by M. L. Rio
I sneezed as if in response to his question, and there was a brief pause before we began suggesting topics.
Alexander: “Source material.”
Filippa: “Structure.”
Wren: “Imagery.”
Meredith: “Conflict, internal and external.”
Me: “Fate versus agency.”
James: “The tragic hero.”
Richard: “The tragic villain.”
Frederick held up a hand to stop us. “Good. Yes,” he said. “All of those things. We will, of course, touch on each of these plays—Troilus and Cressida and other problem plays included—but naturally we will begin with Julius Caesar. A question: Why is Caesar not a history play?”
James was first to answer, with characteristic academic eagerness. “The history plays are confined to English history.”
“Indeed,” Frederick said, and resumed his pacing. I sniffed, stirred my tea, and sat back in my chair to listen. “Most of the tragedies include some element of history, but what we choose to call ‘history’ plays, as James has said, are truly English history plays and are all named after English monarchs. Why else? What makes Caesar first and foremost a tragedy?”
My classmates exchanged curious glances, unwilling to offer the first hypothesis and risk being wrong.
“Well,” I ventured, when nobody else spoke, my voice thick with congestion, “by the end of the play most of the major characters are dead, but Rome is still standing.” I stopped, struggling to articulate the idea. “I think it’s more about the people and less about the politics. It’s definitely political but if you look at it next to, I don’t know, the Henry VI cycle, where everybody’s just fighting over the throne, Caesar’s more personal. It’s about the characters and who they are, not just who’s in power.” I shrugged, unsure whether I’d managed to make any part of my point.
“Yes, I think Oliver is onto something,” Frederick said. “Permit me to pose another question: What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends?”
It wasn’t the sort of question that needed an answer, so no one replied. Frederick was watching me, I realized, with the proud, fatherly affection he usually reserved for James—who gave me a faint but encouraging smile when I glanced across the table.
“That,” Frederick said, “is where the tragedy is.” He looked around at all of us, hands folded behind his back, the midday sunlight glinting on his glasses. “So. Shall we begin?” He turned to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk from the tray, and began to write. “Act I, Scene 1. A street. We open with the tribunes and the commoners. What do you suppose is significant about that? The cobbler has a battle of wits with Flavius and Murellus, and upon further questioning introduces our eponymous hero-tyrant…”
We rummaged around in our bags to find notebooks and pens, and as Frederick carried on, we scribbled down almost his every word. The sun warmed my back and the bittersweet scent of black tea drifted up into my face. I stole furtive glances at my classmates as they wrote and listened and occasionally posed questions, struck by how lucky I was to be among them.
SCENE 7
Convocation was traditionally held in the gold-spangled music hall on the ninth of September, Leopold Dellecher’s birthday. (He’d moved north from Chicago and had the house built sometime in the 1850s. It wasn’t turned into a school until a half century later, when the upkeep proved to be too much for the rapidly shrinking Dellecher family.) Had old Leopold somehow evaded death, he would have been turning one hundred and eighty-seven. An enormous cake with exactly that many candles was waiting upstairs in the ballroom to be cut and distributed to students and staff following Dean Holinshed’s welcome speech.
We sat on the left side of the aisle, in the middle of a long row filled in by second- and third-years. The theatre students, always the loudest and most likely to laugh, sat behind the instrumental and choral music students (who kept mostly to themselves, apparently determined to perpetuate the stereotype that they were the most complacent and least approachable of the seven Dellecher disciplines). The dancers (a collection of underfed, swan-like creatures) sat behind us. On the opposite side of the aisle sat the studio art students (easily identified by their unorthodox hairstyles and clothing perpetually spattered with paint and plaster), the language students (who spoke almost exclusively in Greek and Latin to one another and sometimes to other people), and the philosophy students (who were by far the weirdest but also the most amusing, prone to treating every conversation as a social experiment and tossing off words like “hylozoism” and “compossibility” as if they were as easily comprehensible as “good morning”). The staff sat in a long line of chairs on the stage. Frederick and Gwendolyn perched side by side like an old married couple, conversing quietly with their neighbors. Convocation was one of the rare times that we all melted together, a sea of people in what we all knew as “Dellecher blue,” because nobody wanted to call it “peacock.” School colors were not, of course, mandatory, but nearly everyone was wearing the same blue sweater, with the coat of arms stitched above the left breast. A larger version of the family crest hung on a banner behind the podium—a white saltire on a blue field, a long gold key and a sharp black quill crossed like swords in the foreground. Below was the motto: Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.
As always, it was one of the first things Holinshed said at convocation.
“Good evening, everyone. Per aspera ad astra.” He had appeared onstage from the shadows of the wings, a spotlight on his face striking the rest of us into silence. “Another new year. To the first-years among you I must simply say welcome, and that we are delighted to have you. To the second-, third-, and fourth-years, welcome back, and congratulations.” Holinshed was a strange man—tall but stooped, quiet but forceful. He had a large hooked nose, wispy copper hair, and little square glasses so thick that they magnified his eyes to three times their natural size. “If you are sitting in this room tonight,” he said, “it means you have been accepted into the esteemed Dellecher family. Here you will make many friends, and perhaps a few enemies. Do not let the latter prospect frighten you—if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely. And that is what I wish to discourage.” He paused, chewed on his words for a moment.
