of.”

The most ingenious attempt at getting his attention, though no more effective than any of t he others, took place when there was a knock at the front door one Saturday afternoon after he had just come home from rehearsal; a nd Leo opened it, as his mother was busy in the kitchen and asked him to get it. There in front of him stood two of his female classmates he recognized from their pictures in the yearbooks but otherwise did not know well: Sharon Bitterman and Leslie Waylon. He supposed other boys thought of them as “nice-looking,” but their pleasant, expectant faces hardly registered with him.

“We were driving by,” Sharon explained, averting her eyes, “and my car got a flat tire in front of your driveway. Can you believe it? What bad luck! Could you come change it for us?”

Leo somehow remained calm, intuitively re alizing what they were up to. He was not about to tell them that he did not know how to change a tire. In the eighth grade, he had been forced to take shop—as all boys were required t o do— dealing with terrifying jigsaws that could take fingers off and hot, smelly soldering irons that created blobs that looked like liquid mercury. The whole semester had made him nervous and uncomfortable. Meanwhile, all the girls were required to take home ec, and he didn’t see why he couldn’t take that instead. He wanted to cook like his mother did, but he had said nothing and resigned himself to going along with it all.

“I’ll take a look at it,” Leo said to them, bravely gathering himself and somehow projecting an air of confidence.

When they got to the foot of the driveway a few minutes later, the car was positioned perfectly in front of it w ith the right rear tire practically melting into the asphalt. Such a placement, Leo reasoned, could not have taken p lace by accident. This had taken some clever and precise planning. But he had been put on the spot, no matter what. Thankfully, his improvisational skills came through for him.

“That tire’s unsalvageable,” he told them, squatting down to examine it closely. He could clearly see the horizontal slit on the right side. “You’re gonna have to buy a new one, so let me go and call a tow truck for you, and the y’ll take you to Beau Pre Tires. Give me your parents’ number, Sharon, and I’ll call them and tell them to meet you there.”

“Well, if you think that’s best,” Sharon said, the disappointment clearly registering in her voice.

The extra attention Leo was getting also caused a strain in his relationship with Rebecca. They continued to go out on their platonic dates, but she did not hesitate to tell him about all the gossip going on in the little girl’s room at school about him. It galled her to hear her classmates making all sorts of lustful comments about him as they primped in front of the mirror. One even asked her the inevitable question.

“Is he a good kisser?” Tammy Powers, a girl who slathered herself with makeup, wanted to know, as she was spraying her teased hair for good measure. “If you ever get tired of him, I’ll take him.”

“He’s not available,” she said in a mon otone, glaring at Tammy intensely. “He’s mine.”

That incident, among others, led to a showdown of sorts between Leo and Rebecca. They were on one of their drive-in dates during which he was telling her all about how the rehearsals were going, since she had not made the cut for the chorus this time and wanted to be kept up to speed.

“Why don’t you ever do more than just give me a peck on the cheek?” she asked him finally, after a sip of root beer through her straw. “It took you a while even to do that, you know.”

He looked straight ahead, thinking quickly while conce ntrating on a bug that had recently become a smear on the windshield. What he came up with was, “We’re good friends, of course.”

“That’s not what I asked you. Of course we’re friends. You’re avoiding the question. Is there something wrong with me?”

“So, you want me to kiss you on the lips?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

So without further ado, he kissed her gently on th e lips and drew back. It actually wasn’t that bad. Her lips were soft and tasted of lipstick, and no one’s tongue was invol ved, which would definitely have been off-p utting for him. “Was that o kay?”

“Yes.” Her smile seemed genuine enough. She took another sip of her root beer and continued. “I really wasn’t going to bring this up ever, but it’s been bothering me. Cammie Warren said something to me the other day in the little girl’s room in between classes.”

Leo felt his entire body stiffening as a sense of dread crept in. “Oh?”

“Yes. Seems she brought you a bag lunch in typing class recently and didn’t mind confessing to me that she hoped you would ask her out. But you didn’t. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you didn’t because of us, but she says you didn’t.”

“Right. I d idn’t. I wasn’t interested.”

Rebecca exhaled loudly. “You understand that I just think she’s jealous, that’s all. I think both she and her brother are conceited, especially that Coy.”

Leo knew he couldn’t delve into the truth regarding the ma tter, so he played along. “I’m sure you’re right. She has to know we’ve been going out for a while. That was pretty brazen of her.”

