You Have the Right to Remain Silent

by Barbara Paul

  “Did you ask Kelly what the title means?” Page said.

  “Oh lord, I forgot. Well, the play should make it clear.”

  It was time. Marian felt the rush of anticipation that ran through the audience as the house lights dimmed and the curtain opened. Ian Cavanaugh stood on the stage alone, big and handsome and authoritative. The audience clapped with enthusiasm and affection. That must really be something, Marian mused, impressed. To reach a point in your career where you get applause just for standing on a stage. Just for showing up.

  Cavanaugh was looking through what appeared to be a small leather-bound notebook. Voices sounded offstage; Cavanaugh quickly locked the notebook away in an old-fashioned writing desk and was smilingly facing the door when a man and a woman came in. And they were off and running.

  Marian had trouble concentrating on the dialogue, worrying about Kelly’s entrance instead. She wanted it to be soon; the tension was getting to her. Get out there, Kelly, and do your thing!

  She must have heard her. The upstage door opened and there stood Kelly Ingram, one hand resting lightly on the door frame, not acknowledging the smattering of polite applause that arose from the audience. She looked like a million bucks. The Joan Crawford hairdo she’d been trying out during rehearsal was gone, and her posture was erect without being stiff. Kelly looked straight at Ian Cavanaugh and said, “Has anyone seen my address book? It seems to have grown legs and walked away.” Her voice carried, the words were clear, and the line didn’t sound rehearsed. Marian wanted to bounce up and down.

  After another couple of minutes, Marian began to relax for the first time that evening. Worry about Kelly? Nonsense; the play’s female lead obviously knew what she was doing. She wasn’t going to trip over her own feet, she wasn’t going to forget her lines. Belatedly, Marian began to pay attention to the play. The tension between Kelly and Cavanaugh was tangible from the moment of Kelly’s entrance; they engaged in some subtle verbal fencing that the other two characters on the stage never caught on to.

  People came on the stage, people left the stage. Kelly disappeared and made a costume change. Young Xandria showed up, playing Kelly’s (Sheila’s) kid sister. Then only the two sisters and Cavanaugh were on the stage, and Marian realized they’d come to the watch battery scene. She tensed up all over again.

  Here it comes.

  “People,” Kelly said to Ian Cavanaugh, “mean no more to you than a …” She trailed off.

  Marian held her breath.

  “Than a watch battery!” Kelly shouted at the top of her lungs.

  Marian exhaled. “That’s one way of doing it!” Page whispered in her ear.

  “Useful for about a year, then it’s time for a replacement,” Kelly finished scornfully.

  Marian was so happy she wanted to cry. The play moved on, picking up its tempo and building to a climax. By the end of the first act, the fencing between Kelly and Cavanaugh was over. Their enmity was out in the open, and war had been declared. The stage was set for the battle to be fought in Act II. Applause erupted like an explosion.

  Intermission.

  “I don’t think I ever want to come to an opening night again,” Marian told Page. “Too exhausting.”

  They got up and went outside, where the sidewalks and street were jammed with people grabbing a between-the-acts smoke. “I feel the same way,” Page said, “and I don’t even know Kelly Ingram. She’s great, Ian Cavanaugh’s great, and the play is great. Whoo! What an evening.”

  “Which one of them is going to win, do you think? Sheila or Richard?”

  “I have no idea. It could go either way.”

  A couple of TV camera crews were there, looking for celebrities. All around them, the other playgoers were making the same speculations as Marian and Page. Did Richard really do all the things Sheila thinks he did, or is she guilty of a horrible mistake in judgment? Maybe she’s doing it deliberately, and she’s the villain? Neither is a villain; they’re both just imperfect. Naw, they’re both villains. Too much hostility between brother-in-law and sister-in-law—it’ll destroy the family, you’ll see.

  “Well, this is a surprise!” said a pleasant female voice. “The law takes a night off to go to the theater?”

  Marian looked around to see Elizabeth Tanner beaming over her head at Page, looking more than ever like a movie star. With her was a balding, nice-looking man of about fifty with a half-smile on his face.

