Surviving the Applewhites (8 page)

Y
ou’re kidding!” Sybil had just brought in a tray of coffee, and she set it down with a bang so that coffee sloshed out of the mugs.

E.D. thought it was unlikely that her father had dragged everybody to a meeting to make a joke. Zedediah hadn’t come—he’d told her when she went to get him that unless someone was at death’s door at that very moment, he saw no reason why whatever it was couldn’t perfectly well wait until morning. But Lucille and Archie were there, even though she’d had
to wake them. They were sitting blearily on the couch in their nightclothes. Jeremy Bernstein was there, too, complete with notebook and pen.

“Why would I kid about a thing like this? It’s been the most grueling audition process I’ve ever been through in my life. And the hardest part of it was finding the person to play Maria. Annalouise Mabry sings
and
acts, and she’s young and pretty besides. She is absolutely perfect for the part!”

“Well, it will certainly get the show some attention,” Sybil said. “I don’t know that anyone has ever cast an African American as Maria before.”

“That’s because nobody else had to cast the show in Traybridge, North Carolina, before.”

“I thought
The Sound of Music
was a true story,” E.D. said. “Wasn’t Maria von Trapp a real person?”

“Of course,” her father said. “The guiding force behind the von Trapp Family Singers.”

“But she wasn’t black.”

Jeremy Bernstein took a cup of coffee off the tray and blotted its bottom with a napkin. “Technically speaking, the show is only
based
on a true story. It’s literature—a piece of musical theater—not a documentary. Rodgers and Hammerstein probably took some liberties with the truth in creating it. Your father can take a few when casting it. It’s called
color-blind casting
.” He turned to Randolph. “That’s what makes you such an extraordinary director! That you have the
courage, the vision, to make such a choice.”

“It was the only possible choice,” Randolph said. “Annalouise is incredibly talented. She graduated from Northwestern with a degree in musical theater. She’s the lead singer in a gospel choir that’s toured the country three times. If I hadn’t located this girl, I’d have had to call the whole project off. There wasn’t a single other possible Maria for a hundred miles in any direction. She isn’t the only color-blind choice, though. It’s going to be a rainbow cast. The children playing Louisa and Friedrich are black, and Liesl and Kurt are Vietnamese.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” E.D. said. “I get it that the show isn’t a documentary. But won’t the audience have trouble understanding it? The von Trapp children all have the same parents. There’s biology to think about. You can’t have three different races in one family! It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense! It’s musical theater. Singing. Acting. A little dancing. The kids I cast sing and act better than anyone else in town.”

“Color-blind casting is the
right
thing to do,” Jeremy said. “Biology or not, your father’s morally bound to cast the best people regardless of color or ethnic background.”

“Exactly!” Randolph said, stirring a heaping spoonful of sugar into his coffee. “Anyway, appearances don’t count. Once the show gets started, I guarantee
that the audience won’t notice.”

Sybil shook her head. “Well, they’re likely to
notice
.”

Jeremy waved his coffee mug in the air. “I think it’s a philosophically powerful concept. What’s
The Sound of Music
about, after all?”

“Falling in love and escaping the Nazis,” Cordelia said.

Jeremy nodded. “Escaping the Nazis. What were the Nazis most infamous for? The Holocaust—the killing of six million Jews. One of the most terrible examples of racial hatred in modern times. What better way to hold a mirror up to our own prejudices than to cast this particular show across racial lines. It’s positively
inspired
!” He began jotting in his notebook. “Think of it. Probably the first time
The Sound of Music
has ever been done this way. And it’s being done in the South. This’ll make a great hook for the TV show. The network people will love it. We can have them come for the opening.”

Randolph grinned. “That’s it, of course. I cast the show the way I did for philosophical reasons.”

That was an outrageous lie, E.D. thought, and everyone in the room knew it. But from now on, she knew, that was how her father would think about it. And that’s the way Jeremy would write about it.

“I told you I would give the show an edge, Cordelia. Didn’t I? Didn’t I? I said I would send the audience away both humming and thinking.”

