The Bartender's Tale (15 page)

“Three minutes till. Slow up, there it is at the end of the block.”

The Reinkings lived on the west side of town. Houses were nicer here, the ground a little higher, the view to the mountains more grand. Coming up the front walk to their big, generously windowed house at a robotic pace dictated by my sneaked looks at the watch, we arrived at the door at ten, straight up.

At our knock, it swung open to Cloyce Reinking, regal and bone-dry and eyeing the dripping pair of us as though wondering whether to mop us down before she let us in. I was wearing the rain slicker Lucille had cut down for me, although it was still voluminous, and Zoe looked aswim in more ways than one in the long gabardine coat her mother had foraged from somewhere.

“This weather,” the rather forbidding woman in the doorway said, as if we had brought it with us. “Well, let’s hang your wet things over the cat box, that’s what I do with Bill’s when he’s been traipsing around, getting soaked in the name of higher journalism. Sheba can’t complain too much.” Maybe not, but the fluffy black Siamese or whatever it was meowed and scampered off when it saw the ominous cloud of clothing over its bathroom spot.

“That’s done, come on in.” Mrs. Reinking briskly led us to the living room, the kind with a rug that almost tickles your ankles and chairs too nice to sit in comfortably and pictures certainly not painted by Charlie Russell. I tried to take it all in without staring impolitely, while Zoe couldn’t help making a little O with her mouth.

“Now, then,” we were being addressed with a mild frown, “I suppose the Svengali I’m married to told you why you’re required?”

We nodded in mute unison. Cloyce Reinking did not appear to lack requirements of any other sort in life. Tall and straight, with prominent features that on a man might have been horse-faced but looked distinguished on her, and natural frost in her perfectly kept hair, she seemed to us the living picture of a rich lady, although Pop had said that wasn’t entirely so. “A little more money than most of us, maybe. She just wears it different.”

“This may be foolish of us, of Bill and myself, I mean,” she surprised us with. “All I said was something about not knowing what to do with myself in this awful weather, and he said he knew just what it took to change the climate, and rang up the director in Valier. And here we are. But I don’t know.” All of a sudden she was looking like she wished she had shooed us back out into the rain. “Today may be a waste of all our time. It’s been so long since I was on a stage.”

Zoe and I traded looks of dismay. This did not show signs of being long-term employment. I stammered, “We thought you acted with the Prairie Players all the time.”

“Years and years ago, yes,” she waved the past off. “
Arsenic and Old Lace. The Man Who Came to Dinner.
All the old warhorses that audiences find impossibly funny. Speaking of which,” she said doubtfully, “we may as well give this a try.”

Busying herself setting three straight-back chairs around a coffee table as we stood there awkwardly, being no help, she asked over her shoulder: “Bill didn’t say—have you both been in school plays and such?”

“Sure,” I vouched for myself, “every Christmas. I’m always a shepherd because I have my own sheep hook.”

“The innkeeper’s wife every time,” Zoe similarly reported her theatrical experience. “In Butte, the Catholic girls were always Mary.”

“I see. Well, sadly enough, there are no Nativity scenes in this.”

Sitting us down and then herself, she handed us each a playbook with a cover of that bubblegum color that boys at least called panty pink. Zoe clutched hers in both hands and studied the author’s name.

“Oscar Wil-dee?”

“‘Wild,’ my dear.”

I was trying to figure out the title,
The Importance of Being Earnest
. “Is that how that name is spelled?”

“You’re getting ahead of the play,” she cautioned me with a slight lift of her eyebrow. “Now, then, how to begin.” She gave us a gaze that seemed to estimate our capacity for inspired nonsense, although little did she know. “I’ll just read a straight run-through,” she decided, putting on glasses, the newer horn-rim kind rather than her husband’s type of wire frames, “until we reach the pertinent part. It’ll give you some idea of the play.”

It did, all right, although that was not the same as understanding it. Some of the first act, such as the butler who didn’t think it was polite to listen as his master fooled around on the piano, was funny enough, and some of it went right over us, cucumber sandwiches and high-toned exchanges about going to the country and so on. Regardless, while we followed along in the script Mrs. Reinking read all the parts, Algernon and Jack and the butler, in distinct voices, and Zoe and I shifted more and more uneasily in our chairs. If this woman could perform Oscar Wilde’s witticisms all by herself, what did she need us for?

