Bullets for Macbeth

by Marvin Kaye

  The direction for line 29 was the one I was looking for. It read: “After Thou may’st revenge,’ 3-M relights torch, revealing face FOR THE FIRST TIME. B looks up, recognizes Third Murderer, says ‘O Slave!’ and dies.”

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a pencil mark, a cross which X-ed out the words “O Slave!” A line drawn from the X into the margin led to the penciled exclamation in Godwin’s handwriting, “No!”

  “I have no idea,” said Hilary. “The phrase ‘O Slave!’ is one that scholars have argued over. Some think it is a printer’s error and ought to read ‘O, slain!’ Maybe Michael had second thoughts on the correct form of it.”

  I shook my head. “Then he would have written it down. The fact that he didn’t put it in the prompt script must mean it has to do with the mystery. Otherwise, why would he state that Banquo says it only after seeing the Third Murderer’s face?”

  Hilary studied the entry for a second, then nodded. “Yes,” she said, “you must be right. But what word could he have intended to use?” She looked up at Harry. “See if you can find Michael’s Variorum Macbeth.”

  Harry rose and began scanning the bookshelves.

  “Here’s something else,” I remarked while we were waiting for him to find it, “the fact that Banquo does recognize the Third Murderer supports the theory that it may be Ross. See? Godwin has the Third Murderer strike out the light instead of the First Murderer—in order to escape detection?”

  Hilary looked skeptical. “If that were true, why would he deliberately relight the torch and let himself be seen?”

  “Maybe he was only afraid to be recognized in case Banquo got away.”

  Before she could comment, Harry brought her a thick volume and put it on her lap. She flipped through the pages, found Scene 33 and ran her finger down the lines until she came to “O Slave!”

  “Here it is,” she said, “but there’s only one footnote.”

  It read: “In Some New Notes on Macbeth (Toronto, 1893), Melanchthon F. Libby states that here ‘Banquo recognizes Ross.’ But N. B. the Longman’s edition of the text in which J. M. Manly states, ‘We who read one of Shakespeare’s plays for the hundredth time may occasionally discover a subtlety which the most responsive audience would miss, and which—alackaday! was not intended by Shakespeare.”

  Just then, as I was reading, the doorbell rang. We glanced at one another in surprise. It was too late for visitors.

  “Who the hell can that be?” Hilary grumbled.

  Harry rose and went to the door. He peered through the omnipresent peephole of Manhattan apartment doors, and remarked, “It’s someone who wants to reclaim lost property. Shall I let her in?”

  Hilary nodded. She deposited the promptbook on the coffee table, turned over the Xeroxed duplicate pages so their contents couldn’t be seen, and waited to greet Dana Wynn.

  I’d underestimated Dana as an opponent, and I was immediately sorry for it. As soon as the door opened, she swept in, hurried to my side, put her arms around me, and looked up into my eyes.

  “Gene, darling,” she gushed in a voice which only pretended to be confidential, “I know I told you it was all right to take the script overnight, but something came up and I need it after all.” Still holding on to me, she looked at Hilary. “Do you mind very much if I take it back?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” Hilary replied casually. “I didn’t get a chance to really look it over, but I guess it can wait.” She handed the script to Dana.

  “You’re very sweet to help me.” Dana smiled, then went on effusively, “I’m really sorry we had that little run-in about the press releases a few weeks ago, Hilary. I guess Fred prejudiced me at the time, but I see you’re actually very nice.”

  “I have my moments,” Hilary said dryly.

  Dana released me from her grasp but held on to my hand. I tried to pull away, but she dug her nails in. “How is Melanie?” she asked, sounding very concerned.

  “Not good,” Hilary replied. “Sometimes I can talk to her. Other times she just stares into space.”

  “How dreadful! But have you been with her all this time?”

  “I have to.”

  “That’s not right,” Dana clucked sympathetically. “You have a business to run, and you need time to yourself. Tell you what, I’ll come over and spell you.”

