Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the
gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at
that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss
Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.
Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, _Greta, you imagined
that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer's simply unkinked
herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe
Sid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybe
she just couldn't stand watching Martin give such a bang-up
performance in her part of Lady Mack._
Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehow
all I could think then--and I thought it with a steady mounting
shiver--was, _We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. I
know. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals.
But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stage
Elizabeth ... who's the other?_
And because I didn't dare to let myself think of the answer to that
question, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-colored
skirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I ran
into the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York City
Screen.
V
Even little things are turning out to be great
things and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about the properties
of numbers?
--The Maiden
Lying on my cot, my eyes crosswise to the printing, I looked from a
pink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tiny
doll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread.
Really they weren't covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole an
inch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if my
eye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I'd seen the
two times I'd dared a peek through the hole in the curtain: a bevy of
ladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles
knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of
people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes,
humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their
foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and
in one case that many heads--as if they were dressed up in our
_Tempest_, _Peer Gynt_ and _Insect People_ costumes and some more
besides.
Naturally I'd had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid had
wagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we'd been
giving performances for people who'd arranged a costume theater-party
and been going to attend a masquerade ball, and 'zounds, when would I
learn to guard my half-patched pate?
_I don't know, I guess never_, I answered now, quick looking at a
Giants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willie Mays
baseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I'd looked
at this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren't
reassuring me at all.
The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it,
"What are you looking for? A spider?" when what should I hear coming
back through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet but
Miss Nefer's footsteps. No one else walks that way.
_She's going to do something to you, Greta_, I thought. _She's the
maniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with the
boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at
the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the
others are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile and
weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam
Wood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men in
armor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or torn
apart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon without
being dressed for it or sent burrowing into the past to stifle in Iowa
1948 or Egypt 4,008 B.C. The screen won't keep her out._
* * * * *
Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it was
black-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martin
was giving me one of his rare smiles.
I said, "Marty, do something for me. Don't ever use Miss Nefer's
footsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not the
footsteps. Don't ask me why, just don't."
Martin came around and sat on the foot of my cot. My legs were already
doubled up. He straightened out his blue-and-gold skirt and rested a
hand on my black sneakers.
[Illustration]
"Feeling a little wonky, Greta?" he asked. "Don't worry about me.
Banquo's dead and so's his ghost. We've finished the Banquet Scene.
I've got lots of time."
I just looked at him, queerly I guess. Then without lifting my head I
asked him, "Martin, tell me the truth. Does the dressing room move
around?"
I was talking so low that he hitched a little closer, not touching me
anywhere else though.
"The Earth's whipping around the sun at 20 miles a second," he
replied, "and the dressing room goes with it."
I shook my head, my cheek scrubbing the pillow, "I mean ... shifting,"
I said. "By itself."
"How?" he asked.
"Well," I told him, "I've had this idea--it's just a sort of fancy,
remember--that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you
could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing room and
sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it. Actors
can fit in anywhere. They're used to learning new parts and wearing
strange costumes. Heck, they're even used to traveling a lot. And if
an actor's a bit strange nobody thinks anything of it--he's almost
expected to be foreign, it's an asset to him."
"And a theater, well, a theater can spring up almost anywhere and
nobody ask questions, except the zoning authorities and such and they
can always be squared. Theaters come and go. It happens all the time.
They're transitory. Yet theaters are crossroads, anonymous meeting
places, anybody with a few bucks or sometimes nothing at all can go.
And theaters attract important people, the sort of people you might
want to do something to. Caesar was stabbed in a theater. Lincoln was
shot in one. And...."
My voice trailed off. "A cute idea," he commented.
I reached down to his hand on my shoe and took hold of his middle
finger as a baby might.
"Yeah," I said, "But Martin, is it true?"