“It may be a Christmas color,” she said, “but I’m the wrong color—especially at Christmastime—in that dress.” She meant she looked sallow in red when she didn’t have a tan, and who in New Hampshire has a tan for Christmas?
“THEN WEAR IT IN THE SUMMER!” Owen suggested.
But it was a show-off thing to wear such a bright red color in the summer; that was making too much of a tan, in my mother’s opinion. Dan suggested that my mother donate the red dress to his seedy collection of stage costumes. But my mother thought this was wasteful, and besides: none of the Gravesend Academy boys, and certainly no other woman from our town, had the figure to do that dress justice.
Dan Needham not only took over the dramatic performances of the Gravesend Academy boys, he revitalized the amateur theatrical company of our small town, the formerly lackluster Gravesend Players. Dan talked everyone into The Gravesend Players; he got half the faculty at the academy to bring out the hams in themselves, and he roused the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out for his productions. He even got my mother to be his leading lady—if only once.
As much as my mother liked to sing, she was extremely shy about acting. She agreed to be in only one play under Dan’s direction, and I think she agreed only as an indication of her commitment to their prolonged courtship, and only if Dan was cast opposite her—if he was the leading man—and if he was not cast as her lover. She didn’t want the town imagining all sorts of things about their courtship, she said. After they were married, my mother wouldn’t act again; neither would Dan. He was always the director; she was always the prompter. My mother had a good voice for a prompter: quiet but clear. All those singing lessons were good for that, I guess.
Her one role, and it was a starring role, was in Angel Street. It was so long ago, I can’t remember the names of the characters, or anything about the actual sets for the play. The Gravesend Players used the Town Hall, and sets were never very specially attended to there. What I remember is the movie that was made from Angel Street; it was called Gaslight, and I’ve seen it several times. My mother had the Ingrid Bergman part; she was the wife who was being driven insane by her villainous husband. And Dan was the villain—he was the Charles Boyer character. If you know the story, although Dan and my mother were cast as husband and wife, there is little love evidenced between them onstage; it was the only time or place I ever saw Dan be hateful to my mother.
Dan tells me that there are still people in Gravesend who give him “evil looks” because of that Charles Boyer role he played; they look at him as if he hit that long-ago foul ball—and as if he meant to.
And only once in that production—it was actually in dress rehearsal—did my mother wear the red dress. It might have been the evening when she is all dressed up to go to the theater (or somewhere) with her awful husband, but he has hidden the painting and accuses her of hiding it, and he makes her believe that she’s hidden it, too—and then he banishes her to her room and doesn’t let her go out at all. Or maybe it was when they go out to a concert and he finds his watch in her purse—he has put it there, but he makes her break down and plead with him to believe her, in front of all those snooty people. Anyway, my mother was supposed to wear the red dress in just one scene, and it was the only scene in the play where she was simply terrible. She couldn’t leave the dress alone—she plucked imaginary lint off it; she kept staring at herself, as if the cleavage of the dress, all by itself, had suddenly plunged a foot; she never stopped itching around, as if the material of the dress made her skin crawl.
Owen and I saw every production of Angel Street; we saw all of Dan’s plays—both the academy plays and the amateur theatricals of The Gravesend Players—but Angel Street was one of the few productions that we saw every showing of. To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us—it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating.
Owen and I always knew everyone in all the productions of The Gravesend Players. Mrs. Walker, the ogre of our Episcopal Sunday school, played the flirtatious maid in Angel Street—the Angela Lansbury character, if you can believe it. Owen and I couldn’t. Mrs. Walker acting like a tart! Mrs. Walker being vulgar! We kept expecting her to shout: “Owen Meany, you get down from up there! You get back to your seat!” And she wore a French maid’s costume, with a very tight skirt and black, patterned stockings, so that every Sunday thereafter, Owen and I would search in vain for her legs—it was such a surprise to see Mrs. Walker’s legs; and even more of a surprise to discover that she had pretty legs!
The good guy role in Angel Street—the Joseph Cotten part, I call it—was played by our neighbor Mr. Fish. Owen and I knew that he was still in mourning over the untimely death of Sagamore; the horror of the diaper truck disaster on Front Street was still visible in the pained expression with which he followed my mother’s every movement onstage. Mr. Fish was not exactly Owen’s and my idea of a hero; but Dan Needham, with his talent for casting and directing the rankest amateurs, must have been inspired, in the case of Mr. Fish, to tap our neighbor’s sorrow and anger over Sagamore’s encounter with the diaper truck.
Anyway, after the dress rehearsal of Angel Street, it was back to the closet with the red dress—except for those many occasions when Owen put it on the dummy. He must have felt especially challenged by my mother’s dislike of that dress. It always looked terrific on the dummy.
I tell all this only to demonstrate that Owen was as familiar with that dummy as I was; but he was not familiar with it at night. He was not accustomed to the semidarkness of my mother’s room when she was sleeping, when the dummy stood over her—that unmistakable body, in profile, in perfect silhouette. That dummy stood so still, it appeared to be counting my mother’s breaths.
One night at 80 Front Street, when Owen lay in the other twin bed in my room, we were a long while falling asleep because—down the hall—Lydia had a cough. Just when we thought she was over a particular fit, or she had died, she would start up again. When Owen woke me up, I had not been asleep for very long; I was in the grips of such a deep and recent sleep that I couldn’t make mys
elf move—I felt as if I were lying in an extremely plush coffin and my pallbearers were holding me down, although I was doing my best to rise from the dead.
“I FEEL SICK,” Owen was saying.
“Are you going to throw up?” I asked him, but I couldn’t move; I couldn’t even open my eyes.
“I DON’T KNOW,” he said. “I THINK I HAVE A FEVER.”
“Go tell my mother,” I said.
“IT FEELS LIKE A RARE DISEASE,” Owen said.
“Go tell my mother,” I repeated. I listened to him bump into the desk chair. I heard my door open, and close. I could hear his hands brushing against the wall of the hall. I heard him pause with his hand trembling on my mother’s doorknob; he seemed to wait there for the longest time.
Then I thought: He’s going to be surprised by the dummy. I thought of calling out, “Don’t be startled by the dummy standing there; it looks weird in that funny light.” But I was sunk in my coffin of sleep and my mouth was clamped shut. I waited for him to scream. That’s what Owen would do, I was sure; there would be a bloodcurdling wail—“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!”—and the entire household would be awake for hours. Or else, in a fit of bravery, Owen would tackle the dummy and wrestle it to the floor.
But while I was imagining the worst of Owen’s encounter with the dummy, I realized he was back in my room, beside my bed, pulling my hair.
“WAKE UP! BUT BE QUIET!” he whispered. “YOUR MOTHER IS NOT ALONE. SOMEONE STRANGE IS IN HER ROOM. COME SEE! I THINK IT’S AN ANGEL!”
“An angel?” I said.
“SSSSSSHHHHHH!”
Now I was wide awake and eager to see him make a fool of himself, and so I said nothing about the dummy; I held his hand and went with him through the hall to my mother’s room. Owen was shivering.
“How do you know it’s an angel?” I whispered.
“SSSSSSHHHHHH!”
So we stealthily crept into my mother’s room, crawling on our bellies like snipers in search of cover, until the whole picture of her bed—her body in an inverted question mark, and the dummy standing beside her—was visible.