“But… but she said something horrible to me that I just can’t get out of my mind.”

Leo felt his stomach muscles tightening. “Yes?”

“I don’t even know if I should tell you what she said.”

“You’ve gotten this far. Go ahead, then.”

Rebecca took a deep breath that s eemed to suck up all the air in the car and continued. “Well, she said that she had told her brother, Coy, what she had done for yo u and that you hadn’t responded except to say thank you, so he said to her that…”

Even as she paused, Leo somehow knew what she was going to say next, and every nerve in his body seemed to wake up and tingle. What he greatly feared had come upon him. Did his secret boy crush somehow see through him from afar? How was that even remotely possible? Maybe the way he threw a baseball in P.E. had gotten more play around school than he realized.

“… Warren said that… maybe you were a… homo. I hated even hearing that word. I suppose it’s better than queer, but not by much.”

An image flashed into Leo’s head of being behind the steering wheel of the Fairlane as it sat stalled on railroad tracks somewhere with a train barreling down fast about to extinguish his very existence. He suddenly found himself speaking words way too emphatically a t a decibel level that surprised him. It was almost as if someone else, a stranger, was speaking for him.

“I can assure you, I am not a homo. When I fall in love, it will not be with a man. I will take my time until I find the right person, but I think it’s very hateful of Coy Warren to say something like that about me. He doesn’t know a thing about me.”

“I… I didn’t mean to upset you. I debated whether to bring it up at all.”

Strangely, the exchange altered everything for Leo. In the beginning, he thought there was no saving grace or silver lining in what Rebecca had revealed. Suddenly, he knew that Coy viewed him with suspicion, which meant that his cover might not be working the way he thou ght it was. Even more confounding was the fact that Coy was correct in his speculation, however randomly it had been reached; and that led Leo to the realization that there was a part of him—the part that wanted to play the game—that was ashamed of his attraction to Coy on some level. That attraction wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon, but something new did emerge—a nearly palpable anger toward Coy.

During the run of the play, Leo brought that anger to the surface from the moment Billy Bigelow’s first spoken lines to the mill girls, Julie Jordan and Carrie Pipperidge, reached the ears of the audience. That macho quality he needed to project to be effective in the part—i nitially a resentment of being in the closet but now amplified immeasurably by Coy’s accurate speculation—was never in question. He appeared to become the abusive heterosexual that he was not but that all the girls were swooning over. Was that the way the world worked?

The Beau Pre Press reviewer hailed him as “in command of the play from start to finish, an excellent actor with an impressive voice, one that had obviously benefited from instruction at the Marble School of Music.” Of course, such praise pleased Granny Marble no end, and she too k the entire family out to dinner at the Overlook Inn high above the Mississippi River when Carousel had been put to bed.

“You really did the family up proud,” she declared, just before everyone clinked rims around the table in Leo’s honor.

“Let’s don’t forget that Miz Mosby deserves a little credit, you know,” Leo added after the toast.

“I actually did call her up and invited her to join us,” Granny Marble continued. “But she had other plans, otherwise she’d be right here with us. I certainly did the right thing when I hired her. She’s more than just that hairdo. I have an eye for these things, you know.”

The afterm ath of playing Billy Bigelow continued to plague Leo, however. The calls did not stop, although there were no more flat tires in the driveway. There were even “love letters” of sorts that showed up at his father’s post office box, no matter how often he was seen around town w ith Rebecca in tow, continuing his camouflage. It got so annoying that Leo could halfway picture himself going to the principal’s office and asking to use the school P.A. system so that he could announce to the entire student body: “I am not Billy Bigelow. That was not me up on that stage. Furthermore, to all you girls out there—I really am a homo and not interested in any of you. But thank you all for your interest. Meanwhile, stop with the bag lunches and the flat tires.”

Of course, that was never going to happen. All he could do about the situation was to ride it out, keep seeing Rebecca and hoping that this Carousel infatuation with him would start to fade.

Perhaps the strangest incident of all regarding his reign as the school’s heartthrob happened with C oy Warren himself the week after it was all over. One afternoon as Leo was changing his books in between classes at his locker, Coy came up behind him wearing his star athlete letter jacket, jolting him somewhat.

“I saw you in that play,” he said. There was a hint of contempt in his tone. “But that outfit you had on made it look like you had muscles. I’m gonna find out right now.”

