Chapter 2
It is so hot she could die.
Sweat pricks the backs of Susan’s knees, unbearable under her puritanical woolen skirts.
You don’t realize it, watching her onstage, how intolerable it is under the fat beams of stage-light.
How an amateur would struggle to maintain character on a day like today.
But at twenty-one, nothing about Susan is amateur.
Even as you fan yourself with the flimsy matinee program and beg your eyelids to stay open against the torpid air, she enchants you with her conviction, her delivery, and—yes—her beauty.
Her looks don’t belong here, you might think, but then, people have been thinking that for years.
Now, backstage and desperate, she unlaces her blouse, hikes her three skirts up to her thighs. Two weeks ago, the air-conditioning unit at the Courthouse Witch Museum in Salem gave up the ghost, and July is unrelenting. Eyes closed, Susan whispers lines under her breath:
I am innocent of a witch.
She takes the washcloth from her makeup bag, wipes the damp backsides of her knees, the nape of her neck.
Her brain cells are melting. How is anyone supposed to work like this?
If this show—this role—were not inscribed into her muscles, she couldn’t do it.
But after three years, Bridget Bishop—the first Salem woman hanged for no good reason—fits Susan like a second skin.
The sting of every slur, every false accusation, the raw rub of the noose on her neck are as familiar as her daily walk to the museum.
Susan isn’t well, hasn’t been well for some time.
How can anyone be well under these conditions, when daily you are murdered for being different.
But that’s the job: making every moment feel like the first, staying awake to all that pain.
It’s like keeping a wound open that is trying to heal.
In the corner, a fan beats ineffectively, not even loud enough to mask the familiar lumbering footsteps outside the greenroom.
“Bourke?” Susan calls.
The director cracks open the door, sticks through a snubby noncommittal nose. “He’s coming today.”
“Are you sure?”
Bourke sighs. Every day, he has promised that someone will come to fix the air conditioner. This is just one of many ways that he has disappointed her.
“And Bourke,” she says, “there’s a kid asleep in the front row.”
To be clear: she doesn’t blame the child. They can’t help themselves, kids, being honest. The problem is the look on Bourke’s face now, the absence of concern.
“The heat is getting to everyone, I think,” he says.
Behind the door, his fingers must be scrabbling at his shirt pocket, frantic for a cigarette. Why do I know that? she wonders. It’s pathetic.
“Isn’t it bad luck for me to be back here?
” Bourke asks. He’s teasing her. Don’t. It is bad enough, being the only one around here who cares about theatrical superstition.
Who treats their world seriously. Yes, it is bad luck for the director to interrupt the cast in the middle of a performance, but some things are more important than luck.
Integrity, for example. Taking pride in your work.
Keeping the audience awake. And to think: she once believed this man to be an agent of destiny.
After her final performance at Salem High, Bourke had emerged from the outpouring of parents and siblings and classmates, shook her hand, praised her craftmanship, offered her a job.
In that moment, everything was confirmed; she had been chosen in the way she always imagined she would be—her talents too bright to ignore.
Naively she clutched his compliments, jumped blindly into the production, told everyone—including herself—that she was saving up for Broadway’s bright lights.
Reassured her friends, as they swept off toward their own city dreams, that she wouldn’t be far behind.
The reality, which revealed itself after months of half-assed rehearsals and uninspired direction, was that Bourke was a lazy bastard. He hadn’t strolled farther than a few blocks to find his next Bridget.
The little money she makes here never lingers.
It disappears behind bars and into her mother’s pocket and the empty hat of the homeless woman on the corner by the fire station.
On clothes that call out to her, satin and leather and stonewashed denim that jump off the racks, that demand to be worn.
Clothes that feel like a way out. On new ballet shoes for her sister. Who else is going to buy them?
As Bourke begins to close the door, a tide rises within her.
“I’m going to try the new thing,” she says.
The door swings all the way open, revealing the entirety of Bourke, a man in his late forties with half-moon glasses and a full-moon stomach. The stale coffee smell of him drifts over the threshold.
“Susan,” he says. “We talked about this.”
Yesterday in rehearsal, Susan had come onstage in running eyeliner and electric, damn-it-all hair.
