“And that’s a pity, mm?” Mr. Beeber says.
PRACTICE
Leo needs someone to rehearse with him at home. It is not enough to know the lines; it is also important to know when to say them, so that he will not be blurting (or glurting) them out at inappropriate times.
He asks Contento if she will read with him.
CONTENTO:
I have too much homework! Go away!
LEO:
Pietro?
PIETRO:
A play? Yuk!
LEO:
Nunzio?
NUNZIO:
I have to thave my voithe for choir.
MOM:
Scoot, scoot, I’m busy, can’t you see?
PAPA:
Sardine, your papa is having a headache, very big one.
And so Leo rehearses alone, reading the whole play, all the lines, and when he comes to his own old crone lines, he steps forward and loads them with extra feeling. He rehearses in the bathroom because all the other rooms are occupied with people doing homework and watching television and ironing and having headaches.
When the telephone rings, Leo tries to block out the noise. When can an actor find time to rehearse in peace?
PIETRO:
(knocking on bathroom door) Sardine! Open up! I have to go. Now!
And five minutes later:
NUNZIO:
(kicking bathroom door) Old crone, old crone, let me in!
And five minutes later:
CONTENTO:
(beating on door) Fog boy! What on earth are you doing in there? I want to take a bath! Now!
When he next sees his father:
PAPA:
Sardine, come here. What’s this I hear about you being in a play?
LEO:
Yep.
PAPA:
You didn’t want to try out for football, like Pietro?
LEO:
Nope.
PAPA:
And what role do you have in this play?
LEO:
I’m the old crone.
PAPA:
What’s that you say?
LEO:
I’m the old crone.
PAPA:
But—that’s an old woman.
LEO:
I know.
PAPA:
(raising his hands in dismay) I give up.
CONTENTO:
Sardine! Phone for you—
LEO:
(on phone) Yes?
VOICE:
Hello, Leo. I’m a talent scout—I was in the audience at rehearsal, and I’d like to sign you up, on the spot, to play the lead in a new film!
CONTENTO:
Hey, sardine! Get your lazy self in here and set the table!
LEO:
I’m not a sardine! Quit calling me that. I’m Leo. Leo!
CONTENTO:
Whatever, fog boy.
LEAPING
After dinner, Leo lies on his bed. The room, with its three beds and two dressers, is in its usual state: blankets and clothing on the floor, towels draped over a chair, a muddy football on the windowsill. Leo is trying to read. He has made his way through three pages of his father’s Autobiography, Age of Thirteen, but stops when Contento flies into the room in one of her rages.
He has read the part where his father lists all the people in his family—his mother, father, four sisters (Angela, Maddalena, Carmella, and Rosaria) and three brothers (Paolo, Guido, and Carlo). Leo knows all these aunties and uncles except one: Rosaria. Never heard of Rosaria. Never!
In his father’s book, at the top of the first page is CAST LIST. Next to each name, his father has added a note:
Angela . . . . . . . .
My oldest sister, temperamental
Maddalena . . . . .
My sister, loud
Carmella . . . . . . .
My sister, jealous
Rosaria . . . . . . . .
My youngest sister, happy
When Contento clomps into the room in search of Pietro, Leo hides the book and zips down the stairs and out onto the front porch. He leaps from the top of the porch to the grass, races across the yard to the maple tree, climbs halfway up, pauses on a good sitting branch, and surveys the territory (his house; the yard; the neighbors’ houses, all big and old like his). Then: back down the tree, running alongside the house and sprinting down one side of the backyard, around the mossy birdbath, and back up alongside his father’s vegetable garden. From there: up the pear tree and onto the top of the garage, across the garage roof, leaping down again to the grass, sprinting down the driveway and back to the porch. Ta-da! Leo rests for a few minutes and begins again, the same route.
On each circuit, the challenge is to see something new, something he hasn’t noticed before. Maybe it is a broken bird’s egg on one round, a dead mouse on another, a sparkly pebble on the next round. On he zooms, searching for the new thing.
On this day, Leo thinks of Rumpopo’s porch, in the play he is rehearsing. When Rumpopo and the children are on his porch and Rumpopo is telling stories, the most wonderful things happen. Out of the air, they create a magnificent palace. In another scene, an emerald feather becomes a glistening emerald table.
Leo leaps from the maple tree onto his horse, laden with golden medallions. Leo is a knight on a quest. Off he goes around the yard, and there in the birdbath, aha! Sparkly stones. A cache of diamonds? Stolen from a fair lady? Up to the mighty fortress to offer his findings to the grateful fair lady.
“Noble Leo,” she says, “how can I ever repay you?”
“There is no need for repayment, fair lady.”
The fair lady smiles at him and places her hand on his sleeve.
When Leo returns to the porch, having completed his quest, he is reminded of his father, age of twelve, sitting on his porch, barefoot, smiling at the camera. Leo imagines him leaping off his porch and running around his house, or gathered there with his invisible (to Leo) sister, Rosaria.
