Illyria (7 page)

55

I turned and slowly walked over to the mirror. Whatever enchantment I had felt or carried earlier when I'd worn the cape and sat inside the theater was gone now. I looked like an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl wearing new boots that were already scuffed, and clothes from Sears and Gimbels.

"Okay, that's squared away," called Aunt Kate. "We can get it out again next weekend."

I looked over to see my aunt coming down the stairs.

"I'm not glamorous," I said. I didn't feel sad, just resigned. "Rogan is more glamorous than I am. Everyone is."

My aunt walked over to stand beside me at the mirror. She pulled a stray wisp of hair behind my ear and stared at our reflections.

"Rogan's not glamorous."

"How can you even say that?" I looked away so she wouldn't see tears in my eyes. "He's so beautiful. And what you said about talent-- he has that
voice..."

"No, Maddy. Beauty isn't glamour. It's not the same thing at all." She stroked my hair. "Do you know what
glamour
means?"

"Beautiful." I spat the word. "Perfect, talented--"

"That's not what it means, Madeline." She shook her head.
"Glamour
--it has the same root as the word
grammar.
It is a kind of knowledge, of learning. That means it's something that can be taught. It can be learned."

She put her hands on my shoulders and straightened them. "Your great-great-grandmother wasn't beautiful, Maddy."

"Gee, thanks. Since I'm supposed to
look
like her."

"You're actually much prettier than she was," said Aunt Kate. "You

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have beautiful eyes, your skin's cleared up. And you're taller. She was quite petite; these days you need to be tall. And your teeth are much better--she never had her teeth fixed."

"That's not grammar," I said sullenly. "None of that is stuff I learned."

"No. But you can learn other things. Words, how to speak and walk. How to make your voice carry. Diction."

"That sounds horrible."

"Think of it like this: you're building a house, a beautiful house, a little bit at a time out of all these things--your voice, your body, your memory, how you move. If you do it right, if you put all the elements together, something happens. Something comes to live in that space you've made, inside you. Then you go onstage and people see it. They see you, but they also see this other--thing--that you've created. That you've built, that you're inside of."

"Oh, right," I said. "Like now I'm a goddamn carpenter."

She laughed. "It's like Latin, Maddy. That's grammar, too. But you studied it and learned it and now you're good at it. Your mind is attuned to it.
You
have a
gift"
She turned me so that I looked at her squarely. "You have talent."

"Not like Rogan."

"Rogan is talented, yes." She sounded impatient. "But the tail wags the dog with him."

"I don't even know what means."

She sighed. "It's late. You'd better get home; we need to stay in everyone's good graces."

I walked to the door, contrite. "Thanks, Aunt Kate. It was great-- it was the best time I ever had."

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"It's only going to get better," she said, and kissed me good night.

At home I went into the living room and found the enormous old dictionary that had been my grandfather's. I opened it to
glamour
and read a definition similar to what Aunt Kate had told me; but also something else.

A corruption of GRAMMAR, meaning GRAMARYE.

1. An enchantment or spell; an illusion of beauty.

I set the book down and looked out the window. In Aunt Kate's carriage house a single lamp burned, and in Rogan's window as well. Ghost lights; gramarye.

I turned the light off in the living room and went upstairs to bed.

***

WE DIDN'T JUST SEE
BUTLEY
.
OVER THE NEXT FEW

weeks, Rogan and I saw
Pippin
and
Measure for Measure
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Jumpers
and
A Little Night Music.
We went on Friday nights, and sometimes Saturday, and even weekend matinees. A few times Mr. Sullivan accompanied us, along with Aunt Kate.

This was embarrassing at first, and neither Rogan nor I ever mentioned it to our parents. We still couldn't figure out what had happened--did Aunt Kate lie to them? Had they undergone some weird middle-aged conversion? Had they all gone senile?

But, no, Aunt Kate made no secret of what we were doing.

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She asked for permission each time, always announcing we'd go to Rosoff's first for dinner, or for lunch if it was a matinee. Our parents remained as intransigent as ever otherwise; Rogan's even more so, as his grades, never good, had gotten worse. He'd snuck off twice to hang out with the band fronted by his brother's friend Derek, something I got furious about when he told me.

"They'll kill you if they find out." We were in the secret attic, naked. Rogan had gotten some condoms from Derek, which was how I came to learn about the band rehearsals. "That is so stupid, Rogan."

"Don't you start." He drew away from me. "Stupid. I know, I'm a fucking retard."

"Shut up." I pulled him back toward me and kissed him. His mouth was liquid, his breath pungent with hashish: another gift from Derek. "Don't ever say that. You're brilliant."

It had become more difficult for us to get time together alone-- we were with Aunt Kate most of our free time. And my parents made it clear that they didn't want me constantly at Fairview.

"I want you to spend time with your friends," my mother said.

"Rogan's my friend."

My mother gave me a keen look. "He's your cousin, Maddy." I knew it was a warning.

Now, in the attic, I rolled on top of him. My head bumped the ceiling, and plaster fragments rained onto us.

"Be careful," murmured Rogan. "Let's look..."

He gently tugged the board loose so we could peer inside the wall. It never changed--or no, the stage changed every time we looked at it, the footlights glimmering green or cobalt or vermilion, the

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backdrops shifting as well to signal dawn, or late afternoon, midsummer or deepest winter. Sometimes it snowed; sometimes by some trick of the light the stage seemed slashed with rain or sleet. Once we heard odd chirping strings, like a cricket orchestra, and once a crackling that I realized must be the rattle of a tiny thunder sheet.

