ACT II

Scene One

Some hours have passed.

It is night.

The fireplace glowing. Silda is asleep on the sofa, a throw covering her. Brooke and Trip alone in the living room. They are drinking whiskey. Trip is reading the manuscript, and Brooke is pacing, anxious, making herself known.

Trip (finally, exasperated with her, stops reading) I could make us a sandwich. You haven’t eaten since breakfast.

Brooke (brightly) Oh god. Not really very hungry, actually.

Trip You’re not supposed to not eat, Brooke. (beat, a sigh) I was looking forward to all that strange food at the country club. Crab legs. A whole roast pig. And then there’s suddenly like Pad Thai and rellenos. Crazy mix.

Brooke I think I have successfully demolished Christmas Eve. (looking toward her parents’ bedroom) They’ve been in there far too long.

Trip (smiling) Preparing the attack.

Brooke (a tense smile in return) How can you stay so neutral on this?

Trip Who said I was neutral? I just said I’m still absorbing it all.

Brooke So you support me?

Trip I didn’t say that, did I? Look, I haven’t read the whole thing from start to finish, but enough. You (probably) have the right to publish anything you like, pretty much about anyone, whether it’s decent or cool or not, and they have the right to push back whether that’s decent or cool or not.

Brooke You’re like Mom. It’s like you learned chess in her womb and are playing against yourself and everyone else is only a pawn.

Trip (he stares at her, amazed) What do you want? For me to say ‘Oh boy sis—sure—“art” comes before life’?

Brooke No. That’s the worst kind of oversimplification.

Trip (grinning) But you sort of think it does. And so, you have to accept the consequences of ‘art over life’, which in this case is likely to be losing the trust of the people you love, for the sake of these opinions, these bewildering portraits of these people who seem totally unrecognizable to me.

Brooke Well, maybe your powers of observation . . .

Trip (over her) Let me finish, since you wanna know. (beat) Opinions: you turn Henry into a saint of the seventies, all patchouli and innocent questioning and reacting to the stultifying oppressiveness of these Waspified GOP zombies in the other room—and it just seems to me that maybe he was really, really sick and fucked up and needed a lot of help, and was hanging out with mad bombers at very least. I mean, Christ, I was five when this happened and reading it made ME feel guilty. But Mom and Dad: you think they don’t blame themselves?

Brooke They let him go. They weren’t helping him, they kicked him out—

Trip But—did they let him go? Or did he just fly off in rage and fury. It seems you’re looking for an apology, well, maybe they have apologized and you just haven’t noticed it. (the last is said very emphatically)

Brooke An apology? You don’t write a book because you want apologies, Trip, you write a book because of who you are—a person who writes books—the only obligation I have is to myself. To write it. Well, that’s as far as it goes. I am not a publicist, I am not a hagiographer, I am a writer and this is my flawed version of what happened. I did not come here to be emotionally blackmailed and censored by two people who lived very public lives and then hid in the desert.

Trip (smiling, maybe, but not friendly) A: don’t really need the lecture on what a writer is, and B: it’s just a story! A story you have told yourself and will now share for fame and money and—

Brooke Please don’t say I’m doing this for money, okay—I have no interest in money, you know that.

Trip (laughing) Yeah! Because you’re rich. Even if you don’t take a cent from them, which is not strictly true, because they paid for the fancy hospital in Cambridge where you camped out for six months—

Brooke I wasn’t camping—

Trip You’re rich, you’re smart, absurdly white, Ivy League, New York, and your parents are rich and you know it—

Brooke And what about you? What are you, a Zapotec Indian?

Trip (simple) The difference between us is, I don’t use my sixteen dozen different little sickness for gain. (beat) You do. It’s just who you are. You think being a depressive makes you special? Guess what, being depressed makes you banal. And in your case, hard. Not easy to be with.

Brooke That’s not fair.

Trip Fair? Well. Neither is “Love & Mercy: A Memoir”. And I worship you, I totally do, I love you. But this is true. What I am about to say. Suck it up and take it. And don’t interrupt. (serious) Because you had a breakdown, you actually believe you have earned a free-pass here. Because you couldn’t function, you didn’t care to eat or brush your teeth or wash your hair or even pretty much speak, and even at a point looked like you might follow Henry down the trail to off yourself—you think this entitles you to present a picture to the world of two people who failed in every possible context, as citizens, as parents, as humans.

Brooke (choked, tight) You figured all this out, did you?
Dr. Wyeth? When you weren’t busy cooking up Jury of Your Goddamn Peers?

