The Dearly Departed (3 page)

The invitation to act with the Community Players brought changes for the better for Sunny: Her mother took her to the movies now that she had techniques to study, gestures to borrow, dresses to copy. Dusty blues and greens accented her eyelids, and her fingernails went pink. She began squirting hand cream into new rubber gloves by day and massaging her heels at night. Various upstanding professionals, including an optometrist and a pharmacist, took Margaret out for bites to eat after Thursday rehearsals.

Her fellow thespians uncovered a talent Margaret didn't know she had, the ability to memorize lines more quickly than anyone else—not just her own, but the whole cast's. “Photographic memory,” she'd apologize, unable to swallow the prompts when her fellow actors missed their cues. She understudied both leading ladies and ingenues, and finally had her break when the woman playing Mrs. Winemiller in
Summer and Smoke
needed emergency disk surgery. Sunny ushered at her mother's opening night, and was both pleasantly surprised and disconcerted. Margaret became someone else onstage, gesticulating, enunciating, and projecting, in an accent that was all Blanche DuBois. Sunny thought she looked pretty at a distance with her face painted and her taffeta church outfit rustling, prettier than she looked in real life. The
Bulletin
's freelance drama critic, who taught at King George Regional and had Sunny in driver's ed, reported that “newcomer Margaret Batten brings an understated ardor and energy to the role of the minister's wife.” It was a gift to an unattached, shy, forty-three-year-old woman in a town where everyone read the same newspaper. Men in the KGCP teased her. The crème de la crème of King George society, she liked to say, was opening its circle to her. The bachelor Players called her at home, asking for “Maggie.” Confidence changed the way she dressed, the way she drove—with a chiffon scarf tied around her neck, in Grace Kelly fashion—and the way she entertained. She rented a floor sander, polyurethaned the pine boards to a high gloss, and painted the front room in a color called Caviar. When the KGCP needed sites for their annual progressive dinner, Margaret energetically volunteered what she now was calling the Cotton homestead for the canapé course.

Confined to the stage, Margaret's mild airs and new self-esteem were bearable, even lovable. Sunny knew what play was running on which nights and how to stay out of the refracted limelight. She would baby-sit costars' kids; would paint scenery and post flyers on two dozen bulletin boards around town. But she refused to act—refused to answer even the desperate call for teenage daughters in
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Cheaper by the Dozen.
She studied, she caddied at the golf course that was her backyard, fished golf balls out of the brook that divided the eighth and ninth fairways and sold them back to the original owners at half price. Her mother allowed her to golf as long as she wore culottes and an ironed blouse and didn't look like one of the ragamuffins who had preceded them in the peeling gray house. Margaret frowned on her daughter's carrying other people's golf bags—like a bellhop, she said; like beggars who dived off Acapulco cliffs for coins. Sunny helped her own cause by describing the nice doctors and lawyers, owners of the big houses on Baldwin Avenue, who let her play through and admired her swing.

Too many male caddies were impatient and contemptuous of the ladies' league, but its members finally had an alternative. Sunny took them seriously. She knew the course, and dispensed tips that she'd picked up on loops with the assistant pro. When their husbands surprised them with new clubs for Christmas, the ladies offered their perfectly good woods and irons to Sunny.

It was a small town, but big enough for the theater fanatic and her mildly mortified daughter to coexist until Margaret played the president's wife in
Of Thee I Sing
and came away with an idea for a moonlighting job: impersonating first ladies at private parties, trade shows, or ribbon-cuttings. Since the cameo sideline began, she had dressed as Mmes. Carter, Reagan, and Bush; had added Sandra Day O'Connor and Queen Elizabeth as the occasion warranted. Her appearance at an event injected a guessing game into the dull photo opportunity—this faux-pearled and eagle-brooched character was which woman in Margaret Batten's repertoire?

“Please don't do it,” Sunny would plead. “Please don't let them put your picture in the
Bulletin
again.”

“But that's exactly why they hire me—so someone reading about the event will say, ‘Oh my goodness. Look! A famous person came to the ground-breaking of the new branch. Isn't that Barbara, hon?' ”

“It doesn't fool anyone. It's not being an actress. It's a sight gag. And then you leave and go to the supermarket, and my friends say, ‘I saw your mother yesterday at Foodland in a gray wig.' Or, ‘She was wearing a necklace of shellacked peanuts. Must have been Rosalyn's turn,' with this look that says, Is she
mental
?”

“It's theater,” her mother would say, “an acting job that pays—which makes me a professional. It's your college fund. Besides, you of all people know I don't care what the neighbors think.”

Sunny wrote to the long-absent John Batten every few months, and he wrote back. “Sincerely, John,” he signed his dull, typed letters on the firm's letterhead. Neither correspondent invoked the terms
father
or
daughter;
Sunny did not accuse him of abandoning or failing her, because she understood without being told that there were complications that no one liked to discuss. Sunny studied her mother's wedding pictures and puzzled over the groom's dominant brown eyes and dark wavy hair, his short arms and thick neck. Artificial insemination, she guessed after reading a cover story on the subject in
Time.

