“Oscar Wil-dee?”
“‘Wild,’ my dear.”
I was trying to figure out the title, The Importance of Being Earnest. “Is that how that name is spelled?”
“You’re getting ahead of the play,” she cautioned me with a slight lift of her eyebrow. “Now, then, how to begin.” She gave us a gaze that seemed to estimate our capacity for inspired nonsense, although little did she know. “I’ll just read a straight run-through,” she decided, putting on glasses, the newer horn-rim kind rather than her husband’s type of wire frames, “until we reach the pertinent part. It’ll give you some idea of the play.”
It did, all right, although that was not the same as understanding it. Some of the first act, such as the butler who didn’t think it was polite to listen as his master fooled around on the piano, was funny enough, and some of it went right over us, cucumber sandwiches and high-toned exchanges about going to the country and so on. Regardless, while we followed along in the script Mrs. Reinking read all the parts, Algernon and Jack and the butler, in distinct voices, and Zoe and I shifted more and more uneasily in our chairs. If this woman could perform Oscar Wilde’s witticisms all by herself, what did she need us for?
Then she reached the section with the lines “Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner” and our role, or roles, in this began to come clear.
“Now we get down to business,” she said, fanning the script book in front of her a few times, as if clearing the air. With a tight-lipped smile she turned to me. “You are no longer Rusty, but Algernon, and occasionally Jack, also known as Ernest.”
Zoe giggled.
“And you, child, are Gwendolen now and Cecily later.” That sobered Zoe right up.
“And I,” said our star performer, “am Lady Bracknell.”
The part seemed to fit. Cloyce Reinking was famous for her New Year’s Eve parties, where everyone who was anybody in the Two Medicine country showed up. We were never invited, Pop being busy with one of his most profitable nights of the year. Not that we would have been anyway, I suspected, mentally comparing the housekeeping here with our approximate sort. I figured Zoe’s folks probably shouldn’t hold their breath, either. Telling myself that was neither here nor there or in between, with a feeling of mild panic I scanned the swaths of fancy-pants talk Algernon and Jack/Ernest were responsible for, trying to figure out how to say it anywhere near right. Zoe’s lips were moving uncertainly too as she encountered Gwendolen going on for half a page at a time.
Mrs. Reinking was paging ahead, marking her pieces of dialogue with a red pencil. “This ought to come back to me more than it is,” she said with quite a sigh, in character or not, I couldn’t tell. “I’ve played Lady Bracknell before, during the war.”
Zoe began to ask “Which—?” before I shot her a warning glance.
“Nineteen forty-three doesn’t seem that long ago”—the silver-haired woman probably no older than my father knitted her brow over some paragraph that took a lot of marking—“but I’m not as young as I was.”
Why grown-ups always said that was beyond me. Zoe stated what seemed to us logical: “That’s okay, neither are we.”
“What?” Putting the pink playbook facedown on the coffee table, the lady of this house took off her glasses and twirled them in one hand while rubbing the bridge of her nose with the other. “I didn’t have to wear these things then. They say the eyes are the first to go.” She shut her eyes tiredly. “The gray cells aren’t what they used to be, either.”
It began to dawn on Zoe and me more fully why Bill Reinking had enlisted us, if his wife was going to approach this play as if it was the clap of doom.
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” I sang out, Zoe bobbing her head like a bouncing ball to back up my bit of phony cheer.
“So you are.” Straightening herself up, Mrs. Reinking turned back to the page where she had stopped reading aloud. “Let’s take it from the start of this scene.”
Shortly I was alternating back and forth between Algernon and Jack, telling Gwendolen she was smart and quite perfect, and Zoe was trilling back she hoped she was not that, it would leave no room for developments and she intended to develop in many directions. Then Lady Bracknell’s part began in full gale force, with her recounting the call on a friend whose husband had recently died: “‘I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.’”
The grand manner Mrs. Reinking put into this made the two of us snort little laughs. Her lips twitched a bit. “Don’t get carried away. I gave that line too much. Farce has to be played straight.”
We sobered up, and went on feeding her lines that produced Lady Bracknell’s wacky pronouncements. Most were reasonably funny, although by the time Jack told her he had lost both his parents and she responded that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looked like carelessness, Zoe and I were cutting glances at each other. If we were in over our heads, though, Cloyce Reinking showed no sign. At the end of act 1, she whipped off her glasses again. “That’s enough stretching of the brain for one day,” she said with a wintry smile apparently intended for herself. Zoe and I waited anxiously. She hesitated, seeing the look on our faces. “Well, we’ll take it from the top again tomorrow and see whether my memory held up overnight.”
—
“WHAT’S THIS PLAY about, again?”
Pop lounged against the doorjamb, trying to fathom Oscar Wilde, which I had to admit was not easy. I sat up higher in bed and patiently explained that one character was using the phony name Ernest when in town and his real name of Jack in the country, and there was all other kinds of sleight-of-hand as to who was a guardian to whom and who was left as a baby in a handbag, but it all worked out in the end with Jack, now Ernest for good, free to ask for the hand of Gwendolen and Algernon entitled to woo Cecily, with Lady Bracknell presiding as loftily as imaginable.
