In America (34 page)

Glenwood's face tightened. “I can see you don't know that we never say that name”—he coughed loudly—“either for the play or the character. We don't say it. Ever.”

“How interesting! Is this some kind of American superstition?”

“
You
may call it a superstition,” said Kate Egan, the company's over-age Princesse de Bouillon, who had just entered the greenroom with Thomas—Tom—Deane, its stolid Maurice.

“You mean, American actors when they perform the play can't utter the name Mac—”

“Oh, please don't say it again,” said Deane. “Yes, of course the three witches have to say,
Upon the heath / There to meet with
 … you know, and so do Banquo and Duncan and the others when their lines come. But anywhere except on stage—never!”

“In heaven's name, why?”

“Because the play is hexed,” explained Deane. “Brings disaster. Always does. Why, some thirty years ago in New York, there were to be two productions of the Scottish play at the same time, one with Macready, who was thought the finest English Shakespearean after Kean, and the other with our great Edwin Forrest. Some people became upset about this, I believe there were many Irish among them, saying that for the Englishman to do the same play in another theatre was an insult to our American actor, and so gathered around that theatre on the night of Macready's opening and tore up paving stones and sent them crashing through the windows and were starting to batter down the doors. The militia opened fire, and dozens in the crowd were killed.”

“Well, I shall be sure to bedeck myself with white-magic charms when I come to play Lady—” Maryna looked about mischievously at her anxious colleagues. “The Scottish lady.”

Ryszard hadn't dared ask when Bogdan would be arriving. Maryna had mentioned that she hoped he would soon resign himself to selling the farm back to the Fischers, since his losses would be covered several times over by her earnings from the first run of a week and the four weeks Barton had offered in October. For the moment, Ryszard's only rival was Miss Collingridge, who (for once!) was not waiting in the dressing room at the rehearsal's end, should Maryna want to do some more work on her lines.

“She's almost in love with you,” he grumbled.

“She
is
in love with me, in her respectful way.”

“Then my heart goes out to her. Who would have thought we had so much in common, your little diction teacher and I?”

“Ryszard, don't feel sorry for yourself. Miss Collingridge doesn't.”

“Miss Collingridge is not disappointed. Miss Collingridge does not expect more intimacy from her idol than she already has.”

“Oh,” she cried. “Have I really disappointed you?”

Ryszard shook his head. “I'm a clod. I'm harassing you. It's unpardonable, what I just said. I shall go away.” He grinned. “Until the day after tomorrow.”

“And what would you think,” she said, “if now I encourage you a little? If I admit that something has worked loose in my feelings and—” She flushed. “Maybe you
should
go away. I sit here alone, and worry that I might be getting a headache, and rub my forehead and temples with cologne, and then realize I am thinking not of Adrienne or Marguerite Gautier or Juliet but of you. And, thinking of you, I feel all sorts of physical sensations not unlike stage fright, as well as quickness of breath, restless limbs, and a few other stirrings that modesty prohibits my mentioning.”

“Maryna!”

She raised her hand. “But the emperor, mind, has not said yes. For I ask myself, Is this love? Or is this the feminine yearning to yield to importunate male desire? I fear you have quite worn me down, Rich-ard”—she said his name in the American way, to annoy him. A little slap.

“Ma-ree-na,” he said softly, and drew her hand to his heart.

Grateful as she had been that Bogdan had not yet joined her, and apprehensive as she was about his arrival for her opening, Maryna had not yet put it to herself that she would soon have to choose between the two men. But when she imagined them both standing about her dressing room while she was setting out her makeup and giving instructions to the seamstress, both solicitous, both anxious on her behalf, what did occur to her was, Whose face will I watch?

Then, on Saturday from Anaheim, a telegram:

ACCIDENT STOP FALL FROM HORSE STOP NO BROKEN BONES BUT BRUISES EVERYWHERE INCLUDING FACE HANDS STOP QUITE UNPRESENTABLE STOP ALAS SAN FRANCISCO UNTHINKABLE FOR NOW

Maryna said nothing to Ryszard about how disappointed she was; to herself she admitted that she was more angry than relieved. If Bogdan could not manage to be present at her opening, then he must feel— So be it, she thought. And wondered what she meant by that.

