Cyclorama, page 29
In front of the high school, a WGN news truck was parked in a loading zone and a reporter was interviewing one of about a dozen protesters incensed because AF featured a multiracial cast and was apparently using Anne Frank to criticize U.S. immigration policy. A rabbi held a small prayer book; a kid, maybe fifteen, wearing a dark suit, a red tie, and an American flag lapel pin, carried a handmade sign: IT’S A JEWISH THING; YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.
“Clueless bastards,” Adrian Weekes muttered to his wife.
Carrie tugged him into the school by the sleeve of his leather coat. “Come on.”
“Seriously,” Adrian said. “Someone’s gotta talk some sense into these morons’ heads.”
“They have the right to protest,” said Carrie.
“Yeah, they do.” Adrian said. “And if they don’t see the connection between what’s happening now and what happened then, it’s my right to call them a bunch of ignorant, xenophobic zealots who should be the first we load onto boxcars. You know, the best thing about Hillary losing the election?”—Adrian said “Hillary” like a swear word, uttered it with the same dripping contempt with which he said “neoliberal,” “women’s march,” “Zionism,” or “9/11”—“at least now all this bullshit is out in the open. There’s no doubt anymore who the good and bad guys are.”
When they got up to the Annex, Carrie found her place at the back of the line of students, parents, and faculty waiting to get into the theater, then noticed that Adrian wasn’t standing beside her. He was leaning against the closed door of a classroom, fiddling with his phone. She walked over to him. “Didn’t we say no phones tonight?” she asked.
“We said no phones for you; I’m not addicted to mine,” said Adrian. “I just gotta deal with this last-minute bullshitty client thing. Go in; I’ll catch up.”
Carrie often found it strange, the way Adrian seemed to have little to do with his days, then suddenly after dinner and on weekends he would sneak away to field calls for Feng Over Function, his interior design business. But whenever she asked why his clients couldn’t call during normal work hours, he’d get defensive and say she didn’t understand how his job worked and he could just as easily ask why she worked twelve-hour days and never took vacations. Then Kitty would plead with them to stop arguing, so Carrie would just let it go. During the first years of their life together, Adrian had been so charming, thoughtful, and romantic that she figured marriage would be the one area in her life where she wouldn’t have to work hard. Oh, well—at least he was still sweet to Kitty.
The thought that he might be having an affair did briefly enter her mind from time to time. But she couldn’t understand how people with careers and families had the time for infidelity. Leave aside the question of the immorality of the act or the casual cruelty of it; she couldn’t fathom the logistics. Like, where did affairs even happen—and how? And if her worst fears were right and she confronted him, where would that lead? Arguments, therapy, couples counseling, lawyers. The whole thing sounded so emotionally draining and time-consuming that she couldn’t bear to think about it.
She excuse me’d and thank you’d her way into her row, unable to remember the last time she’d been in a theater. It wasn’t so much that she felt immune or indifferent to art as much as she never allowed herself the time or space to stop and experience it: Kitty often said that the only song her mother knew was the theme to All Things Considered. There had been a time when Carrie went to movies and concerts with Adrian and Kitty, but the two of them got so annoyed with her checking her phone or leaving midway through that she let them just go on their own.
Carrie hadn’t been in this particular auditorium for more than thirty years, but whatever had happened during that long-ago time when she was more or less the same age Kitty was now didn’t occupy her thoughts for long. When you had so many things to think about—patient histories, management challenges, fundraising drives—it was easy to put off other unpleasant topics. Like the fact that Tyrus Densmore had taught here for more than three decades after she’d graduated and, no matter how many parents’ associations and community boards Carrie had sat on, she’d never said a word about him. Like the fact that soon Kitty would be leaving home for college, and then it would just be her, Adrian, and the dog at home, and what would they have to talk about then?
