My Most Excellent Year (35 page)

Dear Mama:

I could never be a bank robber or a hit man, because they can go to sleep the night before their crimes and not wake up once. All
I’m
doing is kidnapping a six-year-old for fifteen hours to take him to New York for a play date with Mary Poppins—and I had to use a night-light for the first time since I was seven. Is this fair?

The only thing that kept my imagination from winding up on a three-state All-Points Bulletin was
Kiss Me, Kate
. Opening night was Friday, and we had the whole third row reserved just for us: Me and Hucky, Pop and Lori, Mom and Dad and Grandma Lily, Phyllis and her kids (Darius even flew in from Cornell for this), Carlos, and Alé’s parents. I wound up missing the overture because there was an emergency backstage that Mrs. Packer needed my help with.

“Are you almost finished?” I asked Augie, who was still kneeling on the floor with his head in the toilet.

“I think I’m—” he began. But then he heaved again and the rest of dinner came up.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten until afterwards,” I suggested, sitting him up against the wall and wiping the puke off his chin with a wet paper towel. “Isn’t that why you say they have all of those late-night places like the Stork Club and the Cub Room?”

“The Cub Room,” he repeated weakly. “Where the elite meet.” Then he groaned. “Tick, Ethel Merman ate steak and potatoes two hours before she opened in
Annie Get Your Gun
. All
I
had was a fish burger and a Pop-Tart. I’m
such
a loser!” So I kicked his ass into the wings and hung around in case they needed me to shove him
onstage too. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and practice tough love. Even if it hurts.

Of course he stopped the show. We all knew that “Too Darn Hot” was going to knock them flat, but Mrs. Packer hadn’t planned on an encore. So when the whole audience stood up clapping and wouldn’t sit down again, nobody knew what to do. Except Augie. He just nodded to Mr. Disharoon like they had it planned all along (it turns out they did—Augie
always
knows what sells), and then they started the whole number over from the top. This time it was Hucky who led the cheers—he got up onto his seat with both of his fists raised, and everybody else took their cue from him.

Alé wasn’t exactly a surprise either. She got three curtain calls of her own, and at the beginning of the fourth one somebody handed her a dozen roses over the footlights. She had no idea who they were from (until she read the card later: “Now we’ve
both
been tempered by a hard and bitter peace. Love, JFK and Anthony”), so she decided to cry instead—which was the perfect thing to do, because the noise only got louder. By the time the curtain went down and the lights in the auditorium went up again, her father was
so
not happy. But when you’ve got a couple dozen people congratulating you on your kid, what can you
say
?

Suddenly it was 2:15 on Sunday, and as far as Hucky knew, we were just going on another special trip—but this one in jackets and ties. I couldn’t exactly tell him where or why, in case we wound up on a police blotter instead of inside a chalk pavement picture with Mary Poppins. Who needed to break his heart??

I didn’t realize that he’d never been on a train before, so when the shiny white Acela glided (glid?) into Back Bay Station, he couldn’t
figure out how to wrap his mind around it.
Is all that for
us
??
Not that you could tell what he was thinking unless you knew him as well as we do. With his ski jacket and wool cap and the muffler covering his face, all you could see was eyes. Meanwhile, Alé and Augie were giving us last-minute instructions as the doors slid open in front of us.

“Remember. You’re Kevin and Seth Edwards. Keep saying it to yourself on the way down to New York. Don’t let them catch you in a trap.”

“Which one of us is Seth?”

“Does it
matter
?”

“Anthony, just think ‘Buck Weaver’ instead of ‘Julie Andrews.’ That always works for you.”

“Hucky, make sure you listen to Tick and do everything he tells you to.”

“Okay! Okay!”
he replied impatiently, pulling on my hand. “
Come on! I want to see the train!”

