It had begun with Mary Ann McKendrick. She had a good-looking face, but that was secondary. It was the body that drew him. She wore tight blue jeans, and he could almost feel the rough texture beneath his palm, him stroking her legs. His palms grew damp and he kept staring at her, watching the movement of her, imagining her without the blue jeans, imagining himself conjoined with her. He tried to visualize her breasts, too, but the man’s white shirt she wore was too loose for accurate observation.
He watched her all during Haldemann’s opening speech, in the theater on Wednesday afternoon. Haldemann and Ralph Schoen stood up on the stage, and the company sat in the first few rows below them. There were five actors and four actresses, the light man, the stage manager, the carpenter, and Mary Ann McKendrick. Mary Ann McKendrick wasn’t an actress. She was Haldemann’s secretary, and she did the theater’s publicity, and she would be assistant director throughout the season and hold the prompt book during rehearsals.
Mary Ann moved around a lot during that first meeting, Wednesday afternoon. She distributed the forms for all of them to fill out, and ball-point pens to those who didn’t have pens of their own. And during the speechmaking she sat on the stage apron, up where the madman could stare at her.
Haldemann talked about how much work they would do this summer, and how they would have to give the theater total commitment if they expected to last the season, and all through his speech the madman stared at Mary Ann McKendrick. Then Ralph Schoen made a speech, telling them that summer stock too often meant theater one notch below amateur, but that in his summer stock theater they were going to be professionals. From what he said, the three leads — Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane and Alden March — had all been here for other seasons and were local favorites. Ralph Schoen expected the new people to give Loueen and Dick and Alden good professional support. He would accept no less.
While Schoen grated on, the madman watched Mary Ann. He felt safe now, and comfortable. He had a place to sleep, and a way to get food, and he would be getting money every week. He had a safe refuge, complete with credentials. He had been accepted. He could relax now, and stare at Mary Ann McKendrick, and remember about women.
It hadn’t been anything to do with women, his having been sent to the asylum. He had killed two people, but they had both been men, co-workers of his.
But the four years in the asylum had changed him. The restraints of civilization had held him tenuously at best; in civilization’s attacking him with Doctor Chax and his shock therapy, with the isolation ward and the hard-handed male nurses, civilization had lost him completely.
He knew of no reason why he shouldn’t take anything he wanted.
When the speechmaking was finished, they all went over next door to have a late lunch. A woman named Mrs. Kenyon had made the lunch. She was a local woman who came every day of the season to cook the meals and clean the house. They all sat at the long table in the room beside the kitchen, and Mrs. Kenyon served them lunch.
All but Mary Ann McKendrick. She was local, too, and didn’t eat with the rest of the company. So the madman looked around the table, the hunger sharpening in him with the departure of its first object.
There were four women at the table. Loueen Campbell, the female lead of the company, was in her middle thirties, a hard-looking woman with most of the femininity beaten out of her. He looked at her, and looked away. Not her.
Linda Murchieson had bright red hair, but she looked like a child. She had a child’s vacuous face, and childishly thin arms, and childishly small breasts. There was a kind of innocent sexuality to her, but it was too subtle an appeal to reach him now. Maybe later, when the first raw ache of the hunger had been satisfied.
Karen Leacock failed for much the same reason. She looked to be in her early twenties, but she was even thinner than Linda Murchieson, with a thin face; thin-lipped, thin-nosed, bony.
His eyes were drawn to Cissie Walker.
Roundness. All roundness, but not fat. Not at all fat. Just roundnesses and roundnesses. She would be soft to the touch, soft and yielding. She would enfold him in musk and warmth and softness. Anywhere he reached, he would find a roundness to fit his cupped hand.
She saw him staring at her, and she blushed, and giggled, and dropped her eyes. And then she looked at him sidelong, and smiled.
In this house there were fourteen beds. Two on this floor, where Haldemann and Schoen had their rooms. Six on the second floor, six on the third floor. All the women had rooms to themselves, and most of the actors had rooms to themselves. Arnie Kapow, the carpenter, shared a room on the second floor with the light man, Perry Kent. And Tom Burns, the stage manager, shared a third-floor room with Alden March, one of the two male leads.
Fourteen beds. Ten rooms that contained only one bed each.
Ten rooms where he could take Cissie Walker, and ease the hunger. Four years; ten rooms; fourteen beds. The numbers circled in his mind, circling images of himself and Cissie Walker.
After lunch, he would get her away from the rest, take her to one of the ten rooms.
But after lunch there was no time. After lunch they all went to work.
Ralph Schoen cast the first play then and there, over the empty lunch dishes. The play was titled The Merry Widow of Vichy, and was a tragicomedy about the wartime years in Vichy, France, during the Petain republic. Loueen Campbell was the widow of the title, the widow of a French general who had died in the first German advance. Richard Lane and Alden March were the two politicians vying for her favor. There were only these three major parts, plus five minor roles. So only two of the ten members of the company would not have parts in the first play. The actor who hadn’t shown up yet was one, and Cissie Walker was the other. She would work in the box office, and would also take care of props.
She went away to the box office right after lunch. And the madman had to stay with the rest, had to go into the rehearsal room with them and go through a reading of the play. And then the male members of the cast were taken away by Arnie Kapow to work in the theater. They spent the next seven hours lowering backdrops from the flies, looking at them, taking them down and rolling them and putting them away at the back of the stage, moving them back and forth from one spot in the flies to another, bringing more up from the storage space under the stage. The madman and Perry Kent worked up in the fly loft, raising and lowering the drops, tying them off and reweighting the carriages. It was hot cramped work, heavy work, and the madman lost himself in the labor. For those hours up in the fly loft he was almost happy; a free human being, working his body as it was meant to be worked, stretching his muscles, straining at the ropes, and working in silent comradeship with other men. At the infrequent breaks, when he and Perry climbed down to the stage to sit with the others and smoke a cigarette, he was at peace. He forgot to be wary, forgot to be afraid. They talked together, and laughed together, and he joined with them and felt himself a part of them.
This was his true self. Not that beast forced to murder an old man and an old woman. How he’d hated that! How he hated the world that had made it necessary.
If only the whole world could be like this. Men working together in harmony, without suspicion, without fear. Without cruelty.