Tell-All

Pearl Harbor , Miss Kathielaughs. Kissing the boy on his lips, she says, “Close but no cigar … I’m Lillian Hellman.”
    Before another note from the orchestra, Miss Kathie leaps to slam an artillery round into the massive deck gun. Wheeling the enormous barrel, she tracks a diving Aichi bomber, aligning the crosshairs of her gun sight. Her sailor whites artfully stained and shredded by Adrian Adolph Greenberg , her bleeding wounds suggested by sparkling patches of crimson sequins and rhinestones sewn around each bullet hole. Singing the opening bars of her big song, Miss Kathie fires the shell, blasting the enemy aircraft into a blinding burst of papier-mâché.
    From offscreen a voice shouts, “Stop!” A female voice shouts, cutting through the violins and French horns, the rockets and machine-gun fire, shouting, “For fuck’s sake, stop!” A woman comes stomping down the center aisle of the theater, one arm lifted, wielding a script rolled as tight as a police officer’s billy club.
    The orchestra grinds to silence. The singers stop, their voices trailing off. The dancers slow to a standstill, and the fighter jets hang, stalled, limp in midair, from invisible wires.
    From the stage apron, in the reverse angle, we see this shouting woman is Lillian Hellman herself as she says, “You’re ruining history! For the love of Anna Q. Nilsson , I happen to be
right-handed
!”
    In this same reverse angle, we see that the theater is almost empty. King Vidor and Victor Fleming sit in the fifth row with their heads huddled together, whispering. Farther back, I sit in the empty auditorium next to Terrence Terry , both of us balancing infants on our respective laps. Clustered on the floor around our chairs, other foundlings squirm and droolin wicker baskets. Chubby pink hands shake various rattles, these
kinder
occupying most of the surrounding seats.
    “You’d better hope this show flops,” says Terrence Terry , bouncing a gurgling orphan on his knee. “By the way, where is our lethal Lothario?”
    I tell him that Webb would have to truly hate Miss Kathie after what happened yesterday.
    Onstage, Lilly Hellman shouts, “Everybody, listen! Let’s start over.” Hellman shouts, “Let’s take it from the part where the kamikaze fighters of the Japanese Imperial Army swoop low over Honolulu in order to rain their deadly fiery cargo of searing death on Constance Talmadge.”
    The Webster specimen is currently undergoing treatment at Doctors Hospital . Just to escape the town house, Miss Kathie’s going into rehearsal, and Webster Carlton Westward III is recovering from minor lacerations to his arms and torso.
    Terry says, “Fingernail scratches?”
    At the house, I say, the nurses keep arriving. The nuns and social workers. The fresh castoff infants continue to be delivered, and Miss Kathie declines to choose. In the past few days, each baby seems less like a blessing and more like an adorable time bomb. No matter how much you love and cuddle one, it still might grow up to become Mercedes McCambridge . Regardless of all the affection you shower on a child, it still might break your heart by becoming Sidney Skolsky . All of your nurturing and worry and careful attention might turn out another Noel Coward . Or saddle humanity with a new Alain Resnais . You need only look at Webb and see how no amount of Miss Kathie’s love will redeem him.
    Wrapped around one wrist, the foundling I hold wears abeaded bracelet reading, UNCLAIMED BOY INFANT NUMBER THIRTY-FOUR .
    It’s ludicrous, the idea of me raising a child, not while I still have my Miss Kathie to parent. A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you’re planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.
    “Don’t look at me,” Terry says, juggling an orphan. “I’m busy trying to raise myself.”
    Despite repeatedly sidestepping possible death by bus accident and dinner at the Cub Room with Lilly Hellman, Miss Katie has invited Webb to share her town house—so that we might better monitor future drafts of his book-in-progress. She confessed, knowing now how Webster was actually a psychotic killer, a ruthless scheming slayer, now their sex life was more passionate than ever.
    It was Webb who brought this stage project to Miss Kathie, gave her the script to read and told her she’d be ideal as the brash, ballsy Hellman