John's wife and office manager, Bonnie, added a banal postscript to every letter—“8 straight days of temps over 100!” or “driving to San Diego to see the pandas,” which Sunny interpreted to mean: John and I have no secrets. I know whenever he writes to you. I protect him. Mostly, Sunny and John corresponded about golf, which he'd taken up in the Sun Belt. He hoped she was taking lessons, and Sunny told him no, but that she took illustrated books by Sam Snead and Ben Hogan out of the library and closely watched the best players at the club. He advised her which hand-me-down clubs, which compounds of steel and new alloys, she should keep and which she should put on consignment. He told her not to ignore her short game. She wrote back and said she was trying to spend an hour a day on the putting green. Was that, in his opinion, enough? “If you're sinking those three-foot white-knucklers with some consistency, it is,” he answered. He never asked about Margaret, and Sunny didn't ask about his wife. He didn't call or send gifts or ask for custodial visits. “I never really knew him,” she'd explain to friends who asked about a father. Or, to close the subject: “He died before I was born.”

From Pennsylvania, Miles Finn continued to pay taxes on his New Hampshire property, an unheated Depression-era cottage with three dark rooms and outdoor plumbing. It was on a minor lake so ordinary and unscenic that one would wonder what inspired him to travel six hours to swim in black water and pee into a fetid hole. The crawl space housed an ancient canoe and an antique archery set; inside, there were moldy jigsaw puzzles, scratchy wool blankets, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed canvas chairs, mouse droppings, the occasional bat, and the empty gin and beer bottles frequently found in near-forsaken cabins.

Margaret aired out the place every spring, defrosted the shoebox-sized freezer as needed, kept clean linens on the bigger bed. If it was a quick trip to close a window before rain or to leave a welcome casserole, Sunny would wait in the car. The cottage, Margaret explained, belonged to friends from Philadelphia—“Finn,” according to slapdash strokes of white paint on a slat—who'd been coming to King George forever.

“Do they have any kids?” Sunny asked hopefully.

“It's just one person,” Margaret said. “An attorney. I worked for him before you were born.”

It sounded right to Sunny that her mother would bring casseroles to an old, childless man who could afford nothing better than vacations at Boot Lake. Over the years, as Margaret headed off alone with her pail and sponges and a flush particular to this mission, Sunny adjusted her view of Mr. Finn. She sensed that the former boss had become a boyfriend—so typically charitable of her mother. Not that sex was involved, Sunny thought. Sex didn't fit Margaret. It had to be a crush, durable yes, but no more fertile or reciprocated than the ones Sunny herself had on teachers at King George Regional or on golfers on TV.

Miles called it his retreat, and if any woman—first his wife, then subsequent girlfriends—voiced suspicions about his treks to Boot Lake, he would say, “If only you could see the camp. I don't even bathe when I'm there. No woman would set foot in this dump. Of course
I
love it, but that's a childhood thing. No one else will go near the place.”

He made the romantic terms clear to Margaret, semi-annually. He was married, with everything to lose personally and professionally. He wasn't inviting love affairs or headlines.

He didn't volunteer personal details unless she inquired: Yes, there'd been a separation. Yes, in fact, a divorce. Yes, he was dating in Philadelphia, but only when necessary; only when he needed presentable companions for black-tie events. They had sex quickly on her fabric softener–scented sheets during her lunch hour, and didn't speak again until he called six months later with a jangle of quarters from a phone booth. “Guess who?” he'd say each time, and always she'd have a clever answer ready: An old boss? A charming dinner companion from Philly? Tomorrow's lunch date?

For a long time, she thought she had no right to mind. Twice-yearly dates didn't make her his girlfriend or his confidante. She wasn't above this flimsy attention—she who'd broken her marriage vows and several Commandments. But eventually she joined the Players, and was lauded in print for her understated ardor. Now when he called from the road, Margaret was not being coy when she hesitated before answering his “Guess who?”

“Is someone there with you?” he asked.

“Miles? Oh, sorry. I wasn't sure. How
are
you?
Where
are you?”

“I'm about twenty-five minutes from there, and you know how I am.” He dropped his voice. “Ready, willing, and able.”

She began to ask, as she sat on the edge of the bed, rolling her panty hose back up, if they could go out, if he could pick her up, if they couldn't have something approximating a date. “I know what you've always said: ‘No calls, no letters between visits, no paper trail.' But we never get a chance to talk. We could drive to Vermont, to an inn, then stay the night. Sunny can stay with a friend. We're both divorced. There wouldn't be a scandal even if we were caught.” She didn't say, “You lost the election sixteen years ago. You're a private citizen. No one knows who Miles Finn is anymore.”