Mac’s voice faltered a trifle. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t of. But five bucks is five bucks. I ain’t so rich I could pass it up. I tried to find out what he wanted but he wouldn’t say. So I takes the five bucks, gets Lillian and goes for the beer.”
“Exactly what time was this?” I asked.
“Just after Mr. Troth and Mr. Gwynne and Miss Ffoulkes left. I didn’t stay over the bar for more’n few minutes. When I got back, you’d come down and was waiting here for me, telling me to ‘phone the ambulance for Mr. Comstock.”
“And you don’t know what this man wanted?”
“I don’t know nothing. When I leaves for the beer, he was standing right here. When I comes back, he’d gone.”
“And,” I said, “what did he look like?”
“Guess he was about middle height, dark with eyes that sort of went up at the sides. Come to think of it, he gives me his calling card. Didn’t pay much attention. But I got it here.”
He fumbled and produced a card which he handed me. I might have guessed it. In flourishing copperplate engraving the card said:
“Roland Gates.”
First the mysterious woman with a light tan fur, then Mr. Kramer, “the provocative dose,” then Mr. Roland Gates. That was all—nothing more than that.
I gulped. “I see,” I said.
But I didn’t. I didn’t see one damn solitary thing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I LEFT the doorman’s room. Even if he did have more crucial information up his shabby sleeve, I was in no fit state to hear it. Immediately outside, looking very beautiful and inquisitive, was Iris.
“You still here?” I asked.
“Of course, darling. You were going to teach me to slouch.” She drew me through the stage door, out of the doorman’s range of hearing. “I listened,” she said. “So Roland Gates was here at the theater last night.”
“Everyone was here at the theater last night,” I said drearily. “Everyone except Santa Claus.”
“And those rats, Peter, did someone really let them out of Eddie’s traps?”
“If anyone mentions rats I’ll scream,” I said. “I’m having the place fumigated. At least I don’t have to worry about rats.”
“But who could have let…?”
“Listen,” I said ferociously, “we are going to Sardot’s; we are going to have something to eat and we’re going to discuss the sex life of the bee.”
At Sardot’s Iris tried half-heartedly to discuss the sex life of the bee, but all too soon the conversation reached the birds and flowers stage and through that to our own sex lives and City Hall. Out of sheer self-protection, I had to change the subject.
After we’d eaten, I abandoned Iris to put in a belated appearance at my office. Now that rehearsals were suspended I had some time to catch up on the business side of my production.
Things were going at their usual hysterical high pressure when I reached Peter Duluth, Inc.‘s new and very swank offices on Fifth Avenue. The waiting-room was stuffed with its normal quota of histrionic hopefuls who were told at regular intervals by Miss Pink, my indomitable secretary, that Mr. Duluth was out of town, that he wasn’t doing any casting, that he was in conference.
I strode through the serried ranks, trying to look as if I were out of town and not casting and in conference. Behind me I heard the telephone shrill, heard Miss Pink’s bright voice proclaiming:
“I’m so sorry. Mr. Duluth is in conference. No there’s no casting today, no…”
I shut the door on her and dropped into a chair behind my desk, starting to glance through the mail. Instantly my business manager materialized from nowhere and began to shout at me about some calamity concerning electrical equipment; then my publicity agent arrived brandishing newspaper clippings and outlining a new press campaign. Like a series of punctuation marks in an interminable sentence, Miss Pink slipped in and out, being brisk and bringing checks to be signed. I signed them, all of them, and started shouting back at my business manager and my press agent. We all got very hot. But it was oddly comforting to find that here at the office, at least, Troubled Waters was being treated like an honest-to-goodness piece of merchandise that had to be peddled on Broadway, instead of a Grand Guignol vehicle-for ghosts, rats, murders and women with light tan furs.
At last I was left alone with the mail again. I was struggling with it when the door from the waiting-room burst open onto a whirlwind which seemed to consist largely of a mink coat, flying hands, red hair and a borzoi wolf hound. They all precipitated themselves at me.