Trip (a smile) You wanna be a little bitch about my TV show, Brooke? At least, at the very least, have the decency to watch it first, okay? You think you’re not like anyone else on Oprah?

Brooke Don’t talk to me like Mom talks to Silda.

Trip (very sharp) Mom talks to Silda like she loves her. And—as for my being like Mom—listen, you’re as hard as fucking Stalin, and as good at chess as anyone I’ve ever known, and you didn’t get that from Lyman.

Brooke Look, I accept that you can’t recognize our parents as I have written them, that time changed them, so why can’t you accept that I’ve been as honest as I could in depicting events that you weren’t really aware of as a little kid?

Trip (overlap) I never said you were being dishonest. Let me ask you a question: Did you give Silda the manuscript while you were working on it? Because I can smell her tone a mile away. And if I can, you bet that Mom can too.

Brooke (defensive) Yes, I did. She was there for a lot of it.

Trip Yeah, she sure was, which she uses like a goddamn baseball bat to hit Mom and Dad with how crappy they were to Henry. What do you think Polly is gonna do to her sister when she realizes that Silda was goddamn Deep Throat for you?

Brooke I needed someone else’s eye to—

Trip (over her) Brooke, I’m just saying that you’ve made the story better and added a lot of very specific detail to show you as the victim. You and Henry. That doesn’t mean you’re a liar.

Brooke Then please, please Trip, just back me up. They listen to you before all others. Really. If you just said ‘it’s okay, it’s okay’, in that way you have. Because I’m not going to back down, I won’t do it and they’re going to have to learn to live with it. (beat) Please. Trip.

Trip (grinning) So, wait. Here are my assignments for Christmas: I have to get Mom not to send Silda out onto an ice-flow like some Eskimo, which will be her first instinct, and also get them to give you their blessing to publish a book, which paints them as right-wing sociopaths whose ideology destroyed their children’s lives? Who am I? Rudolph the goddamn reindeer?

She suddenly laughs. It’s that thing where siblings shift out of the real tension they’re locked in and become kids again. Trip is grinning.

Brooke (suddenly laughing) You do have a shiny nose.

Trip I am sooo rolling a joint.

He proceeds to do this. Expertly.

Brooke You don’t understand this depression thing because you don’t have it.

There is a moment. He looks at her. He nods. Expertly rolling the joint through the following.

Trip Yeah, that’s what all depressives say. How would you know what I have and don’t have? How? You have your head so far up your own butt, you wouldn’t notice if I were covered in killer ants and being stung to death right in front of you.

Brooke Don’t say that.

Trip I mean, it’s true! Oh, we joke about you not watching my show but it’s what I do, I make TV shows, it’s part of my life, my life. (laughs, rueful) There are some things you don’t know about me; I was impotent for a year, I developed an unhealthy relationship to sleeping pills and kicked it cold turkey. I dated a Russian woman almost twice my age and loved her. I take flying lessons and I happen to have read almost every book written about the Civil War.

Brooke You take flying lessons?

Trip Just because I am wasting my goddamn Stanford-Berkeley education making ironic and cheerful TV shows, doesn’t mean I’m not very, very much filled with despair. Nobody who takes pleasure as seriously as I do could possibly be happy. Don’t you know that? (beat) Look at me: I don’t take my romantic life at all seriously. I am probably a sex addict. I don’t want kids because it’s far too easy to fuck them up, and our parents call me every time they need help with their e-mail or cell phones, and I am presiding over them getting older and parts are gonna start falling off of them and you haven’t even noticed that Dad has a little invisible hearing aid which he is too vain to discuss—and they are the only people aside from you and Sleeping Beauty over there—(nods toward Silda)—that I have ever really, really loved, and you’re half insane and vaguely suicidal. Silda is entirely insane and incapable of taking care of herself, and I can feel myself turning into Hugh Hefner. Welcome to the end of the goddamn Golden State. I am California! And California is not happy! (Beat. Finished rolling, he offers her the joint.) Have some.

Brooke (taking a hit) Thank you. And I am not ‘vaguely suicidal’.

Trip (suddenly pissed at her) Well you could have fooled me, Brooke! What is it? Isn’t it revenge enough that everyone worries about you all the time?

Brooke I hate that people worry about me—

Trip (over her, laughing) No, you don’t! Come ON! You love it! You had to add this book to it?

Brooke But you told me I had to get back to work! You said it was up to me, that ‘nobody was waiting for the next Brooke Wyeth novel’. And that I had to change that! I had to force myself on the world.

