At last…Esther Merling and the green door… (Last chapter of “The Green Door”)

Hardly anyone noticed when Lowell Sykes’s contract ran out on his soap opera because the networks were covering the Congressional hearings. The soap-handsome star witness in Marine uniform began his testimony on the same day that Lowell’s character fell down a mine shaft.

Two of the few who did witness Lowell’s fall were Arthur Hopewell and Jenny DePinna, viewing from their Isle End apartment above Ellis’s 4 Star Bakery. I had nearly completed a third revision of “Within Hearing” and looked on the proceedings in Washington with hypnotic interest. I watched high government advisors and elected officials blurred by camera lens and logorrheac commentary. I compared Art and Life. Art manifested as a triptych composed of Lowell’s soap, Iran-contra, and my play. Life presented Carole’s move to an apartment in Port Wagne. She often called me while she also stalked I-Beam with unnerving sangfroid and unerring accuracy.

It was July, just about a year since I had first arrived in Isle End, and not long before I would leave. I stayed at the computer, revising “Within Hearing”. In May, I had gotten an idea for a one-act and had written it in three days and sent it off to a competition in Iowa. Six weeks later, I learned I’d won. It was titled “The Duck Farmer’s Daughter”.

“Face it, Hopewell,” I talked to myself over the throbbing voice of the Marine officer on TV, “you need to get out.”

The American thing to do, I decided, was to go for a drive in my soon-to-be-relinquished Oldsmobile sedan. Since a journey west would lead to the future and The Big Apple, where GREEN AND GOLDEN GIRL was already in rehearsal for the fall, I drove east.

I’d made this drive many times, out to Pamela’s, I-Beam’s, or the Feits’. The few but indelible visits to Pamela’s on North Road made that route feel like an Avalon that had returned behind impenetrable mists. It was a place I no longer wished to go. Pamela was resolved now, moving to Manhattan with Wasley and Martin, to one of the new buildings in Battery Park “City” that faced the great harbor and Lady Liberty, where even Wall Street was uptown. Hank was replacing her as The Green Door’s Artistic Director, and now he had no worries about those West Siders starting up a theater in Port Wagner because the Merling Foundation had bought up the viable real estate.

“Go with the flow,” Hank said to me. Two years earlier, he’d started a mail order business in his basement with a metal stamping machine he’d bought at an auction. He personalized dog tags and buttons, and through catalog sales he’d started making real money. Now he had expanded machinery and manpower and had moved to a Main Street location where he bent my ear about how computers were going “to transform marketing and sales” as he pressed out a button for me, printed with my favorite current computer command: ESC TO WRITE.

I drove east with the car windows open. I had taken a left, north off North Road, away from the houses of my acquaintance. I had never driven up this far before where there were only cornfields and ocean marsh grass. In early July, the corn and grass were both so tall that they blocked any view of the clean, ocean-breathing Sound, actually the open Atlantic at this northeasternmost spit of land. Sea birds flew high in bright sky; their unheard cries were matters of faith in the deep, farm quiet. I banked the car around a curve between high walls of green. Around a second curve, a blast of hot and humid Gulf-like air hit me with Southern gothic nostalgia. My car sputtered up some gravel, and I realized that one of those curves had taken me up a private road. I could have backed out, but with nowhere to go, I decided to follow the gravel strip to its end.

It wound for about 100 yards through a cornfield that terraced to rows of the yellow and orange flowers of wide-leafed squash. The edge of the field was defined by raspberry hedges whose canes bent over with fruit. Sweat ran down my back and soaked my shirt. The road widened into a driveway, where shining in the July sun a green Jaguar was parked. I braked slowly and pulled up beside it. I hesitated but turned off the engine. The stillness was as intense as the heat and humidity, punctuated by the rising, exclamation-marked racket of cicadas. At the front door of a white house with green shutters and a green door stood an elderly woman who waved as if she had been expecting me.

She waved again, more insistently. I thought she must think I was some repairman she had called. I got out of the car and just stood there.

“C’mon in here out of the sun, you without even a hat on your head!” she called.

