My Jane Austen Summer

by Cindy Jones

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The next day, I was folding Founder's Night invitations, stuffing them into the envelopes I'd already labeled for Claire.

  What china would we use for the tea party?

  Omar was tipped back in his chair holding forth on one scholar's suggestion that Jane Austen was an incestuous lesbian, when Sixby entered wearing a cap turned rakishly backward. "Have you seen Bets?" Sixby asked as My Jane Austen yawned.

  "No." We both shook our heads.

  Sixby nodded toward the conference room. "We're getting ready to start a read-through," he said. "She's missed each one."

  I felt a secret thrill, another step in the right direction.

  Omar asked, trembling theatrically, "Is Magda coming?"

  "No, she's at the visa office with her brother; I'm running the read-through." Sixby started for the conference room and then hesitated, remembering to ask Omar, "Are the scripts ready?"

  "Oops." Omar's chair returned to ground level and he jumped up to complete his task at the copier.

  In light of Bets's irresponsible behavior, Vera's remark about not being hasty began to make sense. "Sixby," I said, "if Bets doesn't show, can I read her part?"

  "Absolutely," he said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Bets didn't show and I joined the cast, sitting next to Sixby at Nigel's conference table where everyone waited for Omar to finish copying scripts. Nikki the actress demonstrated plummy diction for me. "Like your mouth is full of plums and you have to talk around them."

  I tried to copy her, imagining big balls of fruit displacing my jaw; the actor next to Nikki laughed.

  "No, actually that's much better," Nikki said.

  Enjoying my place in this group, I felt hope revive. Omar arrived panting; his arms full of paper, his glasses sliding down his nose as he circled the table distributing the scripts, running out before Sixby got one. "I thought you kept the revisions from yesterday," Omar said, adjusting his glasses.

  "I'd like a fresh script," Sixby said, drumming his fingers.

  I'd gotten my copy from Omar earlier and slid it over to Sixby, scooting closer to share with him. I watched as he crossed out all the italicized acting directions associated with his lines, words like gently and loudly. Perhaps he didn't need anyone telling him how to act. I read my lines in what I hoped sounded plummy--My Jane Austen mouthed them painfully with me. When I looked up, Nikki nodded and Sixby whispered, "Excellent. Don't forget we're partners for the follies," and he patted my arm. My Jane Austen took a deep breath. How could I forget? He didn't coach me as he did the others, probably because I was just standing in. We were reading the scene where Mary Crawford is recruited to join the theatricals, and in the middle of reading my line where I say, "What gentleman among you am I to have the pleasure of making love to," the door opened. Magda's terrible presence filled the room and she interrupted me. Had an actual plum been in my mouth, I would have choked to death.

  "Thank you, Lily," she said. "You aren't needed here."

  She couldn't even let me finish my line. My blood boiled and stress shaved moments from my life as they continued reading. No one watched me walk out.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  That evening, I took a seat next to Omar in the conference room where a small audience gathered for an impromptu talk entitled, "Mansfield Park: Convention or Invention?" A lecture idea born at lunch over a bottle of Cabernet Nigel drank with his friend, a professor from a women's college near London. All the writing students were here as well as a representative in Regency attire who occupied the front row, strategically positioned to snag Nigel for a word about ball dates as soon as the talk ended.

  Where would we get enough china for a tea party? Paper cups were not an option.

  No actors were present since Magda was rehearsing them to death in the ballroom, the opening only two days away. Nigel and the speaker, a white-haired gentleman with watery eyes behind round tortoiseshell spectacles, sipped red wine from oversized glasses.

  Omar leaned toward me and said, "Magda was looking for you."

  "Me?"

  Claire closed the conference room door and gestured for Nigel to begin the introduction.

  Omar whispered, "Maybe she has an opening for you."

  "Right." I nodded. Everyone applauded the speaker.

  "So what are you going to do, stuff envelopes all summer?" he asked as the speaker adjusted his spectacles.

