* * * * *
Beau and Doc were already out there, made up and in costume for Ross
and King Duncan. They were discreetly peering past the wings at the
gathering audience. Or at the place where the audience ought to be
gathering, at any rate--sometimes the movies and girlie shows and
brainheavy beatnik bruhahas outdraw us altogether. Their costumes were
the same kooky colorful ones as the others'. Doc had a mock-ermine
robe and a huge gilt papier-mache crown. Beau was carrying a ragged
black robe and hood over his left arm--he doubles the First Witch.
As I came up behind them, making no noise in my black sneakers, I
heard Beau say, "I see some rude fellows from the City approaching. I
was hoping we wouldn't get any of those. How should they scent us
out?"
_Brother_, I thought, _where do you expect them to come from if not
the City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Island
and on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronx
boys have got pretty sharp scenters. And what's it get you insulting
the woiking and non-woiking people of the woild's greatest metropolis?
Be grateful for any audience you get, boy._
But I suppose Beau Lassiter considers anybody from north of Vicksburg
a "rude fellow" and is always waiting for the day when the entire
audience will arrive in carriage and democrat wagons.
Doc replied, holding down his white beard and heavy on the mongrel
Russo-German accent he miraculously manages to suppress on stage
except when "Vot does it matter? Ve don't convinze zem, ve don't
convinze nobody. _Nichevo._"
_Maybe_, I thought, _Doc shares my doubts about making Macbeth
plausible in rainbow pants._
Still unobserved by them, I looked between their shoulders and got the
first of my shocks.
It wasn't night at all, but afternoon. A dark cold lowering afternoon,
admittedly. But afternoon all the same.
Sure, between shows I sometimes forget whether it's day or night,
living inside like I do. But getting matinees and evening performances
mixed is something else again.
It also seemed to me, although Beau was leaning in now and I couldn't
see so well, that the glade was smaller than it should be, the trees
closer to us and more irregular, and I couldn't see the benches. That
was Shock Two.
Beau said anxiously, glancing at his wrist, "I wonder what's holding
up the Queen?"
Although I was busy keeping up nerve-pressure against the shocks, I
managed to think. _So he knows about Siddy's stupid Queen Elizabeth
prologue too. But of course he would. It's only me they keep in the
dark. If he's so smart he ought to remember that Miss Nefer is always
the last person on stage, even when she opens the play._
And then I thought I heard, through the trees, the distant drumming
of horses' hoofs and the sound of a horn.
* * * * *
Now they do have horseback riding in Central Park and you can hear
auto horns there, but the hoofbeats don't drum that wild way. And
there aren't so many riding together. And no auto horn I ever heard
gave out with that sweet yet imperious _ta-ta-ta-TA_.
I must have squeaked or something, because Beau and Doc turned around
quickly, blocking my view, their expressions half angry, half anxious.
I turned too and ran for the dressing room, for I could feel one of my
mind-wavery fits coming on. At the last second it had seemed to me
that the scenery was getting skimpier, hardly more than thin trees and
bushes itself, and underfoot feeling more like ground than a ground
cloth, and overhead not theater roof but gray sky. _Shock Three and
you're out, Greta_, my umpire was calling.
I made it through the dressing room door and nothing there was
wavering or dissolving, praised be Pan. Just Martin standing with his
back to me, alert, alive, poised like a cat inside that green dress,
the prompt book in his right hand with a finger in it, and from his
left hand long black tatters swinging--telling me he'd still be
doubling Second Witch. And he was hissing, "Places, please, everybody.
On stage!"
With a sweep of silver and ash-colored plush, Miss Nefer came past
him, for once leading the last-minute hurry to the stage. She had on
the dark red wig now. For me that crowned her characterization. It
made me remember her saying, "My brain burns." I ducked aside as if
she were majesty incarnate.
And then she didn't break her own precedent. She stopped at the new
thing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers over
the yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: a
virginals.
She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning an
enchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I told
myself, the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths of
Ballard and Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say she
didn't) one of his raids, that long long forefinger tracing crooked
courses through a crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling at
the dots of cities that would burn.
Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings inside
the virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering of
Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."
Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a black
swooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, I
beat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing across
the mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wanted
to make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he'd see
reality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronism
of that menacing mad march music was shrilling in my ears.