In America (43 page)

hope
that I love him. It would be so unfair if I didn't. I
do
love him. Ah. You are very severe with me, Henryk. But you are right of course. I told you, I'm a bad person. I don't love anybody. No, I don't feel crushed by other people's love. What an idea! But
you
shouldn't still care for me. You are too kind to me, Henryk. Much too kind.
Let
me weep. I spoil everything. I make no one happy. You are shaking your head. But I am inconsolable, Henryk. No, I am not acting. Shall I tell you what acting is, Tadeusz? Acting is
mis
representation. The art of the actor consists in exploiting an author's drama to show off his ability to allure and to counterfeit. An actor is like a forger. Bogdan, there's news. Tadeusz and Krystyna are going to marry. I don't mind when people behave predictably, do you? They were destined for each other. I trust the little fool isn't about to give up her career to be a wife. She's talented, more talented than Tadeusz. And I shall be the godmother of their first child. Oh Bogdan, it's so awful to be old. I
hate
becoming old. You say that because you're so kind, and you love me, but I know how I look. My beautiful Kraków. American cities are ugly beyond belief, Józefina. So ugly, so … disrespectful. But the land, the land, the mountains and deserts and prairies, and the wild rivers, are grander, more inspiring, and more disconcerting than in all our European fantasies of America. You cannot imagine how … heroic southern California is. I hope you will see it one day, Henryk. You breathe differently there. The ocean, the desert, in all their sublime neutrality, suggest quite another idea of how to live. You take deep breaths and you feel you can do anything you set your mind to. No, Mama, I'm not ill. I just need to be quiet for a day. Too many parties, and tears, and interviews. I'm told of imminent proposals for my return to the Polish stage which I won't be able to refuse, including the directorship of a theatre of my own. Bogdan, why don't I feel well here? Is it because I'm thinking of Stefan all the time? Now I remember why I wanted to leave Poland. It was because, because … no, I don't know why. Even now. All I know is that I feel so restless. A theatre of my own. A Polish theatre. What could I want more than that? I came back to preen and be admired, and make sure that I'm still loved and missed, and have everyone beg me to return, and it gives me no pleasure at all, none. Barbara, I can't remember your looking so contented, my dear. Do you think sometimes of our Arden? What an enchanting dream it was. And what stalwarts we were! I am very proud of us. Aleksander, we're buying land in Santiago Canyon. The Hunnecott ranch. You remember. We must all meet there a summer from now, after the house is finished. Bogdan wants to have livestock but we shall have proper help, you won't be asked to feed the horses or milk the goats, I promise! It will be wonderful. You two and Danuta and Cyprian and their girls and … Oh, don't remind me. I can't stop thinking about it. And there was no one to stop her! It's horrible. Horrible. Of course we would invite Julian. But I know he wouldn't come. And Jakub from New York. Ryszard? That goes without saying, doesn't it, Bogdan? Is he still in the same lodgings in Warsaw? Geneva? Since when? Why Geneva? No, we've not had news from him recently. And you'll come too, Henryk. Not to California, that's not for you. This year I'm going to have my own company and a much longer national tour. In America, a leading actor is “managed,” like a business, and the manager comes along on the tour. And you'll travel with us as the company physician. There's always someone falling ill. Oh, it's such a lovely thought. Do consider it, Henryk. Perhaps I'll invite Józefina to come, too. My sister is a remarkable woman, don't you agree, Henryk? Nostalgia, Aleksander? For Poland? Spruce-lined Tatras trails, the chestnut alleys of Kraków, that sort of thing? Oh. For my old life. I think that's not what I feel. No, Henryk, nothing will make me nostalgic. I have set my heart against the past. America is good for that. America, America! you retort—by the way, I prefer this tone. If you suspect that I find in my new country whatever I
want
