Love in the Loire Read online

  “Welcome to theater, Leslie. Now you’re a real professional. You don’t even have to get an Equity card now,” I said. I looked at Steve.

  He put his arm about Leslie and said, “You weren’t shocked, were you?”

  “Only that they were down there doing whatever they were doing and they didn’t even stop,” she said.

  “Those things can get pretty urgent,” Steve said. “Just forget about it. No, don’t forget about it. It’s all part of growing up. But if Cranston Muller is giving you a hard time, just remember him brushing off his knees as he came out of that old tower and laugh. The silly old sot.”

  I had never heard Steve criticize anyone before. He seemed to really dislike Cranston. I wonder if Cranston had been pursuing him when I was out of eye and earshot.

  We did a dress rehearsal that evening for an invited audience, and the show went well. I asked Kitty if she would be backstage during the scene just to make sure the rope pulling was done by enough people and if she thought anything could be done to improve it. She said she’d report after the show.

  The little villagers from the student body thronged about very efficiently. Cranston was excellent in directing groups onstage. Leslie sang very well. Danny Fandom as the silly romantic male lead looked cute in his uniform. Steve and I got a lot of laughs as the silly Americans. And E. L. Losada stole the show with his big solo. He had the best voice in the show. Estelle was very amusing in her small role as the automobile-driving society lady. Every little word, every little movement got laughs.

  After the show, we all went to the theater for notes from the director. He seemed very pleased with himself. He congratulated the students and told everyone to get a good night’s rest and not to go out and cavort about too much. And to remember that there would be another performance on Saturday night and a matinee on Sunday. How the matinee would go in broad daylight we weren’t sure, but there were no specific nighttime scenes, so it should go all right.

  Nina, still in her Dutch peasant costume and protruding only slightly, asked Kitty Carlisle Hart and Estelle Anderson to come over for a drink and a snack. Cranston Muller didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t invited. He seemed to be very occupied with the crew and Cass Brewster. Toca Sacar didn’t need an invitation. He was already at the door to the house when we arrived there.

  Kitty had a glass of wine and some cheese and crackers in front of her when I came to sit by her in the lavender room. She immediately said, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. You’re doing it, but it’s chancy. That whole method they have of turning the sails of the mill is very thrown together. And when they pull you up, it requires a lot of precision. Which they’re doing. But who knows? One misstep and it could drop back down with you. It probably wouldn’t kill either of you, but you could be seriously hurt. The theater isn’t the circus. We’re not there to thrill the audience with the possibility of our death or destruction.

  “You think something is going to happen, don’t you? Do you think E. L. Losada wants your part in Tea and Sympathy?” she said.

  “Has that come into your mind?” I said.

  “Well, obviously Cranston has taken a big fancy to you. And your role in this show isn’t big enough for you. Isn’t right for you at all, actually. Although you play comedy pretty well. Of course, someone could be trying to get you out of the way. It happens all the time. I talked to Estelle about it.” She beckoned to Estelle across the room.

  Estelle came across the room to us. She was still wearing her weird French woman makeup but had changed into her own clothes. Black and beige. The ladies were chic around here. Cornichons was going to miss them once the season was over. Estelle said, “Are you talking about that sail-jumping stuff? I think it’s crazy.”

  So I decided I had to tell them about Cass. “You may think poorly of me after you hear this,” I said. And I told them the story of Steve and I getting naked with Cass Brewster and taking pictures. I didn’t put in all the little details. When I finished, Estelle said, “Steve and you are sort of the Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton of Cornichons, aren’t you? Right there to the rescue.”

  “We didn’t give our all, Estelle,” I said.

  “I think the two of you are wonderful,” Kitty said. “So modern. Who would think of blackmailing a blackmailer?”

  Estelle had the big idea. “Look, you have a feeling that something is going to go wrong up there with Cass Brewster at the other end of the rope. You’d be a fool not to. You have to send something else up there. Dummies. And if something goes wrong, you run out and finish the show. If nothing goes wrong, you still run out and finish the show.”

  “Where am I going to get dummies?” I said.

  Estelle said, “Who’s the dummy? You make them. Some of your clothes that look like your costumes. That’s no problem. They’re just ordinary clothes. Stuff them with pillows off your bed. Old newspapers. Whatever. Fasten them together with big safety pins.”

  “Put some bricks and stones in,” Kitty said. “They have to be heavy.”

  I said, “It’ll work because we jump out from behind the hedge to grab the sail when it goes by. We’ll hide the dummies there and just reach up and hook them on. But how?”

  “You’re not going to have time to tie them on. Clothes hangers?” Estelle said.

  “Too fragile. They’d break. I know exactly,” Kitty said. “You know those kind of three-pronged little garden things. What would you call them? Diggers? A little weeder? Wire the end of the jacket sleeves around them and they’d hook on those handles where you have to grab. I’m sure of it.”

  We bid each other good night, and I rushed off into the dark to find Steve and start our plan.

  In the morning we borrowed the Peugeot from Nina and Graham and went to Charlestour. The hardware store, the quincaillerie, had exactly the small weeders we wanted. The clerk obviously wanted to ask why we needed four but didn’t. And we didn’t offer to tell him. Too complicated.

