Backstage Stuff Read online

  Jane handed the note back to Tim, who shook his head.

  “You keep it. It’s a gift. A silly old play, as you called it, complete with a silly old mystery attached.”

  3

  “So Lowry got you down here to work on that silly play?” said Nellie, not looking up from the rinse tank she was scrubbing out.

  “I’m here to work on the Kendell estate sale,” said Jane, parking herself on a bar stool, a front-row seat to the long-running Don and Nellie show that played daily at the EZ Way Inn.

  “The Kendell? Frederick Kendell?” asked Don, trying to move Nellie aside so he could tend to the rinse tanks himself. Jane’s parents had argued for thirty years over whose method was the best, Nellie insisting that Don didn’t use enough soap and Don complaining that the rinse water needed to be pristine, no bubbles leftover from Nellie’s detergent-heavy zeal.

  “Kendell had a kid who wasn’t all there, didn’t he?” asked Nellie.

  Jane’s mother, Nellie, was the keeper of many theories, many of them involving wealthy families. She believed first that those with money did not eat. When Jane and Michael were children helping unpack groceries, complaining that they couldn’t fit another plum into the fruit drawer, Nellie would suddenly begin to expound upon the grocery-buying habits of the rich.

  “You know why they’re rich?” she would ask, leaning forward, shaking a stalk of celery or a handy head of romaine. “They don’t eat. They don’t buy any food. They starve themselves up there in their houses. That’s right,” Nellie would insist over imaginary protests, since Jane and Michael never questioned their mother’s wisdom in these matters, “we might not be rich, but we eat, goddamn it, we at least eat.”

  Number two in Nellie’s list of the secrets of the rich and famous was that all wealthy families had a child who, in her words, “wasn’t all there.” Occasionally she would refer to the child of a prominent family as having a screw loose or she would simply point to her head and make a clockwise motion with her forefinger.

  Once Jane, in a burst of insight, had asked her mother if the damaged child to whom she referred might have problems because of malnourishment.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Nellie had asked. “They’re crazy because they all marry their cousins.”

  “That’s why they keep it quiet and don’t serve any food or cake at the wedding,” said Don from behind his newspaper.

  “Really, Dad?” Jane had asked, ten or eleven at the time.

  “Hell, no,” said Don, lowering the paper. “Sometimes your mom is just a little…” He twirled his finger in circles at his temple.

  “I heard that,” Nellie yelled in from the kitchen.

  * * *

  Nellie now backed away from the rinse tanks, wiping her hands on her apron. “Lowry’s got you working on the Kendell house while he’s doing that silly play then? That’s okay—you probably got the better job. That theater thing…”

  Nellie pronounced theater the-a-tor—long e, long a, long o, and with as much disgust as she could muster.

  Jane did not like to admit she wasn’t in the loop, but clearly Nellie knew something about Tim’s springtime exploits that Jane did not. What theater thing? Doing the silly play? How could she find out exactly what was happening without giving her mother the opportunity to dangle what Jane didn’t know in front of her face, baiting her to the point of exhaustion?

  “What makes you think the play is so silly, Mom?” Jane asked.

  “Well, it was written by Freddy Kendell, and I told you he might have been a few sandwiches short of a picnic,” said Nellie.

  So Tim had shown her that script … not just to cheer her up … but because …

  “Is that it? That’s no—”

  “And,” Nellie said, drawing out the one-syllable word, “Venita, down at Pink’s, says everybody knows Tim’s no actor.”

  “Yeah?” said Jane, clearly treading water.

  “Yeah, the Cartwright boy wanted to play it and he’s been in two plays and does the commercials on Kankakee cable for his granddad’s lumberyard, and he should have gotten it. That’s what everyone’s saying.”

  “How about you, Dad?” asked Jane, trying to hack through the brush and find the path into what the hell Nellie was talking about. “Do you agree with Mom?”

  “I don’t go in for gossip, Janie,” said Don. “But,” he said, chuckling, “Phil, at the barber’s, said he heard Lowry rewrote it ten years older so he could do it, you know, so there weren’t references to him looking like a college boy and all. I don’t even think Timmy could pull off being in his twenties,” said Don.

