by Susan Sontag
Maryna stared at the chair.
Adrienne! But your hand is trembling. You’re ill, said Miss Collingridge evenly, unexpressively.
The gauntlet had been thrown down.
No, no, not anymore. The words arched from Maryna’s mouth. In the actress’s voice. She placed her hand over her heart. The pain is not there. She brought her hand to her head. It’s there.
Said.
It’s strange, it’s bizarre, she continued. A thousand different, fantastic things without order or connection are passing through my mind. It was the opposite of what was going on inside Maryna’s head, in which a firm, slicing clarity had descended.
And the delirious words gushed from her throat.
What did you say? Ah, I’ve already forgotten … my imagination seems to be wandering, where is my reason? But I must not lose my mind, no … first of all, for Maurice’s sake … and … and for this evening. Delirium, produced by the working of the subtle poison on the brain. The theatre has just been opened … the house is already full. No physical pain yet. No writhing. Yes, the curtain will rise soon … and I know how impatient and curious the audience is. They have been promised this play for a long time … yes, such a long time … since the first day I saw Maurice … There was an objection to staging it again. It is too old, some said, it seems passé. But I said no, no … and I have a reason. Ah, little do they guess that reason: Maurice has not yet said to me “I love you” … nor have I said so to him … I don’t dare. Now in this play there are certain lines that … I can say before everybody and no one will know that I am addressing them to him. It is a clever thought, is it not?
My love, my best love, return to yourself, said Miss Collingridge for Maurice, still admirably flat. Maryna looked at Miss Collingridge. She was rocking back and forth in the chair and lifting her face, gone all naked with passion, toward Maryna, and Maryna felt the push of Miss Collingridge’s emotion passing into her, stirring and soothing some soft uneasy place. Hush, hush, she said, as Adrienne, to Miss Collingridge, I must appear on the stage.
She was grateful to Miss Collingridge: one cannot do one’s best on a stage if one does not feel loved. An actor withers without love. Imagine having to do the scene in this empty theatre only for Barton, to whom she now directed all her watchfulness. What a splendid audience—how numerous, how brilliant! How my movements are watched by every glance. They are kind, very kind to love me thus. At first he could not have been paying attention at all, he was reading his letter, then he leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head, and seemed to be gazing at the top of the proscenium arch: she dismissed him contemptuously from her thoughts; but looking again she saw—he was leaning forward, his arms folded across the top of the seat in front of him—that she had finally interested him.
Adrienne! She does not see me, she does not hear me. The brisk, plump, diction-perfect voice of Miss Collingridge, in the role of Maurice.
Yes, Maryna saw, she had Barton now. Now he would see what she could do.
Can no one aid her? Has she not a friend? continued Miss Collingridge as Maurice, still tenaciously under control. And then she had to go on, old Michonnet having just entered—What has happened? Is Adrienne in danger?—a doubling of distress that fractured Miss Collingridge’s composure, for she rose from her chair as she answered hoarsely, for Maurice, Adrienne is dying! and fled to the side of the stage.
What is the silly girl doing, Maryna thought, before realizing that she’d done her a real service by ceding the chair.
Who is near me, Maryna whispered plaintively. How I suffer! Ah, Maurice, and you too, Michonnet. It is very kind. My head is calm now, but here in my bosom there is something like burning coal consuming me.
Poisoned, wailed Miss Collingridge as Michonnet from her dark corner.
Maryna glanced at Barton’s staring face in the tenth row. He seemed aroused. But had she made him cry? Ah, the pain increases. You who love me so much, help me! Then, oh so softly, in tones of accusatory wonderment: I do not want to die.
That was the line that never failed to ignite a burst of sobs in the audience, a line that touched every heart but those of the callous or the prejudiced. Listening to its echo in her head, Maryna allowed that she had never delivered the line better. I do not want to die! She permitted herself a few tottering steps before she sat, slowly.
An hour ago I should have prayed for death as a blessing, she said quietly, but now, without raising her voice, I want to live. A little more firmly: Oh Heavenly powers! Hear me! Not too loud. Barton can receive every syllable in that hollow heart of his. Let me live … a few days more … just a few short days with him, my Maurice … I am young and life starts to seem so beautiful.
Ah, it’s unbearable, moaned Miss Collingridge as Maurice.
Life! Maryna cried. Now the decrescendo would be best. Life!
