Entr'acte (2 page)

“That’s all well and good, Joyce, but it doesn’t qualify you to be a professional. That takes years of work and dedication. It’s a tough field to break into…”

“So I’d better get started, huh?” Joyce stood up defiantly.

“Undermining my confidence is not doing me any favors, Dad.

Because I’m going anyway; if I think about what you said I’ll only be more scared than I would be otherwise.

“If my dreams are bigger than my talent, I’ll find out soon enough. But I’m qualified to try because I say I am,” she said.

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“Joyce,” her father’s voice was wavering, but he was going to try again.

He had remained seated on the bed and Joyce was looking down at him. She put an arm on his shoulder. “Dad, I’m going.

And that’s it.”

Mr. Waszlewski looked startled, like he’d been slapped, and Joyce realized what she had done. Somehow Joyce had adopted the imperious, “don’t mess with me” tone her grandmother had always used when there was a line not to be crossed. And her father recognized it.

Joyce’s mother was in the hallway when they emerged from the bedroom, pretending to straighten up the telephone bench.

“She’s going to New York to be an actress,” Mr. Waszlewski said, his voice cracking. His wife’s face fell. The three of them embraced then, like a football huddle, while Amelia, Joyce’s mutt puppy, circled them trying to figure out the game.

* * * *

The most recent one, for “My One and Only,” had “starring Joyce Waszlewski” in small type under the title. This was a clear violation of school board policy, but with things costing as much as they do, town fathers had agreed to hype the box office on the appeal of their “star.”

“People came all the way from Camden to see that one,” Roy said, as Joyce put his coffee in front of him. “Remember how you danced in a full top hat and tails?”

“And those Gershwin songs. You did them so beautifully,” a woman at the counter said. She started to hum “Nice Work if You 12

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Can Get It,” and Joyce bowed deeply, keeping the Pyrex pot above her head.

When her shift was over, Joyce cleaned out the few personal possessions she kept in the back room. “I’m sorry if I’m leaving you short,” she said to the manager.

He waved off her concern, and pressed an envelope in her hand. Joyce could see there was money in it, and the man awkwardly stammered, “it’s just a little something. We all want to wish you luck.”

As she came out through the front of the narrow diner, the patrons gave her a loud standing ovation, some of the younger ones standing on the booths and chanting “Joyce, Joyce…”

She was out in the parking lot and taking her last look back at the long, low white building with green trim and yellow letters, when the manager burst through the doors.

“One more thing,” he called out. “Do you want a letter of recommendation from me?”

Joyce looked at him, confused, for a long moment.

“You ARE an excellent waitress, after all,” he smiled and waved at her.

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Her grandmother’s lawyer had the kind of office people who are impressed with their position usually prefer: walls paneled in rich, dark wood, an immense wooden chair with expensive leather held to its back with brass rivets, and an outer office for his secretary.

But Earl Whitson, like most of the people in the area, was down-to-earth. He had rented the space from a financial planner who found that people in Maine don’t like being talked down to.

Earl made a point of telling new clients that he bought up the previous tenant’s furnishings to help him meet his bills. “My white wig is out being cleaned,” he’d grin.

The secretary was out, probably running errands, and Earl’s inner office door was open when Joyce arrived the next morning.

“Leaving today?” he asked. “Have you said your goodbyes yet?”

There were no secrets in a small town, and Earl was privy to whatever conflicts each family had because he was the person they called to sort things out.

“The car is all packed,” Joyce smiled. “I’ve been hugged, kissed, blessed. My parents even managed to tell me to break a leg.

They winced when they said it.”

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“They love you, you know that,” Earl said, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. “This can’t be easy for anyone, to see the kid leave home. At least they won’t have to worry about you being broke in the big city.”

He pushed a long pink check across the desk blotter toward Joyce. The check’s amount, in embossed blue figures, was $13,000.