Then she reached the section with the lines “Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner” and our role, or roles, in this began to come clear.

“Now we get down to business,” she said, fanning the script book in front of her a few times, as if clearing the air. With a tight-lipped smile she turned to me. “You are no longer Rusty, but Algernon, and occasionally Jack, also known as Ernest.”

Zoe giggled.

“And you, child, are Gwendolen now and Cecily later.” That sobered Zoe right up.

“And I,” said our star performer, “am Lady Bracknell.”

The part seemed to fit. Cloyce Reinking was famous for her New Year’s Eve parties, where everyone who was anybody in the Two Medicine country showed up. We were never invited, Pop being busy with one of his most profitable nights of the year. Not that we would have been anyway, I suspected, mentally comparing the housekeeping here with our approximate sort. I figured Zoe’s folks probably shouldn’t hold their breath, either. Telling myself that was neither here nor there or in between, with a feeling of mild panic I scanned the swaths of fancy-pants talk Algernon and Jack/Ernest were responsible for, trying to figure out how to say it anywhere near right. Zoe’s lips were moving uncertainly too as she encountered Gwendolen going on for half a page at a time.

Mrs. Reinking was paging ahead, marking her pieces of dialogue with a red pencil. “This ought to come back to me more than it is,” she said with quite a sigh, in character or not, I couldn’t tell. “I’ve played Lady Bracknell before, during the war.”

Zoe began to ask “Which—?” before I shot her a warning glance.

“Nineteen forty-three doesn’t seem that long ago”—the silver-haired woman probably no older than my father knitted her brow over some paragraph that took a lot of marking—“but I’m not as young as I was.”

Why grown-ups always said that was beyond me. Zoe stated what seemed to us logical: “That’s okay, neither are we.”

“What?” Putting the pink playbook facedown on the coffee table, the lady of this house took off her glasses and twirled them in one hand while rubbing the bridge of her nose with the other. “I didn’t have to wear these things then. They say the eyes are the first to go.” She shut her eyes tiredly. “The gray cells aren’t what they used to be, either.”

It began to dawn on Zoe and me more fully why Bill Reinking had enlisted us, if his wife was going to approach this play as if it was the clap of doom.

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” I sang out, Zoe bobbing her head like a bouncing ball to back up my bit of phony cheer.

“So you are.” Straightening herself up, Mrs. Reinking turned back to the page where she had stopped reading aloud. “Let’s take it from the start of this scene.”

Shortly I was alternating back and forth between Algernon and Jack, telling Gwendolen she was smart and quite perfect, and Zoe was trilling back she hoped she was not that, it would leave no room for developments and she intended to develop in many directions. Then Lady Bracknell’s part began in full gale force, with her recounting the call on a friend whose husband had recently died: “‘I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.’”

The grand manner Mrs. Reinking put into this made the two of us snort little laughs. Her lips twitched a bit. “Don’t get carried away. I gave that line too much. Farce has to be played straight.”

We sobered up, and went on feeding her lines that produced Lady Bracknell’s wacky pronouncements. Most were reasonably funny, although by the time Jack told her he had lost both his parents and she responded that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looked like carelessness, Zoe and I were cutting glances at each other. If we were in over our heads, though, Cloyce Reinking showed no sign. At the end of act 1, she whipped off her glasses again. “That’s enough stretching of the brain for one day,” she said with a wintry smile apparently intended for herself. Zoe and I waited anxiously. She hesitated, seeing the look on our faces. “Well, we’ll take it from the top again tomorrow and see whether my memory held up overnight.”

—

“WHAT’S THIS PLAY
about, again?”

Pop lounged against the doorjamb, trying to fathom Oscar Wilde, which I had to admit was not easy. I sat up higher in bed and patiently explained that one character was using the phony name Ernest when in town and his real name of Jack in the country, and there was all other kinds of sleight-of-hand as to who was a guardian to whom and who was left as a baby in a handbag, but it all worked out in the end with Jack, now Ernest for good, free to ask for the hand of Gwendolen and Algernon entitled to woo Cecily, with Lady Bracknell presiding as loftily as imaginable.