  “How can you?” Harry asked. “You have to conduct rehearsals.”

  “Not during the day,” Dana replied. “Besides, we’re not meeting Saturday. I can stay then all day.”

  Hilary shook her head. “No, I can’t accept, I’m sorry.”

  “Never mind,” Dana persisted, “what I can do is have G&G pay for a private-duty nurse.”

  “Ha! Fat chance!” Harry sneered. “I can just picture Fred Grilis footing the bill!”

  “Don’t worry,” Dana said, “he’ll never know. Well?” She regarded Hilary expectantly. “Should I hire one?”

  Hilary wavered. “Well,” she said, a little dubiously, “I could use a day to myself. ...”

  “It’s settled, then!” the other woman stated decisively. “I’ll arrange for a nurse first thing tomorrow morning. Now I really have to be going.” She turned to me. Before I could stop her, she planted a kiss on my lips.

  “That’s for before, lover!” she said in a stage whisper, smiling maliciously. I don’t know what made her decide on that particular brand of revenge; maybe she understood the relationship between me and Hilary better than the two of us do ourselves. I didn’t get a chance to ask her, though, for she was swiftly gone.

  Harry locked the door behind her and returned to the living room, laughing. “That’s quite a battle the two of you must have had over the promptbook!”

  “Harry,” I warned, “shut up!”

  Hilary confronted me. “So that’s how you got all those scratches. From her nails!” She looked disgusted. “I never thought she was your ‘speed,’ Gene.”

  “Damn it, Hilary,” I protested, “you’re not going to believe that charade she just pulled, are you? She was just trying to get even!” As soon as I said it, I wished I’d bitten off my tongue.

  “Get even?” Hilary said suspiciously. “For what?”

  I had to level with her and explain how I’d really obtained the script. Harry didn’t help things with his frequent bursts of laughter.

  “So you lied the first time,” Hilary accused me when I was done.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “Being sorry isn’t good enough!” she interrupted. “I have never lied to you. Never!”

  What the hell could I say in my defense? I hated the mess Dana’d gotten me in: I would rather have Hilary mad at me than to know I’d hurt her. I decided to keep my mouth shut so I wouldn’t make the situation even worse than it was.

  Hilary’s lips were a thin line as she stared at me with contempt “How do I know,” she muttered, “that your second version of what happened isn’t a lie, too?”

  “It’s the truth,” I said, “believe me!”

  “Why should I?”

  Harry began speaking up on my behalf—or so he tried to make it appear—by telling Hilary that, after all, Dana was rather attractive and I could hardly be blamed for making love to her.

  I told him just how to shut up.

  “Don’t talk to him like that!” Hilary snapped. Then she wrinkled up her nose in evident distaste. “God, you still stink of her perfume!”

  Just then, someone called her name.

  Hilary gave me a withering look. “Damn you!” she exclaimed. “You woke up Melanie!” It was useless to point out that she’d been doing most of the shouting.

  She hurried along the hall to a closed door halfway down the corridor. But before she opened it, she fixed me with a frosty eye.

  “When I come back out,” said Hilary Quayle, “you’d better not be here!”

  9

  FRIDAY MORNING, I WOKE up earlier than I’d intended. The sound of the door slamming disturbed my sleep.

>   I dragged myself out of bed and looked into the hall. Hilary was in her room throwing some clothes into a suitcase. She had on a bathrobe.

  “Good morning,” I groaned. “You going somewhere?”

  She shot me an unfriendly look. Without a word, she closed the door to her room. A few minutes later, I heard her shower running. It occurred to me that she hadn’t had an opportunity to change clothes since she’d ridden to Bellevue two nights before. Hilary was meticulously clean, and she must have hated how she felt.

  Several minutes later, she emerged from her bedroom, fresh and neat in a green tweed suit. Her skin was fragrant with the subtle cleanly tang of Jean Naté and she had her hair tied severely in back, the way she used to wear it.

