There seemed to be some sort of automatic emote mechanism in Spur which went into effect whenever he was confronted with a gathering of one or more persons.
Here was a whole roomful.
“What a picture! The sons and daughters of New Rochelle and San Clemente. Stuffing our little shiny faces while kids starve in the ghettos. Groovy!”
Joely spoke for everyone, “Why not cram it, Spur?”
I looked at Mittie and at Leila. Leila looked at Spur. Mittie looked at his plate. Mrs. Thurston tapped her napkin to her mouth, then folded it and replaced it on the table, and looked around for the hospital attendants and the police. Everyone else watched the principals.
Spur pulled two handfuls of silver jewelry from his blue jeans pockets and flung them onto the table nearest him. A necklace landed in the bowl of stewed tomatoes.
“Okay,” he said to the assembled young ladies of the company, “Put ’em on. I’m closing out the business. Remarkable, isn’t it? Me! Hammering out trinkets to stick in the fat ears of infantile chicks! Wow!” He shook his head vigorously over this amazing situation, weaving it like a maddened bull labyrinthed with unappetizing maidens.
“What is going on?” Mrs. Thurston asked Nathan Wolfstein.
He replied in an almost dreamy tone, “The playwright’s back, it seems, and he’s high…it seems.”
Mrs. Thurston did not seem to consider this a satisfactory explanation.
High or not, Spur was certainly not looking his best that evening. His cheeks were flushed, perspiration beaded his face, and his pupils were as large as a night cat’s.
Suddenly he slammed his fist down on the table and began yelling, “Who do you people think you are? Do you think you know what the theater is all about? People like me sweating in pain writing the TRUTH about this garbagepile world; but no, you couldn’t be bothered putting my plays on, you’re too busy wiping your baby-pink asses on COTTON CANDY!!!”
Mrs. Thurston again asked Wolfstein for information: “Would somebody mind telling me what is hap-pening? Who is this person? Is he un-bal-anced?”
“Lady,” Spur said to her, “you want to ask your palsied pal there to stuff his snot rag in your stupid mouth?”
But that was not what she wanted to do. Insanity had never frightened Mrs. Thurston any more than cows frighten people who have been raised on dairy farms. She stood up and shook her head. “I really think this has gone far enough,” she told us. “Mittie, call the proprietor!”
Spur opened his mouth, then closed it. His eyes widened with a startled look, then he lurched forward, fell to the floor, and cracked his head on the edge of the dinner table as he slumped down. Someone screamed. Leila jumped up. So did Mittie, who called out her name sharply. “Leila. Don’t!” She looked at him puzzledly and frowned. Then she knelt down beside Spur. He was conscious and rubbing his forehead; his eyes were blank. She helped him to his feet and stood supporting him.
“Leila!” Mittie called again. “Don’t do it. I mean it, Leila. If you don’t get away from him, that’s it!”
He kept saying more of the same as Leila braced Spur with her arm and walked him out of the room. Then Mittie just stood there at the head of the table until Joely came over, soothed his shoulder, and sat him down.
Wolfstein said that the meeting was adjourned, and the company should be at the theater in one hour. Most shuffled out quietly. Everyone was embarrassed. At his little table, Wolfstein poured himself a drink from a pocket flask. Mrs. Thurston was too absorbed to notice, much less advise him against this misuse of alcohol. She walked over to Mittie.
“Would you please explain this situation to me?” she asked him. “I do think, as a mother, I have a right to ask. What is my daughter’s involvement with that…deranged person?”
Joely answered her. “It’s nothing to get upset about, Mrs. Thurston. We’ve had some trouble with that guy, but he isn’t going to hurt anybody. Leila’s just trying to smooth things over, that’s all.”
Mittie gave a short, high, ugly laugh. Joely motioned for me to get Mrs. Thurston away. But before I could maneuver her out of the room, Mittie began in brittle gasps. “Amanda,” he wheezed, “when you raised that bitch, you raised a class-A whore.”
She turned back against my lead. “Mittie! What is the matter with you? I never heard you talking in such a way in all the years I’ve known you.”
Mittie didn’t reply. She sat down beside him, “Mittie,” she cupped his chin in her hand, “tell me honestly, is your marriage undergoing difficulties?”
Mittie jerked his head back and blew a laugh all over the table top. Amanda stood up and looked for reason in the person of Nathan Wolfstein.
But as Wolfstein swayed past us to the door, he just patted Mrs. Thurston on the shoulder. “Amanda,” he said, “your Leila’s a good woman even if, as the young people would say, she do like to ball.”
This remark, from a Pro-fess-or, dropped Amanda back into her seat. She shook her head at each of us in turn. “Well, I never,” she faltered, “I simply don’t know what to think.”
I believe it may have been the only time in her life she had made such an admission.
