by Cindy Jones
Omar gestured to dark, somber portraits in gilt frames, suspended by wire from a line of molding. "Ancestors, mostly," he said. On the opposite wall, floor-to-ceiling lace curtains dressed the windows like spinsters left over from the Depression. I sensed an attitude of flexibility in our production, a handmade flavor to the house.
Omar noticed my glance at the floor. "The rugs have been taken out for a beating." We entered a small room off the front hall. "This is the Freezer," he said. "Your greenroom where you will escape the scrutiny of patrons while you spend quality time with fellow actors cramming for the next scene. Or checking your e-mail."
The Freezer reminded me of an oversized coat-check room furnished with mismatched contemporary sofas better suited for a fraternity house, a lime green area rug, and faux Danish modern end tables; it was the only room lacking a fireplace. A noble mahogany library table and sideboard waited here, slumming while a better placement was scouted.
"That's Magda's desk," Omar said, pointing to a surface buried in papers and books. "And that's everyone else's." He indicated a table, bare except for a previous-generation computer and monitor. I could imagine actors lounging with scripts in this room, memorizing Jane Austen's prose. Or checking their e-mail.
"How long has it been since anyone really lived here?" I asked, following Omar back to the entry and turning left at the archway.
"Nineteen forty-five," he said. "And this is the ballroom."
"Wow." I gazed into the cavernous hall. A couple in deep discussion sat at a folding table erected just inside the door.
"Hello." Omar waved. The middle-aged man waved in our direction without looking up. Omar whispered to me, "The scenes are presented in here, some of the lectures, and all of the big meetings. The ballroom is one of the few rooms in the house wired for electricity." I imagined actors performing against the backdrop of the raised-panel wall, patrons seated in rows of folding chairs.
"No electricity?" That explained the orange electric cords snaking along the floor, taped over thresholds; powering the rest of the house. Surely the cords would be less obvious by opening day.
"That's Archie," he said, waving to the man with the gray comb-over ponytail and facial hair. "And Magda," a woman who looked young, twenty-nine or thirty, did not wave but kept talking to Archie, her hand on a stack of paper, obviously the same Magda who was giving the women in period attire so much grief over their ball. Magda wore a scarf covering her hair but the rest of her clothing was typical college garb: black jeans and T-shirt. She was strikingly beautiful, even partially hidden by the scarf. Her lack of visible hair called attention to her clear brown skin and perfect white teeth. At the moment she looked rather agitated, thumping the pages in front of her, speaking with a pronounced Arabic accent.
Omar whispered, "Magda and Archie run the enactments."
"Is that the script?" I whispered back.
Magda hit the stack of paper with the flat of her hand. "I don't get it." Magda leaned away from Archie as if to see him better. "Are you backing off?" She waited. "You said I'd have complete freedom to interpret in accordance with my reading." Her words came out clear and distinct, as though the accent was the proper pronunciation, obviously a teacher.
Archie closed his eyes, reminiscent of Martin. "The radical approach doesn't bother me," Archie said calmly.
"Then what is it?" Magda asked, her mouth open.
"It's the blatant lack of consideration for over half our constituency."
Magda jumped in, "I don't give a rat's ass for the Janeites."
"You should," he said. "They're paying the piper."
Magda reared her head back. "I said I'd babysit Miss Banks for the summer, but I won't compromise." Magda sighed. "Next you'll tell me you love Fanny Price."
"I love Fanny Price," I said this to Omar, but they all heard me and turned to see who had spoken so precipitously. Magda's gaze expressed absolute wonder.
"What did she say?" Archie smiled, not sure he heard correctly.
"Never mind." Magda raised a hand.
"She likes Fanny Price?" Archie turned to focus on me but Magda snapped her fingers at him.
"Brave woman," he said, and I smiled back. At the time, I was oblivious to the passion inspired by Mansfield Park's protagonist. But any hope of aligning myself with these two was now dashed; I might be killed in a Fanny War.
"Would you excuse us?" Magda asked, glaring at me.
