King of Shadows (3 page)

Arby was full of stuff like that. He mellowed, the moment he looked down from the plane and saw all those lines and curves of little red-tiled roofs. He'd lived in England once, though nobody knew when or why he'd come to the United States, and somehow nobody had ever asked. Once he started talking to English people again, he began to sound a lot more English than he ever had at home.

Some of the Company of Boys stayed in a London University hostel north of the River Thames; some of us stayed in regular houses, each with a family. Most of these people were Friends of the Globe, members of a group who'd spent years helping to raise money to build the new Globe Theatre, the copy of the one where Shakespeare worked. My foster family was called Fisher. Aunt Jen had been nervous about letting me go stay with strange foreigners, until she had a long transatlantic telephone conversation with Mrs. Fisher and they both ended up swapping recipes for baking bread, which seemed to make her feel much better.

The Fishers lived in an apartment in a big ugly concrete block with a great view of the River Thames. There was a daughter, older than me, called Claire, and a son who was spending the summer doing a course at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I used his room. It had black wallpaper and several paintings of very strange, squashed-looking people, so I didn't ask too much about him. Claire was a serious girl whose favorite subject was politics, and she was always asking questions about the U.S. that I couldn't answer. She was very nice to me though; they all were. When I talked about living with my aunt, it didn't make them inquisitive, it made them keep their distance; like, oh, there's something private here, something we mustn't be nosy about. Maybe the Brits are all like that.

Instead of asking questions, the Fishers made sure they were even nicer to me. They had a flyer for our plays stuck up on their refrigerator door, and a poster out in the hallway to advertise us to the rest of the people in the apartment building,
THE AMERICAN COMPANY OF BOYS
, it
said, with weird bright pictures of Bottom in his ass's head and Caesar with blood all over his toga. “We have tickets for both your opening nights!” said cozy Mrs. Fisher happily. “We're looking forward to it all so much!”

Mr. Fisher was a tall, bald man with a voice that rang out like Arby's, though he wasn't an actor; he worked in a bank. “But I've done a lot of amateur stuff, y'know,” he said to me. “Trod the boards, after a fashion.” There was a faintly apologetic note in his voice. Because we were to play at the Globe, and perhaps because we were foreign, he seemed to think of us as professionals even though we were only boys.

Gil Warmun was going to be a professional someday, that was for sure. The more I rehearsed, with him playing Oberon, the more I learned about Puck. I was a mischievous spirit but I was also a king's servant, and Gil never let me forget it. I ran lines with him every day before rehearsal, and had acrobatics lessons—they called it “tumbling”—with the other youngest boys, from an English friend of Arby's called Paddy, who had first been an Olympic gymnast and then worked in a circus. I was really happy. We all were. We thought about nothing but the two plays, and the day when we'd be up there performing them. Though we had classes every day, they were no more like school than chocolate cake is like rice pudding.

I had speech lessons often too, from Rachel, early in the morning at the house Arby and Julia had rented in Southwark, not far from the theater. It was a tall, narrow house made of brick, with a tiny front garden full of roses. I was amazed how many London houses had flowers on and around them, even if only in window boxes. Rachel lived in this house too, sharing a room with our stage
manager Maisie, a quiet, chunky girl who knew how to yell like a drill sergeant.

Gil was there as well, in a tiny attic room at the top of the house. He and Rachel were a sort of couple, though they kidded around all the time. They'd each in turn been Arby's star pupil at the school where he taught drama, though Rachel must have been two years ahead of Gil. Next September he'd be joining her at drama school in New York. Someday I'm going to go there too.

I knew all my lines by now, and Gil's too.

 

“I am that merry wanderer of the night.

I jest to Oberon, and make him smile—”

 

Rachel said, “‘Jest—to.' Two words, Nat.” We were having an early rehearsal in the kitchen, while Julia answered phone calls in the living room. I guess you have a lot of phone calls to answer when you take twenty kids across the Atlantic for a month.

 

“Okay.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal—”

 

She turned her back to listen as I went to the end of the speech, and then held up a hand and turned around again. “It's good—the speed's just right now.”

“And not too southern?”

“Nat—Arby knows as well as I do that you probably sound more the way they did in Shakespeare's time than anyone in this company. Or even any English actor.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“It's true,” she said. “The English and the Scots who settled those Carolina and Georgia mountains of yours, they took their accents with them. And because they didn't hear too much else up there, they didn't change, the way everyone else did.” She turned to the sink and started rinsing the breakfast dishes.

“My gentle Puck,” said Gil, “you're a fossil.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Maybe I should try to match him,” he said to Rachel. He jumped up, spread his arms out to me and put on a heavy fake southern accent. “Ma jennel Perk, cerm hithah!”

“Poppa!” I said in a high falsetto, and flung my arms around his waist. Gil was a lot taller than me.

He laughed, rumpled my hair with one hand and shoved me away with the other. Rachel rolled her eyes, and closed the dishwasher. “Time out, comedians,” she said. “You've got twenty minutes before rehearsal.”

We were all a bit edgy, a bit silly, because today would be our first time on the stage. Everyone was looking forward to that. For a week now we'd been rehearsing in a school hall in Southwark, a tacky little place that was a temporary extension to a grade school, with little kids' drawings pinned up on fiberboard walls, and a smell of disinfectant. We had the oudine of the Globe stage, and the two pillars we had to play around, marked on the floor with tape, but it was a poor substitute for the real thing. We'd had only a quick tour of the Globe so far; the regular adult company was playing there, and had needed the theater all day for rehearsals as well as performances. But now they'd opened their last production, and we could have the mornings.

