In America (33 page)

“Perhaps. But first you will tell me, what is my fate?”

“Fate?”

“Will you give me a week?”

“A week!” he exclaimed. “I'll give you weeks. As many as you want.”

*   *   *

“
I'M A BILIOUS MAN
, Madame,” said Barton, tucking into the ample noon repast offered at the Fountain Bar. “Can you forgive me?”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“No, no, I beg your pardon from the bottom of my heart. I thought you were a novice. Not even that, I thought you were some society lady with dreams of going on the stage. Never did I imagine that I was about to see a great artist.” He sighed. “You may be the greatest actress I have ever seen.”

“You are kind, Mr. Barton.”

“You mean I'm a fool. Well, I shall make it up to you.”

He says he will make it up to me, Henryk. All went well, Bogdan. Ryszard, come.

They were sitting in one of the more select bars in the city, at the corner of Sutter and Kearny Streets, a popular place, Barton remarked, for bankers.

“As you see,” he added, with a nod at the to-and-fro of men about the room going up to consult a slender ribbon of paper trickling down one of the walls into a basket on the floor, followed by an explanation: these were choice gleanings, fresh at every moment, from the sub-marine cable, which were needed to conduct great mercantile transactions here in San Francisco. “News from the whole world, transported across intervening oceans to arrive on a strip of paper scarcely wider than my cigar band.”

“How convenient,” said Maryna.

“Even Ralston used to come to the Fountain. It's a pity you can't meet him, he was the richest man in the city, but damned, pardon my French, Madame, if he didn't go for a swim in the Bay and drown by accident the very afternoon he learned that his bank failed. Some problem with his partner.” He laughed. “That fellow over there fiddling with the solid-gold watch fob crossing his waistcoat.”

“Shall we turn now to
our
business, Mr. Barton?”

“Right,” said Barton.

They began with a disagreement. Barton did not think she should open with
Adrienne Lecouvreur. Camille,
he thought, would be much better.

Adrienne
first, Maryna said. Toward the end of the first week,
Camille.
And then one, perhaps two, plays of Shakespeare. She thought she should begin with Ophelia or Juliet, whose pathos was second nature to her. For although there was no Shakespearean role she liked better than Rosalind, she preferred to wait to do
As You Like It
until she had further reduced her accent. With Shakespeare's comedies, she said, she had the impression that the audience listens differently. One expects, she explained, a more prominent linguistic grace.

“Am I being clear?” she added.

“Very clear,” said Barton.

“But perhaps you disagree.”

He smiled. “I can see it will be hard to disagree with you.”

“While you are in that mood, Mr. Barton,” she said briskly, “I think we should proceed to discuss my contract, my salary, and the dates you can propose. And the other actors, of course—I trust you can supply me with a Maurice de Saxe as princely as the Maurices I played with in Poland. Also you will tell me something, but not too much, about the drama critics here. Though I can hardly complain of the treatment I have received from critics, I have never liked them. They always start out thinking you are going to fail. I remember when I made my debut at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw, the critics were most skeptical. That I had chosen, yes,
Adrienne Lecouvreur,
was regarded as a great act of presumption. How could I, a mere Polish actress, dare to touch the role written for the immortal Rachel, which had then become the property of Adelaide Ristori? But I triumphed. With that role I was proclaimed queen of the Polish theatre, and from then on I could do no wrong.” She smiled. “A triumph is sweeter when one has first to surmount a wall of skepticism.”

“Indeed,” said Barton.

When they returned to the theatre, Barton took her for a tour of the neatly labeled' interiors and exteriors in the scene-dock (Oak Chamber, Gothic Palace, English Drawing-Room, Old Venetian Palace, Forest Glade, Juliet's Balcony, Humble Parlor, Tavern, Lake by Moonlight, Rustic Kitchen, Dungeon, French Ball-Room, Rugged Coast, Court-Room, Roman Street, Slave Quarters, Bed-Chamber, Rocky Pass) and the property room (throne chair, scaffold, royal couches, trees, scepter, infant's cradle, spinning wheel, swords, rapiers, daggers, blunderbusses, paste jewels, casket, artificial flowers, goblets, champagne glasses, rubber asp, witches' cauldron, Yorick's skull); introduced her to the head scene-painter and the property-man and their dusty assistants; showed her the comforts of the star's dressing room and the dignified greenroom. There were no actors yet on the premises. Barton assured her she would like the company's Maurice, whom she guessed by the way he commended him (“a manly actor of the old school”) would prove easy to work with and not very alert.

