Enter Three Witches (19 page)

The curses ceased abruptly, although the squawking continued at a somewhat lower level, as if terror were giving way to mere indignation.

“Black bastard don’t want to be caught,” came an aggrieved voice, “and I got a meeting to go to.”

“Use a little chicken feed,” suggested Miranda, “but first, do me a huge favor and come up here, Louise. I need advice.” Her voice, Erika noticed, had turned from command to cajolery. There was a grumbling sound, followed by the banging of what was presumably the back door to the basement apartment. Erika wriggled happily in her seat, knowing she was about to meet a third and even more exotic witch.

Miranda shut the window. “I’m glad Bob wasn’t here,” she observed. “After I told him we never noticed the chickens.”

“You actually keep chickens in your back yard?” Erika asked. This was a detail Bren had neglected to mention.

“Not I,” Miranda said with a sniff. “Louise keeps them for some distressing ceremony of her own. She’s a black witch, you know. I mean figuratively as well as literally. But we’re very fond of her.”

Heavy steps could be heard below, and then Louise herself appeared in the kitchen doorway, disheveled and angry but still undeniably regal. “Better be important, babe,” she said. “I got only one hour to catch that cock from hell and carry him up to Harlem.” She seemed to notice Erika for the first time. “Since when we talk business in front of strangers? You gone off your head, Miranda?”

“This is Erika,” Miranda said. “Erika is Bren’s girlfriend, and she needs a little help.”

“I don’t,” Erika said, but was ignored.

Louise appeared to forget the urgency of her chicken chase in the wonder of this information. She chuckled richly and advanced into the room. “Bren have a girlfriend now? Will wonders never cease.” joining the group at the kitchen table, she sat down with her chin in her hand and studied Erika with her small, bright eyes. “Skinny,” she concluded after a moment, “but bright. Not real seductive, maybe, but there’s ways to fix that.” Louise laughed again. “There’s ways to make him fancy a blind pig, come to that. Pretty girl like you should be no problem.”

“But I don’t really want to be helped,” Erika said. “I know that sounds rude; I just feel that some things you have to do for yourself, and making up with your boyfriend is one of them.” She was beginning to feel quite outnumbered by the three witches scheming in her behalf but without her consent.

“Just a little philter,” Miranda said.

Erika shook her head. “Not even a little one.”

The witches exchanged glances, and Erika had the distinct feeling that they were agreeing to carry on without her cooperation. Miranda made a graceful little gesture of defeat. “Then we’ll just have to wish you the best of luck,” she said. “Don’t forget that we’re always here, ready and willing to help if conventional methods bog down, as they so often do.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Erika promised. “And I’m really grateful. Please believe me. It’s been fabulous meeting the three of you, and Vassago, of course,” she added with a special smile for Rose.

“Angels defend us,” the old woman muttered. “She sounds as if she’d met one of the dark lords at a tea party.”

“Look that way to me, too,” Louise said, with a glance around the cozy table littered with cups and saucers.

Miranda laughed. “Rose gave her the full treatment,” she explained, “and then brought her in for a little refreshment.”

Erika peeked at her watch and saw to her consternation that it was four o’clock. Bren might be here in less than ten minutes. She pushed back her chair.

“Oh, stay just a little longer, Erika,” Miranda begged. “I wanted so much to ask you about the play.”

In spite of her panic, Erika was stopped in her tracks. “The play?” she asked. “You mean
Macbeth?
What about it?”

“I saw some of the technical rehearsal,” Miranda said, “and it struck me very forcibly that there was a set of problems worthy of my powers. I met your director, too. Such a nice young man. It would be a real pleasure to give him a hand. I know I could do wonders with the lighting and special effects if I just had a little more information.”

Erika was appalled and felt sure that Bren would be even more so. It also struck her as unlikely that Mr. Behrens would welcome the assistance of the supernatural. She forced herself to remain calm. “I’m afraid this is another problem that’s better left to the people involved,” she said, “especially since it’s really the last minute. Maybe if you had been in on it from the beginning, but even then, I really don’t think…” She became aware that she had lost her audience. Louise was leaning across the table, staring at Miranda with gleaming eyes.

