Chapter 16
Saturday afternoon I drive over to Morgan & Sons with three pages of Englebert’s notes, dictated to me earlier in the morning.
The front door is propped open, and inside, Addie is crouched on a low footstool with the script held in both hands like a hymnal.
“We fail?” she prompts.
“But screw your courage to the sticking-point,” Gabe says, “and we’ll not fail.”
“Wrong.”
“That’s — Addie, that’s the line.”
“You said ‘sticking-point.’ It’s ‘sticking-place.’”
I knock on the doorframe. Addie lights up. Gabe goes faintly pink, which is worth the drive on its own.
“We’re rehearsing,” Addie announces.
“I see that. Who’s the lamp?”
“Banquo. He’s dead right now.” She hops down from the stool to accept Englebert’s envelope on her father’s behalf. “Is it notes?”
“It sure is.”
“He gets a lot of notes,” Addie says, with sympathy.
Gabe opens the envelope and reads for a moment. “Page one says ‘you are a tree describing a forest fire’, whatever that means. I’ll save the rest for tonight.”
He drops into Duncan’s throne, which at the moment is being played by the chair where he seats next-of-kin.
“I can’t read all the words,”Addie says, matter-of-fact. “I take notes on some, but it’s hard, so for the big speeches Dad just says the lines and I check the little words around the big ones. And I do everybody else’s part.” She flips to a dog-eared page. “I’m best at Lady Macbeth.”
“Show her,” Gabe says.
She climbs back onto the footstool, squares her shoulders, finds the line with her finger, and delivers: “When you durst do it, then you were a man.”
“See? Exactly like Pru,” Gabe says.
“Better than Pru. Don’t tell Pru.”
“Now do the cue for the dagger,” Gabe says, and Addie pages forward. I take the chair next to the Banquo lamp and watch the two of them work. He hits the dagger speech clean, every word in its place, with all the smoke and terror of a man reading a shipping confirmation.
“Right,” she says.
“It didn’t sound right.”
“The words were right. I only do the words. Englebert does the other part.”
“The other part is going slowly,” Gabe tells me.
“He said your dagger is ‘a dagger of fact,’” Addie reports, unhelpfully, “and your ghost is ‘a ghost of paperwork.’”
“Thank you, Addie.”
“I wrote them down because they’re insults but they sound like poems.”
“Englebert is good at that.”
We run the banquet with me drafted in as the assembled lords.
I raise an invisible goblet and am told by an eight-year-old that I’m doing it too early.
Gabe walks the row of folding chairs and when he turns and finds the lamp in Banquo’s seat, he flinches.
It’s the closest thing to acting I’ve seen him do.
They call it after another run-through.
“Be honest,” Gabe says, walking me to the door. “Scale of one to ten. How bad is it?”
“The acting?”
“The acting.”
“Four,” I say, hesitant. “But you know that. Englebert can work with a four who knows it. He can’t work with an eight who doesn’t. He told me that. He described it as ‘ancient theatrical wisdom’.”
Gabe leans on the doorframe. Behind him, in the parlor, Addie is returning Scotland to a funeral home, chair by chair, chattering away to lamp-Banquo as she works.
“Are you helping with the bees later, Ms. Mari?”
“What bees?”
“Ms. Annabel says I can come learn how to make honey. You should come learn, too.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“And to think,” Gabe says. “A year ago I couldn’t even get her to talk at dinner.”
* * *
“You don’t have to help,” Annabel says, handing me a veil.
“I’m helping.”
“You’re just trying to distract me from your kindling charm.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Why can’t I do both?”
The hives sit behind the carriage house, on the strip of lawn my mother has always called ‘the orchard.’ I always thought this was a rather generous description of a few crabapple trees.
Annabel is already in her gear. Addie has the smoker. She’s allowed to hold it but not allowed to light it, and she has accepted these terms under protest.
“When do I get to do the smoke?”
“Maybe when you’re nine.”
“I’ll be nine soon.”
“You’ll be nine in March.”
“That’s a lot of bugs,” Bandit says from his position against the stone wall at the end of the orchard.
“They’re bees,” Addie says.
“Bees are bugs,” he says.
Annabel lifts the lid off the second hive. She takes out a frame and holds it at an angle. The whole thing is heavy and gold and moving, hundreds of bees walking across the wax.
“That’s capped,” she says to Addie. “See the difference? Wax over the top means it’s finished. Open means it’s still water.”
“How do they know when it’s done?”
“They just know.”
“But how?”
“That’s a good question,” Annabel says. “But I don’t have an answer.”
“I’ll ask again when I’m nine.”
I hold the box while she works. Somehow, I don’t get stung, and by the fourth frame I’ve stopped bracing for it. We take six frames and leave the rest, because Annabel intentionally always takes less than she could.
Afterward, we sit on the carriage house steps. She pours a jar for Genie and ties a ribbon on it, writes the tag, and then pours a second one.
“Two?”
“She’s been very demanding lately. She’s going to want two.”
She sets a tea light on the step beside my knee.