“Let’s hope the Little Theatre board doesn’t pull the plug on you and cancel the whole thing,” Sybil said. “Traybridge might not be quite ready for this.”

“They wouldn’t dare!”

Lucille stifled a yawn. “I think it’s wonderful that you finally got your cast, Randolph. I’m sure it will all work out. Never fear, Sybil, there’s a shift in consciousness happening these days all over the world. Unity out of diversity. It’s surely happening in Traybridge, too. There’s nothing to worry about.”

In Lucille’s view of the world, E.D. thought, there was
never
anything to worry about. She looked over at Jake, who was sitting at the end of the couch with Winston draped across his feet. He was staring into space as if he hadn’t heard a word that was being said. There was an odd look in his eyes. It reminded her, somehow, of the look Cordelia got when she started talking about her ballet.

“We need to be getting back to bed,” Lucille said then. She nudged Archie, who had fallen asleep where he sat. “Let’s go. Govindaswami will be here bright and early.”

“Who?” Randolph asked. “Who’ll be here?”

“Ravi Govindaswami. My guru. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that, too! He’s going to be staying in Sweet Gum Cottage.”

“Your guru’s coming to stay? Tomorrow?” Sybil asked in a horrified voice. “Why didn’t you warn us?”

Lucille stood, pulling at Archie’s arm. “I did warn you. Nobody pays attention to anything around here except their own projects.”

“But I haven’t had time to do the grocery shopping yet this week. We won’t have enough food—again!”

“That’s all right. Govindaswami is fasting.”

As E.D. slipped into sleep later, she was glad she didn’t have anything to do with her father’s show. She was beginning to have a strong premonition of catastrophe.

J
ake had finished gelling his hair. Now he turned his face one way and then another so that the light above the mirror picked up the dusting of hair on his upper lip. Darken that down and he could pass for seventeen—couldn’t he? Not according to the red-haired kid who’d expected to get cast as Rolf and ended up playing an anonymous soldier instead. “It’s ridiculous for you to play that part. No way an audience is going to believe you’re old enough to get into the SS.” What the red-haired kid thought didn’t count, Jake reminded himself. Or what
anybody else in the show thought either, for that matter. About anything.

Last night they’d had their first rehearsal, and Randolph had made that very clear at the beginning. The director, he had told the assembled cast, made the decisions, starting with casting, and anybody who didn’t like those decisions could go do another show somewhere else for some other director. He had directed in theaters all over the country and had had a smash Off-Broadway hit, and he intended to maintain a professional atmosphere at all times. “I am a professional and I will expect every one of you to behave as if you are, too. I don’t put up with lateness, laziness, or sloppy work. You will not be called to every rehearsal, but when you are called, you will arrive on time and you will be prepared. When you are not actually onstage, you will be silent and respectful of the actors who
are
onstage. There is no place in a Randolph Applewhite production for amateurs who behave like amateurs.”

If he hadn’t started that way, Jake thought, there might have been open rebellion. There had been so much hostility in the air when they first came in that Winston had gone right underneath a folding chair in the corner and hadn’t come out again until it was time to go home.

Nobody except the leads had been happy with the casting. The people who’d
expected
to get the leads
were playing unnamed townspeople or nuns or storm troopers instead. There were so many people in the show that, except for the children, Randolph had had to cast almost everyone who had auditioned. But it hadn’t made them happy. “I’ve been with the Little Theatre since the building was the Masonic fellowship hall,” he’d heard one man say, “and I’ve never played
anything
but a major role! Now he’s brought in all these—these—outsiders and given them the plum parts. It’s a travesty!”

“There are no small parts,” the woman he was talking to said. “Only small—”

“Easy for you to say. You have
lines
!”

“Little Priscilla Montrose didn’t even get cast,” someone else said. “The daughter of the president of the board!”

“And
she
actually looks the part!”

After Randolph’s speech about professionalism, people quit complaining, but the atmosphere hadn’t really changed till rehearsal was over and he mentioned the possibility that a TV crew would tape some of their work for national television. “And why, you ask, do they wish to focus on the Traybridge Little Theatre?” Randolph asked. “Because we are doing something different, something important—an edgy, innovative, truly American version of a classic of the musical theater.” Jake didn’t know whether anyone bought the philosophy part, but the prospect of being
on national television had settled them right down.

