Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries)

by T'Gracie Reese

  Important to each actor, Nina could finally see, was only position.

  To the right of Laertes and just slightly between his shoulder and the audience.

  Now circling him…

  …coming to a stop just there, stage right, so that Laertes must bend slightly to hear.

  Now in motion again, making circular gestures with a long staff that he was not actually carrying at the time.

  And all the time Clifton Barrett, some ten feet away, looking hard into Polonius’ eyes, then turning and gazing at the balcony, from which Nina could see, from time to time, behind the great green eyes, a positive hand wave or an encouraging gesture.

  Until, those last great lines:

  “This above all—to thine own self be true…”

  And, while saying this line, this crucially important line—Polonius forgot where to go.

  He hesitated ever so slightly, and stepped to his right.

  Pause.

  Voice from the balcony:

  “No. J32.”

  There was silence onstage for a moment.

  Finally Clifton Barrett pursed his lips and said quietly, to the man who was standing no more than three feet from him.

  “Do you understand J32?”

  “Yes, Clifton.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  A slight smile, then a nod.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, Clifton.”

  “Point it out for me, please.”

  Absolute silence in the theater.

  The sound of Polonius’ feet as he turned, pointing to a spot on the stage behind him.

  “There.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, Clifton.”

  “Are you sure you understand what you’re supposed to do, and where you’re supposed to go?”

  “I do.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You definitely do? Because you didn’t, only some seconds ago. Where did you think you were going?”

  Silence.

  The question repeated:

  “Where the hell did you think you were going?”

  “Sorry Clifton.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Yes. Won’t happen again.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  ‘Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I’m certain.”

  “That’s good! That’s good to hear.”

  Then Clifton Barrett took a long step forward and bellowed straight into the man’s face, which now had begun to blush vividly:

  “Because we open IN TWELVE DAYS, YOU BUFFOON!”

  Silence again, except for the shout, echoing through the theater.

  “If you want us to run through it again, Clifton…”

  A shake of the head.

  “No. You obviously don’t know what you’re doing. Let’s move on.”

  And they did.

  Oh my God, thought Nina.

  Oh my God.

  Clifton Barrett nodded to Laertes, who said:

  “most humbly do I take my leave, my Lord.”

  Somehow, the actor who was to play his father, and who had just been completely humiliated, managed to go on, replying gamely:

  “The time invites you. Go your servants tend.”

  Laertes to Helen Reddington:

  “Farewell, Ophelia; and remember well what I have said to you.”

  To which Helen, replying:

  “This in my memory locked; and you yourself shall keep the key of it.”

  Laertes:

  “Farewell.”

  Laertes exits, stage left.

  Polonius:

  “What is’t Ophelia, he has said to you?”

  Ophelia:

  “So please you, something touching…”

  Voice from the balcony:

  “No.”

  Silence.

  The voice again:

  “No, it’s K-14. It’s K-14, Helen.”

  No one breathing.

  Two steps from Clifton Barrett, who was now standing directly before his wife.

  And with a quick deft motion, his right arm jerking upward, he slapped her hard on the right cheek.

  POP.

  “Oh!”

  Nina did not know if the short burst of air and sound had come from herself, or from the collective crew, or from Helen, who now stood motionless as the statue she had been to begin the scene—

  ––or from Hope Reddington, whose hands now covered her mouth, and whose eyes were wide with horror.

  Clifton Barrett wheeled, leapt down from the stage, and strode out of the theater.

  And that, Nina thought to herself, explains the rouge.

  They sat there for some instants.

  There was nothing to do.

  Finally, Helen having disappeared backstage, and the various crews beginning to mill and worry and chatter as they had been doing, Hope said quietly:

  “Perhaps we should go now, Nina.”

  “Yes. Good idea.”

  They rose and made their way out of the theater, then out of the mansion, then into a waiting huge car driven by one of the ubiquitous ladies who always seemed prepared to drive Hope—and anyone with Hope—anywhere she needed to go.

  “So how was the rehearsal?” said the woman driving.

  “Oh fine,” said Hope, who seemed perfectly at ease.

  “Hope––” began Nina, not knowing exactly where she was going with whatever it was she was going to say to an eighty year old woman who’d just seen her granddaughter physically assaulted…

  …but she did not have to say anything, for Hope interrupted her like a cheerful little blue and babbling stream flowing into a muddy and stagnant river.

  “It’s remarkable,” she said, “how complicated it all is. All of the things they have to remember.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Thank you for coming with me, Nina.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  “I hope we were not in the way.”

  “I’m sure we weren’t.”

  Then they were silent.

  They remained silent until the car disgorged both of them; Nina made sure Hope was safely in the house; the two women had made the necessary conversation leading to parting; and Nina found herself, Vespa putt-putting dependably along, traversing the Mean Streets of Bay St. Lucy.

