In America (41 page)

Instead, Maryna declared: “Gentlemen, you don't imagine me with a scrapbook, do you? I, who seldom read reviews and have never even thought of preserving what was written about me!”

She had won over the critics, including the redoubtable William Winter of the
Tribune,
the most powerful drama critic in the country. True, Winter could not resist mildly deploring Madame Zalenska's choice of opening vehicle. “Was it really necessary for this exquisite artist (and a countess, too, mind you!) to begin the conquest of our hearts by playing that dubious creature of frail lungs and even frailer virtue?” Of course Winter went on to forgive her. There had been not even a whisper of such censure in dear old San Francisco or blustery Virginia City, and Warnock had to explain to Maryna that the West was more broadminded (lax, some said), while eastern America (“Remember we're a whole continent and there are fifty million of us!”), especially the middle of the country, could get a “a bit” stirred up about the virtue of women depicted on the stage, meaning that Maryna should steel herself for “a fair amount” of sermonizing about the threat to public morals posed by Dumas's notorious and notoriously successful play.

Happily, not all the critics worried about whether their new idol had debased her art by playing a fallen woman. The influential Jeannette Gilder, of the
Herald,
who had become Maryna's special fan, was more interested in the courtesan's finery, an interest, observed Bogdan, one couldn't have inferred from Miss Gilder's own sartorial affectations, which included a high collar and cravat, a melon hat and man's coat. “The arms, which are bared by her gown, are encased in twelve-buttoned cream-colored kids below the elbow, and banded between that point and the shoulder with a velvet ribbon fastened with a jeweled pin,” Miss Gilder noted in her description of Marguerite Gautier's stunning first-act entrance. And wasn't it amusing, continued Bogdan, that the clothes Maryna wore in
Camille
were of all her costumes the most copied by the censorious and the fashionable?

It was Bogdan who first pointed out to her (
she
would be the last person to see it, Maryna said) that ladies in New York were beginning to imitate her manners and gestures and hair styles (as in Act One of
Camille,
where her hair was dressed high on the head with puffs and bands), and Zalenska hats had made their appearance in the smartest shops, and Zalenska gloves, and Zalenska brooches, and “Polish Water,” a new eau de cologne—the label showed an oval portrait of Maryna superimposed on a drawing-room scene with a young man at a piano who had Chopin's signature long hair and sensitive, consumptive face. Photographs of her in full
Camille
regalia were displayed in druggists' windows and for sale in cigar shops. The newspapers carried the daily news of Madame Zalenska's social engagements. Maryna still hadn't put back the weight she had lost, and if she were too wraithlike she would not look well in the much admired gown she wore in the first act of
Camille,
a composite evening crinoline of teal-blue silk with a green-black velvet train, cut to fit close to the body. But she was haunted by the photographs of the new reigning star in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt, she of the birdlike face and scrawny silhouette. Girding herself for future rivalry, Maryna vowed to remain underweight.

After the four weeks at the Fifth Avenue Theatre and a further week of work (taking in, letting out) on her stage wardrobe, which now filled two dozen trunks tended by a German seamstress, Maryna embarked on the conquest of America, appearing with stock companies all over the country except the Far West. In Philadelphia, the city's principal reviewer admired “the cross and tiara of diamonds worth forty thousand dollars” (as bruited by Warnock)—paste, of course—which she wore in Act Four of
Camille.
The mistake, Warnock's mistake, Maryna decided, had been to do only
Camille
for her week at the renowned Arch Street Theatre. Maryna was disappointed in Philadelphia. Baltimore and Washington, where she also offered
As You Like It
and
Romeo and Juliet,
were more appropriately beguiled. Then back up the coast by steamer to where, Warnock had told her, she would be playing—her Rosalind and Juliet only—to the most cultivated audience in the country, in one of its most venerable theatres. (“The Boston
Museum,
Mr. Warnock? Is that common in America, for a theatre to be called a museum?” “Just in Boston, dear lady.”) Her new friend William Winter, a militant New Yorker, was more skeptical about the vaunted capital of high-minded America. Even Boston, he reassured Maryna teasingly, could not challenge her with audiences such as filled the theatres of London in David Garrick's day, who knew their Shakespeare so well that an actor who garbled the text, mispronounced a word, or even misplaced an emphasis risked being hissed or noisily corrected by the pit and gallery. But, yes, he conceded, Boston was full of discriminating Shakespeareans. Maryna looked forward to the challenge with confidence. Since, lulled by praise (her vigilance notwithstanding), she was spending less time monitoring her English, the shock was all the greater the day after she opened at the Boston Museum in what she thought had been her most fluent Rosalind yet, when she read in the
Evening Transcript
that its eminent drama critic found her accent enchanting, especially in the romantic passages of
As You Like It,
but an impediment when it came to the demands of Shakespeare's badinage.

