Puzzle for Players

by Patrick Quentin

  “Darlings … darlings … I’m utterly late … Peter, angel, what a simply divine theater. I’ve always loathed the Dagonet. God, isn’t it cold?”

  Mirabelle had arrived and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter very much. She swept across the stage, dazzling and electric as some major meteorological disturbance. She was hurling herself from one member of the company to another, strewing kisses and random requests in her path. “Eddie, darling, a glass please … Oh, before you go, unearth the brandy, that’s a dear … I must have a teeny-eeny one … it’s somewhere under my arm … yes, that’s right … Iris, honey, how can you look so agonizingly beautiful? God, it must be wonderful to be young … Gerald, darling, isn’t it gorgeous to be young or is it agonizingly sad? I forget. It’s so long ago … and who’s this nice young man? Oh, the author, of course … a marvelous play, Mr. Prince, marvelous… . Theo, my poor sweet, your nose! It’s positively scarlet … look at it, Peter, isn’t it scarlet? … A cough? My dear, how perfectly ghastly.”

  Mirabelle had seen us all a few hours before at the Vandolan, but she always greeted the company with breathless fervor as though we had been miraculously restored to her from some frightful catastrophe.

  All of us, that is except Conrad Wessler. I had never been able to understand just why Mirabelle had taken such an instant and fanatic dislike to her Austrian co-star. But there it was. And, like all of Mirabelle’s other emotional relationships, it was dramatized out of all reasonable proportions.

  When everyone else had been greeted, Mirabelle moved very slowly toward Wessler who was standing by the proscenium, his bearded face expressionless, his eyes gazing down at the little female statuette in his hands.

  Mirabelle stopped dead in front of him, her head with its fantastic red hair tilted backward, holding out both her hands to him.

  “Good evening, Herr Wessler. No, don’t bother to shake hands. I see you’ve got your hands full. Whatever is it—another little doll? Aren’t you cute with your little dolls, so simple and unaffected.” She peered at the figurine in his hands with mock absorption. “Heavens, she’s quite slim for a change, not at all buttocky. Who is she meant to be?”

  Wessler had raised his eyes now. He was watching her with a queer kind of intensity. “The statue, Miss Rue, she is of you.”

  “Me!” Mirabelle gave a shrill little laugh and waved over her shoulder to the rest of us. “Did you hear, darlings? He’s made a cunning little statue of me. What do you suppose he’s going to do with it—stick pins in it?” There was absolutely no change in the sweet dangerous flow of her words. “And, Mr. Wessler, while we’re talking about these darling things, I just peeked into my dressing-room and I see the dressing-table is loaded with odd-looking lumps of clay. You left them there? A mistake, of course, I don’t much care for lumps of clay in my dressing-room. You’ll remove them, please.”

  Gerald was at her side now, dutifully holding out a tumbler of neat brandy. Until her recent and harrowing divorce from the ex-leading man, Roland Gates, Mirabelle had never touched liquor. Now she couldn’t act without brandy constantly on tap. That was the only visible sign of the nervous ordeal she’d been through. I had been worried about her drinking at first. But I wasn’t now. Mirabelle was acting like a dream. She could take care of herself.

  She had just turned from Wessler when the Austrian said very firmly: “I am sorry, Miss Rue. The first dressing-room from the stage, she must for me be. I do not like the other. The mirror, me it does not suit.”

  Mirabelle spun back, staring. I could tell she was fighting mad at this casual contempt for her traditional privileges. But, to my astonishment, she did nothing about it. She merely flourished the brandy in front of Wessler, ignoring his expression of stubborn disapproval. Wessler was fiercely teetotal and I knew Mirabelle was getting rather an unholy kick out of shocking him.

  “To you, Herr Wessler!” she exclaimed. “To the play and to the Dagonet.” She swallowed the brandy at one gulp and tossed the empty glass back to Gerald. “And let us hope that the mirror in my dressing-room it will you suit.”

  Even then, when she said it, that remark seemed fairly ill-omened. But it was not until much later that I started realizing just how very ironical it was destined to be.