“Now that be a truly fine idea,” she declared. “Miranda, babe, you finally come up with something worth doing. Meeting and cockerel be damned. I can stand to spend some time on this.”

Miranda’s eyes sparkled at the compliment, and Erika saw that the other two really held the black woman in awe. “Do you really like it, Lou? Will you help?” Miranda cried. “It’s not any easy thing, and I’m still racking my brains about it.”

“Kinetic power you gonna need, Miranda,” Louise said. “Piles and piles of kinetic power. You think you can pull it off?”

“Never by myself,” Miranda said. “Not for a minute. I’m good, but I’m not that good. Is there a balcony in your theater?” She turned suddenly to Erika, who was startled into answering.

“Yes, but we almost never use it.”

“You’ll get us three seats in the front of the balcony,” Miranda said.

“But I can’t,” Erika protested. “They won’t let you go up, not if it’s really closed, and anyway, I don’t think…”

“You don’t need to think, my dear,” said Rose, “nor to worry about any little rules and regulations. You just dance and say your lines, and if Miranda wants seats in the balcony for herself and a whole platoon of Marines, she’ll get them, I promise you. It’s one of the things she’s good at.”

“All right!” Erika cried. She was now frantic to be gone. “All right. I don’t see how I can stop you, and I absolutely have to run. I just realized that I’m horribly late. Thank you all so much for everything!” She backed to the door, carrying with her the image of the three women who seemed so determined to take her life in charge, gathered around the table with the beautiful, mysterious cat seated like a royal effigy in their midst. The black dog lay with his nose pressed against the crack in the front door. Waiting for his master, she thought, then jerked open the door and collided with Bren, who was standing on the stoop looking through the mail.

Bren staggered back, dropping the mail and his school books into the clump of rhododendron bushes. “Erika!” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing to do with you,” Erika said quickly, clutching the railing to regain her balance. “I came to see your grandmother. She advertises, you know—little cards in coffee shops.”

“In a pig’s eye. You were snooping.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Erika asked. “I came to have my fortune told. I’m really into the supernatural, you know. Or didn’t you? I forget.”

“You are not,” Bren growled. “You’re into snooping, and you’re into driving me crazy. As if I didn’t have enough problems.”

“You dropped everything in the bushes,” Erika observed. She was not really trying to be infuriating. She was trying to think what she could do or say to improve this hideous encounter. The remark, however, had not been well chosen.

“You have a gift for this kind of thing,” Bren said. “You were born to be maddening. What do I care if I dropped an entire library in the bushes? What I want to know is what you were doing in my house.”

“I told you,” Erika said. “I came to see your grandmother. I was all mixed up, and I wanted someone to look into a crystal ball and tell me everything was going to be all right. That’s the truth, Bren.”

“But not the whole truth,” he said. He was really looking at her now and getting pains in his chest as he always did when he looked at Erika. To his surprise, she reached out her hand and pulled him down onto the top step of the stoop.

“No, of course not,” she said. “The truth is I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and when I found out about your grandmother, I felt I had to come and see if I could figure out the rest—you know, why you were always disappearing at odd moments and what there was about your house that I wasn’t supposed to know. I met your mother too, and Louise and Luna.”

Bren groaned and put his head in his hands. “Well, now you know, anyway,” he said in a muffled voice.

Erika stroked the back of his neck. “Now I know, and I think it’s all amazing and wonderful,” she said. “How could you think I wouldn’t, Bren? Did you think I was some kind of nitwit who wanted everything to be like a TV cereal commercial?”

Bren lifted his head and smiled uncertainly. “Never,” he said. “Not for a minute, but, you know, there’s normal, and then there’s different enough to be interesting, and then there’s my place. The gap between the last two, I’ve always thought, is unreasonably large.”

“We don’t really know each other very well,” Erika said. “How could we? And what happens is we keep making these ludicrous mistakes and then getting angry and upset.”

Bren stared at her. “There should be a way around that,” he said, “for two people who aren’t terminally stupid.”

