In America

by Susan Sontag

  “Go on,” she murmured.

  “It was Ben Dreyfus, you remember him, don’t you, who told me that some years ago he’d heard talk of a bizarre cult in Sonora, each of whose members was charged with designing a feasible machine for sky travel. Not a hot-air balloon, at the mercy of the internal work of the wind, but a navigable air-ship that could be lifted off the ground by its own power and, once aloft, flown in any desired direction. A few of these bird-machines actually rose into the air, it was said, before they crashed. When he tried to find out more, he was told that the group had disbanded and its leader, a German named Christian von Roebling, had migrated south to Montoya Beach, near Carpinteria. Now it appeared that von Roebling might still be at it, since a friend of Dreyfus who came down from San Francisco in August by steamer swore to having seen a something, definitely not a balloon, high off the shore near Carpinteria cruising into a cloud. Since, as Dreyfus says, it can’t be long before there are self-powered flying machines, he supposed it might be worth seeing how far these daredevils had got, thinking of a possible investment; and—he’s been so decent, even lending me money to pay off those debts for machinery and supplies I’d not told you about—I offered to approach von Roebling on his behalf. So after I recovered from my accident I went up the coast—remember that week when we were entirely out of touch? You were in Virginia City, making miners weep and dropping down a shaft into the bowels of a treasure-hill. And I, I was chasing some quack Daedalus who could take me up in the air.”

  “What I did,” Maryna exclaimed, “wasn’t dangerous at all. Bogdan! Be careful!”

  “Oh, Maryna, when am I not careful?” he said. “I took a room in the village inn, chatted with people in the saloons, none of whom knew anyone called von Roebling, and prowled the dunes, looking into the blue. After a few days, I was ready to give up, and went to buy some supplies for my return journey at the general store. The only other customer was a grizzled fellow wearing spectacles broad as a bandit’s mask, who was purchasing … barrels of nails, I think. Hearing a blunt German accent, I introduced myself. He told me his name was Dellschau, something like that, but I suspected that I’d found von Roebling. Following him out of the store, I said in German that my scientific interests had brought me news of the work he was directing, and requested permission to watch the next time someone attempted to send his machine into the air. He was silent a long time; I was hoping he might prove to be one of those secretive people who actually crave as much as they fear another’s intrusiveness. But then he let me know, in atrociously intermittent English, that my curiosity could have very unpleasant consequences”—“Bogdan!” cried Maryna—“because if there were any truth to the phantastisch story, this Blödsinn I’d heard about aeros and an Aero Club, his words, I hadn’t used them, surely I would realize that seeing one of these machines up close, not to mention observing one in flight, would be streng verboten to all but bona-fide members of the club. His advice, and he repeated it, was to clear out of town schnell.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And did you ever see anything?”

  “Not in the air. On the beach, late one night, I’d gone for a moonlit walk and there, some way ahead of me, was a dark thing that I mistook at first for a beached outrigger. It was canoe-shaped, though much bigger than a canoe, with four wings, two on either side, a sort of basket in the widest part where a pair of aeronauts would sit, and screw propellers attached to the bow and stern.”

  “I made some drawings of it, Mama.”

  “Peter, you weren’t there!”

  “Yes, but I know all about it and I—I’ll show you!”

  He ran into the other bedroom of the suite and returned with a large folder. Bogdan spread out the drawings at their feet.

  “They’re very prettily colored,” said Maryna.

  “Mama, this is science!”

  “Yes, they’re very accurate,” said Bogdan. “The navigational part seemed clear—the propellers and, see, that’s the rudder. But nothing I could make out gave any clue to how the contrivance is powered. No steam engine, which means engine, boiler, and a considerable weight of water and fuel, would be small enough, light enough. But if not steam, what? What can they have devised to lift something heavier than air off the ground?”

  “A dragon comes,” said Peter. “They have a pet dragon and it flips the machine into the air with its tail.”

  “Peter!”

  “I’m not being childish, Mama. I’m being amusing.”

  “I wanted to get closer,” Bogdan continued, “but then I saw four men with torches approaching. One of them was von Roebling. They were armed, so I decided to go back to town.”