“It’s a cashier’s check, drawn on bank funds, so it will be accepted anywhere,” Earl said. “If we had a day or two we could have wired it to a bank in New York, but obviously your first order of business is to deposit this.”

She signed some papers, dissolving the Joyce Waszlewski Trust, and notifying the IRS of the gift she’d received.

Earl put his hand into the manila folder and fished out two more items. One was a note from her grandmother in a sealed envelope that Joyce put into her purse.

The other, she saw, was a faded theater program.

“PLAYBILL, the National Magazine of the Theater,” it said across the top.

A caricature of Ethel Merman, the size of her mouth comically exaggerated, was on the cover, above the words “Cole Porter’s new musical “DuBarry Was a Lady. Opening night: Dec. 6, 1939

at the 46th Street Theater, N.Y.C.”

Joyce flipped through it until she came to the cast list. There, near the bottom, alphabetically under “ensemble,” was Muriel Pettit.

The name had been circled, and next to it in the margin her grandmother had written: “Joyce. Finish what I started.”

* * * *

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of these changes in her life, she knew there would be no place for Doug.

Dear sweet, well-meaning Doug had to be let down easy. But since he had a wonderful gift for not hearing anything he didn’t want to, giving him the brush-off was going to be difficult.

Her father had taken an instant liking to Doug when Joyce had brought him home at semester break. Within an hour the two men were hunched over the chess board, speaking in that kind of shorthand men develop when they’ve played on the same team or built a garage together.

It had been heartening at first—Joyce’s parents hadn’t liked any of her boyfriends before—but soon Doug was an intermediary in the sometimes difficult relationship Joyce had with her parents.

The couple had plans to meet downtown in late afternoon, but first Joyce was making a stop in Cumberland-Foreside to have lunch with friends of her family.

“I didn’t think they’d let you get this far,” Cliff Collins laughed as Joyce pulled up in front of the condominium in her red VW

Bug.

“The police are right behind me,” Joyce answered. “I need a place to hide out for awhile.”

Millie Collins opened the passenger door of Joyce’s car and let Amelia out, clipping the leash on the puppy as she emerged.

“We’ll be taking a walk and catch up to you shortly,” Millie said.

Cliff and Millie looked like the quintessential New Englanders. Both had the sturdy patrician bearing of people who are sure they are where they belong.

Joyce knew that Cliff and her grandmother had met while Muriel was making her foray into show business and Cliff was a graduate student in physics at Columbia.

For most of her childhood she had called him “Uncle Cliff”

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and believed that somehow they were related. Joyce’s father had set the record straight after the two men had a minor falling out.

Cliff draped an arm paternally over Joyce’s shoulder and led her through the damp grass to the rear of the condo, where he had set up a barbecue.

“You told me on the phone the dentist is getting the heave-ho today. You’ll want to keep up your strength,” he said. “I’m sure you have very good reasons, but that fellow is crazy about you.”

Doug was a civil engineering major, but everyone in her family called him “The Dentist” after Muriel decided that’s what the young man reminded her of. She used the name so often privately, that even Joyce’s parents had adopted it.

Millie was perched decorously on the edge of a chaise when they reached the deck, the first gin and tonic of the day in her hand. She wore a belted sweater dress in teal blue, and scuffed, flat shoes.

“Tell us why your young man didn’t work out,” she said, a playful twinkle in her grey eyes.

“Back at Bates, we ate every meal together in the Commons.

When I worked my concierge job, directing inquiries to the right departments, Doug usually sat in the little booth with me,” Joyce said.

“Once he filled the little bathroom I shared with three other girls so completely with balloons that no one could get inside,”

she went on, accepting the proffered drink.

“It took several minutes of tunneling through these brightly colored balloons, most of which had those awful happy faces on them. We had to push them out into the hall like some bizarre mining expedition, before anyone could get to the facilities.

“Then, after my roommates screamed at me for an hour, I had to act pleased and assure Doug that he was wonderfully romantic.”