This public disclosure of marital difficulties took place on the evening of July 3rd, at a time when Floren Park was crowded with holiday tourists. A traveling carnival had set up its rides and booths in the wide dirt field we used as a parking lot. Red, yellow, and blue neon lights sputtered over the field to the whirring buzz of a huge black generator. There was an over-sweet smell of candied apples and spun sugar in the air. Children screamed with happy terror in the spinning rides.
We expected a large audience at the theater that night and again on Independence Day. Joely and I went over there from the boarding house to set up for the evening’s performance of Our American Cousin, which Mittie had chosen in honor of the national holiday. It was the melodrama that had been playing at the Ford Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated, and it was a favorite of Mittie’s, as he was a Civil War enthusiast: in fact, a person of nationalistic impulses, in general, who put a flag out in his yard on American birthdays and commemorative occasions. (To Joely’s radical annoyance, there was one in front of the theater and the summer house now.) So, for this production, Mittie and I had researched the original staging of Our American Cousin and had tried to reproduce them as nearly as possible. He had thrown himself into this project with a silent, relentless energy that a little disturbed me. He was also playing the lead; Leila was not in the show.
Mrs. Thurston had come to the theater with us, and when I finished checking the set, she asked me to drive her back to the house. We borrowed Wolfstein’s car, for the Red Bus was gone. Mittie had disappeared; so had Leila.
Mrs. Thurston had become very concerned about the children, whom Sabby was baby-sitting back at the house, and she talked about them on the way home. It was as though her knowledge that all was not in its proper place with the Starks had immediately been given to Maisie and Davy too, and had altered their perceptions of life’s stability. She also seemed to fear that the unbalanced Spur would do “Leila’s poor babies” some mental or physical damage before she could come to their rescue. To the children, and to Mittie, she assumed a, “I will never desert Mr. Micawber,” attitude. For, as she said, until Leila could be brought to her senses, someone had to stay sane and hold things together.
Meanwhile, her tone toward me was cooler than usual. She was forced to talk to me because she had to talk, and I was the only other person in the car. But she blamed me because she was talking to me. It was also clear that somewhere inside her, she suspected that I was the cause of the entire situation, either directly or ultimately.
“I hope you will now begin to understand, Devin, why parents often have to take actions that may seem harsh to those who do not have to assume the responsibility for a child’s upbringing. And you know that it is the truth that Leila was a good, Christian, and obedient child until you two started going around together defying me.”
Either Mrs. Thurston chose, for rhetorical effect, to bestow on me undeserved credit as the first to lead Leila astray, or the significance of Link Richards, Dickey Brown, and my half-dozen other predecessors had never been brought to her attention. (As a matter of fact, though I had never admitted it to Leila, when I met her she taught me all the carnal knowledge I knew at the time. And such was her expertise, it was as much as I knew for many years afterward.) However, I accepted my crown of primrose leaves from Mrs. Thurston without disclaimer, and she continued.
“Devin, you cannot deny that you encouraged her to sneer and scoff at my values, to make fun of her own mother. I know that you took part in this because that child would come home and tell me to my face that I was an ig-nor-ant woman and had denied her op-por-tun-i-ties for culture. Now, Devin, everybody knows that you were always a bright boy, and now you have gone on to Harvard University, and I am sure your family is proud of you—but I have also attended college for four years and received my diploma, and I did not deserve to be mocked by you and by my own daughter. By my only child.”
Actually I did remember having frequently remarked to Leila that her mother did not know her ass from a hole in the ground, and it may have been that Leila quoted this conjecture to Mrs. Thurston directly and cited her sources.
At this point, it seemed incumbent on me to make some sort of reply. And I was also willing to let bygones be bygones. “Mrs. Thurston,” I said, “I hope you will believe me that I never encouraged Leila to say such things to you.”
This at least partly mollified her. “Well, Devin, it may be that you did not in-tend for this to happen.”
“No, ma’am, I certainly didn’t,” I nodded.
She came ’round a little more. “You know, honey, that when things got to the point of her not respecting her own parent, why she left me no choice. Why, I had to send her off to St. Lucy’s for her own good.”
I saw then that Mrs. Thurston was worried—either that the present marital difficulty stemmed from her parental decision years ago or that Leila would say it did. She wanted support for that decision to forestall either guilt or blame.
“I understand, Mrs. Thurston. That was the only thing you could do. We were just too young to know what we were doing, both of us.” As I spoke, an image of Leila’s disgusted look flickered uneasily for a second inside my head.
“That is exactly right,” she agreed. “And now that you are older, you can appreciate what you put your own mother and myself through in that awful year.”
