In America (35 page)

She rose to undress and Ryszard caught her by the wrist. “Don't take your clothes off yet. I know what you look like. I've lived with your body in my mind so long. Your breasts, your thighs, your love cave—I can tell you about them.”

“But I'm not a girl,” she said.

He released her arm and stood. Separately, solemnly, they removed their clothes. He folded the smooth length of her body in his arms.

“I can give you my heart, Ryszard. But I can't give you my life. I'm not Adrienne Lecouvreur”—she laughed. “Just another mature actress who relishes impersonating that impetuous girl.”

He lay back on the bed and opened his arms to her. She lay on top of him. “You smell of soap,” she whispered.

“Now you are making me feel shy,” he said.

“It's been such a long journey for both of us to reach this bed.”

“Maryna, Maryna.”

“I shall know you don't love me anymore when you say my name only once.”

“Maryna, Maryna, Maryna.”

“When you wait for something too long, doesn't it become—? Oh…” She gasped.

“Who says we waited too long?” he said.

“No more questions!” she moaned, and drew him farther inside her, circling him with every part of her body.

After they had flooded each other with pleasure and fallen apart for a moment, lying side by side, Ryszard asked if she thought less of him because all this time he had been in love with her he had still gone with many women. “Be honest with me, Maryna.”

She answered him with a vague, radiant smile.

Truth was, Ryszard had never fully believed that Maryna would one day be his. His love for Maryna, at its truest, had been draped by a stinging sense of the unlikelihood of its consummation. But he could not leap beyond desire. Like many writers, Ryszard did not really believe in the present, but only in the past and in the future. And he had hated wanting something he thought he could not have.

You get what you want, and that makes everything right.

She fell asleep after they made love a second time, her head on his chest and her leg thrown over his thighs: though he still wanted her, he had to let her be, for she must be exhausted; he tried to follow her into sleep, but was barred by unslaked desire, and joy. He spent the rest of the night drifting toward sleep, bearing Maryna's body, and at the edge of sleep coming awake again with the thought, But I am still awake. When dawn came, he did sleep, waking a few hours later to find her still flung across him, and wondered if he could move without her knowing; she must sleep on, as late as possible, to have all her strength for another
Adrienne
tonight.

But she was awake, and was covering him with kisses. “Oh, how alive I feel!” she cried. “You have given me back my body. What a second performance I shall give. And all our Polish friends, who must have been speculating about why Bogdan isn't here in San Francisco, will be sure it's because of you. My Maurice will surely notice, when I nestle against his chest to recite the fable of the two pigeons, that the girlish Adrienne is not as shy as she was last night. Mr. Barton will wonder, What has happened to that dignified lady from Poland? Success seems to have quite gone to her head. Her head!” She bent over and began to kiss his groin.

“The Polish lady is in love?” said Ryszard.

“The Polish lady is definitely—recklessly—indecently—imprudently—in love.”

After two more performances of
Adrienne,
on Thursday night Maryna opened in
Camille
and, after a third
Camille
at the Saturday matinee, closed the week with another
Adrienne.
The houses were always full, the ovations more prolonged and rapturous, the cohort of opulently dressed admirers the jubilant Barton led backstage ever larger. She greeted them by name after only the first visit, the liquid energies of her performance quick-drying in the rush of these greenroom exchanges—she was winsome (“Yes, thank you, thank you … ah, you are too kind”), easily amused, inviolable. If they only knew the price I have paid—must go on paying—to do what I do! And now she had another secret: the usual after-the-show lightheadedness was thickened with sexual suspense. But the well-wishers had to be sent away, and their flowers given to her dresser and the property-men to make space for the next day's flowers, before, at last, she could return with Ryszard to the hotel.

Largest among the floral tributes massed together in her dressing room before the performance on Saturday evening was a giant basket plaited in the shape of a tower with tier upon tier of red, white, and blue flowers. From the belfry hung a square sheet of gold-bordered vellum.

