Chapter 10
The third installment of Countdown to Curtain is taped to the wall behind the register at the bakery, printed out on home-printer paper.
The ink goes stripey halfway down the page.
Dorcas has highlighted a sentence in yellow where I quote that the Second Witch’s scones “have kept this company alive.”
“The lemon scones sold out by ten,” Dorcas says, boxing my loaf. “A woman drove down from Burlington. From Burlington, Mari, for a scone, because your post on the internet told her to. I’ve had to institute a limit.”
“A scone limit?”
“Two per customer. I made a sign.”
I glance down and there is indeed a laminated sign. Dorcas has clearly been waiting her whole life for a rationing crisis.
“Now — the next one. The blog, or whatever you call it. Am I in it?”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
Behind me, the door swings open and Mayor Blackwood strides in.
“Mari! Just the woman. I’m loving the blog. Wonderful stuff. Tremendous for the town. I wonder if you’d caught what I said at Tuesday’s rehearsal — about Duncan. As a unifier.”
“I caught it.”
“Because I’ve been developing the character,” he says. “A king, yes. But at his heart, a convener. A builder of consensus.”
“The character dies in Act Two, Terry,” Dorcas says.
“Legacies don’t die, Dorcas.”
The door opens again and Emma enters, alone, clearly on a mission.
“Aunt Mari,” she says. “I found an error.”
“Emma? Where’s your mom?” I ask.
“In the truck with Lily,” she says. “I saw your car and made her stop because I had to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“That I found an error.” She squints at me as though I’m the one not making sense.
“What kind of error?”
“On Wednesday’s blog. You wrote that the witches’ cauldron is ‘a working antique cauldron.’” She turns her clipboard around to show me how she’s printed the offending sentence and underlined ‘cauldron’ twice. “It’s a sap kettle. Dana told me.”
“For the purposes of the play, it’s a cauldron.”
“The magazine says you welcome corrections.” She produces a second page. “It says it at the bottom. I printed that too.”
“I’ll run a correction.”
“Excellent.”
Emma makes a check mark and Dorcas, unprompted, hands her three scones, evidently waiving the limit.
“I don’t make exceptions for law enforcement, but I can make an exception for this corrections officer,” she says. The joke goes over Emma’s head, but Mayor Blackwood lets out a hearty laugh.
My editor wanted ‘behind-the-scenes color.’ If only they knew how much color I’m leaving out.
* * *
The Costume Department seems to be comprised of Ms. Pelham, Jackie Chambers, and Tiffany gathered around a few card tables. They’re having their weekly meeting, making last-minute adjustments and putting finishing touches on the costume designs. I’m here to observe, for blog material.
“Sit down and don’t touch anything,” Ms. Pelham says as soon as I walk in.
The wardrobe for the Duskboro Community Theater’s inaugural production comes from eleven households, two church basements, and some estate sales.
The lords wear tunics cut from blankets.
Banquo’s jerkin was a barn coat belonging to Jackie’s father until July.
Duncan’s burgundy velvet is drapery out of the old Blackwood dining room, donated by the Mayor himself.
“He asked me if it could be let out,” Ms. Pelham says, feeding a hem into her needle without slowing down. “Twice. I’m running out of fabric. It’s a curtain, and he’s already the whole window.”
Tiffany has claimed the third table. Ms. Pelham’s wig sits in the middle of it, atop an upturned mixing bowl. There’s a spool of picture wire by her elbow.
“Don’t write about the wire,” she says, taking the comb out of her teeth. “Write that it’s a custom piece.”
“A custom piece with internal structure,” I concur.
Vivian arrives shortly after I do. She’s here to approve things.
“The lords looked wonderful last night,” she says.
“The lords look like a moving company,” Tiffany says.
“The lords look like a semi-unified ensemble, and that’s all I can ask. Where are we on the witches?”
“Black,” Jackie says. “All three of them. That’s basically the whole design.”
“As it should be,” Vivian says with a nod.
Dana comes through with a label maker and starts putting names on the inside of collars. Ms. Pelham objects because she doesn’t want adhesive in a garment she intends to return to her sister-in-law, but ultimately acquiesces.
“What’s going on with Damien’s cape?” Dana says, pulling it from a garment bag.
“Well. He’s not going to be in it,” Ms. Pelham says.
“Somebody’s going to be in it,” Jackie says.
“The hem’s wrong for Gabe,” she says. “He’s got two inches on Damien. He’ll be showing far too much ankle.”
