THE SECOND LETTER ARRIVED the next week, on show day, at the studio — they rehearsed there Wednesdays and Thursdays. Happy was screaming at the orchestra; at the properties-and-scripts woman, who held the whole enterprise together (she had a name but he called her “the Brigadier”); at the writers; at the cameramen; at Joss. Paolo came around, the sack of mail on his shoulder. Joss took the letter from Paolo and put it into his pocket, unopened.
The show went all right. They had a fading tenor for the next-to-last number leading into Happy’s windup monologue, the sentimental one. Joss stood listening to the tenor in what passed for the wings. The studio had some nerve calling this a stage, wires and cables all over the joint. He’d worked Broadway, rep, vaudeville; the worst house he’d ever played in had kept itself in better shape than the New Medium. The two circuses he’d traveled with were tight as battleships; well, circuses couldn’t afford bad habits … Nessun dorma, sang the has-been. He was at the point in his decline that Joss liked best: ambition flown; to hell with the high notes; emotion at last replacing resonance. He wore a tux and makeup but he might as well have been naked. Joss could sense the paunch under the corset, could imagine the truss, too — oh, the eternal sadness of fat men.
They all had a quick one afterward — Joss and the producer and the Brigadier drinking whisky, the tenor brandy, Happy his usual ginger ale. Then Joss ran down into the subway. Searching his pocket for a token, he found the letter.
Dear Mr. Hoyle,
Ho! I’ve found you! Id est, I looked you up in Who’s Who in American Entertainment. Also in newspapers in the New York Public Library.
You were born in 1903, in Buffalo. You’ve been an acrobat. So have I — in my dreams. You served in the armed forces during the War. You have a wife and a daughter.
Such calm lids, such haunted eyes. Your expression is holy.
I wonder where you went to college after that Jesuit high school. Who’s Who doesn’t say.
The Lady in Green
He’d been a poor boy, but they were all poor boys at the school. He liked every subject, history best. Father Tom’s breathless oratory made history alive. Father Tom’s eyes were green and moist, like blotting paper. The way the fathers lived, there behind the school … a quiet, chuckling sort of house, with Brother Jim their beloved fool. Joss, too, would teach someday, he thought then — history maybe. The fathers mentioned a scholarship to the state university. But he came to see that it was not Father Tom’s subject he loved, not even the teaching of it — it was the delivery. He loved jesting, too: not jokes like Brother Jim’s, not words at all, but glancing and byplay and pratfalls. He had joined a troupe right after graduation, disappointing his mentors and breaking his mother’s heart. Now this letter-writing individual wanted him to relive those times … In the late-night uncrowded subway car he stood up, briefly enraged, and shook himself, twitching in the black glass of the window like a marionette. The window threw back his face: the same face the lady had called holy. A man slid uneasily along the bench away from him.
When Joss got home he put the second letter on top of the first, in the bottom drawer of the dresser, underneath his sweaters. He could have stuck it between the salt and pepper cellars on the kitchen table for all his wife cared.
Mary was asleep, lying on her back, her thin hands side by side on the coverlet. She would have watched the program in the darkened living room, bourbon at her elbow, already wearing nightgown and wrapper. Already? There were days she never got dressed at all. Tomorrow, on their walk to the train, she would tell him about his performance in a flat voice. How the camera had cut him in half not once but several times. How it had dropped him entirely during the production number. How Happy held the audience in the palm of his hand. How Joss had outlived his usefulness … but she wouldn’t say that.
The specialists he’d brought Mary to always first acknowledged the tragedy of their daughter’s condition, then suggested that Mary’s attachment and grief were excessive. You could have a second child, these specialists said … You should have a second child. You are only in your twenties, Mrs. Hoyle … Later: You are in your thirties… You are not yet forty.
Hospitals had been tried; baths; insulin. Nothing made a difference. She had been a darling little thing with soft lashes when they met, but the small down-turned smile on her pointed face might have warned him of her fragility … A second child? He had too many children as it was. He had his sad-sack kid brothers, he had his damaged wife, he had Happy. And he had Theodora, Teddie, his one issue. Every Friday they went to visit her. It was Friday now, wasn’t it — he glanced at the clock as he wearily undressed: 1:00 a.m. In a few hours he and Mary would walk to Grand Central and take the train and get off the train and take a bus and get off the bus and walk two blocks. They’d come to the iron gate. The guard would nod: he knew them.
Teddie knew them. She made that hideous moan, or she covered her eyes with huge hands. Sometimes obesity seemed the worst thing about her. She wore cotton dresses made by Mary, all from the same childish pattern — short-sleeved, smocked, white collared. The fabrics were printed with chickens or flowers or Bambis. Sometimes Joss felt shamed by Happy Bloom’s drag — lipsticked face and fright wigs and bare masculine shoulders emerging from an oversize tutu, or yellow braids flopping onto a pinafore — but why should Joss feel shamed? Happy was the one who should feel shamed, big famous comedian aping big retarded girl. Aping? Happy had never seen Teddie. “How’s your daughter?” Happy would ask maybe once a year, his gaze elsewhere. “The same,” Joss always said.
Though she was not always the same. He sometimes sensed a change. The exhausted staff shrugged. “Not growth,” one of the doctors warned, his English infirm. “Not expect growth, no.” Okay, but once in a while her unforgiving expression softened a little, or her vague look of recognition slid into an equally vague one of welcome. If she could only talk. Perhaps she understood, a little. When they were alone — when Mary had left for one of her desperate walks around the fenced-in pond — he told Teddie that he loved her. He held her fat fingers. He kissed her fat cheek.
“HOYLE!”
Joss took his place at the table with Happy and the Brigadier and the writers. They revised, argued, laughed. Every so often Joss dropped his hand into his pocket and fingered this week’s letter from the Lady in Green. He knew it by heart — he memorized each one now, like a script, easy as breathing.
Happy Bloom’s loud good humor — I guess the public wants it.
Happy and the writers avoided the raw subject of the recent war. But the Europe exposed by the war had inspired many of Happy’s inventions — the British dowager, for instance; the French floor-walker; even the milkmaid who yodeled first and then warbled in Yiddish.
But you — the silent consort — are what the public needs.
The public needed the dowager’s meek husband? The floor-walker’s intimidated customer? The milkmaid’s goat — a horned, garlanded, Joss-faced goat who raised itself on two hooves and executed a double flap and a shuffle?
I absolutely adore the dancing goat.
Happy and Joss would be wallpaper hangers this Thursday. Costumed in overalls, they would lift a protesting clerk, chair and all, out of an office. They would heedlessly paper over bookcases, radiators, paintings. The rolls of wallpaper wouldn’t match. Happy would disappear into a doorless closet to decorate its inner walls. Joss would paper over the recess. There’d be shouts from the imprisoned Happy, in a variety of accents. He’d sing a few bars of “Alone”; he’d sing “Someday I’ll Find Me.” At last his head would burst through the paper, that round lovable head: the teeth, slightly buck anyway, goofily enlarged; a multitude of curls spilling over the brow; the eyebrows darkened and the eyes kohled. While Happy mugged to applause, Joss’s back would be turned to the audience — the silent consort, papering a window.