XXVI
It seemed to Bethel that Romeo and Juliet was not merely a collection of amusing anachronisms, whereby 'modern' very sensibly meant 'commonplace', but also a vehemently human report of vehement human love. She had heard Andy and Satori argue as to what 'skains-mates' meant, and whether Quarto 4 with 'swashing' or Quarto 2 with 'washing' was correct, but she couldn't be much interested. She was too absorbed in seeing Juliet as a laughing, shattered girl of 1938--of 2038.
Let's see. She lived in a marble palace, with a prim garden edged with stone pines, and the murmur of gay, quarrelsome Verona was filtered through jasmine showering down before her window. Oh yes. Down the corridor, paved with marble in squares of soft old red and yellow, was an oriel window and beneath it an oak chest, carved with passion flowers and crescents interlaced, that her ancestor, the sailor-doge of Venice, had brought home from raids of Tartary (where was Tartary?). And here her father, testy old Lord Capulet, who could be so sweet to his little daughter when no one was here to watch him, would come with stories of boar hunting in the Apennines, come down the corridor, his scarlet-braided robe of silver damask swinging, and his old rapier hilt, crowned with polished agate--
Oh no! She was Juliet in modern dress!
No! It was not Verona and marble arches that she lived in, but--oh, let's see, let's see--maybe Hartford, Connecticut, and an old brick mansion out on Asylum Street. Her father was old Governor Capulet, rather like that grand old executive, Governor Wilbur Cross, who had become head of Connecticut after being dean of the Yale Graduate School. Only her father was not sweet-tempered like Dr. Cross.
Let's see. Yes, he'd have to be a Catholic--oh, maybe a very High Church Episcopalian--who had sent her to a strict church school, so that the only handsome young man she had ever known well was her cousin, Tybalt Capulet--he'd played polo in Yale and been chairman of the Prom. Her childhood intimates (since her mother was a social busybody, much concerned with the D.A.R. and the lecture committee of the Charter Oak Study Club) had been a comic small kitten, and her nurse--uh--uh--Mrs. O'Leary, widow of a bartender, a woman given to winking and to placid bawdiness, so that Juliet knew much more about the sound vulgarities than any of the Sisters in her school. And the Sisters had innocently let the girls read the Bible--apple-cheeked maidens beneath the apple trees, all in gingham aprons and black hair ribbons and disgusting cotton stockings, softly reading the Song of Solomon aloud, and giggling.
The best heroine of Juliet-Bethel was Ruth. Yes, she would gladly follow her lover and live with him amid the alien corn, if he was true to her and young and strong . . . and ambitious . . . and always true.
The girls in the school were often taken on long walks over the hills West of Hartford. On the hilltop, under the great sky, she had sat dreaming of a winged hero who
Her little window, high up in the whitewashed wall of Capulet Dormitory--her grandfather, the munitions maker, partner of old Jeremiah Deacon, had given it to the school--looked out on stars above and a valley filled with moving stars below, and once she had thought of an imaginary lover that, when he should die, the gods would
And she knew that even on her most finicking, fantastical days, the young Juliet loved to scrape the crystallized orange sugar from the inside of a marmalade jar, and lick the spoon.
She was studying the Juliet part all over again, for the second understudy rehearsal. But she would not let Iris cue her, nor did Iris ask to be cued.
She went over her part, marking her every error till the typed pages of the 'sides' looked like bird tracks. How Doc Keezer knew, she did not learn, but between acts on Friday evening he snorted, 'Studying Juliet hard? Want to come out and have a hamburger to-night? And I'll cue you.'
So he did, patiently, demandingly, not letting her off on one wrong 'a' or 'the'. They sat in a lunchroom, with hash and catsup and coffee and sides mixed up together on the wide arms of their chairs. Bethel, stooped and solemn, was staring down at a paper napkin, while Doc persisted, 'No. You hesitated on that. Do it again, dear,' and, to the mild horror of a refrigerator salesman in the row of chairs facing them, Bethel lifted her head, glared at him, blank-eyed, and yelled, 'Blister'd be thy tongue for such a wish! He was not born to shame'. The salesman grabbed his neat grey felt hat, picked up his check, dropped it, picked it up and fled.
Bethel did not see him. But she did hear, from behind them, in Iris's light jeering voice, 'Look, Zed. There's the happy young couple, billing and cuing.'
The ghost walked between the matinée and evening, on Saturday--Bethel's first ghost. Smiling like her father, patting her shoulder, Tertius Tully laid on the shelf of her dressing-table a fat little envelope with the first money she had ever earned in the theatre.
It was the first money she had ever earned anywhere, except for the suppositious pay for Saturday afternoons in her father's store, and a few awe-bringing quarters earned by digging dandelions for Mrs. Frank Ziffer, two doors down the block. She slit the envelope with a nail file and reverently took out the soiled bills and the silver.
It was a quaint sum--thirty-nine dollars and sixty cents--her weekly forty minus one per cent Government social security. She held it to her bosom. It was not money at all. It was a new car for her mother and father. It was a journey to Europe for herself, and the theatre in London and Paris and Moscow. It was Chekhov and Shaw and Molnar and Somerset Maugham . . . And it was a dressing-gown like Iris's.
Andy gave them another pep talk, just before that evening performance; it was a brief pep talk, but--well, it was a pep talk, and Tony Murphy snickered.
. . . The ladies and gentlemen of the company would be glad to know that they had put it over, this first week in Belluca. The reviews had been corking, and they had made money! Yes! Not very much money. Not what they were bound to make on one-night stands. But they had more than cleared expenses, and next week they would un-ques-tionably begin to pay back production expenses and be in the black--yessir, in the black--and pretty soon he would be able to think about raising everybody's salary. . . .
Everybody, thereupon, cheered. Including Hoy and Tony Murphy and Zed Wintergeist.
At two in the morning, after the Saturday night performance, they took Pullman for their three-night-stand in Treverton, Illinois (pop. 195,000; brewing and silos). There was no homeward-looking now, but gaiety and expectation and accustomed friendliness, as they pattered down the long cement platform, in the bowels of the Belluca station (celebrated murals of Lewis & Clark; portrait of James Whitcomb Riley in Italian mosaic) to their car.
Bethel felt important when the redcap, carrying her bags, asked, 'Do you belong to the Troupe?' and she came, in the lofty train shed, in a glare of arclights on steel and cement, to their own cars, with the sign:
Mrs. Lumley Boyle
ROMEO & JULIET IN MODERN DRESS
She was again aware of the importance of Zed's loose camel's-hair coat, of Doc Keezer's portable radio--from which he evoked the far-off incantations of a jazz orchestra in Cincinnati as soon as he had set it in his berth--of Mahala's snooty blue suitcases, and Mrs. Boyle's damned dog.