Trip I said that to get you moving again. To get you writing. But not this. Besides, I thought you should write a nice goddamn play that nobody would ever go see!

Brooke (snaps) You think I should put it in a drawer, don’t you? Wait until they’re gone! Jesus, just say it if that’s what you think!

Trip You want me to tell you what to do?

Brooke God yes. Please! Please tell me what to do, I’ll listen.

Trip You never listen to anybody, but okay. (flat) If you’re going to go ahead, do it without apology or drama, close your eyes and go for it—and if you’re not, do it with grace and humility, how’s that? I don’t know! (Beat. Suddenly really mad) Just quit torturing everyone and looking at me like a lost border terrier, fuck!

Brooke Stop trying to make it harder for me.

Trip Why not? This should be the hardest decision you’ve ever made! (Beat. Quietly, really upset) They’ve been really good to you, Brooke, they’ve—you know they love you, they worship you, they think about you all day, they really love you so fucking much, you know that right?

He really takes her in. He shakes his head.

Trip (cont.) I mean, this will sort of kill them. Doesn’t that count in this life? Not withstanding whatever may have happened in the past, doesn’t that count?

She looks at him, wishing he could go further, wishing he had something to offer her. But he can’t.

Silda (suddenly awake, frantic) Jesus, I smell pot! I fell asleep here, oh my god, I’m so groggy! What time is it? Did you go to the club without me, goddamn it?

Brooke (calming) It’s eight-thirty, nobody’s gone anywhere. Mom and Dad have not emerged from their quarters yet.

Silda They haven’t?

Silda wraps the throw around her shoulders and gets up from the sofa, stands by the fire, warming herself.

Silda (cont.) You don’t look so great, what, you’ve been crying? Did something happen? Did I miss—

Brooke (over her) No. We’re just sitting here, you know, talking, waiting.

Silda Waiting for judgement day. Give me that joint.

Trip Oh yeah, that’ll really help things; you, high.

Silda (as though he were a moron) I’m not allowed to drink, nobody said anything about drugs! Give it!

Brooke No. You have to keep your wits about you. Trip thinks Mom is going to make a thing about you looking at the manuscript. It will be construed in a particular way.

Silda Of course it will! Exactly! That’s why I want the pot! I knew one day it would all come to a head. They’re going to cut me off! Kick me out! Where will I go? There were no royalties for those goddamn stupid Hillary movies! I have social security, that’s it, that’s all. I’ll end up in . . .

She stops. Polly is standing in the doorway.

Polly Where will you end up my darling? The Actors Home? If you’re lucky, if you’re very lucky. Perhaps some little stucco place in Desert Hot Springs? A retirement hotel? But we can get to that in due course, we can get to that later.

Silda (grabs the joint from Trip, and takes a drag) Oh boy.

Polly enters, manuscript in hand. Red-rimmed eyes.

Polly (infinite sadness) It’s eight-thirty. If you like, we can still go to the club, have dinner. I could use a drink first, of course.

She crosses to the drinks tray and pours herself a liberal scotch, soda, rocks, from the ice bucket.

Brooke I don’t think anyone’s hungry.

Trip (grinning, slightly stoned) I’d like some M&M’s or something . . .

Brooke We should talk. Where—where’s Dad?

Polly In his study. He refused to read it. He refuses to take a position that might hurt you. Isn’t that something? (beat) You know what I believe in?

Silda (she can’t help it) Aside from the right to bear arms?

Polly takes the joint out of Silda’s hand and puts it in the fireplace. She holds up the manuscript.

Polly Loyalty. Reciprocity. Brooke, from what I have read, from what I could bear to read, this is fiction.

Brooke Is it? Really?

Polly As a novel, it might be fun. Wicked. Nasty, smart, funny, sad, all those things. I have to admit. And kudos to your silent co-author here; my sister, the betrayer.

Trip (so tired of this shit) Oh, for God’s sake, mom, let that one go, really, that’s nothing, okay, please?

Silda (sober and weary and kind) Polly. Let it go; aren’t you tired? What do you think you’re protecting? The Life magazine picture of this family? Nobody remembers that! Life magazine folded years ago! (infinite weariness, she shakes her head) Honey: Nobody’s looking. Nobody’s watching anymore, sis. Nobody even reads anymore anyhow. This book? It’s not nasty, it’s even loving. More loving than I could’ve pulled off.

Polly Of course you have a vested interest, I could hear your patois, your cadence, a mile off. So. I was wondering. Be honest with me. Please, for once. No lies. Is that it? Is it? That’s why you started drinking again. Your consultations with my daughter?

