The Fourth Wall (27 page)

A full-scale search was quickly mounted, and it was only a matter of minutes until Leo was found. He was lying in a stairwell leading down to the storage area under the stage. His right hand had been hacked off, and a bloody-bladed fire ax was lying on the step beside him. The hand itself was nowhere to be found. And get this: a tourniquet had been tied around Leo's arm to keep him from bleeding to death.

Leo was rushed to the hospital, accompanied by his guilt-stricken guards. He was in shock and he suffered from concussion as well: he'd been hit from behind with the flat side of the ax blade before the maiming. But he'd live—a stage manager without his good right hand.

As Griselda Gold told it to me, Lieutenant Goodlow and his men had arrived almost immediately. He ordered another search which had turned up one of the wardrobe mistress's smocks and a pair of cotton work gloves. Both smock and gloves were bloodspattered.

The wardrobe mistress??

No way, said Carla Banner. The wardrobe mistress had grabbed her (Carla) the minute the final curtain had closed and had pounded her ear right up to the time she left. Carla had been with the wardrobe mistress until the moment the latter had walked out the stage door, about a minute before the police guards raised the alarm that Leo was missing. Thus the wardrobe mistress was in the clear—and so, incidentally, was Carla Banner.

The smock had been taken, obviously to protect the wearer's clothes from Leo's blood. Which meant that our enemy had planned long ago what he was going to do and had simply bided his time until the opportunity arose to do it. The first guard, the one who had gone to Hugh Odell's dressing room, had spent about ten minutes looking for Leo before he heard his partner pounding on the prop-room door. Only ten minutes—our enemy clearly had nerves of steel. Ten minutes to notice that Leo came out of the prop room alone, to lock the door, to don the smock and gloves, to attack Leo. And to do it all without being seen. Nerves of steel, damn him.

So who could have done it? Visitors were no longer permitted backstage at
Foxfire
; one of Gene Ramsay's guards met all unauthorized personnel at the stage door and turned them away. According to the doorkeeper's check-out list, the electrician and the stagehands had left while Leo was still on the stage working on the chair. The front-of-house people had left. And a little later, the wardrobe mistress. No one was discovered hiding in the auditorium or any other place in the theater. Still in the theater were the entire cast of
Foxfire
, all in their dressing rooms getting out of costume and make-up. Griselda Gold. Tiny. Carla Banner. The night watchman. The doorkeeper.

So much for Loren Keith's idea that Michael Crown's lover was not a member of the
Foxfire
company.

I'd spent all of Saturday morning at St. Luke's Hospital waiting to learn about Leo. When I finally got to talk to the doctor, he told me Leo had come out of shock but he was heavily medicated and not permitted visitors yet. The doctor said he saw no reason why Leo could not ultimately be fitted with a prosthetic device. At the moment I was more concerned with the amount of pain Leo was suffering. He wasn't feeling a thing, the doctor assured me. At the moment.

I left the hospital and headed toward the Martin Beck Theatre. The police had been there all night, searching for Leo's right hand and anything else they could turn up. They'd still be there, no doubt, filling the backstage area and “protecting” the company. I planned to add myself to the crowd—because of Carla Banner.

The costume mistress and one of the stagehands had quit, and Griselda Gold had had to talk three of the cast members into staying. The defecting crew members had been quickly replaced, but no experienced stage manager had been available. Actors, directors, producers, even writers can all be replaced at an instant's notice, but good stage managers are hard to find. So Carla Banner was going to have to manage both of Saturday's performances, and I was uneasy about it. Carla could probably handle the job under normal circumstances, but she was easily intimidated and
anyone
would be shaken by what had happened. The smart move would be to shut down for a few days, but Gene Ramsay was in Europe and I didn't have the legal authority to close my own play.

When I got to the theater, I found an atmosphere of near-hysteria. Leo Gunn's right hand had turned up.

On Ian Cavanaugh's dressing table.

“Go home,” I told Ian. “This is what we pay understudies for. No one expects you to perform under these conditions.”

