In America (45 page)

Another boon conferred by the snug duality of marriage: since Bogdan had taken up the indignation and dismay she was feeling, Maryna was free to lay claim to another, more indulgent response. Now it was her turn to say, “But what do you expect, dearest? This is America. They need to be sure they're being entertained. But the rude mechanicals enjoy what I offer them, too.”

In Ming's Opera House in Helena, Montana, a Mrs. Aubertine Woodward De Kay played in Maryna's honor Chopin's Mazurka Op. 7, No. 1 and the A-flat major Polonaise before the curtain was allowed to go up on Zalenska and Company's
Camille,
and afterward offered a banquet for the whole company at the De Kay mansion. It was so naïve, so well-intended. My European fastidiousness is crumbling, Maryna thought. I am happy to please.

Her repertory now included three more of the Shakespeare roles she had done in Poland: Viola in
Twelfth Night
and Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
(she loved these tales of mismatched or dueling couples where everything comes right in the end!), and Hermione in
The Winter's Tale,
in which Peter could play the tiny role of Hermione's ill-fated son, Mamillius. Though she knew Peter should be in boarding school, she could not bear to part with him yet. And she'd had to let Bogdan go.

“I envy you. I wouldn't know how to lead two lives,” Maryna said, without looking at Bogdan's eyes. “I've paid too much just to lead this one.”

“I won't go,” he said.

“No, I want you to go. I'll hardly lack for employment while you're gone.”

She felt heroic. It surprised her that some people thought her melancholiac. “You seemed a little sad when I came in,” ventured the motherly reporter from the
Memphis Daily Avalanche.

“What Polish face is without a touch of sadness?” Maryna replied. “But I am only a sad person when I am without my husband. We are together all the time, but lately he was obliged to go to California for a few months on business, and I miss him all the time.”

*   *   *

THE DATE
of the telegram was 23 February 1879:

VON ROEBLING AGREES TO OBSERVING FLIGHT STOP AM NOT SEEKING PERMISSION TO GO UP

What was Bogdan doing? She hoped he would not alarm her, she'd not asked him to reassure her.

The next telegram came eight days later:

TIME ALOFT TEN MINUTES STOP INCOMPARABLE SPECTACLE

Spectacle from the ground? Spectacle from the air? But how could she believe anything Bogdan said? She would have worried even more if there had not been six one-night stands in Missouri and five in Kentucky. Her repertory now stood at nine plays—five of them by Shakespeare—which she had played at thirty-four theatres in the last two months alone. She decided to add
Cymbeline
as they reached Nebraska on the swing back across the Midwest.
Cymbeline,
she discovered, was one of the Bard's most popular plays in America. Audiences loved the stream of reconciliations at the end that washes over both the malign, would-be seducer of the virtuous Imogen and her choleric, easily duped husband.

Husbands are always right. A guilty wife must die. If really unfaithful, then really die. If suspected wrongfully of being unfaithful, then pretend to die—and wait, as long as it takes, for the foolishly enraged man to see reason and forgive her.

Of course it wasn't true anymore. These were modern times. A husband is not always right. But a woman is still expected to declare her poignant dependence on her husband.

Bogdan! Husband! Lie with me. Hold me. Warm me. I miss riding into sleep with you.

Another telegram, dated 17 March 1879:

MARYNA MARYNA MARYNA STOP EVERYTHING IS WHOLE STOP THERE IS WATER EVERYWHERE

Then silence. Had he gone mad? Would he disappear forever?

But of course I can live without him. As long as I keep on touring. These tours keep me in balance. Movement and excitement and the awareness of obligation drive away the bad thoughts, silence the foolish inclinations.

Husband! Friend! Do what you have to do. But don't torment me. I am not that strong. Yet.

*   *   *

“
EACH CRAFT
is constructed according to a different principle,” Bogdan reported when he returned. “This one was called
Aero Heart. Aero Corazón.
Sometimes just
Corazón.
”

“Was? Then it crashed.”

