In America (44 page)

“It is the same play.”

“But why does Frou-Frou have to die?” said Peter. “She could jump up and say, I changed my mind.”

“
That
would make a difference,” said Maryna, kissing his hair.

“Then she could go out to California and go up in an airship and say, Try to catch me if you can.”

“I like this end much better,” Miss Collingridge said.

“So do I,” said Maryna. “Yes, I am becoming quite American. I would much prefer to have a happy ending.”

*   *   *

“
IMPOSSIBLE
,” said Bogdan. The schedule was impossible. “You'll kill yourself.”

On her first tour Maryna had been limited to playing in theatres that had resident companies, of which there were many fewer than a decade ago. With her own company, thirteen women and twelve men, she could perform wherever there was a theatre, and every town in America had a theatre, many of them called opera houses to make them sound more respectable, though no opera was ever performed there.

In New York State alone, Warnock had booked her for one or two performances in Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Hudson, Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Elmira, Troy, Ithaca, Rochester, and Buffalo.

After the week in Boston, this time at the Globe Theatre, came a string of nights in Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, Fall River, Holyoke, Brockton, Worcester, Northampton, and Springfield.

In Pennsylvania, between the week in Philadelphia and the four days in Pittsburgh, single performances in Bradford, Warren, Scranton, Erie, Wilkes-Barre, Easton, Oil City—“Oil City. An unusual name for a town in the eastern part of America, if I am not mistaken,” murmured Bogdan.

In Ohio …

“Kalamazoo,” said Peter. “It must be an Indian name.”

“My stepson is reminding me,” Bogdan continued, “that in Michigan
all
Madame's engagements are for a single night. Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Battle Creek, Ann Arbor, Bay City, Detroit. Eight cities in ten days.”

“Chief Saginaw and his wife Detroit are camping by the Bay City under the Ann Arbor after the Battle Creek before they go on a raft down the Grand Rapids and return to Kalamazooooooo,” said Peter.

“You left out Muskegon,” said Miss Collingridge.

“But they won't forget to take their little son, named Muskegon.”

“Perfect,” said Miss Collingridge.

“Rushing around the country”—Bogdan refolded the map—“and for weeks at a time sleeping, if at all, in a different, uncomfortable hotel room every night? Do you want to kill your star, Mr. Warnock? These single evening engagements that follow mercilessly one after another will have to be dropped from the schedule.”

“My dear sir, you must be joking. One-night stands bring in the biggest profit of the tour.”

Maryna professed herself above the battle and ready for any exertion; Bogdan remained indignant; Warnock was frantic. He saw the whole tour collapsing unless …

Warnock's solution, Bogdan had to admit, was clever.

“Our own private railroad car? Is that common in America?” asked Maryna.

Not at all. Hers would be the very first company to travel the theatrical circuit by a means hitherto reserved for railroad magnates and slain presidents. Maryna liked being part of the wave of the future. Warnock liked the attention from the press which the car would command. In each town they visited, reporters were invited aboard to marvel at the double-height clerestory roof, watery legends on the frescoed ceiling (Moses in the bulrushes, Narcissus at his looking-glass pond, King Arthur on his funeral barge), carved black-walnut interiors, velvet window hangings, silver-plated gas lamps and hardware, Persian carpet and upright piano in Madame's saloon, zebra carpet and gilt-framed cheval glass and full-length portrait of the great actress on horseback in Western garb in her bedroom. Besides a large suite with its own dressing room and lavatory for Madame and her husband, there was a cozy office and adjoining bedroom for Madame's manager, bedrooms for Madame's son and Madame's secretary, and two tiers of comfortable sleeping berths for the actors and Madame's personal maid and the wardrobe mistress: “the sleeping arrangements of the ladies and gentlemen being separated at night by a screen in the middle of the car,” which folded back during the day to leave the floor clear for setting out the fauteuils and dining furniture; at the far end of the car were three washrooms, a galley kitchen, and clothes and bedding closets. Warnock let it be known that the interior redesign and outfitting of the seventy-foot-long former Wagner Sleeper had cost nine thousand dollars. On the exterior, painted a deep burgundy, oval panels on both sides announced in curly gold script:
ZALENSKA AND COMPANY, HARRY H. WARNOCK, MANAGER.
His middle name, he liked to mention, was Hannibal. The car's name, its new name, was
Poland.

