atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (6 page)

“In a room off the kitchen,” said Irving. “The cook was using it to store pots and pans. I had a helluva time getting it away from him. Finally I said, ‘I’d hate for that guy to come back and find out what happened to his net.’ So the cook gave it to me.”

“Well, we’ll definitely find a place for some volleyball in Johnny Appleseed,” said Lynn. “Hey, we could use it as a warm-up for the show.”

Fish, a Cheshire cat smile topping his great height, said, “We had a pretty good team,” and he dribbled the ball around the auditorium, showing off. “Hey, guys, gimme a hand.” A suddenly reconstituted team pushed back some chairs and joined him. They were bouncing and passing that ball all over the place. Their energy heated up the hall, which had been cold a few minutes before. Now the room was shaking and everybody was laughing.

At the next rehearsal, Irving showed up as the Spirit of ‘76 in a costume he’d designed. He’d draped himself in rags and bound his head up in a white bandage. He carried a flag and two wooden sticks and played a drumroll on the back of a chair.

“A man and his dream, right?” he said.

Sam kept hanging around by himself, not about to knock us out with his singing. Irving, still in his Spirit of ‘76 regalia drew Lynn aside on a break and said, “Here’s the thing, Lynn. Don’t worry about Sam. He’s gonna sing.”

“When?” asked Lynn.

“Calm down. Calm down,” said Irving. “Here’s what we need to do.”

Lynn took a deep breath and said, “Okay. What?”

“He has a beautiful tenor voice,” said Irving. “We should… we should have him stand onstage during rehearsals, and we’ll all act around him. By the time we open, he’ll be singing a song. I guarantee it.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“I know him. I was in his company, his unit.” Irving heaved a great sigh. “Okay. Eight years ago. WWII. Island-hopping in the Pacific—Tarawa Island, to be exact. One night he got separated from the unit, one night in the jungle, and he happened on some enemy soldiers, surprising them. He took them prisoner, all thirty-three of them, single-handedly. A regular Audie Murphy. He was going to bring them back to the base, but he was overcome by fatigue. He knew if he fell asleep, see, they would kill him.”

Irving paused and checked for eavesdroppers. He and Lynn and I were the only ones in the hallway. He went on, keeping his voice low.

“So he shot them all. When dawn came, he found his way back to the base. He told his sergeant what had happened, lay down on a cot in the infirmary, and fell asleep for three days. He hasn’t spoken since. But I swear to you, stack of Bibles, sometimes I hear him singing a little tune, and it’s beautiful. He has a beautiful voice.”

It was quiet for a moment. Then Lynn looked Irving in the eye. There was no way for us to know if this tale was true, exaggerated, imagined, or dreamed.

“And now he’s going to sing—in the show?” she said.

“Of course. He’s gonna sing in the show. Why wouldn’t he sing in the show? Just put him up there in the center of the stage and tell him to sing “Danny Boy!” Come on. We gotta rehearse.”

We tried it. When it came time for Sam’s song, Alec brought out a guitar and played it for him. Sam stood there, arms hanging limp, eyes set too deep to reflect the light, hair stringy, voice silent.

A few more rehearsals went by like this.

On the bus one evening Biz, our stage manager, said, “What if it doesn’t happen? What do I do for a cue?”

“Mais oui. Quel dommage s’il ne chant pas!” said Dee.

“I could play the song, and it might look like he was thinking it,” said Annie. “He pretty much looks like that anyway.”

“S’il n’a pas parlé depuis huit ans, pourquoi chanterait-il maintenant?” asked Dee. And then, “Hey, I just made a rhyme in French!”

“Maybe he’s forgotten the words,” said Biz.

“He could hum them,” I said.

There was an element of hysteria in our giggles.

“Oh, shut up!” said Lynn. “You’re driving me nuts!”

Lynn sat in the rear of the bus, her jaw clenched, her temples pulsing. She said, “I can’t begin to tell you how much I really hate each and every one of you right now. And maybe forever!”

We got quiet.

In rehearsal the following day, Sam sang something—a word—a syllable—. It was a single sound. It had a primitive, groaning-door quality to it. It scraped over us. We stood very still, waiting, wanting. But there was nothing more, just the guitar.

When Alec came to the end of the song, Irving went over to Sam. “That’s it, Sam,” he said, patting him on the shoulder. “Keep going. ‘Danny Boy.’ What a great song.”

Little by little, singing a word here and a word there—a few more each time we met—Sam was rehearsing a miracle. The scarecrow was leaving, and a man was emerging. The day he put the first three words together, “Oh, Danny Boy,” he was truly the Irish farmer during the Great Famine saying good-bye to his son. He was a natural. Annie, on the piano, joined Alec very quietly to swell the music. A tiny crack of a smile threatened to sneak across Sam’s face.

His voice was hoarse, but I could hear the pleasure in it. We could hardly stand still. We wanted to shout and cheer and dance and hug him, but we stood glued to the ground so we wouldn’t break the spell.

*       *       *

After four weeks, ready or not, opening night was upon us.

The audience included the residents who could make it, some of them on crutches or in wheelchairs; the nurses and staff who were on duty; a couple of doctors; some interns; a few locals; and some theater department friends from Smith. Not one family member of anyone in the cast, not one friend of any of the men from outside came. It was a low-key affair. Higher powers wanted this break in the schedule to be as minimal and as controllable as possible.

