In America (36 page)

“Ah, no, Mr. Warnock!”—Maryna wrinkled her nose with distaste—“This would not be right at all.” For such a profanation of the family name she would never be forgiven by Bogdan's brother. “That is my husband's title, not mine,” she said. And, hoping to appeal to the democrat in this rotund man with the diamond scarfpin, “Artist—actress—is title enough for me.”

“We're not talking about you, Madame Marina, we're talking about the public,” said Warnock amiably.

“But it is I on the playbills! How can I be both Marina Zalenska and Countess Dembowska?”

“Easy,” said Warnock.

“Unthinkable in Poland,” she cried, and knew she had already lost the argument.

“Well, this is America,” said Warnock, “and Americans love foreign titles.”

“And— And it would be so vulgar for me to allow myself to be called a countess in my professional life.”

“Vulgar? That's an awfully snobbish thing to say, Madame Marina. Americans don't feel chastened when they're told that something they enjoy is vulgar.”

“But Americans like stars,” she said, smiling severely.

“Yes,” he said, “Americans like stars.” He shook his head reproachfully. “And if they like you, you can make a lot of money.”

“Mr. Warnock, I do not come from another planet. In Europe the public dotes on stars. People like to worship, we know that. Nevertheless, in Poland, as in France and the German-speaking lands, drama is first of all one of the fine arts, and our principal theatres, those maintained by the state, are devoted to an ideal of—”

While Maryna, sitting with Warnock in one of the reception rooms of the Palace, was calmly trying to make the manager of her future American career appreciate for just a moment the prestige and privileges that accrue from a career at Warsaw's Imperial Theatre—secure employment and steady promotion through the ranks, exemptions from conscription into the Czar's army, and the guarantee to all, upon retirement, of a handsome pension for life (“An actor is a civil servant,” she said; “A what?” he exclaimed)—Rose Edwards, pacing back and forth in Barton's office, was in full cry. “As you know, Angus, I am not stupid, and I must tell you straight out that I cannot play after such a genius. And in dear old
East Lynne!
—I shall be trounced by the critics. Will you think badly of me if I cancel my week? You cannot, you are a friend. Announce that I am ill, Angus. And, as a friend, might you consider paying my hotel bill and the cost of my getting here and traveling on just as comfortably to the following week's engagement? Yes? No?”

“Dear, dear Rose!” Barton roared tenderly. “What I shall announce tomorrow in all the papers is that you have of your own free will withdrawn from your engagement here in favor of Madame Marina. The public will applaud your noble gesture, welcome you even more enthusiastically the next time you play at the California, and I'll give you not only the expenses you've asked for but five hundred dollars as well.”

So Barton was able to report to Maryna that, as he had hoped, Rose Edwards was ceding her week.

In the second week Maryna repeated her Adrienne and Marguerite Gautier and, crossing at last truly into the English language, added Juliet. Tom Deane was delighted to do his Romeo, James Glenwood made an endearing Friar Laurence, and Kate Egan offered her crestfallen variation on Juliet's Nurse, which Maryna forgave, as she had forgiven Kate for igniting the veil—altogether inadvertently? of course not—on the first night. Last year's Juliet at the California Theatre had to feel glum about being shunted into the role of the Nurse, and obliged to be jolly and coarse with the subject of such headlines as “Debut at California Theatre Marks Epoch in Dramatic Art” and “World's Greatest Actress Makes American Debut in San Francisco.”

Girding herself for the jealousy that invariably accompanies success, Maryna remembered her first year at the Imperial Theatre. Her coming had delivered a vivid insult to the old system, modeled on the Comédie-Française, in which the actors were recruited mostly from the Imperial's dramatic schools, and the few outsiders admitted to the company had to start at the lowest rank. There was no precedent for the invitation Maryna had received from the theatre's reform-minded new president, General Demichov, to come from Kraków to Warsaw for twelve guest-star performances; equally unheard of, and most galling to the other actors, was that the life contract Demichov then offered her included the right to choose her own roles. How well Maryna had understood the scowls and sulks of her new colleagues, before she compelled them to love her.
She
always felt green-eyed at the success of any putative rival. (An ignoble fantasy: Oh, if only Gabriela Ebert could see her now!) But American actors seemed astoundingly generous. (She would try to imitate these Americans and improve her character.) In America actors often spoke well of one another, seemed eager to admire.