The acquisition of a private car and their own baggage wagon, with quarters for their skillful colored crew (cook, two waiters, and porter) and ingeniously sectioned storage space for the costumes and backdrops, made it possible for Warnock to add even more one-night stands.

No more packing and unpacking! They slept and ate on the train for weeks at a time, when every day or every other day there was a new town, a new theatre.

Upon arriving, Maryna and Warnock would go directly to the theatre, where Bogdan and the rest of the company would soon join them—Warnock to check on the box-office receipts and confer with scenery hands about any technical problems that could arise with their backdrops should the flies be too low or the wing space less than the requisite half of the proscenium opening, Maryna to take possession of the star's dressing room and post the itinerary next to the mirror so she would remember the name of the town, the theatre, the manager in charge of the stage. In the afternoon a brief rehearsal might need to be organized if tonight's play had not been done for a week or more, and time had to be set aside for polite exchanges with a delegation of local drama lovers, a poet with a flowing necktie, a stagestruck young lady and her mama, the editor of the town's newspaper, and the president of the local chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Then back to her dressing room to put on her makeup and don her costume, get on stage to do her performance, receive the local eminences in the greenroom, cull a few flowers from the many bouquets, and be at the railway station by midnight, where
Poland
and its baggage car would be hitched to the rear of whatever train was going to the town where they had their next engagement.

The economics of making an acting life entirely out of touring, without a home theatre where plays were rehearsed and maintained, meant that Maryna would never be able to deploy a large repertory in English. (At the Imperial Theatre she had played fifty-six roles!) Still, with six fully rehearsed plays, Zalenska and Company already offered more than did most of the leading actors in America crossing and recrossing the country. Indeed, some actors chose year after year to tour only their most popular role, becoming ever less ambitious for themselves and more contemptuous of their public. But an actor always, and rightly, mistrusts the public. (If audiences knew that the actors are judging
them!
) Giddy with fatigue and relief that the night's exertions are over, the actors peering into their dressing-room mirrors while slathering on cold cream to remove their makeup are also issuing verdicts on tonight's “house.” Attentive? Stupid? Dead? Nothing to be done with stupidity, but Maryna had her ploys to dominate, correct, wake up a dead house—such as moving closer to the edge of the apron, looking out into the audience, turning up both volume and vibrato—or to silence a coughing one. Coughing tells you the audience wishes it were elsewhere. (In a recital, nobody coughs in the first ten minutes or during the encores.)

The theatres were not always full. The reasons could be bad weather, poor advertising, greedy theatre managers who had made the tickets too expensive, or organized outrage over plays judged to be offensively foreign or too associated with New York. “Let New York have its bedroom tragedies. Ohio will keep its mind on higher things,” ended a letter to the newspaper in Lima urging a boycott of Zalenska and Company at the Faurot Theatre in
Camille.
It was signed: An American Mother. The reviewer in Terre Haute evoked Maryna's “womanly grace” in the role of Marguerite Gautier only to reproach her for “thereby making a career of sin seem tenderly appealing.”

Maryna having flatly refused to program some additional, propitiatory performances of
East Lynne
in Ohio and Indiana, Warnock, hoping to distract the public, announced that Madame Zalenska had lost Marguerite Gautier's “cross and tiara of diamonds worth forty thousand dollars”: although he had instantly cabled the finest jeweler in Paris, and the courier toting an even more costly diamond cross and tiara had already boarded the next steamship at Cherbourg, until the treasure reached Indiana he, Harry H. Warnock, could not answer for his star's mood. Maryna protested that he had made her look ridiculous. Not at all, explained Warnock, the American public expects a famous actress to be parted from her jewels at least once a year.

“Only her paste jewels? Or her real jewels as well?”

“Madame Marina”—he snorted with impatience—“a star is always careless with her valuables.”

“Who has told you such nonsense, Mr. Warnock?”

“It was proven twenty years ago by Barnum—”

“But of course.” Maryna sighed histrionically. “I have heard of this Barnum.”

“—when he brought over Jenny Lind. The Swedish Nightingale, as P.T. dubbed her, and that was pure genius, lost all her jewels three times during her tour.”