  “Get me the checkbook,” she ordered. I went to the office, twirled the combination on the wall safe and fished out what she wanted, along with our Citicard. She took it from me, wrote a check to cash, and replaced the book in the safe.

  “Are you going back to Melanie’s?”

  She nodded. “Harry’s waiting for me. I have to give him money to go to the Drama Book Shop and pick up as much material on Macbeth as he can.”

  “I could do that.”

  She smiled too sweetly. “I’m sure you have several more interesting things you can be doing with your time.”

  “All right, let’s get this settled, once and for all! First of all, I did not, repeat did not, have anything to do with Dana Wynn.”

  “Spare me the second of all,” Hilary said disdainfully as she headed for the door.

  “Hold on,” I objected, moving into her path to block her way, “you’re going to listen to me!”

  “Then hurry it up!”

  “Even if I had become involved with Dana,” I said, deliberately slowing my pace to contradict her command, “it wouldn’t be any of your business, Hilary. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” she enunciated carefully. “The same rule applies to my relationship with other men. Is that clear?”

  I nodded, not without a certain amount of reluctance, I will admit.

  “And now that we’re straightening matters out between us,” Hilary continued, “there’s one other thing. ...”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to find some other place to live.”

  It took me a second to assimilate it, and in that time she slipped around me and was gone. I couldn’t chase her into the lobby, because I was still in pajamas and robe, but I almost decided to risk shocking our septuagenarian neighbors, anyway. Frankly, I began to panic. Hilary fired me so often it meant nothing, but never before had she threatened to kick me out of the apartment.

  The situation between us was a lot worse than I’d realized, and I didn’t quite understand why.

  I took a quick shower, shaved, got dressed, took care of the mail, and debated whether I should leave the office. I hesitated to let the phone go untended, but by noon I no longer could stand the suspense and I left.

  The Opel wasn’t in the garage. I hailed a taxi and rode to the Godwins’ apartment in the Village. Neither Hilary nor Harry were there. A thin, middle-aged woman in white reluctantly admitted me after she determined that Melanie knew me. I noted that Dana had made good on her promise to hire a nurse.

  The nurse said Melanie had rallied a bit and asked to see me, so I entered the bedroom where she was resting.

  It had the weight and feel of Michael Godwin’s personality. Books and scripts cluttered every furniture surface and corners of the floor. His clothing crammed a closet, but still there was room in it for three vertical rows of scripts that rose from a shelf high above the hanger rack. A beige rug that looked like it belonged in a hunting lodge covered, but did not totally conceal, an underlayer of black and white linoleum. Next to the bed was a makeup table, littered with grease paint, spirit gum, and other theatrical paraphernalia. Two dressers, a wardrobe for Melanie’s things, and a small nightstand completed the inventory.

  Melanie was in bed, wearing a thin nightdress over which she’d pulled an emerald wool coverlet. Her face was gaunt and her lips and cheeks were colorless.

  “I hear you’re a little better today,” I said.

  “What you mean,” she replied in a feeble voice, “is that today I’m in contact with reality. I don’t expect to get better.”

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?” I asked inanely, helplessly.

  She shook her head, then murmured something I couldn’t hear. I asked her to repeat it.

  “Mills,” she said hoarsely, “I only hope they catch him.”

  “Do you know any reason,” I asked, “why he might have wanted Michael—” I couldn’t say the word. But there was no need.

  “I don’t know what Armand wanted from us,” she answered. Her voice was growing fainter. “I wish I’d never heard of Macbeth.”

  “Amen,” I replied.

  I was going to ask where Hilary had gone, but just then the nurse popped her head in and warned me not to tire her patient. I assured her I was just about to go.

  “Melanie,” I said, “just one more thing, if you don’t mind.”

  Her eyebrows raised, but she didn’t have enough energy to verbalize the question.

  “A few weeks ago, Michael showed me a bunch of quotes about Macbeth that he’d culled from various sources. Do you know where he kept those papers?”