“He’s gone a bit off the wall,” Alexander muttered.
“Well, he has to recycle his speeches at least every four years,” I whispered. “Can you blame him?”
“At Dellecher, I encourage you to live boldly,” Holinshed continued. “Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets. You have come to Dellecher because you prized something above money, above convention, above the kind of education that can be evaluated on a numeric scale. I do not hesitate to tell you that you are remarkable. However”—his expression darkened—“our expectations are adjusted to match your enormous potential. We expect you to be dedicated. We expect you to be determined. We expect you to dazzle us. And we do not like to be disappointed.” His words boomed through the hall and hung in the air like an odorous vapor, invisible but impossible to ignore. He let the unnatural quiet linger far too long, then abruptly leaned back from the podium and said, “Some of you have joined us at the end of an era, and when you leave you will be emerging into not only a new decade and a new century, but a new millennium. We plan to prepare you for it as best we can. The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.”
His gaze settled unmistakably on us, the seven fourth-year thespians.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” he said. “On such a full sea are we now afloat, / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures. Ladies and gentlemen, never waste a moment.” Holinshed smiled dreamily, then checked his watch. “And on the subject o
f waste, there is an enormous cake upstairs that needs devouring. Goodnight.”
And he was gone from the stage before the audience could even begin to clap.
SCENE 8
It was a week before anything else interesting happened. After Frederick’s class (where a discussion of the fine line between homosocial and homoerotic in the infamous “tent scene” had us all teetering between amusement and embarrassment), we descended the stairs together, complaining of our hunger. The refectory—once the Dellecher family’s grand dining room—was crowded at noon, but our usual table was empty and waiting.
“I’m fucking starving,” Alexander declared, attacking his plate before the rest of us had even sat down. “Drinking all that damn tea makes me feel ill.”
“Maybe if you ate breakfast that wouldn’t happen,” Filippa said, watching with disgust as he shoveled mashed potatoes into his mouth.
Richard arrived late, with an envelope in his hand, which he’d already opened. “There’s mail,” he said, and sat down at the end of the table between Meredith and Wren.
“For all of us?” I asked.
“I’d expect so,” he said, without looking up.
“I’ll go,” I said, and a few of them muttered their thanks at me as I stood. Our mailboxes were at the end of the refectory, and I found my name first on the wall of little wooden cubbies. Filippa’s was closest to mine, then James, and the rest were increasingly spread out at the far ends of the alphabet. The same square envelope waited in each of our mailboxes, our names written on the front in Frederick’s small, elegant script. I took them back to the table and passed them around.
“What are they?” Wren asked.
“Dunno,” I said. “We can’t be getting midterm speech assignments yet, can we?”
“No,” Meredith said, already tearing into hers. “It’s Macbeth.”
The rest of us immediately stopped talking and ripped our own envelopes open.
A few traditional performances took place every year at Dellecher. While the weather was warm, the art students re-created van Gogh’s Starry Night with sidewalk chalk. In December the language students did a reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in Latin. The philosophy students rebuilt their Ship of Theseus every January and held a symposium in March, while the choral and instrumental students did Don Giovanni on Valentine’s Day and the dancers performed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in April. The theatre students did scenes from Macbeth on Halloween and scenes from Romeo and Juliet at the Christmas masque. Because the first-, second-, and third-years were barely involved, I had no idea how they were cast.
I broke the seal on my envelope and pulled out a card that bore five more lines of Frederick’s tiny writing:
Please be at the trailhead at a quarter to midnight on Halloween.
Come prepared for Act I, Scene 3, and Act IV, Scene 1.
You will be playing BANQUO.
Report to the costume shop at 12:30 p.m. on October 18th for a costume fitting.
Do not discuss this with your peers.
I stared at it, wondering if there had been some clerical error. I checked the envelope again, but it said, unmistakably, Oliver. I glanced up at James to see if he had noticed anything unusual, but his face was blank. I would have expected him to be playing Banquo to Richard’s Macbeth.
“Well,” Alexander said, looking faintly bemused, “I take it we’re not supposed to talk about this.”
“No,” Richard said. “It’s tradition. The Christmas masque is the same, we’re not meant to know who’s playing whom before the performance.” I had momentarily forgotten that he’d played Tybalt the previous year.
I struggled to read the girls’ faces. Filippa seemed unsurprised. Wren looked excited. Meredith, slightly suspicious.
“Do we get to rehearse at all?” Alexander asked.
“No,” Richard said again. “You’ll get a cue script in your mailbox tomorrow. Then you just learn your lines and show up. Excuse me.” He pushed his chair back and left the table without another word. Wren and Meredith exchanged a quizzical look.
Meredith: “What’s wrong with him?”
