“Bumped into Ditta.”
“Ditta should keep her mouth closed.”
“I had to twist her wrist,” Ben said. “What's the matter, Liz? No nonsense, now. You aren't the crying type, so I know it's more than J. P. Priceless bawling you out about something. You're too used to that to let it upset you anyhow, so don't try that as an excuse.”
Elizabeth looked behind her at J. P. Price's desk, but it was empty.
“He's in watching rehearsal,” Ben said. “Now tell me what's up.”
“Ohâ” Elizabeth tried to keep the strain out of her voice. “Remember my long distance telephone call?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“It's all my own fault,” Elizabeth said. “I've just been elected Miss Dope of the Year. Please don't tell the others how stupid I've been. I wantedâwell, I wanted to make Aunt Harriet see what fun we all have here and how grateful I was to her for letting me have this summer and everything, and I wrote her about you andâand Kurt, and John Peter and Jane, and how we all sit up in our room talking half the night and everything, and she's got the idea that the Cottage is a House or something.”
“Maybe she's not too far wrong at that,” Ben said. “Some of the company down on the second floor ought to change their profession. But that doesn't have anything to do with you. She's not blaming you for
that
, is she?”
“She thinks
I'm
immoral, Ben. She says I have to come home.”
“Do you have to do what she says?”
“This time I can't help myself. I haven't any money for room and board.”
Ben's face darkened with anger. “Is the old witch poor?”
Elizabeth looked puzzled for a second. “The house in Jordan's big and all her furniture's beautiful and everything. I don't think money has anything to do with it, Ben. She's always beenâoh, what you'd call eccentric; and she's always been
against the theatre or any kind of a so-called bohemian life. When I first went to live with her, I was thirteen, and whenever I talked about wanting to be an actress she'd make me sit in my room for an hour to contemplate my evil spirit. But it's really understandable in her case, Ben. I don't mean to make her sound like an ogreâshe isn't. She's truly tried to do the best she knows how for me. But she can't bear anything to do with the theatre because of my mother.”
“What about your mother?” Ben asked.
“This the box office?” a voice behind Ben said. “Is this where I buy tickets for the Valborg Andersen play next week?”
“Yes, right here, sir,” Elizabeth said, and Ben stepped aside.
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When Elizabeth was relieved at the box office, there was about an hour until lunch. Mr. Price was back in the office so she told him the awful news from Aunt Harriet. When he grumbled about it being a “damn inconvenience,” she hoped that he would offer to keep her on without paying the twenty dollars room and board. She held her breath, but he kept grumbling and stormed back into the theatre. Crushed, she went to see if Ben was through with rehearsal; as assistant stage manager he was the only one of Elizabeth's particular friends who actually had the opportunity to work daily with the professional company. He was standing by one of the open side doors talking to Valborg Andersen. Elizabeth watched them for a momentâBen, tall and lanky with a lock of heavy dark hair falling across his forehead, and the smallish woman, dressed in a simple blue cotton dress, drinking coffee out of a paper cup and laughing
heartily at something he was saying. Standing there in the shadows, rather wistfully looking at them, Elizabeth remembered very well the first time she had seen Valborg Andersen.
Â
Almost every year during the Christmas holidays, Elizabeth's father would leave the small house across the street from the school where he taught English literature and go to New York to see as much theatre as he could, sending an unwilling Elizabeth off to Jordan to spend Christmas with Aunt Harriet. But when Elizabeth was ten her father started taking her with him, and the first Saturday evening they went to see Valborg Andersen in
Romeo and Juliet
. Never would Elizabeth forget the excitement and glamour of that evening. Perhaps Aunt Harriet's disapproval lent it an added charm.
Elizabeth had sat beside her father in the balcony, first row center (“My favorite place to see a play,” he told her), holding his hand, half listening as he talked about the play, half looking about her at the audience, at the privileged glamorous people who were accustomed to going to plays, who sat there so calmly, talking to each other or glancing casually at their programs.
When the lights began to dim, Elizabeth clutched her father's arm in anticipation as the footlights came up and the red velvet curtain began to rise. At intermission her father said, “Are you enjoying it, dear? Andersen is giving a magnificent performance. It's a wonderful introduction to the theatre for you.”
As usual when she was tremendously moved, Elizabeth could not speak. She knew only that the question of the future
had been finally and definitely decided for her; she was going to be an actress. She nodded solemnly and waited for the curtain to rise again.
After that she went with her father to New York each Christmas until he died. Then there was no more theatre, except in her imagination, until she went to college. At college, in spite of chemistry, there was the Dramatic Association, and the Theatre Workshop, where she managed to take a few elective courses for credit. And occasionally a professional company came to the old Academy Theatre in Northampton where Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse had once played, or to one of the auditoriums in nearby Springfield.
Valborg Andersen came to Springfield to the high school auditorium as Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
the same year that she published her
Shakespeare Prefaces
. She came on a Saturday and played both a matinee and an evening performance. Elizabeth left college with her roommate at eleven o'clock in the morning, so afraid was she that they might not be on time for the rise of the afternoon curtain. The roommate sighed but did not attempt to reason with her. They were so early that they saw Valborg Andersen standing on the cold stage wearing an old raccoon coat and watching while the stage manager set the lights. Somehow that made the day even more wonderful than it had promised to be, this unofficial glimpse of the professional theatre in action.
Elizabeth sat through the matinee in a state of ecstasy and insisted that they stay for the evening performance, too. Quite a group of other students came over to Springfield for it and afterwards went backstage.
