my family in public, I’ll tell you that.
FELIX: YOU never sewed on a button, either. You never hugged or kissed me.
EMMA: Who could blame me?
FELIX: You never did anything a mother’s supposed to do.
DWAYNE: Just tell me more about why you cried!
FELIX: We were raised by servants—do you know that? This lady here ought to get switches and coal every Mother’s Day! My brother and I know so much about black people and so little about white people, we should be in a minstrel show.
DWAYNE: He really is crazy, isn’t he?
FELIX: Amos ‘n’ Andy.
EMMA: I have never been so humiliated in my life, and as a younger woman I have traveled all over this world.
DWAYNE: At least you never had a wife commit suicide. Or a husband.
EMMA: I know you’ve been through so much, and then all this on top of it.
DWAYNE: I don’t know what part of the world you could have visited, where having the person you were married to commit suicide wasn’t the most humiliating thing that could happen.
EMMA: YOU go back to your friends. And again, I’m so ashamed of my son, I wish he were dead. Go back to your friends.
DWAYNE: Those people back there? You know something? I think maybe I would have come walking out here alone, even if you hadn’t been out here. If you hadn’t given me a logical place to stop, I might have kept walking until I was in Katmandu. I’m the only person in town who hasn’t been to Katmandu. My dentist’s been to Katmandu.
EMMA: YOU go to Herb Stacks, too?
DWAYNE: Sure. Celia, too—or used to.
EMMA: I wonder why we never met there?
FELIX: Because he uses Gleem toothpaste with Fluoristan.
EMMA: I can’t be responsible for what he says. I can’t imagine how he got control of an entire major television network.
DWAYNE: Celia never told me that you and she were sweethearts. That was her big complaint right up to the end, you know—that nobody had ever loved her, so why should she even go to the dentist anymore?
EMMA: Radio, too. He was also in charge of radio.
FELIX: You’re interrupting an important conversation—as usual. Mr. Hoover—yes, Celia and I were not only sweethearts in high school, but I realized there in church that she was the only woman I had ever loved, and maybe the only woman I will ever love. I hope I have not offended you.
DWAYNE: I’m glad. I may not look glad, but I am glad. They’re going to honk the horn of the hearse any minute—to tell me to hurry up, that the cemetery’s about to close. She was like this Rolls-Royce here, you know?
FELIX: The most beautiful woman I ever knew. No offense, no offense.
DWAYNE: No offense. Anybody who wants to can say she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw. You should have married her, not me.
FELIX: I wasn’t worthy of her. Look at the dent I put in the Rolls-Royce.
DWAYNE: YOU scraped up against something blue.
FELIX: Listen. She lasted a lot longer with you than she would have lasted with me. I’m one of the worst husbands there ever was.
DWAYNE: Not as bad as me. I just ran away from her, she was so unhappy, and I didn’t know what to do about it—and there wasn’t anybody else to take her off my hands. I’m good for selling cars. I can really sell cars. I can fix cars. I can really fix cars. But I sure couldn’t fix that woman. Never even knew where to get the tools. I put her up on blocks and forgot her. I only wish you’d come along in time to rescue the both of us. But you did me a big favor today. At least I don’t have to think my poor wife went all the way through life without finding out what love was.
FELIX: Where am I? What have I said? What have I done?
DWAYNE: You come on along to the cemetery. I don’t care if you’re crazy or not. You’ll make this automobile dealer feel a little bit better, if you’ll just cry some more—while we put my poor wife in the ground.
(Curtain.)
26
WE ALL SEE our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that