In America (40 page)

She did worry that she might have shocked some members of the audience—surely not everyone would think it part of the play!—but was reassured when, fifteen minutes later, as Marguerite finally realizes that her pure unselfish love for Armand is never going to be accepted by his father, Maryna heard the theatre fill with the sound of weeping spectators and saw the prompter toss the promptbook to the floor and flee for an orgy of nose-blowing to a corner of the wings. Unfortunately, one of the critics refused to let her forget the incident completely. The next day, the review in the
Sun
noted “a most original display of the fiery temperament characteristic of the greatest actresses, the defenestration of a raucous canary.” Maryna was appalled to see it mentioned in print. Critics! They only want to mock and find fault! But she was even more furious with her relentlessly docile young secretary and diction coach, who had made a vehement incursion into her dressing room as soon as the performance ended. “The bird is not singing now, Madame Marina. That bird has a concussion, I'm sure!” Miss Collingridge
hated
what Maryna did to the bird.

Indeed, Maryna suspected, Miss Collingridge might well have been behind an admonitory visit by a pair of wide-eyed bumpkins from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who knocked at her dressing room an hour before the next evening's performance and requested that she produce for them an uninjured, chirping canary. Dispatching them brusquely, Maryna said that all birds and animals were in the care of her secretary, whom they could find by applying to her manager, down the hall, third door on the left. She hoped the canary would sing.

For a few days, Maryna was under the impression she had decided to send Miss Collingridge back to San Francisco. Was there no one she could count on for support and sympathy?

But then in the second week, just before Christmas, when she was performing
Adrienne Lecouvreur,
whose title Warnock convinced her should be definitively shortened to
Adrienne
(“
Adrienne Lecouvreur,
starring Countess Marina Zalenska? That's a bigger mouthful of foreignness than even New Yorkers can be asked to swallow.” “Mr. Warnock, I can see you are bent on driving me mad. There is no such person as the Countess Zalenska. The Countess Dembowska, yes. My husband's name. But the actress whose fortunes you have so kindly undertaken to promote is plain, as you Americans say, plain Marina Zalenska.” “OK,” answered Warnock)—just as she was starting
Adrienne,
Maryna had news from Bogdan that he was on his way east, bringing her Peter and Aniela. And Bogdan had been so encouraging, and she needed encouragement because for the third week of her New York season she would be doing
Romeo and Juliet
and
As You Like It.
True, for
Camille
and
Adrienne
there had been nothing but panegyrics—the
Herald:
“She won all hearts”; the
Times:
“Popular Success, Artistic Triumph”; the
Tribune:
“She is a great actress”; the
Sun:
“Greatest actress since Rachel”; the
World:
“Not to be missed.” No matter. She could always fail with Shakespeare.

“I see that not only have you performed as expected, but the critics have done the same,” said Bogdan. “A pretty sheaf of accolades.”

“Phrases for Warnock to splash all over the new playbill,” said Maryna glumly.

“Forget Warnock.”

“Alas, I can't forget him. He rules my life. But just tell me, was I as good as in Poland?”

“Better, I think. As you well know, my dear, you thrive on obstacles.”

“And my English?”

“No, no”—he laughed—“for reassurance on that score, you must consult the indispensable Miss Collingridge.”

“Armong, I loaf you,”
was Miss Collingridge's reply. Then, seeing Maryna's horrified look and Bogdan's smile, she added charitably, “But not always.”

Bogdan brought support; Bogdan brought harmony. He gave his amused approval to this addition to Maryna's entourage, a new specimen of hearty asexual American womanhood. And Miss Collingridge liked Bogdan, was impressed by him, and, best of all, had instantly, effortlessly, made friends with Peter. Odd woman out in Maryna's newly reconstituted family was Aniela, her grainy pale face puckered with jealousy. This American woman who owned so many different hats, was she another servant or Madame's friend? For ventures outside her Polish-speaking cocoon in Anaheim, Aniela had learned to count to twenty and say in her tuneful little voice,
That one, Half, More, Good, Thank you, It's too expensive, Good-bye.
In New York, she'd already acquired with Miss Collingridge's gentle tutoring such useful sentences as
Madame is busy, Madame is resting, Please put the flowers over there, I will give Madame your message.
And that was only a start. Aniela had to accept Miss Collingridge, what else could she do?