“Coming, Liz?” they asked her.
She shook her head.
“But why on earth not? You're so crazy about her! And she said we could go back.”
She shook her head again. “I just can't.” She could not explain her reasons even to herself.
“Liz, you should have come back,” her roommate told her afterwards. “She was wonderful to us. And even when I made a couple of criticisms about the production, she took it perfectly seriously as though my opinion meant something, and discussed it with me. She'sâoh, Liz, you should have come back. Why didn't you?”
“I don't know,” Elizabeth repeated. “IâI admire her too much. I couldn't have said anything if I'd gone back there.”
“But there were lots of things about the production you said you'd give anything to ask her about.”
“Yesâbut I couldn't have done it, just going back with a bunch of kids, when she's so busy and tired.”
Â
Elizabeth still couldn't explain why she hadn't gone backstage that night any more than she could explain why, during the past week that Miss Andersen had been rehearsing, she had not, like most of the apprentices, made some sort of excuse to speak to her. Bibi had brought her coffee; Ditta had found an opportunity to talk to her about using
Shakespeare Prefaces
for her students; Ben reported wonderful talks with her; and Jane had gone down the boardwalk to buy her cigarettes.
Now she watched Ben and the actress for a moment longer; then, afraid that she might be noticed, she turned away
from the theatre and walked back to the Cottage. Four of the apprentices were out on the stone porch, wearing wet bathing suits and rehearsing a scene from
Mourning Becomes Electra
, which they had been practicing in their class with Huntley Haskell. Elizabeth watched them critically for a moment before heading inside. The living room was dark in the daytime and smelled cool and damp and musty. The furniture was covered with very old and very faded chintz and was always being pushed around for one rehearsal or another. The ceiling light, which reminded Elizabeth of some horrible overfed spider with its seven weak bulbs at the end of rusty iron legs, was on, and Jane and John Peter, setting the dining room tables for lunch, waved at her as she started upstairs.
I can't go back to Jordan, Elizabeth thought. Oh, please, I can't.
Â
The bedroom was deserted. Elizabeth stood looking at the pictures on the chest of drawers which she and Jane shared. Jane had a picture of her parents in a silver frame. She looked, oddly, amazingly, like both of them. There was also, on Jane's portion of the bureau, a picture of John Peter, dark and moody, his nose an aristocratic beak, his eyes brooding and troubled. Elizabeth liked and respected John Peter, but she was never completely comfortable with him.
On Elizabeth's side of the bureau was a small double frame with a snapshot of her father seated at his desk in his office at the boys' school, and a newspaper picture of her mother. Her father, as he appeared in the snapshot, was a serious-looking man, with a humorous quirk to his mouth, and eyes stained
with sadness. Her mother, in the newspaper picture, had a boyish bob and a gamine's face with huge grey eyes like Elizabeth's. In spite of the fact that her mother's hair was straight and obviously blond, as blond as Jane's, and Elizabeth's was reddish and wavy, Kurt had assumed, the first time he had seen the picture, that it was Elizabeth.
“No, it's my mother,” Elizabeth had said. “Sheâshe's dead.”
“She looks like an actress,” Kurt had said, and turned to the pictures of Jane's parents.
Behind the pictures of her mother and father Elizabeth had a picture of Kurt from a publicity release, looking handsome and blasé and also rather sinister with a slight droop to one eyelid. Next to Kurt's was a picture of Valborg Andersen as Shaw's Lavinia, simple and serene and shining. Elizabeth looked at the two of them, Kurt posing as the worldly director and Valborg Andersen as the early Christian martyr. If only I could stay, she thought passionately. If only I could stay!
She would have liked to fling herself on her bed and weep with rage at her Aunt Harriet and disappointment in general, but she felt that crying was a sign of weakness and she had had more than her quota for the day, so instead she reached for her volume of Chekhov, from which they were rehearsing
The Seagull
in their informal afternoon sessions, and began studying her role. She concentrated with a kind of desperation until John Peter knocked on the door.
“Liz!”
“I'm here.”
“Are you decent?”
“Yes. Come in.”
John Peter and Jane, arms entwined, entered and sat on Jane's bed.
“We missed you this morning,” John Peter said.
Elizabeth shut her book. “Learn anything new?”
“Not a thing.” Jane leaned back against John Peter. “Did you ever get your telephone call?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth stood in front of the bureau and began to brush her hair.
“What did Auntie want?” Jane asked.
“I have to go back to Virginia.”
Jane was appalled. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I say, unfortunately.”
“But why?” John Peter asked.
Elizabeth hesitated. “WellâAunt Harriet isn't sending me any more money for room and board.”
Jane pushed away from John Peter and stood up. “But, Liz, you
can't
leave! When do you have to go?”
“Tomorrow, I guess. I'd been kind of wondering why my check for next week hadn't come.”
“But, Liz, you'll miss
Macbeth
! You'll miss seeing Andersen!”
“You're just making it harder for Liz,” John Peter said.
Jane sat down again and asked, more quietly, “What are you going to do?”
“I'm going to Jordan. I'm going to get a job. I think I can get work at the lab at the hospital. Maybe there was a real reason to all that chemistry in college. And when I have enough money saved, I'm going to come to New York and get another job until I can find work in the theatre.”
John Peter reached over and took Elizabeth's hand. “Liz, it's a shame. Isn't there anything we could do to coerce the old girl into letting you stay?”