  "Or go home," I said, not wanting to chat, looking forward to this lecture. I couldn't go home now, couldn't leave this world where every new thing took me one step farther from my old life. "I'm going to write a business plan," I whispered. And organize a tea party. And get my necklace back.

  "Business plan? For what?" Omar whispered back.

  The speaker cleared his throat.

  "Literature Live."

  Omar pointed at the floor. "This place?"

  I nodded.

  "Do you know how?"

  "I wrote one in college."

  He grimaced as I turned away to listen.

  The professor began his talk, building his case that today's thoughtful reader often applies twenty-first-century issues to Mansfield Park, such as slavery and feminism while dismissing the issues of Austen's contemporary society, concerns like amateur theatricals, ordination, and "family values" (air quotes his). The speaker had just introduced Austen's contemporaries: Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, when the door opened behind me. I ignored the disruption, concentrating instead on the disturbing news that "Mansfield Park was written using plot and structure of the sentimental novel that Austen inherited from her literary predecessors."

  Say it isn't so, Jane Austen.

  The professor put his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on the balls of his feet. "In 1814," he said, "women writers wrote about education, love, and marriage."

  I jumped as a set of gold bangles entered my peripheral vision, headed for my lap. Omar saw them and looked up. The bangles were attached to Magda's arm. Magda's face came close. She dropped a note and touched my shoulder, miming the word tomorrow, and turned away. Unfolding the paper, I lost track of the speaker's thread.

  Make sure Bets gets to her fitting appointment at 9:45 tomorrow morning.

  Magda

  She didn't even say please or thank you. I offered the paper to Omar; he looked at it but gave it back without a reaction, too intent on the speaker's thread. The nerve of Magda assigning me to be Bets's keeper. I sat there fuming as the speaker went on. "All the characters," he said, "engage in self-deception except Fanny Price. Is it unusual in 1814 to have a character who examines her motives?"

  I couldn't answer his question because a really good reason to deliver my roommate to the fitting appointment presented itself: if I helped Bets select her costumes, I could be sure she took one that would fit me. I imagined a white gown trimmed in blue with a matching pelisse and reticule.

  The professor touched the stack of his newly published books he'd brought to sign. "Jane Austen used the eighteenth-century novel conventions. But she invented a protagonist who struggles for self-knowledge. Mansfield Park dramatizes the emotional pain and reward of endurance."

  Everyone clapped; the talk was over.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  To: Karen Adams

  Sent: June 13, 7:38 A.M.

  From: Lillian Berry

  Subject: Helloooooo!

  Karen,

  Is there such a thing as Business Plans for Dummies? Could you FedEx a copy to me ASAP? It turns out they need help with administrative work for the festival and, thanks to my business degree, I've been drafted to help develop a business plan. However, I'm clueless where to start.

  Thanks,

  Lily

  "We need to hurry," I said, headed for the fitting appointment. "We're late." Bets and I passed an actor walking to rehearsals wearing headsets to help memorize lines. Once the word got out that I didn't have a part, the cast ignored me; I m
ight as well have been invisible. When I ran into Alex, the actor of the antique record player, he said, "I thought you were gone."

  Bets stopped to light a cigarette the minute we hit the pavement and waved to Gary, who walked on the other side of the street hauling supplies for Claire. "There's Gary," Bets said, exhaling, adjusting the sunglasses she wore even though it was completely overcast.

  "I see him," I said. "Do you know your lines?"

  "No," she said. "Why don't you wave? He'll think you don't like him."

  "Where's your script?" I asked.

  "Not sure." She yawned. "I think it's in your JASNA bag."

  "My bag?" The bag Vera gave me when she sold me Mansfield Park. My Jane Austen Society of North America bag.

  "At Tommy's."

  "I've been looking for my JASNA bag everywhere, Bets." And then I asked, "When will I get my necklace back?"

  "Oh!" she said, clapping her hand to her mouth and then feeling for it around her neck. "I must have left it at Tommy's, too."

  "You took my necklace after I asked you not to and then lost it in London?" The brazen entitlement.