Sunday night Maryna dreamt that just before she went on stage Barton informed her that she was to do the role in Russian.

On Monday, Maryna was in her dressing room three hours before curtain, performing little rituals of order. Ryszard stood nearby, nervous as a husband in his new white kid gloves and patent-leather boots, hoping he had mustered the right shade of reassuring firmness to show his support and calm her nerves. (He remembered that look on Bogdan's expressive, ironic face.) He had accompanied her from the hotel, seen her engaged with the dresser, pinned the many telegrams from Poland to a cork mat on the wall beside the mirror, leaving on top the ones she had singled out—from Henryk, her mother and Józefina, Barbara and Aleksander, and Tadeusz, Krystyna, and other young actors at the Imperial Theatre—then left to pace the corridor. At seven-thirty Ryszard came back, agreeably stocked with juicy lingo, to tell her that all illumination was ready (the gasman had lighted the “borders” with torch and long pole, and the “foots” in front of the curtain, and turned them “down to the blue”), the doors had been opened, and the audience—he could see their compatriots had turned out in force—was filing into the theatre.

Since Adrienne does not appear in Act One, there was plenty of time for Barton to report on the audience. True, the house was not full, but a goodly number of important theatregoers were there, as well as the reigning American Juliet, Rose Edwards, who was booked into the California for the following week to star in the ever popular British melodrama
East Lynne.

“Wait until Rose sees
you,
” Barton exclaimed. “She's a good actress, and she's no fool either. Maybe she'll tell me that she doesn't dare follow in your footsteps, and you can have her week.”

“I doubt that any successful actress would make such an offer,” said Maryna, smiling. “You are very clever, Mr. Barton, at keeping my spirits up.”

But where is my fear, Maryna asked herself, after sending both men away to make her final inner preparation and mirror-check, and await the call-boy's summons for her entrance in the second act. Standing in the wings, she still registered none of the tumultuous symptoms of stage fright, the sweating palms, the racing heart, the knotted stomach. It seemed to her that she must be mad to have this certitude that everything would go well. And then she realized that she was more afraid than she had ever been in her life, but the fear was outside, like an impossible thickening of the air. She was strapped into her fear—a cold fear without physical resonance, except for a tightening of her skin—and inside she felt calm and spacious. More than spacious enough for all these words she was carrying: English words, behind which were the words of the play in Polish, and behind them the French words of the original play, which she had studied when she first prepared the part in Warsaw … but everything had to be inside, protected against the fear. Her skin, all of it, from her scalp to her soles, was the barrier against the iron cladding of fear; her upper body—her mouth, her tongue and lips, her neck, her shoulders, her chest—was the vessel in which the moist words were stowed that would start streaming, in English, when she went on stage.

She would, as she reminded herself again just before she stepped into the light, be starting without the jolt of the ovation that in Poland had invariably greeted her entrance, bringing the play to a halt and preventing her for several minutes from uttering her first line. There would be—except from her compatriots—only brief polite applause. She had seen, even with the great Booth, that American audiences do not break into applause after the famous set speeches that many knew by heart. (“At the opera, yes,” Barton had told her.) How did this new animal show enthusiasm, indifference, displeasure, the readiness to be tamed? She knew how to interpret Polish applause, as well as Polish coughs, whispers, shifting in the seats. But this audience seemed too quiet. How was she to interpret that? When she started the fable of the two pigeons (
Two pigeons were lovers both tender and true
 …) all coughing stopped; when she finished, there was silence for a moment, and then a tempest of applause, cries, calls. Tom Deane tried five times to begin Maurice's lines before he succeeded in going on. He looked quite inconsolable. When the act was over Maryna left the stage in a trance, while the audience roared, clapped, and stamped its feet. In the interval Ryszard roamed the lobby with Barton and Miss Collingridge. “Splendid! Splendid!” he heard over and over, rising above the sprightly chatter, the mutual bows, smiles, handshakes, and waves. A man in a top hat greeted Barton with “Now she's worth thirty thousand dollars a year!”—the editor of the
Evening Post,
Ryszard learned from Barton afterward—and his wife, imposing in her trained evening skirt, said that while Madame Zalenska's English had a shade of foreignness, she must keep it as it is, for it was “sweetness incarnate.” Miss Collingridge did not return Ryszard's treacherous smile.

