“She’s probably never had such willing henchmen,” said Lisette, looking at them fondly. “They needed an audience. I’ve hardly ever seen either Rob or Nick this happy.”
Or Maggie, thought Ellen.
The next day, the first flowers came, a small bunch of daisies. Maggie picked up the little florist’s package from the mail desk and opened it, and buried her nose and her smile in them.
Ellen glanced at her own mail and stuffed it into her bag, then inspected her roommate more carefully. “All right, tough girl,” she said. “You can’t fool me. You’ve gone all soft and runny inside.”
Maggie peeked over the white petals at her and then handed her the little card. “Pour ma soubrette—de ton danois,” it said. From your Dane. Ellen looked back at her friend and shook her head, frowning.
“Too bad,” she said regretfully. “Makes you act exactly like an ingenue.”
Maggie laughed and raised her math book like a club, and, in a bubbling exuberance of high spirits, chased Ellen all the way up to their room.
Flowers came every week after that.
Eleven
The mad scene was still Nick’s greatest worry. The joker seemed to have sworn off all but photograph jokes, and although they still watched alertly on the few occasions when he and Lisette ate with cast members, nothing serious occurred.
But spring vacation was approaching, and Lisette had still not come to grips with the mad scene. One night Rob sat in the auditorium with Brian and watched the scene. A few minutes later, when Nick could take a break, he went back toward the greenroom. Maggie and Paul Rigo were there, in a corner, working on some project or other in physics that seemed interminable. At the center table, a couple of costume people were working on hats. Rob, standing by a sofa, seemed to be ignoring them. As he came down the hall from the wings, Nick could hear his low voice.
“It shouldn’t be that hard, Zetty,” he was saying, a thread of anger in the quiet words. “Just pretend you’ve had too much booze. Or something.”
Lisette was furious, Nick could see as he approached the door. She was standing in her rehearsal skirt, her head back, her hands clenched, her eyes dark with anger. But she spoke quietly too.
“You’re hired to act, not direct, Rob Jenner. Don’t you think Brian might like to know who you’re directing? Or Dean Wagner?”
“Brian and Dean Wagner might be interested in what Arnie Hutton could tell them, if it comes to that,” he said coldly. Maggie, caught by the tone of the quiet voices, was watching them now.
“Or in what Kathleen could tell them!”
“Lisette! Rob! For heaven’s sake,” said Nick, exasperated, finally reaching the door. They both looked at him angrily. Rob recovered first.
“Uncle Nick. You’re right. You’ve interrupted a nursery quarrel, I’m afraid.”
“Shut up, Rob,” said Lisette furiously.
“I plan to, Zetty. I was completely out of line. Let’s never speak of the matter again.”
“Good plan, Rob,” said Nick briskly, but Lisette remained stubbornly silent. He took her hand and led her upstairs and out to the parking lot. The nights were still chilly, and the air, not moving much, carried the smell of coal smoke from the college heating plant. They sat on the wall that ran beside the sidewalk.
“Nicky, he can be such a beast!” She was still angry.
“He isn’t usually.”
She thought a minute and shrugged. “I know. I guess I really started it. He just said that opening night wasn’t too far off now. I thought he was criticizing my scene.”
“He won’t do it again.”
“God, Nicky, he can draw blood.” She shuddered.
“We all can when we want to. But we generally don’t.” He smoothed back her soft hair with the backs of his fingers. “Blossom, I really think you’re stronger than you were.”
“I’m still afraid, Nicky.”
“Of course you are.”
“Maybe in a few days.”
But Brian didn’t give her a few days. They ran the scene again the next night, and as she started offstage to wait for her entrance for the second time through, Brian stopped her.
“Lisette, just a minute.”
“Sure.” She turned back toward the auditorium. Her rehearsal skirt had a little rip in the side that someone had safety-pinned together.
Brian walked up to the edge of the stage from his seat in the center of the house. “Okay. When you read that scene for me in New York, it was intelligent and sweet.”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice.
“It still is,” he said. “It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s exactly the same. Ophelia has outgrown it.”
Nick, still waiting in the wings for his own entrance, tensed a little. Help her, God, he thought.
She faced Brian, sad but composed. “I know, Brian.”
“Everything else you’re doing is wonderful. People are going to want something more from this scene.”
“I know.”
Nobody else seemed to realize what was happening. Ellen, long hair smooth down her back, was taking advantage of the pause to write out some scribbled notes legibly as she perched at the stage manager’s desk near him. David was fidgeting behind him, practicing pulling his sword from the scabbard smoothly. Cheyenne was focusing a light from one of the side boxes. Grace and Jim were sitting calmly on one of the wagons. Some staging crew members were working on the slide that was to hold one of the elaborately painted curtains, running it back and forth, over and over. And Brian, calmly and competently doing his job, was opening a chasm in front of Lisette.
“I think the problem is with the death images,” he said with terrifying accuracy. “You’re relating very well to the King and Queen and your brother. Very appealing. The songs are okay. But there’s no depth. I just don’t feel that you give a damn about your father being stabbed by your lover.”
“I’m horrified by it.”
“Yes, okay, I’m overstating a little. What you’re doing now would go. But it could be so much better. The horror is all intellectual, it isn’t very real. ‘The violets withered all.’ Surely you’ve felt like that at some time or other, when someone important to you died or something. The insanity of it all?”
She had covered her face with her hands.
“Lisette?”
“Brian, you’ll have to give me a minute.”
She turned and walked upstage, head lowered, and leaned on one of the newly finished columns of the back level. Nick, in the wings, was gripping the velour of a black tormentor curtain in one hand, crushing it in silent terror. He ached to hold her, to encourage her somehow. Around him the inane noises of the theatre continued—the whisk of David’s sword leaving its scabbard, the trickling sound of the curtain sliding on its rod, the faint scratch of Ellen’s pencil. He couldn’t bear to watch her lonely battle any longer and glanced away, and unexpectedly saw someone near him in the wings. Maggie, a coil of electrical cable looped over her shoulder, was watching her too, tense, lower lip gripped between her teeth, dark blue eyes intent and worried. Unreasonably comforted by the realization that someone shared his terror, Nick looked back at Lisette.
Brian at least had the sense not to push her now.
Another moment passed. Then she turned back abruptly, head high. “Okay, let’s go. You want withered violets, you’ll get withered violets, Brian. Hup, two, everybody!” She clapped her hands imperiously. “Move!”
Ellen, startled perhaps, but as always unflappable, calmly read off the cue as the actors scurried to their places. Jim and Grace gave the opening lines, and then Lisette entered, with her sad little song. “White his shroud as the mountain snow— /Larded all with sweet flowers; /Which bewept to the grave did not go /With true-love showers.” That was his cue, and he came in anxiously. She was shaking, and the blank eyes she turned on him frightened him. But her lines were still coming accurately.
“Conceit upon her father,” he said, and she stared at him in horror, as
though “father” meant “Jennifer.” Which, for now, it did.
At last, brokenly, she managed to push away her dread for a moment, and shifted to the cheerful and bawdy St. Valentine’s song.
“Pretty Ophelia!” was Nick’s line.
And then she terrified them all with something they had never rehearsed. Her line, referring to the end of the song, was, “Indeed, without an oath, I’ll make an end on it.” But this time the submerged mad thoughts overwhelmed her, and she sprang violently and unexpectedly at Jim, seizing the dagger in his belt and wildly pulling it up, ready to stab herself. Nick was there in an instant, wrenching it away from her, and the blighted eyes looked at him unseeing for a moment. Then, with a little shrug and an absent, chilling smile, she finished the song.
Nick, shaken and completely out of character, forgot his next line. “How long hath she been thus?” Ellen’s calm voice prompted him. He repeated the line woodenly. Lisette gave her first exit lines, shaking as waves of horror overcame her and steadying as she pushed them away. She moved offstage, graceful and distracted. Nick started after her. In the wings, he saw her stumble into Maggie’s arms. After a second Maggie looked at him over Lisette’s shoulder and signaled “okay” with thumb and forefinger. “Follow her close,” said Ellen, for the second time. Oh, God, that was his line too.
“Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you,” he said, as much to Maggie as to Horatio, and watched Jim join them in the wings. Nick stumbled through his next speeches and managed to complete them, but he kept looking offstage and had no sense of his character at all. Grace and David, a bit puzzled, held up their end well, though, and before long it was time for Ophelia to enter again, singing. She saw her brother, and her eyes went immediately to his drawn sword.
“Fare you well, my dove!” she said, and this time, although David was shocked, Nick was ready when she lunged for the blade. He pulled it away from her, and again she gave the little shrug and vacant smile and went back to the songs, and to distributing the flowers in her sash.
“Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference!” she said to Grace seriously. “There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end.” The slim body was shaken again by a wave of dread, and then she sang bravely, “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.”
David said, “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself/ She turns to favor and to prettiness.”
Ignoring him, Ophelia finished her song. “God have mercy on his soul! And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God be with you.”
Nick followed her out this time, irresponsibly and unprofessionally, leaving the others onstage alone. She had walked to the fly rigging and was leaning back against the ropes, exhausted. Maggie was holding one of her hands.
“She’s okay,” Maggie said, her wide smile welcoming Nick. He picked Lisette up and held her to him a moment, off the floor.
“Oh, God, Lisette,” he said into her shoulder.
She leaned back a little in his arms and looked down into his eyes. “Hi, Nicky,” she said, and smiled.
“Hi.”
“Looks like you’ve blown your concentration.”
He put her down and inspected her carefully. “You’re okay,” he said, unbelieving.
“I was only acting.” Impish, triumphant. Overwhelmed, he hugged her again.
Rob, who had been in the house again watching, came bounding up the connecting stairs and embraced them both.
“Zetty, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house!” he exclaimed.
“Thanks, Rob.” She beamed at him.
“You’re exhausted,” he said, looking at her clinically.
“Sure. Heavy scene,” she said cheerfully.
“Well, honey, you’ve just left the rest of us gasping in your dust.” He turned to Nick with a humorous look. “Especially Nick. Our admiration for Zetty’s performance is equaled only by our scorn for Uncle’s.”
“Looked bad, did it?” asked Nick. He was grinning foolishly. He wanted to jump and sing.
“I was sent to tell you that Brian wants to see you all onstage as soon as you pull yourselves together.”
“Okay.” Lisette started out onstage promptly, and Nick followed.
Brian was no fool. “Lisette,” he said, quelling the spontaneous applause from the scattered actors in the auditorium, “is that something you can get under control?”
“I’d like to try, Brian.” Calm and quiet.
“I’d like you to try, too.” Reassured by her attitude, as Nick had been, he still was a little cautious. “But the other actors have to be able to trust you.”
She looked mischievously at Nick. “I didn’t muff my lines.” Grace, standing behind them, turned and walked to the side of the stage, arms folded.
Brian asked, “Do you want to run it again now?”
“Yes, I do. Very much.”
“Will you be grabbing for the weapons again?”
“If you want me to.”
“I do. I just want to know.”
“Okay.”
Brian started to say something else, then paused and looked at Nick. Nick said, “Could we try it exactly the same way? I’ll try not to blow it again.”
“Yes.” Brian understood and nodded, and Nick had permission to seize the weapons that she grabbed from the others. Carefully blunted though they were, they could do real damage. He could still feel, with an inward shudder, the wild strength in those slim arms raising the dagger. He couldn’t, yet, trust Jim or David with her in that state. Not yet.
It was not quite as good the second time, but more than good enough. Lisette seemed to tire during her second entrance, and the distribution of flowers and the final song were a little strained and fatigued. But the diseased frenzy was as powerful and frightening as before.
“Everyone onstage,” said Brian when they were done.
They all trooped back and sat or stood on the forestage. Brian came to the front of the auditorium, by the orchestra-pit rail, and looked them over. Nick sat on the edge of the stage, legs dangling into the pit, and pulled Lisette, tired but not unhappy, close to him to lean on his shoulder.
“All right,” said Brian. “We’ve got a new scene here, people. It’s not set, and I don’t want to set it yet. Right, Lisette?”
“It’s still pretty fluid, I’m afraid,” she agreed.
“Okay. That means everybody onstage—Jim, David, Grace, Nick—has to be alert. If she surprises you, good. Work it into your own character. But don’t break her concentration.”
They nodded soberly.
“As for Nick…” Brian looked at him, still serious. “We can hope you’ll get used to it.”
“Nothing I’d rather do,” said Nick lightly; but only Lisette, and maybe Maggie on the catwalks above, knew how much he meant it.
They went up to the dressing rooms to change from their rehearsal clothes, and, because he was still absorbed in the joy and terror of Lisette’s accomplishment, Nick blundered. He dressed quickly and was going down the stairs to the greenroom to wait for Lisette when he saw Grace, still in her rehearsal skirt, sitting on one of the bottom steps of the stairwell, face bent toward the wall.
“Grace! Are you ill?” Worried, he put his hand on her trembling back and crouched beside her, concern furrowing his friendly face.
“Yes.” She was at the edge of tears, the gray eyes too bright.
“Can I do anything?”
She turned and looked at him a second, then kissed him, lips fierce and soft, hands gripping his broad surprised back with desperation. Nick held himself still, ignoring the answering warmth that was spreading up through him. In a moment she released him and turned away. “Oh God, oh God.”
His hand was still on her back. He patted her clumsily and sat back on the same step, leaning against the pipe that held the handrail. Well, boor, he told himself bitterly, neatly done. Nick O’Connor, artist- and stud-in-residence. Let’s see you get out of this
one. “Grace, it’s all right,” he said lamely.
“It’s not all right.” Her voice was low and husky.
“You didn’t mean it.”
“But I did, Nick.”
“But not in any permanent sense.”
She gave him a quick glance. “You don’t think so?”
“When we work on shows, we all fall a bit in love with each other.”
Another quick glance. “Maybe.”
“I always do.”
“But you stay with her, with that child!”
“Yes.” His voice was gentle. “Because a show doesn’t last very long. But my commitment to Lisette is for good.”
“I know.” She nodded miserably.
“You’re outgrowing Jon a little.”
“He’s so rigid, Nick! With his sports, and his lectures, and his endless research articles! I’m sick of it!”
“Dear friend, all theory is gray, and green the golden tree of life.”
She looked up at him then, helplessly. “See?” she said. “You understand. Instinctively.”
“Goethe understood.”
“Jon’s read it all too. But he’d never think of saying that.”
“Grace…” Nick rubbed his hand across his thinning hair. Everybody’s goddamn uncle. “Look. Do you ever quote anything to him?”
“No. He wouldn’t understand.”
“Maybe not. But maybe he thinks you wouldn’t understand.” She was startled. Nick added, “Actors say things like that. It’s our business to say them. Gives us an unfair advantage.”
“Yes.” She was a little better, embarrassed now. That he could cope with. She said, “Oh, God, how can I look you in the face?”
“Grace.” He stretched his arm across the step and turned her face toward him. “It’s the most wonderful compliment a man could ever have.”
She shook her head, still miserable. “But you think I won’t feel the same in a year.”
“No, you won’t. So I should probably tell you right now, Grace. On this show, you are one of the people I’ve fallen a bit in love with.”
Gratitude and, thank God, a bit of suspicion. “Maybe,” she said. She flexed her hands, looking down at them where they lay on her knees. “Nick, what’ll I do?”
Audition for Murder Page 14
