In America (47 page)

“We were only joking about, Madame, and reciting doggerel to each other,” said Cornelia Scudder, the young actress to whom Maryna had given the roles of Celia in
As You Like It,
Perdita in
The Winter's Tale,
Hero in
Much Ado About Nothing,
and Louise, the virtuous sister in
Frou-Frou.

“Then—I insist—you will continue.” Maryna liked Cornelia. She looked from face to face. “No one wants to perform for me? No one wants to make me laugh?” She smiled at their discomfiture. “Very well.” She nodded gravely. “Then I must perform for you. Something you'll find of special interest, I think, even though it's in Polish.”

Maryna began in a whisper. Her dappled voice turned husky, then liquid. Her delivery was full of hesitations at first, revealing a mind heavy with feeling, amorous feeling, bitter feeling, unsure of what it wished to express. Then, gaining momentum, she passed to a high, mocking cadence. Rhapsodic, purling phrases were routed by harsh, slicing sounds, and a light, crazy laugh and then sobs and moans. Gazing out vacantly, she dropped into a hoarse tone, broken with grief, and finished with a pulsing vocal surge, telling of renewed hope and determination.

Clutched by Maryna's spell, the actors stared at her mutely. Miss Collingridge, sitting opposite Maryna, scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it across the table. Maryna frowned. Finally, someone dared speak. “Tremendous,” gasped Horace Petrie, their new Posthumus in
Cymbeline,
Angelo in
Measure for Measure,
and Banquo in
Macbeth.

“Sshhh,” said Mabel Hawley, typecast for maids (Juliet's Nurse and Nanine in
Camille
and Joyce in
East Lynne
) but, to cork her near-overflowing discontent, also awarded the role of
Adrienne'
s Princesse de Bouillon.

“Whatever it was, Madame, I was harpooned by it,” said Harry Kellogg, the company's ringleted, portly Prince de Bouillon in
Adrienne,
Henri de Sartorys in
Frou-Frou,
Leontes in
The Winter's Tale,
and Duke Senior in
As You Like It.
He was from a whaling family in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

“Was it a poem, Madame?” said Mabel. “A monologue from an old Polish tragedy?”

Maryna smiled, and lit a cigarette.

“What was it, Madame? What was it?” exclaimed Charles Whiffen, her Iachimo in
Cymbeline
and Claudio in
Measure for Measure
and Orsino in
Twelfth Night
and Archibald Carlyle, the wronged husband in
East Lynne.

“I merely—” she began, while idly unfolding Miss Collingridge's note. It read: “You recited the Polish alphabet. Twice.” Maryna burst into laughter.

“Tell us! What was it, Madame?”

“You tell them, Mildred, what I was reciting.”

“A prayer,” declared the young woman defiantly. She was blushing.

“Exactly,” said Maryna. “An actor's prayer. In my sad devout country, there is a prayer for everything.”

Miss Collingridge smiled.

“Mildred, you've not been studying Polish behind my back, have you?” Maryna said the next morning on the train heading toward a night's
Frou-Frou
in Leadville. Dressed in a lacy tea gown, she was reclining on a chaise longue, waving her cigarette with a lazy gesture; Miss Collingridge shook her head. “Then, if I did not know you so well, I would say you were quite diabolical.”

“Madame Marina, that is the nicest thing you've ever said to me.”

“And how was it, my alphabet?”

“In English, we say ‘And how was my alphabet?'”

“Noted,” Maryna said. “And the alphabet?”

“Grandiose,” sighed Miss Collingridge.

Maryna could never understand why in America there was so much suspicion of the arts, even among educated people, and so much antipathy toward the theatre. A woman to whom Maryna was introduced in the lobby of the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee boasted that she had never set foot inside a theatre. “When I see a theatre entrance, I cross to the other side of the street.” Yet there was no end of young women in every American city who thought (or whose mothers thought) they were born for the stage.

One or two might become actresses. None whom she saw—and Maryna wanted to be magnanimous—would ever be a star.

Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness—these are what make a star. And an unforgettable voice. You could do
everything
with the voice, once you knew which notes should be punched out, which left in shadow. Your breath control now gives you whatever you need: seamless phrasing, a bright range of colors, subtle timbral changes, the jolt of a cry or a crystalline whisper or an unexpected pause. Your voice rises, effortless, unhurried, and pure—enchanting the whole theatre into reverent silence. Who did not feel improved, then and there, by Isabella's noble plea?

    
But man, proud man,

Dress'd in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep—

You could make every member of the audience feel pensive, profound, if only for a moment. Or, with
Here's the smell of the blood … still
and just a flutter of fingers at the end of a shapely arm clamped demurely to your side while looking down at the paralyzed guilty hand (no need to sniff it or lick it or hold it to the tip of your taper's flame) and groaning, sighing, resonating like a bell with
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this … little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
—you could, you did, convulse every heart in the theatre.

*   *   *

SOMETIMES MARYNA
rehearsed an actor in a new part from midnight to five in the morning, was up and at her first appointment at nine, and went on to have a full day and perform in the evening. She never looked tired. When asked, as she often was, about her beauty secrets, she at first replied, “A happy life … my husband and child, my friends, my life in theatre, a reasonable amount of sleep, and good soap and water.” In America it was common for a star to claim to be, under the wrappings of privilege, no different from everyone else, which everyone else, while only faintly imagining these privileges, knew was untrue. Maryna's women admirers were happier when she began “endorsing” something they could buy: Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Beauty Creams and Angel Star Hair Lotion.

She wished she could find a cream or lotion she liked, especially since she had reluctantly begun using the new grease-based makeup. Standardized like so much of modern life, the new makeup elements came ready-made in the form of round sticks, each numbered and labeled. It was quicker to apply than dry makeup, and safer, if one believed the rumor that certain chemicals used in preparing some of the powders, such as bismuth and red and white lead, were actually poisonous. (If only it were possible to use both dry and wet makeup—as the steamships plying the Atlantic, smoke streaming from their great funnels, also sported, in case of engine failure, a full complement of sails!) And Maryna had to resign herself to harsh, unflattering lighting, too. Odorless, safe (is safety
that
important?), brighter (oh, so much brighter)—what was thrilling on the street was a devastation in the theatre. Thick soft gaslight, with all the lovely specks and motes in it, conferred the necessary illusion on many a scene which electricity now revealed in all its naked trashiness. She'd heard that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry had refused to replace gas with electricity in the Lyceum—ever. But in America no one could refuse the often unlovely imperatives of progress. Gaslight was obsolete, and that was the end of it. The American partiality for the new decreed: whatever is, can be improved. Or ought to be replaced. Maryna soon forgot whether she had signed a letter, dated May 7, 1882, which appeared in many magazines under the heading “Madame Zalenska's Tribute to an American Invention,” just for the fee she was paid, or whether for a time she had actually used this amusing new product.

My dear Sir: Last October while in Topeka, Kan., I purchased several boxes of your Felt Tablets (Ideal Tooth Polisher) for the teeth and have been using them ever since. I cheerfully add my testimony to others as to their value, and believe this invention will eventually almost entirely supersede the brush made of bristles. I am only afraid that at some time I may run out of Tablets in a place where none are procurable.

Yours sincerely,

Marina Zalenska

It became harder—does this always happen to great actors?—to remember the difference between what she said and what she thought. After she hailed her friend, Mr. Longfellow, as America's greatest poet—she had broken off her tour to recite “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and say a few words of tribute at his funeral—Bogdan ventured to rebuke her. “You can't
really
think Longfellow is as good a poet as Walt Whitman?” he exclaimed. “I … I don't know,” Maryna said. “Do you think I'm becoming stupid, Bogdan? It's quite possible. Or just very conventional? I shouldn't like that at all.”