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” Page said with a sigh. “Enjoying the play?”

  “Love it, simply love it. It’s going to be a big hit, don’t you think? Do you know my husband? Dr. Frank Tanner. Darling, this is Trevor Page, and, ah, Sergeant, ah.”

  “Marian Larch,” Marian said, wondering if Elizabeth Tanner called her husband Dr. Frank at home.

  “I wish you’d told me you were coming tonight,” the other woman was saying to Page. “We could have made arrangements to come together.”

  “Ah, what a pity,” Page said expressionlessly.

  Dr. Frank smiled his half-smile.

  “But now that we’ve run into each other,” his wife went on, “we could meet later for a drink? Or a bite to eat, perhaps? How does that sound?”

  “Lovely,” Page said, “but Marian and I have already made plans for later. Maybe some other time.”

  Elizabeth Tanner looked at Marian for the first time. “I’m so sorry you were thrown out of the office this afternoon. But you have to understand, Edgar is getting a little paranoid. He’s not used to having police all over the place.”

  She doesn’t like my being here with Page, Marian thought. And: No, I will not play this bitchy game. “That’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Tanner,” Marian said in her cop-on-duty voice. “We pretty much got what we came for.”

  Tanner got the message; there was even a sparkle of amusement in her eyes. Just then the chimes sounded to summon them to the second half of the play. “Time to go in,” she said brightly. “Trevor, you must come to our place soon, so we can all get better acquainted. Perhaps next week?”

  Page made a noncommittal noise.

  Elizabeth Tanner remembered to flash a smile at Marian and headed back into the theater. Dr. Frank trailed after her, the half-smile still on his face. He hadn’t said a word the whole time.

  The diplomatic thing would have been to keep silent, but Marian wasn’t feeling very diplomatic at the moment. “Do you two have a history?” she asked.

  “No,” Page said emphatically, and then laughed. “It’s just that Elizabeth is interviewing potential fourth husbands, and I seem to have made the list of candidates.”

  They went back inside. “For insurance, you mean?” Marian said as they took their seats. “Since her first two husbands died on her?”

  “Something like that. Elizabeth works very hard at the ‘total woman’ game. Being a high-powered business executive isn’t enough. She wouldn’t dream of living her life without a husband somewhere in the background to give her respectability—one that doesn’t make too many demands, of course. And she’s had exactly one child, enough to authenticate her womanhood. When I first met Elizabeth, she talked a great deal about motherhood but very little about her son. And oh yes—she paints or sculpts or something, to give expression to her ‘creative’ side. What a cliché Elizabeth is.”

  Marian didn’t know whether to laugh or to feel sorry for the woman. She was glad when the lights went down and the curtains opened on Act II of The Apostrophe Thief.

  The battles prepared for in the first act were now being fought, and the weapons the two antagonists used were the other characters in the play. Skirmish after skirmish was played out, with each one changing the lives of the participants in some way. About halfway through the act came the only scene in the play in which the two co-stars were alone together on the stage. It was a strange, edgy scene, in which it only gradually dawned on the audience that these two adversaries were attracted to each other, the way soldiers sometimes come to love their enemies. Sheila and Richard circled
each other warily, dancing around this unexpected erotic element that had emerged to confuse what had been up to then a clear-cut hostility. But in the end each of them saw responding to their mutual attraction as a form of capitulation, and they both backed off.

  “Whew,” Trevor Page said.

  A murmur ran through the audience, and there was much shifting of weight in the seats. Marian sat there with her mouth open. That scene was one of the most sensual things she’d ever seen, and the two actors had never once so much as touched each other. Whew indeed.

  The play ended with the two generals of the internecine war figuratively killing each other off. Sheila was successful in her attempt to dislodge Richard from his position of authority in the family business and within the family itself, but she wasn’t able to do so without discrediting herself as well. The result of all their manipulating had been to draw the other characters together in a new unified front against them both. The last thing the audience saw was the entire family gathered together around a buffet table, laughing quietly and talking, making plans, in a scene of subdued celebration from which Sheila and Richard were excluded. Those two sat on opposite sides of the stage, apart from the others, staring at each other, wondering what had gone wrong.

