Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall
sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a pair
of sheeres.
--Old Play
My sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls' third
of the dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private.
When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pasted
and thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives me
security: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the
_Times_ and the _Mirror_, a torn-out picture of the United Nations
building with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, and
hanging in an old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by Willie
Mays. Things like that.
Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep me
located and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my
knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from
the play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks and
tables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen
to them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones
by their crooked trip. But they're always tense-making. And tonight (I
mean this afternoon)--no!
It's funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren't go
out into--no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though I
know it from the Pond to Harlem Meer--the Met Museum, the Menagerie,
the Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra's Needle and all the rest. But
that's the way it is. Maybe I'm like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to
go outside because the whale's a terrible monster that's awful scary
to look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a second
time, yet reassured to know you're living in the stomach of that
particular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth
planet of Aldebaran.
It's really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing
room. The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders and
doughnuts in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts and
hamburgers and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me raw
vegetables--carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, and
watches to make sure I exercise my molars grinding them and get my
vitamins. I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don't seem
to think actors ever take baths, even when they've browned themselves
all over playing Pindarus the Parthian in _Julius Caesar_. And all my
shut-eye is caught on this little cot in the twilight of my NYC
screen.
* * * * *
You'd think I'd be terrified being alone in the dressing room during
the wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but that
isn't the way it works out. For one thing, there's apt to be someone
sleeping in too. Maudie especially. And it's my favorite time too for
costume-mending and reading the _Variorum_ and other books, and for
just plain way-out dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the one
place I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York that
terrorizes me, I'm pretty confident that it can never get in here.
Besides that, there's a great big bolt on the inside of the dressing
room door that I throw whenever I'm all alone after the show. Next day
they buzz for me to open it.
It worried me a bit at first and I had asked Sid, "But what if I'm so
deep asleep I don't hear and you have to get in fast?" and he had
replied, "Sweetling, a word in your ear: our own Beauregard Lassiter
is the prettiest picklock unjailed since Jimmy Valentine and Jimmy
Dale. I'll not ask where he learned his trade, but 'tis sober truth,
upon my honor."
And Beau had confirmed this with a courtly bow, murmuring, "At your
service, Miss Greta."
"How do you jigger a big iron bolt through a three-inch door that fits
like Maudie's tights?" I wanted to know.
"He carries lodestones of great power and divers subtle tools," Sid
had explained for him.
I don't know how they work it so that some Traverse-Three cop or park
official doesn't find out about me and raise a stink. Maybe Sid just
throws a little more of the temperament he uses to keep most
outsiders out of the dressing-room. We sure don't get any janitors or
scrubwomen, as Martin and I know only too well. More likely he squares
someone. I do get the impression all the company's gone a little way
out on a limb letting me stay here--that the directors of our theater
wouldn't like it if they found out about me.
In fact, the actors are all so good about helping me and putting up
with my antics (though they have their own, Danu digs!) that I
sometimes think I must be related to one of them--a distant cousin or
sister-in-law (or wife, my God!), because I've checked our faces side
by side in the mirrors often enough and I can't find any striking
family resemblances. Or maybe I was even an actress in the company.
The least important one. Playing the tiniest roles like Lucius in
_Caesar_ and Bianca in _Othello_ and one of the little princes in
_Dick the Three Eyes_ and Fleance and the Gentlewoman in _Macbeth_,
though me doing even that much acting strikes me to laugh.
But whatever I am in that direction--if I'm anything--not one of the
actors has told me a word about it or dropped the least hint. Not even
when I beg them to tell me or try to trick them into it, presumably
because it might revive the shock that gave me agoraphobia and amnesia
in the first place, and maybe this time knock out my entire mind or at
least smash the new mouse-in-a-hole consciousness I've made for
myself.