Just before the performance, Irving, who’d “liberated” a bottle of ketchup from the kitchen, poured it all over himself for blood. He was delighted with his surprise. He’d kept it secret until the last minute. As red drops of ketchup-blood flew here and there, a motley band of men celebrating Independence Day marched along the back of the auditorium, down the aisle, and onto the stage. “Yankee Doodle Dandy” flowed out of them at the top of their lungs. For the opening number, they arranged themselves around the upright piano, a cardboard tree, and a basket of apples.

The Ballad of Johnny Appleseed!” said Fish.

He picked up the basket and started walking through the audience, tossing out apples as the cast sang.

There was a solo from Tom, the tenor, his white hair flying:

Apples sweet and apples sour,

I could eat ‘em by the hour.

Bernie, a baritone, sang while biting into his apple

Apple pie and apple tart

Applejack to warm the heart.

Fish, the bass, drew himself up to his full height and sang:

Apple jelly, spice and candy,

Apple cider, apple brandy.

And then the chorus came in:

Some men want money to have and to hold;

To Johnny an apple meant more than gold.

After watching the entrance, I ran to the makeshift changing room to get into my costume, the beaded two-piece, which I was protecting until the last minute. I opened the box where I kept it and saw that the skirt was missing. There was no time to send anyone looking for it or even to tell anybody. There was no one to tell. If I lingered, the butterflies dancing in my stomach would go on without me.

I put on the top, looked in the mirror, and said to myself, “Nobody will notice.” A couple of beads fell off and rolled away. I turned around and looked again at my thigh-length tunic. “You can see more at the beach.” I jammed the feather in my headband. “I can act the skirt!” And I flew through the corridor to the stage. Hell, I’m on the wrong side, I thought. There was no crossover space behind the stage. I could hear Irving saying lines I’d never heard before. He was ad-libbing!

“I wonder where Pocahontas is?”

“Somewhere over yonder, I would expect,” said Fish.

Annie was playing a vamp based on “Indian Love Call” to get my attention. There was no time to run downstairs, cross under the stage, and get up to my entrance, so I went on from where I was.

“Here I am!”

The men all had their backs to me as they waited and watched for me to enter from the opposite side of the stage, so there was some confusion and some milling around until, God bless ‘em, they rearranged themselves. Only Dave, still in his trainman’s hat as he had been from the first day we met him, missed what was happening, but he looked comfortable. He was still singing.

The audience was riveted, not sure what was happening but willing to go along with whatever it might be. Audiences are like that. They stay right with you so long as there’s reality. It was very real, what was happening. We didn’t know enough to fake anything or pretend everything was going well.

I was having a waking actor’s nightmare. This was my family, at least for the moment, no? These were my best friends for the next hour. Why were they all looking at me like I was the crazy one? The hell with them; this was my big scene.

As I barreled on, I sensed a kind of uncertainty, a vibration that hummed among the men, as a red-headed, white Indian in half a costume danced and sang among them.

Even the music sounded tentative. Annie was looking back and forth between me and the vets as if I’d done something wrong and she couldn’t understand why.

When I finished my number, there was a huge pause as though someone had missed a cue. The show had stopped, but not in the way I had expected. The audience was too quiet out there.

Yes, something was wrong. They all seemed to be holding their breath. They looked scared.

Then Sam, although it wasn’t when we had planned it, stepped forward and sang. His gorgeous Irish tenor wrapped around us like cashmere and silk. His eyes followed the boat that was carrying his boy off to America, probably forever.

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow—

It was the first time Sam had sung the whole song.

The audience would not stop applauding. Sam smiled at them. Irving went over to him and said, “They want you to sing it again, buddy.”

Sam sang it again. There was a different kind of quiet now, a stillness in which we could hear the breathing of the audience change to match Sam’s. When it was over, they stood up and cheered. Sam broke into a laugh and waved to them.

After the show, I saw Sam speak to Irving, to Alec, and to a couple from the cast who came over to shake his hand. Then he saw me and sent a thumbs-up in my direction. He had a smile that was full of mischief. In my fantasy, The man I might have married flashed on a vaudeville card downstage right. Nice save, Sam.

The show had flown by. The experience had changed us all. The audience felt it too. They hung around us in front of the stage. They wanted to touch us, shake our hands, prolong the connection, tell us what a good time they’d had. A woman said to me, “I love your outfit.”

When I went offstage, Lynn grabbed me. “Why didn’t you wear the skirt to your costume?”

“I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in the box. There wasn’t time—”

“I thought you were gonna be gang-raped to guitar music right there onstage,” she said.

“What?”

She was so close to me that her eyes crossed.

“Do you realize what a chance you took out there? A beautiful girl gamboling around half-naked through a group of men who haven’t been with a woman, some of them, sweetheart, in maybe twenty years?”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking of it like that,” I said.

“You better start,” Lynn replied. “You could have been scarred for life. My God, I could have lost my grant!”

My legs started shaking.

“Good thing Sam started to sing,” I said.

Lynn sighed, one of her big ones, and said wearily, “See if you can find the skirt. I have to return it to wardrobe tomorrow.”

She suddenly looked old, at least thirty-five or so.

As I went down the hall to change, Irving came running after me.

“Peggy! Peggy! You forgot your skirt! Here it is. Don’t you want it?”

I wanted to throw my arms around him.

“Oh, Irving, where was it?”

“One of the guys took it out of the box you left by the piano during the last rehearsal, when you didn’t want to put it on and ruin it before the show. He was playin’ a joke on you.”

“Lynn is furious!” I said

“She’ll get over it. I know her type.”

He whistled a couple of bars of “Yankee Doodle” and spoke in a voice somewhere between a rasp and a whisper.

“Are you coming back?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know, Irving. We’ve got finals coming up and all.”

“Yeah. I understand.”