She sat with her back to her makeup mirror, still in her costume of trunk hose and doublet, the doublet unbuttoned, however, showing a finely embroidered lace blouse beneath, straight from a Mayfair shop no doubt, her own private joke throughout the night’s portrayal of Hamlet, a secret assertion of her modern womanhood. She was flanked by four suffragettes, two on each side, their uniform dark skirts and white shirtwaists making them look like a ladies string quartet about to go off to play in a palm court at a local hotel.
I stopped a single pace into the room, my hat in my hand. My mother rose. Quite formally, even solemnly. Then she took a step forward and opened her arms. “My darling Kit,” she said.
I came to her and we hugged and she smelled of greasepaint and mothball camphor and she felt all bones and sinew inside her man’s clothes.
“Isn’t he handsome, my dears?” she said.
The women simply made little muttering sounds in response, ready for the vote but not for boldly voicing the sort of sentiments my mother was challenging them to have.
I focused on her suffragettes, as my mother resisted my incipient withdrawal from her arms, assessing them as she would have them assess me.
They were varying degrees of young — Mother had brought only the more impressionable acolytes into her closest circle — but three of them did not hold my eye even for a moment. One, though, had a strong-jawed, wide-mouthed sort of farm girl prettiness, the kind of girl you’d enjoy trying, briefly, to pry away from her horse.
Mother was letting go of me now, pushing me back to arm’s length but keeping her hands on my shoulders. “Where have you been for the past year?”
Where she had been was a more interesting question, but I politely did not ask it in front of the young women for whom she was still performing.
“Ah yes,” she said, as if just remembering. “I read your stories lately. What a fine writer you are. I taught him to write by making him read a thousand books in countless star dressing rooms on three continents.” The “him” was the only indication she’d suddenly started to talk directly to the other women, as her eyes kept fixed tightly on mine, shining that light of hers on me, making me a willing part of her present performance.
She said, elaborating on her perusal of my stories, “But Constantinople of all places,” she said. “All those poor people suffering under the Ottomans. A terrible business. Why would you ever go out there? I thought you were the great chronicler of bullets and cannon shells and men in battle dress, my darling.”
I did not have a chance to reply.
“And your ordeal on the high seas,” she said, the light changing in her eyes, giving off more heat and less illumination. “Did you get my telegram?”
“No.”
“Well, I didn’t know where to send it.”
Then you already knew I didn’t get it. But I didn’t say this.
“He was on the Lusitania,” she said.
The suffragettes clucked softly in sympathy.
“Closer to three thousand,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Utter non sequitur, my darling,” she said.
“The number of books you had me read. I figured it out not long ago.”
She brightened.
“In an idle moment,” I said. And then, to the others: “She and an ever changing cast of theater people she enlisted taught me everything I knew, before I knew to teach myself.” As she had done, I did not look directly at the suffragettes, letting the pronoun suggest I was addressing them.
Mother let go of my shoulders.
She introduced me to the young women, and I smiled at them and shook their hands, their grips still limply disenfranchised, but I did not endeavor to remember any of the names. Even, though it went against my natural inclinations, the name of the pretty one. Immediately after the introductions, my mother ushered them all out of the dressing room, everyone fluttering ardent good-byes and comradely good wishes every step of the way.
Mother closed the door and leaned back against it. “Was I splendid tonight?” she asked.
The question was not rhetorical, though I knew she knew the answer. “You were,” I said.
“Yes I was,” she said.
“Does all of London realize it?” I asked.
“Much of London.”
Some of the critics surely sneered at any woman playing the role. But she seemed content, so I did not ask.
“Poor Bernhardt,” she said.
Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in London in ’99 to vicious reviews. Mother was inviting the comparison. “You did better?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But I was referring to her leg. They cut it off only a few weeks ago and she gave it to a university.”
From Isabel Cobb’s Hamlet in London to Sarah Bernhardt’s losing a leg, service to my government had put me behind in my reading.
“Gangrene,” my mother said.
“So you’re doing better than the Divine Sarah in legs as well,” I said.
Mother lifted her face to the ceiling in a loud bark of a laugh. But when her face came back down, she grabbed a chaw of my cheek between her thumb and forefinger and gave it a squeeze and shake to match the laugh. “I feel bad for her,” she said.
I have a pretty high threshold of pain, but like those Chicago thugs going soft about their mothers, I felt the same at thirty-one years old about Isabel Cobb’s uninhibited mother-cheek-pinch as I did at ten: it hurt like hell.
She finally let go, and she sat down in the chair where she’d been presiding over her suffragettes. I sat in the chair at the idle makeup station next to her. Edged into the frame of her mirror was my formal portrait in a cabinet card, a thing she’d insisted I do for her six years ago upon hearing that the Post-Express was sending me off to Nicaragua on my first war assignment.
She caught me looking at it.
“I carry you with me everywhere,” she said.
I turned to her.
In spite of her being made up as a man — a melancholy man, no less — and being an age that tormented her always for what she no longer was, my mother was still beautiful, her face, in impact, all dark eyes and wide mouth, both restlessly shaping and reshaping in attentiveness to whoever was before her.
It had long pleased me to be able to make her eyes and mouth abruptly freeze. Like now. “Can you think why a tough guy with a gun would be stalking you?” I said.
But I had her for only the briefest of moments. Then, with a tilt of the head, her eyes veiled themselves like a cat showing its trust, and her mouth made a dismissive moue. “Not at all,” she said.
She sounded sincere. But she was arguably the greatest living actress of the American stage. She could sound however she liked. What I needed to figure out: had the oddness of the question itself been enough to make her pause for that brief moment or had it revealed she was now lying?
I had good reason to suspect the latter.
Last year she got involved in some undercover detective work in New Orleans while she was trying to make an escape from the theater.
“Are you still in bed with Pinkerton?” I said.
“What do you take me for?” she said. “Old man Pinkerton’s been dead for thirty years.”
She winked.
“Okay, Mother,” I said. “I usually let you get away with ending a serious conversational topic with an ambiguous theatrical gesture. Not this time. Does the wink mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but if he were alive it would be a different matter, or does it mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but you may still be working for his detective agency?”
This stopped her face once again.
She squared around to me, leaned forward, straightened her back, and pressed her hands onto her knees. A manly gesture. A man with more backbone than Hamlet. But I recognized it from a lifetime with this woman as a no-nonsense Isabel Cobb gesture. She said, “Listen to me, my darling. Consider my ego. Did you think I would be happy to play that role for long? Going after two-bit hoodlums for a corporation of private dicks?”