* * * * *
I guess they must have got by themselves a year ago and talked me over
and decided my best chance for cure or for just bumping along half
happily was staying in the dressing room rather than being sent home
(funny, could I have another?) or to a mental hospital. And then they
must have been cocky enough about their amateur psychiatry and
interested enough in me (the White Horse knows why) to go ahead with a
program almost any psychiatrist would be bound to yike at.
I got so worried about the set up once and about the risks they might
be running that, gritting down my dread of the idea, I said to Sid,
"Siddy, shouldn't I see a doctor?"
He looked at me solemnly for a couple of seconds and then said, "Sure,
why not? Go talk to Doc right now," tipping a thumb toward Doc
Pyeskov, who was just sneaking back into the bottom of his makeup box
what looked like a half pint from the flask I got. I did,
incidentally. Doc explained to me Kraepelin's classification of the
psychoses, muttering, as he absentmindedly fondled my wrist, that in a
year or two he'd be a good illustration of Korsakov's Syndrome.
They've all been pretty darn good to me in their kooky ways, the
actors have. Not one of them has tried to take advantage of my
situation to extort anything out of me, beyond asking me to sew on a
button or polish some boots or at worst clean the wash bowl. Not one
of the boys has made a pass I didn't at least seem to invite. And when
my crush on Sid was at its worst he shouldered me off by getting
polite--something he only is to strangers. On the rebound I hit Beau,
who treated me like a real Southern gentleman.
All this for a stupid little waif, whom anyone but a gang of
sentimental actors would have sent to Bellevue without a second
thought or feeling. For, to get disgustingly realistic, my most
plausible theory of me is that I'm a stage-struck girl from Iowa who
saw her twenties slipping away and her sanity too, and made the dash
to Greenwich Village, and went so ape on Shakespeare after seeing her
first performance in Central Park that she kept going back there night
after night (Christopher Street, Penn Station, Times Square, Columbus
Circle--see?) and hung around the stage door, so mousy but
open-mouthed that the actors made a pet of her.
And then something very nasty happened to her, either down at the
Village or in a dark corner of the Park. Something so nasty that it
blew the top of her head right off. And she ran to the only people and
place where she felt she could ever again feel safe. And she showed
them the top of her head with its singed hair and its jagged ring of
skull and they took pity.
My least plausible theory of me, but the one I like the most, is that
I was born in the dressing room, cradled in the top of a flat
theatrical trunk with my ears full of Shakespeare's lines before I
ever said "Mama," let alone lamped a TV; hush-walked when I cried by
whoever was off stage, old props my first toys, trying to eat crepe
hair my first indiscretion, sticks of grease-paint my first crayons.
You know, I really wouldn't be bothered by crazy fears about New York
changing and the dressing room shifting around in space and time, if I
could be sure I'd always be able to stay in it and that the same sweet
guys and gals would always be with me and that the shows would always
go on.
* * * * *
This show was sure going on, it suddenly hit me, for I'd let my
fingers slip off my ears as I sentimentalized and wish-dreamed and I
heard, muted by the length and stuff of the dressing room, the slow
beat of a drum and then a drum note in Maudie's voice taking up that
beat as she warned the other two witches, "A drum, a drum! Macbeth
doth come."
Why, I'd not only missed Sid's history-making-and-breaking Queen
Elizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I had, now it was over), I'd
also missed the short witch scene with its famous "Fair is foul and
foul is fair," the Bloody Sergeant scene where Duncan hears about
Macbeth's victory, and we were well into the second witch scene, the
one on the blasted heath where Macbeth gets it predicted to him he'll
be king after Duncan and is tempted to speculate about hurrying up the
process.
I sat up. I did hesitate a minute then, my fingers going back toward
my ears, because _Macbeth_ is specially tense-making and when I've had
one of my mind-wavery fits I feel weak for a while and things are
blurry and uncertain. Maybe I'd better take a couple of the
barbiturate sleeping pills Maudie manages to get for me and--but _No,
Greta_, I told myself, _you want to watch this show, you want to see
how they do in those crazy costumes. You especially want to see how
Martin makes out. He'd never forgive you if you didn't._
So I walked to the other end of the empty dressing room, moving quite
slowly and touching the edges here and there, the words of the play
getting louder all the time. By the time I got to the door
Bruce-Banquo was saying to the witches, "If you can look into the
seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will
not,"--those lines that stir anyone's imagination with their veiled
vision of the universe.