“Maryna, you haven't understood. It did go up. Almost straight up, the distinctive feature of this aero being that it has no wings. Straight up, without any outward skimming, to a hundred feet or so. There it hovered for ten astonishing, sublime minutes!”

“Tell me more,” she said.

“Ah, Maryna. I feel very foolish. What am I doing to us? I'm possessed.”

“No, you're not. You're telling me a story.”

“I don't tell stories!”

“Yes, you do.” She laughed softly.

“What do you want to know?”

“What it looks like.”

“Like a giant bell, with the cabin completely enclosed and a huge, broad screw propeller sticking up from the roof that, when set in motion, is like a spinning top. I told you it has no wings, didn't I? Yes, of course I did. The lift-power is supplied by something the inventors call Air Squeezers, a tube through which compressed air is ejected below the craft. Squeezers and propeller send the craft straight up to a predetermined height, after which it stops, then flies horizontally—that part didn't work this time—in the direction in which it's pointed. Up to eighty miles an hour, Juan María and José claim.”

“I thought the inventors were all Germans.”

“Almost all.”

“And they survived, unscathed, your Mexican friends, when the aero fell. You'd have told me if they were killed or…”

“Yes,
Corazón
is superbly prepared for catastrophe. A balloon three times its size, called a compensator, inflates rapidly to retard too sudden a descent, and elastic legs shoot out beneath the craft to break the fall on alighting.”

“But you didn't go up with them?”

“Maryna, I told you I wouldn't.”

“And so you didn't.”

“I was on the verge of asking to be taken along. But I was afraid of being unable to master my fear. I knew, they knew, the landing would be subdued, disillusioning, not fatal. Still, there's no certainty. That's what an adventure is, isn't it? It's got flowers in its hair but it has no face”—“What, Bogdan?”—“Oh, and Dreyfus
is
interested. And I think I can get von Roebling to meet with him. And then I'll have accomplished my mission. Maryna, Maryna, please don't shake your head like that!”

*   *   *

LEAVE AMERICA
? Because—most American of reasons—it was “time to move on”? Warnock didn't understand. “But you've just begun in America. You can make a fortune here. Everyone loves you.”

But how could a man like Warnock understand the lure of London for a true worshipper of Shakespeare? To be an actress in England, not just in English! In England she would bloom and surge beyond everything achieved on this second, even more successful American tour.

“No, you won't,” said Warnock.

With the baffled, angry Warnock continuing to predict that her London venture would be a failure, Maryna put herself in the hands of Edward Dudley Brownlow, the English impresario. On May 1, 1879, she made her London debut with
Camille,
although not under that title, because
Camille
—as
La Dame aux camélias
was known, nonsensically, in English—lay under a ban from the Lord Chamberlain. Having always revered England as not only the land of Shakespeare but the birthplace of every civic freedom, Maryna was astonished to learn of the existence of a government censor in London. Just like Warsaw. No, not like Warsaw, if English censorship was so puny it could be thwarted by changing a play's title. And Maryna rather liked
Heartsease,
the new title, which seemed agreeably, meaninglessly conciliatory, and was disappointed to learn from Brownlow that heartsease was merely the name of another flower. She felt demoted, like the pure-hearted courtesan's signature flower. Surely this Lord Chamberlain could not oblige “the lady with the camellias” to die in the fifth act on a bed strewn with … pansies!

She'd chosen
Camille
over a play of Shakespeare for the same reason she started in America with
Adrienne Lecouvreur:
her accent would matter less in a French play. The new mask through which she had learned to produce the sounds of English in America, with its jaw a little slack, had, with Miss Collingridge's help, to be tightened for London. Syllable breaks were reexamined and became crisper, consonants produced from the back of the mouth were moved forward, and the lips made thinner. “Snobs that they are, the English enjoy finding fault with our American accents,” Miss Collingridge observed. “They particularly object to what they describe as the drawling intonation of American actors.” “Drawl!” exclaimed Maryna. “Since when do I drawl?” Maryna could not admit to herself that she found the English intimidating. She had got used to the loose-mouthed American conversational attack—its garrulousness, its insistence on familiarity. In America, no one was interested in the tragic fate of her homeland, but she was made to feel welcome all the same. Here, both journalists with soiled collars and her titled dinner partners assumed she would want to bore them about Poland, while she was hoping to make English conversation. About the theatrical season in London. About Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone. About the weather.