  She nodded and rolled her head so she could aim her eyes toward his dresser. I walked over to it and saw a small manila folder with the words “Extracts” penciled across the front.

  “May I take this in the other room and look it over?” She made an effort to nod. Thanking her, I left her to rest as best she could.

  In the living room, I did a thorough job of gleaning the contents of the excerpts, but though many of them dealt with the Third Murderer problem, none shed any direct light on Godwin’s choice of actor for the role.

  However, there were two quotes, one right after the other, which were bracketed in heavy lead pencil. Opposite them, in the margin, were two words in Godwin’s familiar handwriting: “The key!”

  The first, by J. M. Manly, was brief and reminded me of the passage Godwin had shown me when I’d told him about Dave Bluestone’s Third Murderer theory: “Those of us who know the play well are apt to read every event in the light of the whole play, but obviously the events of a play have at the moment of their occurrence only the significance which they display upon seeing them first presented, later a new significance appears as we see their results. This sounds like a truism; too much closet study of Shakespeare has caused some of us to forget it.”

  The second extract was longer. It was attributed to a commentary printed in the November, 1906, issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and was by one Theodore Watts-Dunton. It read: “It is curious, however, that critics in a general way are apt to ignore the theatric quality of Shakespeare’s dramas [Godwin had another brace of exclamation marks here]—apt to consider them entirely from the poetical, the literary, the dramatic standpoint: using the word ‘dramatic’ in what would seem to be its present acceptation as implying a true delineation, in any literary form, of the soul of man. If Shakespeare himself were alive to read these criticisms, nothing would astonish him more than to learn this. To the oral critics of the Mermaid and the Apollo Saloon it would have seemed as absurd to talk about a play without discussing the playwright’s structural method and mastery over theatric conditions as it would be to talk about a poem like ‘Venus and Adonis’ or ‘Hero and Leander’ and leave the subjects of stanza, rhyme, and rhythm undiscussed.”

  There were three more penciled words at the end of the paragraph: “Ergo, Globe staging.”

  I put down the folder and told the nurse I was going. I asked whether Hilary’d said when she’d be back, but the woman shook her head. I figured Melanie might know, but I was reluctant to disturb her again.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to talk to Hilary, but had no idea where she was. On a hunch, I ran down to pr
ecinct headquarters, but she wasn’t there, and neither was Betterman. Next I took the IRT uptown to Fiftieth and Broadway and walked a few blocks to the Drama Book Shop, but Harry either hadn’t gotten there yet or he was already through with his shopping.

  I spent most of the afternoon shuttling back and forth between the office and Melanie’s, but Hilary didn’t return to either place. At four-thirty, I gave up in disgust and went out to grab a beer. The day was clear for a change, but the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing, and I could take no delight in the respite from precipitation.

  I was sitting nursing a Schaefer’s when a new idea came to mind. Tossing off the rest of the brew, I took a taxi to the East Side and got out in front of Harry Whelan’s place.

  Once there, my nerve left me. There was no point in barging in on the actor; if Hilary was there, she would not welcome my presence. Still, I didn’t see where else she could be, so I hung around across the street from the building.

  I waited there for almost an hour, then suddenly Harry emerged from the front door and hurried down the street carrying a suitcase. There was no sign of Hilary.

  It looked like he was planning to do a vanishing act, just like Mills. I decided I’d better tag along in his wake to find out where he was headed.

  Harry hailed a cab. I did the same. Several minutes later, he got out in front of Felt Forum. I paid the fare and, while doing so, momentarily lost sight of Harry. It didn’t worry me, since I figured he had to make a stop inside the theater.

  I was wrong. I cautiously checked the lobby, auditorium, and finally the dressing rooms, but he was nowhere to be found. I’d lost him.

  I was fed up with myself, but there was no point in hanging around and thinking up terms of recrimination. I was hungry, so I headed around the corner and ate a burger.