We found two seats in the Club Coach and waved to Augie and Alé as the train began to move.
Bye! We’re going on an adventure!
But as soon as they slipped out of our view and got replaced by an empty platform and the rail yard, the smile fell off my face and the bottom of my stomach felt like it had just dropped onto the outbound tracks. Whenever Augie is with me, I never have to worry about being brave. Now he was back
there
. Why couldn’t he have come with us?? Then I remembered Pop’s favorite words from
Apollo 13
. “Failure is not an option.” (Actually, we use it for other things too. “Onions are not an option.” “Diarrhea is not an option.” “Cavities are not an option.”) So I decided that at least for a day, fear was not an option either.

“What’s that?”
asked Hucky. By now he was sitting up on his knees and staring frowny-faced over the back of his tall blue seat at the snack bar, trying to figure out what it was doing there.
Food? On a
train
? What a concept!

“It’s a little restaurant,” I told him, pulling off his jacket and muffler. “For when we get hungry. Sit.”

“I’m hungry right now! Who’s that?”

“The conductor. He’s taking our tickets.”

“Will he give them back?”

“No.”

“That stinks.”
I couldn’t get him to unfold his arms or take off his mad face for a good five minutes.

After lunch—potato chips, cupcakes, and cranberry juice—I opened up a map that Alé had given me so I could show Hucky where we were. There was a red circle around Boston at the top and another one around New York at the bottom, and every time we got to a new station, I’d tell Hucky what to circle next. This turned out to be a game that Augie would say “has a short shelf life.” Hucky was excited by New Haven, bored by Stamford, and yawning by Bridgeport. Besides, he was having too much fun pressing his face against the window and finding out firsthand how big the world really was. The only time I had to call a peace out was twenty minutes before we got to New York when we passed Yankee Stadium—the House That Bucky F. Dent Thought He Built. So I pulled down the shade. Hucky was way too young to have to see something like that.

Once the Acela had hissed to a stop and we’d hit the platform, he was a little spooked by Penn Station—and I don’t blame him. With
all of the passengers pushing their way through the waiting room to get back home after the weekend, he looked a lot littler than he really is, and he held my hand a lot tighter than he ever had before.

“Why does everybody move so fast and look so mad?”
he wondered, staring up at me nervously.

“They’re all just late,” I signed back to him. “Like the rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
. They’re not really mean, even if they act like it.” But after we hit the sidewalk he turned into Regular Hucky again, staring up at the buildings on both sides of Eighth Avenue like we were in a long tunnel above the ground.

“New York is
tall
!”
he decided as I buckled us into a cab on Thirty-fifth Street. Since we were still a little early, I told the driver that Hucky had never been to New York before, so he turned off the meter and drove us around Times Square on our way to the Shubert Theatre. (Actually, this didn’t happen until I signed “Don’t play with your seat belt” to Hucky and he saw us in the rearview mirror. When people find out Hucky’s deaf, they like to give us things for free.) Hucky was so dazzled by the view of the colored lights from Forty-seventh Street, he could only manage to ask me two questions: (1)
“Doesn’t it look like Christmas?”
and (2)
“Why is that man peeing on the street?”
So I told him (1) “Yes,” and (2) “Because that’s the way they do it in New York. But you have to have a license first.” I had to lie through my teeth about the last part because I’d already jumped ahead to what he was planning when we got out of the cab.

The driver dropped us off in “Shubert Alley,” which is actually almost a street, and as soon as I saw the 2,000 people in tuxedoes and the photographers and the television cameras, my stomach did
another somersault.
I feel just like Augie did with his head in the toilet. Dude, this is
so
not going to fly.
To Hucky, it was just another chapter in our Sunday—“
Look, T.C.! Men dressed like the penguins!”
—but that only reminded me how much was riding on this. So I grabbed his hand and thought about Buck Weaver and purple balloons.

“Spit-spot,” I said confidently, like we weren’t about to wind up on an episode of
Law & Order
.

The outside walls of the Shubert Theatre are painted gold, and right in the middle is a door with a sign that says “Stage Entrance.” By the time we’d crisscrossed the crowd and found ourselves standing in front of it, my heart was thumping faster than it did on the night I kissed Alé.
Right, you gink! And
that
worked out, didn’t it? It’s an omen
. So just to make sure I had all of our bases covered, I crouched down in front of Hucky and gave him one last instruction.