Maryna had anticipated that the English were not to be conquered as swiftly as the Americans. She had not supposed that they weren't to be conquered at all, except conditionally. Her wager to herself was that if no more than half the reviews in the London newspapers mentioned her “enchanting” or “charming” accent, she would succeed in transferring her career, triumph and all, to England. All the reviews were flattering. Every critic mentioned the accent.

She was praised, but not embraced. Unlike Americans, the English didn't know what to do with questing foreigners. (Allowing them to become English was not an option.) And she, Marina Zalenska, was doubly a foreigner: a Pole from America.

At the end of May, when her run at the Court Theatre (
Heartsease, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It
) had finished, she went with Bogdan and Miss Collingridge to see, possibly admire, the celebrated romantic pair of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, at Irving's theatre, the Lyceum. Ready to incline her head to these new gods of the English stage, Maryna was almost disappointed, so she told Bogdan, to discover that she was as good as the Terry she studied closely that evening in the title role of Bulwer-Lytton's fusty, ever popular
The Lady of Lyons;
and as for the great Henry Irving, in the role of the lowborn hero, he seemed to her, with his dragging walk and weak guttural voice, altogether inferior in grace and distinction of speech to Edwin Booth.

At least Maryna had the satisfaction of knowing that, were she not barred from a career in England because she had committed herself body and soul to performing in English, she could have stood her own against Terry. But she couldn't compete with Sarah Bernhardt, who was about to arrive and would play at the Gaiety in French.

The day that Bernhardt and the Comédie-Française opened to worshipful acclaim in her
Phèdre,
Maryna went out on summer tour of the English provinces. There she offered her Rosalind and her Juliet, and also her Ophelia and Viola, which Brownlow was eager to present in another London season in the fall; but Maryna had no desire to stay on, campaigning for a more clinging approval. Perhaps, Maryna wondered gloomily, she had used up the allotted number of impossible feats her will could make possible. Even if that were so, there still remained the nearly impossible. The merely very difficult.

It had taken this sojourn in England to understand how much easier it was (
hadn't
it been easy?) to prevail in America: a whole country of people who believe in the will.

At a dinner party given in her honor by Lady Wolsington, Maryna had been seated next to the formidable American novelist and theatre critic Henry James, recently settled in London, and Mr. James had wondered if she might care to join him the following Tuesday for tea at the Café Royal, where he told her with circuitous bluntness that he hoped she'd not find him in the least predatory if … he hesitated, stroking his beautifully trimmed silky beard; he had already hesitated several times since they sat down at the marble-top table. “If what, dear Mr. James?” “If I confess to being what I can only describe as very interested, if not actually fascinated, both as a novelist and, I shall take the liberty of confiding in you one of my fonder hopes, a future playwright, fascinated, I say, in the actress as a contemporary
type.
I speak not of the actress as someone capable of an uncommon expressiveness, that expressiveness being to some extent conjoined with a flair for taking risks, necessary as such assets, expressiveness, audacity, are to her art, but the actress, the contemporary actress, as the most brilliant embodiment of feminine
success.
” Mr. James spoke with decided emphases, sometimes at the beginning, usually at the close of his often meandering sentences.

“It doesn't feel as if I have been altogether a success in London,” said Maryna. “At least not as much as I'd hoped, though I am most grateful for your friendly article.”

“Ah, you must give the English a chance, dear Madame Zalenska. I'm afraid you may have been spoiled by our Yankee forthrightness. For all the want of
spread
in these compact isles there is much more
surface
here, one thing is said while another is meant, they are cautious, they can be suspicious, they are not keen on making a great effort, they would rather be thought a bit slow than too clever, they, how can I put it,
withhold.
But I predict they will come round.”