The overall lighting was a little dim (afternoon fading already?--a
_late_ matinee?) and the stage lights flickery and the scenery still a
little spectral-flimsy. Oh, my mind-wavery fits can be lulus! But I
concentrated on the actors, watching them through the entrance-gaps in
the wings. They were solid enough.
Giving a solid performance, too, as I decided after watching that
scene through and the one after it where Duncan congratulates Macbeth,
with never a pause between the two scenes in true Elizabethan style.
Nobody was laughing at the colorful costumes. After a while I began to
accept them myself.
Oh, it was a different _Macbeth_ than our company usually does. Louder
and faster, with shorter pauses between speeches, the blank verse at
times approaching a chant. But it had a lot of real guts and everybody
was just throwing themselves into it, Sid especially.
* * * * *
The first Lady Macbeth scene came. Without exactly realizing it I
moved forward to where I'd been when I got my three shocks. Martin is
so intent on his career and making good that he has me the same way
about it.
The Thaness started off, as she always does, toward the opposite side
of the stage and facing a little away from me. Then she moved a step
and looked down at the stage-parchment letter in her hands and began
to read it, though there was nothing on it but scribble, and my heart
sank because the voice I heard was Miss Nefer's. I thought (and almost
said out loud) _Oh, dammit, he funked out, or Sid decided at the last
minute he couldn't trust him with the part. Whoever got Miss Nefer out
of the ice cream cone in time?_
Then she swung around and I saw that no, my God, it _was_ Martin, no
mistaking. He'd been using her voice. When a person first does a part,
especially getting up in it without much rehearsing, he's bound to
copy the actor he's been hearing doing it. And as I listened on, I
realized it was fundamentally Martin's own voice pitched a trifle
high, only some of the intonations and rhythms were Miss Nefer's. He
was showing a lot of feeling and intensity too and real Martin-type
poise. _You're off to a great start, kid_, I cheered inwardly. _Keep
it up!_
Just then I looked toward the audience. Once again I almost squeaked
out loud. For out there, close to the stage, in the very middle of the
reserve section, was a carpet spread out. And sitting in the middle of
it on some sort of little chair, with what looked like two charcoal
braziers smoking to either side of her, was Miss Nefer with a string
of extras in Elizabethan hats with cloaks pulled around them.
For a second it really threw me because it reminded me of the things
I'd seen or thought I'd seen the couple of times I'd sneaked a peek
through the curtain-hole at the audience in the indoor auditorium.
It hardly threw me for more than a second, though, because I
remembered that the characters who speak Shakespeare's prologues often
stay on stage and sometimes kind of join the audience and even
comment on the play from time to time--Christopher Sly and attendant
lords in _The Shrew_, for one. Sid had just copied and in his usual
style laid it on thick.
_Well, bully for you, Siddy_, I thought, _I'm sure the witless New
York groundlings will be thrilled to their cold little toes knowing
they're sitting in the same audience as Good Queen Liz and attendant
courtiers. And as for you, Miss Nefer_, I added a shade invidiously,
_you just keep on sitting cold in Central Park, warmed by dry-ice
smoke from braziers, and keep your mouth shut and everything'll be
fine. I'm sincerely glad you'll be able to be Queen Elizabeth all
night long. Just so long as you don't try to steal the scene from
Martin and the rest of the cast, and the real play._
_I suppose that camp chair will get a little uncomfortable by the time
the Fifth Act comes tramping along to that drumbeat, but I'm sure
you're so much in character you'll never feel it._
_One thing though: just don't scare me again pretending to work
witchcraft--with a virginals or any other way._
_Okay?_
_Swell._
_Me, now, I'm going to watch the play._