Ristori’s Adrienne, following Rachel’s, would attempt to stand after these words, attempt in vain, and then sink back into the chair. Maryna had always played the moment that way, too—audiences expected it—but inspiration now led her to a new, a better idea. She wrenched her body around to face squarely upstage, as if Adrienne wished to spare her lover and her old friend the sight of the agony devastating her features, keeping her back to Barton a full, endless thirty seconds. Then, slowly, she turned, turned toward him another Adrienne, another face, that of someone already dead. No, no, I shall not live; every effort, every prayer is in vain. Do not leave me, Maurice. I can see you now, but I shall not be able to see you much longer. Hold my hand. You will not much longer feel its pressure …
Adrienne! Adrienne! cried Miss Collingridge.
There were to be no more words from Michonnet or from Maurice, she had launched Adrienne’s final speech, only a few more lines to the end, and though she could see every furrow in Miss Collingridge’s waxy face at the side of the stage, she could no longer make out Barton’s face at all. O triumphs of the theatre! My heart will no longer beat with your ardent emotions! And you, my long study of the art I have loved so much, nothing will remain of you when I am gone. Tone of noble lament as if, for a moment, Adrienne had quite forgotten herself. Nothing survives us, nothing but memory. But she remembers now! Maryna looked blindly about her. There, there, you will remember me, will you not? (She saw Miss Collingridge nod through her tears at that passable There, there.) And, as in a dream, she finished, Farewell Maurice, farewell Michonnet, my two, my only friends!
There was a moment of silence. She could hear Miss Collingridge sniveling. Then Barton began to applaud rhythmically, echoingly, very slowly. Maryna felt slapped by each sound. Then he took out a handkerchief, blew his nose loudly, and shouted into the dark theatre, “Tell Ames I can’t meet him at all. Madame, I … No, wait, I’m coming on stage.”
“Miss Collingridge,” Maryna said softly, “will you meet me at my rooms this afternoon at four o’clock? I must hear Mr. Barton’s verdict without a witness.” It was cruel to send the girl away, but she had to confront her destiny alone. Barton, wheezing, came forward and grasped her hand. “May I invite you to lunch with me?”
“Perhaps. But first you will tell me, what is my fate?”
“Fate?”
“Will you give me a week?”
“A week!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give you weeks. As many as you want.”
* * *
“I’M A BILIOUS MAN, Madame,” said Barton, tucking into the ample noon repast offered at the Fountain Bar. “Can you forgive me?”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
“No, no, I beg your pardon from the bottom of my heart. I thought you were a novice. Not even that, I thought you were some society lady with dreams of going on the stage. Never did I imagine that I was about to see a great artist.” He sighed. “You may be the greatest actress I have ever seen.”
“You are kind, Mr. Barton.”
“You mean I’m a fool. Well, I shall make it up to you.”
He says he will make it up to me, Henryk. All
went well, Bogdan. Ryszard, come.
They were sitting in one of the more select bars in the city, at the corner of Sutter and Kearny Streets, a popular place, Barton remarked, for bankers.
“As you see,” he added, with a nod at the to-and-fro of men about the room going up to consult a slender ribbon of paper trickling down one of the walls into a basket on the floor, followed by an explanation: these were choice gleanings, fresh at every moment, from the sub-marine cable, which were needed to conduct great mercantile transactions here in San Francisco. “News from the whole world, transported across intervening oceans to arrive on a strip of paper scarcely wider than my cigar band.”
“How convenient,” said Maryna.
“Even Ralston used to come to the Fountain. It’s a pity you can’t meet him, he was the richest man in the city, but damned, pardon my French, Madame, if he didn’t go for a swim in the Bay and drown by accident the very afternoon he learned that his bank failed. Some problem with his partner.” He laughed. “That fellow over there fiddling with the solid-gold watch fob crossing his waistcoat.”
“Shall we turn now to our business, Mr. Barton?”
“Right,” said Barton.
They began with a disagreement. Barton did not think she should open with Adrienne Lecouvreur. Camille, he thought, would be much better.
Adrienne first, Maryna said. Toward the end of the first week, Camille. And then one, perhaps two, plays of Shakespeare. She thought she should begin with Ophelia or Juliet, whose pathos was second nature to her. For although there was no Shakespearean role she liked better than Rosalind, she preferred to wait to do As You Like It until she had further reduced her accent. With Shakespeare’s comedies, she said, she had the impression that the audience listens differently. One expects, she explained, a more prominent linguistic grace.
