I'll Love You When You're More Like Me Page 14

  “Someday you will,” he said. “Where were you born, anyway?”

  “New Hope, Pennsylvania,” I said. “Mama and my dad were doing a show up there that summer.”

  “Sure, at the Bucks County Playhouse.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He took out a pack of Camels and offered one to me. I reached for it saying, “I shouldn’t. I have an ulcer.”

  “Then don’t,” he said, putting the pack away. “I had one of those once. They go away. . . . Was your mother acting that summer at Bucks?”

  “Was she ever! I was practically born on stage. That’s quite a story in itself,” I began.

  19. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

  On the first day of my last year at Seaville High, there was a funeral for Priscilla Sigh, only survivor and sister of Mr. Sigh; he died the night I was in New York with Sabra.

  Instead of going to the school cafeteria for lunch, I went home to help Charlie, who was in charge of the services and burial.

  While Charlie was mingling with the bereaved in our chapel, I grabbed a peanut-butter sandwich in the kitchen.

  “At least poor Prissy didn’t linger on long after she lost him,” my mother was saying as she fixed herself a salad.

  “Do we have to live with that thing?” I asked her, pointing to the cornucopia on the top of our refrigerator.

  “Charlie’s mother brought that over today,” my mother said, “and yes, we have to live with it, if Charlie wants it. I rather like it, and I want Charlie to feel right at home here.”

  We could hear the strains of “Abide With Me” as Mr. Llewellyn played the organ in the chapel. My father was on his way to the Hauppauge morgue to pick up our new guest, a Mrs. Fabray. A.E. was in school.

  Mr. Trumble was still in Southampton Hospital, recovering slowly from a heart attack he’d had the same night Mr. Sigh died.

  I often wonder what would have happened if Milton Tanner hadn’t shut off the phone that night, and my mother had been able to reach me. I only know what wouldn’t have happened. Charlie wouldn’t have offered to help out, and my father wouldn’t have gotten the idea to ask Charlie to come into the business with him.

  Things can change overnight…or as Monty Montgomery had put it a few days ago at Current Events: “Chance makes a football of man’s life, Withered Heart. … A woman has everything: a good man, a good home, a faithful dog, and chance blows a lathe operator from Commack her way—and she gives it all up! For what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she needed a change.”

  “A change from what?” he said. “She had the world on a string. . . . Oh, I’ll get along all right. Lunch and I’ll get along all right, won’t we, fellow?”

  The dog looked up at him from the floor and opened his good eye, then rested his head on his paws and sighed.

  “It’s Martha who’s in for it,” Monty said, “and I blame all this women’s liberation crap she came across in all these ladies’ magazines.”

  I reached for a radish from my mother’s salad and she said, “Don’t, Wally. Your father always says radishes are just as strong on the breath as onions. You’ll have to help Charlie with the bereaved. It’s his maiden voyage, after all.”

  I washed my sandwich down with a glass of milk and went down the hall toward our chapel. Charlie was standing just outside, in the alcove, talking on the telephone. He was wearing a new blue suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie. He was wearing the gold tie clasp with the crown on it that he’d won in the dance contest Labor Day weekend. Mrs. St. Amour and Charlie took first prize doing an old dance called the Lambeth Walk.

  Sabra never returned to Seaville. The last time I saw her was when I woke up on her couch in their apartment. It was around ten in the morning and she was fixing a pot of coffee for Milton Tanner. I got on the phone and called the Long Island Railroad to find out what time I could get a train back to Seaville.

  “We talked all night,” she told me. “I’m sorry if I worried you, Wally, but Milton says a chaotic temperament is a natural to an actress.”

  “I don’t have any quarrel with that,” I said. “Goodbye, Sabra.”

  “Never say good-bye,” she said, taking my hand, closing her eyes for a moment, opening them and looking deeply into mine. “We’ll meet again in another time, in another place, who knows when? But until we do it’s not good-bye, not for you and me ever. Say it isn’t.”

  “It isn’t,” I said.

  “Take long steps and by all means look back,” she said. “You’ll see everything behind you getting smaller, and eventually passing completely out of view.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Who wrote it?”

  Sabra laughed. “Who cares?” she said. “I said it.”

  Yesterday when my mother came home from Mr. Jim’s Beauty Parlor, she had this clipping she’d torn out of The Examiner, from a gossip column on soap operas:

  From “Hometown” comes news that young Sabra St. Amour will have a registered nurse in attendance while she is on the set, due to a precarious health problem she is doing her best to lick. Her fans will be pulling for her, as she makes a heroic effort to go on with the show. . . . Meanwhile, “Mama’s” being seen around town with a certain bigwig writer from the coast, who’s rumored to be doing a book about Sabra. Good luck to all of them!

  I stood beside Charlie, waiting for him to get off the phone, holding my watch under his nose to remind him the services were due to begin at twelve thirty.

  “I don’t have anything against you, personally, Deke,” Charlie was saying. “The Sigh funeral flowers came from Pittman Florists, that’s all.”

  I whispered, “It’s twelve forty. I have to be back by one.”

  “I don’t know who’ll get the order for the Fabray flowers,” said Charlie. “I leave that up to the bereaved. . . . See you around, buddy.”

  Then Charlie hung up. “I’ll be a son of BEAMS,” he said, “Deke actually begged me to remember we were old friends.”

  In the chapel, Charlie and I helped the mourners to their seats, and then before Reverend Monroe began the eulogy and prayers, Charlie made a little speech about the Sighs’ importance to Seaville. He stood at the lectern and talked to the gathering as though he’s been doing it all his life. One old lady even clapped when Charlie finished.

  Reverend Monroe took me aside at the end of the service, while Charlie went up to close the casket. The mourners filed out to the waiting limousines, and the pallbearers stood in readiness just outside the chapel door.

  “What a blessing Charlie’s going to be to your father,” said Reverend Monroe. “Are you accompanying us to the cemetery, Wally?”

  “I have to go back to school,” I said. “Charlie will handle it.”

  “He certainly will!” said Reverend Monroe enthusiastically.

  At a signal from Charlie, the pallbearers filed in to lift the coffin.

  It was then that we heard it, a sudden, incredible, inhuman sound, an eerie moaning going higher and higher: Arrrrrrrrrrrrr-ow, Arrrrrrrrrrrrr-ow!

  The pallbearers jumped back.

  Reverend Monroe and I rushed into the chapel.

  Charlie opened the coffin and Gorilla leaped out and rushed past us with her hair standing up and her tail flagging.

  “Shall we proceed?” Charlie asked everyone.

  My first glimpse of Lauralei Rabinowitz, on my first day of my last year at Seaville High, came after last class. She was walking by herself out the front door, and I caught up with her. It was a fine fall afternoon with the leaves turning and drifting down lazily from the trees, and Lauralei Rabinowitz looked down at me with a sweet smile.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, Wally.”

  “Where’s Maury?”

  “Maury who?” she said, tossing back her long, soft, black hair, grinning into my eyes.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes, oh,” she said. “That’s fini, chéri.”

  I felt a sudden, lovely glow, as though mayb
e this new school year was going to be the best one, and it was senior year, too: the last, the best.

  “How have you been, Wally?” she said in her breathless tone.

  “Just great,” I said. “Have you heard the news about me?”

  “What’s the news about you?” she said, hooking her arm in mine, brushing against me while we went down the winding walk from school.

  “I’m not going to be an undertaker,” I said.

  “Marvelous!” she said. “Super! . . . Now if you were two feet taller and your name was Witherstein, you’d be perfect!”

  Well, as my Uncle Albert is fond of saying, you can’t win them all.

  THE END

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