So I followed her into the fairytale house. It was dim and cool. Ceiling fans moved in slow circles; gauze drapes fluttered at the windows. I tried to explain that she must have mistaken me—

“No, no, my dear, I’ve been expecting you. For such a long time. You are the Merling Winner, and I have waded and waited through eight others for you.” Then, no further explanation apparently necessary or forthcoming, she added, “I am Esther Merling. Please sit down.”

She let me look at her. Slowly, I put together all the images of her I had glimpsed over a year’s time – and vaguely elsewhere, including dreams. I recognized her from the Feits’ Chanukah party, Pamela’s Thanksgiving, how many performances of plays, and where else?

While that question, like a lost dream, gnawed at me, she rose and said, “I’ll get us something cool to drink.”

In her absence, I looked around. The walls were white like the gauze at most of the windows. I sat on a green couch facing two green-striped chairs. Before a brass firescreen were pots of leafy plants. Around the room, green Wedgwood porcelain pieces (ashtrays, covered boxes, bowls, and vases full of gladioli and tea roses) formed a collection. Beneath one mahogany end table was a Ouija board. Over the fireplace mantel was an abstract oil painting in many shades of bright yellow and shadowed green. It seemed the image of sunlight kaleidescoped above tall trees. I looked out one big, uncurtained picture window onto a lawn that sloped into a blue horizon of water. I suddenly recognized the view as the cove one could see from a 180 degree rotation of angle, from the narrow bridge that separated this Point from the road that led to town. I watched a car drive over the bridge in the distance; it could have been me in that car and only my spectral self standing in this living room.

I stood when Mrs. Merling returned carrying a tray with a pitcher, two poured glasses of iced tea, and two carved wooden bowls. One was heaped with raspberries and the other with cream.

“I like mine with yogurt,” she said, “I hope you will, too.”

She sat in one of the striped wing chairs, nodding at me to face her on the couch. I accepted a glass of tea and drank it in nearly one swallow. She laughed. “Go ahead, pour yourself another one. Isn’t it nice the way dogs can keep themselves cool in this heat just with their tongues hanging out?”

She picked up a fat raspberry, swiped it through the yogurt, and popped it into her mouth. I sipped from a second glass of slightly bitter tea.

“Have you seen a pair of eyeglasses?” Mrs. Merling said, rising.

I looked around and shook my head dumbly.

“I need my eyeglasses to brush my teeth in a mirror, and when I put them down – I don’t know why I ever do put them down – I can’t find them. The truth is, I can’t find anything. This time, my life has been made up of perpetually losing one thing and then finding something else. Do you get that way?”

“This time?” I said.

“This time,” she repeated, looking around. “Yes. I can’t remember where I’ve put my glasses down, yet I do remember most of my previous lives. Go figure.”

I looked down at the green rug patterned with small dots that seemed to be moving.

“Of course you think you think I am a crazy old lady. I have been going a little crazy waiting for you all this time. It was lonelier than I thought it would be, all the years without my husband, waiting for you to be born and grow up and learn to write and win the award that I created for you to win.”

I stood up, felt odd, and sat down again.

Mrs. Merling continued talking as she moved around the room touching tables and green Wedgwood, running her wrinkled hands in the creases of chair and couch cushions. Exasperated, she muttered, “Where are those glasses?” To me, she said, “I’ve waited so long to see you, and now when you’re finally here, I’m blind as a bat.”

“But you waved to me and invited me into your house.”

“Of course.”

“Do you live alone, Mrs. Merling?”

“My companion is out on errands. Don’t be afraid, dear.”

Had I sounded fearful? She reminded me of her porcelain collection. In the loose clothes and sandals she wore, she could have been one of the raised white bas relief mythological figures on a Wedgwood candy dish. Mrs. Merling left the room, apparently still in search of her glasses, but returned quickly without them, waving a pocket watch at me.

“Here it is!” she said. “You can’t imagine how long I’ve been looking for this. I should have known it would turn up when I needed it. Here, dear, it’s yours.”

I tried to move my hands away, but she grabbed my left hand and slapped a heavy gold watch into my palm.

“I can’t – you mustn’t give me–” I protested.

Mrs. Merling looked at me sadly for a second, then said, “No, you don’t understand. It is yours.”

