“I know why,” Ben said as she disappeared. “He makes a nice fat sum of filthy lucre on people like Bibi and Soapie. Come on, kids, let's get dressed. Race you to the garage, John Peter.”
John Peter shook his head. “Not me you won't. I'm too old for that sort of stuff now. All my joints protest whenever I stand up. At least I no longer have a toothache.”
“Yeah, I guess old age is creeping up on you,” Ben said. “I hope none of the other oafs are over in the garage. They'll want to go with us. Meet you on the beach, kids.”
Â
The beach was crowded. They stepped over the tanned bodies of the sunbathers and splashed into the surf. Ditta scooped water in her palms and dashed it into her eyes.
“Ditta, what on earth are you doing?” Ben asked.
“Getting saltwater into my eyes. It's supposed to be good for them.”
“But it stings.”
“I have stoic blood,” Ditta said, submerging. When she came up she explained, “If I splash a little in first, then I can go under and open my eyes.”
“Good heavens, is it good for your eyes?” Elizabeth asked. “That's wonderful. I always open mine and look around when I
go under. I'd adore to go down in a diver's helmet and see what it's really like. Wouldn't Shakespeare have loved to do that, though! âFull fathom five' is one of my favorite verses in the world. âOf his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange â¦' Isn't that shivery beautiful, though! And wouldn't he have had fun down on the bottom of the ocean looking at everything through a diver's helmet?”
“Liz,” John Peter said, “you talk about Shakespeare as though he were some friend of your father's who lived down the street from you and whom you liked a lot.”
Elizabeth cupped some sand and water into her hand and looked at it. “I feel lots closer to him than that.” She let the sand sift through her fingers. “âTo see the world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.' That, for your information, my children, is Mr. William Blake.”
“Gad.” Ben sat down in the shallow water with a splash. “We are poetical today, aren't we?”
Elizabeth grinned. “Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here I am afflicted with it at my tender age.”
Ben snorted.
Elizabeth looked up and caught her breath. She had not seen Kurt on the beach as they crossed it to get to the water, but now he walked over the sand to join them, and she felt herself
reddening. This is a mess, she thought, if I'm going to blush every time I see Kurt from now on. I've got to control myself. Please let me be able to control myself.
“Hi, kids,” Kurt said. “Good rehearsal?”
Elizabeth lay on her back and floated, letting little waves lap over her face as Jane said, “Pretty good. Huntley couldn't work us very long; he had to get over to the theatre.”
The breaking of the waves against Elizabeth's body was gentle and compassionate, and she lay there and tried not to mind the fact that she was close to Kurt and nothing inside her reached out to him. Her heart beat rapidly but it was no longer with joyful excitement. She hoped above all else that he would not come nearer to her.
“We've got to get on back if we want to get the tables ready,” she heard Jane saying, and Elizabeth stood up, shook the water off like a dog, and ran her fingers through her wet hair.
Â
After dinner Elizabeth hurried into her ushering dress and out of the Cottage. Kurt was on the porch, and called out to her.
“Let's go for a little walk, Liebchen.”
“Sorry,” she said hurriedly, “I've got to get over to the theatre,” and she ran down the steps of the porch. The theatre was still dark when she got there, but she sat on the steps until it was time to go in, watching the people walk by, looking across the boardwalk to the ocean stretching out till it was lost in the sky. As head usher she had to be at the theatre before the others, so she hoped that Kurt would think that her excuse was a legitimate one, that he would not think she was avoiding him. After all, she thought, and tried to keep her thinking dispassionate,
it's not his fault if I've been a fool. It's myself I'm angry at for having been such an idiot as to think I meant anything serious to him.
She stood up, gave herself an angry shake, and went into the theatre.
The house was packed for the opening performance of
Macbeth
. J. P. Price had even put extra chairs at the side. Elizabeth stood at the back of the house and suddenly nothing existed for her except
Macbeth
, except the magic that was being created onstage.
“Lordy, Andersen's magnificent,” John Peter said at intermission, and Elizabeth was too speechless to do anything but nod. For these few hours she was no longer Elizabeth Jerrold caught up in her own muddled personal problems but a sensitive receiving instrument ready to receive things that were greater than herself or her sorrows, so that even in the midst of a turmoil which might be making her feel passionately unhappy she could also be capable of feeling great joy.
But after the curtain had come down, after Valborg Andersen had taken her last curtain call and the houselights had come up, she lost her mood of exaltation and fell plummeting down into loneliness. Loneliness is a chilling thing, and she shivered in her light dress.
After the audience had left and she had folded the seats to the chairs and stacked her programs and flashlights for the following night, she wandered backstage. Most of the cast had already removed costume and makeup. She caught a glimpse of Jane in Valborg Andersen's dressing room, talking earnestly and seriously to her aunt. Miss Andersen was listening, laughing
once in a while, and then the two of them left the theatre. Ditta and Marian were standing at the stage door with Ben, laughing in the companionship of a shared joke; then they called good night to Ben and left. Elizabeth went into the wings and sat on Joe's empty stool, putting her head down on the promptbook on the table. She heard the final slamming of dressing room doors, the clink of keys being hung on the rack, feet hurrying down the steps, good-nights being called out; and she sat there, hidden in her corner, and felt for the first time alien and not part of the life around her.
But this
can't
happen because of Kurt, she told herself in consternation. The way I felt about Kurt doesn't have anything to do with the way I feel about the theatre!