  “Guns,” said Peter. “They all had guns. Does everyone in New York have guns, too?”

  “No, darling!” said Maryna. “We’re not in the Wild West anymore. Now be good, and go to the other parlor and read.”

  “That was supposed to make you laugh,” said Peter. “But since I’m not amusing you, I think I’ll go down the hall and find Aniela or Miss Collingridge.” He slammed the door.

  Maryna frowned. “And then?”

  “When I went out at dawn to the same spot, it was gone.”

  Maryna thought, Maybe he is making this up. Maybe Bogdan also thinks he has to entertain me.

  “Of course, it must sound ridiculous that someone who had recently fallen off a horse would be hoping to be taken hundreds of feet up in the air in some fanciful contraption that couldn’t possibly stay aloft very long.”

  Reminded of this accident in which she’d not really believed at the time, Maryna asked him, once again, just how badly he had been hurt in September.

  “You want to know the exact nature of my injuries? Why? Do I seem scarred or disabled to you?” He stood. “I’ve told you. It’s not worth retelling.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. And after a silence: “Did you tell von Roebling you’d sighted his machine?”

  “Hardly. But I’ll be back in California before long, and perhaps I’ll attempt to talk to him again.”

  “And if these … these aeros really do fly, will you go into partnership with Dreyfus as an investor?”

  “Surely not,” said Bogdan. He sat beside her again and took her hand. “If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from this past year’s rural venture, it’s that I shall never make a businessman. For the foreseeable future, my dear, the sole money-earner in this family is you.”

  Money was the reason they had not been reunited as soon as Maryna had decided to break with Ryszard. Money—and Ryszard’s refusal to leave San Francisco, his excuse being that he was waiting to be called as a witness at the Hanks trial. Bogdan’s affairs in Anaheim were still not settled, and it would have been foolish to liquidate everything in haste in order to come for Maryna’s return engagement at the California Theatre in October as long as he and Peter still had a home in southern California: foolish and ruinously expensive. It might seem indecent to complain about having to scrimp and make sacrifices, as Maryna did every day to Warnock, when she was clearing a thousand dollars a week, far more, as dear old Captain Znaniecki had seen fit to remind her, than most workers in America earned in a year. But then most people did not have Maryna’s expenses and responsibilities. At least she was able to send Bogdan some money to settle the debts he had accumulated in Anaheim; rescue the penniless family headed by Cyprian and Danuta, disillusioned with their life at Edenica and longing to return to Warsaw (she paid their passage); remit in full, as honor and indignation demanded, the outrageous fine of five thousand rubles exacted by the Imperial Theatre for breaking her contract (she had pleaded with the director—an erstwhile friend!—to extend her year’s leave of absence by another year, but was refused). And before her loomed the outlay for the trip to New York, six weeks in a hotel until she would again be on salary when she opened in mid-December (Warnock would advance her the money for her hotel bill but could not be expected to pay for lodging Bogda
n, Peter, and Aniela, and she would already have been paying for Miss Collingridge); and, most onerous of all the expenses she had to anticipate, the costumes. She had been able to make do in San Francisco. Costumes for Adrienne and Juliet were among those brought from Poland, while for Camille she had borrowed some money from Captain Znaniecki, hired a seamstress, and fitted herself out passably; but in New York she would be opening in Camille, and all five costumes had to be truly sumptuous. In New York, it didn’t need to be explained to Maryna, a great deal was expected of a leading actress’s costumes. Even more, Warnock observed, than in Paris.

  But surely the advertising would not have been as vulgar in Paris. Warnock’s work in that department—the playbills announcing the New York debut of “Countess Zalenska of the Russian Imperial Theatre, Warsaw”—had made her cringe. The Countess Zalenska, who in God’s name is that? And, oh, must it say Russian? But Bogdan only laughed when he saw it. “Que veux-tu, ma chère, this is America. Why should they get anything about foreigners right at first? Warnock thinks there’s a fortune to be made from you, but he’s apprehensive all the same. Trust me, Maryna, he’ll soon see that he needn’t attach my irrelevant title to your charming new name.”