Carrie was busily trying to shove that particular line of thought into the compartment where she relegated other topics she preferred to avoid when she saw a woman walking toward her, wearing a series of wraps, leggings, a black YOUR FUTURE IS FEMALE; MY PRESENT ALREADY IS T-shirt and pointy, paint-splattered, black shit-kicker boots that peeked out from underneath skirts and slips; there were so many layers, it was difficult to figure out exactly what her outfit was and what function each article of clothing was performing. The woman’s jet-black hair, only a few tinselly strands of silver in it, was bunched atop her head in a loose bun held in place by chopsticks.
“If it isn’t my sweet little Anne!” Judith said.
“Mom!” Carrie laughed, and the two women embraced.
As teenagers, they had always felt a little frightened around each other: to Carrie, Judith had been the epitome of bohemian cool and experience; to Judith, Carrie had been a paragon of virtue and intelligence that she could never match. But now that they were adults and mothers of teenage girls, conversation was effortless, joyful, particularly for Carrie, who by now had pretty much forfeited the luxury of friendships.
“I can’t wait for you to see your girl up there; she’s a natural,” Judith said, and Carrie knew this was probably true. In her youth, she had excelled at everything she tried, but only because she was so scared of failing that she spent as many hours as was necessary to make sure she succeeded. Whereas somehow Kitty was able to do all Carrie ever could plus more while watching Black Mirror, playing Minecraft on her phone, and sleeping until noon on weekends.
“Are your girls here tonight?” Carrie asked. Judith pointed them out, and there seemed to be an enviable effortlessness to them too: a pair of funky kids with dyed hair, wearing vintage dresses, bright, patterned tights, and sneakers, whispering to each other and giggling.
They made plans for after the show: Judith and her wife and kids were going out with the cast for pizza, and Carrie said of course she and Adrian would love to join.
“I’d say we should all go to Yesterday’s like we used to, but Yesterday’s closed down,” Judith said. “How’s that for symbolism?”
Carrie laughed freely. She kept smiling when she saw Adrian looking peeved as he entered their row, but her smile started to feel forced, as if she were trying to convince both Judith and herself that she could feel as relaxed when he was around as when he was elsewhere. Adrian gave Judith a perfunctory handshake but didn’t say much, so Carrie talked up his business until it became obvious to her and probably to Judith that she was talking only to compensate for Adrian’s negative energy. She wanted so much for others to see all the potential in the creative, unpretentious, and surprisingly shy man she was spending her life with, and felt disappointed when they didn’t. If only Adrian could feng shui himself as easily as he could an office space.
Judith told Carrie it had been good to catch up, but the show was about to start and she was going up to the lighting booth to watch. “Your wife’s a wonderful woman,” she told Adrian. “You’re lucky to have her.”
“Everyone is,” said Adrian.
At the back of the stage, the cyclorama faded into view, suggesting the wall the president wanted to build on the United States’ southern border—black with red-white-and-blue graffiti spray-painted on it: AMERICA FIRST; COPS LIVES MATTER; MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Over the PA system, the sounds of ambulances and helicopters were interspersed with bursts of speeches and radio broadcasts: Hitler at the Berlin Sportpalast; Mussolini declaring war on France and Great Britain; Trump on the campaign trail: “Get ’em outta here; get ’em the hell outta here.” Speeches, sirens, and bootsteps crescendoed; then the image on the cyclorama shifted, and everything looked the same but in German: MACH DEUTSCHLAND WIEDER GROSSARTIG.
Otto Frank and Miep Gies entered. He was a big kid in navy-blue slacks and a light-blue short-sleeved bus driver shirt with a CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY patch on one sleeve; she wore tight jeans, Converse sneakers, and a red Chicago Blackhawks jersey with GIES and the uniform number 1943 on it. She pulled the jersey over her head and he unbuttoned his shirt; they tossed them onto the floor with the rest of the clothes, then picked up their outfits—Mr. Frank, a white shirt and frayed dark suit jacket; Miep, a dowdy, loose-fitting gray dress. More actors entered, shedding street clothes then donning costumes, seeming to inhabit both present and past.