“I should’ve seen that coming.”
“Attempt eighteen. Nothing in front of it, nothing behind it. Go.”
I hold my intention like a match and offer it to the wick.
Predictably, the candle doesn’t light. It slides down the step and tips over.
Addie comes up the lawn with the smoker held out in front of her.
“March,” she says, to both of us.
* * *
A few hours later, there’s a theater on my lawn. I was not consulted.
The stage is the flat part between the porch and the forsythia. The audience section is four kitchen chairs, carried out one at a time, and a quilt. The set is a lime green lawn flamingo named Doreen, transported by Lily from Hannah’s front yard in a wagon over a distance of nearly a mile.
“Doreen’s the castle,” Lily says.
Emma has a program made of index cards, stapled, with a cast list and a running time.
THE SCOTTISH PLAY (SHORT)
Duration: 11 minutes
Intermission: no
Refreshments: after
“Eleven minutes? Wow.”
“We cut it,” Emma says. “The real one is too long.”
Addie plays Lady Macbeth, of course. Lily has combined all the exciting roles into one and cast herself in it, so is playing Macbeth, the murder, the ghost, and the dying. Bandit plays Banquo, according to the program.
Englebert arrives at the top of the porch steps. “Where’s the throne?”
“That stump over there,” Emma says.
“Where does the audience sit?” He descends and circles the makeshift stage. “No, don’t answer. I can see where the audience sits, and it is wrong. Move the chairs. You can’t have your house looking directly into the sun. They must be able to see.”
They move the chairs.
When the play goes on, the house consists of me, Hannah, Annabel, Gabe, and Maude, who arrives on his own recognizance and installs himself in the center of the quilt, forcing Hannah onto the grass.
“Give him your seat,” Englebert says. “He is a professional. He was offered a role in the full production and declined. I respect this decision. It is the correct instinct at his stage of career.”
“He’s just a normal cat, Englebert. He’s not an actor.”
“He is a cat with a style.”
Lily comes on and delivers a soliloquy she wrote herself, consisting of the sentence “I want to be the king” four times at increasing volume, followed by a stab.
“Who did she stab?” Hannah says. “There’s nobody there.”
“Duncan,” Emma says, from her post at the corner with the script and the timer. “Duncan’s offstage. He’s offstage in the real one too.”
“That’s actually right,” Gabe says with a shrug.
Addie enters with a dish towel over her shoulder and delivers her lines.
“She’s better than you,” I whisper.
“She’s better than everybody. She gives me notes at breakfast.”
We reach Banquo’s death. Bandit goes over sideways with his feet still going. Lily, from the stump, screams “AVAUNT” with complete commitment and presumably no idea what it means.
The sleepwalking scene is Addie walking in a circle, rubbing her hands together. “Out, darn spot,” she says.
Everybody dies at the end, including Doreen, who is laid on her side by Lily with some ceremony. Everybody gets up for a curtain call. Lily bows eleven times.
“Notes?” Lily demands.
Englebert lights up.
* * *
“Does the offer for a practice audience still stand?” Gabe asks. “I ran the banquet against the Banquo lamp four times and I started to feel like the lamp was judging me.”
“It probably was.”
We set up on the porch. He takes the rail as his stage and I take the swing as the assembled lords of Scotland. Englebert is asleep in the parlor, worn out from a day of what he called ‘production administration.’
“From the toast,” I say.
“I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table,” Gabe says, lifting an imaginary goblet.
“You just toasted a man you had killed on Tuesday. Give it some feeling.”
“I know. I’m trying.”
“You sounded pleased to see him.”
“I know.” He drops onto the rail and sits. “Here’s my problem. Everything Englebert tells me to feel… my whole career is built on not doing any of that. I’m there for everyone’s worst day and my job is to be the one person in the room who doesn’t fall apart.”
“So stop trying to fall apart,” I say. “Do what you know.”
“What do you mean?
“Play a man who’s trying not to fall apart in front of people. That’s the scene, isn’t it? He’s at a banquet. There are guests. He’s the host. He is trying to hold the room, and the room keeps getting away from him.” I shrug.
“That’s a good note,” he says.
“Don’t tell Englebert.”
He gets up and runs it again, and this time when the ghost arrives — the ghost being Maude, who has wandered out through the cat flap — Gabe plays a host with a secret, smiling too hard at his guests while his voice climbs out from under him. It almost works. It’s definitely an improvement.
“Hence, horrible shadow,” he says, to my cat. “Unreal mockery, hence.”
Maude blinks at him and begins to wash a paw.
There’s a stretch where the only sound is the swing chain until Englebert emerges through the door, rumpled from sleep and instantly suspicious.
“I heard voices,” he says. “Rehearsal voices. Someone has been running the banquet without the director.”
Englebert makes Gabe run the toast twice and pronounces the improvement “adequate, and clearly the result of my foundational work.”
He then requires the entire scene from the top, with blocking, on the porch. Gabe catches my eye over the cat’s head, grins, and does as he’s told.