It felt so natural to Maryna to be engulfed by admiration, as it did to have found the freedom to accept Ryszard's love. If there was a voice that said to her, Such an idyll cannot last, she could not hear it.

Ryszard heard it, conjured it up everywhere. He was leaden, reproachful: exactly what, a few days after they became lovers, he had promised Maryna he would not be. She had got
that
out of him by a chilling question. “Now that you have me”—they were lolling in bed late one morning—“what are you going to do with me?” But then, he thought, I would have said it anyway; I wanted her to think of me as light, light, light.

“What a question, my love! I'm going to look at you. As long as I can see you every day, I'll be happy.”

“Just look at me? When could you not do that?”

“Now”—he drew her against his body—“I can look at you … closer.”

But of course it wasn't as simple as this.

Ryszard thought he was a free spirit, unfettered by jealousy. How could he have known otherwise? Until now, the women he possessed he did not love and the woman he loved he did not possess. Now that he possessed her, or thought he did, he raged against all Maryna's admirers. And, of course, there were letters from Bogdan, and the occasional telegram, whose arrival Maryna made no attempt to hide, and that meant letters went from Maryna back to Bogdan. But Ryszard had no right to expect an account of this correspondence. At first he'd been grateful that Bogdan went unmentioned. It was as if the man had been magically banished from the universe. Now it felt as if Maryna were simply protecting Bogdan by never talking about him.

Everything spilled over in a tirade at the beginning of the second week, after her first Juliet.

“And that dullard, the Guatemalan consul who comes backstage every night, and he's not even Guatemalan, what's his name, Hangs—”

“Hanks,” said Maryna. “Leslie C. Hanks.”

“Hangs is better,” said Ryszard. “You were flirting with him.”

And perhaps she was. Every man seemed more attractive to her. Why couldn't Ryszard understand that
he
had made her more alive to the attentions of men; it was because she was with
him
—but no, he was simply jealous, more and more jealous. Bogdan had only been amused when other men flirted with her and she flirted back. He knew she meant nothing serious by it. He knew it was part of the normal giddiness and hypocrisy and insatiable craving to be loved to which every actress is prone. But then, she thought, Ryszard is a boy, Bogdan is a man.

And the next night, it was a stockbroker named John E. Daily, and the same scene all over again, with Ryszard storming about the parlor of Maryna's suite and on the verge of going back for the night to his own room on the second floor, when Maryna began laughing at him, just after Ryszard shouted, “I'm going to kill them both.”

But there was no need for such desperate measures, as a scarcely chastened Ryszard was soon to report. Several days later, out for a stroll on Market Street, thinking (as he assured Maryna) of nothing but his mouth between her thighs, Ryszard saw the stockbroker stride out of a building (it was, Ryszard learned, the office of his brokerage firm), red-faced, glowering, yelling over his shoulder at a man hurrying after him through the door, then turn up the street—he was coming toward Ryszard—whereupon his pursuer, whom Ryszard now recognized, the Guatemalan consul, pulled out a pistol and fired at Daily's back. The stockbroker continued on a few steps, coughed, plucked at his collar, and fell dead at Ryszard's feet.

“Maybe I would have shot Dearly, if he kept on sending all those little
billets-doux.
Anyway, Hangs got there first.”

“Ryszard, this isn't amusing.”

“The nuisance is,” he continued, “that now I can't stray too far from San Francisco. As a witness to the murder, I shall have to testify at the trial, which is unlikely to take place before November.”

“And has Mr. Hanks confessed the motive for the crime?”

“No. He refuses to say. Doesn't matter, he'll hang for it. Unless he says that he'd just discovered that Dearly was his wife's lover and had gone out of his mind with the shock. Apparently, they don't hang you in San Francisco for killing your wife's lover, as long as you do it as soon as you find out about him. The police assume it was some bad speculation in Nevada mining stocks that Dearly had talked him into—”

“While you suspect they were brawling over me.”

“Maryna, I didn't say that.”

“But it occurred to you.”