“Like seeing more of each other?” Erika suggested. “Like talking to each other and telling the truth, at least part of the time, and taking walks and doing things together and what-not?”

“And lots and lots of what-not,” Bren said, putting his hands behind her head and closing the small gap that remained between them.

Through the massive front door there came an anguished yelp and a thump as Shadow, his patience tried beyond endurance, threw himself against the barrier that separated him from his friends. Erika and Bren sprang apart, suddenly aware of where they were—of the public nature of a front stoop in Manhattan and of the existence of other creatures in the universe.

“We could begin by taking Shadow to the park,” Bren said, “and carry on from there.”

“And on and on,” said Erika, scrambling joyfully to her feet. “And on and on and on!”

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” cried Edward Behrens, borrowing shamelessly from a different play.

“And close the wall up with our Perkins dead,” an unidentified voice suggested from the back of the room.

The entire cast and crew of
Macbeth
were assembled in the tiny greenroom of the Perkins Theater to hear the theatrical version of the pep talk before the big game.

“It will go wonderfully well, you know,” their director continued, and they gazed at him in mute, terrified adoration. “You have all heard about bad dress rehearsals being followed by smashing first night performances, and I want to assure you that this is absolutely true. I have seen it hundreds of times,” said Mr. Behrens, who had personal experience of perhaps ten productions. His eyes roved over his small and, at this moment, much-loved band of students, and he felt a wave of genuine confidence and admiration. “Polly, just one little tuft more on the left side of that ravishing beard, my dear. Macduff, your ears are still shockingly white. Don’t worry. You’ve plenty of time to put it right, and really, you all look splendid. Now go out there and sock it to them!”

“Is it really true about bad dress rehearsals?” Bren asked Eli as they climbed the stairs to the light booth.

“Could be, but don’t count on it,” Eli said. “If you ask me, it’s one of those things like walking under a ladder. If somebody drops a bucket of paint on your head, the superstition is confirmed. If not, you forget about it. Same thing with rehearsals. If all goes well tonight, everyone will remember the old saw. If it bombs, it won’t count. Why? Are you scared?”

“No. Should I be?” Bren asked, hoping that Eli could not detect the thundering of his heart against his ribs.

Eli shrugged and ducked into the light booth. “I don’t see why,” he said. “After all, we’re the wonder boys of Perkins Theater. You’re just kind of a funny color.”

“Haven’t been getting my daily sunshine,” Bren said, following Eli into their familiar little den. He was, in fact, suffering from stage fright despite the vast improvement in the lighting since the first technical. The reconciliation with Erika had, he felt, transformed him utterly from a wretched, miserable incompetent into someone strong, brave, and confident in the exercise of his craft. The disasters that had continued to plague the cast and stage crew had left him largely untouched, but now it was opening night, and he was petrified.

“All systems go,” said Eli, after a swift check of cue sheets and switches. “And now we wait.”

Bren sat down at the switchboard and looked out over the empty balcony to the rapidly filling main floor of the theater. There, neither too far up nor too far back, he saw his father’s broad shoulders and fashionably tousled hair. And there, making stately progress toward the front row, was Madame Lavatky in a costume that would have done credit to an opening at La Scala.

A buzzer sounded in the light booth, and Bren began the slow fade of the house lights. Gradually the babble of the audience died away and was replaced by the expectant hush that is the special delight of all who love the theater. Bren’s eyes, straining to catch the parting of the curtains, his cue to bring up the lights for the opening scene, missed the arrival of three women who, in the moment of darkness before the play, slipped into seats in the front row of the balcony.

Now the stillness was broken by a rumble of thunder, and lightning flashed in the shadows far upstage. A white spotlight stabbed down onto the apron, and into its dazzling circle leapt Erika. Bren caught his breath, for she seemed to materialize out of nowhere at the same instant as the light. It was the effect they had striven for and never quite achieved.

Rushing in from the wings, the other witches joined her, and Bren brought up two more of the big lico lights, one blue, one green. The three girls were wonderfully hideous as they huddled together and plotted their fateful meeting with Macbeth. Chortling and hugging each other in an obscene parody of sisterhood, they chanted hoarsely,