🎧 774: Then, smiling . . .

     Then, smiling, she said, “You’re right, though, Peter. You’re a perceptive little guy. It wasn’t intended as a punishment, but that’s what it became. That’s what I made it.”
     “Punishment for what?” I asked.
     “Oh, who knows? Pick what you like. I might have been responsible for the death of some guy—”
     “What?”
     “—and I let your grandfather down—”
     “Oh—”
     “—and I wasted half my life trying to be the person the wrong people wanted me to be—”
     “Wait a minute, wait a minute. One at a time. Responsible for the death of some guy? You mean Guy?”
     “I might mean Guy, yes.”
     “Did you have reason to think that—”
     “I don’t know. I never asked my brothers what they did to him. How much they did to him. So I began to think the worst—about what they had done—and about what I had wanted them to do—and about what I might have suggested that I wanted them to do—by a look, the tone of my voice, the dramatic way I showed them those bruises. I didn’t ask. Big Ernie drove his motorcycle into a Packard Caribbean less than a year after I went on display, and died without saying a thing about it. Right then I should have asked Little Ernie, but I didn’t, and in another couple of months he was dead, asphyxiated, with a stolen tank of nitrous oxide by his side, a homemade mask on his face, and under the mask his big dumb grin, but not a single clue to what he and his big brother had done to Guy.”
     “But, Ariane, they wouldn’t—”
     “Wouldn’t what?”
     “Wouldn’t have—”
     “Wouldn’t have what?”
     “Wouldn’t have gotten away with it. They were too stupid. They would have gotten caught. You’d know.”
     “Would I?”
     “I think it’s very unlikely that you wouldn’t.”
     “At the very least they inflicted pain and suffering.”
     “He had it coming.”
     “That’s a primitive idea of justice,” she said, cutting me off. “But anyway it doesn’t have to be Guy that I was punishing myself for. It could have been—”
     “—my grandfather?”
     “Your grandfather,” she said. “Yes. A sweet man. I should have stayed with him. Maybe. I don’t know. I might have helped him. Do you think so?”
     “No. I don’t think so, Ariane.”
     “Do you mean that?” She seemed relieved.
     “I do,” I said.
     To the audience, I said, “After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather quite happily lost his senses, just slipped painlessly into a blissful lunacy, and for the rest of his days imagined himself on that ­endless ocean voyage he had begun with his darling Eleanor. ­Eventual­ly, my parents had to put him in a nursing home, but I remember him sitting there on the porch in the sun, smiling, sniffing the air to judge the breeze, peering toward the horizon, and humming ‘Rarotonga.’ ”
     To Ariane, I said, “I don’t think you could have improved on that. I think you had already helped him a great deal—and there was nothing more you could have done.”
     “It’s sweet of you to say that,” she said. “I’m not sure I agree with you, but it really doesn’t matter now, since I’ve been punished quite enough, thank you, and that’s why I’ve decided that my life onstage has no purpose anymore, and the time has come to end it.”
     A gasp.
     “Oops—I made that sound more dramatic than I intended. I didn’t mean end my life. I meant end my life onstage.”
     Another gasp.
     “No. No. I didn’t mean it that way, either. I mean that I’m about to leave the stage. That’s all. The time has come for me to say good-bye. I’ve been here long enough. I’ve been at this long enough. Another phase has ended. I’m going to walk out that door and roam the wide world.”
     “You might want to skip the hat,” I said.
     She took it off, regarded it for a moment, and tossed it onto the couch.

[to be continued]

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