Silda (laughing) Hey. I didn’t need a reason to drink, everyone else gets to escape in this place but me! Look at you! You guys are drunk by sundown!

Polly Silda. I am so tired of worrying about what you might do next, about when you’re going to take that final long drink of gin, I lost hope that you might be a loving sister to me before you do take that drink.

Silda laughs. She shakes her head.

Silda Honey, I deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for loving you as much as I DO! How do you love someone who became someone else?

Polly There are lots of bars open on Christmas Eve. I could even save you the trouble and pour you one myself.

Silda (quiet, smiles) Oh, honey. By all means—do it. Here I am, sweetie, pour it, if you like; you offered. Go for it. (beat) And there it is: the real Polly Wyeth. In living color.

Silda points to Brooke.

Silda (cont.) It’s ALL in her book! That’s why you’re being driven crazy by it! Polly. I love you as much as I can, honey. But if you fuck your daughter over here the way you did Henry, I’ll never let either of you live it down.

She has a smile on her face. She faces her sister, not backing down.

Brooke So you’re not going to sign off on this?

Polly (she turns to Brooke) Are you nuts? The entire thing is spurious. You’ve written an entire book based on the premise that we drove our son to suicide, but only after years of incubating him as a murderer. All these years, this is what you thought?

Brooke Then we have nothing left to say. I mean, I guess it was crazy to think you would be relatively okay with it. (a sigh) Well, I guess I must be as nuts as people say.

Polly Maybe you ARE! There’s some manic energy in you and the book.

Brooke Oh, is that how you’re gonna spin it, Mom? “I wrote the book while I was crazy”? You wanna go with that?

Polly Leaving aside the grotesque characterizations of various and sundry friends of ours who come across really as a parade of doddering, self-satisfied Paleolithic half-wits—

Silda Is that so far-fetched?

Polly Leaving that aside—

Brooke That is not what this is.

Polly Let me just read you an example. Let’s see. (reading) “After he is kicked out of the house Henry has not been seen in weeks. On the news, Chet Huntley is talking about an army-recruiting station in Long Beach that has been firebombed. The body of a janitor has been found inside, burnt beyond recognition.

Lyman enters the room. He stands listening. He is somewhat ashen. They stop.

Lyman (a low growl) Go on.

Polly (reading) At two in the morning, there is shouting by the pool, Dad nose to nose with Henry, who is sobbing, pleading something.Without warning, Dad slaps him across the face with a retort that sounds like the tiny fireworks we used to buy in Chinatown. Again, two more times, Henry stock still as Lyman hits him again and again.”

Lyman (suddenly) Yes. He told me what he had been part of. I snapped. But I didn’t stand there by our pool striking him repeatedly. It was a reaction—it was a reaction to this—

He stops. He hates doing this.

Lyman (cont.) I am doing what I swore not to: I’m defending myself. Jesus.

Polly (reading) “By the time I get downstairs Henry is already gone. Dad looks at me, turns away and picks up the phone. Police cars are called. Henry is all over the news. Instead of looking for him, my parents have sent the LAPD to find him, no matter the consequences.”

And silence.

Lyman Of course I called the police, I wanted him safe, in custody!

Brooke (looking down) You may have wanted him safe, yes. But. You lost your temper and it wasn’t the first time. (beat) There are reasons he made the choices he did.

Lyman You see us as monsters?

Brooke No, I don’t, but he did.

Lyman (turns to Trip) She presents us as ghouls who drove him to become some sort of murderer! (back to Brooke) Christ, there’s something so vicious about what you’re doing here, Brooke, don’t you know that?

Polly Of course not, she knows so little about actuality. The things she knows nothing about could fill the Library of Congress.

Brooke Then tell me the things I don’t know, I’ll revise. When your son came to you for help, why did you slap him in the face and lose him forever?

Lyman (furious, and raging) He was—he had rejected—he had lost his mind. (beat) Don’t you understand what you’re saying? The implication is that because I held that traditions, American traditions, should be protected from a generation of hooligans, including my own son, who had resorted to total chaos and who were mired in drugs and sex and nihilism and were going to destroy this country, I broke my son! It wasn’t politics he was protesting, it was US! It was LIFE! He was ill, sick! Just like you, with a lot of anger just like you, and he had been a happy child, just like you. Do you remember how happy you were? Or is that a bit of convenient revisionism from us, too?

Brooke (emphatic) Until he was gone, I was. But not truly happy ever again.

