I will vault credit
and affect high pleasures
Beyond death.
--Ferdinand
I sat down where Martin had been, first pushing the screen far enough
to the side for me to see the length of the dressing room and notice
anyone coming through the door and any blurs moving behind the thin
white curtain shutting off the boys' two-thirds.
I'd been going to think. But instead I just sat there, experiencing my
body and the room around it, steadying myself or maybe readying
myself. I couldn't tell which, but it was nothing to think about, only
to feel. My heartbeat became a very faint, slow, solid throb. My spine
straightened.
No one came in or went out. Distantly I heard Macbeth and the witches
and the apparitions talk.
Once I looked at the New York Screen, but all the stuff there had
grown stale. No protection, no nothing.
I reached down to my suitcase and from where I'd been going to get a
miltown I took a dexedrine and popped it in my mouth. Then I started
out, beginning to shake.
When I got to the end of the curtain I went around it to Sid's
dressing table and asked Shakespeare, "Am I doing the right thing,
Pop?" But he didn't answer me out of his portrait. He just looked
sneaky-innocent, like he knew a lot but wouldn't tell, and I found
myself think of a little silver-framed photo Sid had used to keep
there too of a cocky German-looking young actor with "Erich"
autographed across it in white ink. At least I supposed he was an
actor. He looked a little like Erich von Stroheim, but nicer yet
somehow nastier too. The photo had used to upset me, I don't know why.
Sid must have noticed it, for one day it was gone.
I thought of the tiny black-and-silver spider crawling across the
remembered silver frame, and for some reason it gave me the cold
creeps.
Well, this wasn't doing me any good, just making me feel dismal again,
so I quickly went out. In the door I had to slip around the actors
coming back from the Cauldron Scene and the big bolt nicked my hip.
Outside Maud was peeling off her Third Witch stuff to reveal Lady
Macduff beneath. She twitched me a grin.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Okay, I guess," she shrugged. "What an audience! Noisy as highschool
kids."
"How come Sid didn't have a boy do your part?" I asked.
"He goofed, I guess. But I've battened down my bosoms and playing Mrs.
Macduff as a boy."
"How does a girl do that in a dress?" I asked.
"She sits stiff and thinks pants," she said, handing me her witch
robe. "'Scuse me now. I got to find my children and go get murdered."
* * * * *
I'd moved a few steps nearer the stage when I felt the gentlest tug at
my hip. I looked down and saw that a taut black thread from the bottom
of my sweater connected me with the dressing room. It must have
snagged on the big bolt and unraveled. I moved my body an inch or so,
tugging it delicately to see what it felt like and I got the answers:
Theseus's clew, a spider's line, an umbilicus.
I reached down close to my side and snapped it with my fingernails.
The black thread leaped away. But the dressing room door didn't
vanish, or the wings change, or the world end, and I didn't fall down.
After that I just stood there for quite a while, feeling my new
freedom and steadiness, letting my body get used to it. I didn't do
any thinking. I hardly bothered to study anything around me, though I
did notice that there were more bushes and trees than set pieces, and
that the flickery lightning was simply torches and that Queen
Elizabeth was in (or back in) the audience. Sometimes letting your
body get used to something is all you should do, or maybe can do.
And I did smell horse dung.
When the Lady Macduff Scene was over and the Chicken Scene well begun,
I went back to the dressing room. Actors call it the Chicken Scene
because Macduff weeps in it about "all my pretty chickens and their
dam," meaning his kids and wife, being murdered "at one fell swoop" on
orders of that chickenyard-raiding "hell-kite" Macbeth.
Inside the dressing room I steered down the boys' side. Doc was
putting on an improbable-looking dark makeup for Macbeth's last
faithful servant Seyton. He didn't seem as boozy-woozy as usual for
Fourth Act, but just the same I stopped to help him get into a
chain-mail shirt made of thick cord woven and silvered.
In the third chair beyond, Sid was sitting back with his corset
loosened and critically surveying Martin, who'd now changed to a white
wool nightgown that clung and draped beautifully, but not particularly
enticingly, on him and his folded towel, which had slipped a bit.
From beside Sid's mirror, Shakespeare smiled out of his portrait at
them like an intelligent big-headed bug.
Martin stood tall, spread his arms rather like a high priest, and
intoned, "_Amici! Romani! Populares!_"