“Am I being clear?” she added.
“Very clear,” said Barton.
“But perhaps you disagree.”
He smiled. “I can see it will be hard to disagree with you.”
“While you are in that mood, Mr. Barton,” she said briskly, “I think we should proceed to discuss my contract, my salary, and the dates you can propose. And the other actors, of course—I trust you can supply me with a Maurice de Saxe as princely as the Maurices I played with in Poland. Also you will tell me something, but not too much, about the drama critics here. Though I can hardly complain of the treatment I have received from critics, I have never liked them. They always start out thinking you are going to fail. I remember when I made my debut at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw, the critics were most skeptical. That I had chosen, yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur, was regarded as a great act of presumption. How could I, a mere Polish actress, dare to touch the role written for the immortal Rachel, which had then become the property of Adelaide Ristori? But I triumphed. With that role I was proclaimed queen of the Polish theatre, and from then on I could do no wrong.” She smiled. “A triumph is sweeter when one has first to surmount a wall of skepticism.”
“Indeed,” said Barton.
When they returned to the theatre, Barton took her for a tour of the neatly labeled’ interiors and exteriors in the scene-dock (Oak Chamber, Gothic Palace, English Drawing-Room, Old Venetian Palace, Forest Glade, Juliet’s Balcony, Humble Parlor, Tavern, Lake by Moonlight, Rustic Kitchen, Dungeon, French Ball-Room, Rugged Coast, Court-Room, Roman Street, Slave Quarters, Bed-Chamber, Rocky Pass) and the property room (throne chair, scaffold, royal couches, trees, scepter, infant’s cradle, spinning wheel, swords, rapiers, daggers, blunderbusses, paste jewels, casket, artificial flowers, goblets, champagne glasses, rubber asp, witches’ cauldron, Yorick’s skull); introduced her to the head scene-painter and the property-man and their dusty assistants; showed her the comforts of the star’s dressing room and the dignified greenroom. There were no actors yet on the premises. Barton assured her she would like the company’s Maurice, whom she guessed by the way he commended him (“a manly actor of the old school”) would prove easy to work with and not very alert.
And when that was done—they were back in Barton’s office—he offered her a week starting ten days from now, on September third; the California’s general manager had insisted on booking a crowd-pleasing variety show for that week, but he would be delighted to cede the Georgia Minstrels, Hermann the Wizard, and Professor O. S. Fowler, the renowned phrenologist, to the Bush Theatre or to Maguire’s. Then in October she could have three—four, if she liked—more weeks.
“There is one other thing. Your name, dear lady—of course it’s in the letters from your friends, but would you be so kind as to write it out for me?” He looked at the piece of paper. “M-A-R-Y-N-A Z-A- funny L-E-Z-O-W-S-K-A. Yes, I remember. And now, please, pronounce it for me.”
She did.
“Would you say that again? The second name. I’m afraid it doesn’t sound like what I’m looking at.”
She explained that the Polish l, the barred l, was pronounced as a w, the e with a hook under it as “en,” the z with the dot over it as “zh,” and w as an f or v.
“I shall attempt it once. Just once. Zalen … no, Zawen … I have to lisp, right?” He laughed. “But let’s be serious, dear lady. You realize, don’t you, that no one in America will ever learn to pronounce your name correctly. Now, I’m sure you don’t want to hear your name mispronounced all the time, and my worry is that only a few will make the effort to say it at all.” He leaned back in his chair. “It’s got to be shorter. Maybe you could drop the z-o-w. What do you say?”
“I shall be glad to improve my difficult foreign name,” she said airily. “Isn’t that what many people do when they come to America? I’m sure my late first husband, whose name I bear, Heinrich Załężowski—no, I think I’m not going to explain to you why he was Załężowski and I am Załężowska, that’s too much for a Yankee mind—would have been very amused.” And, amused by the prospect of marring Heinrich’s last bit of sovereignty over her, she took back the paper, wrote on it, and handed it to him again.
“Z-A-L-We’re forgetting about the Polish l, right?” He registered her nod. “Z-A-L-E-N-S-K-A. Zalenska. Not bad. Foreign, but not hard to say.”