"No problem," I said, flashing the indulgent smile I reserved for childish adults.
Omar was already in the hall.
"Miss Banks isn't coming, is she?" I asked, fearing the worst. "Vera told me she wasn't."
"I've no idea," Omar said, steering through a dark room. "Lady Weston locked these doors in 1945, after the war, and moved to modern digs in Kent. She kept up visits in the summers, hoping her son would eventually restore Newton Priors as his residence, but that didn't work out."
"Why not?"
"He got himself and his wife killed while driving in the Cotswolds."
"Driving in the countryside?"
"Have you seen how they drive on country roads? Nope," he said, as we walked, "they died young, leaving two darling orphans for Grandma to raise." Omar paused by the door. "No one has had the time to redecorate or change anything. No central heat or air."
I stopped walking and asked, "So Randolph Lockwood is one of the children Lady Weston raised?"
"Yes; and his sister, Philippa. I'm sure you'll have an opportunity to meet them soon. This is the music room," Omar said, indicating a parlor, another tall boxy room with a fireplace where a ratty sofa kept company with an antique piano. A small bust of Mozart sat on a bookshelf. "You will find drawers and shelves in this house still full of household detritus from 1900 and earlier." Suddenly, I was Catherine Morland snooping through drawers to discover the dead mother's last letter to Randolph.
"Nothing interesting, I've looked." Omar pointed upward where curling shreds of yellowed paper dangled in the dim upper reaches. "Please note the original wallpaper," he said.
I looked up and felt a burst of excitement, ready to begin my new life among musty drawers and peeling wallpaper.
"Oh, and Alex brought his old record player." Omar pointed out the antique stereo plugged into an orange cord, a stack of records nearby, "so you can listen to vinyl LPs in your spare time." Bach topped the pile of albums.
"I'll remember to do that." I followed Omar through a narrow hallway leading to a room where dusty books crammed the shelves. "Why don't they replace the wallpaper?"
Omar laughed, then without answering he stopped and stared at me. "What are you looking for, Lily?"
His question surprised me, and for a moment, I wondered if he wasn't gay. "What do you mean?"
He adjusted his glasses. "What do you expect to get out of this summer? Expand your repertoire? Develop an accent?"
"Oh." I had to think. "Yes. Expand my repertoire, exactly."
Omar waited.
"Actually"--I gestured with both arms--"I'm interested in working among actors who also read books; who understand the meaning of only connect." This was important to me.
Omar winced.
"You know, E. M. Forster, Howard's End," I said, holding my breath.
Omar folded his arms in concentration. "As in, 'connect the beast and the monk; the prose and the passion'?"
Now it was my turn to be confused. I'd read the book long ago, actually seen the movie more recently. Perhaps I should brush up before holding forth to English teachers. "Yes," I said, vowing to find the book at my earliest opportunity. Maybe there was a copy of Howard's End in here somewhere.
Omar walked; I followed. Shells, rocks, stuffed birds, and a statue of a shepherd boy kept company with the books on the shelves, all collected by someone long gone, the house a living relic, a repository of the Weston family, their spirit lingering like dust on the books.
"From a photo taken in the 1920s, it is clear that nothing, down to the peacock feathers in
that urn over there"--Omar pointed to the corner--"has been changed in nearly a century."
I had a strong feeling right then that My Jane Austen walked the rooms with us and that rather than old and dusty, the place was green and growing, full of hope and possibilities of fulfillment. Another passage led us to what appeared to be a kitchen, tacked onto the end of the house.
"This room was added at the turn of the century." Omar pointed to a pair of odd faucets, connected to metal pipes snaking over the wall's surface. "The sink hasn't been used since 1945." My eyes found a patch of light where settling had caused a gap in the wall large enough for a hand to reach through. I thought of Fanny Price exiled to her shabby home in Portsmouth. The room had no counters, just dark bare wood, shelves holding pale china, and racks for towels. Baskets gathered dust and a rack of old teacups hung on the wall. Mrs. Russell and her volunteers would have a hard time making tea in here. No wonder Lady Weston's daughter fled. Again, My Jane Austen flitted through my peripheral vision, looking pale in her lavender dress.
