Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  Maybe the boys on the dorm were using some kind of incense to which she was allergic. Or maybe they had transmitted to her some obscure virus, one to which males were naturally immune.

  He was tempted to fall into a metaphysical depression. Was he himself the cause of her troubles? By flouting the gods, by marrying this lovely young woman, had he aroused their anger, triggered their punishment? Which old culture warned that it was unwise to find a perfect love, for such a love would make the gods jealous?

  Not fair, he corrected himself. Theirs was not a tragic story of star-crossed lovers; it was about the princess who kissed the frog. She kissed him and found that he remained a frog, and she married him anyway. The conventions of the story demanded that she get well.

  Or at least that she avoid suffering.

  The worst would be some lingering illness. Horace Somerville had spoken to Warden’s most private fears today when he had talked about the speed of his son Alfred’s death. To watch Cynthia gradually fade, to lose her beauty and her spark, that would be unbearable. Warden had been through that with both parents in the past decade—the months of increasing debilitation, the convulsions, the trips to the hospital, the remissions, the many false assumptions that, at last, it would be over this time, the final relief mingled with guilt and grief and emptiness.

  Denial, anger, depression, bargaining.

  What kind of bargain would he make to get her well? Sell his soul, like Faustus, to the devil? If only he believed in voodoo or black magic, then he could track down the shaman who was responsible for Cynthia’s illness and steal his magic. Instead, he had to rely on the local witch doctor.

  Upstairs in Fleming Hall he sat at his desk and stared at the empty surface. What was he here for? Had he meant to come here, or was he going to the gym for his workout? He would remember in a moment. Right now he wanted to start a poem, something about superstitions and scapegoats.

  Something religious: death in life, the dying god.

  The death of one so that another might live?

  SCENE 13

  At 9:15, Thomas Boatwright finished Act I of Othello and should have started on his biology lab report. He and Greg had spent an uninterrupted hour studying. It had been a comfortable silence between them, and Thomas was ready for a break. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bag of corn chips.

  “Less than an hour till I can call Hesta,” he said.

  Greg put down his pen and took some chips. “She called you before study hall,” he said. “I meant to tell you earlier.”

  The heart did the usual double-pump, and then the disappointment took over. Damn, if he’d been on dorm, he could have talked to her. “What’d she say?”

  “Nothing. Said she’d call back.”

  “Who’s on duty in this building tonight?” Thomas said.

  “Nathan Somerville.”

  That was a relief at least. The fifteen seniors on the honor council were dispersed among all the dormitories. They were almost like faculty members at times, making sure rooms stayed clean and rules were obeyed, but since they weren’t faculty members, they tended to go a little easier on you if they caught you breaking a rule. If you were on the phone during study hours, say, and somebody like Mr. Somerville was on duty, he would stick you with demerits for sure, but if it was his grandson, Nathan, you’d probably get by with just a warning. You were also supposed to consult with your councilman if you ran into any trouble on the dorm. It was the biggest honor at Montpelier to be a councilman—and also the biggest pain, since the faculty expected you to be a perfect citizen and the students expected you to cut them a break.

  “You think I should ask Nathan for permission to call Hesta?”

  “You won’t be able to get through at Mason anyway,” said Greg. “They got study hours, too.” He took more chips.

  He was right. And if Coach McPhee came back through on his rounds and saw Thomas on the phone, he’d probably kill him on the spot.

  “You know what Mr. McPhee was telling me before you came in?” said Greg. “He and his wife split up.”

  “She’s not living here anymore?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Michael?”

  “She took him, too.”

  “When?”

  Greg told him that it had happened over the Thanksgiving holidays. She’d taken off and gone back to Boston. She’d packed up all her clothes, too, and her books and her pictures and all her cameras, and she’d already found some work in Boston back at the photographer’s studio where she used to work before they got married.

  “Why’d she leave?” asked Thomas.

  “He wouldn’t say. He said he’d flown up to Boston over the weekend to try to talk her out of it.”

  Thomas considered the implications. “I bet it was because of Michael,” he said. “I think Michael was really jealous of him. He didn’t like Coach McPhee much.”

  “That boy was crazy. He had himself the perfect stepdad.” Everybody knew about McPhee: how he’d played college ball and then pro ball in Italy. He’d come back and gone to grad school at Georgetown and had started coaching basketball at Capital City Prep. Two years ago he had come to Montpelier, and everybody said he was a better basketball coach than Mr. Delaney. Just last summer he’d gotten married to a widow from Boston with a fifteen-year-old son, a guy nobody knew very well.

  “Michael was weird,” said Thomas. “I asked him if he’d be going out for basketball one time. He said he’d deflated his basketball and thrown it away after he’d moved to Montpelier. Like this was some big statement.”

  Greg agreed that the coach was much more likeable than the kid. “I talked to him once,” he said. “The guy complained because he didn’t have a dorm room. I’m talking like, boy, count your blessings. Can you imagine not wanting to live in that apartment? No phone restrictions, TV anytime?”