This double ad matrem argument was a little unfair to Mama. For what Mama had mainly objected to in my youthful romance (besides the volume at which Leila and I kept the record player going with my Rachmaninoff records, which jangled in Mama’s hearing aid) was not our going together, but the reverse—the sudden and, to her mind, ungentlemanly way I had broken up with Leila, of whom she had been, and continued to be, very fond.
Mrs. Thurston hadn’t finished yet. “Of course, once she set herself against me, it was hard to keep any influence over her at all. Why, you remember how wild she acted when she came home from her senior year. Drinking. Being escorted to the door at insane hours of the night by total strangers to myself, and I actually sometimes believe, to her as well! Just like Esther! Just like her! Why nobody could talk sense to her!”
Her mother snapped open her purse, took out her handkerchief, and stabbed at her mouth with it. “Then refusing to go get a college education and just packing up and coming out to Colorado, a thousand miles from home! To be an actress!”
I kept nodding.
“Why, she just went wild, Devin, as you yourself will acknowledge, until it got to the point that I did not even know my own daughter. Then getting married out of nowhere. At eighteen! Now I have come to love Mittie as though he were my own, and he knows that I love him, and no one could care more about those poor babies than their grandmother. But it is transparently clear from what is happening right here and now that Leila was not ready to take on the responsibilities of motherhood, as I could have told her if she had ever bothered to ask for my advice. Which the Lord knows, she never did. And then, and then, the minute she turned twenty-one, giving that entire inheritance from her grandfather Beaumont—who was a pure fool to have left that money to her that way—giving it all away to St. Lucy’s, when, Devin, she had children of her own to raise! Well, don’t ask me to explain it.”
As Mrs. Thurston paused for breath, I pulled into the driveway and helped her out of the little car. We found Maisie and Davy asleep, seemingly unaffected by the disclosures at the boardinghouse dinner. I left them to the solicitude of their grandmother, and Sabby and I drove back to the theater, she in her Victorian bustle, me in my sheriff suit.
“Oh, I hope everything’s going to be all right,” Sabby said, glancing back at our house, where on the front porch moths crashed into the bare electric light.
Backstage, Joely was explaining to the company that the breach between Mr. and Mrs. Stark was only a minor misunderstanding. While no one really believed him, the assertion in itself was a relief. The company liked both Mittie and Leila; nobody wanted to choose sides. The villain was Spurgeon Debson, who, since his extemporaneous exhibitionism in the last act of Hedda Gabler and at the dinner, was pretty much persona non grata in the Red Lagoon Theatre.
“Was Mittie at home?” Joely asked me.
“No. Isn’t he here? I thought maybe you’d found him back in his office.”
“No. I saw him down by the creek a while ago. Reading Othello.” Said he wanted to be alone. So I left him alone. I figured he’d come on inside after he cooled down. So now the curtain’s supposed to go up in five minutes, and Mittie’s supposed to be standing center stage when it does! And where in hell is he? Jesus!” Joely jerked his fingers through his hair ’til it stood out like a bright crimson sunset.
“What are we going to do?” I asked him.
“Well, Ashton’s been understudying. He says he knows all the lines. I guess he’ll be okay. Man, what a mess. You know, Mittie got a letter from his father last week telling him this was the last summer he was going to shell out for the stock company, and Mittie better resign himself to Portland and an office at the Metal Works. That’s what’s driven him nuts like this.”
I thought it was Spur.
After the show that must go on went on without Mittie, Joely and I left Marlin in charge of closing up, and we borrowed Wolfstein’s car to patrol the town. Neither Mittie, Spur, nor Leila had been seen for hours, and we weren’t sure who had the Red Bus as part of an impromptu property settlement. But if Spurgeon and Leila were in Floren Park together, I thought we ought to find them before Mittie did. I felt slightly melodramatic and a little excited. Joely said that the day before, he had seen Mittie setting fires behind the theater, throwing on them papers, books, even costumes. He had hidden Mittie’s sleeping pills. But there were other possibilities: he even had the Hedda Gabler gun.
First we stopped next door at the Red Lagoon Bar. Lady Red told us that none of the three had been there and added that she didn’t want any trouble. Her husband stood behind her and nodded. Next we tried the other bars, the fairground, the dance hall, the arcade, the motels, hotels, hostels. I even called Verl. He said, “Well, if the guy was passing out, she probably took him to a doctor.” So we called Dr. Ferrell’s office and learned that Leila had, in fact, brought Spurgeon there, but they had left some time ago. We kept searching. Nothing. Finally we gave up and went back home.
There we found the children still asleep and a bathrobed Mrs. Thurston inquiring of Wolfstein’s looked door whether he was certain he wouldn’t have a cup of hot cocoa. He was quite certain.
We reported the failure of our mission to her, and she shook her head sorrowfully. Pulling a chair up beside the tidied fireplace, she sat down. “Why, Devin, I really do not know what to make of this situation, and no one has bothered to offer me an explanation that I can consider satisfactory at all. Just what is the matter with Leila? She was not brought up to act in this manner.”
