Illyria (13 page)

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Harlem that night--I'd be chasing all over London after him. His mother says he's taking drugs. And ..."

She paused, staring at her hand. "There's very little they could teach him."

"What do you mean? He could do anything! You
know
that--" Aunt Kate turned toward me. With one swift gesture she pulled the emerald ring from her finger.

"This was my grandmother's." Her voice shook as she thrust the ring within inches of my face. "This was Madeline Tierney's. She gave it to me for safekeeping. It has never belonged to me. Your cousin

Rogan--"

She tilted the emerald until sunlight struck it and a green flare leaped from her fingers. Then she raised her hand and, with all her strength, threw the ring across the room. I cried out as it smashed into a cabinet, then dropped to the floor.

"Get it," said Aunt Kate. I shook my head and she repeated the command. "Get it and bring it to me, Madeline."

Crying, I stumbled to retrieve the ring and shoved it blindly at her.

"No," she said.

She grabbed my hand and forced it open and placed the ring in my palm. When I looked down, I saw that the gold setting was damaged. The emerald was intact.

But it was no longer possible to wear the ring.

"It was a gift," said Aunt Kate. "A family heirloom. Just like his voice. You remember that, Madeline."

She stood. From the other room I heard my parents talking. The phone rang.

108

"Does he know?" I whispered.

"There was never a chance, Maddy. Not for a long time." Aunt Kate drew her hand to her face. Without the ring it seemed tiny, a child's hand and not a woman's. "But no, I haven't said anything to him. I think it would be better coming from you."

"I can't do that," I said. "How can you even think I could do that?"

Aunt Kate looked at me, her blue eyes bright with tears.

"You're an actor, Maddy." She turned to leave. "You'll find a way."

***

I GRABBED MY THINGS AND FLED THE HOUSE
through the back door, so I wouldn't have to face my parents. Rogan and I had planned to walk together to the last show.

But I was only halfway down his driveway when Fairview's front door opened and Rogan's brother Michael stepped out. He looked at me and shook his head, motioning for me to stop, then hurried up the drive to meet me.

"He's not here," he said. His face was flushed; he wore only a T-shirt and rubbed his arms to keep warm. "And if you were smart, you wouldn't be either."

"What? Is he okay? Where is he?"

"I don't know. He went over to Derek's a while ago for band practice. I guess he's still there."

"But--we have the last performance."

109

"Oh, he'll be there." Michael looked at me, his expression mingled disgust and fear. "Your precious show. You two should get some help, you know that? You should, anyway.
You're
not a total fucking idiot."

He turned and started back to the house.

"Wait--" I began, but Michael looked back and cut me off.

"Get out of here, Maddy," he said. "Now. Just go."

Rogan arrived backstage fifteen minutes before curtain time.

"Hey." He grabbed me and drew me close enough that I could smell marijuana and tobacco and mouthwash, then pulled away. "I got to get ready. See you in a few."

The house was full again. The performances--not just Rogan's, but mine, everyone's--were the best we'd ever done. My relief at not seeing any Tierneys in the audience was offset by the sight of Derek and some of his friends in the front row. I was afraid Rogan would leave with them afterward--our final cast party was supposed to be a wrap party, where we struck the sets.

Instead Derek and the other band members split right after the curtain calls. I couldn't blame them. It was ten minutes before we all stumbled offstage. I was elated despite myself, charged up from being onstage, from being in Rogan's orbit during our scenes together.

And, no matter that my stomach still churned at the thought, the phrase
London ... I'm going to London
ran through my head like the opening lines of a speech I'd memorized. As I took my final bows, Orsino's hand in mine, I looked out at the audience on their feet and for a second shut my eyes, imagining another crowd there, another place; an outdoor theater, or an arena stage rather than a proscenium. Real acting teachers rather than Mr. Sullivan; real directors.

110

A real me, instead of the girl in scuffed tights and thrift shop costume, stepping back so that my cousin could take his customary bow, front and center.