"What do you understand only connect to mean?" Omar asked. "I'm not sure I follow."
"Oh." I cleared my throat, wondering if he could sense Jane Austen in the room or if it was just me. "It's like really connecting," I said. "Connecting in an emotional, rather than worldly, sense." Sounded plausible to me. "The way readers connect with books, actually; on the higher plane of ideas. I hope to find people here with whom I can connect, on that level."
"Oh." He pushed his glasses up and folded his arms. "That's not what I understood it to mean."
"Oh?" I braced myself.
"No, I understood Forster advocating that people connect what they profess to believe with their actions." Omar looked up at me. "This requires self-knowledge."
"Oh."
"Which is why I was confused you would come here to meet people who understand." He walked out of the kitchen back into the hallway. "Actors? Literature Live is the Grand Central Terminal of disconnected personalities," he said. "And this place is Fantasy Island for Janeites."
I thought of Mrs. Russell wearing her costume on the train.
"You've got your work cut out." Omar chuckled, which seemed better than lingering on my misunderstanding. Omar led us back into the ballroom, where we found a man jumping on the stairs.
"Hey, John." Omar waved. Omar introduced me to John Owen, the project's conservationist. "A friend of Nigel's."
"Don't mind me," John Owen said. "I'm only testing the stairs."
Omar put his hands in his pockets and we watched the man bounce on one step, and then move down to the next. I noticed he was wearing an odd combination of clothing: pants from an old office suit, a dingy soccer shirt, and sneakers with Velcro fasteners. "What do you expect to find?" Omar asked.
We strained to hear him whisper, slightly breathless, "A noticeable bounce may mean structural problems."
"Is it bouncing?" Omar asked.
He stared past us in concentration. "Not sure." He went back up to a previous step. "There may be something here." He examined the steps, going from one to the other, jumping and trying again.
We took the stairs to the second floor while Omar explained that John Owen had been part of the original deal with Lady Weston. "He putters around all summer with his crew of grad students who think they're having a symposium, fixing things, making sure the place isn't falling into irretrievable disrepair, in return for Literature Live's use of the property."
I smiled. "The students think they're having a symposium?"
"And they pay for the privilege." Omar gestured to a lot of closed doors in the second floor hallway. "None of this is open to the public. Some of these bedrooms serve as private offices for Archie and Magda and the lead actors, and since I'm not sure which are which, I just stay downstairs unless summoned." As we walked down the hallway, Omar grinned, nudging me with his elbow. "I don't think John Owen grasps the meaning of only connect, do you?"
"I think you're making fun of me," I said, "and we've only known each other since six."
Omar touched the handle of another narrow door and explained about the third floor. "Off-limits," he said, "just a lot of dead furniture up there, not interesting."
I sensed My Jane Austen touching the handle from the other side of the door.
"Do you think we'll get a lease extension?" I asked, imagining the first real lines in my novel life interrupted by a real estate broker with a sign and a hammer, wondering if Omar had felt anything because he was holding his own hand.
"Depends. The taxes are exorbitant, and the new lord needs the cash to finance his bar bills." Omar started down the stairs. "The offices are over here in the east wing." Omar led us down a curving hall and opened a door but we didn't go in. "Nigel's office, the conference room, and library. Not interesting, just the admin heart of the festival." Omar turned and bumped into me. "Let's go, it's dark," he said.
"But we must have seen less than half."
"Tomorrow is another day, Scarlett. You can't see anything in the dark anyway."
∗ ∗ ∗
The great wooden door, not locked as feared, responded to my push, admitting me into the chilly stone nave of St. James's Church. I'd gently disengaged Omar by professing a need for more exercise, although he likely sensed I was up to something. Pulling the door shut, I waited for my eyes to adjust, dim evening light filtering through the ruby and cobalt of stained glass, delighted to sense that My Jane Austen was still with me.