And so they were having their first quarrel, which ended handsomely that evening in bed. “I'm only jealous of everyone because I love you so much,” explained Ryszard witlessly.

“I know,” said Maryna. “But you still have to stop.” She was about to say, Bogdan wasn't jealous of
you
back in Poland, but realized that she didn't know if this was true.

At the close of Maryna's second week of San Francisco triumph, and two days before she went out on a three-week tour arranged by Warnock which would take her first to the phenomenally rich mining communities of western Nevada, Barton gave a farewell party. When asked to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and, looking into the blur of the candlelight, crooned, “To my new country!”

“Country,” muttered Miss Collingridge. “Not
coun-n-try.
”

Ryszard would be at her side, and Warnock, who had already gone ahead to make everything ready, and Miss Collingridge, who had happily agreed to take on the duties of Maryna's secretary but said that she hoped Madame would call her by her first name from now on.

“Of course, Miss Collingridge, if you really insist,” replied Maryna with a smiling shrug.

“Collingridge,” said Miss Collingridge. “As it is one word. Not—”

“I shall be delighted, dear friend,” said Maryna, “to address you as Mildred.”

It was three hundred miles to Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode, and the largest town between San Francisco and St. Louis. “But it's not a normal town,” Warnock had cautioned before his departure, “and the trip's quite an experience too.” Hairpin turns on the iron road banded to the face of the snowcapped granite wall, slim trestlework bridges strung over mile-deep canyons—the Central Pacific's fabled crossing of “the Big Hill,” as he told her the Sierras were jocularly called, might seem spectacular enough. But the best would come when they were almost there, after they had changed trains in Reno. The remaining distance to Virginia City, seventeen miles if you were a bird, fifty-two miles if a passenger in one of the lemon-colored Pullman coaches of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (another wildly profitable venture of the late Mr. Ralston), would take them along a track whose grade was steeper than steep, circling and recircling the treeless mountain to reach the fabled town near the peak. “But I know you have strong nerves, Madame Marina,” he concluded.

“I do.” She smiled. How Americans love their wonders. “Thanks to you, Mr. Warnock, I am prepared for everything.”

He guaranteed Maryna that she would forget the drama of the journey to Virginia City when she discovered the big-city scale of the town's most famous theatre and the luxury of its six-story International Hotel, which rivaled the Palace in San Francisco in plush and ormolu, gilt and crystal, marquetry and cloisonné, crystal goblets from Vienna and richly brocaded bellpulls from Florence, all in gallant defiance of the occasional reminder that the town sat squarely on top of the mines. “You know,” he said. “Doors that suddenly don't close, windows that you haven't tried to open which all of a sudden, well, shatter.” Ryszard looked at him with unconcealed dislike. “Prepared for everything,” Maryna repeated dreamily. “Subsidence,” Miss Collingridge said crisply. “Exactly,” Warnock said. “Now and then.”

She opened her week of performances in the tilted town with
Camille.

The manager in charge of the stage at Piper's Opera House told Maryna not to expect that his stock company could offer her a supporting cast as expert as the one at the California Theatre. “But they're good actors, mind you, and they've each got dozens of parts down line-perfect. The star can let us know at the last moment whether it's
Romeo and Juliet
or
The Octoroon
or
Richelieu
or
Our American Cousin
or
Camille,
whichever, and we're ready to play. And as I always tell my actors, the first rule is to give the star the center of the stage and keep out of his way. But if help is needed we can give that too. I remember the first time Booth came to do
Hamlet
here at Piper's. I guess he thought, this being a rough kind of town, maybe we weren't up to his standards. What seemed to worry him most was the fifth act, but I assured him that he'd have a practicable grave and whatever else he required, and we did a little better than that, we gave him something more lifelike, I'll wager, than he'd had in all his long career. I had a section sawed out of the stage floor, hired a couple of miners from the Ophir to do valiant pick-work, and that night the gravediggers shoveled some interesting specimens of ore onto the stage before handing up Yorick's skull, and when Booth cried out,
This is I, Hamlet the Dane!
and leaped into Ophelia's grave to tussle with Laertes, he had a surprise, you should have seen the look on his face, when he found himself landing almost five feet down and on bedrock.”