“That’s pretty deep for me,” Pop said, then asked what he really wanted to know. “How’d you get along with Cloyce Reinking?”
“Good enough, I think.” He caught my slight hesitation. “I mean, she’s kind of hard on herself about gearing up to be Lady Bracknell. She doesn’t sound like she’s sure she can do it anymore. And that seems to really bug her.”
He considered that in silence, then shifted his weight on the doorjamb. “Let me tell you a little something about her so you don’t get yourself in hot water, okay?” He ran his hand through his hair. “Don’t repeat it, this is just some skinny between us.”
That flustered me. “But Zoe’s there with her just like me, too, and if there’s gonna be any trouble—”
“All right, you can tell your partner in crime,” he granted. He drew the kind of breath needed to begin the story. “Cloyce Reinking started off with all the advantages in life, see, down there in Hollywood. As I heard it, her folks made a pile of money in the movie business in the early days. But these things happen,” he shrugged fatalistically, “she lost out on all that somehow and she ended up here, with Bill. You couldn’t ask for a better human being than him, but she’s, how would you say, never taken to the town the whole way. Some people are like that, they like a bigger pond to swim in. Get what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“She’s not my all-time favorite person”—he stuck his nose in the air indicatively—“and I doubt that she thinks any too highly of a run-down bartender. None of that matters. My guess is, getting up in front of an audience and being Lady What’s-her-name means a lot to her. You don’t want to mess that up for her, you wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you.” I shook my head that I certainly wouldn’t. He made himself clearer than clear. “So even if she has to gripe her way into it every inch of the way, just lay back in these rehearsals and give her some rope, right?”
“I will, honest. Zoe,
too.”
“Okay, that’s that.” He shoved off from the doorjamb and headed for his bedroom. “Don’t let the ladybugs bite.”
“Pop?” I called after him.
“Yeah, what now?”
“What’s a Svengali?”
“It’s a Swede who says ‘Golly’ a lot.” His voice grew muffled as he went on down the hall. “Although you might check that against a dictionary.”
—
“LET’S TAKE IT from the top again. There has to be a better approach to this.”
We were in the third or fourth straight day of Cloyce Reinking despairing at doing Lady Bracknell theatrical justice. Practically ramming her glasses into the bridge of her nose, she faced down into the script and tried in a fluting voice:
“‘I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing. Which do you know?’”
The script said Jack should hesitate before answering, so I did. “‘I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.’”
“‘I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.’”
Zoe patted her hands together in silent applause, but Mrs. Reinking wasn’t having any. With a groan, she pulled off her glasses. “It would help,” she was back to her own throaty tone, “if Oscar Wilde were less clever and more substantial.” She eyed the script as if feeling sorry for it. “This is such a flimsy piece of work in the long run, isn’t it,” she reflected. “There’s an old saying that there are only two stories that last and last. A mysterious stranger rides into town, and somebody goes on a big journey. There you have it, from Shane to The Odyssey.”
Truthfully, that did seem to match up with the experience of two twelve-year-old drama critics, recalling John Wayne cantering into the Alamo and the entire cast of As You Like It transported in the turn of a phrase to the Forest of Arden. For that matter, Zoe’s magical arrival was the story of my summer so far, and her parents’ consequential migration from Butte to the Top Spot was hers.
“But it’s funny.” I felt I had to stick up for The Importance of Being Earnest. “Isn’t it?”
“Very well, Rusty,” Mrs. Reinking granted with a twitch of her lips, “it has its moments. I wish I had mine anymore.” She snapped her fingers like a shot. “The time was when I could absorb a script like that and know by instinct how to play it. Now?” She shook her head in that way that made us afraid she was about to call it quits. Instead she just murmured, “Well, let’s take a break.”
Perhaps to make up for the play’s lack of reward, this day she had fixed a pitcher of Kool-Aid of some strange flavor—persimmon, maybe—and set out a plate of tired macaroons. I went right at a couple of the cookies while Zoe took one for politeness and, after licking off a shred of coconut, put it aside.
With an eyebrow arched, Mrs. Reinking watched this. “Child, do you ever touch food?”
“Y-e-esss,” Zoe said back. True as far as it went; I had seen her move it around on her plate like a card-trick artist. Mrs. Reinking was getting to know us, but she still had a lot to find out, such as how fast Zoe could change the subject. “Did you really live in Hollywood?”
“Of course,” came the surprised answer. “Why?”
“What was it like?” Zoe said eagerly, and I followed up with, “Who was there?”
Cloyce Reinking shifted restlessly. “You really want to know, do you. All right, my parents were among the pioneers, you might say, in the film business. Movies were silents then, so at parties, there might be Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, people of that sort.” She twirled her glasses while thinking back to that time. “Everyone had mansions, including us—I sound like Lady Bracknell, don’t I,” she laughed slightly in spite of herself. “But it was true. I suppose”—she looked uneasily at us and our circumstances—“it made me a little spoiled. For instance, my parents let me use their roadster whenever I wanted when I was only a few years older than you.” Zoe and I goggled at that. “Of course I couldn’t drive in public quite yet,” she went on, as if even the rich faced certain drawbacks, “but up and down our orange groves, I probably was a holy terror.”