to find there, you are right, Henryk. America is good for that as well. And you baked these kaiser rolls all by yourself, Peter darling? They're exquisite. Bogdan, I learned something very interesting the other day. According to Henryk, until not so long ago nostalgia was regarded as a serious, sometimes fatal, illness. Autumn was thought to be the most dangerous time, and soldiering a particularly vulnerable profession. Virtually anything, a love letter, a picture, a song, a spoonful of the tasty gruel of one's childhood, a few syllables in the accent of one's native region overheard on the street, could induce the onset of the disease. The case histories he's read have all appeared in French medical journals, but it seems unlikely that only the French were capable of dying of their attachment to the past. Poles, we agreed, must have been even more susceptible to this illness, just as Americans have turned out to excel at freeing themselves from the past. Yes, it's delicious, Mama. No, Mama, I don't want a pork cutlet or cauliflower topped with breadcrumbs and butter. (My God!) Mama, I'm
not
too thin. The most admired actress in Europe today, the queen of the French stage, weighs no more than … oh, never mind! Mama, have you any idea, any idea at
all,
who I am? The very question, Bogdan, I asked him. Presumably, the decline of this illness is one of the many benefits of the progress of civilization: of the steam engine, the telegraph, and regular mail. But you know Henryk—optimism being foreign to his nature, and also being unable ever to forgo the barbed observation—he says
he
thinks the decline of this sentiment in its lethal form merely portends the rise of a new illness, the inability to become attached to anything. Of course I think of Ryszard sometimes, Henryk. Doctor. Can you prescribe something to kill the pain? Or is it the numbness? I wasn't just being selfish. I panicked. He took my breath away. I felt too divided. Bogdan, Henryk said to me yesterday, you know how acerbic he can be, Poland loves you. Poland needs you. But you don't need Poland anymore. What can I say to him? Henryk, there are two kinds of people. Those, like you, dear friend, who only feel well where everything is understandable, familiar. And those, the race to which I belong, who feel trapped, dull, irritable when they're at home. Which doesn't preclude my being fervently patriotic. What I most admire about Józefina, Henryk, is that she is largehearted. Oh Bogdan, how could Ignacy be so intransigent! It must be awful for you. We deserve a bit of holiday now. I'm glad we made the effort and accompanied Henryk back to Zakopane. Should a pair of seasoned southern Californians have flinched at a two-day wagon trip? Should we not rejoice in the progress that has come to the village, starting with Henryk's new, splendidly equipped dispensary? It's still our rough, pungent, deliciously isolated Zakopane, and we've feasted, what feasts, and walked, what walks, climbing farther than we meant to for a familiar panorama, and the highlanders have been so welcoming. I know you thought we were staying until Sunday. But we shall just make Henryk more unhappy. He'll miss us even more if we stay longer. Józefina's brow, her hair. Don't you think she's lovely, Henryk? You're blind, my friend. Where are we? We're in Zakopane. But I didn't want to come to Zakopane. We're in Kraków. But I don't want to stay in Kraków. Peter, embrace your grandmother and your aunts and your uncles and your cousins. Of course you can say good-bye to Mr. Gliński! Bogdan, Bogdan darling, I know you'll think me unpardonably capricious, but I don't want to stay as long as we planned. Let's leave for Paris now. I need clothes, yes, days and days of fittings. And every night we'll go to the theatre.
She
may be playing at the Comédie-Française. I know I'm going to hate her
and
fall in love with her. I already have a pang when I think of the sonorous vowels of Racine as she must launch them, and the majestic periods. Perhaps I wouldn't enjoy seeing her
Adrienne Lecouvreur
or her
Dame aux camélias,
but her
Hernani
and her
Phèdre
—more than anything in the world. As long as she doesn't know I'm in the audience. Mama, certainly I'll be back next summer. And you and Józefina shall come live with us in America, when Bogdan and I have our ranch. You, too old? Don't be ridiculous, Mama. Oh Poland. Don't be a lost love. Be my strength, be my pride, my shield that I carry out into the world. Oh Ryszard, your hands, your mouth,
ton sexe.
Bogdan, is everything still all right? For me, yes. I'm resigned
and
triumphant, Henryk. Who would have thought it would be like this?