  Jane was ready to turn over all the cards and give up when the screen door swung open and Francis walked in. Francis had delivered bread and buns and snack cakes, supplying the EZ Way Inn kitchen and bread rack, for as long as Jane could remember. Even though he was now retired and Don and Nellie didn’t serve any kind of regular lunch, Francis still showed up late morning and Don and Nellie still referred to him as Francis the bread man.

  Jane nodded to Francis and he nodded back.

  Nellie poured him a cup of the thick viscous liquid that the EZ Way Inn promoted as coffee. Jane had ordered coffee in every diner, every chic coffee shop, every franchised fast-food dive, always curious if anyone made coffee that tasted like her mother’s. Nellie used two glass bubble pots, boiling the water that shot up through the metal funnel-like device filled with grounds, then dripped slowly back into the carafe. The resulting semiliquid poured like molasses, and Jane had often thought that she should melt a little chocolate in it and bottle it as an ice cream sauce. There could be a fortune in it.

  Don thought there might be more money in using it as a home remedy.

  “We put it in cough syrup bottles, Janie, and peddle it from the trunk of our car with your mother as the pitchman. That’s where the money is.”

  Tim had suggested an infomercial to promote it as a fixative in a jar. “Holds false teeth in place, hangs posters without unsightly nail holes in your walls, and … patches shingles better than tar! No mixing required. Call now and we’ll throw in a jar of de-caf-goo-to-you, too!”

  Francis, on the other hand, just showed up every morning and drank a cup. He made the same acid grimace that everyone made at the first sip, then settled into drinking Nellie’s bottomless brew, seemingly intent on removing the lining of his ample stomach.

  “Hullo, Janie,” said Francis.

  “Hi, Francis,” said Jane. “How are you?”

  He shrugged. It was the all-purpose Kankakee answer.

  “Visiting?” he asked.

  Jane shrugged back. When in Kankakee, she believed in speaking the language.

  “She’s here to work with that Lowry, selling off the Kendell place,” said Nellie, topping off Francis’s cup.

  “Gonna be in the play, too?” asked Francis.

  Of course, that was it. Tim must be putting on that terrible play. That’s why he had the scripts. And he was going to get Jane to act in it! Jane hadn’t stepped onstage since college. She had started school as a theater major, had several roles in university productions, been a member of a comedy troupe. She had loved it. But after school, there was Charley and that wonderful job opportunity at Rooney and Rooney, where they welcomed theater majors, art school dropouts, poetry students with music minors … “creative types … we love you creative types,” they had said. And Jane had never looked back. Correction—Jane rarely looked back. Every once in a while, when she happened to catch the Tony Awards or Oscar night on television, she recalled her acceptance speeches. She and her friends “in theater” had all written them and every year, at Oscar parties, they would dress up and deliver their heartfelt thank-yous to one another for “being there during the lean years,” and “supporting their art.”

  And now that sweetheart, Tim Lowry, was going to take her mind off her mundane real-life troubles by asking her to resume her too-short career, cut off in her prime, and Jane Wheel was once agai
n going to trod the boards!

  Could she do it? Could she memorize lines, walk confidently across a stage, not laugh at the silly dramatic dialogue in Kendell’s play?

  “There she is,” said Tim, entering the EZ Way Inn through the seldom-used front door. “Kankakee’s answer to Helen Hayes, Sarah Bernhardt, and Thelma Ritter … my leading lady!”

  Jane laughed, feeling her cheeks grow warm. Had she missed being the centerpiece of someone’s life so much that being asked to star in a Kankakee Community Theater play was enough to lift her out of the swamp? How pathetic was that?

  “Lowry, is that all you can talk about now? That damn play of yours?” said Nellie.

  “You’ve heard, Janie, right? You know why I showed you the script, you know I’m directing Kendell’s play for the Community Theater?” asked Tim. “I know it’s creaky, but I thought it would be fun to ‘discover’ a seventy-year-old play written by a Kankakee resident from a famous Kankakee family.”