And on Leo’s last round, what he sees is not something in the yard, but something in his mind, a memory, of his father running with Leo around the yard. Papa was wearing a yellow shirt and he was barefoot, and he was holding Leo’s hand, and they were laughing.
THEN AND NOW
When Mr. Beeber meets with the cast, he says they have to get a sense of their characters. “You have to know them, understand them. Try to imagine,” he says, “what they were like when they were young.”
The cast looks puzzled when he says this. It’s easy for Rumpopo, because in the play you find out what he was like when he was young. You learn that he and his sister used to turn the porch and the woods into their stage, where they created the golden palace and the emerald table. But in the play you don’t learn anything about the villagers or the old crone when they were younger. How could you possibly know what they were like then?
“Mr. Beeber, you wrote the play,” Orlando says. “Can’t you tell us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, maybe I don’t know. Or maybe I want to know what you think. An actor has to bring something of himself to the role.”
Ruby, who is playing the front—and talking—half of the donkey, says to Leo, “Hmm, what part of myself is a donkey?”
“There might be some clues in their lines,” Mr. Beeber says. “Are they fearful? Jealous? Why do you think that is? What might have happened to them that made them that way?”
Ruby leans toward Leo. “Beeber really wants me to imagine what this talking donkey was like when it was little?”
So many other actors are complaining about being unable to figure out what their characters were like when they were little that Mr. Beeber slumps into his chair and says, “Okay then. What about you? What were you like when you were younger? Are you exactly like you are now?” He suggests they jot down notes about their younger selves.
Dreadful Melanie Morton is the only one writing. Leo leans over to see what she’s written:
1. I was very cute.
2. I was very sweet.
3. I was very smart.
Leo thinks he might gag.
Mr. Beeber, noticing the cast’s distress, says, “Wait a minute. Wait. I’ve got another idea. Maybe it’s too hard to recognize the difference in your own selves. Try someone else. Try a brother or sister.”
“My brother is a royal pain,” Orlando says.
“But was he always like that?” Mr. Beeber asks.
“Yes.”
“Always? Even when he was a toddler?”
Orlando starts writing. Everyone else is writing, too.
The person Leo really wants to write about is his father. Leo has his father’s very own book about his younger life, so it should be easy to write about him. But as Leo sits there, he realizes that so far, in the Autobiography, Age of Thirteen, his father has mainly talked about everyone else in his family. Leo doesn’t have a clue as to what his papa was like, except that he liked to tap-dance when he was happy.
Mr. Beeber strolls around the room, observing everyone else busily writing. He stops beside Leo and says, “Leo? Nothing yet?”
“I was going to do my father, but—”
“Ah, fathers. Those are hard. You have brothers, right? Try one of those.” As he walks away, he adds, “And when you’ve told about the younger person, describe him or her now. Do you see any connections?” Mr. Beeber leaves this question floating in the air as he returns to his own writing.
PIETRO AND NUNZIO
Pietro is eleven, a year younger than Leo, and when Pietro was very young, still a toddler, he would not go anywhere without Leo, and always he was holding Leo’s hand or crawling into his lap, even though Leo was not much bigger than Pietro was. Pietro wouldn’t sleep in his own bed, either. His mother or father would put him to sleep there, but as soon as they left the room, he’d climb out and appear beside Leo.
PIETRO:
Leo? Need you.
LEO:
You’re supposed to be in your own bed, Papa says.
PIETRO:
Not.
LEO:
Not?
PIETRO:
Not. Not doing.
And so Pietro would climb into bed with Leo, and Pietro was like a warm bear cub, and Leo would tell him the story of What We Did Today, and they would fall asleep like that, crowded in the bed, and sometime in the night, Leo would hear his father come in and remove the bear cub, and it would feel lonely there in Leo’s bed.
Now Pietro is all arms and legs and rough boy in his helmet and shoulder pads, and all he talks about and dreams about is football. Leo doesn’t understand Pietro’s love of football, the smashing bodies, like playing war on the field. Pietro wants only to be with boys who like football, wants nothing to do with his sister—that yukky girl—or with boys who aren’t into sports.
PIETRO:
Girls stink.
LEO:
Girls don’t stink.
PIETRO:
Girls are stupid.
LEO:
Girls aren’t stupid.
Leo tries to raise the level of conversation.
LEO:
Pietro, listen to this. (He reads from a highly intelligent novel.) “High up on the ridge, he could see below fields of golden wheat—”
PIETRO:
Yuk. Stupid.
LEO:
“—and far in the distance, beyond the golden wheat—”
PIETRO:
Barf.
Sometimes at night Leo misses the little Pietro, the one who would say, “Leo. Need you,” and he misses Pietro’s bear-cub self, and Leo wonders if he, Leo, has changed from a cute cub into something revolting, and he wonders if anyone misses the younger him.