Lyman (bitter, very, very bitter) Well—maybe you don’t get to be happy for very long in this life.

Brooke Maybe. Maybe that’s true, Dad.

There is silence. Somewhat shocked at his level of intense emotion at this. And then—

Brooke (cont.) I am so sorry but . . . I am suddenly so tired of the indentured servitude of having a family.

Polly Well, you’re not going to have one for much longer, I’m afraid. (beat) I mean it. This is beyond repair. You insist that we publicly relive the worst time in our life, in a book and a magazine, and I am supposed to buckle because one is supposed to do anything for one’s child, whatever one can to make them happy, to save them. THAT is indentured servitude.

Brooke Did you do that for Henry?

Polly You have no idea what we did for Henry. There are parts you don’t understand, you were way too young.

Brooke Explain them then, you never have.

Lyman and Polly look at each other. She shakes her head, a warning.

Lyman If you understood what you were doing, you would hang your head in shame. I feel sick. I feel like this is a dream. I’m losing another child here! But I will never be able to . . . (beat) I will never be able to love you again, I only had a little bit of my heart left intact after we lost Henry, and what’s left is breaking, we’d be done as a family.

Polly (to Trip) Do you think she should publish it? How do you feel about it? What do you think?

Trip looks at them all.

Trip Yeah. You know, let me just like preface this with—uh, I’ve lived most of my life in the shadow of a brother I barely knew—and I have about “this much” left—okay? (beat) That said—the people in this book are not the same as the ones who brought me up. I’ve told Brooke this. They are different people than the ones I am looking at, totally.

Brooke looks stricken. She looks down at her feet, shakes her head. Polly nods, ‘yes, exactly’. Trip looks at her.

Trip (cont.) But it’s the best thing she’s ever written.

Silda There. Listen to him!

Polly (a sharp stab) I see. So you think that as literature, it works, so therefore that tops all other concerns? Well that’s simply quite frankly a morally despicable—

Trip (weary) I couldn’t give a fuck about literature, Mom. I don’t know the first thing about it. (beat, and he goes forth without pause) I say that we all live with each other’s divergent truths and in spite of having deeply conflicting accounts, which don’t matter anyway anymore—(growing rage, finally it all comes out and it is scary)—Because it’s in the past! (beat) And we’re all getting older and if this is heading toward desolation, which I can see it is, you will all regret it, so give your daughter a pass and your sister, too, both of you, stop fighting like weasels in a pit, because on your last day on this planet, you’ll be scared and it won’t matter as you take your last breath—all what will have mattered is how you loved. (beat) And I’m out. I’m done. That’s all I got.

There is silence. He is spent and he exits.

Polly I can’t. Not built for it. I know myself.

Brooke Yeah. Well then.

Polly I know myself.

Silda (with a quiet fury) That’s right, Polly. You. Know. Yourself. Oh, you do. With such unyielding certitude. That’s what your daughter has written. Her book is about two true believers. Who never let go.

She looks at her sister.

Silda (cont.) The zealots who have taken over your party and marinated it in intolerance. You guys let it happen. You are incapable of speaking out, even while finding fault with it in private. (beat) And you live in that complicity every day. A war in which so many people are dying in a desert, thousands of miles away. Because it’s a war declared by a man whose father is someone with whom you occasionally dine, you keep silent. That is what true believers do. That, that’s what your daughter has written.

Polly (a slow ironic clapping) Well. That’s a good speech. All that liberal sentiment.

Silda Not liberal. Human.

Polly But I know that Henry came to you for help. And you were too drunk up there in Laurel Canyon to come down. (beat) I may be a true believer but at least I am not a hypocrite. To moralize, whine and moan, but when push came to shove, you weren’t there for Henry. He called you. And you just were too busy in your wallow. And that is the story of Silda Grauman, who spent her life in the cheap seats telling us what shits we were, and who couldn’t do anything to help someone she loved more than anyone in the world.

And Silda looks aghast.

Brooke He came to you, Silda?

Silda (helpless) I was—it was a very bad time and there was . . .

She stops, she can’t say anything.

Brooke He came to you? Why did you not tell me that?

Polly Because it was not convenient to her fantasy of moral outrage, Brooke. That is why.

Brooke (almost horrified) But you sat there on the phone with me, giving me notes—

Silda I know.

Brooke We poured over those pages together, you sat there telling me what I had right—

Silda (desperate) But what you have IS right—you’re in a very fragile state, you’re—

Polly (vicious) Yeah, she didn’t feed you that bit of info, did she, for your book, Brooke? Yeah, she left that out. So, you don’t know the whole story.