She never thought she’d still be here, three years later, but if there is a reason, it is Bridget Bishop.
Bridget, staring down the gallows, is no bonnet-wearing sad sack.
Bridget is wildfire and protest songs. Bridget is resistance.
They are nothing if not in this together.
Bourke had not agreed.
“The audience is bored,” she says. “You can’t just read out the transcript.”
“And you can’t just make up history,” he says. “Cosmetics were banned. Loose hair was banned.”
“It’s called artistic license,” she says, tipping dangerously toward insurrection.
Susan isn’t normally the type of person to question authority.
In general, she trusts easily, believes what she sees on TV.
But Bourke has lost her respect. Yes, he may know about history, but she knows far more about art, which is to say, telling the truth.
And the truth is not a fact, it’s something you feel in your bones.
“I am serious, Susan,” he says. “This is a museum. Not somebody’s basement.”
She can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. Christ, he would be one of them, she thinks. Or maybe Bridget thinks it.
“Do we have a problem?”
She is too angry to look at him, trains her eyes on the dusty tile floor. “No.”
He turns and walks down the hall, leaving the door open, as if to say, I’m watching.
A groan escapes her. Is no one else interested in being alive?
Focus, now, return to the preparation. Take the anger, use it.
Her demise is coming. I am innocent of a witch, she whispers, the words becoming incantation.
Susan doesn’t have a process, or at least, she’s not sure what other people are talking about when they refer to it.
All she ever does is allow herself to feel things, to understand without language a life beyond her own.
She wants to live a thousand lives, to be a thousand people—this, more than fame or money or anything is the imperative.
To transform so well that other people believe it.
That it becomes the truth. So imagine it was you: arriving at death row, young and unready, to find that no one will save you.
Not the church, not your mother. Not Goldie Hawn or Kim Basinger or any of the other saints to whom you pray.
Not Bourke, not the well-intentioned nerds who complete the cast, not Mary and Angie and Bernie and everyone you know who went to New York.
There will be no more nights of dancing or talking about the future, or getting up to no good in this run-down town.
No one came for Bridget Bishop. Who would come for you?
When she blinks wet lashes and looks up to the mirror, a man is staring at her from the doorway.
This isn’t unusual. Men stare. They comment wolfishly on her body outside Boston bars.
She tells them what she thinks. Generally, it’s that they should go to hell, but sometimes she surprises herself, asks for their name.
They never expect it. But the truth she senses instinctively, looking at this man (his glasses, his general air of competence), is that he is here to save her from the heat.
“Oh thank God,” she says. “It’s just over there.” She points at the defunct unit in the top corner of the room.
“Sorry?” he says blankly.
“The air-conditioning?” She looks again. Is he dumb? Maybe he isn’t really standing there at all. Maybe he is a mirage. Maybe the heat really is getting to everyone.
“Doesn’t seem to be working very well,” he says. He smiles. He wipes his brow.
Oh no. What is that phrase? To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Please tell me you are here to fix that thing.”
“Afraid not.”
Dear God, she thinks. Has it come to this?
Strangers permeating the doorframe, the charade of dressing room sanctity revealed for the joke it is, the never-ending suffering of heat under her bonnet, under these too-many clothes, and all of it for what?
Some regional reenactment run by Salem’s smallest museum?
Once again, she has blinded herself with hope, seen what she wanted to see.
Maybe she is just a bad judge of character.
Her hands are untying her bonnet, dropping it onto the floor, raking through her hair.
Fuck it, she thinks. It’s too hot to behave.
Somewhere in another dimension, the man is talking, explaining he is looking for some materials here in the museum.
An assistant who had begun to help him has disappeared.
“I think the head archivist is on holiday,” he sighs.
But the man does not exist in Bridget’s world.
Bridget licks three coats of mascara onto her lashes, pouring water from a flask onto her fingers and rubbing her eyelids until she can feel it streaking.
She is thinking about injustice. She is preparing herself for a final fight. I am innocent as the child unborn.
Pointing to the fan, he clears his throat and says, loudly: “I didn’t know they had those in the sixteen nineties.”