  The curtains closed. Dead silence.

  Then a roar exploded from the audience—cheering, clapping, even some yelling from the more vociferous of the playgoers. Marian didn’t know much about playwriting or the craft of acting, but she did know she’d witnessed something extraordinary that evening. So did everyone else in the audience; during the curtain calls, they greeted each member of the cast as a new Olivier. And when Kelly and Ian Cavanaugh at last appeared, holding hands and smiling, the noise was deafening.

  Then Cavanaugh did a gracious thing. With a little bow and a one-handed gesture toward Kelly, he made his final exit of the night, yielding the stage to his co-star. As one person, the audience rose to its feet, excitedly cheering the new star they’d seen created that night. Marian’s hands hurt from pounding them together so hard. A man appeared from the side of the stage, handed Kelly a huge bouquet of flowers, and disappeared.

  Kelly Ingram stood there alone, with her triumph and her armful of flowers, openly basking in the waves of approval that flowed up to her from the audience. For the first time, Marian began to understand why her friend had been drawn to the acting profession in the first place. On impulse she turned to Trevor Page; they wrapped their arms around each other in a big hug, sharing the good feeling the evening had generated. On the stage, with a natural performer’s instinct that had nothing to do with experience, Kelly knew the exact moment that the applause peaked and made a graceful, smiling exit.

  Marian collapsed back into her seat. She was totally, utterly exhausted.

  17

  Backstage, the Broadhurst was wall-to-wall people. With Trevor Page in tow, Marian tried to work her way through the amiable, jostling crowd toward Kelly Ingram’s dressing room. A TV camera was recording the cheerful chaos for posterity, or at least until the next newscast. A shouted interview was being carried out with a television actor, a former co-star of Kelly’s. He thought the play was real terrif, he said.

  The door to Kelly’s dressing room was open, and the well-wishers and congratulators crowded in there were showing no sign of leaving. Marian gave up on trying to work her way in and looked around to find she’d lost Page. She found a place against the wall out of the crush where she could wait for the crowd to thin.

  After a while it did, although plenty of lingerers remained. Page excuse-med his way over to Marian, laughing at the scene he found himself in. “This is almost as good a show back here. Have you seen Kelly yet?”

  “Can’t get in. I thought I’d just wait—you don’t mind, do you?”

  “Mind? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Eventually Kelly shooed all her visitors out so she could take off her make-up and change. When she came out of the dressing room, she spotted Marian against the wall and started toward her; but four or five people closed around her and hurried her toward the stage door. Kelly looked back over her shoulder and called out to Marian, “Bradenton Towers, penthouse apartment A!” Then she was gone.

  Marian and Page looked at each other. “Do you suppose that was a clue?” the latter asked.

  “Could well be. Care to check it out?”

  “By all means.”

  It took them a while to get a cab, but at last they found one that took them to the Bradenton Towers building in the East Eighties. The condominium had a doorman dressed the way all doormen used to be dressed, like a general in a Franz Lehar operetta. “Name?” the general barked. Marian told him her name, wondering if she should add her rank and serial number. The doorman checked a list he had, nodded, and marched away.

  “I think we’re supposed to follow,” Page said.

  The military doorman unlocked an elevator, commanded them inside, and punched a button marked A. He stood at parade rest as the doors began to close, inspecting them. At the last second Page snapped him a salute.

  The elevator opened in a foyer of a luxurious apartment already crowded with people. When no one appeared to meet them or check their credentials or whatever, Marian and Page exchanged a look and a shrug and joined the party. Most of the people there were clustered in three little islands, the centers of which were Kelly Ingram, Ian Cavanaugh, and a small, dark woman. “That’s Abigail James,” Marian told Page.

  A roving waiter came by and gave them each a glass of champagne. A buffet table had been set up along one wall, but the party guests were still riding their high from the play and weren’t yet interested in food. “I wonder who our host is,” Page said.

