Enter Three Witches (3 page)

“She really shouldn’t practice this late,” Miranda said. “The neighbors will complain.”

“We can probably hear her better than anybody else,” Bren said. “Lucky us. Is she really under the delusion that somebody might pay her to sing?”

“She just does what’s important to her, like all the rest of us,” Miranda said, “and then, of course, there’s the added fact that she really is quite mad, poor thing.”

“Bonkers,” Bren said. “She told me the other day that Caruso was her singing coach.”

“But Bren, that’s quite possible, given her age.”

“He’s coaching her
now
, Mom,” Bren explained.

“Oh, that is a bit wide of the mark.”

“You could say so.”

They had returned to their usual state of somnolent comfort, but now the front door slammed, and Rose’s quick step was heard in the hall. Bren got up and stretched. “Bedtime,” he said, and gave his mother a light tap on the head. “Ta, Mum. Thanks ever so for the char. Come, Shadow.”

“If you’re going to go on sleeping with that dog, we’ll have to get you a bigger bed,” Miranda said.

“I’m practicing for sleeping with a woman,” Bren said from the door. “A short, fat woman who snores. Night, Gram.” He passed his grandmother and headed for the stairs to his room.

During the night the wind changed, carrying the golden weather out to sea, bringing a sky that looked more like November. Bren gazed with disapproval at the clouds brooding over the dark faces of the brownstones across the street. During breakfast rain started to hiss down the chimney. Bren grumbled so much about the weather that Miranda offered to change it for him. Bren said he thought efforts as drastic as that should be saved for more important occasions. It was, after all, a school day. Let her save her strength for the weekend.

By the time school was over, things had gone from bad to worse, and Eli suggested that they should go down to the theater and monkey with the lights. They got the key from Mr. Behrens, swearing many oaths of responsibility so he would leave and let them have the place to themselves.

Edward Behrens wanted to go home, where he would put his feet up, play some progressive jazz, and study
Macbeth
. He was a new teacher of physics and chemistry—and astronomy, when he could squeeze it in. He also coached the drama club in what was laughingly called his spare time. For all of this he was paid extremely poorly, but he had a lot of fun. He was young, heavily bearded, and very large. The students, inevitably, called him Edward Bear.

“I let a girl go down already,” Mr. Behrens said. “The new dancer who’s so smart, what’s her name? Erika. Said she wanted to try out some steps, so I let her go on the grounds that anyone who could do physics
and
dance couldn’t be all bad.”

“That’s fine,” Eli said. “I like having someone on the stage. I’ll turn her purple, pink, and pistachio.”

“Enjoy,” Mr. Behrens said, and ducked out into the rain.

Eli led Bren down into the double basement, which had been widened and deepened under the two old West Side houses that comprised the Perkins School. Here a grateful alumnus, who had learned to act among the pushed-back tables of the school cafeteria, had spent a great deal of money and created a little gem of a theater. In the balcony was a booth with a small but wonderfully sophisticated lighting switchboard, the object of Eli’s deepest love and, until now, a complete mystery to Bren. Eli turned on a shaded lamp and ran an experienced eye over the array of dials and switches. “Nothing on but work lights now,” he remarked, and Bren nodded sagely. Neither of them bothered to glance out the long window that ran across the front of the booth, giving a view of the stage where a slim girl in a leotard was dancing in the cold, gray light. “That’s this switch here,” Eli said, flipping it off. A banshee howl of rage came from the dark stage. “Oh, sorry, lady,” Eli muttered. “Let’s see. We’ll give her something special from the last show. If nobody screwed around with the program over the summer.” He consulted a long cue sheet from last spring’s production of
The Tempest
.

“You’d better hurry,” Bren suggested, as a stream of unladylike language rose from the stage.

Eli punched a few buttons and began to turn a dial. The abusive comments stopped, and Bren looked out over the rows of seats to the bare platform, where a magic transformation was taking place. Softly from the wings came a mist of midnight blue, and then a ghostly pale green touched a fragment of scenery upstage. The girl was a black silhouette, arrested against the growing backdrop of light. Now a white beam began to shine from somewhere above their heads. She stepped into it, and her short, wild hair flamed in the sudden illumination. Eli’s fingers played again over the controls, and gradually the lighting grew less harsh. Pinks and light ambers filled in the shadows where the girl had begun once more to dance.