And Warnock was right. After he divulged the story about the jewels, the houses for
Camille
were always full.

Also to be endured: following seven curtain calls for a fast-paced
Camille
at the Academy of Music in Fort Wayne, the obese man, yellowing wig askew, pushing his way through the throng of present-bearing admirers in the greenroom (who had already pressed on her a bronze statuette of Hiawatha, the collected speeches of Ulysses S. Grant, and a music box, set on a nearby table and repeatedly wound up to unwind “Carnival in Venice”)—
he
insisted on Maryna's accepting the gift of his own, dearest, fat, snuffling, champagne-colored English pug. “It ain't the jewels, Madame Zee, but I'll bet she keeps you happy for a while.”

“I shall call her Ug,” said Maryna, all smiles. She was tired, even peevish, that night.

“I beg your p?” said the fan.

Unexpectedly, Maryna, who was only fond of large dogs, and dogs without faulty breathing systems, had to promise Warnock she would not give Ug away. Another of Warnock's dicta: “All famous actresses have small dogs as pets”—and on this one he was unyielding. But Miss Collingridge, who would have charge of the beast, was allowed to rename her Indiana.

In Jacksonville, Maryna was presented with a pair of lime-green baby alligators.

“You don't have to keep these,” said Warnock. Miss Collingridge had already found a larger cage for them, and was daintily emptying jars of insects and snails and some bleeding morsels of raw beef into their open jaws.

“Ah, but I will,” said Maryna. “I've already bestowed Polish names on them. That one is Kasia. And her mate is Klemens. Miss Collingridge assures me that they are pleasant creatures, whose little white teeth are not yet sharp enough to do much harm.”

“You are making fun of me, Madame Marina.”

“How can you imagine such a thing? Have you not heard that Sarah Bernhardt has a pet lion cub, a cheetah, a parrot, and a monkey?”

“Sarah Bernhardt is a French actress, Madame Marina. You are an American actress.”

“True, Mr. Warnock. Or should I say, True enough. Nevertheless, were I not condemned to live out my days in a railroad car, I would already have acquired a—”

“Right,” said Warnock. “Keep the alligators.”

When Warnock had her sit for a photograph with Kasia and Klemens, announcing to reporters that the alligators had been given to Madame Zalenska in New Orleans, Maryna, no amateur herself when it came to the enhancing falsehood, was curious to know why.

“Because New Orleans sounds better than Jacksonville.”

“Better? In what sense better, Mr. Warnock?”

“More romantic. More foreign.”

“And that is a good thing in America? Be patient with me. I am just trying to understand.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

“But of course. Then do announce they were foisted on me in New Orleans by a ninety-four-year-old Creole soothsayer to ward off the evil spell she saw hanging over my head. And that, although I laughed at the old crone's prophecy, after a chunk of lead pipe dropped from the flies missing me by only an inch during the ovation for a
Romeo and Juliet
in Nashville, I have come to feel safer with these baleful creatures in my boudoir than without them.”

“Now you're on board!” said Warnock. “I see, dear lady, you have understood … everything.”

“Mr. Warnock, I have always understood. I have not agreed. That is all.”

Before her
As You Like It
at the Schultz Opera House in Zanesville, Ohio, the audience was treated to a lecture by a Professor Steele Craven on “Shakespeare and the Comic Spirit.” At Doheny's Opera House in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a program of variety acts (a ventriloquist, a unicyclist, dancing dogs) preceded her
Juliet
on the twenty-foot-wide apron stage. At Chatterton's Opera House in Springfield, Illinois, first came a minstrel show's twenty-minute
Eliza Escaping Across the Ice,
then
Frou-Frou.
In Owen's Academy of Music, in Charleston, South Carolina,
Adrienne
followed “A Medley of Short Pieces by Bellini, Meyerbeer, and Wagner.” At Pillot's Opera House in Houston, the audience was prepared for
East Lynne
by a monologue entertainer, Thaddeus—“but I answer to Tadpole”—Murch. From the wings, Maryna heard him going on … and on: “Tadpole because I was very little when I was small. Murch because my daddy was Murch. Doodleball Murch. Now he was called Doodleball because—” Bogdan exploded. Either Warnock made sure that nothing, nothing was ever programmed before Zalenska and Company, or Madame would cancel the rest of the tour.