“Peter, darling, I thought you’d be here, I’ve got to see you. It’s utterly important. The most terrible thing … Dmitri, darling, be an angelic dog and sit in the corner … you’ve got to do something about it, Peter. If he goes through with it he’ll be ruined as an actor, absolutely ruined… Don’t you agree?”
For the next few seconds the room was all Mirabelle and borzoi. One of them started barking, presumably the borzoi. I sat in patient silence while chaos reigned and then, somehow, the dog got chased into a corner where it squatted, lean and reproachful, its aristocratic nose supported on two thin paws. Mirabelle said, “Darling dog,” she tugged off her gloves, tossed back her hair, made a rush at me and seized both my hands.
“Darling, you mustn’t let him tear up his contract.” The husky voice torrented words at me. “You may say I’m selfish; that I want him for myself. I adore him, of course. But it isn’t that. It’s not even the play, though God knows what we’ll do if he walks out on us now. It’s Gerald himself. He’s too young.”
She dropped my hands, perched herself on the edge of my desk and lit a cigarette. Long before I’d recovered my breath, she was gripping my shoulders, gazing at me from ocean-green eyes, the amazing red hair swirling around her shoulders. She looked like something out of a myth—a dynamic dryad or a super-charged water nymph.
“Peter, darling, we’ve got to do something.” I said meekly: “Mirabelle, what are you talking about?”
“But, my angel, I told you! The wire came in this morning. Hollywood’s offering Gerald fifty thousand for one picture. He has three days to make up his mind.” Mirabelle’s hands did something beautiful and dramatic. “Don’t you see how Hollywood will ruin him? He’s only just out of a small town, Peter. I lived in a small town once. My God, I was even married in one before I came east to be an actress. I guess you never knew that. But it’s true. And I know how something glamorous like Hollywood, coming on top of that, completely demoralizes you. Gerald’s career means everything to me—everything. He’s being stubborn as hell. He won’t listen to me. He says he has some reason for having to get out of New York right away.” She looked earnest and rather dangerous. “But you’ve got to make him see sense, Peter. You’ve got to be tough as hell and hold him to his contract.”
I had recovered my breath now only to lose it again. Pelion seemed to be piling itself on Ossa that afternoon. As if things weren’t hellish enough without Hollywood’s trying to wheedle away my juvenile on the eve of the opening night!
“He can’t quit now,” I said. “It’d be damn disloyal to me. And it would be crazy anyway. If he holds out till we’re through with Troubled Waters, he’ll get a far bigger offer. I’ll talk to him.” I added without conviction: “I only hope he’ll listen.”
“Of course he’ll listen, angel. Everyone listens to you.” Mirabelle kissed me and started weaving around the room again as if every care in the world had slipped from her shoulders. That was typical of her. One second she was bowed to the earth with tragedy; the next, she had the earth under her arm. She said conversationally: “Didn’t Gerald mention anything about it to you when he saw you at Wessler’s this morning?”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “He was too busy being stinking rude to Wessler.”
I had meant that as a mild admonition and she took it that way. She threw away the cigarette and stared me straight in the eyes.
“You think I’m being damn childis
h about Wessler, don’t you? I am. I admit it. But I just can’t help it. Everything about him makes me see red. He’s so respectable and solid and enormous and—and that damn memory of his. It drives me crazy. There isn’t a face in the United States he hasn’t seen before—not a single face except mine.” She tossed her head derisively. “This morning he started remembering Henry. Henry! That unmemorable, subdued little chipmunk. But he doesn’t remember seeing me before. Oh, no. And I’ve only been plastered over the stage magazines for twenty years. That’s all, just twenty years.”
So her vanity was piqued because Wessler hadn’t gone through his “where-have-I-seen-you-before” routine with her. I wondered if that could possibly be the reason back of her dislike for him.
“But he’s a wonderful actor, Peter,” she was going on rapidly. “He plays better than I do. Maybe that’s why I’m so loathsome about him. Every time we’re on stage together, I feel he’s stifling me, obliterating me. I feel if I don’t fight back, there won’t be anything left, that I’ll be swallowed up.”
