Chapter 1 #2
“He sent flowers to your office,” I say. “Only a few months ago. You told me all about it.”
“There were flowers,” Pru concedes. “With a card. The card said ‘for old times sake’ and I again would like to make clear that the ‘old times’ were eight months long and I spent two of them grounded.”
“What did you do with the flowers?” Annabel asks.
“Gave them to my paralegal. She put them on the reception desk. The receptionist was thrilled, so in a sense Damien Carter was finally successful in sending flowers to a woman who actually wanted them.”
Gabe laughs. Addie, who has been following this conversation in the way children tend to do, with total attention and no context, chooses this moment to contribute.
“Is Damien the one who says ‘maybe’ wrong?”
The table looks at her.
“Emma and me watched from the lobby,” Addie says. “When Dad picked up Ms. Archer’s drill. The Macbeth man said ‘maybe’ really weird. Like, ‘mebbe’. Englebert made him say it nine times.”
“MAY-be,” Englebert says. “The gentleman has spent so long acting for cameras that he has forgotten that words have backs as well as fronts. On a soundstage, one can murmur. In a gymnasium hall with the acoustics of an aquarium, one must project. We are working on it. He is not unteachable. He is merely unaccustomed to being told he’s not finished learning. ”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about him,” Hannah says.
“I am unfailingly generous. It is one of my burdens.”
* * *
I make eggs, and the eggs go quickly. Hannah makes a second batch without asking. Lily eats the middles out of three pieces of toast and constructs the crusts into what she says is a fort.
Emma has brought her clipboard. To be fair, Emma always brings her clipboard. Today’s page says ‘PLAY -- PROBLEMS’ at the top, and under it there’s a numbered list I can only partly read upside down, though I can make out item four, which says ‘CURSE (REAL?)’ with a box next to it, unchecked.
“It’s for the record,” Emma explains. “Everyone keeps saying the play is cursed. Nobody is writing down any evidence.”
“What’s the evidence so far?”
She consults the list. “The castle fell over twice. Mr. Fitzgerald’s ladder broke. The lights went out on Thursday. Somebody’s car got towed. And Ms. Pelham’s wig caught on the exit sign and she had to be rescued.”
“This could all be coincidence.”
“Maybe,” she says, clicking her pen. “But every single time something bad happened, somebody said the name inside the building first. I have the dates.”
The rule – the actual, ancient, honored-by-real-actors rule – is that you don’t say the name of the play – Macbeth – inside a theater. You say ‘the Scottish play’, and if you slip, you go outside, spin around three times, spit, swear, and knock to be let back in.
Englebert explained this at length to the assembled company on the first day of rehearsals, in his fullest voice.
He narrated the whole history, including a boy actor who died in 1606, some riots, and a gruesome list of injuries down four centuries of productions.
The company listened respectfully and has since broken the rule an average of nine times per rehearsal, because the play is called Macbeth, the lead character is named Macbeth, and the word Macbeth appears in the script approximately five thousand times.
So, every time a flat falls or a fuse blows, someone shouts ‘Who said it?’ and, of course, someone always did, and Englebert makes the guilty party do the whole ritual in the parking lot.
By now half the cast can do it in with the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew.
Ms. Pelham holds the record for fastest completion. Ms. Pelham is sixty-eight.
“He made Vivian do it,” Hannah says. “She’s the director. She said the name of her own show on her own stage and a twenty-pound cat sent her to the parking lot to spin around.”
“And did the lights fail again after she complied?” Englebert asks.
“No.”
“I rest my case.”
“The lights failed because the Community Center’s wiring is from fifty-something years ago and someone plugged in a fog machine, a coffee urn, and a space heater on the same circuit.”
“And yet.”
“You can’t ‘and yet’ the electric grid, Englebert.”
“I can and I did.”
We don’t press the matter any further because we’ve all silently agreed not to hand Englebert any ammunition, but the fact is that this is Duskboro, and in Duskboro the line between superstition and mundane municipal malfunction is thinner than it is elsewhere.
When a bunch of people gather nightly in one room to chant about toil and trouble and double-doubling, I would not personally guarantee that nothing bigger is listening.
“So, I heard back,” I say, into a gap in the curse litigation. “From the magazine. New England Byways. They want the theater piece.”
Hannah puts her spatula down. “Mari! That’s great.”
“Let’s stay calm,” I say. “It’s twelve hundred words for a regional glossy that mostly runs foliage maps.”
“It’s a byline,” Pru says. “You’ve been feral about not having one for months. Take the byline.”
Unfortunately, she’s right. It’s been months since the Tribune shut down my desk, and the freelance market for a political investigative reporter in a town of eleven hundred people is exactly what you’d think.
I’ve been pitching anything I can, anywhere I can.
This one I pitched half as a joke: former soap actor comes home to an audience of folding chairs, small town builds itself a theater from scratch, first show ever. The editor wrote back in six hours.
She wants the curse in it. Of course she wants the curse in it.
“It means I’ll be at rehearsals this week,” I say. “Tonight, probably. Interviewing people.”
“You’re coming tonight?” Englebert’s head comes up off his paws. “Tonight is the first run-through, Marigold. Full company, full sequence, no stopping. It is the crucible in which we learn what we have made.”
“I’ll sit in the back.”
“You will sit in the back and you will observe professional discipline, which I say for your protection, because Vivian has become extremely sensitive about interruptions since the incident with the fog machine.”
“Which incident with the fog machine?” Pru says. “There have been several.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I won’t intrude.”
“You’ll quote me, though, won’t you?”
“I’m not quoting a cat in a regional magazine.”
“You’ll attribute it to ‘a source close to the production.’”
“Every source in that building is close to the production. It’s forty people in a gym.”
“Then it will be very difficult to identify me,” he says, “and that is what makes it elegant.”
Gabe has his hand over his mouth, trying to stifle a laugh. Pru flips through her script, landing on the sleepwalking scene.
“One more time,” she says. “Before tonight. If anyone laughs, I’m quitting and Vivian can put the crown on Moonbeam.”
“Moonbeam auditioned,” Hannah says. “It didn’t go well.”
“Then you all know the stakes.”
Pru stands up. She’s in her work clothes, blazer and all, holding a script with her own handwriting crowded into the margins. She plants herself at the end of the table.
“Out–” she says, and stops. “Damned spot. Out, I say.”
Pru would hate that I’m saying this, but: Englebert is right. She gets four lines in, maybe five, and it’s hard to look away.
Englebert hops down from the director’s chair. “Marvelous,” he says. “Simply marvelous.”
Maude, who hasn’t moved from his position under the sill, is now sitting in a full square of morning sun. He begins to purr.
Hannah starts gathering plates. “Run-through’s at seven. Be there at six-thirty, if you want to catch people before Vivian starts her speech. She always gives a speech.”
“I’ll be there at six-thirty.”
Pru picks her keys off the table. “Mari?”
“Yes?”
“When you meet Damien,” she says. “Don’t tell him where I live.”
“This is Duskboro. He already knows where you live.”
“Then don’t confirm it,” she says, and lets herself out.