For Carrie, watching the actors enter and change was a little like watching a dream—not that she tended to remember her dreams. She was seeing something happening now and long ago, she knew these people and yet they were strangers, the story they were about to tell was unfamiliar yet one she knew by heart.
Could it be that Franklin was right after all? she wondered as the houselights dimmed. When he had suggested she had chosen her career because of what she had seen in the Annex, she told him he was being simplistic and presumptuous, but now she wasn’t so sure. Why else did the angry voices spewing hate through the auditorium speakers fuse in her mind with the sound of Tyrus Densmore in this Annex—mocking, threatening, humiliating? And why else did the fear, anger, and weary resignation she saw on the faces of the actors as they took their places remind her of those same emotions she’d seen in her fellow actors on the last night they’d performed this play? And why did everyone up onstage remind her of someone she had cared for—a patient she had treated, a grieving family member she had tried to comfort, someone she wanted to speak up for because she remembered a time when she couldn’t?
In fact, the only person who didn’t seem entirely familiar was her own daughter.
Kitty was last to enter. A baby spotlight shone on her, sitting in her bed, writing in a diary as if she had been there all this while, as if she were always there—watching, writing.
“Things went well for us. Then the war came.”
Carrie had been keeping herself together fairly well, but the moment she heard her daughter’s voice, she shivered and started to sob. She had almost forgotten what crying felt like. Whenever she felt herself about to cry for someone she read about or saw in a movie, she reminded herself of all the patients she encountered every day, and if she cried for them, she would never be able to stop. She had learned to be stoic, to keep her eyes dry, her face immobile when patients told her of seeing friends murdered, families ripped apart, parents dying of diseases that should have been eradicated years ago.
But as she watched Kitty—twirling in a skirt, admiring herself in a mirror, fighting with Mrs. Van Daan over that stupid coat—she wept as she hadn’t since she was a child. For she now understood that the way Kitty seemed up onstage—trapped, frightened, trying to hide her pain from her parents—must have been the way she felt at home sometimes, trying to make her mother believe that everything was all right so she could go off and save the world.
So much of the Kitty up onstage seemed truer than the one she knew—the angry outbursts, the impassioned sighs, the emotions Kitty felt but never let her see—the same way Carrie had kept her inner life secret from her own parents until that first semester at Stanford when her father visited her and saw how skinny she had gotten. “Do you get eight hours of sleep?” he asked shortly before he drove her to the health center. “You mean in a week?” Carrie asked.
Onstage, Mrs. Frank sent her husband to comfort Anne—“It’s you she wants!”—then collapsed in tears.
Carrie could understand the pain Anne’s mother felt—being so close to someone yet having no clue what they were feeling or thinking, knowing you might never be able to help. Any day the Nazis might break down your door and you’d never know any more than you did now; any day your daughter would leave home and you’d never have more answers than you already did.
She watched Anne up in the annex with Peter—Kitty with a boy half a foot shorter than her.
“Did you change your mind, the way I changed my mind about you?”
“Well—you’ll see.”
How often had Carrie and Franklin rehearsed that scene—backstage; in Franklin’s family’s apartment after she’d broken up with Declan; in the basement of Beth Shalom; up in her bedroom with her father tapping on the door every ten minutes: Did they want snacks? Something to drink? “No, Dad; no, it’s fine, thanks.” Carrie had come to think she understood Anne and Peter so well that, during the few months she and Franklin dated—before her father took her and the family to California for a year; before she went to Stanford and Franklin had gone off to Columbia; before she had served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon; before Carrie had come to believe that they would never wind up in the same place—she felt as if the spirits of Peter and Anne could live on within them. And after she had abandoned that dream, she thought their spirits could live on in Kitty in a perfect world she’d create for her, one built on trust and love.