Leo walks part of the way home with Ruby. She’s the only one in Leo’s class who is shorter than Leo, and she thinks that’s why she got the part of the donkey. “I’m probably the only kid who would fit into the costume,” she says.
“Who’s going to play the back end of the donkey then?”
“I don’t know,” Ruby says. “Probably some little squirt Beeber rustles up.”
One thing Leo likes about Ruby is that she doesn’t act girly. She has supercurly red hair and pale, pale skin and huge blue eyes, and she always smells good, like soap and oranges. She doesn’t do that giggle-thing that so many girls do, and she doesn’t act moony over guys, and she doesn’t have a fit if she gets wet in the rain.
Ruby says, “So who’d you write about for Beeber?”
Leo tells her about Pietro. “But I don’t think I did it right. I told about Pietro when he was young and Pietro now, but I couldn’t see any connections. It’s like he was one kid when he was little, and he’s a different kid now.”
Ruby says, “Huh.”
“So who did you write about?”
“My brother.”
“Your brother? You have a brother?”
“Had.”
Leo stops. “Had? You mean an older brother who moved away?”
“No, a younger brother.”
“Younger? Did he—did he—”
“Yes. He died.”
Leo feels sick. He feels like such a wimp.
Ruby shakes her head at his pitiful self. “I’ll tell you about it sometime,” she says. “Not now, okay? But listen, I don’t know why I wrote about him. It’s just what came out, but then I couldn’t finish because there is no now-brother. I could tell about what he was like when he was little, but he never got big.”
In his head, Leo sees a little coffin, and he sees Ruby standing over it, and he feels as if he is going to throw up right there on the sidewalk.
Nunzio, the baby of the family, four years younger than Leo, was born with a mass of soft black hair, like a velvety halo all around his head, and the longest, darkest eyelashes, and ebony eyes so dark you felt as if you could fall into them and disappear.
When Nunzio learned to speak, it was with an endearing lisp:
NUNZIO:
Thardine? You help me?
LEO:
With what, Nunzio-bunzio?
NUNZIO:
Tie my thoothe?
LEO:
Your thoothe? Your thoothe are untied? Come here, let me see, Nunzio-bunzio.
And Nunzio would trail along with Contento and Leo and Pietro, snagging one of their hands or shirts, hanging on, toddling merrily along, humming little songs, lo de do, lo de do.
Even now, at eight years old, Nunzio is still the baby, spoiled by all of them, but how can they help it? His lisp seems so much a part of Nunzio that none of his family can bear to correct him, and instead they encourage his babyish language and way of speaking.
NUNZIO:
Thardine? Lithen to me. Lithen to thith thong.
LEO:
You learned a new thong? Okay, go ahead.
NUNZIO:
(Sings, in a clear voice, like beautiful church bells.) “There we go, to the thea, thailing on the waveth—”
LEO:
It’s great, Nunzio.
NUNZIO:
Lithen! Not done! “A-wave, a-wave, a-wave—”
And on Nunzio will go, singing all day long, sometimes beautiful songs, sometimes unintelligible lyrics from popular songs, and at night as Leo goes to sleep, he hears Nunzio humming and singing.
It is easy for Leo to see the connections between Nunzio-then and Nunzio-now. Nunzio is still a happy, singing, lisping kid. But Nunzio is only eight, and Leo hopes he won’t change like Pietro did.
IMPROVISING
The maple tree is the only quiet place today, what with everyone running and shouting and zipping and dashing in the house. There is comfort in the smooth, cool feel of the bark and in the sound of the breeze flipping the leaves. Leo is reviewing his lines for Rumpopo’s Porch.
“Get in character,” the drama teacher, Mr. Beeber, said at the last rehearsal. “Feel the character. Be the character.”
So Leo tries to shrivel up, to be an old crone.
He thinks of Great-grandma before she died, a million wrinkles, hollow cheeks, watery black eyes. Leo sucks in his cheeks, squints his eyes. He curls his fingers, like Great-grandma’s. Hunches his shoulders. Nearly falls off the branch.
The last rehearsal was a disaster. Everyone goofed, even Dreadful Melanie Morton, of the golden hair and freckled nose, playing the part of the abandoned girl, Lucia, who comes to Rumpopo’s house with her brother and their dog. Melanie forgot many lines. The rest of the cast stood around waiting for cues that never came as Mr. Beeber pulled at his collar, saying, “No, back up,” and “Wait, that wasn’t—” and “Stop!” Finally, he said, “You are all going to have to learn to ad-lib, to improvise, if someone forgets his or her lines. You can’t just stand around waiting. The audience will be snoring in the aisles.”
For the rest of rehearsal, when Melanie forgot a word or a line (which was often), off she went, talking about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with the play. Here is the way one scene was supposed to begin:
RUMPOPO:
I am going to the porch now.
LUCIA:
Will you tell us about the green woods again?
Dreadful Melanie Morton, however, forgot her line and decided to improvise: