“Oh Dad, that would be super!”
“My little bird,” he hugged me.
“Daddy, did you ever wish we hadn’t left England?”
In the light from my bed lamp his broad brow furrowed. “Why would you say that, pumpkin? We’re back home now. We’re in our own country.”
I shivered. “I don’t know Dad. The Pentagon is just across the Potomac River. We’re right by Congress and the Supreme Court. The other day I heard a dreadful racket and I looked up and there was this great big helicopter whup-whup-whupping toward Andrews Air Force Base -- and I think, that’s the White House helicopter carrying President Johnson to Andrews Air Force base, where my father works!”
“That’s right. I’ve seen it myself. Quite a sight through these old elm trees. And I’ve been on Air Force One... Not when the President was there, of course, but...” He cocked his head. “Well, I’m a little alarmed, I must say. I thought that you and your little brother would love it here. You’d learn a lot and benefit from being close to the center of things.”
“Dad, we may be near Washington D.C., the nerve center for the world’s most powerful nation. But we’re in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and I’m going to a school where more than half the students are learning to weld or keep house. We were by Oxford before. I guess I miss it. I think I learned a lot there.”
He grinned. “You learned to be a Beatlemaniac and an oddball. I never should have taken you to see Beyond the Fringe.”
“Oh, and the trips to London, yes. We did see a lot of Shakespeare too, you know.”
“Cheeky girl!” he said. “You know, I don’t see why we can’t get you some kind of summer program over there this year! Why not?”
I was at first thrilled at the idea, but then I remembered. Peter. We’d have to see how that went, right?
“Oh yes, let’s do look into it!” I said.
“So, do you think you can go to sleep now, minus nightmares?”
“You’ll be there to beat ‘em all up, Daddy.”
“You are a sweetie. Goodnight, dear.” He reached over to the bed lamp.
“Maybe,” I said, “I’d better keep that on.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE VAMPIRE STOOD by the window.
He was very tall, and had I could feel his presence, radiating through the room. His hair was slicked back, and his long cape slowly fell toward the floor, from where it had once hung in the air as wings. Outside the window, the night moved like a living thing, and I heard a wolf’s howl, distant and mournful.
I lay upon the bed, and watched him.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.
He was magnificent.
His hair was a long mane of black, beautifully combed, perched atop broad shoulders. His forehead, pale and domed, had a bottom of fierce eyebrows, like black flares. His face was long and elegant -- regal, with high cheekbones, and a soft mouth. His eyes blazed with hazel focus, looking at me as if I were the only thing in the world that mattered.
Despite myself, I felt my heart hammering in my chest.
He was big and powerful and beautiful.
Slowly and gracefully he glided over to where I lay on the bed. I could almost feel his body heat as he neared me, but I barely noticed. I could only look at the eyes from where I lay on the bed. They bore into me with a hypnotic fervor, and I felt myself in some kind of fevered trance.
The vampire reached the bed.
He bent.
The cape lifted and draped over me.
I felt something like I’d never felt before. I felt rapture. I felt his strength and his presence, his beauty and his ardor -- his need. I felt strength and power in a delirious mixture of earthiness and transcendence.
He smelled like stargazer lilies.
Beneath the cape, he opened his mouth. I held my neck up to accept him -- but he had no fangs in his teeth, just a chagrined smile.
“I hope I did that right,” he whispered.
There was a sudden burst of applause.
My spell burst.
I blinked.
“It seemed -- uhm -- fine,” I said.
Emory Clarke lifted his cape from the bedside, and lifted his knee as well, rising back up to his full six foot four height, out of character and stooping again. He looked a bit sheepish as he smiled out at Mr. Crawley, who was hopping up onto the proscenium and walking toward us.
“Emory, maybe just a little bit faster from the window. I’ll gauge it later with a bigger audience. Otherwise, just perfect. You really have some nice posture, if you try. And Rebecca...”
He looked at me, with an odd look.
“You surprised me.”
“I did?”
“You were spectacular!”
“I was?” I said.
“You had just the right mixture of fright -- and something else. Fascination? Yes, something like that. Do you think you can do that again?”
“I’ll try.”
He looked at me with an odd gravity, as though he was reassessing me. I think he thought I was a better actress than he’d thought, since he had mostly picked me for the role because of my English accent. What he couldn’t have known was that I wasn’t acting.
I had felt frightened.
I had felt fascinated.
And I’d felt a lot more too boot that I hoped hadn’t shown.
Emory Clarke had been a revelation. A revelation in the role of Count Dracula.
I wasn’t the only one who’d been bowled over and shocked by the announcement that Peter Harrigan, the school’s best actor, had selected the meatier character role of Van Helsing instead of the matinee idol role of Dracula. Plenty of jaws had dropped. Emory Clarke, class weirdo -- as Dracula? What, had his father had a strange whim that he son should tred the boards? And pulled strings?
But as soon as Mr. Crawley had put a cape on him at the first rehearsal and instructed him to stand up straight and “perform like you did in my office”, jaws dropped even further.
Yes, Emory was tall.
But shaven and without hair falling in his face, he was absolutely majestic. He was handsome, regal -- and he had a strong presence.
“Oh yes. When we get some make up on you -- that will sock it to the audience!” cooed the English teacher drama coach, echoing the popular phrase from NBC’s Laugh In.
Everyone was a bit aghast and all the girls looked at Emory in a different way. The effect hadn’t been lost on me, but I was still focusing on Peter, who was so happy and lost in his practice of his European accent and manners as Van Helsing that he seemed totally oblivious to anything else.
Yes, yes, here I was in close proximity to my target. But if he was so wrapped up in this role he barely paid attention to anyone, how would he notice me?
I’d congratulated him on the role and told him it would be fun working with such a good actor -- and he’d just smiled at me condescendingly, as though he was accepting his due, with no regard whatsoever to the individual -- and sex -- and the individual distributing the praise!
Still, I made every effort to sit as close to him as possible. I wore a lavender perfume -- hopefully Victorian style -- to get his attention. I chirped laughter happily whenever he made something even close to a joke. I used every possible wile short of baring my breasts to get his attention. Nothing seemed to work very well. He was off in Thespianland, in his own fantasy world of scenery chewing.
“Oh, he’s just drawing on his inner Peter Cushing,” Harry had joked. Peter Cushing, of course, was the best known Van Helsing of the sixties, Edward van Sloan -- Bela Lugosi -- being pretty forgotten. Peter Cushing was in plenty of Hammer movies, but one Harry was referring to was Horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee as the undead Count.
“Well, that performance was very good in
deed, don’t you think people?”
Applause pounded.
Hopefully, I looked over to see if Peter had been watching. And there he was, nodding his head and smiling, looking at me in an odd way.
He had been watching!
I waited expectantly for my heart to skip a beat.
It just kept on thumping. Elevated rate, yes. But curiously not because of Peter’s attention, but because of the strange experience I’d just had with Dracula. I mean, of course, Emory Clarke.
Still, the notion that Peter had been watching was rather a triumph indeed. But I managed to stuff all these feelings down into myself and soldier on.
There was, after all, more rehearsing to be done.
Rehearsals at this point were just a couple hours after school, every day but Friday. We’d had a read through first rehearsal, and it had been a bit rough. The read through hadn’t happened on stage, but in a classroom. The director had just told us to put our own slant on the characters at first, no pauses for instruction. He said he wanted to get a take on our first impressions of the characters. This, of course, was after we’d had a week or so to read the novel (again, for me) -- and then a rehearsal period to watch the original 1931 film of Dracula directed by Tod Browning. Throughout, the question remained -- unvoiced but lingering in everyone’s minds --
Why Emory Clarke?
From the moment he’d shuffled into the classroom to watch the old spotty print of Dracula splash onto the clunky school screen that had been the question.
Why had Emory Clarke been chosen to play the count?
He looked particularly forlorn and odd on these rehearsal occasions, as his usual companion Cheryl wasn’t with him. I couldn’t bring Harry either. No one but actors and understudies were allowed. Emory tended to just select someplace away from the group, and hunker down with his playbook, flipping quietly through the pages as though burning each and every one into his memory.
Nor did he do anything particular wonderful with his memory.
In the play version, Dracula has many of the best lines, but not as many as the book, and very few in comparison with the rest of the cast. Emory read them without any trace of the famous deep and often-imitated Hungarian accent of Bela Lugosi. Instead, he used his usual Southern drawl. It was odd -- but certainly not without its creepiness.
“He’s from the South Carpathians, this Dracula, you see?” Mr. Crawley had quipped, after Emory had said, “Listen, the Children of the Night,” more like a character in a Tennessee Williams play than a supernatural European melodrama.
That had set the tone for the rest of the reading. The mood was fun and a bit exaggerated rather than nervous. In fact, Emory’s reading seemed to give me license to do play a bit with my British accent. I found voicings and vowels and nasalities coming out of me, hitherto unknown.
I’m not sure the acting in that read through was any good, but that didn’t matter. The spirit was there -- and it was having a jolly good haunt in that schoolroom.
The excitement amongst us all after that reading was palpable. There was a shiver of delirious glee in Mr. Crawley’s voice when he said, at the end, “Not bad! Not bad at all!”
“You know,” said Steve Seymour, who was playing Renfield inspired (he claimed) by some character named Gollum in Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, “That’s a pretty good play.” Steve was a senior and a drama club regular all the way back to junior high. He was pretty accustomed to the usual staid repertory of school plays.
“Not as good as the novel, certainly,” said Mr. Crawley. “But it does have a nice period flavor. He gestured in the direction of the school auditorium. “With the right lights, scenery, costumes, music and of course sound effects, though -- and some fun acting -- this, I think, will indeed be a production to remember.”
Now, here on stage, holding our playbooks rented from Samuel French and still learning our lines, we kept that goal in mind.
A production to remember!
Right now, though, sitting back down amongst the other students and Mr. Crawley blocked out another scene, this time with Van Helsing and Dracula, what I was remembering was Emory Clarke, leaning down over me.
I tried to look at my playbook and go through my lines, but the feelings of fierce needy closeness, the thrill and transcendence of just scent -- was still very much with me. When the scene was over, Emory was walking past me.
“Oh,” I said, as casually as possible. “Hey, Emory!”
“Hello,” he said, stooped, looking a bit befuddled. He’d put his glasses back on, and taken the cape off. The charisma was quite gone, but it lingered in my mind like ground fog.
“This is fun, huh?”
He looked at me oddly. “I suppose.”
“Can I talk to you a minute?” I found myself suddenly nervous, much in the way I was nervous. But I put myself squarely in my actress mode and role-played the cool and friendly cohort in the comedy of all this business.
He nodded. “Certainly.”
I patted the chair next to me and smiled a bright Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show!” smile to my new Mickey Rooney. Wholesome and harmless!
I watched as Emory sat down.
“You’re really good. As...as Dracula, I mean,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. He smiled faintly. “As you are clearly an appreciator of the best in the gothic arts, I take that as high praise indeed.”
“I never knew you were an actor!” I said.
“There is a long tradition in the Clarke family of acting. The Clarkes knew the Funts and the Barrymores. Clarkes entertained Charles Dickens on his first visit to America.”
“Oh, you mean the one that resulted in Martin Chuzzlewit? That novel wasn’t very kind to the United States.”
Emory’s pale eyes glimmered with a new appreciation of me. “You know your literature, Rebecca.”
“I do.” I said.
He looked suddenly awkward as though he realized he’d been drawn out. I was still feeling nervous, especially since now I had a different memory of that regal face. Rather than withdraw myself, however, which is my usual wont, I blurted.
“Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“Why of course. Harper Lee. “
“Gregory Peck was good as Atticus Finch, wasn’t he?”
“Not quite the way the book relates the character -- but acceptable, I suppose.” He squinted a bit at me, reassessing me and I felt obliged to forge onward.
“And I like Truman Capote and Eudora Welty and of course William Faulkner. What a great, great story “A Rose for Emily” is!”
He nodded. “Rebecca, have you been to the South?”
I laughed. “We’re in the South, Emory.”
“Well, south of the Mason-Dixon line, I suppose,” he said with just a bit of a rueful smile.
“And I’ve always heard of Washington D.C. referred to as a genteel Southern town.”
He smiled broadly at that one. “Perhaps, if you’re from Boston!”
His eyes changed when he smiled.
They absolutely twinkled. There was a golden, secret joy there, gleaming as though reflecting some private sun. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Have you ever lived in the Deep South, then, Rebecca?” he said. “Not that you need to, of course, to appreciate Southern literature like you do.”
“Well, for a couple years Dad was stationed in Texas. But I was like five! I mostly remember the heat and the flies...and really nice people.”
“Texas is quite large,” he said, nodding to himself. “And unquestionably it is a part of the heritage of the South. But it is not the Deep South.”
“No. No, I guess it’s not. Your father is a Senator, right?”
Emory nodded gravely. He looked suddenly as though
their was added weight on his shoulders. “My daddy is the U.S. Senator from the state of Alabama. Has been for quite some time.”
“Do you miss Alabama?”
“I do. But we go back to our home in Birmingham often enough.”
“I guess, Emory, one of the things I’ve always wondered about you was why you’re going to a regular school and not some more, ah -- exclusive school...”
Emory’s face somehow grew even more grave. He looked far older than his years.
“My Daddy is a populist Senator. A man, he says, of the people. He believes in the public education system and believes his children should use the public educational system. My brothers and sisters did in the past. I do now.”
“I know....but Crossland.”
“You speak of the vocational program here. Crossland Senior High is an important school. My daddy is a great supporter of President Lyndon Johnson. He believes in the Great Society. If integration of coloreds -- pardon me -- of Afro-Americans is important, is not the integration of other different classes?”
I nodded. I’d steeped myself so in the class-ridden British society of now and yesterday, I didn’t even think much about “integration”. It was, however, an issue I could not ignore now.
And besides, if being a cheerleader for the Great Society was something that would help me understand, somehow, this guy -- why not?
“Oh. Yes. I see. Yes, that’s more or less the sort of thing that the Principal was saying to me the other day in his office.”
Emory suddenly seemed to break out of his withdrawn shell. His face softened a bit and empathy showed through, like the sun suddenly peeking out of dark clouds.
“Oh yes. He asked you to go to his office after that unfortunate business the other day. Was it very terrible?”
“It was kinda weird.”
“Oh?” I saw an increasing interest. The subject of Principal Canthorpe was something that oddly concerned him. Or was he really interested in me, and just cloaking it?
I had to pursue that possibility.
At the Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 6