When she learned that Kitty had been cast as Anne, she thought she might have actually succeeded. But now, watching her daughter—those mournful silences as eloquent as any words she spoke—she knew she was wrong. Who even was this girl? Was it too late for them to be as close as they once had been?
Anne and Peter leaned in as if to kiss, but they stopped before their lips touched. Two police officers in riot gear were pointing automatic weapons at them. Downstairs, the Franks and Van Daans had their hands in the air—Gestapo agents in black coats and boots were waiting.
Anne began to give her final speech, but she was soon drowned out by marching boots, by gunshots and sirens, by voices crackling over walkie-talkies. The actors onstage froze. They looked straight out at the audience. The stage lights burst on bright.
Carrie remembered the final moments of the Anne Frank she had starred in, how Densmore had made the characters’ lives seem so utterly hopeless, as if they were locked inside a tragedy they would never escape. How trapped she had felt on the stage that last night—Densmore judging her, Declan watching her. When she first knew Declan, he had seemed like such a creative, vulnerable, funny, romantic kid until he became tortured, needy, and insecure—always having to touch her, always demanding reassurance. Back then, she had thought only how annoying all that was; she had been too young to step back and ask where Declan had learned to act that way and who had taught him. Yet the answer must have been somewhere in the back of her mind all along, there with all the other abuses she hadn’t allowed herself to think about until Declan started talking about them and Franklin wrote about them for the Tomorrow. Why else had Carrie told her daughter that, of all the dangerous places in the world, this was the one where she wasn’t allowed to go?
Still, in the image Judith had created—the Franks, the Van Daans, and the rest of the cast staring into the eyes of the audience as if they were all part of one family—there was a beauty and a sense of connection, of characters reaching out across time so that you could almost begin to feel the words that Anne turned around to spray-paint in phosphorescent white on the cyclorama: IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, I STILL BELIEVE . . .
The lights dimmed slowly, and there was silence. Soon only the words remained, glowing in the dark.
The auditorium stayed that way—quiet and black—for a long time. And in that silence Carrie vowed that she would be more straightforward, more honest—would make sure that, no matter how busy she was, her daughter would come first. She started to wipe her tears—no, she thought as she stood to applaud while Adrian headed for the exit; no, she’d leave them there. Pretending she hadn’t been crying was just another sort of lie.
But after the show, when Kitty walked out the backstage door into the Annex hallway with the rest of the cast, and Carrie ran to her, Kitty didn’t seem to register her mother’s tears. The fact that her mother had stayed for the whole show seemed even more confusing than the fact that she’d apparently been crying. “Why’re you still here?” Kitty asked.
“Shouldn’t I be?” asked Carrie.
“You haven’t checked your phone?”
“No. It’s been off the whole time. What’s going on?”
“Check your phone,” said Kitty.
“Whatever it is can wait. Dad and I are going out with you and the cast and Judith and the kids.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna be happening,” Kitty said. “Check. Your. Phone.”
Carried turned on her phone and looked at the display. “Oh, Jesus.”
Kitty smiled, a blend of “Sorry” and “Told you so.”
“How did you hear about this?” Carrie asked.
“From the news,” said Kitty. “I got an alert.”
Carrie looked at her daughter through new tears. “I’m sorry, Kit.” She walked to the stairwell and scrolled through her alerts—eight missed calls and half a dozen texts, all from the clinic:
Carrie, can you give us a call over here? Don’t mean to bug you on your night off.
Then: Hey, call us when you get this. This is seriously messed up.
And later: We need you down here, C.
The second-to-last message: R u ok?
Finally: ?
She called her voice mail. The messages were tough to hear—too many people walking by, chattering. She faced the wall, pressed her phone tight over one ear, the palm of her hand over the other. She could still make out only half of what was being said, and there were too many pronouns to understand completely: “They’re here.” “We’re gonna have to get outta here.” “Call us when you get this.”
