Parades, Plays, and Trouble in Paradise

There were two pretty girls in this town, and I dated them both. They're over me now, done, gone, moved on, leaving me here to tend my bookstore, rot and moulder, an old dead man among old dead men. They think they had the last word but like all purveyors of literature, I know something they don't.1

Yesterday I was walking down Center Street, past the Methodist church with its cornerstone that says Church of the United Brethren, 1884, and I saw an old woman leaving it on the arm of a young man, tears on her face and the young man solemn by her side and uncomfortable in his suit coat, the two of them heading the funeral procession, and I remembered escorting Elspeth Grady in exactly the same way after the death of her father. She wasn't sorry to see him go, a drunk who forced her mother to fall in love and then beat all notion of love out of her leaving her a cold wide-eyed shell of a woman. She was excited, because the night before we had kissed, made out, declared our love for one another.2

The day after Elspeth and I plighted our teenage troth was the annual Summer Festival of Lights, a tradition we still keep. Main Street shuts down, and the farmers tend a pig roast and give out big slabs of dripping meat, and we celebrate all day until the evening. When the sun sets we bring out candles and flashlights, and some people have those thin-paper Japanese lanterns, and we march around the town in a wash of our own personal suns, our sea of twinkling lights a small mirror image of the stars flickering above us.3

Elspeth and I held flashlights and held hands but the only lights we saw were reflected in our eyes and in our romantic minds. The parade led at last into the theater that sits in the middle of Main Street and we raised a hymn written by our town's founder, called the Hymn to the Dead:4

Oh rest softly in your graves
Trouble not our weary beds
We remember you, O slaves
Now rest your weary heads5

And a weird unearthly silence would fall where we would not be sure what we had done or sung and in order to make up for the guilt at betraying our strong upright traditions we would break into the Battle Hymn of the Republic, badly and off-key but with a robust false enthusiasm.6

Elspeth and I broke away from the main group, dodging through a doorway and up some stairs backstage, up more stairs into the rafters where we could see the ropes quivering and we pulled each other to the floor, all arms and legs and lust. I looked up only once, and a man was standing there, wearing a three-piece suit in 1800s style and looking a lot like pictures I'd seen of the founder of our town, that mysterious man whose name no one knows, who left nothing but his hymn and his money and his will that we build this theater and never tear it down, and he looked at me and shook his head and walked away into the shadows and disappeared.7

In the paper the next day was a casting call for the community theater's production of The Music Man. Elspeth said we should try out, wouldn't it be romantic if we got the lead parts?8

We tried out, and we got the parts. Our fall semester was spent hurrying to rehearsal from school, trying to do homework in the brief interims when we weren't needed onstage.9

The only other person our age, Lorraine Dunahae, had the oldest role--the Irish mother of the female lead. Marian's mother, Elspeth's mother. Identities become confused during a play.10

She would talk in her Irish accent all the time, to stay in practice, so she wouldn't suddenly slip and forget herself and sound Midwestern during a performance, even if we were supposed to be Iowans.11

I had Algebra with Lorraine. The teacher was an old nun, driven crazy by Lorraine's sudden ethnicity. At first she thought Lorraine was making fun of her, or the school, or the Catholic Church, but finally she decided Lorraine was having fun in general--an equally grave offense. One day she said to Lorraine, 12

"Stop that or I'll send you to the principal."13

"Teacher!" I raised my hand. "Why are there two hundred thirty-nine beans in an Irish stew?"14

The nun gave me a look designed to make the Devil flinch. It didn't faze me.15

"Because any more would be two-farty!"16

Lorraine and I were both sent to the office.17

That night Elspeth and I were practicing our big kissing scene by the footbridge. Things got a little heated as we tried to find a happy midpoint between our usual making-out sloppiness and a trite stage kiss that wouldn't throw enough sparks to be seen in a dark room. Elspeth left--not quite stomping--to get a drink. Lorraine approached.18

"Do you want me to show him how it's done?" she asked our director. 19

He was a short balding divorced exasperated man, ill-tempered at the best of times.20

"If you think you can help," he said. "By all means, do so."21

Lorraine came up on stage and threw herself into my arms and planted a big, wet, yet fairly chaste kiss on my lips. Elspeth chose that moment to walk in the door. She stopped, opened her mouth, closed it, spun and walked out. She stopped coming to practice. She avoided me at school. It looked like I'd never see her again.22

Lorraine got the part of Marian, and in all ways picked up where Elspeth had left off. I don't know if this was her plan, or if she just took advantage of things. I know she wasn't sorry.23

Our opening show went... well, about as well as a show could where halfway through we'd substituted Marian's mother for Marian and an old Baptist lady who couldn't sing or do an Irish accent for Marian's mother. Elspeth came to opening night and congratulated me, coldly, in the receiving line afterward and she took Lorraine aside and talked to her, earnestly, for a while. Lorraine came back to the line smiling beatifically.24

"So that's what you're up to," she said. After that night, she too would have nothing to do with me. All of my study, all of my reading, has failed to bring me even close to a guess at what Elspeth said to her.25

Just as well, though. Women are more trouble than they're worth. Books, while no less irritating or inconstant, are self-contained and can be shelved.