Brooke (turning to Silda) Why would you not have told me?

Polly Because it was not convenient to her fantasy of moral outrage, Brooke. That is why.

Silda Polly, I know you, this is your way of—

Polly My way of pointing out the facts?

Silda Brooke, don’t let her confuse the—

Brooke But this happened?

Silda There are—yes he—I think I told him that if he could get up to my house—I remember there were so many people at that house, it was a—he never showed up . . .

Brooke (almost horrified) But you sat there on the phone with me, giving me notes—

Silda I know—

Brooke (she can’t fathom this) We poured over these pages together, you sat there telling me what I had right—

Silda (desperate) But what you have IS right—you’re in a very fragile state, you’re—

Brooke (over her, with rising anger) I’m fine—

Silda Yes, he called me but don’t let her sew doubt with—

Brooke With what? With a fact?

Silda I wanted to tell you—I don’t care if you—you throw me in with everyone else—I at least know I failed—

Polly (vicious) Yeah, she didn’t feed you that bit of info, did she, for your book, Brooke? Yeah. She left that out. So. You don’t know the whole story.

Lyman holds out his hand, trying one last time to walk back this catastrophe.

Lyman (a hoarse croak) Brooke. Can’t you please, please trust us? Wait. Publish it in a few years. Wait. That’s all. Just wait ’til we are gone.

Polly (pouring scotch) Which should only be a matter of hours, the way things are going.

Brooke (after a moment, ice cold) Yeah. No. I’m not going to do that. You are asking me to shut down something that makes me possible. Your arguments for suppression mean I would die. Well, I’ve been dead before and I’m not going back. If it means that we’re over, well, then it means we’re over, and life will go on, one way or another. (beat) Dad, you’re not even against—your only cohesive argument against the book is not that it’s meretricious, but that I should wait for you to die before publishing it. Maybe it was crazy of me to try and write it, but I did. So, I owe myself more than that, and I owe Henry a lot more. You are asking that I help you? Henry asked you for help. He made a terrible, brutal, awful mistake and you shunned him. And with that, you have to live. (beat, unyielding) Relationships are hard-earned things; they have a reason and a logic to them. Well, I cannot go backwards into my cave. (beat) Mother, when you criticize and find fault in every last choice I make, for some reason, that’s how you were made, and I know you tell yourself that it’s because you’re pushing me, you only want the best for me. (beat) You make it almost impossible for me to see the love in that. All I see is a bully who has lost touch with gentleness or kindness. That is what I see; there are many other ways of being. And yours, I just fail to understand it.

Brooke looks right at Polly. When Brooke says the next thing, Polly flinches. It is not cold or bitter, just fact.

Brooke (cont.) I. Can’t. Bear. You. We have earned that relationship. That is the relationship we have earned, it is entirely organic, so no, I will not wait. I cannot—because I’m just like you: I know who I am. Most people don’t have to make a step-by-step decision to stay alive, most people just basically want to live. I am not one of those people, not after Henry. (beat) There will be a book. Maybe it will be the last thing I ever publish, but there will be a book. It is the last six years of my life on those pages. And it’s for Henry. I have no choice. What happened to Henry will have been seen. Everything. Everything in life is about being seen, or not seen, and eventually, everything IS seen. I am as sorry I am a writer as you are. I wish I had been made differently. But as it stands, I am . . . (beat, a breath) going to pack. And fly back east. And I will be home . . . HOME . . . by tomorrow evening. And in a few months, it will be out.

She starts to exit.

Lyman Brooke! Don’t! You don’t understand!

Brooke (a laugh) What is there left to say, really? Dad? Maybe we’ll—

Lyman Brooke, really, I—

He turns to his wife, shaking his head.

Lyman (cont.) I can not do this anymore, Polly! I can’t. I just can’t.

Polly Don’t. Don’t. Really. Lyman.

Lyman (a great roar from him) You know what, Polly? If I have to go on one more second keeping secrets, I’d rather live alone. I swear to you, I love you, but I would rather live alone. Than have one more second of this—

Brooke Of what?

Beat. He stops. He looks at his wife. She is startled. Riven, motionless. She nods. She turns to Brooke.

Polly (a whisper) Sit down. Please.

Trip and Brooke comply. Polly thinks for a moment. Lyman looks to Polly and nods.