  Oh my God oh my God oh my God, she found herself thinking, while wondering whether to turn on Coastal Boulevard or keep sputtering along Bay Drive or stop and get coffee somewhere—or just drive straight into the sea and drown and get the whole thing over with.

  What could Hope be thinking now?

  Nina, Nina, Nina…

  …Nina, should you have left the woman alone to wander up the stairs into that bedroom to stare at the pictures of a sixteen year old girl who had at one time seen her entire life in front of her?

  …but what could you have said, if you had stayed?

  What was there to be said?

  That slap—a brutal slap, the sound of it having echoed through the space, as it was echoing now through Nina’s brain––

  ––and the thing about it that was worse, that being the knowledge that it was almost certainly not the only one of its kind.

  There had been others before it.

  There before her loomed Margot’s shop, and there out of the shop loomed Margot, who, perceiving Nina, smiled and waved and thus brought back into the world some semblance of normality.

  “How did it go?”

  She parked the Vespa, locked it, stored her helmet, and straightened.

  Margot was about to get into her Volkswagen.

  “How was the rehearsal, Nina?”

  It was, she did not say, the worst single experience of my entire life. She continued not saying, I don’t think I will ever get over it. Furthermore, she did not add, I’m going to be sick to my stomach and I may never sleep again, because I will keep having nightmares about tha
t insufferable jerk humiliating that beautiful and fragile young woman there fifteen feet in front of her aging grandmother.

  She did not say any of these things.

  “It was okay,” is what she did say.

  “Good. Want to come with me? I’m visiting a few studios around town. Stock is getting a bit bare, and I need to buy some pieces.”

  “I’d love to come.”

  “Good. Get in.”

  She did, immensely grateful to have something to do, and also wondering if she and Hope had been the only citizens of Bay St. Lucy to have seen the slap, everyone else being ‘theater people’ and thus unable to communicate with the town itself.

  “We’ll pop by Laura Redmond’s studio first. She does divine things. They keep selling, too. Then we’ll head over to Bob Fiske’s place. He told me he’d be throwing a few more clay pots this morning. Those always move nicely. Then we’ll…”

  Thank heaven, thought Nina.

  Margot had been in her shop all morning.

  The slap had taken place, when?

  She looked at her watch.

  Fifty-five minutes ago.

  If Margot, bustling about in the center of Gossip Center Bay St. Lucy, had not heard about it, no one had.

  Which meant it did not exist.

  It had not happened.

  So Nina could allow herself to be drawn into the same flow of meaningless chatter she always engaged in with Margot and avoid using a string of profanities to describe Clifton Barrett, because she hated profanities and never used them anyway.

  But then, thinking back on what she’d seen, perhaps that was a mistake.

  One or two choice profanities right now…

  They turned into Laura Redmond’s driveway.

  Then they were in Laura Redmond’s shop, gazing at the paintings that were hung and were propped up and were hidden and were half finished and were just being started and were—at least three of them—just purchased by Margot and destined to be delivered to her shop the following day.

  Then they were somewhere else

  Clay pots were all around them.

  Except Nina was nowhere other than that accursed theater, which kept drawing her mind back into it.

  The worst thing about it, she decided…

  …oh hell, there was no single worst thing about it. It was all worst.

  But one of the contenders for Worst Thing in the Universe Ever Prize was the fact that Clifton Barret and his quick short brutal right cross to the jaw had ruined Hamlet forever.

  “Oh that this too too solid flesh could…”

  SLAP!

  “To be or not to…”

  SLAP!

  “The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.”

  SLAP!

  “My hour is almost come, when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames…”

  SLAP!

  And then they were gone and on their way to some other place.

  It was just in front of this other place, where they’d just gotten out of the car, that Helen Reddington found them.

  At first, she thought that Helen had simply materialized, as she had seemed to do on stage some hours earlier.

  But then she saw a bicycle, a sole bicycle, in the rack beside the door, and knew how the materialization had been accomplished.

  “Helen!” exclaimed Margot. “Helen, Nina has been telling me how much she enjoyed the rehearsal!”

  Let’s see, thought Nina, how good an actress you really are.

  Helen beamed.

  “We were happy to have her there! Yes, yes, I think things are coming together nicely!”

  Pretty damned good. Pretty damned good.

  “Nina…”

  “Yes, Helen?”

  “I wondered if…well, I wondered if we might talk a bit.”

  Margot, sensing the ‘in private’ that hung two feet above a small mimosa tree and seemed to have nowhere to go or anything to do, dissipated it by saying:

  “I’m going to be inside here for a time; why don’t the two of you wander through that magnificent jungle of statuary in the back, and chat there?”

  Which is what they did.

  It took them some time to make their way through a maze of hedges that guarded whatever ramshackle center of craft and hand wizardry that Margot had now brought them to—for Nina had now lost track of their comings and goings and had no idea where they were—but get through it they did, and they were rewarded by the sight of a massive football field of statuary lying seemingly discarded in front of them.