  “Was Kendell famous?” asked Don. “I thought he was just rich.”

  Nellie approached Francis with the coffeepot but he shook his head and covered his cup with both hands. “He invented the monkey bars,” said the bread man.

  All conversation stopped and all eyes landed on Francis.

  “That’s what my wife said,” he explained, shrugging his shoulders.

  “He manufactured and sold playground equipment,” said Tim. “I’m not sure what he actually invented or if—”

  “He didn’t invent the monkey bars, Francis,” said Don, laughing.

  Nellie nodded vigorously. “How can you be so gullible? Monkeys invented the goddamn monkey bars.”

  All eyes turned to Nellie.

  “What? You don’t think a monkey swinging through the trees invented the monkey bars? Jeez, where’s Rita?” asked Nellie.

  “I left her at the house,” said Jane. “She told me you two had been up all night trading animal secrets.”

  “Very funny,” said Nellie, turning to head back to the kitchen. “Who wants pie? I got cherry and lemon cream.”

  “Okay, as I was saying,” said Tim, “I’m directing the play. It has a perfect part for me, so I’m acting in it, too. I’m tweaking and rewriting a bit … it’s public domain so nobody’s going to complain. Nothing beats working with a dead writer. And all that’s left is to cast my leading lady.”

  “Tim, I think it’s flattering, but…” Jane began.

  “You’re going to have to do some wooing,” said Don.

  “That’s why I brought these,” said Tim, producing from behind his back an enormous gift box of Godiva chocolates.

  “That cost a fortune,” said Jane. “No one buys a five-pound box of Godiva.” Jane felt her hands begin to tremble. For someone like herself who never bought retail, who thrifted, scavenged, and scrounged, buying an overpriced luxury item like this produced shivering and a cold sweat. “In this economy, Tim? Godiva chocolates? It’s obscene.”

  Nellie returned with a piece of cherry pie in one hand and a slice of lemon cream in the other. She set the plates on the bar and glanced at the gold, beribboned package. Then, just as Jane, shaking a little, reached out for the chocolates to take a closer look, Nellie rocked back on her heels, then forward onto her toes, and snatched the gold box away from her daughter’s hands.

  “For me, Lowry?” said Nellie, smiling slyly.

  “If you say yes to being my leading lady, Nellie,” said Tim.

  Jane felt faint, like little lights were being turned off all around her head.

  “All right, I’ll star in your goddamned play.”

  4

  “Nellie is not the leading lady,” said Tim. “She’s playing the dying dowager head of the family. She lays in a hospital bed onstage during the whole third act, comatose. I just needed someone like Nellie, you know, to get on board.”

  Jane whipped out her notebook and rummaged through her tote for a pencil.

  “Let’s get this show on the road, Tim. Where do you want me to start at the Kendell house?” she asked. “You’re obviously going to be busy down at the auditorium, rehearsals and all, so…”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to act anymore. You’ve said a million times you were through with all that. I might know you better than you know yourself, but even I cannot read your mind!”

  Jane put down her pencil and began applauding, one slow clap at a time.

  “So Timothy Lowry finally admits that there is something he can’t do? Let’s hear it for the boy!”

  “Sarcasm is so ugly on you,” Tim said. He picked up the fork she had next to her plate and broke off a bite of the cherry pie Jane had claimed for herself. Seated in a corner of the EZ Way Inn dining room, Jane and Tim were speaking in low voices, neither wanting Nellie to overhear them, albeit for different reasons. “And I planned on asking you to help with the play, but you were so snarky about it when we read the scene together, I just figured you wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Let’s get over to the Kendell place so you can show me around,” Jane said, giving up on finding the pencil. “I don’t want to have this conversation in front of Nellie.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  * * *

  The drive to the home of Frederick Kendell took ten minutes. In ten minutes’ time, one can accomplish many things: read ten or more pages of a book, prepare a microwave rice pilaf, boil an egg, run a mile. In these particular ten minutes, Jane Wheel and Tim Lowry accomplished the following: Jane Wheel set a record for the most minutes she had ever remained silent in the company of Tim Lowry; Tim Lowry set a record for the most words spoken in the face of uninterrupted silence from Jane Wheel.