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“He sounds like a dip,” Millie said.

Cliff stood up and tied an apron over his khaki slacks and oxford broadcloth shirt. “How do you like your burgers, Joyce?”

he asked.

The women gave their lunch orders, and Millie leaned over to whisper in Joyce’s ear: “When a man thinks he can cook it’s always a good idea to play along with him.”

Amelia put her head forlornly on Joyce’s lap while she ate, studying each bite as it traveled between the plate and Joyce’s mouth. Occasionally she was rewarded with errant bits of food, but it wasn’t until Joyce gave her the heel of the bun with some ground beef inside that Amelia was happy.

“It’s nice to see my cooking is appreciated,” Cliff said, throwing the last patty on the grill for Joyce’s dog. Then he refilled everyone’s glass and sat back down on the steps of his Taj Ma-Deck.

The Collins’ called it that because Cliff took the same laborious, thorough approach in retirement as he had in his teaching career. The deck, with benches, built-in cabinets for the seat cushions and a lamp post, had taken twice as long to build as the entire condo had.

Joyce felt comfortable with the older couple, and often confided in them the problems she was having at home.

“My mother told me I could take anything I wanted from our house for my apartment, but I think the offer was just supposed to make me feel guilty,” she said. “Anyway, what I really wanted was the grandfather clock.”

“Oh yes, that cherry case clock with the Federalist pediment,”

Millie said. “That’s a lovely antique.”

“Can you imagine lugging that all the way to New York in your little car?” Cliff smiled. “What would you do, wedge it between the bucket seats and tie a red flag on the end that sticks out the 18

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hatch? Every time you hit a pothole you’d get chimed and bonged to death.”

“It would be a lot of fun carrying a grandfather clock under my arm while I looked for an apartment,” Joyce laughed.

The older couple glanced at each other, and Joyce picked up on it. “What’s going on?”

“We think we have a solution to your housing problem,” Cliff said slowly. “A colleague of mine has a daughter about your age who is also in New York, trying to break into acting. Her roommate moved out a few weeks ago, and she needs to find someone to share the rent.”

“How did you know?” Joyce began.

“Your father only asked us if we knew someone, and we do,”

Millie said quickly. “It’s not like anyone is meddling; it’s entirely up to you. You can even stay there just until you find a place of your own. It’s one less thing to worry about.”

Joyce found herself agreeing, even though she knew that her parents had let the Collins’ make the offer because she would be more likely to accept from them.

Millie went inside to make the arrangements, and Joyce went to sit next to Cliff on the steps. The conversation got around to the possibility of time travel.

Joyce knew that Cliff worked with the physicists who developed the generally accepted theory that there are “worm holes,” tiny openings in the “quantum foam” that permeates the universe.

“A wormhole is a kind of tunnel that connects two parts of the space-time continuum, which is the underlying fabric of reality,”

Cliff said, warming to his subject.

“There is no past, present or future in these wormholes, these are places where time literally doesn’t exist. But each is infinitesimally small, and their location is constantly changing.

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“What the physicists are saying is that time travel would be possible if one could build a machine that would find and widen these wormholes to allow someone to slip through to another point in time.”

Joyce looked around the backyard. Two small birds were at the feeder on an oak tree, and squirrels were running through the pachysandra. It was such a normal scene for such an unreal discussion. “Do you think it’s possible?” she asked.

“Right now, no. But who knows what advances future generations will come up with?” Cliff said. “All of the theories for assembling a laser were in place by 1917, but the first laser wasn’t built until 1961. What would be needed are powerful gravitational or electrical fields that can keep the wormholes open.

“Another model that has been around since the late 1940s demonstrated mathematically that when matter is rotated space is distorted and time forms lines or loops,” he said. “These would be relatively easy to travel along.”

“They make it look so easy in the movies,” Joyce smiled. “But wouldn’t you create a lot of problems, going back in time?”