“Everything is back as it should be,” Maryna said as they were falling asleep together in the big bed in the suite at the Clarendon Hotel. “I have you, if you can put up with me. I have Peter. I have the stage…”

“Is that really the right order?” he murmured.

“Oh, Bogdan,” she cried, and kissed him fiercely on the mouth.

In contrast to the stage, where a woman's adultery never went unpunished, real life, as Maryna noted gratefully, did not have to be a melodrama. Life was a long hot soak in the tub, life was a glycerine massage and a pedicure. Life was never being idle, trying always to surpass oneself, having three new wigs made, throwing a canary out a stage window, making strangers cry. Life was a quiet talk with Bogdan about Peter.

“Wouldn't it be better to put him in boarding school before I go out on tour? That's no life for a child.”

“I think we should keep him with us for the tour and at least through the summer. Miss Collingridge and I will give him his lessons. It's too soon for him to be separated from you again.”

“He's furious with me.”

She brought him some barber-pole candy. He threw it away. She bought him presents. He broke them. She read to him. He told her to stop.

Bogdan didn't answer.

“Yesterday he told me he loves Aniela more than he loves me.”

“He'd have to be angry that you went away. And since he's a child he doesn't have to hide his feelings.”

“But I can make it up to him. He'll forget. Do you think he'll forget? He can't stay angry.”

“I think he won't stay angry,” Bogdan said.

“I've promised that I'll never leave him again.”

“Excellent promise,” said Bogdan.

*   *   *

YOU COULD HAVE COME
, Henryk. As far as I'm concerned, dear friend, you had no excuse anymore, once I was in New York, which is
much
closer to our old Europe. Bogdan would have liked you to be here, since he could not be. (He is with me now, I am glad to say.) But …
passons.
And so at last I have had my New York debut. Naturally—let me plume myself—it was a success. I have proved to myself once and for all that with a strong enough will one can surmount any obstacle. The theatre is always full (on gala nights the best tickets are sold at auction), the newspapers are enchanted with me, the women love me. And yet—will you be surprised by this?—I am consumed with anger. Or is it sadness? For I am truly alone in this triumph of mine; I can't deceive myself about that. Where were my friends? Where is the community of friends I believed in? Where is Poland? To be sure, all the Poles we met here last year were in the audience on opening night, but of real friends the only one present was Jakub, who, as you know, has been living in New York for six months now. And what has become of our splendid artist? He has found employment as an illustrator on a popular magazine,
Frank Leslie's Weekly,
and spends his days at a desk in the magazine office alongside the other illustrators. He says he hopes still to do some painting “on the side.” What a pity. And Jakub has heard from a friend in Kraków that Wanda recently made another try at suicide. Why didn't
you
tell me about this? Awful, awful, awful! I know weak people will always succeed in harming themselves if that's what they really want to do. But even so—

Maryna had invoked the power of the will, as she often did with Henryk—there was a reproach in that, as well as a boast—but perhaps will was just another name for desire. She wanted this life, whatever it cost her: this loneliness, this euphoria. The quasi-amorous approval of innumerable, never to be known or barely known, others; her own painful, invigorating dissatisfactions. She would have been devastated had the reviews been anything other than paeans. If Maryna was to believe what she read about herself, hers was the opposite of declamatory acting. Her “simplicity,” her “subtlety,” her “delicate and refined art,” her “utter naturalness” seemed very original to New York. But she did
not
believe what she read, especially when it consisted of nothing but praise, and for quite antithetical virtues. Certainly there was nothing natural about this naturalness, which was concocted for each role out of a thousand tiny judgments and decisions. Much, she knew, could be improved. Her voice still had its mighty throw, she allowed, but the yearlong absence from the stage had weakened the precision of her breath control. She felt the words sometimes lacked bite. She needed to vary still more the flow of certain passages. But when all this was corrected, as it would be by performing eight times a week (and on Sunday, Maryna came to the theatre for a few hours to work on the empty stage), would she not risk being too broad in her vocal effects?