Ms. Pelham considers the cape over the top of her glasses. “It’s got a false hem. Bring it here.”
She lets out the hem, then it goes back in the bag, then the bag goes back on the end of the rack where it’s been hanging since the night Damien went down.
“For when he wakes up,” Ms. Pelham says, to nobody in particular, and threads her needle again.
* * *
The drive to rehearsal that night is a struggle.
Englebert wanted Maude. He was serious about that.
He explained, in the car, at a volume that open windows did nothing to reduce, that a production of this caliber could not open without training Macbeth with a ‘ghost of genuine stillness’, and that he had discovered such a stillness under his own roof, and that I was throttling the show in its cradle by refusing to transport a second cat.
“Maude is not coming to the Community Center,” I say. “And I thought you were feuding.”
“He is a generational talent. The perfect stand-in for the role.”
“If Vivian wants a silent presence that stares at Gabe until he comes apart, she can use a folding chair.”
Englebert goes quiet, sulking for the rest of the ride. “A folding chair has no interiority,” he says upon our arrival, and then, thankfully, lets the matter rest.
Inside, Damien’s absence has a surprising weight.
His cape is hanging, unworn. The front row, where Skye usually sets up with her phone at-the-ready, is empty, because she’s at his bedside, holding his hand.
The company has gathered anyway, in a loose horseshoe of folding chairs, waiting to be told the plan.
Vivian tells them.
“Damien is stable. His condition is unchanged, which seems to be a good thing, for now.” She pauses.
“The show is proceeding, and tonight we work. Englebert stands in so Prudence has a Macbeth to play against. Gabe learns the role at the table. Nobody has to be brilliant tonight. You just have to be here, and you have to say the words in order.”
A few people nod. Mostly, everyone just looks exhausted.
“Places. Act One.”
* * *
On stage, the full company runs the play with Englebert as Macbeth.
Off stage, at a folding table dragged in from the lobby, there’s Gabe, with his script and a pencil, learning the part he’ll play if Damien doesn’t wake up.
The idea, according to Englebert, is that the production keeps its pulse while Gabe builds the role slowly.
Gabe, of course, needs people to read the other parts against him. He gets whoever happens to be available, which means his scene partners rotate without warning and without regard for who’s playing whom.
At one point he runs a soliloquy across the table from Dorcas.
A minute later Dorcas is called up to be a witch, and Gabe is playing the same scene against Ms. Pelham, who keeps losing her place because she is also, simultaneously, knitting.
Then Ms. Pelham goes up, and Gabe is left reading opposite a fifteen-year-old.
“You want me to do the wife?” Cody asks.
“Yeah. The lines I’m pointing at.”
“‘Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself,’” Cody reads, stumbling over his words.
“That’s the one,” Gabe says. “You’re doing great. You’re a natural.”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Englebert’s voice carries from the stage.
Pru is watching from the wings with her arms crossed and her crown pushed back off her forehead. When Englebert finishes, she uncrosses her arms.
“He is good,” she says to me, quietly. “Unfortunate that he’s a cat.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that. He’ll want his own dressing room. He’ll want a chair with his name on it.”
“He already wants those things.”
On the stage, Englebert has climbed onto a stool and is posed like a monarch accepting tribute.
* * *
Lily dies for the first time as the bell rings.
The bell announces Duncan’s murder, which happens offstage, so technically nobody dies onstage, but Lily has decided this is a loophole rather than a rule.
From her seat in the audience, she clutches her chest, makes a sound like a deflating pool toy, and slides out of her folding chair and onto the floor where she lies with one arm flung over her eyes.
Nobody reacts, which tells me this has been going on longer than tonight.
A little while later, she dies again. This one has more choreography. She staggers three steps up the aisle, delivers a soft “et tu,” which is the wrong play, and collapses across two chairs.
“She saw a video,” Hannah says when she catches me watching. “Some kid online. He does dramatic fake deaths. She’s been dying for days. She died into the bathtub on Saturday. She flooded the bathroom dying.”
“We’re done being knights?”
“Yeah,” Hannah says. “Knights were last month. Now we’re dead. Dying. Whatever. Repeatedly.”
At intermission, which Dana calls early because the fog machine needs to cool, Lily dies twice more.
Once by poison, clutching a juice box she’s decided is hemlock, and once, ambitiously, by falling.
She climbs onto a table and topples off it backward into Moonbeam, who catches her without breaking the conversation she’s having.