I tried not to look at the object in my hand, but it was irresistible. There were engraved initials, R.D., and the words To my Cherish’d Son signed Mother. Energy seemed to flow away from me to Mrs. Merling: the more sapped I felt, the more energetic she became.

She said, “I found it in an antique shop in Chicago. Isn’t that remarkable?”

I heard a sigh which came from me.

“It is yours,” she insisted.

“I’m so grateful for…this has been some year…“

“Listen to me, dear. You tell Carole to take everything out of the Stock Market this September because there is going to be a terrific crash in October.” Then she sat down beside me on the couch and closed my hand over the gold watch lying in my palm. My fingertips started to itch. I put the watch on the tray with raspberries and yogurt.

“Everyone says the Market is headed for a fall,” I said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Help you remember, dear. You were my son. Your name was Raymond, which I still prefer to Robert. I was not generous to you. In this life, I created fellowships for children like you, but especially for you because I knew from the bardo that you would become a writer for the theater. All you had ever wanted then was to be an actor, but we forbade it, your father and I. We insisted you become a pharmacist.”

The itching had subsided, replaced by giddiness. “A pharmacist?”

“You took over your father’s successful pharmacy in St. Louis, but then you left your wife, and I never saw you from that day until now. She never remarried. In this life, she made you suffer, but she doesn’t want you to suffer anymore. You have atoned for abandoning her.”

“What’s bardo?”

“You’re laughing at me, but I don’t mind,” she said. “I love how open-minded you are.”

“I’m positively porous. If you’re psychic, why can’t you find your glasses?”

Mrs. Merling got up and from a bookcase took a yellow folder; I recognized it as a copy of my “Green and Golden Girl”.

“Do you know how archeological psychics can recognize the age of ancient artifacts? The older an object is, the colder it feels. Such people have assisted in the location of long buried cities, buildings, and bodies. When your manuscript arrived, I just touched it and I knew.”

“Did you read it?”

“Well, of course.” She tossed me the script. “Don’t be fresh. You feel nothing when you hold an object because you don’t remember. Instincts are just memories of different sorts.”

For a second, she reminded me of Grandpa Joe. She sat down again beside me and put a soft, wrinkled hand on mind. It felt cool.

“In bardo,” she said quietly, “after we leave life, we may rest, and time has no meaning. One meets with –observers—impartial judges with whom one considers the last life and how, when, it would be best to reopen the green door to life. Sometimes the choice to return is a very frightening thing because one sees that new life will be painful, but sometimes,” she pressed her hand on mine, “it is joyful because one will be reunited with a loved one or be given the opportunity to make things right.”

I bent my head. “Mrs. Merling–”

“It’s all right. Just use your memory.”

I looked into her eyes, old and clouded like jade.

“You want me to write about… today… a play?”

“Oh, no, dear. This will be your first movie. There will be other movies, but you will always return to the theater which you love.”

Then I was able to stand. “Mrs. Merling,” I said, “thank you will never be enough.”

“Imagination will always surpass the truth,” she said. “Do you remember that? Fiction is the only reality,” she added. “Remember?” She stood up and put her arms around me, her face only reaching my chest, cheek turned as if to listen to my heart. Then she let go of me and said, “You don’t believe me.”

A heavy wave of déjà vu kept me from the words on the tip of my tongue.

The next wave struck harder, with understanding:

“But you do believe,” I said, “and therefore I am here. It’s a new, improved Existential syllogism. Tu crois, donc je suis! Which is enough… what was the Enough Song at Hank Feit’s seder?”

“Dayenu,” she said.

“You weren’t there.”

“I know the song.”

We walked outside slowly. The sunshine was glaring off her Jaguar and my Olds. I opened the car doors to let the heat out.

“What do you put in your tea?” I asked.

“Oh, just my own herbs,” she smiled. She touched the bridge of her nose for the eyeglasses she had not found. “Did you take your pocket watch?”

“Not this time,” I said.

“I’ll find it for you again if I can.”

She put her hands on her hips and squinted at me in the sun. I got into the car and she leaned through the open window to kiss my cheek. She turned and walked back toward the front door, waving at me as she had at my arrival, only now everything played in reverse. I backed the car out of the driveway and turned on the radio. Gravel sputtered under the tires. On their own, my fingertips on the hot steering wheel danced to the music.

