THE REHEARSALS TOOK PLACE IN THE AUDITORIUM, SO-CALLED, which was actually just the dining hall with the tables removed and the chairs set up in rows before a stage built up against the farthermost wall. Bob quietly ushered the dogs into the room and took a seat in the back row, that he might spy on June and Ida and learn something about their coming performances.
The stage was lit by footlights, a warm, yellow-gold glow against the painted backdrop, a realistic rendering of a public square in the eighteenth century. A full-size guillotine was set up center stage, and Ida fixed in its stockade, her face and hair made up to resemble a filthy and dejected man, a prisoner on the verge of execution. June was the executioner in pointed black leather hood, leather vest, and elbow-length leather gloves. Bob paid close attention to their words and behaviors; eventually he realized they were not rehearsing anything, but had interrupted their rehearsal to have a disagreement. Ida, the angrier, said, “How can I be meant to represent a criminal’s emotional reality if I don’t even know what crime I have committed?”
“I say again that you’re thinking too much about it,” June said, reaching under her leather hood to scratch her chin. “It doesn’t matter what the crime was. Actually, Ida, and in a way, that’s the point. I don’t think of your character as a hardened criminal, but rather, one due to have his head lopped off in reply to an infraction.”
“But what was the infraction?”
“It is irrelevant.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is in that an infraction must never result in the lopping off of one’s head, for it is merely an infraction. The function of the scene is the description of a man’s costly error in a savage era.”
“It is just as savage now.”
“Yes, but in a newer way.”
“It is no less savage, June.”
“Fine, yes, I didn’t say I disagreed with you. But that’s to the side of the point, just as the man’s crime is.”
Ida said, “You don’t know the crime in the first place, do you?”
“As a matter of fact I don’t. I have not authored the crime because it is superfluous.”
“May I author a crime?”
“You may not.”
“Perhaps I’ll author one in my mind and keep it hidden from you.”
“Ida, it is far too late in the day for you to succumb to your lunatic nature.”
Ida wagged her finger in a style that said she would not be deterred from her principal point: “By inhibiting this process you are intentionally demeaning the quality of our work.”
“All right!” said June, and she punched the air with her black gloves. “I’ll name the crime. But you must promise me now that you won’t succumb. You are already dipping a toe in, you know that you are, and I demand that you promise me you’ll not fully indulge.”
Ida said chastely, “I do promise it.”
“Because I can see the lunatic rising up in you and I must insist that you halt her from taking shape.”
“Yes, yes,” said Ida. “What is my crime?”
“Let me think.” June paced in her creaking leather garb. “You are many seasons in arrears with your land tax.”
Ida made the face of thinking. “No, not that.”
June said, “You slapped an officer of the court in a tavern.”
“Well,” Ida said. “Was I drunken?”
“Quite drunken, yes.”
“But,” said Ida, “I’m not a common drunk.”
“No, you had some bad news, someone has died, and so you went to the tavern to drink away your sorrow.”
“My own son had died.”
“Died by drowning,” said June.
“He drowned in the quay and he was my one and only boy.”
At this last word, Buddy commenced making a needful growling noise, and then Pal also did, and June and Ida ceased their discussion to look out into the darkness. June held her gloved hand over her eyes. “Is that Bob out there, and does he have the babies?”
“Yes,” Bob called.
“How did it go, Bob? Are our comrades alive, and unafraid, and did they behave, and did everyone enjoy everyone’s company?”
“Yes,” Bob called.
The dogs both were whining and pulling against their leashes, and June said, “You may set them loose, Bob.” Bob did as instructed, and the dogs were off. Pal had the lead; he beelined for the stage, taking its lip in one leap, then soaring up and through the air and into June’s arms, while Buddy bounded up the steps to the side of the stage, hurrying to Ida and licking her all about the face. Ida, powerless to stop this, flapped her manacled hands and cried out bloody murder that her makeup should be ruined.
THE GUILLOTINE WAS WHEELED INTO THE WINGS, AND JUNE AND THE dogs went away to the tower to rehearse in private while Bob and Ida sat in chairs facing one another on the stage, and Ida made to teach Bob how to play a snare drum. She got an almost frighteningly serious look in her eye when she performed the drum roll, what she called a press roll. The drum rested on her lap, the sticks held at odd angles in her hands as she drew them across the drum and toward herself, over and again, evenly, machinelike. Ida had mastered this percussive effect so that it did not sound like many individual raps upon the drum but rather a whole and complete sound: dense, sustained, fraught. She was staring hard at Bob as she made her demonstration, and she continued drumming as she spoke: “The drumsticks are loose are in my hands. I am not banging; I’m not tapping. I am exerting an even pressure as I drag the hopping sticks over the skin of the drum. Press, roll, press, roll.” The sticks were blurred smudges in the air. “What is this sound?” she asked, while still making it. “What does the sound say?”
Bob said, “Pay attention.”
“What else?”
“Something is coming.”
She abruptly ceased drumming. Ida looked pleased, or less displeased than her usual. “In any language, Bob, in any town on earth, that’s what a press roll says, yes. It’s an important signal and a critical aspect of the last scene of our coming performance. I’d like for you to take the drum to your room and practice what I’ve shown you. We have a phonograph recording of a press roll that we could use in a pinch but we always prefer the true human activity. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m telling you that if you can arrive at a place of proficiency with this particular flourish, then we should welcome you to join us.”
She passed the drum and sticks to Bob and he set them on his lap, wondering at their shape, materials, weight. June returned with the dogs, and she wore the face of defeat as she told Ida, “It was a fine idea and I hope you know I appreciate it but I just don’t believe it’s possible to teach a dog to goose-step, and I’m sorry.”
Bob was relieved of his duties for the afternoon, and he took the drum to his room and sat with it on his bed. Recalling what Ida had said about holding the sticks loosely, he understood that what he was after was a bouncing effect; it was gravity at work, the player collaborating with natural law. He soon could summon a consistent roll with his right hand, but not his left. An hour passed like nothing when there came a knock on the door and there was Mr. Whitsell, who began with a casual appraisal of the afternoon weather but soon admitted that Bob’s drumming was making him nervous. “And a little angry,” he said. “The sound is making me nervous and angry both, and I’m happy you’re bettering yourself, but please take pity on an old man with a frail and fussy disposition, won’t you?” Bob carried the drum and sticks down the stairs and across the highway to the seashore; and here he sat and practiced. It was good to practice beside the even roar of the ocean because he could hear his drumming but the noise didn’t travel and so could not disturb anyone. Periodically he would cease drumming and there was a tingling in his hands and up his arms, but when he returned to it then the tingling went away, or was hidden somewhere, subsumed by his activity, just as the sound of the drum was subsumed by the sea.