  “Good grief, look at all this!” Nina found herself whispering.

  Helen, younger and therefore more cynical, simply moved her head from side to side, narrowing her gaze.

  They took several steps forward, then more steps, until finally they were surrounded by what would certainly have been the largest most massive, most wonderful cemetery lawn in the world except that there were no dead people under it.

  To begin with, there were birdbaths. Big birdbaths, wide birdbaths, petite little cute birdbaths, ornate birdbaths, Greek birdbaths, simple rustic birdbaths, birdbaths for eagles, romantic and flowery birdbaths, obscene and dirty and vulgar birdbaths—it seemed such a shame, Nina found herself wondering, that, just as there were apparently no corpses buried in the most wonderful graveyard in the world, there were also no birds bathing in the thousand million or more swimming pools that had, by dint of light gray limestone and loving workmanship, been offered up to them.

  Perhaps because there was no water.

  There were not only birdbaths, of course.

  There were tiny little concrete rabbits the size and shape of bowling balls with frozen ears; there were ornamental flowers weighing fifty pounds apiece. There were little shepherd boys and girls, ogling each other, and there were lambs and cows and deer and dogs and cats and animals of indeterminate nature.

  There, far across the—what? Yard? Football field? Memorial Park?—at any rate there across it was a monstrous concrete horse, at least ten feet high, and certainly able to hold the entire Greek army, which was just waiting until another Troy could be built for the chance to jump out and wreak havoc.

  Somehow they found themselves attracted to this beast, and had been making their way toward it for some time, avoiding rock toad frogs that had somehow made their way onto the narrow sidewalks, when Helen said:

  “I went to Margot’s shop after rehearsal. Well, no…I went home first and made sure Grandmamma was all right. Then I went to the shop. They gave me a list of the places you and she might be going this afternoon. Finally, I got lucky.”

  “Well, I…”

  There was nothing to say, of course, and so she simply let the sentence die, aware as it expired of the somnolent growling of an airplane engine high above them.

  Nina looked up. There, circling lazily overhead, was a World War I vintage biplane pulling behind it a large red banner upon which had been written, in old English script, the words HOT SAUSAGE!

  How strange, she found herself thinking, as she stared out over the field of monuments around her. How strange it all is.

  “Nina, I wanted to explain to you about…well, about what you saw today.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Helen.”

  “I want to.”

  “It’s really not any of my business.”

  “I know you must be concerned. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  Again, nothing to say.

  The horse grew larger as they approached it.

  The airplane continued to circle.

  “My world is difficult to describe. Clifton can be…well he can be quite demanding.”

  They reached a strange and distrustful looking oasis in the desert of statuary. Tropical palms of some sort now ringed around them. There was a wrought iron table with two chairs.

  An unseen power pulled them to the table and forced them to sit down.

  “When I arrived in New York—my God, what was I, nineteen? I had one year at Interlochen, but
even after that I knew nothing. Nothing at all. I got hired by a repertory house off off off off Broadway—so far off Broadway it was probably in Illinois or at least it seemed that far. It was actually New Jersey, as I told you a few days ago. The subway didn’t even go out there. But anyway, someone told Clifton about me and he came to watch a performance. After that, it all changed.”

  “I’m sure it did.”

  “After that…well, the world was different.”

  Silence for a time.

  Then…

  You have to ask it, Nina.

  You have to ask it.

  “Does he hit you often?”

  “I need…I need discipline.”

  “You need what?”

  “Discipline.”

  “That’s what was happening today? That’s what we saw? Discipline?”

  ‘Yes.”

  “Helen, your husband hit you.”

  “I deserved it.”

  “You what?”

  “I deserved it. We’re twelve days from opening. Missing a spot like that—professionals can’t do that. Not in Bay St. Lucy, not on Broadway, not in London—I think it may have been Paul—the actor playing Polonius—I think Paul may have thrown me off. Or having Grandmama in the audience. I don’t know. But I deserved to be slapped.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Nina…artists, at the highest level…well, there has to be a…”

  “Divorce him.”

  “What?”

  “Divorce him.”

  “Nina, he’s all that’s …”

  “Divorce him. Right now. This minute.”

  “Hey, you two!”

  This from Margot, who was making her way along the paths toward them.

  “We’ve got to go! I’ve got four more shops to visit!”

  Nina rose.

  So did Helen.

  “Divorce him, Helen.”

  Whereupon Helen Reddington looked at her, shook her head, slowly, and said:

  “I can’t.”

  Then she turned and walked away.

  During the following shop visits, and the ride back to Margot’s, and the ride back to her own shack, Nina could think of only one good thing about the entire situation.

  That was the fact that no one in Bay St. Lucy knew that Helen had been slapped, except for Nina and Hope.

  She arrived home to find John Giusti’s van parked in her driveway.

  John himself was sitting on her top step.