All the years I was growing up, before my mother died, at the end of large family gatherings everyone crowded at our front door, kissing goodbye twice, once on each cheek the French way…but no one would actually leave. My father called it “the Beethoven ending,” and only when he spoke that cue did people begin to depart, laughing at his familiar joke. Endings, too, take their own sweet time. In my last few weeks in Isle End, I struggled with the thought of knocking at Dr. Doucette’s front door. You can’t go home again when it’s still home, but you’re not you anymore.

My August departure coincided with Lowell Sykes’s return. He limped back through The Green Door like a hound soaked in a thunderstorm. Though the other actors were sensitive at first to his expulsion from Eden or The Big Time as Lowell incessantly referred to TV work, they tired of his insulting self-aggrandizing self-pity. Finally, one day Jenny erupted into a speech from one of my one-acts, MUSEUM PIECES, in which an idealist argues the folly of using money as a measurement of success:

Money is a great thing, she recited, and it has probably done more to civilize us than anything except sports, or, on a Sunday, religion. But when money’s the denominator of a person’s life, the richer he gets, the poorer he is. Which is the larger number, 1 over 1 or 1 over 1 million?

Fractions were over Lowell’s head altogether, and he said it wasn’t the money, it was also the fame and glamour. Jenny pulled at her hair with hopeless exasperation.

But I told her that she’d read the lines perfectly, and she told me the lines were brilliant, which is really what we both wanted to hear.

A week later, she and I left Isle End on the Long Island Railroad, just after the performances of Wilder’s “Alcestiad” and Behrman’s “No Time For Comedy”. Jenny, represented by Roy Olds the shrewd PR man, had been recruited by a major Off-Broadway repertory company, plus she had an audition for a Dennis Quaid movie.

After Jenny gave that speech in the dressing room, everyone had admired my ESC TO WRITE button, and Hank said he’d take orders. Frank Marino called me Hopewell for the first time; I was a little sad to leave “Prince” behind. Liz Prager gave me a hug and asked if I’d be going to New Orleans in October for Carole’s and I-Beam’s nuptials. Yes, Carole had been a fast and determined worker as always, a real loss to Japanese industry and commerce. I imagined the gigantic nieces and nephews she would deliver, descendents of Acadians and Shinnecocks. I-Beam asked me to be best man; I agreed. I didn’t anticipate a reconciliation with my father. That would be something for another life, I told Jenny, whose own parents, the Winkowskis, welcomed me warmly as a son. Jenny, staying in character, kept me even more warmly off balance.

The last thing that Jenny and I did before I flew to Iowa and then Dallas where the one-acts were in production at the NET affiliate, was go to see Angelo in the apartment he was sharing with Peter, who was taking classes at City College uptown. TV news was on in the background. The big story that day was a plane crash in Detroit on a highway near the airport. Everyone aboard had been killed except for a 4 year old girl who’d been thrown clear. Rescuers were calling her The Miracle Baby. Angelo angled his thumb at the TV and then pointed it back to himself. He had been in remission since June. The chemo soup cooked up by his doctors, he said, “makes me effing barf, but it effing works.” He was doing commercial voiceovers, for “Green and Golden Girl”. I denied responsibility, but he hugged me anyway. Then he reached into his jeans pocket and took out something he stuck into my palm. It was the engraved gold pocket watch.

“I’m supposed to tell you it’s from your brother. I didn’t even know you had an effing brother,” Angelo said.

“Well, maybe I effing do.”

Jenny and I walked to the elevator. Angelo stood in his apartment doorway and called down the hall, “See ya!”

I didn’t turn around, just raised my hand holding the pocket watch, and I waved it at him. On cue, the green elevator door opened. Jenny and I took a cab ‘way downtown where we were going to dinner in Battery Park City. Pamela made her usual 5 course meal. No one hit me. For dessert, the melon balls were served in a whole watermelon carved, we were informed, “like an Egyptian barque.”

It’s great in life, how sometimes, for just a little while anyway, you think you know everything. And probably, for about 10 minutes, you do. That’s when everything changes. And, all of a sudden, you’re green again.