And it was incandescent. Not only because the part was so close to his own story, either; an actor playing an autobiographical role can easily slip into maudlin sogginess. For Jenner the part was both autobiographical and external. He interpreted it with his double mind, with the mind of a tired actor and with the mind of a potential senator on the way up. The two personalities crossbred; Jenner’s performance tugged at the heart. Advance sales piled up until record figures began to dance across the ledger pages.
They opened in New Haven on the tenth of February to a packed house and rave reviews. Ten days later was the Broadway opening, right on schedule; neither driving snow nor pelting rain kept the tuxedo-and-mink crowd away from the opening-night festivities. A little electric crackle of tension hung in the air in the theater. Jenner felt utterly calm. This is it, he told himself. The chips are down. The voters are going to the polls…
The curtain rose, and Jenner-as-Larrabee shuffled on stage and disgorged his first mumbled lines; he got his response and came across clearer the second time, still a bent figure with hollow cheeks and sad eyes, and the part began to take hold of him. Jack Larrabee grew before the audience’s eyes. By nine o’clock, he was as real as any flesh-and-blood person. Jenner was putting him across; the playwright’s words were turning to gold.
The first-act curtain line was a pianissimo; Jenner gave it and dropped to his knees, then listened to the drumroll of applause welling up out of the ten-dollar seats. The second-act clincher was the outcry of a baffled, doomed man, and Jenner was baffled and doomed as he wrenched the line out of him. The audience roared as the curtain cascaded down. Jenner drew the final line of the play too—a triumphal, ringing asseveration of joy and redemption that filled the big house like a trumpet call. Then the curtain was dropping, and rising again; and dropping and rising and dropping and rising, while a thunder of applause pounded at his temples; and he knew he had reached them, reached them deeply, reached them so deep they had sprung up from their own jaded weariness to acclaim him.
There was a cast party later that night, much later, in the big Broadway restaurant where such parties are traditionally given. Vincennes was there belligerently waving the reviews from the early editions. The word had gone out: Jenner was back, and Jenner was magnificent. Lloyd Lane came up to him—Jenner’s understudy, now. He looked shell-shocked. He said, “God, Mark, I watched the whole thing from the wings. I’ve never seen anything like it. You really were Larrabee out there, weren’t you?”
Looking at this man he had elbowed aside, Jenner felt a twinge of guilt, and redness rose to his cheeks. Then the other mind intervened, the ruthless mind of the nameless politician, and Jenner realized that Lane had deserved to be pushed aside. A better actor simply had supplanted him. But there were tears in the corners of Lane’s eyes.
Someone rushed up to Jenner with a gaudy magnum of champagne, and there was a pop! and then the champagne started to flow. Jenner, who had not had anything to drink for months, gratefully accepted the bubbling glass. Within, he kept icy control over himself. This was his night of triumph. He would drink, but he would not get drunk.
He drank. Vapid showgirls clawed through the circle of well-wishers around him to offer their meaningless congratulations. Flashbulbs glittered in his eyes. Men who had not spoken a civil word to him in five years pumped his hand. Within, Jenner felt a core of melancholy. Helene was not here; Walt Hollis—to whom he owned all this—was not here. Nor was his counterpart, the man whose mind he wore.
Champagne slid easily down his gullet. His smile grew broader. A bald-headed man named Feldstein clinked glasses with him and said, “You must really be relishing this night, Mark. You had it coming, all right. How does it feel to be a success again?”
Jenner grinned warmly. The champagne within him loosened the words, and they drifted easily up through his lips. “It’s wonderful. I want to thank everyone who supported me in this campaign. I want to assure them that their trust in me will be amply repaid when I reach Washington.”
“Hah! Great sense of humor, Mark. Wotta fellow!” And the bald-headed man turned away, laughing. It was good that he turned away at that moment—for if he had continued to face Mark Jenner, he would have had to witness the look of dismay and terror that came over Jenner’s suddenly transformed, suddenly horror-stricken face.
The play was a success, of course. It became one of those plays that everybody simply had to see, and everyone saw it. It promised to run for at least two seasons, which was extraordinary for a nonmusical play.
But night after night in the hotel suite Mark Jenner had rented, he wrestled with the same problem:
Who am I?
The words that had first slipped out the night of the cast party now recurred in different forms almost every day. Phantom memories obsessed him; in his dreams, women he had never known came to reminisce with him about the misdeeds of a summer afternoon. He missed the children he had never fathered—the boy who was seven, and the girl who was four. He found himself reading the front pages of newspapers, scanning the Washington news, though always before he had turned first to the theatrical pages. He detected traces of pomposity in some of his sentences.
He knew what was happening. Walt Hollis had done the job too well; the other mind was encroaching on his own, intertwining, enmeshing, ingesting. There were blurred moments in the dark of the night when Jenner forgot his own name, and temporarily nameless, dreamed the dreams the other man should have dreamed.
And, no doubt, it was the same way with the other, whoever he was. Jenner realized bleakly that a strange compulsion bound him. He lay under a geas; he had to find his counterpart, the man who shared his mind. He had to know who he was.
He asked Hollis.
Hollis had come to him in the lavish hotel suite on the sixth day after Larrabee’s opening. The little man approached Jenner diffidently, almost as if he were upset by the magnitude of his own experiment’s success.
“I guess it worked,” Hollis said.
Jenner grinned expansively. “That it did, Holly! When I’m up there on the stage I have the strength I never knew I could have. Have you seen the play?”
“Yes. The third night. I was—impressed.”
“Damn right you were impressed,” Jenner said. “You should be, watching your Frankenstein monster in action up there. Your golem.” There was nothing bitter in Jenner’s tone; he was being genially sardonic.
But Hollis went pale. “Don’t talk about it that way.”
“True, isn’t it?”
“Don’t—don’t ever refer to yourself that way, Mark. It isn’t right.”
Jenner shrugged. Then casually, he interjected a new theme. “My alter ego—the chap you matched up with me—how’s he doing?”
“Coming along all right,” Hollis said quietly.
“Just—all right?”
“In his profession it takes time for results to become apparent. But he’s building up strength, lining up an organization. I saw him yesterday, and he said he’s very hopeful for the future.”
“For the Senate race, you mean?”
Hollis looked past Jenner’s left shoulder. “Perhaps.”
Jenner scowled. “Holly—tell me his name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I have to know it, Holly! Please!”