“She has such a strong life force,” Moonbeam tells Hannah, holding a horizontal six-year-old. “That’s why the death play is so important for her. She’s processing the whole cycle.”
“She’s processing a YouTube video.”
“She can do two things at once,” Moonbeam says.
Tiffany has been watching Gabe all night. Her attention keeps sliding away from her own role and onto the folding table where Englebert has begun, between his own scenes, to drop by and give Gabe notes.
She waits until Englebert crosses to Gabe for the fourth time, then puts her staff down in its designated spot on the props table and turns to me.
“So he gets a tutor now?” she says. “We’ve all been here for months, trying our best, and Gabe walks in off the street and gets private coaching.”
“He’s learning the whole role in a week, Tiffany.”
“I learned two roles. On my own time. With no help.” She pauses.
“I asked. Did you know that? First week, I asked Englebert if he’d run the sleepwalking scene with me, in case, God forbid, something happened to Prudence.
And you know what he said? He said understudy work was a matter of ‘private study and personal character.’”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Now something did happen, to the other lead, and suddenly it’s all hands, all coaching. But not me. I’ve been sitting for six weeks holding two parts in my head, and nobody has once. Not once--”
“Tiffany,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Nobody thinks you’re not working hard.”
“They don’t think about me at all. That’s the problem.
You didn’t interview me. You interviewed Dorcas, but not me.
” She picks a nonexistent thread off her sleeve.
“I’m just saying. When they hand the crown to the person who did nothing to earn it, and pass over the person who did everything, somebody should be writing that down. ”
With that, she picks up her prop staff and heads back to the stage, prepared to be a witch again.
After she leaves, I watch the props table.
It sits stage right, against the wall under the cranked-up basketball hoop, dressed with Dana’s taped zones.
The banquet goblets aren’t there tonight — they’re still with Annabel — but everything else is.
It’s where everything lives between scenes, and I watch it, for an hour, to see who comes near it.
Unfortunately for my investigation, everyone comes near it.
Dorcas sets her box of baked goods down on the corner and the whole cast files past to take a day-old muffin, one after another.
Moonbeam drapes her cardigan over the end of it.
Cody leaves his gaff tape and his multi-tool there.
Ms. Pelham leaves her knitting supplies there when she’s on stage.
Mayor Blackwood leans against it to deliver an anecdote and knocks a rubber dagger onto the floor and puts it back in the wrong zone.
Lily dies against its leg. Tiffany crosses to it four separate times, and so does Pru, and so does everyone.
Whoever dosed that cup didn’t need any special sort of access. Everyone has access. That’s the problem.
* * *
Vivian calls rehearsal off at ten because Dana tells her to. Cody comes off the light board looking for his multi-tool, which was on the props table twenty minutes ago and isn’t there now. He checks the floor.
“Somebody move my tool?”
Nobody says anything.
Emma, I notice, is furiously writing on her clipboard. Her page tonight is headed ‘VANISHINGS.’ Things have been going missing for weeks, she says, and she’s been keeping a log. Costume jewelry. A set of keys. And now Cody’s tool.
“It’s probably just misplaced,” I tell her.
“Maybe,” Emma says, clicking her pen. “But you should always keep track.”
The company drifts toward the lobby. Gabe closes his script and comes over to where I’m packing up.
“Well,” he says. “I was a tree once. Now I’m a Scottish king. That’s real range.”
“You’re doing great.”
“I somehow kept forgetting my lines through the banquet and I was reading it off the page right in front of me.”
Englebert arrives on the arm of my chair in one jump, tail high, deeply satisfied.
“Gabriel. You have promise. You’re able to listen, which puts you ahead of most men I have coached.” He turns to me. “Marigold. I require transport. I have given the company its spine back and I intend to sleep for twelve hours in celebration of my own restraint.”
“Your restraint?”
“I did not once tonight suggest that I should simply play the part on opening night, and I believe that’s quite admirable.”
“It is,” I say. “You did well, though. It’s working, somehow.”
“It changes nothing,” he says, somberly.
“Damien must wake up, or Gabriel must be ready. I know I’ve fought the notion, but you’re correct in that a cat cannot command the stage in front of an audience of strangers.
It is preposterous of me to pretend otherwise.
” He tucks his paws under his chest. “But you’re right.
It did work, tonight, in front of a audience of people who love us. I want that noted.”
“It’s noted.”