  After a while the group around Abigail James was down to two people; Marian and Page joined them. When their turn came to talk, they introduced themselves and expressed their enthusiasm for the play, trying to avoid the usual clichés. The playwright answered with what was obviously a practiced public persona, polite but distant.

  Then Marian asked the question. “Ms James, we were wondering if you would explain about the title. The Apostrophe Thief … what does it mean?”

  A pronounced change came over Abigail James. First she looked startled, then a smile appeared on her face—a genuine one, not one manufactured for public appearances. “Do you know,” she said, “you are the only person to ask me that?” Marian shot a glance at Cavanaugh. “No, not even Ian,” the playwright went on. “Theater people would die rather than admit they don’t understand something about a play.”

  “No one has asked you?” Page said skeptically.

  “No one. Not the producer, not the director, not any of the cast. But since you did ask, I’ll tell you. It doesn’t mean a blessed thing.” She laughed at their blank looks. “I just liked the sound of those words together, ‘apostrophe’ and ‘thief.’ High-handed thing to do, I know, but I was fairly certain no one would question it—not that I wouldn’t have told the truth, if anyone had bothered to ask. Now all that remains is to see whether any of the critics will point out that the newest play on Broadway has an utterly meaningless title.”

  Marian and Page were both laughing by the time she’d finished. “Abby?” Ian Cavanaugh appeared behind her, then spoke over her head to the other two. “You’ll excuse me, I hope—I must steal her from you.” He didn’t remember Marian.

  When they were gone, Page laughed again. “No meaning at all. I feel cheated!”

  “Do you?” Marian said. “I don’t.” She looked over to where Kelly was surrounded by her usual contingent of admiring men and decided to butt in. “We’ve waited long enough,” she said, putting down her champagne glass. “Come on.”

  The minute Kelly saw her she walked away from her admirers to meet her. The two women smiled speechlessly for a moment and then hugged each other close, both of them happy and excited.

  After waiting so long to speak to her friend, Marian suddenly found she had no words. “Kelly, I am in awe of
you!” she finally got out.

  Kelly’s smile got even bigger. “Never thought I’d hear that from you. Awe, huh? I hope it lasts at least ten minutes. Tell me I did good.”

  “You don’t need me to tell you that, but I’ll tell you anyway. You were better than good. You were magnificent. Sounds melodramatic, but it’s the only word that fits. You were magnificent.”

  Kelly pursed her lips in mock-judgmental style. “I don’t think it sounds melodramatic at all. I can live with magnificent. So, this good-looking man here—is he with you?” If Kelly was surprised at seeing someone other than Brian, she didn’t let on.

  “This is Trevor Page,” Marian said. “Trevor, meet Kelly Ingram.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” Page said. “Just as it was an honor to be in that audience tonight. This is a night I will never forget.”

  “I like him,” Kelly said to Marian.

  They sat down on a sofa, Kelly in the middle, and talked of the play, of scary moments (from the actors’ point of view) when things almost went wrong, of Kelly’s relief that her first opening night was now behind her. After a bit, Page slipped away and left the two friends alone. Marian apologized for sounding proprietary, but, she said, she was so proud of Kelly she felt she was going to burst.

  Kelly said she didn’t mind at all. “You know, Friday isn’t the best day of the week for an opening. We’ll probably be here all night, and we have two performances tomorrow. I’ll have to get up at the crack of noon when I should be sleeping.”

  “Does that bother you?” Marian asked. “Would you rather sleep than perform?”

  Kelly made a face. “Hell, no. I wish we had three performances tomorrow.”

  That would change, they both knew, as soon as the excitement of the debut wore off. Marian was happy for her friend for another reason. If anyone had earned the right to put on airs a little, it was Kelly Ingram. But she was the same good-humored, self-ironic woman she’d been the entire three years Marian had known her. Maybe that too would change, in time, as her prominence in the theater grew. But Marian didn’t think so. For one thing, Kelly had already enjoyed a sizable amount of celebrity from her television career, and that hadn’t spoiled her. Besides, Kelly was just too Kelly to let herself be swayed by the flatterers and the sycophants her newfound status was bound to attract.