  "I can find it," she said. "And in the meantime, you're welcome to anything of mine." She gestured grandly.

  "You have to get it back to me," I said. "And my JASNA bag."

  "Maybe the bag's in my car." She threw her cigarette on the cement; I stopped walking and faced her as she stepped on it.

  "I'm serious, Bets. That necklace is one of the few things I have to remember my mother. She gave it to me; she's dead. She can't ever give me another necklace." It made me sick to think I might never see that necklace again, not only a necklace; but her wedding band, a gold pin she won in high school, and a baby ring, all melted down and reformed into the shape of a cross, a reminder for my sister and me of what our mother found to be important at the end of her life. Not a necklace; but my mother.

  "Tell you what," Bets said, lighting another cigarette. "If I can't find it, I'll give you my mother."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Suzanne, the tiny wardrobe lady, presided over the damp and musty second floor warehouse of costumes inherited from various sources, various sources being a euphemism for dead volunteers in period attire. She pulled an armful of dresses for Bets to try, while another actress changed behind a screen, throwing gowns into separate "take" and "no take" piles. Bets handed me her six-hundred-dollar designer purse and disappeared behind a screen. Maybe Bets could persuade the Wallet to rent china for our tea. Or sentence Bets to another season of Literature Live in exchange for china.

  "I can't wear this." Bets laughed. "I look like Granny in Little Red Riding Hood."

  The phone rang in Bets's purse.

  "Would you mind answering that?" Bets yelled, throwing a rejected gown over the screen.

  "She can't come to the phone right now," I said, rifling through the contents of her purse for anything I might recognize as my own.

  "Who is it?" Bets asked.

  I put the phone away. "Tommy," I said.

  "Shit, give me the phone." Bets charged out from behind the screen, reaching for her bag, the dress around her waist.

  The wardrobe lady said, "Oh dear," covering her mouth with her little hand.

  Bets swiped her purse from my hands. Her body featured artwork that no Jane Austen character had ever sported: a Celtic cross tattoo permanently inked above her left breast. "Forget this," she said, stepping completely out of the dress and leaving it on the floor while she pulled her shirt over her head.

  The wardrobe lady reached into a drawer and pulled out several very large white kerchiefs. "You'll have to wear these," she said, "like a shawl," but too late. Bets zipped her jeans, slid feet into her shoes, and ran out the door.

  "What about the dresses?" Suzanne called after her.

  Suzanne hauled the dresses out and between the two of us, we compared the remaining dresses to the one Bets had tried on, deciding which to take. I held each dress to my shoulder and looked in the mirror, pretending to admire the style and artistry but slyly appraising my own fit, calculating how much time Bets would need to reach the parking lot. I left with an armload of dresses, most of which would surely fit me, imagining Bets in her car. Walking back to my room, I gauged how long it would take her to get through the main drag of Hedingham. Opening the door to my room, I said a little prayer: Please let my roommate be AWOL.

  Inside, there was no sign of Bets.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  To proceed with my plan, I needed a copy of the script. For this, I walked to Newton Priors, all the while considering my favorite scenario: Bets goes to London, gets totally smashed, and sleeps through opening day. I would play Mary Crawford in her place, they would all realize how much better I was, and reassign Bets to play Chapman, the maid. The more I imagined, the more possible it seemed that with a little maneuvering from me, her part might be available tomorrow. But first, I must learn her lines. In the office, I lifted a script off Claire's credenza when she wasn't looking. Next, I needed a quiet place to memorize.

  I set off for the great church at the other end of the town where I had planned to go anyway for a little self-therapy. I could hide in the back row and stay as long as I pleased, communing with my mother, memorizing lines, escaping into Mary Crawford's character, without having to worry about meeting anyone I knew. I passed carriage lanterns and window boxes spilling creeper into the walk, strolled through a market where cheese, fish, and flowers were sold, and walked among people on foot, bicycle and open-top double-decker tour buses, toward the Anglican church whose spire towered over the town.