Polly (cont.) I was taught by Nancy, who was like a big sister to me—that to control everything, every bit of information, every gesture, every pose, that was the way to live. Order. Precision. Discipline. Well . . . (beat) every few years, someone from the Justice Department will come to see us. After all, he was never found. Suspicions remained and the case of Henry Wyeth remains open. A boy implicated in such a thing; the bombing of a recruiting center, a crime for which three other people are still in prison. And these visits always go the same. “Has there been any contact from anybody trying to get in touch with your son?” And have you ever heard from him, and does your phone ever ring and does the other party hang up after a moment without saying a word? Do you hear breathing on the other end of the line?

She stops. She looks to Lyman. “I can’t do this alone.”

Lyman (quietly) We had been fighting. For a solid five years straight. Since Henry was fifteen and he became aware of the fact that we, his parents were on the wrong side. Of everything. All of it. And I was not just an agent of the old guard but one of it’s spokesmen, and was for the war, and our fighting became more bitter, more personal, and we lost him, the way you lose people you love. (beat) And he moves to some squat in Venice, where the entire lifestyle consists of drugs and screwing and there’s not even a shower, and we see less and less of him. (beat) I am helpless. Nobody knows what to do. By now we are afraid of young people. The people in his house are some sort of religionless theologians of liberation, whatever they call themselves, but one day I open the L.A. Times, and there’s this story about a bombing, and this group in Venice Beach is suspected and I knew. (beat) I remember it so clearly, he shows up here, this filthy wraith, with long matted stringy hair, and this filthy beard, and he’s practically emaciated, and his eyes are feverish and he’s clearly ill—and he tells us. He tells us that he didn’t know. He had no idea. And he’s crying, he’s a boy again, and I tell him he has to turn himself in, and he starts arguing politics like a child, “but a man is dead,” I yell, and he says “so are millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians,” and I slap him across the face because I can’t get through to him. And there’s no coming back, he looks at me, and . . .

Lyman stops. He shakes his head

Lyman (cont.) And he runs off, I run after him. And he’s gone.

Lyman shakes his head, lost.

Polly It all comes out. He’s in the papers. We’re in the papers. News people all over, going to our friends, camped outside. I go numb, I don’t care, I drive around town looking for him, all over L.A. (beat) And then there he is, he somehow remembered, he knew that once a week I volunteered at the Actors Home. I was reading Dickens to ancient actors, most of whom were deaf and blind, and I walk out to my car, and he’s sitting in the backseat. His clothes smell of that rancid ripe cheese, homelessness, and he is really unrecognizable . . . (beat) It’s a straight drive up. You can do it in three days if you just keep driving, almost all through the night, stopping for donuts and coffee, coffee and—and who’s going to stop a lady in a blue Eldorado convertible and her clean-cut son? (beat) He cleaned up so easily, with his hair cut, he still looked fifteen; gone was the beard, gone were the rags, just put him in jeans and a Brooks Brothers shirt and comb his hair and . . . it was so easy. At first we didn’t speak. Almost at all. And then he talked. Most of it, still entirely self-deluded, at first, but finally, he just cried. “I have blood on my hands now, too.” (beat) “Everyone has blood on their hands today.” And more silence. Sleep. It was so easy, you could just crossover, day trippers, really, before terror became the . . . (beat, disgust) . . . . profession that it is today.

Silda (quietly) Oh my God. Oh my GOD.

Lyman (quietly, he can barely speak) And I took a plane up to Seattle. So I could say goodbye, which we do. All three of us. On a ferry. (beat) We sit in the car. We dictate his note. This suicide note. We’re crying. This apology. A night ferry, drop his old rags on the deck, the deck of the ferry. Leave the note in his ragged shoes. On the deck of this ferry. (beat) One of many ferries he will take. And I hug him, the last time I will ever see him, of course, which we all know. I will never see him again and I never have. (Lyman starts to cry) And he said he was so so sorry and I said so was I. And I said, “I will always love you, and we can never tell anyone about this” and he said “but what about Brooke?” He asks us. “But what about her?” (a low moan escapes from Brooke) And I said, “no child could be expected to live with such a secret, and when the time is right we will tell her, but there has to be some cost to what you were part of. Maybe this is it.” (beat) And, of course, it never came. The time to tell you. I had no intention. I could have died then, I really didn’t care. Your mother insisted that I live. And that we thrive. (beat) So, I get called to Bohemian Grove and I go, I host events, I have people here, and I always think “if these men knew who I really was . . .” But I can never show a trace of it. Because I think “if I can pass as one of them, they will never know what I did.” But acting, you know, it’s easy for me, it’s easy. And I know he’s alive, there’s that, we do know that, the phone, you know, it does ring. There IS a click. He is silent. He is there.