Maryna floated back for the third act on a wave of energy that seemed to be coming from even further inside. She felt haloed, smooth, light-limbed, invulnerable. In the dark pavilion, scene of Adrienne's first encounter with her rival for Maurice's love, it was canonical staging for the Princesse de Bouillon to approach Adrienne with a candle to penetrate the disguise of the unknown woman who has chivalrously offered to rescue her from a compromising situation. Receptive, becalmed, Maryna watched the candle coming nearer and nearer, its flame pointed at the energy inside her, until gasps from the audience that fortunately covered Kate Egan's “Oh, hell!”—and “Sorry!”—made her aware that a corner of her veil had caught fire. Wondering whether Egan was apologizing for the profanity or for the mishap, Maryna flung the burning veil on the floor, in a single swift movement redraped her face with Adrienne's moiré silk shawl, and extended her hand to lead the wicked princess to safety. Some people thought it was all in the play; others applauded this daring bit of staging invented by the Polish actress.

She was recalled at the end of the third and the fourth acts for more applause.

The delivery of the words she had so long labored to say correctly was only a part of the flow of rhythmic events in her body. As for the inevitable rhyming of certain lines with some of her own feelings (what actor, whatever the role, does not feel this?), only once, and almost at the end, did Maryna allow herself to think about the words. When Adrienne says in her delirium,
Now in this play there are certain lines that I can say before everybody and no one will know that I am addressing them to him,
Maryna thought to herself, If it is a success, then I have been addressing Adrienne's words of love to Ryszard.

It is a clever thought, is it not?

One must love somebody.

It was as good a performance of Adrienne as she had ever given—and a triumph beyond anything she could have hoped for. Eleven curtain calls, eleven. And then hundreds thronging backstage to congratulate her, including all the Poles (except for their larcenous friend, though she was sure Halek had been in the audience), beaming and chattering and embracing one another. Bluff old Captain Znaniecki couldn't keep from chiding her for permitting her first name to be Russified, then burst into tears of joy and pride; Maryna cried too, and hugged him. What gave her most pleasure was the homage of an auburn-haired woman in brocade evening dress and shoes who was almost first to reach the greenroom and introduced herself as Rose Edwards. “I am at your feet, Madame,” she said.

Two hours after the performance had ended, Maryna was finally able to leave the theatre.

Returning to the hotel with Ryszard, she stopped at the desk and sent a one-word telegram to Bogdan.
VICTORY.

A half hour after they bid each other good night in the lobby, Ryszard, who had moved to the Palace two days before, came to Maryna's suite. She was waiting for him. She knew she was waiting for him because she had not undressed for bed, nor started preparing one of her more unsightly beauty secrets: the squares of brown paper soaked in cider vinegar that she wore against her temples while she slept, which kept the skin around her eyes smooth and free of wrinkles. She knew she was waiting for him because she turned down the jets in the sconces just so, until the room was bathed in shadow. She knew she was waiting for him because she stared for a long time at the enormous bed, mahogany, with a headboard that went halfway up to the fifteen-foot ceiling, wondered for the first time what she didn't like about it, and then removed first one, then two, then three of the six plump goose-down pillows and wedged them into the bottom of a wardrobe in the dressing room.

They kissed while she was closing the door; they were still kissing as she led him to the bedchamber, quick bruising kisses that were like words, like steps: she felt she was drawing him after her with her mouth. As they fell on the bed, still clothed, closed, the force of their bodies uniting pushed their heads apart. Maryna's mouth felt quite homeless. Meanwhile, tangled arms and legs were seeking the better position, the unlocking closeness. “I think I'm embarrassed,” she murmured against his face. “You make me feel like a girl.”