  We stole pillows from some of the unoccupied dormitory rooms at the Abbey. I borrowed some pliers from Graham, and we cut up coat hangers to fasten things together. The dummies had to be strong if we were going to load up the pants with old stones. I knew exactly the pile to get them from. Right by the tower. If there’s one thing old French buildings aren’t short of, it’s piles of stones.

  The heads would be easy. We both wore hats in the show. Just stick a hat on some little sofa cushions. I bought two in Charlestour in the morning. But the hats? Where was I going to find those? In Nina’s front hall was a hat rack with a lot of old hats on it. Would she loan me a couple?

  “Take whatever you want, darling,” she said. She knew we were up to something, but Nina’s no snoop. Or gossip. I guess she thought if she didn’t know what was going on she couldn’t possibly talk about it.

  So we carried our dummies over to the hedge bit by bit, kneeling down behind the hedge to put them together. The edge of the sail was right there over our heads. The garden tool hooks worked perfectly. There was no one around. Everyone else was resting. We were probably going to give terrible performances that night, having worked our butts off all day. Well, I thought, I’d rather be tired than dead.

  We briefed our leading lady, Leslie, a little bit in the dressing room.

  “Do not, repeat, not, come out on the wall until you see us out there. And we might be running up the stairs. As a matter of fact, we are definitely going to come up the stairs behind you and lead you out to jump onto the scaffolding behind the wall. So stay tight in the mill,” I said.

  Leslie looked apprehensive.

  “You’re going to go out there a little Dutch girl, and you’re going to come back a star,” Steve said. He was getting to be funnier all the time.

  And of course, it went exactly as we thought it would. The first act wandered by. The audience applauded dutifully. Charming as we all were, they weren’t cheering.

  But in the second act, when the mill began to creak, Steve and I, hiding do
wn behind the hedge, hooked our dummies on the sail above our heads. The audience gasped when they went up and screamed when the sail came crashing right back down again, the dummy bodies right under it.

  Steve and I had gotten well out of the way at either end of the hedge and dashed out, up those stairs and out on the wall. I had time to pinch Steve’s butt as we ran up the stairs. It was dark in there, but Leslie shone her flashlight down the staircase so we could see a little bit. We did it, we did it, we did it! Out onto the wall and jumped down onto the mattresses on the scaffolding, laughing our heads off.

  The audience leaped up and screamed and applauded and hooted and wouldn’t settle down. They thought it was all part of the show. It had scared the bejesus out of them, and, of course, they loved it.

  As we climbed down the ladder from the scaffolding, Cranston Muller was there. He had rushed up from the audience.

  “Are you all right? I don’t know what could have gone wrong! Where did those dummies come from? I’m so sorry. You guys were great! We’re going to keep this in the show. It’s fantastic. We can go to Broadway with this in the show. Can you go on to finish the show?” Which we, of course, did.

  The whole audience came surging up around us as soon as the show was over. E. L. Losada didn’t get much attention, even though he sang very well. The escape scene was the knockout moment in the show. “How did you do that?” “It was brilliant!” “I was never so excited in the theater in my life!” Yes, they liked it a lot, but we weren’t ever going to do it again.

  Backstage, nobody had any idea how it happened. The crew said they had been pulling on the rope, pulling it around an old pillar that was near the base of the mill to keep it steady. And suddenly it just went pop!

  “Where’s Cass?” I asked. Nobody knew. “He was with us when we were pulling,” somebody said.

  Henrietta appeared with a hatchet in her hand. “Did you do it, Henrietta?” I said.

  She gave me a scornful look and said, “I found this in the bushes.”

  One of the boys said, “Yeah, Cass had that in his belt earlier today. I remember seeing him and thinking he looked like an Indian.”

  “Where is Cass?” I asked again.

  And we didn’t find out. Cass had left town.

  We left it at that. The rope had broken. We had not been injured. We did two more shows that weekend, with Steve and I just running up the tower steps. Three more the following weekend, and that was it.

  During the week that followed I had Henrietta in one of my classes.

  “That was a very lucky thing that you found that hatchet, Henrietta,” I said.

  “I put it there,” she said. “Cass dropped it when he ran away.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked.

  “I did,” she said. “Mr. Muller. I told him I saw Cass Brewster give the rope a whack with a hatchet and it broke and he ran away.”

  “What did he say?” I said.

  “He said, ‘So what?’ And I said, ‘So I want billing over the title of Ten Little Indians as the star. I also saw you doing something to him in the tower. When he was going to pee in your face. If I tell people, they will think you got him to cut the rope.’ “I’m not so dumb.” She was right.

  And it all happened that way. “Henrietta Rothschild in the Ten Little Indians.” That’s what it said on the posters and playbills.

  As we parted that day I said, “Oh, what’s ever going to happen to a little girl like you, Henrietta?”

  She said, “When I get tits I’m going to Hollywood.”