“So, okay, now this is lesson one,” Eli began. “The changes for that scene were programmed into the board so that when the cue came up, all I had to do was…Hey, Bren. You want to learn how to do this stuff or you want to stare at that skinny girl the rest of the afternoon?”

“I want,” Bren said slowly, “to watch that skinny girl for the rest of my life. I’ll learn about lighting some other time. Just keep her lit, my dear friend Eli. Just keep her lit.”

Eli shook his head and continued to play with his switchboard, doing things that were alternately wonderful and grotesque to the dancing girl, and Bren gazed on. She was not really skinny, he thought. She was small and lithe, some would have said “boyish,” but this was not a word that occurred to him. It was hard to tell under the changing lights exactly what color her hair was, but now Bren remembered it. The school was small, and few had failed to note Erika’s hair, which was a rather improbable shade of red—more pink than red, perhaps. She wore black jeans, white shirts, and a motorcycle jacket. Not crazy enough to be punk, but with a touch of that. She was definitely a girl with her own style and a defiant way of carrying it off. In black tights and leotard she was, to Bren, wrenchingly beautiful.

Eli was leaning around him to see the cue sheet. “Hey, Bren,” he said. “You want to stare, go stare someplace else. This place is too small for useless baggage. Go play a scene with Juliet down there. Yeah, that’s an idea: I’ll light you both.” Eli chortled, and Bren looked horrified. “You mean like go up on the stage and talk to her?”

“Something stupid like that I had in mind,” Eli said, “but do what you want so long as you don’t do it in here.”

To go and sit in the empty theater, an audience of one, seemed even more difficult than a confrontation with the girl on the stage. Bren compromised by going down to the front of the house and looking up at her.

Erika stopped dancing. “Hi, down there,” she said. “Who are you? I can’t see a thing with these lights in my eyes.”

“Bren West,” Bren said.

“Are you responsible for all those neat effects?”

“No, that was Eli. He’s still at it,” Bren added, as Erika changed from a golden girl to a purple one.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “Come on up here and share the spotlight with me, as the saying goes.” Erika gave a low laugh—more of a gurgle than a laugh, an enchanting sound.

Bren scrambled up onto the stage, and Eli, who was obviously anticipating the moves in this improvised drama, skewered them both with white spotlights.

“Don’t mind him,” Bren said, turning to glare at the light booth.

“No, I love it,” Erika said. “Don’t you? I mean you can’t imagine how performers feel about lights. I guess that’s obvious, but really, lights can be absolute magic. Who’s lighting
Macbeth
, do you know?”

Bren found that his interest in stage lighting had suddenly revived. “Eli and I,” he said. “Why? Are you in it?”

“First witch!” she said proudly.

“That’s terrible,” Bren said. “I mean, a witch—you don’t look like a witch. Not like that kind of witch.”

“What kind of witch do I look like?” Erika wanted to know.

“Forget it,” Bren said. “You don’t look like any kind of witch.”

“Do I look like Lady Macbeth?”

“I don’t know what Lady Macbeth should look like.”

“Stately and menacing,” said Erika, stretching herself up to her full five feet and pulling a long face.

“Well, but a witch…” Bren said helplessly.

“Bren, the witches are fabulous. Eli, some witch lights, please!” Erika shouted, and Bren jumped. Her normal speaking voice was low, with an intriguing trace of huskiness. Her shout was something else again.

“Give me a minute on that,” came Eli’s faint voice from the booth.

“He’s using cues from
The Tempest,”
Bren said, squandering in one sentence his entire knowledge of stage lighting. “There ought to be something good in that.”

Erika made a horrible face and dropped to all fours. “Caliban lights,” she said, bounding over to Bren and gazing up at him with what was suddenly the look of an ugly but appealing monster. “Caliban lights would be just fine.” The stage darkened again, and out of the wings came shafts of icy green and blue. Erika ran her hands through her hair, which had turned pitch black, changing it into a spiky bush. There were great black shadows on her white face, and her body was all angles, emaciated but somehow strangely attractive. She began a slow, perversely fascinating dance.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air,” chanted Erika as she circled an imaginary cauldron.