“A poem,” said Maryna. “Unsigned.”

“Of course!” Ryszard exclaimed. “It was inevitable. You've captured the heart of another writer. Give me his poem and I'll tell you, with complete objectivity, whether my new rival has any talent or not.”

“No”—Maryna laughed—“I shall read it to you. It can't be as difficult as a sonnet by Shakespeare, and, luckily for me, Miss Collingridge is not here to mend my pronunciation.”

“The good fortune is mine.”

“
Là, mon cher, tu exagères!
Jealous men may be exciting on the stage but in real life they soon become very boring.”

“I
am
boring,” said Ryszard. “Writers are boring.”

“Ryszard, my sweet Ryszard,” she cried—he groaned, happily—“you're going to stop thinking of yourself and just listen.”

“When do I do anything else?”

“Sshhh…”

“But first I have to kiss you,” he said.

They kissed, and did not feel like separating.

“You still want to oppress me with my rival's poem?”

“Yes!” She picked up the vellum again, held it before her, and declaimed, in what Polish critics had called her silver register:

Hither, unheralded by voice of fame,

Except as a fair foreigner you came.

Light was the welcome that we had prepared—

Even our sympathies you scarcely shared;

Not—

“Oh, Madame Mareena, dear Madame Mareena,” Ryszard crowed, “sympathies. Not
sympaties.
”

“Sympathies is what I did say, you dolt,” Maryna exclaimed, and leaned over to kiss him before continuing:

Not as the artist whom your people knew—

As some fresh novice did we look on you.

“Aha, my rival is a mere drama critic!”

“Quiet!” she said. Curling her right hand, with her thumb and index finger Maryna tapped herself on the chest, twice, a venerable thespian gesture, mock-cleared her throat, and dropped into her celebrated velvet tone:

Mark the great change! Since that eventful night,

Only your wondrous art remains in sight.

Despite the fetters of a foreign tongue—

“Fetters,” Ryszard hooted.

“Ryszard, I'm not going to let you stop me!”

Despite the fetters of a foreign tongue,

Jealousy round your matchless talent hung;

Enraptured we acknowledge your success—

Success the greater as expected less.

“But now he's going to kiss the hem of your robe, this little drama critic.”

“And why not?”

Keep Polish memories in—

She stopped.

“What's the matter, Maryna? Darling!”

“I don't— I don't know if I can read the final couplet.”

“What does the beast say about you? Tear it up!”

“No. Of course I can finish.”

Keep Polish memories in your heart alone,

America now claims you for her own.

She put it down and turned away.

You get what you want, and then you're in despair.

“Maryna,” said Ryszard. “Darling Maryna, please don't cry.”

*   *   *

BY MID-MORNING
on the day after the opening, seven journalists had set up restless, rivalrous encampments in the mammoth Parlor of the Palace Hotel; Maryna descended at noon. Ryszard had come down an hour earlier to say that Madame would soon be with them, and to send a telegram to the editor of the
Gazeta Polska
announcing his forthcoming full account of Maryna's American debut, which was certain to make all Polish hearts throb with pride. Learning a day later from his editor that a rival Warsaw newspaper was dispatching someone to San Francisco to cover the event, Ryszard rushed ahead with not one but two long articles, the first describing Maryna's performance in detail, the second its ecstatic reception by the first-night public and by the critics, who were, as he put it, “all, to a man, enraptured by the womanly charms and the incomparable genius of our Polish diva.” No need to remind his readers who Maryna had been, only to recount what she had gloriously, and in truth, become.

Who—what—she had been, that was Maryna's subject in adroit conversation with the smitten local journalists waiting at the Palace that morning; and there were many more in the days that followed. Giving interviews entailed rewriting the past, starting with her age (she lopped off six years), her antecedents (the secondary-school Latin teacher became a professor at the Jagiellonian University), her beginnings as an actor (Heinrich became the director of an important private theatre in Warsaw where she made her debut at seventeen), her reasons for coming to America (to visit the Centennial Exposition) and then to California (to restore her health). By the end of the week Maryna had begun to believe some of the stories herself. After all, she'd had a plethora of reasons for emigrating. “I was ill.” (
Was
I ill?) “I always dreamed of going on the stage in America.” (
Did
I always mean to go back on the stage here?)