  She felt his calm, his benign calm, settle over her. He’d not changed too much: yes, country-brown when he arrived, a little heavier, and he’d taken to biting his nails; no, he was the same. Bogdan was kind, very kind, to feign lack of interest in Ryszard’s whereabouts: Maryna volunteered the news that their friend, having the bad luck to see a man shoot down another in the street, had been detained in San Francisco to testify at the murderer’s trial, after which he had returned to Poland. Heavy with unshareable thoughts, Maryna gratefully allowed herself to feel lightened, then steadied, by Bogdan’s ingenious reserve. She’d been so nervous before he arrived. For a month her only untroubled relation had been to the wire-and-cloth dummy on which she elaborated the new costumes for Camille. With the seamstress Maryna had quarreled about both the magnificent ball dress for Act Four and the dying attire (a night robe of white India muslin) for Act Five. Everyone got on her nerves.

  She had felt very agitated on opening night. The part she could identify as stage fright seemed appropriate, but it wasn’t just stage fright and it didn’t abate. Cynical and despairing in the first act, anxious and vulnerable and finally accepting Armand’s love in the second—she knew she was simulating Marguerite Gautier’s pathos and joy as well as she had ever done. It was the emotion that the story gave her no opportunity to deploy—anger—which was making her so nervous. At last, in the third act, she had a chance to vent it. A deliriously happy Marguerite is now living with her beloved Armand in the countryside just outside Paris; this morning he has gone into the city on a brief errand, and she is alone in a sunlit room looking onto the garden, dressed in a cashmere robe of peach-blossom pink, trimmed with a cascade of lace down the front and one narrow flounce around the bottom, lace ruffles on the elbow sleeves, a lace fraise at the neck, and one shell-shaped lace pocket on the left side ornamented with a pink rosette, which was to find particular favor with several of the reviewers. Her maid Nanine has just announced the arrival of a gentleman who wishes to speak to her. Marguerite, believing it to be her lawyer (unbeknownst to Armand, she has put up the entire contents of her grand house in Paris for sale), has asked for him to be shown in. Of course it is not the lawyer.

  Mademoiselle Marguerite Gautier? A dignified older man has appeared at the door upstage right and continued past the live canary with which the stage manager, zealous for scenic realism, had seen fit to dress the set. That is my name, said Maryna. To whom do I have the honor of speaking? The canary started to chirp. To Monsieur Duval. Chirp. Chirp. You might have thought there were two birds in the cage. Monsieur Duval? Chirp, chirp, chirp. Yes, madame, to Armand’s father. Maryna was supposed to say the next line in a troubled but calm tone—calm, she, with that bird’s vile piping? Armand is not here, monsieur. Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. I know. It is to you that I wish to speak. Be good enough to listen to what I have to say. Listen? How could she listen to anything? My son is ruining himself for you. Chirp, chirr, squawk, cheep, trill, twitter, chirp. Having stood it as long as she could, Maryna walked to the rear of the set, took down the cage and hurled it out the open mullioned window, then turned and came gliding down the sloped stage floor to keep her appointment with heartbreak.

  She did worry that she might have shocked some members of the audience—surely not everyone would think it part of the play!—but was reassured when, fifteen minutes later, as Marguerite finally realizes that her pure unselfish love for Armand is never going to be accepted by his father, Maryna heard the theatre fill with the sound of weeping spectators and saw the prompter toss the promptbook to the floor and flee for an orgy of nose-blowing to a corner of the wings. Unfortunately, one of the critics refused to let her forget the incident completely. The next day, the review in the Sun noted “a most original display of the fiery temperament characteristic of the greatest actresses, the defenestration of a raucous canary.” Maryna was appalled to see it mentioned in print. Critics! They only want to mock and find fault! But she was even more furious with her relentlessly docile young secretary and diction coach, who had made a vehement incursion into her dressing room as soon as the performance ended. “The bird is not singing now, Madame Marina. That bird has a concussion, I’m sure!” Miss Collingridge hated what Maryna did to the bird.