  Mirabelle and Wessler were still staring at each other like a couple of fighting cocks, maneuvering for position. I wasn’t going to stand for any more nonsense that night I called the rehearsal sharply to order.

  Mirabelle was instantly a changed person. She forgot Wessler, she threw off her hat, slipped down into the house, found a seat in the front row, ran her hands through her stunning hair and lapsed into sudden and absolute stillness. Mirabelle was always like that in the few moments before she went on stage. It was as if she turned off the unquenchable stream of her vitality at a spigot, letting it bank up inside her.

  Eddie had switched on a single spot. He gave Harry Prince and me our copies of the script and took up his prompting position in the wings. Wessler deposited his statuette in the disputed dressing-room and returned.

  “Okay,” I said. “Mr. Wessler—Iris. Ready for the first act, please.”

  Theo, Gerald and old Comstock moved onto the side of the stage, waiting for their cues. Henry and I joined Mirabelle in the darkened house.

  Our first rehearsal at the Dagonet was under way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AFTER the theatre’s ungracious welcome, I had resigned myself to a ragged performance. I was wrong. The various and sundry disturbances of the first half hour seemed to have put the whole company on its mettle. The show got off to a flying start.

  From his first line, Wessler picked it up and had it in the palm of his hand. He used a brutal, aggressive type of playing all his own—something I’d never seen in America. It was perfect for his role in Troubled Waters as the Pennsylvania Dutch farmer who ruled his family with a fist of steel. In spite of his enormous European reputation, wiseacres had prophesised that the airplane accident would have left scars on his talent as it had left them on his face. They were cockeyed. Conrad Wessler was going to take New York by storm, and I was lucky as hell to have him under contract for his American debut.

  It was incredible luck, too, that Troubled Waters should have come into my life just when I had rejected over a hundred scripts. I had decided that my old enthusiasm for the stage, the one major passion in my life, had been sozzled away in drinking days and would never flare up again. And then, five minutes after I had turned the last page of young Henry Prince’s first play, the blood had begun hissing in my veins like champagne and I was raring to dash headlong into production.

  Not that Troubled Waters was a work of sublime genius. It wasn’t. Like Rain, like the Lady from the Sea, it threw a world-weary glamour girl up against a group of primitive characters. In Troubled Waters, Cleonie, the heroine-menace happened to be a sort of honky-tonk suffragette from a pre-war cabaret; the milieu happened to be the farmhouse of the Kirchners, a typical Pennsylvania Dutch family; the force that marooned her there happened to be a flood. Those were just trimmings to the time-worn pattern of two different worlds clashing— and clashing like hell. Troubled Waters was derivative, but it was a grand piece of theater with a swell dramatic punch.

  But there were a dozen pitfalls. If any wrong stresses were given, the whole thing could have collapsed into burlesque. With the right direction and the right cast, however, it had an excellent chance at the really big time. And, that night at the Dagonet, as the first act got under way, I realized with a sense of elation just how right my cast was. Wessler was Hans Kirchner, the young patriarch, down to the last hair on his beard and the last guttural in his accent. Even Iris, who had never acted until a crazy hunch of Dr. Lenz’s and mine had landed her in this show, was turning in a honey of a performance in the tricky role of the frustrated farm girl. It was a joy watching Theo Ffoulkes shedding her brusque English personality and put all her splendid technique into the embittered drudge who was Wessler’s wife.

&
nbsp; Gerald Gwynne was grand, too. He had made only one previous Broadway appearance and, if it hadn’t been for Mirabelle’s insistence, I wouldn’t have dared entrust to him the part of the patriarch’s tough kid brother. But, as usual on all stage matters, Mirabelle had been right. Her young protege was proving that his smash success in his debut had something real to back it up.

  For the first fifteen minutes of that rehearsal, there was virtually nothing for me as director to do. I just sat in my dusty seat, gripping the arms. I didn’t give a damn about the Dagonet or its face in the mirror. Let all the spooks in Christendom come and jingle their jinxes— they couldn’t stop us from haunting Broadway for at least two seasons to come.