  Beyond the church's enormous wood door carved with shields and symbols, the cool air soothed and the upward momentum of the vaulted ceiling effected the sort of transcendence I experienced hearing Sixby's stage voice. People moved, coming and going, kneeling, consulting guides, oblivious to the liturgy, oblivious to the rapture occurring in the young woman staring at the ceiling. Walking over dead bodies under stone slabs, I slipped into an empty back pew and listened to the service in progress, seeking my favorite passages, but the sound was obscured by the time it reached the back of the enormous nave, competing with the white noise of air circulating through the mighty space.

  Kneeling, I recited the funeral liturgy in my head, All we go down to the dust, but I was unable to concentrate. Chips of colored glass jumbled together in the tremendous windows and Latin proclamations littered side walls. A stone body lay atop a bier in the midst of the crowd, hands clasped in prayer. How odd that this enormous structure, across the ocean, older than time, smelled just like my neighborhood church, musty as any Baptist basement back home. Yet I was unable to feel my mother's presence in this place. And since it would be really bad manners to actually pray for Bets to get smashed and sleep through opening day, I rested my elbows on the seatback in front of me, sat my rear on the edge of my bench, and evaluated my neighbors' accessories, one pew forward. Would the church loan us their china? My Jane Austen frowned at me, and I returned to my knees. Focusing forward, a little shock brought me to attention. In spite of my great distance from the front of the church, I sensed a familiar face. My memory sought an association. Gloomy setting laced with romantic hope? St. James's Church. Behind the rail of the sanctuary stood my church man. The same man who'd walked into the orientation meeting with Randolph--but now dressed in white robes and the collar of a priest. Was this church an extension of Literature Live, my church man playing Edmund at this moment? I was confused momentarily between reality and theatre.

  Who was this man?

  He came forward to read the Gospel, still too far away to see me. His reading voice sounded dignified and weighty, not dramatic like Sixby's. For just an instant, in the glare of the ancient words, the whole idea of Literature Live and enacting scenes seemed silly. My script lay abandoned on the pew while I tried to reconcile this priest with the guy lying on the pew in the dark church and the man with Randolph at orientation. The recessional hymn started and he slowly appro
ached my row. He sang the hymn as he walked, but he looked preoccupied as he had looked in the dark church. The woman ahead of me lifted her bright red purse and he looked our way. Our eyes met for an instant.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Time was running out to learn Bets's lines. I walked back by way of Newton Priors, hoping to find a secluded place to memorize lines. What I found was John Owen, the stair-jumping conservationist, holding court near an exterior window of the great house. Several students huddled to hear his urgent whisper, one of them trampling a lavender bed. Flourishing a pen-knife, John Owen plunged its tip into the undersurface of the window's sash where, to everyone's horror, it stuck. "What we have here, gentlemen," he whispered, "is paint failure."

  One of the students shook his head.

  "An open invitation to water," John Owen said, "and rot."

  Raising his binoculars, John Owen gazed upward beyond the second and third story windows toward the roof. Perhaps there was a quiet place up there to learn lines. Passing binoculars to the student on his left, he pointed to the roof, and our collective gaze traveled up. "A sound roof is the first line of defense against the number one enemy of an old house, which is"--and several of his students moved their lips as he whispered--"water."

  "Did water cause the damage around the chimney base?" one of the disciples asked.

  John Owen grabbed the binoculars. "Rot can be arrested," he said, looking carefully upward. "Let's go." The group followed John Owen up the fire escape--a symposium field trip. As they climbed, I noticed an orange electric cord hanging outside the building, emerging from a second floor window and entering a window on the third floor, the attic.

  Once the posse left, their bodies no longer blocked my view through the wavy glass and I could see the cast rehearsing in the ballroom. They appeared to be on break--or stuck. Magda yelled about rats' asses again. Upon closer inspection, my roommate appeared to be the cause of the fuss.

  Bets was still here. She hadn't gone to London.

  I wouldn't be able to take her part at the opening.