After a while she looked up and saw Ben coming toward her. “Hi, Liz,” he said.
“Hi, Ben.”
“Liz, I want to talk to you.”
She sighed. “Okay. What about?”
“You. And Kurt. And me.”
She flung her arms wide in a mock-dramatic gesture. “All is over between Kurt and me, if that's what you mean.”
He gave a slightly sardonic grin. “Well, I rather gathered that. Listen, so all day we've been kidding. I've known something was wrong and you've known something was wrong, and every time I thought I was going to get up courage to ask you I'd make another sappy crack instead.”
“Well, now you know.” She put her head down on the promptbook again.
“I know you and Kurt had a fight or something but I want
to know more than that. You've been acting toward me as though I had leprosy or something and you were being kind to me out of auld lang syne but really you didn't think you ought to get close to me. What does busting up with Kurt have to do with me? It's more than your being unhappy. Sure, I understand you're unhappy and I'm sorry as hell, but if busting up with that bastard means the end of you and me too, then I want to know why.”
Now Elizabeth raised her head and looked at him in consternation. “Oh, Ben, I'm so sorry, butâ”
“But what?”
“It hasn't anything to do with Kurt, it'sâ”
“What?”
“Ben, I guess I've been kind of a stinker about you, only I didn't realize it, honestly, and Iâwell, that's what it is. That's what's between us. What I told you about yesterday.”
“Oh, damn Dottie!” Ben shouted furiously. “Damn John Peter and any other interfering busybody who's been shooting off his mouth.” Then he calmed down. “Okay, listen to me. I'm so glad whatever happened with you and Kurt happened I could sing. I'm not a bit sorry. Does that make us even?”
Elizabeth smiled rather wanly. “I don't know.”
“Okay, then, listen to this. This is a promise. I'm going to ask you to marry me. Not now or in a month. Not for at least six months. I don't want you on the rebound. But it might interest you to know that my intentions are strictly honorable. Might be rather amusing for a change.”
“Oh, Benâ”
“Listen, in the theatre everybody goes around arranging
other people's lives. After the first day everybody decided you were for me. Then Kurt comes along and puts a crimp in it. So everybody's mad. Everybody thinks I'm being done dirt. Rot. You were already twined tightly around Kurt's little finger before I tumbled to the fact that you were my girl. Okay, so I could wait. I knew the Kurt thing wouldn't last. I was right. And get this straight. I'm not asking you to accept me now. I wouldn't have you now. But in six months I'm going to court you properly and you might as well know it now. Okay?”
Elizabeth sighed again but she smiled up at Ben. “Okay.”
Ben sighed, too, and sat down on the floor beside her. “Now that I've announced my oh-so-honorable intentions, I'm going to be a stinker. About this business with Kurt. I think you ought to get it out of your system and better me than anybody else. You didn't do anything you shouldn't do, did you? Not that it would make any difference to me if you did, but I know it would to you.”
“No, Ben. I didn't.”
“I shouldn't have asked you that.”
“It's all right. I don't blame you for asking.” She looked down at her feet in the gold evening sandals on the dusty ground cloth. Underneath them she could hear the soft lapping of waves against the piles holding the theatre up. The work light above her was swinging slightly and the shadows moved about on the walls and the canvas flats, grotesque and menacing.
“No. I should have known you well enough to know I didn't need to ask it,” Ben said.
“It's all right. I've made a fool of myself about Kurt in every other way. I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking I might have in that way, too.”
Ben didn't say anything. The light above them was still now; its slow swinging had stopped; but the shadows pressed about it so that it made only a faint small pool of solace.
“Ben, I've been making such an idiot of myself all summer. Agonizing so obviously when he went out with Dottie or anyone else. I wasâI was
crude
.”
“It wasn't as bad as all that,” Ben said. He took her glasses, which she was twirling unhappily, out of her tense fingers and laid them down on the table.
“The trouble is,” Elizabeth spoke in a muffled voice as though the shadows which were muffling the light were also muffling her, “that I've let it color everything. The way I feel about you, and Jane and John Peter and everything. I guess I've gone to the other extreme. I've begun to look at things as though I were Aunt Harriet.”
“What things?” Ben asked gently.
Now Elizabeth looked up and focused her eyes on a sandbag hanging from the flies. “Ohâthings like the way you and John Peter are always in our room sitting around. I never thought of it as being anything wrong. I never thought of it as âmen in the room.' It was just the nicest place for all of us to beâout of the way of the professional company and where we could talk and have fun. I never thought of it as anything wrong.”
“It wasn't anything wrong,” Ben said with finality.
“Aunt Harriet thought it was wrong.”
“Nothing went on in that room that couldn't have gone on in the living room, did it?”
Elizabeth gave a half grin. “Lots more goes on down in the living room than ever goes on in our room.”
“Well, then?” Ben asked.
“But, Benâ” Now Elizabeth looked away from the sandbag, but she could not look out into the theatre because the asbestos was down and she and Ben were hemmed into Dunsinane, into the dark, relieved only by the single bulb of the work light in its small wire cage, and it seemed that there was nothing of comfort on which she could rest her eyes.
“What, Liz?” Ben asked.
“I went to Kurt's dressing room. At night, I mean.”
“Oh,” Ben said.
“And thatâthat was wrong, wasn't it?”