“That’s pretty deep for me,” Pop said, then asked what he really wanted to know. “How’d you get along with Cloyce Reinking?”

“Good enough, I think.” He caught my slight hesitation. “I mean, she’s kind of hard on herself about gearing up to be Lady Bracknell. She doesn’t sound like she’s sure she can do it anymore. And that seems to really bug her.”

He considered that in silence, then shifted his weight on the doorjamb. “Let me tell you a little something about her so you don’t get yourself in hot water, okay?” He ran his hand through his hair. “Don’t repeat it, this is just some skinny between us.”

That flustered me. “But Zoe’s there with her just like me, too, and if there’s gonna be any trouble—”

“All right, you can tell your partner in crime,” he granted. He drew the kind of breath needed to begin the story. “Cloyce Reinking started off with all the advantages in life, see, down there in Hollywood. As I heard it, her folks made a pile of money in the movie business in the early days. But these things happen,” he shrugged fatalistically, “she lost out on all that somehow and she ended up here, with Bill. You couldn’t ask for a better human being than him, but she’s, how would you say, never taken to the town the whole way. Some people are like that, they like a bigger pond to swim in. Get what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“She’s not my all-time favorite person”—he stuck his nose in the air indicatively—“and I doubt that she thinks any too highly of a run-down bartender. None of that matters. My guess is, getting up in front of an audience and being Lady What’s-her-name means a lot to her. You don’t want to mess that up for her, you wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you.” I shook my head that I certainly wouldn’t. He made himself clearer than clear. “So even if she has to gripe her way into it every inch of the way, just lay back in these rehearsals and give her some rope, right?”

“I will, honest. Zoe, too.”

“Okay, that’s that.” He shoved off from the doorjamb and headed for his bedroom. “Don’t let the ladybugs bite.”

“Pop?” I called after him.

“Yeah, what now?”

“What’s a Svengali?”

“It’s a Swede who says ‘Golly’ a lot.” His voice grew muffled as he went on down the hall. “Although you might check that against a dictionary.”

—

“LET’S TAKE IT
from the top again. There has to be a better approach to this.”

We were in the third or fourth straight day of Cloyce Reinking despairing at doing Lady Bracknell theatrical justice. Practically ramming her glasses into the bridge of her nose, she faced down into the script and tried in a fluting voice:

“‘I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing. Which do you know?’”

The script said Jack should hesitate before answering, so I did. “‘I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.’”

“‘I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.’”

Zoe patted her hands together in silent applause, but Mrs. Reinking wasn’t having any. With a groan, she pulled off her glasses. “It would help,” she was back to her own throaty tone, “if Oscar Wilde were less clever and more substantial.” She eyed the script as if feeling sorry for it. “This is such a flimsy piece of work in the long run, isn’t it,” she reflected. “There’s an old saying that there are only two stories that last and last. A mysterious stranger rides into town, and somebody goes on a big journey. There you have it, from
Shane
to
The Odyssey
.”

Truthfully, that did seem to match up with the experience of two twelve-year-old drama critics, recalling John Wayne cantering into the Alamo and the entire cast of
As You Like It
transported in the turn of a phrase to the Forest of Arden. For that matter, Zoe’s magical arrival was the story of my summer so far, and her parents’ consequential migration from Butte to the Top Spot was hers.

“But it’s funny.” I felt I had to stick up for
The Importance of Being Earnest.
“Isn’t it?”

“Very well, Rusty,” Mrs. Reinking granted with a twitch of her lips, “it has its moments. I wish I had mine anymore.” She snapped her fingers like a shot. “The time was when I could absorb a script like that and know by instinct how to play it. Now?” She shook her head in that way that made us afraid she was about to call it quits. Instead she just murmured, “Well, let’s take a break.”

Perhaps to make up for the play’s lack of reward, this day she had fixed a pitcher of Kool-Aid of some strange flavor—persimmon, maybe—and set out a plate of tired macaroons. I went right at a couple of the cookies while Zoe took one for politeness and, after licking off a shred of coconut, put it aside.