*   *   *

THEY LEFT POLAND
in late July; journeyed to Paris, where Maryna spent three weeks creating a dozen new wardrobes, sitting for her portrait, going to the theatre (she did see Sarah Bernhardt as Doña Sol in Victor Hugo's
Hernani,
and went backstage afterward to offer gracious homage to her magnificent rival), visiting the galleries and the Exposition Universelle; and sailed from Cherbourg on August 20th, arriving a week later, in time for the last month of New York's malodorous summer. They stayed again in the theatre district, off Union Square: the suite at the Clarendon Hotel filled with flowers, which quickly rotted in the lancing, muzzy heat. Maryna had found
her
hotel, where she would always stay when performing in New York; and she would accumulate, on this second national tour, other inflexible inclinations. Those who are professionally itinerant want to be greeted and fussed over reliably, familiarly, at the longer pauses on their circuits. Settling into the same room in the usual hotel, taking every supper at the same restaurant—the pleasure lies in having as little as possible to decide.

Maryna had been so happy to return to America, and then unable to repress a flare of disappointment (she felt let down by her imagination) as soon as they docked. But whether it was frustration at never being truly understood, or impatience with everyone for being so picturesquely, amusingly, earnestly, complacently American (had she imagined them otherwise?), disappointment, and frustration, and impatience were all quelled once she started auditioning actors for her company. To feel well, steady, it was enough to enter a theatre each morning and take command, the theatre where she would start playing in early October for six weeks. Emerging in the early afternoon, she felt weakened by the sunlight and the heat and the bumptious, adamant crowds. She had to remind herself that this was not America but only New York, so self-important and so sweaty, so narrow and so filled up. Home—the part of her new country Maryna could imagine claiming as home—was not New York, where the immigrant's America begins, but where America runs into the next ocean and ends. Bogdan needed California, the ending, the last beginning, and so did she.

For her second New York season at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Maryna repeated, to even greater acclaim, her Adrienne and Marguerite Gautier and Juliet, and in the last two weeks forged a new triumph in the title role of
Frou-Frou,
another much loved French play about the wages of adultery. The story? Ah, the story! Vivacious, immature Gilberte de Sartorys, whose nickname is Frou-Frou, has introduced into her household her self-effacing unmarried sister, Louise, a paragon of female virtue, who inevitably comes to replace the spoiled child-wife in the affections of her little son and her husband, whereupon, imagining herself betrayed by her sister, Frou-Frou runs off with the caddish former suitor who had never stopped pursuing her, only to return several years later, penitent and mortally enfeebled, and be forgiven by her husband and permitted to embrace their child before she dies.

“I think it not quite as treacly as
East Lynne,
” said Maryna. “Yes? No?”

“
East Lynne
is English,
Frou-Frou
is French,” said Bogdan. “American audiences weep most liberally over the fate of disgraced women who are foreign.”

“
And
rich.
And
titled,” observed Miss Collingridge.

“Bogdan, tell me it's not as bad.”

“How can I? Look at how they both end, with you laid out and readying to expire in the nobly proportioned drawing room of the home you had foolishly, criminally abandoned. In
East Lynne
your last words are, and don't we all know them by heart,
Ah, is this death? 'Tis hard to part! Farewell, dear Archibald! my husband once, and loved now in death, as I never loved before! Farewell, until eternity! Think of me sometimes, keep one little corner in your heart for me—your poor—erring—lost Isabel!
Curtain.”

“Mildewed, I expect,” said Maryna. She was laughing.

“Ah, is this death?”
said Peter.

“You're not to interrupt, you,” said Maryna, pulling him into a hug.

“Think of me sometimes, keep one little corner in your heart for me,”
said Miss Collingridge.

“You too!” exclaimed Maryna.

“Whereas,” continued Bogdan, “whereas in
Frou-Frou
you say instead—though you can use the same sofa, covered with another fabric—
Ah, at this time to die is very hard. Nay, do not grieve for me.
This to your woeful husband, sister, and father, all instructed to be sobbing into their handkerchiefs so the audience can better fix its attention on you.
What had I to expect but to die deserted by all, despairing and abandoned? In place of that, surrounded by those I love, I die peacefully—happy—no suffering—all calm, quiet
—”

“Spare me!” Maryna cried.

“And there is soft music and loud grief to escort you to your last words,
You all forgive—do you not?—Frou-Frou—poor Frou-Frou!
Curtain. Now, tell me, is this not the same play?”