Wren: “He was fine half an hour ago.”
Meredith: “Do you want to go or should I?”
Wren: “Be my guest.”
Meredith left the table with a sigh, her shepherd’s pie only half eaten. Alexander, who had finished his own, had the good grace to wait a full three seconds before he said, “You think she’s coming back for that?”
James pushed the plate at him. “Eat it, you savage.”
I glanced over my shoulder. In the corner by the coffee urns, Meredith had caught Richard and was listening to him talk with a hard frown. She touched his arm, said something, but he shrugged away and left the refectory, confusion hanging like a shadow over his eyes. She watched him go, then returned to the table to tell us he had a migraine and was going back to the Castle. Apparently oblivious to the fact that her plate had gone missing, she sat down again.
As lunch dragged on, I ate and listened to the others talk, lamenting the volume of lines they had to learn for Caesar before off-book day, which was another week away. The envelope felt heavy in my lap. I watched James across the table. He was quiet, too, not really listening to the conversation. I looked from him to Meredith to Richard’s empty chair, and couldn’t help feeling that the balance of power had somehow shifted.
SCENE 9
Combat class was held after lunch in the rehearsal hall. We dragged battered blue mats out of the storage closet, spread them on the floor, and began to stretch halfheartedly, waiting for Camilo. Camilo—a young Chilean guy whose dark beard and gold earring made him look a bit like a pirate—was our fight choreographer, personal trainer, and movement coach. Second- and third-year movement classes were devoted to dance, clowning, animal work, and all the basic gymnastics an actor might need. First semester of fourth year was devoted to hand-to-hand combat, second semester to swordplay.
Camilo arrived at exactly one o’clock and, because it was a Monday, lined us all up to be weighed.
“You’ve put on five pounds since start of term,” he said, when I stepped on the scale. He’d been pleased with my progress over the summer, even if Gwendolyn hadn’t. “Are you sticking to the program I gave you?”
“Yes,” I said, which was mostly true. I was supposed to be running, lifting, eating well, and not drinking much. We unanimously ignored Camilo’s responsible drinking policy.
“Good. Keep at the weights, but don’t kill yourself.” He leaned closer, as if to share a secret. “It’s fine for Richard to look like the Hulk, but frankly you don’t have the metabolism for it. Keep your protein intake up and you’ll be lean and mean.”
“Great.” I stepped off the scale and let Alexander—who was taller than I was but always too skinny because he couldn’t stop smoking or wake up in time for breakfast—take my place. I eyed my reflection in the long mirrors on the wall opposite the windows. I was fit enough, but I wanted a little more weight, a little more muscle. I stretched and glanced at James, who was the smallest of us boys—barely five ten, slim but not skinny. There was something almost catlike about him, a kind of primal agility. (For animal work, Camilo had assigned him the leopard. He spent a month prowling around our room in the dark before he was sufficiently absorbed in the role to pounce on me in my sleep. I spent the next half hour waiting for my heart to stop hammering while I assured him that, yes, my cry of terror had been entirely genuine.)
“No Richard today?” Camilo asked, when Alexander stepped off the scale.
“He’s not feeling well,” Meredith said. “Migraine.”
“Pity,” Camilo said. “Well, we must carry on without him.” He stood looking down at the six of us, sitting like ducklings in a neat little row on the edge of the mat. “What did we finish with last week?”
Filippa: “Slaps.”
Camilo: “Yes. Remind me of the rules.”
Wren: “Make sure you’re not too
close. Make eye contact with your partner. Turn your body to hide the nap.”
Camilo: “And?”
James: “Always use a flat, open hand.”
Camilo: “And?”
Meredith: “You have to sell it.”
Camilo: “How?”
Me: “Sound effects are most convincing.”
“Perfect,” Camilo said. “I think we’re ready to try something with a little more force. Why don’t we learn the backhand?” He cleared his throat, cracked his knuckles. “The backhand—you can do this with your fist or a flat hand, depends what you’re going for—is different from a straight slap because you should never cross the body.”
“How do you mean?” Meredith asked.
“James, may I borrow you?” Camilo said.
“Certainly.” James climbed to his feet and let Camilo position him so they were standing face-to-face. Camilo extended his arm so the tip of his middle finger was a hairsbreadth from the end of James’s nose.
“When you slap someone, you have to move your hand across the middle of their body.” He moved his hand across James’s face in slow motion, without touching him. James turned his head in the same direction. “But with a backhand, you don’t want to do that. Instead, my hand is going to go straight up along his side.” Camilo’s right fist moved vertically from his left hip up past the crown of James’s head. “See? One long straight line. You don’t ever want to cross the face doing this because you could just about take somebody’s face off. But that’s all there is to it. Shall we try it full speed? James, I’ll have you do the nap.”
“All right.”
They locked eyes, and James gave Camilo a little nod. Camilo’s arm flashed across the space between them, and there was a solid crack as James smacked his own thigh and lurched away. It happened so fast it was impossible to tell they’d never made contact.