And when that was done—they were back in Barton's office—he offered her a week starting ten days from now, on September third; the California's general manager had insisted on booking a crowd-pleasing variety show for that week, but he would be delighted to cede the Georgia Minstrels, Hermann the Wizard, and Professor O. S. Fowler, the renowned phrenologist, to the Bush Theatre or to Maguire's. Then in October she could have three—four, if she liked—more weeks.

“There is one other thing. Your name, dear lady—of course it's in the letters from your friends, but would you be so kind as to write it out for me?” He looked at the piece of paper. “
M-A-R-Y-N-A Z-A
- funny
L-E-Z-O-W-S-K-A.
Yes, I remember. And now, please, pronounce it for me.”

She did.

“Would you say that again? The second name. I'm afraid it doesn't sound like what I'm looking at.”

She explained that the Polish
l,
the barred
l,
was pronounced as a
w,
the
e
with a hook under it as “en,” the
z
with the dot over it as “zh,” and
w
as an
f
or
v.

“I shall attempt it once. Just once. Zalen … no, Zawen … I have to lisp, right?” He laughed. “But let's be serious, dear lady. You realize, don't you, that no one in America will ever learn to pronounce your name correctly. Now, I'm sure you don't want to hear your name mispronounced all the time, and my worry is that only a few will make the effort to say it at all.” He leaned back in his chair. “It's got to be shorter. Maybe you could drop the
z-o-w.
What do you say?”

“I shall be glad to improve my difficult foreign name,” she said airily. “Isn't that what many people do when they come to America? I'm sure my late first husband, whose name I bear, Heinrich Załężowski—no, I think I'm not going to explain to you why he was Załężowski and I am Załężowska, that's
too
much for a Yankee mind—would have been very amused.” And, amused by the prospect of marring Heinrich's last bit of sovereignty over her, she took back the paper, wrote on it, and handed it to him again.

“
Z-A-L
-We're forgetting about the Polish
l,
right?” He registered her nod. “
Z-A-L-E-N-S-K-A.
Zalenska. Not bad. Foreign, but not hard to say.”

“Almost as easy as Ristori.”

“You mock me, Madame Zalenska.”

“Call me Madame Maryna.”

“We'll have to do something about the first name too, I'm afraid.”

“Ah, ça, non!”
she cried. “That really is my name.”

“But nobody can say it. Do you really want people saying Madame Mary-Naaah? Mary-Naaaaah. Mary-Naaaaaaah. No. You don't.”

“Your suggestion, Mr. Barton?”

“Well, you can't be Mary. Too American. Marie, that's French. Say, how about changing just one letter? Look.”

On the paper he had written:
M-A-R-I-N-A.

“But that's how my name is spelled in Russian! No, Mr. Barton, a Polish actress could hardly have a Russian name.” She was about to say, The Russians are our oppressors, and realized how puerile this would sound.

“Why not? Who in America would know the difference? And people can pronounce it. Mareena, they'll say. They'll think it's Italian. It sounds nice. What do you say? Marina Zalenska.” He looked at her flirtatiously. “Madame Marina.”

She frowned and turned away.

“Well then, that's settled. I shall have the contract drawn up this afternoon. And now—may I, to toast the occasion?” He was lifting a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. “I must tell you,” he said, “that anyone who works for me is fined five dollars if caught drinking in the theatre. Actors ten.” He half-filled two glasses. “Except for Edwin Booth, of course. Exceptions are always made, and I say rightly so, for poor Booth. Neat or with water?”

Marina Zalenska. Marina Zalenska. Marina—what was the matter with Edwin Booth?—Zalenska. “I beg your pardon? Oh, no water.” Marina, mother of Peter. Peter's last name would have to be changed too.