He shook his head. “He's telling me I'm next. I don't want … if my family … I'm afraid I'll …”

“Contaminate them?” He nodded. I knew the feeling; it had happened to me when my home had been wrecked. “Then go somewhere else. But get out of here. Look at you! You're white as a sheet.”

But Ian stubbornly resisted the suggestion—whether out of a feeling of fatalism or the need to have something to do, I don't know. I argued with him a few minutes and then gave up.

Carla Banner was nervous but holding up well. She kept reading through Leo Gunn's cue sheets as if they were new lines she had to memorize. When the time came for the matinee to begin, she gave her first instruction—“House lights down”—in a tight-throated squeak. But once the curtain was open and she saw the play wasn't going to collapse because of something she did, she began to relax a little.

I kept myself close by in case she needed help. Griselda Gold patrolled the entire backstage area instructing the army of policemen stationed there that if they really must talk, please not to whisper. Whispers carry, she told them, and a low murmur from backstage was much less distracting to the actors than a whisper. She had a way of saying it that made even the toughest-looking cops fall back on sign language as a way of communicating.

The performance was hardly inspired, but I thought the actors did a creditable job considering what they were really thinking about. It started to drag a few times, but each time it was Vivian Frank who got things moving again. She'd fire up, become more intense, increase her tempo, her volume—anything to animate the other members of the cast and get them back on track again.

“Vivian, you never cease to amaze me,” I told her when she came off the stage at the end of the performance.

Her mouth twisted wryly. “Is that a compliment?”

“Yes, it is,” I said sincerely. “At a time when everyone else is scared half out of their wits, you come through like Superwoman.” Nerves of steel. “Don't get sick,” I grinned.

“I don't plan to,” Vivian laughed. “I'll be here as long as
Foxfire
is.”

Carla Banner was sitting on a stool, grinning idiotically. I told her four or five times what a good job she'd done. Someone wandered by and asked us if we wanted to order something to eat. Griselda Gold came up and made a point of asking Carla for her permission to tell the police they could use the green room. Carla flushed with pleasure at this evidence of her new authority and said,
“Uh, sure
.”

It was beginning to look as if
Foxfire
was going to survive even this latest calamity. Then I came upon Hugh Odell, trembling and stammering and blaming himself for what had happened to Leo Gunn.

I decided to play tough. “Come on, Hugh, snap out of it. You've got another performance tonight.”

Hugh leaned forward over his dressing table and stared into the mirror. “Abby, I don't remember this afternoon's performance. I just walked through it. I don't remember a thing about it.”

Oh boy. “Hugh, you've got to stop thinking like this. It's morbid.
You
're not the guilty one. You mustn't let this maniac make you feel guilty—that's exactly what he wants.
You mustn't give in
. Resist!”

He looked at me distractedly, as if he were trying to make some sense out of what I was saying. “Resist?”

“Every minute of the day. It's just too damned easy to start blaming ourselves for everything that's happened. He wants us to feel guilty—don't you see? Don't give him the satisfaction.” I'm not Jewish and I'm not a mother, but I found myself falling back on food for solace. “Did you order anything to eat?”

Hugh shook his head. “Not hungry.”

When the food was delivered, I took the sandwich I'd ordered in to Hugh and nagged him into eating it. He was just finishing when Griselda Gold stuck her head through the door. “Abby. Better come.”

“Where?” I asked, but she was gone.

Some sort of argument was going on just inside the stage door. A small man with thinning reddish hair was trying to force his way in. He was yelling and excited. Both the doorkeeper and a guard were trying to calm him down. Griselda stared at the little man uncomfortably, not knowing what to do.

“What's the trouble?” I asked.

“My name is Carl Banner,” the little man yelled, “and I demand you return my daughter to me!”

“Have we kidnapped her?”

“This place is not
safe
!” he screamed. “You've got a lunatic loose in here and you all just go on pretending nothing's wrong!”