When it was all finished, I changed quickly into the clothes I'd worn over, then looked for Rogan. I found him outside, smoking a cigarette in the brittle black air of early evening.

"Are you going to stay and help take everything down?" I asked.

He drew on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. "In a while. I'm going home first and get a sweater. I'm fucking freezing."

"Okay if I come?"

He grinned. "Sure, Mad-girl. Always."

We walked home. I knew I wouldn't be able to tell him in the secret attic or in his bedroom, or mine, just as I knew I couldn't tell him backstage. So I told him as we walked down the long hill toward Arden Terrace, shuffling through the dirty snow and gritty sand left by the plow trucks. As I spoke Rogan said nothing, only took out another cigarette and lit it, so I could see how his fingers trembled as he cupped the match between his hands.

"Wow," he said at last.

We were in the street in front of my house. A car drove past and Rogan stepped up onto the curb, as an arc of slush rose then fell around us. When the car's taillights receded into the night, Rogan turned and started toward Fairview. I ran to keep up with him.

He said, "Don't do it."

"What?"

"Just tell them you won't go." He didn't look at me. "That's all. Just tell them no."

111

I stared at my feet.

"They can't make you," he said. "Not unless you let them. They can't force you to go."

"I know."

"I wouldn't go. If it was me." A chunk of ice went skidding in front of us as he kicked furiously at the ground. "If they tried to make me go without you. I wouldn't do it."

He turned to me. His eyes looked flat and gray, all the color leached from them. "Maddy."

"I know," I whispered. "I know."

We'd reached the porch. Rogan stood with his hand on the ornate knob of the front door and looked back at me.

"Aunt Kate." He bared his teeth in a grimace. "Aunt Fate. I can't believe you're going to fucking roll over and do what she says."

He went inside, letting the door fall closed on me.

"Rogan. Stop--"

He ignored me and ran upstairs. I followed, not daring to speak again till we reached the third floor. "Rogan, please."

I tried to grab his hand but he pushed me away and headed for his room. "Rogan--"

He stopped in the doorway. "Oh, fuck."

I came up behind him and stopped.

The room had been trashed. Rogan's mattress lay beneath the window, sheets ripped from it and the ticking slashed open. A chair had been smashed against the wall until its legs shattered, a sheet wrapped around it like a torn sail. Books were everywhere, their pages gone, and empty cardboard boxes, ruined Christmas decorations

112

and Halloween masks and ragged pieces of velvet and lace. Fistfuls of coins were strewn across the floor.

Only when I stumbled inside, I saw they weren't coins but foil-wrapped condoms. The air reeked of scorched wool. Ashes covered the floor, and blackened fragments of charred wood; cigarette butts and rolling papers and broken glass ornaments.

"Oh, no," whispered Rogan. "Oh, no, oh, no."

He knelt beside the entrance to the attic. The door had been torn from its hinges. It dangled from the wall, surrounded by crushed cartons and a splintered wooden panel. On the floor was a heap of shredded paper.

"Maddy." Rogan gathered the wreckage in his hands and looked up at me. "Oh, Maddy."

It was all that remained of the theater: ragged bits of cardboard and tissue, traces of glitter falling from the shattered awning of what had once been the proscenium. I dropped beside Rogan and raked through the drift of torn paper, trying to find something that had not been destroyed.

But there was only shredded cardboard and gilt, matchstick-size splinters that had been topiary trees and damp gauze bearing the faintest shadow of a ship's mast.

"Who--"

Before I could shape the question, someone grabbed Rogan and dragged him to his feet.

"Do you think this is a flophouse?"
I stumbled backward as my uncle shouted, his face so red it looked as though it had been boiled.
"Do you think this is your crash pad? Do you?"

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His hand struck Rogan's cheek. My cousin reeled backward and struck the wall.
"You left a cigarette burning in there! You nearly burned the house down--the whole goddamn house--"

"Stop," I yelled. "Stop, you can't--"

My uncle turned and stared at me, his eyes widening in revulsion.

