3. FIRST DEATH

Walking slit-eyed across town into the setting sun, Ed, homeward bound, reflected again that there was a bit of silver lining to not being fired. At least it removed some of the money pressures.  The major medical plan was a godsend.

He pushed himself onto the uptown Broadway express.  Grasping a hand noose and swaying with the crowd as the train sped northward, inches separated him from adjoining passengers crushed but isolated in their personal bubbles. He gazed at headlines on newspapers held aloft in readers' hands, and was quickly lulled into an oft repeated reverie as the train sped and bumped toward the 225^th Street stop where he would normally walk three blocks north under the El to the “Medium Income” Marble Hill Project in which Fran, their new daughter, and he now lived, having graduated with the advent of steady wages from the “low rent” Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn. 

He was a loving husband and father but often strangely distant.  People around him sensed him, without understanding it, surrounded by a gauzy scrim, a self inflicted barrier walling off Fran’s illness from her and everybody else.  Fran, seemingly unsuspecting, loved each day, coddled her baby, talked incessantly on the phone with friends about impending try outs, or the last play they had seen.  Occasionally they had friends to dinner.  On such occasions, Ed tried to participate. He laughed occasionally, but then invariably caught himself, “there’s nothing to funny” guilty at allowing himself pleasure.  He obsessed that she would talk about her illness to him or anyone else.  So he had to remain silent.  To Fran he often seemed glum and distant.  She thought she understood.  “He’s hating not doing TV stuff.  I know he’s doing it for me. He’ll find something soon.” She tried to cheer him; assured him that things would change. She knew so little.

Distractions helped him.  Diapering the baby and various household chores were brief escapes; challenges at the office longer-lasting diversions. He took refuge in memories, sometimes too much so.  “Daydreaming again Ed?” from a concerned onlooker sometimes startled him apologetically back to the present.

Memories should have been perfect analgesics but too often made things worse.  Today, with nothing and no one to intervene, the clack of the homeward bound train lulled him into a reverie so deep that that he failed to notice his stop, remaining on board until the end of the line, three stations beyond his own where he crossed to the southbound tracks to catch another train back to 225^th Street.

Like so many earlier crowded-subway reveries, today’s began with a nightmarish idea he knew with certainty was brainless, stupid, ridiculous, but which spun repeatedly back on itself and would not go away.  For the umpteenth time he wondered whether the two jolting deaths in the last two years, both intertwined with their theatrical world, were warnings.  Suppose they were signs that Fran must leave show business or suffer deadly consequences.  As always, he told himself “Skip the stupid superstition.  Get a grip.  Deal with it,” only to come back to the thought and know that it would pop into his head again whether he willed it away or not.

Certainly both deaths were bizarre tableaus far removed from their ordinary lives.  The first as strange as the summer stock mysteries in which Fran appeared. Still fresh in his mind today although it happened three years earlier.  It was just after Fran's first season with the summer stock company at the Chase Barn Theater in New Hampshire.  He drove up every weekend to be with her. The theater sat snugly in the craggy splendor of the White Mountains not far from Franconia Notch. The barn was a timbered gem of seasoned cedar with plush seats inherited from the old Metropolitan Opera house through the good offices of Will Chase, who had been an art critic for the New York Times and brother of the theater’s producer-owner.

Fran and Ed relished driving and hiking through the exhilarating New Hampshire mountains and granite outcrops.  Ed enjoyed the company members even more than the productions themselves, gossiping with Fran about their trysts and romances. Ed, the only visiting spouse, was embraced as an ex-officio member without portfolio. The entire troop, loose with laughter, intense about their craft.  Angela and Bob, the ingénue and leading man met, fell in love and announced their impending marriage, and like several others in the company continued to be close in the years that followed.  Harriet Wallace, the timid costume designer, a bit older than the others, shy, with a flair for the gothic. Sandy Green, a novice stage designer of enormous talent who became a kind of pet though given to occasional inane insults which they all forgave. Harold Trentlyon, the wild haired director whose barrage of jokes kept them all in stitches at the White Mountain Inn bar lounge. And apprentices, worker bees, there to build, learn, and hopefully be cast in a role with sufficient onstage lines to earn their way into Actors Equity.

The season over, she and Ed were together again in Brooklyn.  They would celebrate their fourth anniversary in a few months. They treasured their ”low rent” Gowanus Project three- roomer in a slum area a block from the odorous algae laden canal of the same name.  As he did now, Ed commuted to work in Manhattan.  BIZARRE KILLING IN GREENWICH VILLAGE

A few weeks after their return, on his way home at the end of a work day, jammed into the commuting crowd, the news was literally thrust in his face.  Gripping an upright pole he faced a fellow commuter reading his Daily News. Staring vacantly at a full face photo on the paper’s front page, he mused “It’s like looking into a foggy bathroom mirror.”  Suddenly the picture snapped into focus. Not a reflection, but a headshot of Sandy Green, the scene designer from they had said goodbye to two weeks earlier after a “let’s get together soon” exchange.  Beneath his picture the huge black caption “STAGE DESIGNER KILLED.” Beneath that “BIZARRE KILLING IN GREENWICH VILLAGE” 

The spirited young man they had warmed to so during the summer had been murdered.  They had barely gotten to know him.

Ed’s sort held their noses at Patterson's tabloid, but at the next station he ran for a copy. Gruesome third page meat for the New York Daily News, Sandy had been found in his own apartment bound and partly burned under an overturned couch that had been set afire. 

As always in this oft repeated recollection of Sandy’s killing, Ed switched mental gears. He tossed aside the silly idea that it might have foretold Fran’s death and remembered the unnerving sequel.  The police investigation.  If Sandy’s murder was bizarre, their exposure to the so far fruitless inquiry that followed was black humor, an angering coda to their friend’s killing. 

The day after the news, Fran and Ed sat at their kitchen table talking about Sandy’s death when costume designer Harriet Wallace phoned. One of their mutual summer stock friends had told her that “the police are calling in everybody in Sandy’s address book for questioning.” She said she hated the thought of being at a police station alone, and went on “They’re going through his book in alphabetical order.  So they’ll probably call Fran and me at the same time.”  This made sense.  All aspiring actors needed stage names. Fran’s was Wallace, her brother’s first name. So, Fran Wallace.  Harriet, also a Wallace, arrived at her simple request.  When either she or Fran was summoned, might they go together?  They told her that was fine, and that Ed would accompany them.

None of them knew that Fran and Ed were actually in Sandy’s black book under their married name, not Wallace.  Fran was called with the Gs soon after the conversation with Harriet.  When they phoned to tell her, she asked if she could accompany them anyway.  Fran and Ed were happy to accommodate her.  They agreed to meet.