  “Now just hear me out, okay? I started the clean-out, right? The first walk-through was amazing. You’ll see when we get there. No one has lived in the house for fifteen years and it’s been untouched since the day the parents left. Before that, the mother’s parents and the father’s parents and two great aunts lived there with them—with all their stuff. These two kids—a little older than we are—are the heirs and they want nothing out of this house. They’re done. They want a sale, hoping that some of the big items make money, the paintings, the piano, the harp … that’s right, there’s a harp. The grandfather made a fortune and married a fortune and the son—the grandfather of these heirs, Frederick Junior—sat around on pillows made of money and wrote plays and this one actually got published. I think it was the equivalent of self-publishing because I’ve never heard of this place—Knarp Press? Have you?”

  Jane shrugged.

  “So anyway, I find twelve of these scripts and I just took them home, looked them up, and saw no one had ever bothered with a copyright and decided to make a case for putting this play on as the spring community theater production. Naturally, I’d direct, and who else could play the lead? So … long story short … I’m getting a little flack about directing and starring, so I needed to get some new blood involved—you know, people who don’t usually participate in stuff like this. So I suggested to the board that I could get a whole element of the community to attend if I got Nellie to be in the show and so they kind of agreed that it would widen the circle—they’re tired of being accused of being cliquey. And if Nellie’s in it and the whole EZ Way Inn crowd comes, well, that’s a wider circle for sure.

  “And I thought you might want to get involved, too,” said Tim, finally stopping for a breath.

  Jane looked at him with one eyebrow raised. She had been practicing Detective Oh’s no-eyebrow-raise-eyebrow-raise and she could feel it working its magic.

  “I know you need money, and acting in the show doesn’t pay—it’s community theater—but there’s a stipend for tech stuff, so I thought maybe you’d…” Tim stopped and looked over quickly as he turned into the long drive leading up to the Kendell mansion. Jane still hadn’t spoken. Tim took a deep breath and finished his question. “I thought maybe you’d agree to do props?”

  Jane was loo
king out her window. The house was enormous—even by the standards of old-money houses on the river, this one was special—gigantic. Without turning back to Tim, she asked, “How much?”

  “All of them,” Tim said, sounding a little confused. “It’s a three-act play.”

  “How much is the stipend?”

  “Five hundred dollars. I know it’s not much, but it’s four weeks’ work and I figured we’d find most of the stuff right here at the house, borrow it for the production, then bring it back in time for the sale. Freddy earmarked the props he wanted used. Family won’t care. I’ve got a great carpenter building the set and if you were to dress it and—”

  “Design and props? And I have to run the show?”

  “I figured you’d want to and that way maybe you could help with the vintage clothes and—”

  “So aside from hammering in the nails myself, I’d be in charge of everything? Props, basic set dressing and design, costumes? How about makeup and hair?”

  “Diane down at Waves said she’d handle all that,” said Tim. “Janie, don’t you think it would be fun? We haven’t done a play together since Antigone senior year of high school.”

  “This is the other teeny little job you had for me, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Tim. “I thought you didn’t hear me when I said that.”

  “I hear everything,” said Jane. “I’ll think it over.”

  “Think fast, because I already told the theater board you’d do it.”

  “Tim!”

  “Look, it will be fun, you’ll get paid, oh … yeah, there’s one more thing,” said Tim.

  “You want me to hang the lights or sew a new stage curtain?”

  “No, no, I almost forgot the most important part. I just heard this morning that the year after he finished the play, Freddy Kendell collapsed just like the character in the play. They found him out like a light in the garden. Just like the end of the first act? The cousin is found poisoned, collapsed in the flower beds. That’s where they found old Freddy,” said Tim, looking through an enormous ring of keys to find the one that would unlock the massive oak front door. “They said it was a heart attack, but it’s possible he was poisoned.”