  It was in this exhilarated mood that I turned to Henry Prince, who sat, earnest and bespectacled, in the seat next to mine. It still seemed almost unbelievable that good luck could have come to me from so unassuming a person. Although this, his first play, showed all the zip and self-assurance of a born headliner, Henry still seemed to me after three months just an uninteresting small-town boy, bewildered by the prospect of success. Since the evening of the very first reading, he had been too timid even to attend rehearsals and it had taken a good twenty minutes to persuade him to come to the Dagonet that night. He was scared of actors, he said. He was afraid of getting in the way.

  I felt very paternal about Henry.

  “Going nicely, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” whispered Henry. “I think it’s wonderful.”

  “And what do you think of Wessler now?”

  Henry’s only manifestation of stubbornness had been his reluctance to have Wessler play the lead. Wessler was an Austrian and he had wanted a real Pennsylvannia Dutchman in the part. I’d never dreamed of falling in with his ideas, but I made a point of showing interest.

  He smiled a little wistfully now and whispered: “I think he’s grand. I wish father could see him.”

  That was Henry’s highest form of praise—to give anything his father’s vicarious approval.

  Mirabelle didn’t go on for just over twenty minutes. All this time she had been sitting at my side, her hands crossed in her lap, her eyes staring straight ahead of her. Now, just a few seconds before her cue, she slipped up into the wings, poured herself another jigger of brandy, patted Eddie Troth on the shoulder and waited, looking small, almost mousey—utterly unlike a great actress.

  And then her cue came. As soon as she entered, half staggering, half supported by Gerald, you could feel all the coldness and the vastness of the flood waters outside the farmhouse; you could feel the exhaustion, the fear, the instinctive suspicion of the hard-boiled cabaret girl who had been rescued from the raging river only to find herself in a human set-up completely alien to her. In two seconds, Mirabelle had set that dreary theatre on fire; it was Bankhead and bitters, Cornell with a kick.

  And to me it was a miracle. A few months back, Mirabelle had been a bundle of shattered nerves, convalescing in the Thespian Hospital. I knew just how shot she’d been for we’d been very close to each other ever since the days when we were two unknowns battering together at the locked door of Broadway. She and her actor-husband, Roland Gates, had for years run the Lunts neck and neck as the biggest box-office marital team in the theater. And, like the Lunts, they had been boosted to a million fans as the most successful love-match in the profession. No one had ever guessed about Roland—not even I who knew him as well as I knew anyone. Mira-belle had never breathed a word of the incredible mental and physical torture she’d been subjected to during those years as the stage’s happiest wife.

  And then, when their last show closed after a season’s smash business, Mirabelle cracked. One night she told the truth to Gerald and me. She told us the unbelievable things Roland did in those odd moments when the suave, drawing-room idol had amused himself by brutalizing her. Mirabelle had taken it all those years, partly because she didn’t want the world to know the truth, partly because she was scared that if she split the team she’d be through on Broadway.

  Gerald and I virtually railroaded her into a divorce. Gates contested and the details brought out in court made a seven-day holiday for the yellow press. We couldn’t keep publicity back. Roland was hounded out of town and, for a while, Mirabelle was through. They told me at the hospital there was a good chance of her going nuts.

  But they didn’t know Mirabelle. On the night I read her the script of Troubled Waters, she left the hospital— just like that. And no power on earth could have stopped her. She admitted it was crazy but she said she’d rather die than pass up a chance of playing Cleonie.

  That was the reason she gave me. I knew there was another. Mirabelle was a hell of a good friend. She saw that my one chance of breaking through and making something of myself again rested on that play. She was going to do her damnest to help me up.

  That’s why I never kicked at her drinking brandy at rehearsal; that’s why I gave her her head even in her rather undignified victimization of Wessler. I never forgot just what Mirabelle was doing for me.

  Actually her attitude to Wessler was a cinch for the play because the script had the two of them reacting violently to each other from the gun. That night, as they went into their first big scene together, the stage was electric with their pent-up antagonism.

  I was watching them, quite carried away, when Mirabelle broke off in the middle of a sentence and swung round toward the door leading from backstage. I looked too and saw a man pushing through the door—a stranger in a camel’s-hair coat and a derby hat. Under his arm he carried a large portfolio.