  Indeed, Maryna suspected, Miss Collingridge might well have been behind an admonitory visit by a pair of wide-eyed bumpkins from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who knocked at her dressing room an hour before the next evening’s performance and requested that she produce for them an uninjured, chirping canary. Dispatching them brusquely, Maryna said that all birds and animals were in the care of her secretary, whom they could find by applying to her manager, down the hall, third door on the left. She hoped the canary would sing.

  For a few days, Maryna was under the impression she had decided to send Miss Collingridge back to San Francisco. Was there no one she could count on for support and sympathy?

  But then in the second week, just before Christmas, when she was performing Adrienne Lecouvreur, whose title Warnock convinced her should be definitively shortened to Adrienne (“Adrienne Lecouvreur, starring Countess Marina Zalenska? That’s a bigger mouthful of foreignness than even New Yorkers can be asked to swallow.” “Mr. Warnock, I can see you are bent on driving me mad. There is no such person as the Countess Zalenska. The Countess Dembowska, yes. My husband’s name. But the actress whose fortunes you have so kindly undertaken to promote is plain, as you Americans say, plain Marina Zalenska.” “OK,” answered Warnock)—just as she was starting Adrienne, Maryna had news from Bogdan that he was on his way east, bringing her Peter and Aniela. And Bogdan had been so encouraging, and she needed encouragement because for the third week of her New York season she would be doing Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. True, for Camille and Adrienne there had been nothing but panegyrics—the Herald: “She won all hearts”; the Times: “Popular Success, Artistic Triumph”; the Tribune: “She is a great actress”; the Sun: “Greatest actress since Rachel”; the World: “Not to be missed.” No matter. She could always fail with Shakespeare.

  “I see that not only have you performed as expected, but the critics have done the same,” said Bogdan. “A pretty sheaf of accolades.”

  “Phrases for Warnock to splash all over the new playbill,” said Maryna glumly.

  “Forget Warnock.”

  “Alas, I can’t forget him. He rules my life. But just tell me, was I as good as in Poland?”

  “Better, I think. As you well know, my dear, you thrive on obstacles.”

  “And my English?”

  “No, no”—he laughed—“for reassurance on that score, you must consult the indispensable Miss Collingridge.”

  “Armong, I loaf you,” was Miss Collingridge’s reply. Then, seeing Maryna’s horrifi
ed look and Bogdan’s smile, she added charitably, “But not always.”

  Bogdan brought support; Bogdan brought harmony. He gave his amused approval to this addition to Maryna’s entourage, a new specimen of hearty asexual American womanhood. And Miss Collingridge liked Bogdan, was impressed by him, and, best of all, had instantly, effortlessly, made friends with Peter. Odd woman out in Maryna’s newly reconstituted family was Aniela, her grainy pale face puckered with jealousy. This American woman who owned so many different hats, was she another servant or Madame’s friend? For ventures outside her Polish-speaking cocoon in Anaheim, Aniela had learned to count to twenty and say in her tuneful little voice, That one, Half, More, Good, Thank you, It’s too expensive, Good-bye. In New York, she’d already acquired with Miss Collingridge’s gentle tutoring such useful sentences as Madame is busy, Madame is resting, Please put the flowers over there, I will give Madame your message. And that was only a start. Aniela had to accept Miss Collingridge, what else could she do?

  “Everything is back as it should be,” Maryna said as they were falling asleep together in the big bed in the suite at the Clarendon Hotel. “I have you, if you can put up with me. I have Peter. I have the stage…”

  “Is that really the right order?” he murmured.

  “Oh, Bogdan,” she cried, and kissed him fiercely on the mouth.

  In contrast to the stage, where a woman’s adultery never went unpunished, real life, as Maryna noted gratefully, did not have to be a melodrama. Life was a long hot soak in the tub, life was a glycerine massage and a pedicure. Life was never being idle, trying always to surpass oneself, having three new wigs made, throwing a canary out a stage window, making strangers cry. Life was a quiet talk with Bogdan about Peter.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to put him in boarding school before I go out on tour? That’s no life for a child.”

  “I think we should keep him with us for the tour and at least through the summer. Miss Collingridge and I will give him his lessons. It’s too soon for him to be separated from you again.”