“Nobody's pretending anything, Mr. Banner,” I said. “There are police all over the place. Carla's well protected.”

“Like that guy who got his hand cut off?”

I didn't have an answer to that. Just then Carla came up, carrying her purse and a plastic shopping bag full of what I supposed were personal belongings. She was drooping in a posture of defeat, her eyes fixed upon the floor. “All right, Daddy, I'm ready.”

“Carla!” I said, shocked. “You're not going with him? What about the performance? You can't just walk out on us!” She moved her head back and forth miserably but wouldn't look at me. “Carla, you signed a contract! You can't leave us with no stage manager!”

“Let's go,” her father snapped and turned on his heel. Carla shuffled after him, and they were gone.

We all stared at each other dumbfounded. Even the police looked stunned.

“Cancel?” said the doorkeeper.

“No,” I answered automatically. “Let me think.”

Earlier in the day I'd half-wanted to cancel a few performances, just to give everyone a chance to calm down a little. But now, something in me rebelled. It was too much. It was all just too much. The best play I had ever written, plagued by one goddamned thing after another. No, we were not going to cancel. No, we were not going to give in.

No
.

I turned to our assistant director. “Griselda—”

“Not me,” she said quickly, her eyes huge. “I can't. Don't ask me, Abby. I don't know how—I've never managed in my life. I don't know how.” She was almost babbling. “Somebody else. Not me.” So Ms Supercool was going to panic in a crisis.

Unfair
, I told myself. I meant I was being unfair. I had no right to ask Griselda to take over. Of course she'd panic at the thought of stage managing—her experience was limited and it was unrealistic to expect her to step into Carla's shoes. Reluctantly I realized I'd have to do it myself.

There was, however, that little matter of the union. Tell union officials you'll have to cancel a performance unless a nonunion worker is permitted to do a certain job, and they say
Cancel
. Theatrical unions don't give a damn about the welfare of the theater. In my first professionally produced play I'd included a minor bit of business that required a lamp to be moved from one table to another between the acts. The union decided three able-bodied men on full pay were needed to perform that chore. I was so outraged I rewrote the part requiring the lamp to be moved. Whereupon the union informed us that
no
stagehands would be available unless we performed the first version. We performed the first version.

So if I stage-managed even one performance of
Foxfire
, the union would have my hide. Well, let them try. Right now I was feeling belligerent enough to take on the consolidated working force of the entire United States.

I announced my decision and sat down to study Leo Gunn's cue sheets. Tiny came over and patted my shoulder and mumbled something in my ear. I was scared. The last time I'd managed a play was in my amateur-theater days, when the entire production had cost less than what Ian Cavanaugh earned for one performance of
Foxfire
. But one way or another,
Foxfire
would be performed that night. It had nothing to do with that show-must-go-on garbage; I was simply tired of being bullied.

When the time came to start, I found I was just as tight-throated as Carla Banner had been that afternoon. But the curtain was open and Vivian Frank and another actress were out there on the stage saying their lines just as if this were any other performance. When I managed to make a telephone ring on cue, I felt as if I'd just written
Hamlet
.

“They're up, oh wow, are they u
p
!” I looked around to see Griselda and Tiny and a policeman all watching the stage excitedly. “They're giving a great performance, Abby,” said Griselda, “
great
!” A great performance, and I couldn't watch it.

I missed a light cue in the first act. The electrician sat at the dimmer board and smirked at me. That mouth-breathing cretin knew the cue, but he wouldn't do a damned thing unless I first told him to. Then when I told him to do a fast sneak to make up for it, he twirled the dial all the way around in one swift movement. Instant sunrise. Another argument in favor of fully automated lighting systems.

By the time the first act ended, my shirt was plastered to my body with sweat. The cast was keyed up, knowing they had a winner going tonight—if the stage manager didn't close the curtain in the middle of the next act or some other damn fool thing. I wasted a minute telling the electrician what I thought of him and then hurried off to check on the stagehands. By the time they had everything in place, it was time to go again.