"You get out of here." He began pushing me toward the door. "Get out of here, get out of here--"

I tripped and nearly fell, caught myself, and staggered onto the landing. Rogan got to his feet and looked around wildly until he saw me.

"Maddy," he said. "Go--"

I fled downstairs and back outside. I didn't stop until I reached my own house, empty and dark in the early January night.

It wasn't until much later, when I looked out toward Fairview and the carriage house beyond, that I saw both houses were dark as well. For the first time I could remember, no ghost light burned in Aunt Kate's upper window.

***

I DIDN'T SEE ROGAN AGAIN BEFORE I LEFT FOR

London. His parents pulled him from St. Brendan's and sent him to board at Mount St. Michael Academy, an all-boy school in the Bronx run by Marist Brothers. We were forbidden to write or call each other.

114

The truth was that, after three or four days, I was too caught up in a rush of preparation to grieve.

And I was young--I was constantly reminded how young I was, as though somehow my age made an invalid of me.

It didn't, of course. I knew I was being pushed away from Rogan, not just his physical being but his memory, everything connected with him. Which was absurd--he was my cousin; we were tied by blood if nothing else: our shared childhoods, our shared neighborhood, our parents and siblings, the very air we'd breathed for fifteen years---all of these things bound us intrinsically. It was a temporary separation: a few months, a year. Until we were older. Nothing would ever change.

But everything did.

That spring, Uncle Richard and Aunt Pat separated. Within a year, they were divorced--the first divorce in the Tierney clan. My parents didn't separate, but during my second term at the National Youth Theatre they moved. The house at Arden Terrace was sold, a new house bought in a small town fifty miles north of where I'd grown up.

I was seventeen before I spent a night in it. My visits to the United States were few and short-lived. I don't know what strings Aunt Kate pulled to get me into the London theater scene, but once she tugged at them, she never let go. Her friend in Hampstead extended his Greek visit by eighteen months, so we remained in his flat, part of a lovely gray stone edifice surrounded by holly trees and rhododendron that bloomed all year long. At drama school I was a quick study; neither brilliant nor beautiful but willing to take on any role, no matter how dour, no matter what short notice.

115

"A character actor" I was told when, after three years, I finally auditioned for Central. I'd done Viola, and Amanda from
Private Lives,
for my audition at RADA--I now had a perfect English accent--but I wasn't accepted there. Central took me, though. Despite being typed as a character actress, I did my share of ingenues, along with the classics, in school productions of many of the same plays I'd seen years earlier with Aunt Kate and Rogan. Shakespeare, Shaw, Wycherley, Noël Coward's
Hay Fever,
and Alan Ayckbourn's
Norman Conquests.
My parents flew over to see
Hay Fever,
and once VCRs and videotape became popular, I sent them tapes of everything I did.

Aunt Kate was back in the States by then. I moved from Hampstead to share a flat with several other struggling actors in Highgate, all of whom were gratifyingly envious when I got a small role at the Royal Court with Nancy Meckler. A year later, I toured with the Manchester Royal Exchange in
Charlie's Aunt
with Sabrina Franklin, saving enough money to buy a one-bedroom flat near the Angel in Islington. To distinguish myself from my great-grandmother, I performed under the name Madeline Armin.

By the early 1980s I was doing a lot of television work. A girl who got run over by a tram in
Rumpole of the Bailey,
a running part on the soap opera
Emmerdale,
and a nice bit as a female police rookie on
Juliet Bravo.
It wasn't what I'd dreamed of doing, but it was what I'd trained for. I wasn't a star yet. I was something that occasionally seemed even more miraculous, especially among my cohort: a working actor. Still in my twenties, I was young enough to believe that greater success would come; that I wouldn't be frozen forever in those small moments on BBC1; that another, hidden world still awaited me, populated with the parts I was meant to play