Bren watched with a mixture of consternation and delight. Witches, he thought. It had to be witches, didn’t it? And even the immense distance that separated the ladies of his household from Shakespeare’s savage grotesques did not seem great enough. Apart from this, he was happy. A whole new world was opening before his eyes as he gazed at the dancing girl. He would learn stage lighting and take a major part in the production of
Macbeth
. If Erika enjoyed playing a witch, he would make her a weirdly beautiful one. After rehearsals he would walk her home and they would stop off in one of the West Side’s many little cafés.

Suddenly Bren had an inspiration—one so full of terror and promise, it made the hair rise on the back of his neck. In three days there would be one final event in the summer’s long cultural spree at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. A dance recital.

But I hardly know her, he thought, as Erika performed one last contortion and came to stand, radiant and breathless, before him. Eli, out of some unaccustomed kindness, or by accident, changed the lighting to a flattering, late afternoon glow.

“Well, at least you can sort of see what I mean,” she said. “And the witch scenes will be a real challenge. I can’t wait.”

“We’ll do something amazing with the lights,” Bren promised. He hoped that Eli would still have him, and even more that Eli would not decide to come down from the light booth to discuss the show. In this his luck held, but Erika seemed about to escape.

“Great,” she said. “I’ll expect it. Some special effects, too—smoke, lightning. I’ve got to dash. ’Bye for now.”

I can ask her in physics tomorrow, Bren thought. And worry about it all night? No thanks. “Hey, Erika!” he called to her retreating back. “Are you going to the dance thing in the park Saturday night?”

She whirled. “No! What dance thing? I didn’t hear there was one. Is it any good?”

“The best,” Bren said recklessly; he knew next to nothing about dance.

“Then let’s go,” Erika said. “What a neat idea,” and she was gone into the dark wings of the theater.

Bren stared with bulging eyes at the place where she had been. Was it as easy as that? Surely not, but still, it seemed to be. A shared interest (he would have to read everything he could find about dance in the next few days), a convenient event, and presto chango, there you were dating the girl of your dreams. It was like magic, and he had done it himself. Now for Eli. He was going to have to be spectacularly nice to Eli, who would have a heavy teaching job ahead of him.

“Eli,” he cried, arriving breathless in the light booth, “I’ve changed my mind again. Please don’t say anything smart; just teach me everything you know about lighting as fast as possible. I want to run the board for
Macbeth.”

Eli grinned. “So now he wants to run the whole show. All of a sudden Mister Big Shot. Don’t worry, there’s plenty you can do. About the performance, we’ll see how many plugs you’ve rewired. I might let you run a change or two.”

“I knew you would,” Bren said. “Now show me about these plugs.”

“With pleasure,” Eli said, and handed him a screwdriver.

Erika sprinted through the rain. She had pulled a short black skirt and an oversized white turtleneck on over her leotard. Shiny black boots and a red umbrella completed her costume for the rainy afternoon. As she ducked and skipped, her umbrella swerved overhead; once, when she raised it high to get out of someone’s way, it struck the branch of a tree and deluged her with raindrops. She laughed and skidded to a stop at Broadway, which was crowded and gleaming under the street lamps, already lit in the early dusk.

Erika’s apartment building, the Apthorp, was built in a square with a garden in the middle and tall, wrought iron gates on Broadway and on West End Avenue. The doorman stood under the arch and waved to Erika as she galloped past. He was pleased to see her look so happy. Doormen know everything, and this one disapproved of Erika’s father, who left her largely alone in the big apartment overlooking the Hudson River.

She, however, was delighted to be by herself. Once inside the apartment, she shed boots and umbrella on the floor, put an old Stones record on the phonograph, turned the volume up full, and gave herself over to a state of unaccustomed joy.

Rose trudged through the rain with a shopping basket on her arm. The dampness made her bones ache, made her think of dreary things like age and decay and the steady passage of time. She, too, had an umbrella, which she held firmly jammed down over her head. From its shelter she peered gloomily at a glistening display of fruits and vegetables. She reached out and pinched a peach. “Lady, no touch!” cried the Korean grocer, who was watching the fruit.