Christopher Beha: Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

All this talk about the privilege of attending such a place had accentuated the feeling that he didn’t quite belong there. But that had changed when the drama teacher, Mr. Carlton, started casting him in plays. Eddie wouldn’t even have auditioned without the twisted ankle that kept him off the basketball court one winter with nothing to do after school. His success had solidified his long-standing but intermittent friendship with Blakeman, the most popular kid in the grade. The two of them and Justin Price formed the nucleus of an “artistic” clique — Blakeman the writer, Eddie the actor, and Justin the musician — that came to dominate their class at St. Albert’s through their high school years. It was then that Blakeman began calling him “Handsome Eddie,” and the name caught on. Eddie understood it wasn’t entirely a compliment, but who didn’t want to be handsome? Another member of their circle, Eddie Doyle, became “Bright Eddie,” because he was in the honors sections and Handsome Eddie was undistinguished in the classroom.

Now Bright Eddie was fighting in Afghanistan and Handsome Eddie was a teacher. He expected his old friend to appreciate the irony of this, but no one seemed surprised when he first took the job. The mediocre student was precisely the one destined to stay in the classroom, the unspoken assumption seemed to go. The smart ones earned enough money to send their sons to the school.

Graduation started at three, and it was after two thirty by the time Eddie had finished boxing up his papers and the props he used for acting exercises. He went straight downstairs and crossed the street to St. Agnes Church. Susan had already found an open pew inside, and she knelt with her eyes closed. She wasn’t ostentatious about her faith — they’d dated for weeks before he had any idea how important it was to her — but she couldn’t enter a church without saying at least a short prayer. Eddie always wondered what went through her head at these times. He didn’t much understand how prayer worked, though of course he could recite various standards. What Susan did was more in the way of improvisation, Eddie imagined, and he’d never had much talent for that.

As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him. Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage, and it might have been more than a matter of logistics that had led him to give up altar service just as he started acting in his first play. In the decade after he graduated from St. Albert’s — the years of his life with Martha and his acting career — he went to church no more than twice a year, at Christmas and Easter with his parents. If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish — it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.

His teaching career had brought religion back to his life in a superficial way. School days opened in the chapel on the second floor, which had stained-glass windows, wooden pews, and a small pipe organ. The sessions began and ended with a hymn, but what passed in between was more assembly than religious ceremony. Each morning a different teacher gave a “chapel speech,” not a sermon or homily so much as a general didactic pep talk. Every faculty member was required to give at least two of these a year.

Eddie did the minimum. He didn’t think he had much in the way of advice to give, having come back to St. Albert’s because he’d made such a mess of his life. The best he could offer were cautionary tales. But he found that the boys appreciated funny stories from his own student days, which he could shape in a way that suggested some moral, usually not one the events had suggested at the time. He never brought up God or faith in these talks. He didn’t have anything to say on those subjects.

He’d been dating Susan for a few months when she invited him to mass one Sunday, and he’d been going with her ever since. He wasn’t sure he believed the story the church was selling, but he liked about it the same thing he’d liked about acting: the understanding that someone was watching, that every action had a purpose and a meaning. Like Susan herself, it had come into his life at a time when he needed it. She had brought him back from a desperate place. What’s more, she had not even known she was doing so. She’d done it just by being herself. When things weren’t going well between them these days, he tried to remind himself of that.

Susan rose from the kneeler and opened her eyes just as the organ in the back brought the crowd to attention. The fifty-three members of the graduating class processed up the center aisle, singing the school song. Eddie watched them take their seats in the front three pews. They had been in seventh grade — little boys really — when Eddie started teaching. They’d been completely altered since he’d first met them. As had he, Eddie thought.

He remembered his own graduation, his mother’s pride at the idea that he would be the first in his family to go to college. Many more firsts were expected to follow. After he left NYU as a sophomore to act, his parents used the rest of the money they’d saved for tuition on a down payment for a house in Florida and took to expressing relief, when he called them there, that at least he hadn’t killed any girls in the park.

The pastor, Father Seneviratne, gave a brief blessing before welcoming Luce to the lectern. Hungover as Eddie was, he found it mercifully easy to ignore the man’s drone while dancing on the fuzzy edge of consciousness. Susan’s elbow brought him to attention when necessary. Luce finished by calling up Patrick Hendricks, the class’s valedictorian.

Patrick was Eddie’s favorite student, the only one in five years to show genuine, if modest, talent for acting. Eddie had tried to encourage him within reason, but he’d been glad to learn that Patrick was going to Dartmouth next year, which seemed far enough away from the temptations of professional work. He would be in a few student productions before finding other interests. After the usual introductory business, Patrick described his pride at representing his class, his love of St. Albert’s, which he’d attended since first grade, and his excitement for himself and his classmates as they embarked on the next stage of life. Eddie only came to real attention when he heard his own name.

“When I was a freshman, Mr. Hartley cast me in The Skin of Our Teeth. The very night the casting list went up, I went home and saw him on TV, in an episode of Murder Squad .”

This story was new to Eddie, and he wondered whether it was strictly true or altered somewhat for dramatic effect. His few guest spots on television didn’t make the air much, though this was the second time in as many days that someone had mentioned seeing one.

“Here was this real actor,” Patrick continued, “a professional actor teaching me how to do this thing. And I thought, I want to be like Mr. Hartley.”

By now Patrick had found Eddie’s pew, and he was looking at him as he spoke. Eddie smiled weakly back at him before looking down. Patrick was completely serious, in his way. But of course he didn’t really want to be like Eddie. He wanted to be the person Eddie had wanted to be at Patrick’s age, the person Eddie would have been if things had turned out differently.

Eddie gazed at the worn marble of the floor beneath him. Someone watching might have thought he was simply flattered or moved by pride, but his chest was tightening and he felt suddenly out of breath. The feeling didn’t subside as Patrick went on to other things, thanking his family and dropping a few inside jokes for the benefit of his friends, before ending on an earnest note of thanks.