In America (37 page)

Of course the great thespian didn't say a word of thanks, and luckily he hadn't hurt himself, continued Piper's manager in charge of the stage. “Lord, he's a strange broody man. But geniuses are like that, I know.” He told Maryna he had recommended to Booth that, after leaving Virginia City, he stop at a special spring situated a mile west of Carson City, much frequented by persons afflicted with rheumatism and melancholia. It's a “chicken-soup spring,” so called because, with the addition of pepper and salt, the water acquires the taste of thin chicken soup and is actually quite nourishing.

“And I recommend it to you too, dear Madame.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tyler, but I am neither rheumatic nor melancholiac. At least, not yet.”

Cameel, Cameel, people called to her on the street. One was a tall man with a wide neat bandage under his chin, whom Ryszard decided must be recovering from a slit throat. Each of the three plays Maryna gave during the week called on her to counterfeit death—as Adrienne she died in an excruciating delirium; as Juliet, in a sensuous swoon, falling across the body of her Romeo; as Marguerite Gautier, in a convulsive protest against the injustice of death—but it was generally acknowledged that her greatest success in dying was in
Camille,
during one performance of which, reported the town's leading newspaper,
The Territorial Enterprise,
two members of the audience, in different parts of the thousand-seat theatre, were so transfixed with horror at seeing Marguerite spring from her couch and fall with a terrifying crash, dead, upon the floor, that both were struck with a rigidifying paralysis and remained unable to rise from their seats for a full hour after the performance had ended.

How else could the
Enterprise
convey to its readers the enchantment of Maryna's performances? Tall tales, hoaxes, and practical jokes were the paper's much admired, trademark method of responding to a landscape of improbabilities. Virginia City was itself a tall tale—the chance discovery by several ignorant prospectors, some twenty years before, of a lode of silver-rich quartz just below ground near the top of the mountain then called Sun Peak, which had been turned, by magnates from San Francisco who knew how to exploit it, into the most lucrative mining venture in the history of the world. Only recently some miners had cut into a block of almost pure silver fifty-four feet wide and thirty feet deep. Sober-sided reporting had little chance of being heard as long as there were true stories like that.

Toward the end of the week Maryna let it be known that she would like to see the insides of this fabulous mountain, and promptly received an invitation signed by Jedediah Forster, the superintendent of the biggest of the bonanza mines, the Consolidated Virginia. Arriving with Ryszard at the mine office, she was provided with a cap, a pair of breeches, and a cloak, and, after donning her costume in an adjoining storeroom, returned to the office to be greeted by a very tall, handsome man in buckskins and silver buckles, Forster himself. He would be honored—he bowed—to be Madame Zalenska's guide, though he hoped she understood that the mine was ill-equipped to receive visitors, least of all so distinguished a lady visitor. Signaling one of the men in the office to follow with an oil lamp, he led Maryna and Ryszard outdoors to a brick shed housing an iron frame with a square plank floor, which he entered first. As the cage started its slow, clanking descent, the air thickened and the dampness acquired a sharp foul odor that pinched the nostrils and clogged the throat. They could hear water coursing down the shaft as they dropped lower and lower, and when the cage began to sway from side to side, Ryszard stretched out his arm to protect Maryna from contact with the rough wet wall. (What can
this
experience be good for, Maryna wondered, struggling not to give way to panic. One of those foolhardy adventures you get through by ignoring where you are and what you are feeling?) At last it stopped, discharging its passengers at the dim mouth of a low narrow tunnel. They began to walk, deeper and deeper still. The heat, unbearable, was being borne by miners stripped to the waist, wielding their pickaxes and shovels. Infernal work! “We are nineteen hundred feet under the ground,” said their guide, who, after asking permission from Maryna, pulled off his buckskin jacket, exposing an immaculate silk shirt.

Ryszard determined not to remove his jacket, much as he would have liked to, even as he politely allowed himself to be taken off to look at the rising water in the next chamber and the new pumping machinery brought down to drain it. Con-Virginia's elegantly garbed superintendent, who remained with Maryna, did not suppose a lady would be interested in being shown how anything in the mine actually worked. He was very pleased, however, to be in her company.