  “They should have sent him to another school,” said Thomas. “We don’t need guys like that here.”

  Then Thomas started to think: What if Hesta had been calling to tell him that she couldn’t come down this weekend after all? What if what had happened to Mr. McPhee and his wife were part of some epidemic or something, with all women breaking up with all men?

  Greg brushed the chip crumbs off his fingers and began to unroll a blueprint on the desktop. Thomas asked him what it was for.

  “Art,” said Greg. “This is my project. You recognize the building?”

  Thomas couldn’t recognize anything. It seemed to be about five buildings, all the same shape, like a stretched-out, squared-off horseshoe. Then he realized that it was five stories of the same building.

  “It’s Stringfellow,” he said. “Where’s our room?”

  Greg pointed to a small square on the right-hand wing of the third horseshoe.

  “There’s the bathroom,” said Greg. “And there’s the common room. You notice something funny here?” He pointed to a large open space at the end of the hall.

  “Where’s Mr. Carella’s apartment?”

  Greg said that was the point. These blueprints were from 1928, and Mr. Carella’s apartment hadn’t been carved out yet. “That was a reading room and a library,” said Greg. “Mr. Delaney told us about it today in class.”

  That was pretty interesting, Thomas had to admit.

  “So what’s your project?” he asked.

  “Architecture,” said Greg. “I’m supposed to figure out from the plans of the buildings on campus where a secret escape tunnel might be built.”

  “A secret escape tunnel?”

  “Sure,” said Greg, “in case the Indians or the slaves or the Revenuers started getting too close to home.”

  Thomas was starting to remember something. He didn’t reply.

  Greg spoke in the same neutral tone. “Slaves, man. That was a joke.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking about Revenuers.”

  Greg said the tunnel was supposed to connect Stringfellow Hall with the Homestead.

  “Un
der the Quad?” said Thomas.

  “That’s what Delaney said.”

  They looked at the blueprint for half a minute in silence.

  “So,” said Greg. “There’s my art project. Why are you thinking about bootleg whiskey all of a sudden?”

  He told Greg about the staggering figure leaving Bradley Hall this afternoon. “It looked like he was drunk. You don’t think Farnham was drinking, do you? A surly drunk?”

  “Get real,” said Greg.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Somebody looked drunk?” said Greg. “Somebody not walking right?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “All bundled up in a bunch of clothes?”

  “That’s him,” said Thomas. “You know who it was?”

  “Yeah,” said Greg. “It’s not a him. It was Mrs. Warden. She got there at the end of rehearsal. Everybody else was gone. Farnham was talking to me about working on my character, but when she showed up, he sent me on home.”

  “But why would Mrs. Warden be drunk?”

  “She wasn’t drunk,” said Greg. “She just wasn’t walking right.”

  “You think she hurt herself?” said Thomas.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Or,” said Thomas, “maybe she’d been down there earlier, and Farnham had blown up and had hit her with a board, and she was limping because of the injury.”

  “Get real.”

  “Well, it’s possible,” said Thomas.

  “Maybe she told him something that got him mad,” said Greg. “Maybe she told him she didn’t want to be his lover anymore.”

  “She’s not his lover,” said Thomas.

  “It’s possible,” said Greg.

  “She’s not his lover.”

  “Okay,” said Greg. “Don’t get mad.”

  Thomas had surprised himself with the vehemence of his response. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said. He pulled out his book of lab reports.

  “Did you finish Act I?” Greg asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  Greg paused. “So when Iago says that stuff about ‘the beast with two backs,’ is he talking about, you know, doing it?”

  “You got it,” said Thomas.

  “I couldn’t believe Shakespeare would talk so much about sex,’’ said Greg. “I thought it meant something more serious.”

  Thomas said he thought there was nothing more serious than sex.

  “Tell me about this speech here,” said Greg, “where Desdemona is talking to her father.”

  Thomas said he’d be glad to.

  And he was pleased to realize that he meant it. Coach McPhee would be proud when he returned to check on them. He had asked Thomas to do his homework and to find out about Greg’s art project, and Thomas had followed his orders.

  But Patrick McPhee did not return to speak to them that night. He got sidetracked by the death of Russell Phillips.

  SCENE 14

  My noble father,

  I do perceive here a divided duty:

  To you I am bound for life and education;

  My life and education both do learn me

  How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;

  I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my husband,

  And so much duty as my mother show’d

  To you, preferring you before her father,

  So much I challenge that I may profess

  Due to the Moor my lord.

  Warden was reading the lines to Cynthia in their bedroom. He was fully dressed in gray woolen trousers, white shirt, and tie, while she wore a blue flannel nightgown. He sat on the bed and leaned back on the headboard while he read; she lay supine beneath the covers. The bright, hard winter sunshine of Tuesday morning provided plenty of light for the reading.

  “My noble father,” echoed Cynthia, “I do perceive here a double duty—”

  “Divided duty,” said Warden.