Then there were the unnecessary inventions. Maryna knew why she said she was thirty-one: she had already turned thirty-seven. Or why she said that only acute exhaustion brought on by years of overwork in Poland could have induced her to agree to a term of rustic seclusion (“Can you picture me, gentlemen, for ten months among chickens and cows?” she said, laughing): she didn't want anyone to think she'd been one of those simple-lifers. But why had she said that the farm was near Santa Barbara? No one would think less well of her if she said it was outside Anaheim. And why tell different stories to different interviewers? Usually her father was an eminent classics scholar still teaching at Kraków's noble, ancient university, who, when his daughter became, “what do you call it, stagestruck?” she said prettily, had vehemently opposed her hopes of an acting career (“but I was determined and left Kraków for Warsaw, where I made my debut in 1863”); but more than once he was a man of the mountains, a misfit only son, a dreamer, who committed to memory the verses of the great Polish poets during long solitary weeks in the high Tatras tending the family sheep, and having quit his village for Kraków hoping to gain admittance to the university, never succeeded in finding better than humble employment, never adjusted to city life, and did not live long enough to be proud, as she knew he would have been, of his actress daughter. Perhaps one tires of telling the same story again and again.

She could have said she was merely tailoring her reminiscences to make herself comprehensible: work of a foreigner. (And yes, she said, “Yes, I am especially pleased to have made my American debut in San Francisco.”) Or acknowledged, with a smile, that fabulating was simply an actress's sport. Rachel, she had heard from one of the senior actors at the Imperial Theatre, told the most extraordinary untruths about herself to journalists when she came to perform in Warsaw twenty years ago. (“Like many exceedingly imaginative people,” as this charming man had put it with great delicacy, “Rachel was given to what in other persons would be called lying.”) But it's not easy to remember which of the stories you relate about your life are true when you relate all of them so often. And all stories respond to some inner truth.

Of course it is impossible, and imprudent, to explain oneself fully when one has become a foreigner. Some truths need to be emphasized to jibe with local ideas of seemliness (she knew Americans liked being told about early hardships and rebuffs by those crowned with wealth and success), while some truths, the ones that have their just weight only back home, are best not mentioned at all.

The morning after her debut three candidates for the role of Maryna's personal manager had also been waiting in the Palace lobby, eyeing each other sullenly, but Maryna signed on with the first with whom she conferred, Harry H. Warnock, who had come recommended by Barton. Ryszard was troubled, as he told Maryna later, by the speed with which she'd acquired this professional spouse. “Spouse?” Of course he didn't like him, Ryszard lumbered on, but that was not the point. Did she realize that from now on Warnock would always be with her (with us, he meant), was she sure he was the kind of man whose proximity she could tolerate for long, and so on, and perhaps Maryna hadn't understood how important a decision she had made, since personal managers did not exist in the Polish theatre. But Warnock was persuasive: he proposed a brief tour later that month in western Nevada (Virginia City and Reno) and northern California (Sacramento, San Jose), a debut in New York in December, and after that a four-month national tour. And Maryna was impatient and drunk with triumph. They agreed about repertory. Maryna would do mostly Shakespeare—she had played fourteen of Shakespeare's heroines in Poland and planned to redo them all—while continuing to offer
Adrienne Lecouvreur
and
Camille
and, in the more provincial communities that filled out any comprehensive tour, a few melodramas (“But not
East Lynne!
” she said; “What do you take me for, Madame? I know when I am dealing with an artist”). The money promised was stupendous. Indeed, they were on the way to agreeing about everything, until Warnock mentioned that he was glad some of her Polish friends had thought last night to tell him she was a countess. He'd find good use for that in making her a star!