“This is the second mine I have visited,” Maryna remarked, for want of anything better to say. “Some years ago I was given a tour of the famous salt mine that lies south of Kraków, my native city in Poland.”

“A salt mine. I'm afraid people around here wouldn't think that was much of a mine.”

“Agreed, Colonel Forster”—all heads of mines, Maryna had been told, are addressed as Colonel—“salt is hardly as valuable as silver, but the mine itself is well worth visiting. You see, it has been in continuous operation since the thirteenth century.”

“And they still haven't extracted all the salt? They must work very slowly in your country. But there can't be much incentive, considering what I guess the profit would be from salt.”

“I can see, my dear Colonel, that I haven't explained properly what this great mine, this royal Polish mine, includes. It's not just a business, as everything is here in America. And you must not suppose our Polish miners are lacking in diligence. Their centuries of digging have hollowed out a vast underground world on five levels, with mile after mile of spacious galleries connecting more than a thousand halls or chambers, many of immense size. Some are supported by intricate lattices of timber, others by pillars of salt as thick as the great old trees of northern California, and several of these subterranean caverns, so long and wide as to appear boundless, are without any support in the middle. In two of the largest are grand lakes that can be crossed in a flatboat. But it is not only for these awesome Plutonic vistas that the mine has attracted so many distinguished tourists, starting with the great Polish astronomer Kopernik; even Goethe thought it worth a visit. Most interesting for the visitor is that, after the chambers have been bored and all the salt extracted, the miners carve life-size figures out of the salt to decorate the abandoned chambers.”

“Statues,” said Forster. “They take time off, while they're down in the mine, to make statues.”

“Yes, statues of Polish kings and queens—there is a remarkable statue of one of my country's founding martyrs, Wanda, daughter of Krakus. And of course religious statues in the chapels on each level where the miners worship every morning, the grandest and most ancient being the one dedicated to Anthony of Padua, which has columns with ornamented capitals, arches, images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and the saint, altar and pulpit with all their decorations, and figures of two priests represented at prayers before the saint's shrine—all sculpted out of the dark rock salt. Here, once a month, a High Mass is celebrated.”

“A church in a mine. Right.”

Clearly, the Colonel did not believe her. He knew a tall story when he heard one.

Maryna enjoyed regaling Ryszard with the story of how she had flummoxed their imposing guide when they were back at the hotel.

“I know a story about another salt mine,” said Ryszard, “though, unfortunately, it's not I who made it up but Stendhal. At the salt mine of Hallein, near Salzburg, the miners have the pretty custom of throwing a wintry bough into one of the disused galleries and then retrieving it two or three months later when, thanks to the waters saturated with salt which have soaked the bough and then receded, it is thickly encrusted down to the tiniest twig with a shining deposit of little crystals, and these rare pieces of jewelry are presented to the lady tourists who visit the mine. Stendhal claims that falling in love is something like this process of crystallization. Dipping the idea of his beloved in his imagination, the lover endows her with all perfections, like the crystals on the leafless bough.”

“As you've done with me.”

“With other women, for a week or three, I admit.” Ryszard laughed.

“Not with me.”

“Dearest, peerless Maryna!”

“Why not me as well? Maybe I'm just a wintry bough. On a stage I scintillate and dazzle but—”

“Maryna!”

“I don't understand why you're telling me this story.”

And Ryszard thought: I can't understand either. How could I be so stupid? What am I doing? And surely it was inane, no, cowardly, to reply, “Please, darling, let's not quarrel now.” Now? “Ever!”

*   *   *

LEAVING THROUGH
Piper's stage door near midnight after the final performance, Maryna and Ryszard and Miss Collingridge joined some two thousand people who, by bright moonlight and bonfires, were gazing upward as a woman clad in a short frock and tights stepped off the wrought-iron balustrade above the theatre's entrance into the air; followed with the crowd down Union Street as she too went down the steeply angled street, high above their heads; and applauded with the crowd as Miss Ella LaRue walked off the rope with a proud stamp of her foot onto the roof of a brick building on the corner of D and Union. “Cheering sight,” said Ryszard to Maryna. “Immense across the hips, isn't she?” he added, hoping to annoy Miss Collingridge. Then, in search of further entertainment, they strolled back up to C Street and through a pair of double glass doors into the Polka Saloon.