“Baloney!” I said. “You know you can stand up against anyone in the theater.”
“Peter, you’re divine to say that, but it’s not true.” The sting had gone out of her somehow. She looked pinched, rather frail. “He does something to me. He makes the play real. It follows me away from the theater so I can’t sleep at night, can’t get that damn voice of his out of my mind. I think I hate him.” She broke off, a strange catch in her voice. “God, I’m being neurotic.”
I’d never seen Mirabelle like that before. Usually, even in the darkest days after the divorce, she would have died rather than let anyone see her without control.
I said: “Darling, no one’s going to stop your hating anyone, if that’s the way you feel.” Since I seemed to be in a didactic mood, I added: “But I do think it might be a good idea to pipe down a bit. There wasn’t any point in sending Gerald around to be deliberately bad-mannered.”
She looked up sharply. “You mean this morning? When he went to get the brandy? Darling, I didn’t mean him to be bad-mannered. I swear it. I wasn’t trying to be nasty. It’s just that—that I wanted the brandy.”
“Yes,” I said, “I noticed the bottle was half full.” Her reply came too quickly, too breathlessly. “And I said it was empty last night, didn’t I, Peter? I know it. I’ve been feeling terrible about it. But, Peter, when Lionel —Lionel died like that, it was so sudden. My nerves went. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I was thinking of what he said about the mirror, all that. I was shot, Peter. That’s why I said the bottle was empty. I really thought it was.”
She sounded perfectly truthful. What she said made perfect sense. I wondered why I didn’t believe her.
She was still staring at me, her eyes remembering back. Then her expression changed, her mouth tightened as if she had something to say and was scared of saying it. She said abruptly:
“About Comstock’s part, Peter, why did you get that man to play it?”
I didn’t quite know what to say. I could hardly explain Lenz’s theory of Mr. Kramer and the “provocative dose.” And yet I was curious to find out just what was wrong between Mirabelle and Kramer.
“He’s Henry’s uncle,” I said guardedly. “And he offered to take over.” I added: “You know him, don’t you?”
Mirabelle’s eyes widened—a little too far. “Me know that man? Darling, don’t be too absurd. How could I know him?” She flushed slightly as if it had occurred to her that she was maybe protesting too much. She added quickly: “But, Peter, apart from anything else, you don’t want that man in the play. That’s what I came to tell you.”
“Not want him?” I echoed, agreeing fervently in my heart. “But why should we get rid of him? He did the part well.”
“I don’t give a damn how he played the part.” Mira-belle clutched my arm impulsively. “It’s just the part itself that’s wrong. You know it’s unlucky to have a coffin scene on stage. Comstock played it and he died, didn’t he? It’s jinxed. I know it’s jinxed. I want you to cut the role out altogether.”
“I may be superstitious,” I said, “but not that superstitious.”
“It’s not just superstition.” Mirabelle’s voice was urgent. “It’s a bad part, Peter. It’s melodramatic. It makes the first act top-heavy. It’s unnecessary.”
She started to tell me why. Mirabelle was always electric when she discussed plays, but this time she discharged as much dynamic energy as the T.V.A.
As a tempestuous climax to her argument, she snatched copies of the script from the table, dragged the impervious Miss Pink from the outer office and made us all three act the scene through, eliminating the dying business magnate. Miss Pink was incongruously allotted the Wessler role while I, for some reason, was Iris. Mirabelle played all the other parts.
It was one of those crazy, extemporary things that she did superbly. And she convinced me. Switched around her way with the Comstock character dying off-stage and never appearing, the scene wasn’t hokum any more. She’d tightened it where I’d never realized it was sloppy. She had lifted the whole act.
“There, darlings.” She tossed back her hair and beamed triumphantly at Miss Pink and me. “Isn’t that better? Tell me, darlings, isn’t that the way it should be?”
It was. And I admitted it, only reminding her that Henry, as author, had contractual rights to veto any alterations. That didn’t seem to bother her.
