Chapter 5
The New England Byways article goes up online, ahead of print, early in the morning the next day under the headline ‘THE SCOTTISH PLAY COMES TO DUSKBORO’.
By noon it’s been shared to the town Facebook group multiple times.
Most of the comments are arguing about whether the parking situation can handle success.
By two o’clock, Vivian calls to inform me — or, really, to inform Englebert — that opening night has sold out.
By four, so has Saturday. Within twenty-four hours, there’s a waiting list for all showings.
A woman from Burlington offered Dorcas forty dollars for her comp tickets.
My editor sent an email with the subject line ‘MORE!!’ in which she proposes that I write a short daily blog for the magazine’s website in the run-up to opening night.
‘Countdown to Curtain’ she wants to call it.
Behind-the-scenes color, she says. The curse stuff killed.
Readers love the cat. Of course, they don’t know that he’s a talking cat, or that he’s been alive for the better part of a century. They know him as a perfectly regular cat who happens to live in the Community Center. The readers love the cat regardless.
The cat knows the readers love him. That’s the problem. He won’t stop gloating.
“You’re doing the blog,” Pru says. She’s at my kitchen table again, eating the last cinnamon bun from a box Dorcas sent home with her. “It’s money.”
“It’s twenty dollars a day.”
“It’s twenty dollars a day more than you’re currently making, and it’d mean you’ll be at every rehearsal until opening night, which means you can drive Englebert, which means I don’t have to.”
So that’s settled, and that’s how I come to be in the third row of the audience, watching yet another rehearsal.
* * *
It’s two weeks from opening night, and the gym has finished its transformation, or at least gotten as close as it’s going to.
The castle wall still stands. The folding chairs have been squared into neat rows, and the props table has been reorganized into taped zones with labels — DAGGERS, CROWNS, BANQUET, BLOOD.
Dana is everywhere. If the article about Vivian and Damien has followed her into the building, she isn’t letting it show in front of the company. I can’t help but notice, however, that she’s not speaking to Vivian beyond the operational minimum.
“House opens in five.” “Cody needs the cue sheet.” “Viv. Time.”
Vivian, for her part, has stopped saying ‘darling’ to anyone. The two of them are running a smooth rehearsal at a distance of never less than twenty feet.
None of this will go in the blog.
Emma is in the audience with her clipboard because Hannah is on standby with the drill and at this point I don’t think she’d accept being left at home even if it was an option.
“Four days,” she says, when I sit down behind her. “Nobody’s said the name in four days. And nothing bad has happened in four days.” She clicks her pen. “I’m not saying it proves anything. But it’s consistent.”
“Your methods are sound.”
“I know,” Emma says.
The company is mostly in costume, which has done wonders for morale and strange things to everyone’s posture.
Jackie wears Banquo’s leather jerkin like she was born for it.
Ms. Pelham’s wig has been reinforced with picture-hanging wire.
Mayor Blackwood’s Duncan robes are burgundy velvet and honestly look quite nice.
He’s already asked whether he can wear them to the Maple Festival next year.
Pru comes out of the storage-room-turned-dressing-room in a deep green gown with her hair pinned up under Hannah’s painstakingly-carved brass crown.
“One word,” she says, to the room, “and I quit.”
Nobody says a word.
To no one’s surprise, Damien is the last one dressed.
He emerges in Macbeth’s jerkin and a floor-length cape.
The cape was a negotiation. The costume design didn’t include a cape, but Damien sourced one himself from ‘a guy in Queens’, and Englebert brokered a compromise, which is that Macbeth may have a cape after the coronation and not one scene before.
Skye films his entrance from the front row. She’s been quieter this week — the article did its work on her too, I’d imagine — but her smile is on, and when Damien sweeps the cape she whispers ‘yes, babe’ to the phone.
At seven sharp, Vivian stands, and doesn’t give a speech.
“You know what this is,” she says. “No stopping. Whatever happens, keep going. Act One.”
* * *
The witches open on cue and the fog machine produces a dignified amount of haze then quits while it’s ahead. Everyone nails their lines, at least without any noticeable fumbles. Moonbeam has stopped counting ingredients on her fingers.
Damien projects. MAY-be. It seems Englebert finally got through to him. The soap opera face still surfaces, but the words have backs as well as fronts now — whatever that means — and the dagger speech is the best he’s ever been.
The banquet table is fully dressed tonight.
Real goblets of mismatched pewter and brass, scavenged from half the sideboards in town, are set at every place.
Each one is poured two fingers deep with Dana’s house vintage, which is cranberry juice cut with flat seltzer, mixed in a Gatorade cooler and distributed by ladle backstage.
Pru’s goblet is the tall one at the table’s end, because of course Lady Macbeth gets the tallest one.
The scene starts. Jackie-as-Banquo’s-ghost takes her mark in the doorway upstage, hair full of corn syrup blood. Damien works the table of lords, and when the toast comes he lifts his goblet. “I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table.”
Pru raises her cup back with as little warmth as possible. Damien drinks, dramatically throwing his head back.
“Avaunt,” he says, “and quit my sight!”
For a minute, he’s better than he’s been all night.