Now Winston, who had been whining at the bathroom door, began to scratch to come in. Jake sighed. He opened the door and Winston waddled in, his tail wagging furiously. “Hey, old guy—you don’t care whether I look thirteen or seventeen, do you?” he asked, rubbing Winston’s ears. The dog’s long tongue swiped across his hand, leaving a trail of saliva. Jake wiped it off on his pants. “Disgusting,” he told the dog as he patted his head. “That’s what you are, disgusting.”

An hour later, when the family gathered for breakfast at the main house, Lucille’s guru joined them. Jake had seen him coming up toward the house from the cottage he was staying in and couldn’t get over the idea that the man was a sort of human version of Winston. He was short and round, dressed in voluminous pants and a long tunic, and moved as he walked the way the dog did, almost as much from side to side as straight ahead. He had the same dark, solemn, almost mournful eyes. In Winston these were contradicted by a perpetually wagging tail, in Govindaswami by a perpetually sunny smile. “I am having a cup of tea,” he told them, beaming as he settled himself into the chair at the head of the table, “so as to join with you for the fellowship. I hope you will not be offended by my fast.”

Far from being offended, Jake thought, the family
was thrilled not to have to share their breakfast. Jeremy Bernstein offered, as he stared at the single spoonful of scrambled eggs that was left in the bowl when it had been passed to him, to take the grocery list to Traybridge. Archie agreed to lend him his pickup.

After breakfast Jake slipped into the schoolroom, took an empty coffee can and a printout he’d made from the Internet, and hurried around to Lucille’s vegetable garden. Lucille had come in that morning just as he and Winston emerged from the bathroom, complaining loudly that there were caterpillars all over her parsley, eating it down to the stems.

She had asked them kindly to leave, and they hadn’t gone, she said. That method had worked with slugs and earwigs and even aphids. But the caterpillars had refused to listen to her. She wouldn’t use poison and didn’t even like to pick them off, because whatever caterpillars started eating they had to go on eating, or they’d starve. She’d consulted with the nature spirits, and they had had no advice except to relinquish her need for control. “So I guess we’ll just have to leave the parsley to the caterpillars and do without. So much for the tabouli I was planning to make.”

“You can put parsley on the grocery list and get it from the grocery,” Archie had suggested.

“Oh, sure! Covered with pesticides and probably
genetically altered besides.”

Lucille’s complaints had given Jake an idea. In the garden he found exactly what he’d been hoping to find. As Lucille had said, the parsley was covered with green-and-black-striped caterpillars that were busy eating all the leaves. Stem after stem had its caterpillar, some small and newly hatched, others fat and almost ready to pupate. He checked them against the photograph on the printout. Just as he’d thought, they were the larval stage of one of the most beautiful of the Carolina butterflies, the black swallowtail. Black swallowtails had a particular preference for parsley, the printout said. Carefully, he picked the caterpillars off the parsley plants and put them into the coffee can. Then he picked the rest of the leaves off the parsley plants and put them in with the caterpillars. It wasn’t enough to feed them for long. He would add parsley to the grocery list before Bernstein went to town. He hoped if he washed it carefully, the store parsley wouldn’t hurt the caterpillars. Back in the schoolroom, he found an empty aquarium that would be just perfect for his plan.

Today was Zedediah’s day to be teacher on call. Unlike the rest of the family, Zedediah had a habit of actually showing up. He’d even demand to see what they’d been doing and ask them questions about it. Jake hated Zedediah’s days. On his first one the old man had asked Jake what gave him joy. Jake hadn’t
understood the question. “You mean what do I like to do?”

“I mean,” Zedediah had said, “exactly what I said.
What gives you joy?
”

Jake hadn’t been able to come up with an answer.

“Once you know that, you will know what you want from an education and you’ll be able to set your own program. Meantime, just do what E.D. is doing.” Every time Zedediah had been on call since then, when he checked out whatever work Jake had done, he’d given him a look that seemed to say that Jake Semple was a screwup who was never going to amount to anything. E.D., of course, never got such a look.