“I knew you’d realize,” she said. “Then it’s all right? You can tell that Mr. Marker or Kramer or whatever his name is to get the hell out.”
Mirabelle plunged into her old, overwhelming self for a moment, throwing the scripts on the table, kissing me, kissing the exiting Miss Pink and hurling herself at the borzoi who still squatted patiently in the corner.
And yet, I wasn’t quite deceived. Her suggested alteration was swell. But I knew she’d had only one reason in pushing it. She wasn’t basically interested in improving the first act. She was just desperately, madly keen to get Kramer out of the company—at all costs.
Things weren’t getting straightened out. They were just getting more and more tangled.
As soon as Miss Pink had gone, Mirabelle dropped her rather manufactured exuberance. She moved toward me, holding out her hands, her lips half parted, uncertain.
“Peter, we’ve got a wonderful play. A very wonderful play. We mustn’t let anything happen to spoil this.”
“How could anything spoil it?” I asked, thinking offhand of at least a dozen answers to that one.
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s all too good to be true. At last I’ve got a part that means everything for me. It’s the part I’ve always dreamed of playing— better than my dreams. You know those damn doctors told me I was crazy to leave the hospital. They said I’d crack if I took on another play. But I knew right away that Troubled Waters was one of those things that come and you’ve got to grab before it’s—it’s too late. I think I’d die, Peter, if anything happened to prevent me…”
She broke off, her hand moving suddenly to her cheek as if to brush away some invisible thing that had stung her. “Peter, there’s something I want you to tell me— honestly. I mean, honestly. Am I any good any more? Am I as good on the stage as I was when I was married to Roland?”
“You’re far better,” I said quietly, meaning it.
“Am I? Oh, am I, Peter? You wouldn’t lie, would you? I’d kill you if you lied. You see, I don’t really know any more.” Her eyes were suddenly naked, panic stricken. “How long did I live with Roland? Seven years. They were seven bad years, Peter. I hated him; I was scared of him. But I was acting well, we were acting well together. I thought somehow that just having him always there, loathing him, helped me—keyed me up so that I could really get into a part. A sort of escape, I suppose. That’s one reason I stuck by him so long.”
She moved the hand from her cheek and stared at it blindly. “Now I’ve cut all that away. I’m free. There isn’t any more
Roland. He’s a nightmare that’s gone. But something else has gone, too. At least I had roots with him, even if they were rooted in hate. Now I’m cut loose.
Peter, you won’t understand, but I’m afraid, hellishly afraid.”
She’d never talked that way about Gates before— never to anyone. Mirabelle who had always been indomitable, a tower of strength—it was horrible to see all that stark suffering in her and not be able to help. And I knew then that there was something wrong in her life, something far worse than any of us had guessed.
“Mirabelle, darling,” I said, “tell me what’s the matter. Tell me what you’re scared of. Is it Kramer? If it is, I’ll see him to hell.”
Her lips were trembling; there was a dazed, lost look in her eyes. Then she was in my arms, burying her face against my shoulder, clinging to me like a kid.
“It’s nothing, Peter, nothing that isn’t inside of me. It’s just that I’m scared I’m through. I’m washed up. I can’t take it any more.”
Anything I could have said would have seemed pretty futile. I just held that small, quivering body and wished with every ounce of my being that someone would start giving us all an even break.
I was only dimly conscious of raised voices in the office outside. Then one of them definitely became Miss Pink’s, loud, executive, saying: “Mr. Duluth’s busy. He mustn’t be disturbed.”
I heard another voice, soft, unrecognizable; then there was a scuffling. The door opened. I heard Miss Pink calling: “Please!” But the door shut her and her voice out The man who had entered stood with his back to it, his hands in the pockets of his black overcoat, his black hat tugged down over black, sardonic eyes.
He looked at us. “Dear me,” he said, “what a dramatic entrance.”
I had never been less prepared for anything than I was for the appearance of Roland Gates at that particular moment. My arm instinctively tightened around Mira-belle’s waist. I said quietly: “You better get out of here, Gates—right away.”
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