So all is settled, Henryk. The dates, the roles, my munificent salary, my mutilated name. No, the man is not a brother tippler. And when I took out a cigarette, he merely said, “Ah,” and reached for his matches. He is the first American I have met who does not seem genuinely shocked to see a lady smoke. I think I shall get on with this Mr. Barton very well. He likes me, he is a little afraid of me, and I like him, he is shrewd and he truly loves the theatre. I have dined with him and his charming wife, a simple home-cooked meal of creamed corn soup, deviled crabs, lamb chops in tomato sauce, stuffed potatoes, roast chickens, banana ice cream, jelly-roll, coffee, and I must not forget the stalks of uncooked celery set about the table in tall glasses to gnaw on
ad libitum
throughout the meal. You would have smiled at the heartiness of my appetite.

Applying to the mirror, the actor's only candid friend, Maryna acknowledged that she was thinner than when she left Poland, though she trusted that she would not look too thin, actually thin-looking, when all the costumes brought with her had been taken in; that her face had aged, especially around the eyes, though she knew that on a stage, with the normal wizardry of makeup and gaslight, she would appear no more than twenty-five. To be sure, she wrote to Henryk, the gush of animal spirits of a lighthearted girl is beyond me now, but my joy and enthusiasm are intact. I believe I can give a faultless imitation of the emotions that may elude me in real life. I was never a great instinctual actor, but I am tireless and strong.

Four days before she was to open, when the rehearsals began, Maryna moved to a pompous suite on the top floor of the Palace Hotel. It was Barton's idea, Barton's extravagance. As he explained it, “People will hear you're at the Palace, and that will make them take notice. Mr. Ralston put his all into the Palace. We're the second-best theatre in America. The Palace is the grandest hotel in the world.” Maryna liked hotels: being in a hotel, any hotel, had meant, and would mean again, having a theatre to go to. And treating luxury as merely her due after the privations of the last months, while accepting inquisitive stares from across the immense Grand Court with its seven-story-high domed ceiling of amber-colored glass and breath to breath in the mirrored confines of the hydraulic elevator, was itself a kind of performance. Playbills around the city proclaimed the American debut of the great Polish actress Marina Zalenska, though Barton had not managed to prod a single journalist from one of the daily newspapers into requesting an interview. Members of the Polish community in San Francisco, abrim with anticipation of the imminent American triumph of their national treasure, sent trinkets and books and flowers, but the most thoughtful present of all was already waiting at the desk when Maryna checked into the Palace: a little velvet-lined box containing her black silver necklace and pendant earrings, the precious gift from Bogdan's grandmother, with a card: “From an anonymous”—this was crossed out, and “abject” written above—“admirer.”

She wore them happily, her miraculously restored mourning jewelry, until Monday night, when she put on Adrienne's brilliant jewels.

Eager to coddle his astounding “discovery,” Barton had offered four rehearsals of
Adrienne
with the full company, including a dress rehearsal on the day of the opening. Normally only new plays were rehearsed. For repertory, a few hours on the day of the performance with speeches rattled off and stage business reviewed was considered preparation enough. Maryna took note of the mild annoyance of her fellow actors at having to turn up four days in a row at ten o'clock; for her there could be nothing routine about these days. The first morning that Maryna was admitted to the California by the stage entrance seemed no less momentous an occasion than the evening long ago when, as Stefan's baby sister, she had passed through her first stage door. And hadn't the porter in the theatre in Kraków where Stefan was playing in
Don Carlos
been ill-tempered and slow to respond, like the one here with the baleful name of Chester Cant? But all theatres are alike, she thought gaily: the smells, the jokes, the envy. The porter at the Globe Theatre could well have been the model for the immortal grumbler in Macbeth's service who, tarrying to open the castle gate to some rackety late-night visitors, imagines himself the porter of hell.

“Your Shakespearean porter,” she exclaimed to James Glenwood, her amiable Michonnet, who had also arrived for the rehearsal early, but only after some dispute with the surly porter—she could hear the din from the greenroom.
“I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire,”
Maryna recited companionably. “But let us hope our Mr. Cant does not.” Seeing Glenwood's blank expression, she added, “
Macbeth,
Act Two.”