Summoned at last to play opposite Edwin Booth, in a benefit performance of
Hamlet
at New York's Metropolitan Opera, Maryna sang Ophelia's songs to the music Moniuszko had composed for her when she played Ophelia in Warsaw many years before. “Ah, my father's ghost!” Booth shouted when Maryna knocked on his door an hour before curtain; she wanted to show him the precious original score. He was sitting in full costume in the dark, drinking; she could barely see his slender, important face. The dressing room smelled of urine. She'd heard it said so often that he was born pensive and sad, that his youth, given over to serving a tyrannical, antic father, had been comfortless, and that he had never recovered from the death of a beloved young wife after three years of marriage, followed, soon after, by the infamous deed of his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth. Maryna had her own reasons for being moody, but none of them could compare with his. She did not presume again on his solitude.

She felt serene. She hoped it wasn't just being old. Each evening, after she finished her makeup and put on her costume, she would select one scene and work on freshening the reading of some lines: then she was lucid, focused, anxious. In her dressing room between the acts, a scarlet and magenta kimono (gift of the Japanese ambassador in Washington, an admirer) flung over her costume, woolen scarf around her throat to keep her vocal muscles warm, cigarette caught in a small gold clamp attached to a ring that she slipped on her forefinger, Maryna brooded over a lapboard accommodating cards hardly bigger than thumbnails … until the call-boy's summons wrenched her away from her game.

You don't cheat when you play solitaire. But neither do you accept every hand you deal yourself; you redeal and redeal until you see a hand (say, with two kings and at least one ace) that gives you a better chance to win. Sometimes she was thinking; or planning something; or remembering, for instance, about Ryszard. Often it was just the silky, insidious desire to play another game. There was news about Ryszard. He had married. Henryk had written her first, and then the others. Jealousy flashed, white-hot. (Yes, she had been vain enough to suppose he would never love anyone else.) Her insides felt scooped out with regret; then she iced with anger. (It didn't occur to her that he had married without love.) She dealt herself the cards. She lost. If you lose, you
have
to play again. You think, Just one more game. But even if you win, you still want to play again.

*   *   *

“
I WISH TO SPEAK TO
Madame Zalenska and her children,” said the tall gaunt apparition in the doorway of Maryna's car.

An hour ago they had pulled into the train yard at Lexington, Kentucky, for two nights, and the wonder was how she had got past Melville, their clever porter, who was under orders to admit no one except members of the company. The young women who prowled about the stage door or haunted the pavement outside the hotel (if Maryna was in their city for a week's run), hoping for a glimpse of their idol, had even been known to venture into the railway station's darker precincts. But this, Maryna saw, was no aspirant to the stage.

“How may I help you?” said Maryna, rising.

“You are Madame Zalenska and”—her pale blue eyes scanned the long table where Bogdan, Miss Collingridge, Peabody, and a half dozen of the actors had just sat down to supper with Maryna—“these are your children?”

Thirty-five-year-old Maurice Barrymore (a gifted English actor and aspiring playwright who had been Maryna's Romeo, Orlando, Claudio, Maurice, and Armand Duval for several seasons now) and sixty-year-old Francis McGivern (her Friar Laurence, Angelo, Michonnet, and Armand's father) burst out laughing.

“Quiet, you youngsters, or you shall be spanked and sent to bed without your supper!” said Maryna. “As we all know that a great actress is ageless, I thank you for the compliment, Mrs.—”

“Mrs. Wenton.”

“—but unfortunately I have only one child, and he is far away, in a boarding school near Boston.”

“I am speaking of your company. These are your children too, the children of your soul, and their salvation depends entirely upon you.”

“What would you guess the population of religious lunatics to be in America?” Bogdan murmured to Miss Collingridge.

“Why are you whispering, sir? You should listen to what I am saying to your mother.”

“I am not an actor, madam, so perhaps my soul is exempt from immediate danger. And I defy anyone to construe my relation to this lady as filial.”

Eben Stopford, their Charles the Wrestler in
As You Like It
and the Porter in
Macbeth,
banged the table with the flat of his huge hand.