  “‘I do perceive here a divided duty,’” said Cynthia. “I should have known that from the meter. Da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum. Da. Iambic pentameter with a little extra syllable at the end.”

  “Go on.”

  “My life and education both do teach me—”

  “Learn me,’’ said Warden.

  “No wonder the neoclassicists rewrote Shakespeare,’’ said Cynthia. “His grammar was terrible.”

  “Start again.”

  She said the speech aloud and corrected those errors but committed two others.

  “Not bad,” said Warden.

  “She sounds like Cordelia,” said Cynthia.

  “So she does.” This was Othello, and Cordelia was in Lear, but the principle was the same: a daughter who understood love better than her father did, and who was soon cursed by her father for her supposed disloyalty and ingratitude. And both died at the end of their plays. The canniness of his wife’s insight was what hurt Warden the most. She was so talented, so smart, so good; she should be finishing her doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare and publishing and acting and enjoying life till she was one hundred and fifty years old.

  “How much time do we have?” Cynthia asked. The question startled him. Then he realized that she was asking about their departure.

  It was 8:45 A.M. “Another forty-five minutes,” he said. Montpelier School was on a rolling schedule stretching over six days of the week, so that no class met at the same time each day. Warden’s first class on Tuesday did not meet until 9:30, when he would walk over to Fleming Hall, tell the students their assignment, and then drive Cynthia to the hospital.

  “Did you finish grading your papers?” she said.

  “Finally, this morning, yes,” he said. “I spent an hour looking around that classroom for them, and they were here all the time.”

  She reminded him that he had already told her about his error twice. “Are you tired of reading?” she asked.

  He said he was absolutely not tired of reading. How could he be, when he was reading his favorite writer to his favorite audience?

  She had woken with blurred vision in both eyes. They had not panicked; she was going to the hospital soon, where the doctors would make her well. In the interim, she was going ahead with learning her lines. She was not going to allow her eyes to prevent her from playing Desdemona.

  “Do you know why I’m writing about this play?” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it reminds me of us,” she said. “The father who objects to his daughter’s marriage, the older man marrying the younger woman.”

  Warden had not missed the parallels himself. “The fair young woman marrying the man with the sooty face.”

  “Your face is not sooty,” said Cynthia. “It’s rubicund.”

  Warden touched the mark on his face without thinking. “I was paranoid when I first met you,” he said. “I thought you were trifling with me. I assumed you had some ulterior motive.”

  Cynthia reached up and took his hand from his face. “What do you mean?” she said. “I had a very ulterior motive. I wanted to marry my teacher.” She kissed his open palm.

  “I hate my face,” said Warden. “I wish I could give you a face you deserve.”

  “‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,’” said Cynthia. “Desdemona and Othello truly loved each other, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we truly love each other, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Warden.

  “Then how could he kill her? Could you even imagine killing me?”

  “Stop it,” he said. He pulled his hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s this vertigo. It makes me just the tiniest bit off plumb.”

  But her question brought the play into focus for him as if he had never understood it before. Othello adored Desdemona, and she him. And yet he killed her. In their bed. At night, when he should have been making love to her. The scene of her death was as familiar to Othello and Desdemona as this bedroom was to Warden and Cynthia—the most intimate, the most privat
e, the most personal room of the house. Desdemona lay in bed and begged her husband to investigate her story, to believe her, to trust her as she had trusted him, but he proceeded to kill her nonetheless. He was jealous, under the spell of the green-eyed monster that lurks in wait to feed on love. He loved her so much that he killed her.

  Warden thought of Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” told by a madman who killed his mistress at the moment she expressed her greatest love for him, so that such a love could never be diminished. He imagined himself, even now, putting down the book, leaning over, and taking his wife’s throat in his own large hands and squeezing the life out of her. Would she fight? Would she protest? Or would she simply look at him in understanding that he was killing her because he loved her so much, because he could not stand the thought of her living with some terrible virus inside her, nibbling away at her insides, stealing her energy away. The sickness knew her in a place where even Warden could not go. He was jealous of her disease.

  He shuddered.

  “You have given me the worst sorts of nightmares,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  It was warm and bright in the bedroom. He lifted the white-covered Signet paperback and looked for his place. Cynthia interrupted him.

  “Othello must have killed people in the course of his career, don’t you think?” said Cynthia. “He was a general. He had had a long life of adventure. It was hearing about all those adventures that attracted Desdemona to him. She was attracted to him because he was a killer.”

  Warden accused her of deliberately misreading the text. “She was attracted to him because of his nobility, his courage, his valor,” he said.

  “So killing people was noble?”

  “For the right cause, of course.”

  “Would you kill someone for the right cause?” she asked.

  “It would have to be a very good cause,” said Warden.

  “Would you kill someone if it would cure me of cancer?”

  “Cynthia.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m doing it again. We don’t know that it’s cancer.”

  Warden reached over and caressed her neck.

  “It could be nothing,” he said. “Some tropical bug you got off a papaya in the Safeway.”