Turning to face Coy quickly, the only thing Leo could think of to say was, “What?”

He did know what Coy was referring to, however. Billy Bigelow’s costume consisted of a tight-fitting, long-sleeved, gold turtleneck with a red-and-green plaid vest worn over it. The combination was extremely co lorful, almost peacock-like, as would have been the choice of a carnival barker on the coast of Maine in the late 19th century. It also appeared to make his character’s arms look beefier than they were.

“Let me feel your bicep,” Coy continued, his tone now slightly threatening. “I wanna see if you really have muscles.”

Still taken aback, Leo made a bicep with his right arm, and Coy briefly squeezed it, then released it as if he had been handling a piece of overripe fruit. “Just as I thought,” he said. “You don’t really have muscles.” Coy quickly offered his own bicep. “Feel it. That’s what a real muscle feels like, Mr. Billy Bigelow, in case you didn’t know.”

Leo dutifully did as he was told. “Yes, your muscle is much bigger than mine. I don’t think there’s anyone who would doubt that. You have to have those kinds of muscles to play football as well as you do.”

Apparently satisfied, Coy then smirked and walked away in silence with a swagger. But the an ger that rose up after finding out that Coy had suggested to his own sister that Leo might be a homo evaporated right then and there. Leo wanted to laugh out loud at first but instead was content with a start ling and somewhat ironic revelation.

Beau Pre High School’s football hero was jealous of him.

Most likely because he had always had his choice of girls to date and surely still did. But now some of those same girls were making a fuss over someone else without real muscles who wasn’t even an athlete. Word got around fast about all mat ters related to “who was going with who” and that sort of th ing. Leo delved into it further: someone who threw a baseball “like a girl,” yet who had played the womanizer of all time onstage. Someone whom Coy had suggested might be a homo, who actually was one and had a mad crush on the school’s football hero throughout all of it. Finally, Leo couldn’t hold in the complexity of it all any longer, closed his locker and walked away chuckling to himself with a swagger of his own. There were unseen benefits to being a school heartthrob after all.

That night in bed, however, some sort of mental shift occurred. It all boiled down to the way Coy had forced him to form a bicep and then made fun of it.

Billy Bigelow would have done something like that, came into his head and set up camp. He could not let go of the notion. Oddly, he found himself wishin g something bad would happen to Coy Warren because of his subtle form of bullying. He did not like the way that made him feel.

One month after Carousel’s run, things did indeed begin to return more to the “normal” Leo so devoutly coveted and plotted meticulously to maintain. But as he reviewed the entire experience when things settled down, he eventually focu sed on something he had largely dismissed as insignificant, when in fact i t was rather remarkable. And like his vocal prowess, he had no idea where it had come from.

Mr. Campbell, who was the director of the play, summoned him to his office one day before first period and after rehearsals had just started and said, “Leo, I’m having trouble making heads or tails of the first act, even though everything is laid out in the libretto.”

“You mean the Carousel Waltz? The whole mi med thing?”

“Yes. The blocking seems to be eluding me for some reason, and I’d like for you to take over the direction of it, please. I know it’s a lot to ask, but there it is.”

Leo didn’t hesitate, didn’t question his director’s dictates, and the words came out of his mouth reflexively. “Sure. I know just what to do with it.”

And he did know. He coordinated the dark blue lighting with the opening bars of music, knew when the curtains should first start opening slowly, revealing the open ing scene in silhouette, followed by the gradual opening of the see-through scrim and then the moment when the entire scene at the carnival would come to life with a bang in full color, so to speak. It all fell into place and worked beautifully, as if a Broadway director had put a hand in the process long-distance.

“I knew you could do it,” Mr. Campbell told him after the first run-through, patting him on the back. “I was baffled.”

“How did you know I could do it?” came the reply.

“I just knew somehow.”

Leo considered long and hard, looking back on it all. From the vantage point of hindsight, how had he known what to do, and h ow had Mr. Campbell known he could do it? It fell into the category of things appearing when they were supposed to, lik e Leo’s strong vocal talents after years of nothin g to indicate he even h ad them. As for the staging of the Carousel Waltz, the newspaper reviewer had even made mention of the imaginative lighting schemes at the beginning of the play. Leo concluded that he had tapped into something he was destined to experience with Carousel, and it registered as a mixed bag of lessons he was supposed to learn.