Miss Lizzie (25 page)

But she, I glumly recalled, had been huddled with Father at the time.

Well, even so, they would find someone, and it would not be William.

Things, it seemed, were finally beginning to work out.

I awoke with a shock as sudden as if I had been hurled into icy water. Dread coiled in my chest and sweat lay chill and dank along my skin. For a moment I lay there, heart rapping against my ribs, and tried to understand what had happened, why I had scrambled so panicky from sleep.

It was late; two or three o'clock, one of the darker corners of the night. The rain had stopped, the sea was still, the house was silent. I could hear only the steady metallic dripping of runoff from the roof's gutter as it plopped to the puddles below.

Then I smelled it.

Smoke.

Today I do not know why, nor did I then, but immediately I assumed that the men who had been outside Miss Lizzie's house, the men who had pelted her with rotten tomatoes, had returned and set the house afire.

I threw off the covers, swung my legs off the mattress, and stood up. I picked up my robe from the back of my chair and wrapped it around me. I tiptoed over to the door, cracked it open, held my ear to the opening. I heard nothing. Opening the door farther, I saw that Miss Lizzie's door, across the hall, was ajar, and that a light glowed beyond.

The smoke was drifting from her room, and I recognized it at now as cigar smoke.

Had she fallen asleep with the light on and a cigar burning? If she had, ought I not do something?

I had never been inside Miss Lizzie's room. She had never invited me in, and during the day she kept the door shut. Perhaps it was locked; I had never tried it, and never asked. Doing either would have been, I thought, a violation of her privacy.

Now, tentatively, I crossed the hall. Without touching the door, I leaned toward it and whispered, “Miss Lizzie?”

Nothing.

I pushed the door open gently and stepped inside.

She had told me she had hired a team of movers to help her transport furniture from her house in Fall River to the shore. As I stood in the doorway, I wondered how many of them had wrestled with the enormous four-poster that sprawled across the room at the far wall. It was a behemoth of dark wood, canopied with pale-pink silk, and it looked solid enough to go sailing across the seas; forever, like the Flying Dutchman. By the light of the kerosene lamp on the nightstand, I could see that someone had lain in it; but it was deserted now.

Then I looked to my left and saw—my breathing stopped, my entire body went cold—two strange women sitting there. They did not move, they did not acknowledge my intrusion. In the flickering lamplight, they had a peculiarly somber and melancholy quality, a pair of specters waiting with infinite patience, but virtually no hope, for some final decision: a ransom, a pardon. Had I not been frozen with surprise, I think I would have run from the room. And then, after a moment, I realized that they were a doubled Miss Lizzie, the woman herself and her reflection in the mirror of a wide mahogany dressing table.

I barely recognized my friend. I had seen her only when she wore her black mourning and her hair was clenched in a chignon, Now her hair tumbled in thick white curls to her shoulders, and she wore a lavender silk dressing gown, belted, on each lapel of which was embroidered a large red rose. Her legs were crossed, right over left, and her head was canted slightly forward. Her hands were in her lap, folded round a balloon glass of dark liquid.

To her right, on the dressing table, sat a tall opaque green bottle and rectangular teakwood jewelry box. Beside them, in a square black ashtray, a cigar sent smoke spiraling up to the ceiling.

I stepped forward. “Miss Lizzie?”

Her glance swung up into the mirror, and she saw me.

“Amanda,” she said tonelessly, watching me in the glass.

“Are you all right?”

She shifted in her chair, cleared her throat. “I couldn't sleep.”

“Can I get you something?”

“No,” she said, and looked down. “No.” She turned, looked at me directly, and said, “No, dear. Thank you.”

To her left stood a small stool whose red leather matched that of her chair. I walked over to it, sat down, and looked up at her. “Are you okay, Miss Lizzie?”

She raised the balloon glass to her lips, sipped at the liquid. “I'm fine, Amanda. I'm just thinking.”

I glanced into the mirror. It made me uncomfortable, made me feel that there were too many of us in the room. I asked her, “Are you sure? I could make us some tea.”

“I'm sure,” she said. She picked up the cigar, puffed on it, blew a small cloud of smoke. Then she frowned at me. “Amanda? Why are you up so late?”

“I think I had a bad dream. I woke up and I was scared.”

She smiled faintly, one of her inward-looking smiles. “Yes,” she said, and put the cigar back in the ashtray. “That sounds like a bad dream.”

“I don't remember it, though. Usually I remember the bad ones.”

Looking off, she nodded slowly. “It would be good, wouldn't it, if we didn't remember any of the bad ones.” She sipped again from her glass.

“Are you still upset?” I asked her. “About those men yesterday?”

“No,” she said. “No. They were nothing.” She moved the glass in a slow wave of dismissal, and the liquid sloshed against its sides. “A ripple of anger. Hatred.” She shook her head. “Nothing. It passes and the surface is still again.”

I did not know what she meant by that, and I did not know what to do. She seemed to me profoundly unhappy, and I had nothing to offer her. But I did not want to leave her alone. Quickly I glanced around the room. For want of anything better to say, I volunteered inanely, “That's a really pretty jewelry box.”