All month, even. He backs away from Jackie with his hand out, hand shaking.
His voice climbs. “Thou hast no speculation in those eyes—” He grabs the table edge.
A goblet topples over. Ms. Pelham, at the table as a lord, throws her hands up in character.
He pushes off the table, and staggers downstage.
“Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence!”
His voice cracks and he sits down on the stage, both hands flat on the plywood. Pru’s line is next. She doesn’t say it.
“Damien?” she says instead.
He looks toward her and says, in a small, unprojected voice, “mebbe,” and folds sideways onto the stage.
The room holds still for one second, everyone waiting for him to stand back up. Jackie crosses to him first and turns him over. Corn syrup blood smears his cheek.
“He’s out,” she says. “Somebody — he’s out.”
Pru gets off her chair and on her knees beside him, her crown sliding loose. Vivian is up on the stage stairs faster than I’ve ever seen someone move in such high heels. A shriek comes from the front row before anyone else has caught up, and Skye is scrambling up the apron.
“He’s breathing,” Pru says, two fingers at his throat. “His pulse is fine. Damien. Damien.” She takes his jaw and turns his face to her, and pinches his ear, hard. Nothing. His face is slack and unbothered.
“Call 911,” Mayor Blackwood says.
“Call Annabel,” Pru says. “This is obviously outside the realm of conventional medicine.”
Besides, the county ambulance is twenty-five minutes away on a good night. Annabel is six.
Annabel answers quickly. I explain the situation and she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. “Don’t move him. Don’t give him anything. I’m coming.”
Moonbeam attempts to organize a healing circle and gets four takers.
Ms. Pelham announces that this is the curse, that it was always going to be the curse, that her cousin saw a production in Bangor in 1981 where a Macduff went through the stage.
Two of the lords go out the lobby doors without being sent and complete the ritual, preemptively.
Cody brings up every light in the building.
Tiffany finds me with my notepad out. “I told you,” she says. “Things happen to people in this play.”
Emma stands on her chair with her clipboard and pitches her voice to carry, which she presumably learned from Englebert.
“Nobody said it.” She holds the log up. “I’ve been here since six. Nobody said the name. Not once, all night.” She looks around the gym at the adults, waiting for this to matter to someone.
Englebert hasn’t left the wings. He’s sitting at the edge of the stage with his tail wrapped over his feet, saying nothing.
* * *
Annabel comes through the lobby doors in a raincoat over pajamas and garden clogs, carrying a canvas bag. She kneels at Damien’s side and works without talking.
She takes his pulse at the wrist and the throat. She thumbs back an eyelid and watches, then leans down close over his mouth and smells his breath.
“He’s stable,” she says. Skye makes a sound like a hiccup and sits down hard on the stage stairs.
“His breathing is deep and even. Heart’s slow but strong.
He’s not in danger tonight, but I don’t know why he won’t wake up.
It isn’t presenting like a stroke. It doesn’t seem like he’s just fainted.
People who faint come back when you pinch them. ”
“Can you fix him?” Skye asks. Her mascara is everywhere. “You can fix him, right? You do… remedies, right? He just needs, like, a remedy.”
“I need to understand what’s wrong before I can help him,” Annabel says.
The Mayor does something actually useful, which is call Damien’s mother. It’s decided that he’ll be moved home to the Carter estate on Quarry Road, and Annabel will go with him tonight and stay. They carry him out on the lid of the props crate, cape trailing, Skye holding his hand the whole way.
The lobby doors swing shut behind the stretcher party, and Englebert walks out of the wings to center stage, into the light Cody hasn’t killed. He addresses the remaining company from approximately the spot where Damien went down.
“He is alive,” Englebert says. “And Annabel says he is in no danger. I wish it to be noted that I never doubted it.” He allows the relief a respectful two seconds.
“And so, having established that our Macbeth will live, I must now raise, with all tenderness, the related matter, which is that we go live in TWO WEEKS.”
“Englebert,” Vivian says.
“The house is SOLD, Vivian. Every night. There is a WAITING LIST.” He’s pacing the apron now, tail going like a metronome.
“Four centuries this play has eaten its leading cast, and four centuries the theatre has answered with one sentence, the oldest vow we have: the show must go on. It went on in plague years. It went on in the Blitz. In 1974 I personally watched a Peter Pan—”
“You told us about the Peter Pan,” Hannah says.
“Then you know what is POSSIBLE.” He stops, sits, and collects himself.
“I am simply observing that every soul in this room has heard Macbeth’s lines nightly for weeks.
That the role is, at its core, a man being loudly told what to do by forces beyond his understanding, an experience with which this entire company is intimately familiar.
And that I” —he lifts his chin— “know every word of this play, in order, and have known them since before any of you were born.”
“You’re a cat,” Jackie says.
“Olivier was shorter than people remember.”
“Englebert,” Pru says. “He’s a person. He’s somebody’s son. The play can wait until we know whether the man is all right.”
“Yes, yes,” Englebert says, at half his usual volume. He looks at the spot on the floor where Damien sat down, and his tail comes around his feet. “He had finally begun to project,” he says, dejectedly.