“It's true, isn't it?” she wailed at Miss Collingridge, whom she had instantly summoned to her suite at the Langham Hotel for a coaching session. “How long have I been slipping?”

“In Philadelphia you said
ozer
for other, and in Washington you said
loaf
for love and
strent
for strength, and in Baltimore you said
bret
for breath and
trone
for throne and
lar-r-r-k
for lark.

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.

That was the worst.”

“Dear Mildred, how do you put up with me?”

“Armong, I loaf you.”

“Stop it, Mildred. I have taken the point.”

If only Maryna's sole frustration were keeping her English fine-tuned enough to do justice to Shakespeare!

Toronto went better; Buffalo and Pittsburgh acknowledged themselves enchanted by this new, exotic ornament of the American stage; Cleveland and Columbus positively gleamed with approval. Since Maryna had made the mistake of telling Warnock that she never took more than two days to memorize a new role, it was just three days before they arrived in Cincinnati that he informed her that she was not only billed for
Adrienne
and
As You Like It
but, on the Saturday matinee, for
East Lynne,
too. Furious, Maryna reminded him that she'd said she would never stoop to
Beast Lynne,
as she called it—“I am an artist, Mr. Warnock,” she thundered, “not a merchant of tears!”—but there she was, in the second month of touring, having succumbed to Warnock's pleas, Warnock's insistence, playing it in Cincinnati and Louisville and Savannah and Augusta and Memphis and St. Louis. Warnock had been right of course when he assured her, “It's money in the bank”—“It's what?”—“I mean, audiences love it.” “Because they want to cry?” “Well, yes, people do like to cry in the theatre, almost as much as they like to laugh, and what's wrong with that, dear lady? But what they most like is watching great acting. And that's you!”

No exercise of histrionic prowess was more pleasing to audiences than that afforded by a plot requiring the main character to depart and then sneak back into the story, disguised for expediency or transformed by suffering, as somebody else, whose true identity, obvious enough to all who had paid to see the play, goes undetected by everyone on the stage. Such is the starring role in
East Lynne
—in effect, two roles. One is the weak-minded, gullible Lady Isabel, who deserts a loving husband and their children under the malign influence of a scheming rake. The other is the repentant sinner, prematurely aged by the agonies of contrition, who reenters her household as a bespectacled grey-haired governess, “Madame Vine,” to care for her own children. Her cry, after the littlest of the three, a mere babe at the time she had left, dies in her arms—
Oh, Willie, my child, dead, dead, dead! And he never knew me, never called me mother!
—unleashed in audiences an explosion of grief. And the tears gushed again when she, dying, throws off her incognito and begs her husband's forgiveness—
Let what I am be erased from your memory, think of me (if you can) as the innocent trusting girl whom you made your wife
—is forgiven, and implores him not to punish their two remaining children for her own dereliction—
Be kind and loving to Lucy and little Archie,
she whispers hoarsely.
Do not let their mother's sin be visited on them!

Never, never!
cried the actor who played Archibald in this particular stock company—America had dozens of Archibalds, but there would be only one Isabel, the best, the most awesomely sad, as Maryna learned to play her. He bowed his head. She saw dandruff on his collar. She was spinning in a drum of unslakable grief. What am I doing, Maryna wondered as, little by little, she gave herself to the indestructible excitements and brazen pathos of
East Lynne.