But the toy theater itself never changed. The proscenium with its paired masks and delicate frieze of languid Muses; the gauzy red curtains, bound in place with gilt thread--day to day, week to week, all remained unaltered. The invisible audience rustled and sighed, the invisible actors moved, if they moved at all, in steps unknown to my cousin and me.

It was late October. One Monday we arrived at school to find that Mr. Sullivan was now an English teacher. Sister Alberta had gone into St. Joseph's Hospital for treatment.

"Will she be back?" a girl asked.

Mr. Sullivan smiled wistfully. "I don't know. I hope so."

"I don't," said another girl, and everyone laughed.

Immediately, Mr. Sullivan became an object of much speculation. He was handsome, though maybe not as good-looking as Mr. Becker, who also taught English, and who was rumored to smoke pot.

But Mr. Sullivan was mysterious. He had been in the seminary-- why hadn't Rogan and I known that?--and he'd also been an actor, with a small recurring part as Dr. Burke on
One Life to Live.
He'd been in a commercial for Irish Spring soap, a commercial that still aired and which I'd seen at least a dozen times.

"Why didn't you tell us?" demanded Rogan after class one day, when Mr. Sullivan admitted that, yes, that was him in the commercial,

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him in the boat, wearing a tweed walking cap and speaking with a brogue so patently false I was ashamed for him.

"You didn't ask," said Mr. Sullivan mildly. "And I can't play favorites in school."

We'd noted that already, when we tried in vain to get him to change the curriculum for Freshman English.

"These books," said Rogan. He began to tick them off on his fingers.
"Billy Budd. The Catcher in the Rye. A Separate Peace. Romeo and Juliet. Lord of the Flies.
Every single ninth-grade book, everyone dies! It's depressing."

Mr. Sullivan tipped his head. "Good point. But you still have to read them."

"Why?" Rogan stared at him challengingly, almost belligerently. "Can you give me one good goddamn reason why?"

"Enough" snapped Mr. Sullivan. "Everyone, get out your copies of
The Diary of Anne Frank!'

Rogan's defiance bled into our trips to the city as well. We were with Aunt Kate on the train back home after seeing
The Country Wife.
Aunt Kate was seated, reading
The New Yorker.
Rogan and I were goofing around, swinging on the poles by the train doors. As the train approached the 125th Street Station, a small group of people gathered around us, waiting to get out.

The train stopped. The little crowd stepped out onto the platform.

So did Rogan.

I gaped in disbelief. He took a step backward, grinning broadly, and as the doors closed gave me a little wave and mouthed
Bye-bye.
"Holy shit," I said.

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The train pulled out of the station. Aunt Kate looked up, eyebrows raised. "What?"

"Rogan." I pointed uselessly at the platform disappearing behind us. He--

I collapsed, laughing hysterically, onto the floor of the train.

Aunt Kate was not amused. "That brainless idiot," she fumed, nostrils white with rage. "Getting off in
Harlem
in the
middle of the night?

"It's only eleven," I protested. She looked daggers at me. "Don't you say a word. Did you put him up to it?"

"No!"

At the next stop she dragged me from the train onto the platform. We waited, hardly speaking, for the next southbound train. It was a short distance between Melrose and 125th Street, but there were few trains that late at night. I began to grow anxious.

"Should we call the police?" I asked.

"And say what? That there's a white boy wandering around Harlem?"

By the time we got a train and it stopped at 125th Street, nearly an hour had passed. Aunt Kate grabbed me again and yanked me onto the platform.

There, sitting sheepishly on a bench, was Rogan. Beside him sat a tall black woman, dressed as elegantly as my aunt, her hands crossed resolutely on one knee as she stared straight ahead. I couldn't tell if she was a young woman whose hair had turned prematurely white, or an old woman who had drunk from the same Fountain of Youth as Aunt Kate.

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As my aunt approached her, the woman stood. "I take it this is your young man?" Aunt Kate nodded. "I found him roaming the street like a chicken with its head cut off."

The woman gave Rogan a severe look, then lightly cuffed his long red hair. "Better for him if that
was
cut off. He said he was interested in the night life."

She and Aunt Kate regarded each other measuringly. I felt the same jaw-dropping disbelief as when Rogan had stepped from the carriage: this woman and my aunt
knew each other.

But then a voice boomed across the platform, announcing the arrival of the next northbound train.

"Thank you very much," said Aunt Kate. She nodded respectfully.

"I'm just glad I happened by," the woman said. She waited until the train stopped at the platform, smiled, and left.

Aunt Kate pointed at Rogan. "You. Stand up and get on that train. No more nonsense."

"Did you see anything?" I whispered to Rogan as the train pulled away.

"Not really. A little." He turned to stare longingly at the streets below us, desolate and windswept, a few solitary figures hurrying along the sidewalk. "It was cool. Next time I'm staying."

The announcement for the school play went up the following Monday. Rogan and I were walking down the hall, when we saw a few people gathered in front of the bulletin board outside the English Department.

"Bad news, bro," someone said to Rogan. "It's not a musical." I glanced at Rogan. His jaw tightened, his face froze into a mask

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of resignation and suppressed anger so intense that, without thinking, I touched his arm. He shrugged me off and pushed through the group to look at the audition sheet.

St. Brendan's Sock & Buskin Club

Annual Play Tryouts for TWELFTH NIGHT, or What You Will by William Shakespeare Friday, November 12, 3:00 See Mr. Sullivan for details