Polly (holds up the manuscript) The truth will out. (a shrug, she looks at Brooke) He is at risk at any time anyhow, always, the history, the secret history of the Wyeths’ would be at terrible risk, all of your questions, all of your unanswered and unanswerable questions will turn on a light. In a closely guarded, carefully locked attic. Us in the papers again, old photographs of him, someone might recognize, and all of us guilty of this crime, this aiding and abetting. (beat) Now you know all the facts. Publish your book.

And Brooke is suddenly on her feet, and snatches the manuscript out of her hand and flings half of it at her father and half at her mother, and pages fly about, up into the air, hit the Wythes and drift to the floor.

Brooke I have spent years trying to—I have spent YEARS! YEARS! Of my life! In the fucking. . . (a rush of words) When I was in the hospital I tried to hold on and not kill myself because it would have been too much for you to have lost two children that way, and he gave me permission to do it, by having done it, he paved the way and I wanted to follow him! Every day I have to find my footing and not do—

Lyman BROOKE! (fierce) But you didn’t! You haven’t! You didn’t die. And he’s alive somewhere in this world! You are alive. And so are we! (beat) For a while longer at least. It is done. (beat) It is done. You. You are innocent, and you are kind, and you are, God knows, brave, and now you have to live with this knowledge too, and maybe one day you’ll get to see him, probably . . . (quietly) after we’re gone, but in the meantime, this is how we have lived, this is how we have managed to live. In this world. (beat) This world.

Lights fade.

Scene Two

March, 2010

Some suggestion, perhaps not literally, of Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle.

A book reading/signing. Brooke is finishing reading sections of Love & Mercy to the crowd. Trip is there.

Brooke Let’s see. I’m skipping around a little. I have these sort of easy, bite-sized sections—this—is toward the end—(She looks out smiling.) God look at you all. I love Seattle. You love books here. I guess it’s the rain, isn’t it? (A small laugh. Beat. She clears her throat. She reads) Lyman died on a weekend. One of those absurd and overly cinematic ocher and umber Palm Springs sunrises after a feverish, morphine clouded night. It took a few minutes. He had a conversation with himself, or with an imaginary director, on a long forgotten set, about whether or not he needed another take. He once made a list for me of his death scenes, and there were many of them, perhaps fifty. And now he was really having one, but of course, dementia deprived him of the real deal. For him, it would only be Hollywood. He was lost to the movies. His first love, I suspect. He insisted that he in fact, needed another take. In this hallucination of his, my mother and I sat, and listened. He could do better, he told the director. He had another take in him. (a laugh) Ever was it thus. (beat) And Polly and I sat by the pool.

She stops reading and smiles.

Brooke (cont.) Which is what we did best for the rest of her life. After I moved in next door. But of course, if you buy the book, if you are gullible enough to buy my book, you can read about that. The—fun with her. It—no—it actually ended up—

She shakes her head.

Brooke (cont.) We got to know—each other in that way—when all the men are gone, suddenly, and—(She looks down at her copy of her book) Let’s see—one little—thing here—I marked it, but I seem to have lost all my places—God, people used to ask me when my next book was coming out—(beat, a smile) I mean, because it had been announced and then it never came out, and—anyway, it took a long time to do that thing of stepping away, and looking at it all from some distance—distance is always good . . . My brother Trip, who is here tonight, tells me that I tend to run long, so I’ll wrap it up with a little thing about our late brother Henry.

Beat. A Bright smile. She laughs. She is happy.

Brooke (cont.) Here it is. (reading) “Henry is showing me a short cut through the backyards of Bel Air, and he is expert, at fourteen, tan and stealthy, a subversive, knows where fences have holes in them, knows where there are no fences, knows where trees can be climbed, and he is ahead of me, his long hair, his multicolored jeans flashing between the leaves of lush Bel-Air Jacaranda trees, and he is beckoning me to follow him, but I am losing him, I am not as fast as he is. I am not as fast, not as brave, not as adventurous, not as easy with neighborhood dogs, not as fearless . . . (beat) And he turns around to wait for me for one moment, while hanging on the branches of a tree over a long white wall that separates the seclusion of Bel Air from Sunset Boulevard, and he can wait no longer. And he drops from the tree, on the other side of the wall, and I think . . .” Now he is gone. How will I find him . . .”

Brooke closes the book. She looks out at the audience, smiling.

Brooke (cont.) (a small laugh) How will I find him?

She smiles, and looks out at the crowd. Making contact with the audience, watching . . .

The End