  I had made it plain to the doorman that, with the exception of Dr. Lenz who was backing the show, all visitors were vetoed at rehearsal. I was just about to get tough when something about Mirabelle stopped me. I knew she hated interruptions too. But she wasn’t registering just ordinary irritation. There was another expression on her face—an expression of surprise and something else that was almost fear.

  The stranger strolled toward her. I thought he was going to speak, but at the critical moment she turned her back and said shakily:

  “Sorry I blew up, Wessler. Give me the cue again, will you?”

  But Wessler didn’t give her the cue. He was peering at the man in the derby hat. Wessler had an incredible memory for faces and a queer habit of scrutinizing strangers as if he were trying to check them up against some vast identification file in his mind. I had the odd feeling he was trying to recognize this man while Mirabelle was doing her utmost to pretend she didn’t know him.

  The rehearsal had stopped completely. This unknown individual seemed suddenly and without the slightest effort on his own part to have become the focal point of that whole cavernous theater. For a split second I tried to figure out what it was all about, then my irritation swamped other, more obscure sensations and I bawled: “Who let you in?”

  The man in the derby hat skirted Wessler and Mirabelle and picked his way down the house toward me. A small mustache stretched in a smile of apology. He was about forty, plump and too pink. I disliked him on sight. “I just wanted to see if the author …” He bent across me calmly and peered at Henry whose mouth had dropped in an astonished O. “So it is you, Henry. I hardly recognized you.”

  Indifferent to the fact that he was holding up the rehearsal, he pushed his heavy bulk past my knees, sat down next to Henry and started to talk in a confidential whisper. Henry was looking acutely self-conscious. I heard him mutter: “You’re disturbing them, Uncle. We mustn’t talk here.” He rose hastily, almost dragging the man in the derby hat over my knees again out into the aisle. His solemn face stained a deep pink, he said, “Mr. Duluth, this is my Uncle, George Kramer. He didn’t realize he was disturbing you. I’m sorry.”

  While he continued his apologies, Mr. Kramer gazed up at the stage, his beady, impertinent eyes fixed on Mira-belle.

  “You are certainly lucky to have Miss Rue in the cast, Mr. Duluth,” he said suddenly. “An artiste—a very great artiste.”


  He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t even look at me. Accompanied by the agitated Henry, he moved up once more onto the stage and made for the door with the broken panel. I watched him pass Mirabelle. She didn’t pay the slightest attention. But she was conscious of every move he made.

  Then, just as the uncle-nephew combine had reached the swing-door, Wessler called: “One moment, please excuse.”

  The two of them turned. Wessler took a step toward them. He said excitedly: “In Vienna, yes, in 1936, you are there at the American Ambassador’s reception?”

  That odd remark didn’t seem odd to me or to anyone else who knew Wessler. His amazing memory was linked up with a passionate desire to place people whose faces struck him as familiar. Already he had pinned Iris down at the Boeuf in Paris, Theo at Nancy Cunard’s in London, and me in any one of a thousand bars. The only surprise in this particular instance was the fact that Wessler had met Kramer before.

  He was staring at the two men, waiting for a reply, Kramer stared back, his plump face completely unconcerned. After a rather too protracted second, he turned to his nephew and said:

  “Henry, Mr. Wessler is speaking to you.”

  Henry started and said: “No-no Herr Wessler, I have never been to Vienna.”

  It seemed to me that Kramer had deliberately passed the ball to Henry. But the two of them disappeared immediately and I forgot both the incident and Mr. Kramer— at least, I forgot them until later when there was nothing about that first rehearsal at the Dagonet that I didn’t remember with most unpleasant vividness.

  In spite of Uncle George’s interruption and the dramatic appearance of a rat on stage, the first act kept up its breathless pace until old Lionel Comstock’s entrance. Comstock played the business magnate who had been taking Cleonie out on a dubious weekend and had been caught with her in the flood. Rescued some time after her, he had little more to do than to die and be put in a coffin which those pre-war Pennslyvania Dutch, with a sort of pessimistic efficiency, kept in the back kitchen in case of emergency. That evening, since the coffin had not yet arrived, Comstock had practically no business and only two lines. But he hammed impossibly.