The telephone rang at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, in the dim, candle-smelling apartment on Brook Street, where Theda had been sitting at the kitchen table since noon with the black cassette in front of her and a legal pad on which she had written NEW YORK at the top of one column and PROVIDENCE at the top of the other and nothing at all underneath either one.
"He was here," said Filomena Teixeira, without hello. "Your bus driver. Ten o'clock this morning, I'm still putting the money in the register. He walks in, he goes straight to the back, he stands in front of the Oldies. He stands there. Five minutes. Then he comes up to the counter and he asks me do I have It Happened One Night." A pause, rich with Azorean contempt. "I said, Nicola, you own it. He said he knows. He said he just wanted to see if it was there."
Theda said nothing. She held the receiver against her ear with both hands.
"Then he rented Tootsie," said Filomena. "Hoffman in a dress. He'll bring it back. That man always brings it back." Another pause. "Curtain's at eight. St. Benedict's on Atwells. I'm going. Amadeu likes the cannoli at the intermission, the ladies' guild makes them. Sit on the left side, the radiator on the right side bangs."
The parish hall of St. Benedict's was a long, high-ceilinged room in the basement of the church, with a stage at one end hung with red velvet curtains donated in 1952 by a funeral parlor, and a hundred and forty folding chairs set up in rows on a floor still marked for basketball. By ten minutes to eight every one of them was full. Theda sat on the left side, in the sixth row, between Filomena Teixeira in her fire-engine cardigan and a large woman in black who turned out to be Nonna Rosaria and who told Theda, before the lights went down, that Carmela's brother Nicola was a good boy but no Clark Gable, and was Theda married, and why not. Cosmo Zito was in the fourth row with his wife, who wore a hat. Barney Coelho was standing at the back in his RIPTA uniform, having come straight off his shift.
Then the lights went down, and the funeral-parlor curtain jerked open in two uneven halves, and there was a yacht, which was painted on a bedsheet, and a girl named Mimi Furtado from the Atwells Avenue bakery in a white satin gown from somebody's prom, slapping a man who sold Oldsmobiles and was playing her father, and then there was a bus.
The bus was eight folding chairs in two rows of four, with a steering wheel from a junked Chevrolet bolted to a sawhorse at the front, and when Nicky DeLuca came stumbling on from the wings in a battered fedora and a rumpled suit with his tie pulled loose, telling off his editor down a toy telephone, Theda found that she had stopped breathing.
He was not Clark Gable. Nonna Rosaria was right about that. He was too big and too gentle and his ears were all wrong. But he was loud and quick and rude and funny, and he went at every line as if he didn't care whether it broke, and when he dunked his doughnut in the first act, in front of a hundred and forty people, it stayed in one piece. He lifted it out of the cup with a flourish and took a bite and turned and, for one half of one second, looked straight out past the footlights into the sixth row on the left, and the audience, who knew nothing about it, burst into applause.
"He's been practicing," said Filomena.
At intermission there were cannoli. Theda did not eat one. She sat in her folding chair and watched the curtain.
In the second act came the auto camp: two cots, a clothesline, an army blanket, and the Walls of Jericho going up to great laughter. And then the lights went down to one blue lamp, and Mimi Furtado lay on her cot on one side of the blanket and asked, in the dark, whether he had ever been in love, and Nicky DeLuca lay on his back on the other cot with one arm under his head and began to talk about an island in the Pacific.
He did not read it like the specials at a restaurant. He did not read it at all. He lay with his face turned toward the edge of the stage, toward the sixth row on the left, and he said every word of it slowly and plainly, as if they were his own words, as if he had found them that morning standing in front of a shelf in a video store and had decided, finally, to say them out loud: the water and the sky, the place where one ended and the other began, the girl who would be hungry for that, the girl who would swim out into it with him. The parish hall had gone so quiet that Theda could hear the radiator on the right side banging, just as she'd been warned. Nonna Rosaria took out a handkerchief. When he finished, nobody clapped. Nobody moved. And then from somewhere in the back Barney Coelho said, "Atta boy, DeLuca," in a voice that broke on the boy, and the whole room let out its breath at once.
At the end the stage went dark, and from the wings came a single blast on a trumpet, played by a seventy-four-year-old priest who had once been the pride of the CYO band and had lost none of his lungs, and the hall shook with it, and the lights came up, and everybody stood.
It took her a long time to get backstage. There were a great many relatives, and ladies from the guild with trays, and a small boy with a scraped chin who stood in the doorway to the wings with his arms folded like a bouncer, until Theda said, "You're Rocco," and he said, "Who wants to know," and she said, "I can show you how to take apart a cassette with five screws," and he stood aside.