Joely and I stood in front of her looking at the absent fire.
“Well,” she concluded, standing up, “I am obviously to be kept in ignorance by everyone, including my own son-in-law and my own daughter.”
“Well, ma’am,” Joely offered, “I think Mittie is pretty upset.”
“Joely, I re-a-lize he is upset. We are all upset. But we are not all simply running off and neglecting our responsibilities to others.”
We agreed. Then Joely and I left her to straighten up just a bit before she went to bed so that things wouldn’t go to pieces. She envisioned order unraveling in her hands like a ball of yarn jerked on by three wildcats.
Down in the basement, we heard her plowing the vacuum cleaner in straight furrows back and forth, back and forth across the living room floor right over our heads. Slowly, like the sea, it hummed us to sleep.
I dreamed that I was running after Jardin, running across a chasm over a maze of thin strips of pointed rock with jagged spears of glass protruding. On the other side, James Dexter sat at an enormous glass desk, signing papers with a gold pen. I tore a rock loose from my path and hurled it at him. Then shale gave way, my foot slipped, and I fell for hour after hour, turning in a circle, down to the floor of the chasm. It was dark and unbearably hot; the rocks were volcanic and seared my feet and hands. Then I looked up and far above me; I saw Verl leaning over the edge, passing down a rope. I leapt to catch it; my fingers scraped down the side of the chasm wall; hard lava broke off and crashed around me. I jumped again and sat up, awake.
The scratchy, ripping noise went on. Groggy, I thought of a bear outside the window; the screen was being torn open. But as my vision cleared, I could see that the blurred shape now crawling through the window opening was definitely human. It was cursing too. It was Mittie.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Go to hell,” he replied.
He jerked his torn pants loose from the screen, jumped to the floor, and then headed quickly out of the room and up the stairs to the first floor. Joely had also been awakened by the noise of the break-in. He pawed for his glasses. We flung out of our beds and chased up the steps after Mittie.
Upstairs in the living room, we saw Spurgeon Debson rising barefoot, but otherwise clothed, from the couch. A towel fell from his forehead. Mittie stood across from him with Hedda Gabler’s pistol in his hand. Leila was nowhere to be seen. Presumably she was (once again) in bed asleep. I took a second to note this further evidence of her egalitarianism: apparently she went to bed not with, but, so to speak, on just about everyone.
Just as this thought was taking shape, Mittie raised his arm and fired. This time, as if to make up for the embarrassment it had caused in the finale of Ibsen’s play, the pistol did go off. And neatly blew away one of Aunt Nadine’s pink flowered glass globes from the mantelpiece.
Spurgeon’s body froze. His mouth, as I expected, opened. He didn’t, however, bother to phrase his remarks with their usual periodic eloquence.
“Mother fuck! Are you crazy, man?” was all he had to say.
Mittie stared at him.
Spur stared at the gun. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going to kill you,” Mittie replied.
Spur closed out the colloquy, flung the manuscript he was holding (a copy of his latest play, Napalm U.S.A.) at Mittie’s gun arm. It hit him instead on the temple and momentarily stunned him. Spur did not pause to pursue the matter or even to retrieve his opus; he sprinted agilely to the porch, unlocked the front door, and went through the screen door without even bothering to unlock it. The broken latch hung limply off the wall.
Mittie was on his way to the bedroom.
“Hey, Mittie! Hey! Come on now, Mittie!” Joely and I both yelled as we stumbled over each other to get to the bedroom door.
But Mittie swept us aside and stepped into the bedroom, where Leila sat up in her bed, naked in the blue silk sheets like Aphrodite waist-high in sea foam, awakened by the shot. I edged past him toward the bed. “Look here, Mittie,” Joely said hoarsely.
Mittie stared at Leila, his face as still as madness. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,” he quoted at her in a strangely horrifying deadpan whisper. Then, “Put out the light,” and he shot the bedside lamp off the table. Crawling quickly, I scrambled under the bed, frozen in darkness.
A third shot was fired. Above me the mattress bounced. From my seclusion behind the bedspread, I saw Leila’s feet hit the floor with a sharp pat. They walked over to Mittie’s feet.
“Give me that stupid thing, and get the hell out of here, you idiot,” we heard her say.
A thick silence followed, broken only by the rasp of Mittie’s breathing. Pressed around my face and arms, objects grew distinct. A suitcase, a white boot, a dusty copy of The Pearl, a crumpled cigarette pack, a peach core, a doll without arms in a white dress. I waited for a fourth shot to send yet another of the Sluford heirs violently heavenward.
Instead, Mittie’s loafers slowly turned and left the room. Leila’s bare feet followed.