Arby had decided we shouldn't see one of their performances yet, in case it influenced our own style. Gil and several of the older boys thought this was crazy, and intended to sneak off and watch, but Arby carefully kept us all working in the tacky school hall every afternoon—and the English company played in the afternoons, because that's what the original actors did, in the days before artificial light. (Today's company did 7:30 performances too, under lights designed to simulate daylight, but so far Arby had managed to keep all our evenings busy too.)

There was something really strange about Arby. He was such an intense guy, and yet sometimes he seemed to be coming from a great distance, as if he belonged to some other planet. He scared me a bit, when I first met him.

It was in Atlanta, and I was playing the small part of the Boy, in a Youth Theatre production of
Henry V.
Arby had come there on a recruiting trip for his Company of Boys, looking for actors good enough to come to his auditions. We all knew about those auditions; they were going to be held in New York two months later, for “boys between 11 and 18 with skills in acting, singing and acrobatics.”

We were playing
Henry V
in a community theater, and we all shared one big dressing room. Arby came backstage to talk to the boy who was playing Henry, but he kept looking across at me, with those intent blue eyes, and pretty soon I found him next to me.

“You were the Boy,” he said.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“You were very good,” he said. “Very good. What's your name?”

“Nathan Field,” I said. “Nat.”

And he laughed. It wasn't as if he thought my name was funny; it was a weird laugh, sort of triumphant.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” The blue eyes were blazing at me; it gave me the chills. I could see a muscle twitching under his left eye. “Come to my auditions, Nat Field,” he said, “come, or I'll be back to fetch you.”

That stopped the chills, and anything else in my head; like all of us, I was longing to get into the Company of Boys. I said, “But on the application, it says ‘skills in acting, singing and acrobatics'—and I'm not a great singer.”

“You have the other two, so that doesn't matter,” Arby said. “Doesn't matter at all. Not for my purposes.”

He had the oddest look on his face, eager and crafty and mysterious all at once, and I couldn't figure it out at all. But of course I went to the auditions, with Aunt Jen, and he chose me to play Puck. And that was all that mattered to me. Or to Gil, or Eric, or Ferdie, or any of us in the company.
He'd chosen us,
to play at the Globe.

We ran through the grey London streets toward the theater. It was an awesome place; right on the River Thames, facing the banks of pillared granite buildings and glass office towers on the other side. They'd built it to look just as it had in Shakespeare's day; it was round, all white plaster and dark wood beams, with a real thatched roof made out of reeds, that ran in a circle around a gap. The middle of the building was open to the sky. It was a “wooden O”—that's what Shakespeare called it himself, in a speech in
Henry V.

As we swung around the last corner, I stumbled and nearly fell. I guess I thought then that I'd tripped on a paving stone. For that moment, though, I had a strange
giddy feeling, as if the buildings looming around me were moving, circling. My head was suddenly throbbing. I thought I heard a snatch of bright music, from some stringed instrument like a harp or a guitar, and I smelled flowers, the sweet scent of lilies, like in my aunt's garden—and right after it another scent that was not sweet at all but awful, disgusting, like a sewer. Was it real? I put my hand on the nearest wall, to steady myself, and Gil looked back at me.

“Nat? What's the matter?”

The buildings were still and safe again around my head. “Nothing.”

I ran to catch up with them, and we hurried on. I said casually to Gil, “What a stink, at the corner there.”

“Was there? I didn't notice.”

But then we were at the theater, with Ferdie bopping along ahead of us toward the glass doors.

“Hey, Nat! How's your family, man—where you're living?”

“They're cool,” I said. “I like them.”

“I had oatmeal for breakfast, real thick and gooey, you could stand the spoon up. Porridge, they called it.”

“Yuk.”

“But with cream, and brown sugar. Turned out pretty good.”

“A true artist, our Ferdie,” said Gil. “Concerned with the really important cultural elements of life.”

Ferdie didn't hear him. We'd just come through the last entrance into the theater, and the sun was blazing down through the wooden O of the roof, and there ahead of us was the great stage, five feet high.

“
Wow!
” Ferdie said.

We stood in the center of the theater, where the “groundlings” stood to watch the play—the people who couldn't afford to pay for seats. All around us, all around the almost-circle of the auditorium, the rows of seats reared up in galleries, way high, very steep, and in front of us the stage jutted out. It had two reddish marble pillars near the front—when you touched them, you found they were painted wood, but they sure looked like marble. They helped support a small roof covering part of the stage. If it rained during a performance, the groundlings would get wet, but the actors wouldn't. The underside of this roof was painted like a bright blue sky, with sun and moon and stars all up there together.

The long back wall of the stage had six small pillars set into it, echoes of the big ones out front, and three entrances, the central one a big space covered by a painted cloth, and the side ones two sets of big wooden doors. Above all this was a long stage balcony, where musicians played when they were needed.

Out onto the balcony, as we watched, stepped big Ray Danza, dressed in black as usual, as Theseus, Duke of Athens, and a slim fair boy called Joe Wilson, who was playing his about-to-be-duchess Hippolyta. Joe was about my age, and like all the boys playing women, he still had a husky-light voice.

Ray's strong voice rang out:

 

“Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon—”

 

For a moment I felt giddy again; my head buzzed, as if the space were filled with voices. The air seemed hot, and again I could smell strange sour smells. I put out a hand for balance, and found myself grabbing Gil's arm. Jolted out of his focus on the stage, he mistook it for a nudge reminding him we should be onstage soon.

“Hey, yes, come on—I think it's this way—”

So we slipped out to find the way backstage, and into our first rehearsal at the Globe, and I forgot about everything else. It was wonderful. You could feel the play coming alive. I even found myself enjoying the parts between the four lovers—Lysander and Demetrius, two of Duke Theseus's courtiers, and their girlfriends Hermia and Helena—who spend most of the play wandering through a wood trying to figure out who's in love with who.