you forever. It’s always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam…and the best sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can’t remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can’t ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong…and I remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come scuttling back.
The costumery’s good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the racks extend into the fourth dimension—not to mention the boxes of props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of Furness’s Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I’d been boning up on. Oh, and I’ve sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.
In a less sloppily organized company I’d be called wardrobe mistress, I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I’m not that old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even Martin.
Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I’ve tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think she’d whang me.
And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my little whims.
I don’t mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But in spite of Sid’s whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its efficiency—people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the leading lady’s face. In short, we’re a team. Which is funny when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest come from just everywhere.
* * * *
Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room’s very coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself.
Yes, the costumery’s a great place to quiet your nerves or improve your mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn’t have been there eight minutes when Miss Nefer’s Elizabeth-angry voice came skirling, “Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?” I laid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen Liz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and then and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character—a real Paul Muni.
She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at least as far as her face went—I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on her forehead (I’ve sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India or Egypt maybe).
Yes, she was already all made up. This time she’d been going extra heavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away, even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She signed to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I got busy I looked at her eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely (maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it.
“Cold, so cold,” she said, still seeing things far away though her hands were working smoothly with mine. “Even a gallop hardly fires my blood. Never was such a Januarius, though there’s no snow. Snow will not come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary’s death-warrant unsigned. There’s my particular hell!—to doom, perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and the Pope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England. Philip’s tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortresses south-away—cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in the Lowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurting out my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were a glut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!”
And I thought, Cry Iced!—that’s sure going to be one tyrannosaur of a prologue. And how you’ll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats me. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you’d better give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day when your nerves heal.
* * * *
She was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. It was as if I’d managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in the park outside and heard the President talking to himself about the chances of war with Russia and realized he’d sat down on a bench with its back to mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, two females undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her into that crazy crouch-deep bodice that’s like a big icecream cone, and yet here at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, three hundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a Central Park dressing room. It shook me.
She looked so much the part, you see—even without the red wig yet, just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from her own short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. Miss Nefer can’t be a day over forty—well, forty-two at most—but now she looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a dozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she does it with each molecule.
That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn’t do me much damage because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see, I’d started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee against the tail of her spine.
“How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?” I asked her, innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench.
For a wonder she didn’t somehow swing around and clout me, but only settled into character a little more deeply.
“Fifty-four winters,” she replied dismally. “’Tis Januarius of Our Lord’s year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sit cold in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary’s death warrant waits only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open the doors to future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not, Philip’s armada will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffing smoke and shot, and my English Catholics, thinking only of Mary Regina, will rise and i’ the end the Spaniard will have all. All history would alter. That must not be, even if I’m damned for it! And yet…and yet.…”
A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has some insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn’t even flicker her eyelids.
“I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride, praying for some mischance, some prodigy, to wash from my mind away the bloody question for some little space. It skills not what: a fire, a tree a-failing, Davison or e’en Eyes Leicester tumbled with his horse, an assassin’s ball clipping the cold twigs by my ear, a maid crying rape, a wild boar charging with dipping tusks, news of the Spaniard at Thames’ mouth or, more happily,