Her fear was that these resurgent feelings of piratical masterfulness would provoke her to overacting. It is one thing to be uninterruptedly expressive, what acting is; another for the actor, out of vulgarity or defective self-awareness, to do too much. She said to Bogdan, “I would give ten years of my life to sit just once in the audience and see myself act, that I might learn what to avoid.”

Authority on the stage is tantamount to the ability to project continuously, fluently, piercingly, a character's essence. In nature there are many off-duty moments, many unessential gestures; in the theatre characters reveal their essence all the time. (Anything else would be trivial, unfocused; oozing instead of signaling and shaping.) To act a role is to show what is emphatic in a person, what is sustained. Essential gestures are gestures that are repeated. If I am evil, I am evil all the time. Look at my leers, my scowls. I bare my teeth (if I am a man). Thinking of the suffering I'm about to wreak on my gullible victims, I quiver, visibly. Or, I am good (as women are good). Look, I am smiling, I am gazing tenderly, I bend forward to succor, or backward in pitiable recoil from the bestial advances of him-against-whom-I-am-powerless-to-defend-myself.

Everyone agreed that this was how to proceed. The audience can't be mistaken about whom to love, whom to pity, whom to despise. But must showing one's essence mean exaggerating the signs by which we recognize it? If one could have the courage to be not quite so pointed from the beginning, wouldn't that be finer, truer? More fascinating? Every night as she went on stage Maryna promised herself, I will hold something back. I will not be entirely legible. More variance, she bid herself, even at the risk of being confusing. More smolder.

And
my
essence? thought Maryna. What would I show if I were playing myself?

But an actor doesn't need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask.

Trying to analyze something ineffable which she brought to her roles, the critics fell back on words like “subtle” and “aristocratic.” The presentation of the self that had charmed in San Francisco fell short in New York. Maryna had entranced many a reporter in California with her tales of rude beginnings, when touring in the Polish countryside meant playing in riding schools and barns as often as in theatres. Here in New York they were more interested in her ideas about the theatre, as long as these were uplifting. But what hope was there of correcting any of the impudent misunderstandings that dog the transfer of a great career to another country? Every actor (singer, instrumentalist, dancer) has been taught, has mentors, an artistic genealogy, a moral genealogy too; but Maryna Załężowska's, stocked with equally unpronounceable names, meant nothing here. Hers was an orphaned talent. And how to explain in America the distinctive sense of mission nourished by the Polish habits of devotion to impossible dreams. “We Poles are a very theatrical people,” she declared with summary intention to the new batch of journalists who interrogated her.

In Poland she had represented the aspirations of a nation. Here she could only represent art, or culture, which many feared as something frivolous or snobbish or morally unhinging. Bogdan pointed out with a smile that Americans seemed to need perennial reassurance that art was not just art but served a higher moral or wholesomely civic purpose.

For her early interviews with the New York press, she had at the ready an English translation, made by Ryszard, of a cherished tribute published in the Warsaw theatrical journal
Antrakt.
“In every role she plays, Załężowska is fully responsive to the age in which she lives, as the music of Verdi sighs, weeps, suffers, loves, and cries out in the idiom of all humanity. As Verdi is the supreme composer of the age, Załężowska is its greatest actress.” But Maryna suspected it would make no sense to anybody here that an eminent theatre critic in Poland had compared her, for the universality of her expressiveness—not for her role as bearer of her nation's aspirations—to Verdi. Americans might think what was meant was that her genius was unsubtle, merely operatic.