  Graham Checks In

  Though we were still playing The Red Mill with the new escape scene and Cass Brewster had left town, there was no delaying in getting into rehearsal for Tea and Sympathy. Most of the scenes were with Estelle Anderson, but I hadn’t gone near the one small one that I had to do with Graham, playing the school headmaster. I had been nervous about it. I don’t think we had actually ever been alone together.

  He had his hands full with Nina’s mother and her son and her son’s girlfriend and then his cousin coming to visit. That was almost more than anyone could handle, even if they weren’t appearing in a play.

  But the show was opening in ten days and we were having our first run-through the next day. I felt it was time to get the rehearsal underway.

  I had a few hours available that afternoon, so on my way out in the morning to the café, I rang the bell to Nina and Graham’s. Graham answered.

  “We must find a few minutes to rehearse our scene,” I said. “What’s cooking this afternoon?”

  “Nina’s mother is going to babysit Theo so Nina can take a nap. And I’m available. Strangely enough. I think I’ve got the lines down pretty well. Where shall we meet?” Graham said, lounging against the doorway. It was impossible for him to make any kind of move without looking sexy.

  “How about under the big Cedar of Lebanon right on the Abbey lawn?” I said, gesturing toward the tree immediately on the other side of the hedges across the street. Outdoors would be good, I thought. No wild fits, screaming accusations, or sudden fucks there.

  We met right after lunch and did the first run-through with scripts in our hands. Then we put the scripts down on the grass and ran it off book. Off book. That means no looking at the script. Since the scene was played with both of us standing we didn’t need any props or anything. The people who passed in and out of the gate and along the gravel walk ignored us. Watching actors rehearse was old stuff for everyone now.

  I just had to keep it in my head that Graham’s character was old enough to be my father, and that I was still a teenager. I’m pretty good at slipping into another phase of my own personality. I can conjure that up pretty well. How to move. The level of my voice tone. Things like that.

  “I think it’s going well, Hugo,” Graham said. “Let’s take a little break. Am I moving too much? I’m a little taller than you are, and I don’t want to appear threatening.”

  “I don’t think that’s coming across. But one of my teachers once told me not to move and deliver lines at the same time. I actually like to walk across the stage talking, but maybe the audience is watching you move instead of listening to you when you move. Is that a useful comment?” I said.

  “Let me see.” He jumped up. “If I’m here, and I move over here while you are speaking . . . Yes, that could be better.”

  “Don’t move too much while I’m speaking. They’re all going to want to look at you anyway. I think schoolmasters as handsome as you are rare in those cold, lonely boarding schools.”

  Graham plopped down again. “I was thinking of playing this as though I was attracted to you. I know it wasn’t written in that way. But I thought we could modernize it a little bit that way.”

  I said, “That’s great. Estelle is obviously somewhat older than you are. So you are a younger, maybe-gay, man who married an older woman. Who is headmaster in a school for boys because he consciously or unconsciously wants to be around them. And while a teenage student is unjustly accused of being homosexual, the older man is there seething with lust for him. And the older man’s wife sleeps with the student so he can be reassured about his own sexuality. I like it.”

  “It makes a little more out of the plot, don’t you think?” Graham said.

  “Let’s run it that way. I am going to be entirely unconscious of your secret longings. But let’s see what happens,” I said.

  It was very good. And Graham was very good. Perhaps many of the people in the audience wouldn’t get it. It was subtle. But there were little outreachings of hands. Snatching them back. A very false throwing of one arm across my shoulders. Sudden heartiness in the voice. It made you realize that the way jocks interact with each other is very artificial. A kind of masking of their real feelings. Which might be a lot of things: dislike, sexual attraction, boredom. But it is the masking of real feelings. Graham got it. He was a better actor than I had given him credit for being.

  We sat down again.

  “T
hat was really good, Graham. It will make a big difference in the play. It makes your character and Estelle’s much more three dimensional,” I said.

  “Everyone knows a lot more about sex than they did when this play was first done. We don’t want the characters to be caricatures,” he said.

  “You’re smart about relationships. Tell me this,” I said. “It’s really none of my business, but since we all had dinner the other night, I’ve been wondering why women like Nina and my mother fall in love with and want to be with men like my stepfather and yourself. You’re kind of similar couples.”

  “We met. We fell in love. Is it more complicated than that?” he said.

  “But you didn’t meet. Nina went looking for you. And found you with Edwina’s help. They told me that. Do you think she knew you were supposed to be together? And what about the gay thing?” I said.

  “Is your stepfather gay?” he said. “No more than you are. But we were lovers before he married my mother.”

  Graham cocked his head in surprise. “This is a lot of news for one little rehearsal period. Do you think that was his way of marrying you?”

  “I never thought about that. If you mean, to be near me. Definitely no. We haven’t slept together again, and we aren’t going to. If you mean that he thinks my mother and I are a lot alike, there may be something to that. But they have something very solid together. They don’t see much of me. What I was thinking of more was that men like Glenn Elliott and you move through life like big pirate ships and women like your wives have to board you and capture you and take over the helm.”

  “I’m not so sure they take over the helm. I hope not. I’d like to think that we’re on a course together,” Graham said.

  “But what about the sex thing?” I said. “I saw you fucking Steve. What about that?”