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part three: Trying Times for Ed Kennedy, 8♠, 9♠, 10♠, J♠, Q♠, K♠ 

Summary: 8♠ clown street. chips. the doorman. and me.  

Ed takes Doorman to surveil 23 Clown Street, the address found in Morris West’s book The Clowns of God. It’s an Italian restaurant named Melusso’s. Over four nights, they sit across the street on a park bench and eat French fries while Ed waits for inspiration. Audrey comes by Ed’s place to express her unease with the changes she detects in their friendship. Ed tries to reassure her, and himself, that they will retain what they have. The taxi-fare runner comes to Ed’s doorway to tell him to be at Melusso’s at 8 p.m. the next night—and to stop eating the fries. When Ed demands to know who sent him, he tersely asks Ed to consider that he’s not the only one getting aces in the mail. Audrey has overheard some of the conversation. Afterward, she asks Ed to tell her the details of his missions but falls asleep after the first one. 

Summary: 9♠ the woman  

Ed parses the messenger’s words from the previous night and realizes they represent a bigger scheme beyond just himself. He goes to the restaurant as instructed. Ed’s mother, Bev, joins a distinguished-looking gentleman who’s waiting for her. His mother looks attractive and confident and Ed sees her as an individual for the first time. Ed thinks of his father, Gregor, who was a hero to Ed throughout his childhood. He feels his mother is betraying his memory. Then he recognizes that he begrudges her happiness because of his own solitary situation. 

Summary: 10♠ front-porch cyclone  

Ed immediately goes to Bev’s home after leaving the restaurant. Ed confrontationally asks if she enjoyed her evening at Melusso’s. She reacts defensively and tries to end Ed’s visit. Ed asks why she hates him and refuses to leave until she gives him an answer. He produces as evidence her double standard, treating his siblings with kindness and him with disrespect. Bev explains that Ed is just like the husband who failed to take her away from her dead end-that life. Ed has similarly not made anything of himself like her other children have. Ed understands it’s not circumstances that hold people back as much as their choices. He asks the momentous question of whether Bev was having an affair while his father was alive. Bev tearfully confirms that she was unfaithful as well as the fact that Gregor knew about it. 

Summary: J♠ a phone call  

Ed calls to check on his mother as a kind of olive branch, a reaching out to let her know he loves her. She abuses him as usual and he knows they are on good terms again. 

Summary: Q♠ the bell street theater  

The Bell Street Theater is located at 39 Bell Street, the marked page in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Ed buys a ticket to see Casablanca. The projectionist/owner Bernie Price falls asleep after the first reel and as an apology offers to show any move he wants the next night, and to bring his girlfriend. Ed chooses Cool Hand Luke. 

Ed reads Wuthering Heights to Milla and prays that she and the real Jimmy are reunited after her death. Ed invites Milla to Christmas dinner at his place. Audrey gets dressed up for the movie date. During the screening, Ed invites Bernie to watch the movie with them. He does join them. Audrey, sitting between the two men, takes their hands. At the reel change, they see someone in the projection booth who escapes, leaving behind a reel marked “Ed.” Ed asks Bernie what’s going on, and Bernie says that whoever is behind the messages to Ed started at least a year ago, and the reason they do it is that they can. 

Summary: K♠ the last reel  

Bernie puts on the reel left for Ed. The film begins with his mugging by the Rose boys and their friends, which brings Audrey to tears. It shows him carrying the eighteen books from the library, the Tatupu Christmas lights, and his confrontation with his mother. The film ends with the words, “Trying Times for Ed Kennedy. Well done, Ed. Time to move on.”  Bernie puts on the rest of Cool Hand Luke, and during the scene where Luke’s friends desert him when he’s not cool anymore, Ed feels the same sense of desolation at the illusiveness of answers as to who is behind the aces and why he is being tested and tried. He finds the ace of hearts left on his seat. 

Analysis of 8♠, 9♠, 10♠, J♠, Q♠, K♠ 

Audrey watches the metamorphosis of Ed’s persona from a comfortable old friend into a dynamic visionary. She articulates the feeling by telling Ed he is becoming somebody instead of a nobody. She concludes that he’s better and thus possibly out of her league. Ed understands that the equilibrium between them has been disturbed by his new purposeful approach to life. Although his new energy has ignited his passion for Audrey, Ed prioritizes their relationship as kindred spirits over physical intimacy, and he reassures Audrey of their status quo. The arrival of the messenger gives Audrey further food for thought and she asks Ed to share his secrets with her. She means well as a friend but she wants no real stake in his activities. When she falls asleep, leaving Ed alone with his story, her abandonment of Ed is consistent with her withdrawal from meaningful connection. For his part, Ed's identification with a network of messengers like himself brings new vigor and hope. While Audrey is content to stay within her narrow world, Ed continues to expand his. 

The sender has led Ed to Melusso's restaurant on Clown Street using Morris West’s novel The Clowns of God for a reason. West's book tells the story of a pope removed from the papacy by the church hierarchy to silence his prophecy of a coming day of reckoning. The allegory of a godly man with a private revelation of judgment informs Ed’s interactions with Bev Kennedy. Ed’s confrontation with his mother results in a dramatic revelation, as earth-shaking in his world as an apocalyptic prophecy in Morris West’s fictional world. For Ed, the information about his mother’s marital unfaithfulness puts a new interpretation on his father’s alcoholism, restoring Gregor's stature in Ed’s eyes. For Bev, her sorrowful admission to her son that her husband Gregor knew she was having an affair during their marriage allows her to express guilt and remorse. This confession opens up a festering wound in her relationship with Ed so that it can heal. Their phone call the following day confirms the success of this intervention. Although Bev lapses back into her familiar caustic communication, Ed takes it as terms of endearment and reassurance that their bridge to each other still stands.     

Ed arrives at the Bell Street Theater through Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Plath’s images of a bell jar in this novel and the empty museum in her poem “Barren Woman” evoke the loneliness of a person cut off from connection to people. The movies also symbolically figure Ed in their strong, solitary protagonists: Rick Blaine, the jaded expatriate café owner in Casablanca who saves the beautiful Ilsa Lund and her freedom-fighter husband, and Luke, the decorated war veteran in Cool Hand Luke who inspires his fellow prisoners to preserve their independence of spirit. 

Ed fights the debilitating system he was born into, where insecurity, violence, and impotence grind down the human spirit. Where his sisters and brother escaped from their circumstances, Ed stayed. His escape was through books. It took an extraordinary event, the bank holdup, to move him out of his inertia. The ace of diamonds arrived like destiny. His willingness to undertake the missions has not dampened his desire to know who is behind the messages. When the proprietor of the theater, Bernie Price, turns out to be another messenger, his answer that messengers do what they do just because they can, speaks of a power to facilitate change. It can be taken as the mandate for individual moral responsibility, to do good when doing good is within one’s power. 

Of all Ed’s missions, the film reel shows four laborious accomplishments. The documentary footage and the message at the end deliver closure to those missions and also the mastermind’s approval. The stark evidence of Ed’s sacrifices for others must be meant for Audrey’s eyes as well. The end of Cool Hand Luke, Ed and Audrey’s favorite movie, has special meaning for Ed on this day. In the film, the inmates live vicariously through Luke’s exuberant opposition to the prison establishment. When Luke’s spirit is crushed by the prison system and he becomes subservient, the inmates abandon him. Ed feels his stealth messengers similarly push him to feats of bravery from the shadows but do not support him. The mastermind orchestrates a mysterious plan but Ed alone must see that it comes to fruition. The loneliness of the hero’s quest builds suspense for the next card.

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