“Almost as easy as Ristori.”
“You mock me, Madame Zalenska.”
“Call me Madame Maryna.”
“We’ll have to do something about the first name too, I’m afraid.”
“Ah, ça, non!” she cried. “That really is my name.”
“But nobody can say it. Do you really want people saying Madame Mary-Naaah? Mary-Naaaaah. Mary-Naaaaaaah. No. You don’t.”
“Your suggestion, Mr. Barton?”
“Well, you can’t be Mary. Too American. Marie, that’s French. Say, how about changing just one letter? Look.”
On the paper he had written: M-A-R-I-N-A.
“But that’s how my name is spelled in Russian! No, Mr. Barton, a Polish actress could hardly have a Russian name.” She was about to say, The Russians are our oppressors, and realized how puerile this would sound.
“Why not? Who in America would know the difference? And people can pronounce it. Mareena, they’ll say. They’ll think it’s Italian. It sounds nice. What do you say? Marina Zalenska.” He looked at her flirtatiously. “Madame Marina.”
She frowned and turned away.
“Well then, that’s settled. I shall have the contract drawn up this afternoon. And now—may I, to toast the occasion?” He was lifting a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. “I must tell you,” he said, “that anyone who works for me is fined five dollars if caught drinking in the theatre. Actors ten.” He half-filled two glasses. “Except for Edwin Booth, of course. Exceptions are always made, and I say rightly so, for poor Booth. Neat or with water?”
Marina Zalenska. Marina Zalenska. Marina—what was the matter with Edwin Booth?—Zalenska. “I beg your pardon? Oh, no water.” Marina, mother of Peter. Peter’s last name would have to be changed too.
So all is settled, Henryk. The dates, the
roles, my munificent salary, my mutilated name. No, the man is not a brother tippler. And when I took out a cigarette, he merely said, “Ah,” and reached for his matches. He is the first American I have met who does not seem genuinely shocked to see a lady smoke. I think I shall get on with this Mr. Barton very well. He likes me, he is a little afraid of me, and I like him, he is shrewd and he truly loves the theatre. I have dined with him and his charming wife, a simple home-cooked meal of creamed corn soup, deviled crabs, lamb chops in tomato sauce, stuffed potatoes, roast chickens, banana ice cream, jelly-roll, coffee, and I must not forget the stalks of uncooked celery set about the table in tall glasses to gnaw on ad libitum throughout the meal. You would have smiled at the heartiness of my appetite.
Applying to the mirror, the actor’s only candid friend, Maryna acknowledged that she was thinner than when she left Poland, though she trusted that she would not look too thin, actually thin-looking, when all the costumes brought with her had been taken in; that her face had aged, especially around the eyes, though she knew that on a stage, with the normal wizardry of makeup and gaslight, she would appear no more than twenty-five. To be sure, she wrote to Henryk, the gush of animal spirits of a lighthearted girl is beyond me now, but my joy and enthusiasm are intact. I believe I can give a faultless imitation of the emotions that may elude me in real life. I was never a great instinctual actor, but I am tireless and strong.
Four days before she was to open, when the rehearsals began, Maryna moved to a pompous suite on the top floor of the Palace Hotel. It was Barton’s idea, Barton’s extravagance. As he explained it, “People will hear you’re at the Palace, and that will make them take notice. Mr. Ralston put his all into the Palace. We’re the second-best theatre in America. The Palace is the grandest hotel in the world.” Maryna liked hotels: being in a hotel, any hotel, had meant, and would mean again, having a theatre to go to. And treating luxury as merely her due after the privations of the last months, while accepting inquisitive stares from across the immense Grand Court with its seven-story-high domed ceiling of amber-colored glass and breath to breath in the mirrored confines of the hydraulic elevator, was itself a kind of performance. Playbills around the city proclaimed the American debut of the great Polish actress Marina Zalenska, though Barton had not managed to prod a single journalist from one of the daily newspapers into requesting an interview. Members of the Polish community in San Francisco, abrim with anticipation of the imminent American triumph of their national treasure, sent trinkets and books and flowers, but the most thoughtful present of all was already waiting at the desk when Maryna checked into the Palace: a little velvet-lined box containing her black silver necklace and pendant earrings, the precious gift from Bogdan’s grandmother, with a card: “From an anonymous”—this was crossed out, and “abject” written above—“admirer.”