At least he’d have something to show Zedediah this time. Not something E.D. had thought up. He put the caterpillars and the parsley into the aquarium and added a couple of sticks, propped against the glass and held in place with lumps of modeling clay. Then he tied a piece of cheesecloth over the top of the aquarium to keep the caterpillars in and lettered a sign that said
METAMORPHOSIS, A LIVING DEMONSTRATION
. He taped the sign to the front of the aquarium. This would be an infinitely better Teaching Opportunity than a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis. Destiny—and all the rest of the family, for that matter—would get to watch the caterpillars pupate and then turn into butterflies.

The Internet website that had had the photo of the
black swallowtail caterpillar had advised keeping butterflies inside once they’d emerged from their pupa state rather than releasing them. That way they could be cared for and guarded all the way through the life cycle. More butterflies could be safely raised indoors that way and eventually released to increase their numbers in the wild. Butterflies were in trouble, it said, from pesticides and habitat loss. Raising them for release could help. The website gave a recipe for feeding the butterflies once they hatched. They would get to know you and come land on your hand to feed, it said. You could offer the concoction, made of soy sauce, Gatorade, and milk, and they would unroll their long, strawlike tongues and suck it up. The mixture sounded disgusting, but the website promised that the butterflies would love it. You could also make a plain sugar syrup or just put out a piece of ripe melon where they could get to it, and they would feed themselves.

He draped newspapers over the aquarium so E.D. and Zedediah wouldn’t see it the minute they came in, and then sat down at his desk with a book about the Civil War E.D had given him. When E.D. came in and began gathering what she had done during the week to show Zedediah, Jake began humming the title song from
The Sound of Music
. Before she had a chance to react, Zedediah arrived with Destiny, who was loudly yodeling the song about the lonely goat
herd. As usual, he was slightly off-key.

“Zedediah,” E.D. said, “make him stop!”

“That’s enough now,” Zedediah said to Destiny.

“What’s a goatherd?” Destiny asked.

“A boy who takes the goats up to the pastures in the mountains to feed. And watches out for them. Protects them.”

“And why is he lonely?”

“You’d be lonely, too, if your only friends were goats,” E.D. said as she held out her curriculum notebook to Zedediah. “I’ve checked off everything I’ve finished. My report on the Battle of Gettysburg is all done—I just haven’t had a chance to print it out yet. Jeremy’s been on the computer a lot.”

“We must let him know that you need your time on it, too. Maybe Hal can let him use his sometimes.” Zedediah looked over E.D.’s notebook. “Good. Good. I see you’ve started reading
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.” He turned to Jake. “Have you begun it yet?”

Jake shook his head. “I’m reading
Hamlet
instead. Because of Cordelia’s ballet.” He could tell by the look on her face that E.D. hadn’t read
Hamlet
yet. Good. He’d actually be ahead of her on something then.

“How far have you gotten in it?”

“Not that far. It’s slow going. I’ve been taking it with me to rehearsals, but it’s hard to concentrate there.”

“I hope you aren’t going to let your role in
The Sound of Music
interfere with your schoolwork. We
have an obligation to your grandfather to be sure you do a little learning while you’re here, you know.”

Zedediah was giving him that look again. Was he warning Jake that the show could get snatched away from him like a cigarette or his headphones? “We only have rehearsals at night,” Jake said. “I can read it during the day.”

“Good.”

“I’ve finished the Butterfly Project, though,” Jake said.

“You can’t have!” E.D. protested. “It was already done.”

Jake went to the aquarium and whisked away the newspapers. “This is a different way—a better way—to do the Teaching Opportunity. Destiny can see the whole process of metamorphosis—in real life.”

E.D. stared into the aquarium. “What are those?” She looked more carefully. “Black swallowtails?”

Jake nodded, humming “The Lonely Goatherd” quietly to himself.

“Are those worm thingies going to gets to be butterflies?” Destiny asked. Jake nodded again. “And do I gets to see them grow their wings?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yay, Jake!”

Jake smiled at E.D., who glowered back at him. Score one for the delinquent kid.