As the mines were always working, so were the saloons. Miners arrived fresh from their shifts to wager their earnings at faro, monte, and poker (they distrusted fancy games and any sort of gambling machinery), and Maryna begged her companions to amuse themselves while she sat and watched the spectacle.

Ryszard went to stand at the bar and was soon being regaled by a reporter from the
Enterprise
with the news of the discovery in a sealed mountain cavern of a “silver man”—some poor Indian trapped in the cave long long ago, whose body over the centuries had been changed by the nature of the earth, steaming vapors, and the transfer of metallic substances into a mass of silver; more exactly, the body having been sent for assay to Carson City, into sulphuret of silver slightly mixed with copper and iron. Meanwhile, Miss Collingridge had become entranced by the saloon mascot, Black Billy, who, unlike the many goats living in old mine tunnels and foraging for scant herbage on the slopes of Mount Davidson, was one of a more privileged or daring band who had the run of the city: Billy lived and chewed tobacco on C Street.

Maryna remained undisturbed with her glass of champagne a full quarter of an hour before a bearded giant in a red-checked shirt rose from one of the nearby tables and lurched toward her, bottle in one hand and a red geranium in the other, bawling “O Jewelie-ette, Jewelie-ette, wherefore art thou Jewelie-ette!” She looked about the room for Ryszard's intervention, but a woman was right behind the intruder and already shooing him away with “Get along now, Nate. Don't bother the lady. She's worked hard too, and she has a right to sit here peaceable in my saloon and have a drink without bein' pestered by her admirers.”

Her rescuer lingered next to the table. Fat, tightly corseted, beribboned, a little drunk, around forty-five or fifty, Maryna guessed. “I just want to tell you what an honor it is to have you in my saloon.” She smiled, and Maryna saw that she had once been very pretty. “I just can't believe it's you, sittin' there. It's like a queen came in here. A queen! Here in the Polka!”

“Which we dance in Poland,” said Maryna gaily.

“No kid?” said the woman. “And I thought it was a hundred percent American!” She paused. “You must want to be by yourself. I wouldn't blame you. You must be surrounded by people all the time.”

“Do sit with me,” said Maryna. “My friends will be back in a moment.”

“May I?”—she sank into a chair—“May I? I won't talk too much, I promise.” She gazed, awestruck, at Maryna. “I just have to tell you, you were so”—she sighed—“so wonderful last night. You know we get a lot of plays in Virginia and I always go when I can, I seen them all, almost, everyone comes here, even Booth, and I saw three of his Hamlets. And sometimes he'd stop by the Polka. Once he sat right at this table.”

“I'm pleased to be sitting at Mr. Booth's table,” said Maryna, smiling.

“Right there where you're sittin'. Very polite, no airs at all, but he seemed so sad. And he got drunk as a lord, though you'd never know it the next night. Well, he's grand, I don't say no, but I like actresses better, and you're the best. You can really feel somethin' when a woman suffers, at least that's what I think. Take the one you just did, the French lady who has to drive the nice young fellow who really loves her away and pretend she doesn't love him anymore, I can never say her name, it's not the same as the play.”

“Marguerite Gautier.”

“That's right. We've had a lot of Camilles, but you're the best. I never cried so much at a
Camille
in my life.”

“It's a splendid role for an actress,” said Maryna.

“And the way you do Juliet, that was wonderful, and the other one, I saw everything you did this week, the one about the French actress, what's her name, you know.”

“Adrienne.”

“That's it. You did it a whole lot better than that Italian who came here two years ago, I forget her name, and did it in Italian, but that didn't bother me, when someone is good you understand the feelin'.”

“Adelaide Ristori.”