Tiptoeing carefully over uneven stone to a dark wooden pew, I sat, breathing the musty air deeply through my nose, exhaling through my mouth, a visitor in a quiet tomb. A narrow shelf built into the pew before me held the diminutive Book of Common Prayer, the English version, smaller than those back home. The regular size hymnal hung over the shelf's edge, too big to fit. A needlepoint cushion hung from a hook below. Near the front of the church, stone effigies, perhaps the First Baron of Weston and his wife, slept in a bed of marble, their hands clasped in prayer these many years. I tried to be quiet but the pew creaked with every movement. Another entombed body lay prone in the far corner, all alone, facing the wall with the great window. Lifting the needlepoint cushion from its hook, I knelt and whispered the words from the funeral liturgy: "All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song. Alleluia. Alleluia." I repeated the phrase over and over, with a special heartfelt emphasis on "yet even at the grave." Usually the repetition would begin to soothe me and I would become lost in the words, but it wasn't working for me now. I kept thinking about the ancient sleepers and the universal smell of mustiness and how it smelled old but still alive. Still present among the living, but separate. At times like this, the utter permanence of death came home to me like a thick iron wall that closed forever between my mother and me. I could never tell her about Sue or ask her advice about my father or anything else. Death did not negotiate.
No longer whispering, I tried speaking quietly, "All we go down to the dust." Unable to focus on the prayer, I surrendered to the excitement growing in my spirit: the feeling of being in deep communion with a great mind. Even if the volunteers were a sorority of secret stockings like those of Mrs. Russell, and even if the academics were mostly incoherent to me, this festival was all about the book, Mansfield Park. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Jane Austen and her book. But here was a whole new rich, promising world opening up for me, something I hadn't been aware of two days ago. The novel was alive. This was what I had meant about living in a novel. We were all alive in Mansfield Park. This could never have happened in Texas.
And from this great distance, I could see clearly that Martin didn't get me. He'd never read Forster; he thought only connect was a dot game. Being married to Martin would mean sharing him for weekends of hunting and paintball. His ideal vacation would be scuba diving with the guys in some oversubscribed Central American destination. Perhaps I generalized, but it seemed Martin, as well as all the men in my social circle, relied on the same slim catalogue
when choosing interests and vocations. We met in a bookstore, yes. But he wasn't buying books. He was checking out the chicks who bought books. I kept squeezing myself into underwhelming romances with men like Martin because I wanted one so badly. But they never had enough gravitas to survive on their own merits. In these relationships, we parked in each other's lives until something like holiday travel interrupted the flow, and when we got back into town, we couldn't remember where we'd left our cars.
Something creaked. I held my breath, and waited for a repeat of the sound I'd heard. Something besides me had moved. Although I thought I was alone in the dark, I couldn't really be sure. It sounded like something alive in another pew but I saw no one. The creak happened again. I sat up straight. My scalp tingled and fear gripped me. What if the tombs opened up? Too late to hide. From the front of the room, a dim figure rose from a pew, Heathcliff hiding in the dark. I scooted closer to the wall, bumping an overhanging hymnal on the shelf in front of me, sending it to the floor with a mighty resounding thud. He looked over at the disturbance and our eyes met. Young and serious, thirty by my guess, wearing jeans and T-shirt, probably frightened by my chanting and afraid to be in the same dark church with me. He had been lying on the pew. Now he stepped over the dead interred in the stone floor, in a church where protagonists had brooded for centuries, their rich stories lingering in the damp fertile air, encouraging all forms of yearning and despair, perhaps in my very pew.
I'd arrived at a place in the cosmos where I could connect, at last.
Five
Those arriving at the orientation meeting were forced to squint as morning sun cast white rectangles of light on the wall above the massive stone fireplace. As they squinted, I took a good look at their name tags, bracing myself for the possible arrival of Miss Banks. Urns of coffee exhaled a cozy morning smell and green plastic yard chairs crowded around small tables facing the stage where, in a few days, actors would perform for the public. A staff person tested a microphone while someone placed water bottles at each place on the table behind her. So far, no Banks.