She looked toward the box. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. It was a gift from my father.” She shifted the glass to her left hand, reached out with her right and lifted the lid. A clockwork mechanism was hidden somewhere inside. Music suddenly filled the room, as tinny and as paltry and as poignant as only a music-box tune can be.

“What song is that?” I asked her.

“It's the music someone wrote for a poem. ‘Hame, Hame, Hame.' It's a Scottish word. It means
home
.”

We listened to the tune play, light and lilting at first, then steadily exhausting itself as the device wound down. The notes grew hollow, leaden; they slowed, faltered, died; and left in the room, all at once, a silence louder than themselves.

In nearly a whisper, looking off again, Miss Lizzie recited, “‘When the flower is in the bud … and the leaf is on the tree … the larks shall sing me hame … in my ain country.'” She looked at me and smiled, and gave me a small soft shrug, as though in apology, as though she were embarrassed by the quality of her reading, or of the poem itself. “It was his favorite song,” she said.

I had noticed that two items lay on the top shelf of the jewelry box, a strand of pearls and a gold-framed picture, portrait sized, facedown. Nodding to the box, I said, “Is that his picture?”

She looked at the box, shook her head. “No.” She reached out, carefully lifted the picture off the velvet lining, and handed it to me.

It was a photograph of a young woman, taken sometime toward the end of the last century. She wore a light-colored dress, its sleeves long, its skirt pleated, its waist sashed; and over it a matching, tightly fitted jacket whose short ruffled sleeves were bordered with lace. Her blond hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun, a few tendrils escaping artfully at her temples. She stood sideways to the camera, looking into it, holding a bonnet behind her back, a pose that demonstrated to best advantage an excellent, almost a voluptuous, figure. The pose, with the lighting and the expression on her face, seemed to be striving for, while not quite achieving, a soulful esthetic delicacy.

Possibly her face was at fault. Her eyes were set too deeply and too far apart; her mouth was a shade too narrow, a shade too thin. It was a face that suggested some small but potentially troubling weakness of character: willfulness, perhaps, or pettiness.

For all that, she was a very pretty woman, and I said so to Miss Lizzie.

“Yes,” she said, and took another sip from her glass. “She was very pretty.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“I killed her,” she said.

NINETEEN

MY FACE MUST have shown my shock, for Miss Lizzie smiled and said, “No, not out here, not in the real world.” She gave the word
real
a slight sarcastic emphasis. “No. In here.” She gestured with the glass toward her breast. “In my heart.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Who was she?”

She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows speculatively. “Who was she.” She sipped at her drink, then shrugged lightly. As though it answered the question, she said, “She was an actress.”

This I found not especially illuminating. “An actress?”

“One of the best,” Miss Lizzie said simply, and I could see her lassitude begin to fall away. “She was brilliant. I've seen Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, and neither of them could hold a candle to her.”

She picked up her cigar, puffed at it, put it back down. “I saw her first in 1904 at the Colonial in Boston. Lady Macbeth. Do you know
Macbeth
?”

I shook my head.

“Lady Macbeth is a difficult role, you see. She's not a very nice person. She goads her husband into killing the King of Scotland so the two of them can take over the kingdom. She's tremendously ambitious. A monster, in fact. And many actresses play her that way. Gnashing their teeth, sweeping their arms about, tearing out their hair. Unredeemed evil.”

She sipped at the drink. “But Nance had a gift. It was an instinctive thing—she'd had no formal training. But she was able to make the audience feel that even monsters have depth. And really, why shouldn't they? Few people, including monsters, account themselves evil in their own minds.”

“But that doesn't mean they aren't,” I said.

She smiled sadly. “No. It doesn't.… But what Nance was able to do was give you a sense that there was something behind Lady Macbeth's villainy. Something vulnerable and frail. Something you couldn't identify precisely but knew was there.… And it made you feel that if you'd ever been able to understand it, you'd have been able to understand the evil too.”

She paused, shook her head. “I'm not doing this well. What I'm trying to say—well, perhaps the audience at the Colonial said it best. For the first time that I'd ever seen, an audience felt genuinely sorry for Lady Macbeth.”

“Even though she was evil?”

“Evil is a failure of empathy. What Nance did was make the audience empathize with the failure.” She shrugged. “It's a trick, you see. Like the Whispering Queen or the Knockout Speller.”

“Is that when you met her? When she played Lady Macbeth?”

She shook her head, took another sip. “Not then, no. About six months later. At a party in Tyngsboro. She was opening at the Tremont in
Judith
. We talked, and we became friends.”

“What was she like?”

“Like fire,” Miss Lizzie said. She smiled. “Like smoke and rain. She was an elemental, a force of nature. Quite different, I needn't tell you, from anyone I'd ever met.”

“And so what happened? How come you stopped being friends?”

She shrugged again, lightly. “The brightest blaze leaves the coldest ashes. We were friendly for a while, intensely friendly, and then we weren't.”

“But what happened? You said you killed her in your heart.”

She sipped at her drink, frowned.

“That's okay,” I said. “It's not really any of my business, I guess.”

Miss Lizzie smiled. “You'd make a good actress yourself, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her, but my face was flushed.

Miss Lizzie laughed. “At least you have the grace to blush.” Another sip of her drink. “Nance wouldn't have blushed. Laughed, perhaps. She usually laughed when she was caught out.”