“Okay,” I began, trying not to let him see I was sweating bullets. “When we go inside that door, there’s a man I’m going to talk to. Now, if I squeeze your hand three times—like this—I want you to pretend you’re crying, okay?” Hucky was all over it. He’s a bigger ham than Augie is. (Almost.)

“Okay.”
He grinned.
“But how come?”

“It’s a game. You’ll see.” Then I stood up and yanked open the gold door before I had any more chances to chicken out or barf. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen right now.

Inside, it looked just like Augie said it would. There was a ragged old guy in a beat-up cubicle on one side of this little entryway, who wore the same kind of “you’ve got exactly five seconds or else” attitude that Mrs. Fitzpatrick wears whenever she can’t get us to stop talking after recess. In the background, you could see all of
these actors running around in different costumes and bumping into each other and using the F word like it was a contest, and you could tell from Hucky’s face that he couldn’t figure out
what
was going on.
Cowboys and baseball players?! What’s up with
that
?
In the meantime, the doorman didn’t seem too happy to see us.

“Whadja want?” he snapped, like he was accusing us of shoplifting or something.

“Um, I’m Kevin Edwards,” I mumbled, positive that my red face was going to give us away, “and this is my little brother, uh—”
Seth, you gink!!
“Seth. My aunt forgot to leave our tickets at the box office and now she’s back here somewheres.”
Where did “somewheres” come from??
The doorman gave us the kind of squint you usually get in a police lineup.

“Who’s your aunt?” he grumbled.

“Julie Andrews,” I blurted, praying that the FBI wouldn’t come out of the closet with a warrant. This wasn’t turning out to be the cakewalk that Augie had promised. Because he just kept glaring.

“Your aunt, huh?” he repeated.

“Yes, sir. Could you maybe get her for us?” And while I was asking, I was also squeezing Hucky’s hand three times. Half a second later, he began to sob.
They really should have cast him in
Kiss Me, Kate.
He learned his cues faster than Alé did.
So I crouched down in front of him again and made a big deal out of wiping the tears off his little blond face and signing, “It’s okay, buddy. We’ll find her.” That was all it took. When I stood up again, the doorman had already moved on to other things in his head.

“Look, kid,” he muttered, “I can’t leave here just to find your aunt.” Then he jerked his thumb behind him. “Go down those steps, cross
to the other side, and turn right when you get to the hall.” After that, he answered a telephone.

I don’t remember if I even said thank you, because I was numb.
It
worked
?? HOLY CRAP, IT WORKED!
I grabbed Hucky’s hand before anybody could find out what posers we were and dragged him down the steps into Augie’s “big room under the stage, right off the orchestra pit” that I already knew was going to be there. There was a long table with food on it for the actors and some chairs pushed up against the back wall—so I took over the seat in the corner where we wouldn’t get in anybody’s way, plopped Hucky onto the chair next to me, and breathed for the first time in an hour and a half.
Houston, all systems are go. Except one
.

“Dude,” I signed to Hucky, “you can stop crying now.”

“Why? It’s fun!”

“Because we won.”

The next two and a half hours would have been my brother’s idea of what heaven looks like, but I could barely keep my eyes open. Before each production number in the show, the chorus rehearsed their dance steps one last time in our orchestra room, whispering the words so the audience upstairs wouldn’t hear them, while Hucky and I ate smoked salmon off the table and watched. The only thing that kept me awake was seeing how many of the routines I could recognize from all of the ginky musicals that Augie and Mom drag me to—and I actually wound up batting .800. I nailed
Oklahoma!
(Mom hated it),
Sweet Charity
(Mom tolerated it),
West Side Story
(Mom loved it), and
South Pacific
(Mom
really
hated it). I only missed out on the one where everybody was wearing pajamas (but Mom would have hated that too—trust me).