Plainly, living in Gros Ventre was small potatoes after that. But that’s where we all were, and Zoe now brought matters back to earth.
“Boy oh boy, they sound like the best parents ever. Are they still around?”
The woman in the chair opposite us went rigid, as if she might not answer. But then: “They were killed in a car wreck. Right after Bill and I were married. We were young, still teenagers really, and the movie company fell into other hands.” She made a gesture as if brushing all that away. “These things happen in real life.”
“Wow,” one of us said softly, it may have been me.
“Well,” Mrs. Reinking stirred uncomfortably and picked up her script but didn’t open it. “Back to The Importance of Being Earnest.” The dubious expression had returned to her. “Or not.” Abruptly she threw her glasses down on the coffee table. “Bill must be out of his mind, pushing me into this,” she said angrily. Zoe and I traded apprehensive looks. “I’m sorry, children, but I really think we’re not getting anywhere and had better give this up as a bad—”
We had talked this over and agreed it would be best coming from Zoe. “Mrs. Reinking?” she interrupted. “Before we start again,” just as if we were going to. “Can you do that bit for us? The Ben somebody one you told us about after Shakespeare that day?”
She frowned, taking a minute to remember. “The crossed eyes? No, why should I fool around with that?”
I leapt in. “Don’t you think it might be kind of funny if somebody as, uh, stuck-up as Lady Bracknell did that? Not all the time, but every once in a while?”
Drawing farther into her chair as if backing away from the suggestion, she looked askance at our eager faces. “Children, I don’t think that’s in my repertoire.”
“Just try?” we pleaded.
With considerable reluctance she did, slowly directing her eyes as if trying to see the end of her nose. Her attempt was more wall-eyed than cross-eyed, but it altered her looks fantastically, pulling her strong features into a comical prune face.
Zoe and I grinned, giggled, outright laughed. “You should see yourself.”
“You two.” She shook her head, but looked around for a mirror. Getting up swiftly, she led us into the hall, interrupting the cat at its business in the box. “Scat, Sheba, that will have to wait.” Posting herself at the mirror beside the hat rack, she drew herself up, took a breath to compose herself in the reflection, and said: “Give me a line, please.”
Zoe recited in her Cecily voice: “‘Mr. Moncrieff and I are engaged to be married, Lady Bracknell.’”
“‘I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this part of Hertfordshire,’” even the dowager voice sounded better, “‘but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.’”
The three of us gazed into the mirror as she held the expression leading up to the finish of that. Her try at crossing her eyes at the climax of this did not actually yield dueling eyeballs, but it did produce a classic caricature of a snooty lady looking down her nose.
Letting her face relax, Mrs. Reinking nodded slowly to her reflection and the pair of us. “It has possibilities.”
—
GIDDY WITH THE ASSURED prospect of further rehearsals—“Ten sharp, remember,” we had been reminded with a smile that was at once tart and sweet—Zoe and I practically sailed back downtown, talking a mile a minute. As we rounded the corner to the Medicine Lodge, however, I caught sight of something that made me tighten inside. Howie’s bald head instead of Pop’s dark one showing through the plate-glass window. Zoe was so busy chattering she didn?
??t notice, and I managed not to say anything beyond our usual “Later, gator” as she sashayed off to her chores at the Spot.
Hurrying around to the back of the saloon, I checked across the alley. The Packard was parked where it always was, so at least Pop wasn’t loading up for another trip. Yet.
I charged into the back room and there he was, idly rambling around the room to no clear purpose that I could tell, hands in his hip pockets, gandering at this and that like a museumgoer. “Hey, how’d it go today?” he greeted me, still looking around. “Did Cloyce Reinking need much help being theatrical?”
“What . . . what are you doing? Why’s Howie here?”
“Just kind of looking things over,” he said, gruff at having been caught at it. “Howie’s handling a shift while I take a little inventory up here.” He tapped his temple, circling the room some more. “Cripes, there’s stuff tucked away here I’d forgot about.”
I watched him, not knowing what to think. He looked the way he had lately, as if there was a lot on his mind. Maybe the weather was getting to him. There hadn’t been a chance to go fishing yet this crazy year. That was the least of it, though. Summoning my courage, I sneaked a look at the tarp. To my surprise, it didn’t appear to have any surplus under it. Still, I asked suspiciously, “You’re not gonna make a trip again already, are you?”
By now he was over at the shoe box of cigarette lighters, burying a played-out one to the bottom and trying out a shiny Ace in the Hole type. When it flamed on first try, he grunted and closed the lid, tapping the lighter in the palm of his hand contemplatively as he looked at me. “Naw, not right away, anyhow, you don’t have to worry your hair off about that.” He held his gaze on me. “Guess what. If and when I do, it’ll be a short one, maybe a day.” He made this sound casual, although it was anything but. “Down to the Falls, most likely.”
Did I hear him right? Those trips that plagued me like nothing else, over and done with, in just that many words? My voice thick with hope, I made sure: “Not Canada anymore? Ever?”