CLARISSA: He was so odd.
MARINA: You’re absolutely right. Shooting his wife that way. Then shooting himself. Odd.
(Marina sips her tea, holds cup in air.)
Miles suffered from an excess of fastidiousness.
(She sips tea again, puts cup down.)
He was appalled by its absence in others.
CLARISSA: Miles was quite wrong about one thing. He thought his wife and your husband were paramours.
MARINA: But it was you and my husband who were paramours.
CLARISSA: We were the best of friends.
MARINA: And now that’s all past. Now Miles is dead and my husband considers you a well-poisoner.
CLARISSA: I understand your anger.
MARINA: My anger faded long ago, replaced by other emotions.
CLARISSA: I won’t ask what they are.
MARINA: I’m not sure I could say what they are. They’re quite mysterious.
CLARISSA: Your husband thinks me a well-poisoner?
MARINA: He blames himself, but thinks you spawned the disaster.
CLARISSA: How does he think I did that?
MARINA: Through Mangan, who conceived the plot to expose your love nest, the most successful creative act of his life.
(She sips her tea.)
CLARISSA: Mangan never forgave Miles for the fireman’s-wife joke.
MARINA: Nonsense.
CLARISSA: He was so humiliated.
MARINA: Mangan is unhumiliatible.
CLARISSA: Mangan is really quite sensitive.
MARINA: Mangan lacks fastidiousness.
(Pause.)
He told me you were his constant paramour, even when you were seeing my husband. Dreadful to reveal such things.
CLARISSA: Did Mangan say that?
(She sips her tea.)
He’s such a liar.
MARINA: He did not seem to be lying.
(She proffers plate of sandwiches.)
Sandwich?
CLARISSA: Thank you.
(Clarissa takes sandwich, bites it.)
Delicious.
(Marina takes sandwich from plate and smells it.)
MARINA: Raw fish. How repellent.
(She puts sandwich on her own plate, wipes her fingers with napkin.)
Mangan has always envied my husband. They were like brothers once, but he envied my husband’s social position, envied his marrying me, envied his success in the theater, envied his self-possession.
(Pause.)
My husband was the true target in the love-nest conspiracy, not poor, simple Miles.
(She lifts teapot.)
Tea?
CLARISSA: If you please.
(Marina pours tea.)
Mangan told me he once had Miles’s wife. In a Pullman compartment on the train from Albany to New York.
MARINA: I did say Mangan lacked fastidiousness, did I not?
CLARISSA: But he does seem to know things.
(Pause.)
He told me you took a seventeen-year-old neighbor boy as the light of your life.
(She sips her tea.)
He believes there is no such thing as fidelity. “The fidelity fallacy,” he calls it.
MARINA: He stole that phrase from a speech in my husband’s unfinished play. Do you know the rest of that speech? “No one understands the disease of infidelity until it’s upon you. And then you are transfigured. Of course you have your reasons for what you do, but they are generally misleading.”
(She sips her tea.)
Quite an accurate speech, wouldn’t you say?
CLARISSA: I’m sure you know better than I. Mangan also told me he had you, two days after the shooting.
MARINA: He tried often with me, but never succeeded. I’m not as diverse as you in these matters.
CLARISSA: You have such lofty airs.
MARINA: And you are from womanhood’s lowest register. You linked yourself to my husband when he was a rising star, and now, after you’ve risen on his back, you want to destroy what remains of his life as a fallen star.
CLARISSA: I loved him truly.
MARINA: You began as a frivolous soubrette, full of intrigue, and in short order you’ve risen to become a sublime slut. Do your sluttish things, as you must, but don’t speak to me of love.
(Marina picks up teapot.)
Love is vertical. You are relentlessly horizontal.
(She proffers teapot.)
More tea?
Katrina Ruminates on what She has Seen
HE MAKES ME cleverer than I am. He knows things I do not know about Maginn. I don’t know how he knew Maginn came to see me, and I doubt very much Maginn had Felicity in a Pullman. She wouldn’t. Would she? Edward believes he knows the truth about my life without him. “I know of your dalliances,” he once said. “Of course you don’t,” I told him. He will come to know some of what was. His writing is acute, and bright people will admire it, but the clergy will try to have the play closed. No one can say such things publicly. Edward knows this. He is flaunting his play “You made me the villainous eater of broken meats,” he is saying. “Here then, see what raw fish such a man offers you.”
He is obviously finished with that woman. I do like the well-poisoner line. I wish I had said it. He is giving a shape to the chaos that overtook us. What he said at dinner — when the matter is ready the form will come. I wonder did he see me sitting in the theater? He did not come down. Perhaps he thought I would go backstage. No. He would assume I would not wish to confront them all. He must not have seen me. Nonsense, if he thought I could not face up to people. I’ve recovered. I’ve recovered from everything. It’s depressing how total my recovery is; as if the condition had not been serious. No one can know what the wound was like. No one would care to know. Even Edward could see only the blood, the scab, the scar. There will be a photograph of my recovery. It’s depressing how easily we reconcile the unthinkable. I must let Edward know why I never told him about Giles, and Maginn’s doggerel. How to tell him? I want no argument. Tell him also what no one ever knew about Felicity. But I saw it. Tell Edward these things now. Yes. Answer all questions. What was I supposed to do with my life? Was it correct, what I did? Was it worth doing? Write him a letter. A letter, of course. When the matter is ready the form will come.
She left the theater and walked to the cabstand in front of the Armory, full of the memory of significant life on the Hall’s grand stage. There she had seen Caruso and Pavlova and met John McCormack after he’d thrilled her with that old ballad (“Oh! hast thou forgotten how soon we must sever? Oh! hast thou forgotten this day we must part?”). She had watched Duse and Maude Adams and Richard Mansfield and countless others play out their charades of life, she had danced with Edward on the false floor that covered the theater seats for Governor Roosevelt’s inaugural ball. And this week Edward’s people, you among them, Katrina, will come to life on that enormous stage. And everyone’s legend will grow.
Katrina’s hat was so large that she had to tip her head sideways in order to step into the cab.