She was looking for a terrible tranquillity.

In Chicago, where she played at Hooley's Opera House for ten days, she was importuned with flowers and gifts and entreaties from the city's ever multiplying Polish settlement, the most numerous in America. On Sunday, following High Mass at St. Stanislaw's with Bogdan and an interminable luncheon given by Monsignor Klimowski, Maryna offered a program in the social hall adjoining the church (the proceeds to be distributed among needy parishioners) in which she recited poems of Mickiewicz, passages from Słowacki's
Mazepa,
and some of her famous moments from Shakespeare: Portia's mercy speech, Ophelia's mad scene, the Scottish lady's somnambulistic rave. It made her feel very carefree to be delivering Shakespeare wadded in Polish. Gruff shabby men and red-eyed women in kerchiefs came forward and kissed her hands.

So much journeying, to do the same thing in each new place, shrinks the world. A new town amounted to the size and appointments of her dressing room, the greater or lesser incompetence of the stock-company actors, the security of seeing Bogdan at his post (in the wings, as he preferred, or in a box, as Maryna often insisted, where she could see him better while on stage), and the warmth of his reassurance that all had gone well.

As a young actress in Heinrich's company, Maryna thought she had experienced the arduousness of touring to its fullest. But in America the need for respite was weakly acknowledged: Americans had invented the continuous tour, performance after performance, with only a day or two between one town and the next. Keeping to their compartment on the train, Maryna listened to the words of her roles in the clack of the wheels. Bogdan read. He would keep on reading when, after some desolate stop, they would be shunted to a siding to wait for an hour as more privileged trains hammered past them. Peter would gaze out the window, mumbling to himself, while Maryna stood and sat, sat and stood. She knew better than to interrupt him then, after having done it once.

“Twenty-eight what, my darling?”

“Mama, you're spoiling it!”

“For heaven's sake, Peter, spoiling what?”

“I was adding the numbers on the freight cars. There was a 1 and a 9 and an 8 and a 7 and a 3 and then you—”

“Sorry. Go back to your counting.”

“Mama!”

“Now what have I done?”

“I have to wait for another train.”

She often did not have a proper night's sleep, but her endurance was phenomenal. She could sleep whenever she wanted to and awaken refreshed after an hour.

Warnock waited for her to complain.

“I do not complain, as you see, Mr. Warnock,” Maryna said in the middle of the night, sipping tea at the end of their car somewhere in icy Wisconsin. She was going from two evenings at the Grand Opera House in Milwaukee to three at the Academy of Music in Kansas City. They had halted in a freight yard, and the train had been lurching forward and backward, screeching and shuddering, for more than an hour. “These ghastly all-night train trips. The dingy hotels where you have lately been lodging me and my family. The terrible actors I am obliged to play with. This is Marina Zalenska's first American tour, and I have much to learn. I say only, please listen to me, for I shall not repeat myself, it will not be like
this
again.”

Poland was circles—everything familiar, saturated, centrifugal. Here the country, ever more spacious and thinly marked, streamed and spiked in all directions. In constant movement from one unfamiliar place to the next, Maryna had never felt so concentrated, so sturdy, so impervious to her surroundings. Acting armored her with its urgencies, its satisfactions. Shakespeare's Juliet and Rosalind; Adrienne and Marguerite Gautier; even
East Lynne'
s wretched Lady Isabel—how comfortable she was in their company. Sometimes they entered her dreams, talking to one another. She wanted to console them. They succeeded in consoling her. It often seemed enough to have no thoughts but theirs.

Meanwhile, something was receding ever further from being spoken of. Something fitfully glimpsed was being covered over. She remembered when her hair fell out during the bout of typhoid fever three years ago, disclosing to her astonishment two dark pink stains on the back of her head, one below the crown and the other above the nape. Holding a hand mirror at the correct angle, she had stared with revulsion at the reflection of the birthmarks in the large dressing-room mirror behind her. But only her wig-maker and her dresser saw the back of her scalp, soon covered with a nap of obscuring first fuzz, and then the whole mass of hair grew back, and it was unlikely that she would ever be obliged to see her naked scalp again.