The Ruby Tear (4 page)

Victory

J
ess hurried toward the theater, ten minutes early for the first rehearsal. She felt as if her heart were flying ahead of her, exultant in victory. She had to remind herself that the hardest job still lay ahead. Now that she had won the part, she had damned well better deliver.

The board had given Walter the go-ahead: if he wanted to cast Jessamyn Croft on as Eva, they would back his choice. So he’d made it.

Jess hadn’t dared to fully accept this as a done deal until Nell Clausen, the theater’s business manager, took her into the office and showed her a copy of Nick’s contract for the production. The playwright had, according to the papers, a right to participate in the casting process and to contribute his input. He did not have veto power over the director’s choices.

Moreover, since Nick hadn’t come to the city for any of the auditions for Eva (or for any other part, for that matter), the Board members decided that he had no case for interfering at all in Walter’s decisions.

Upstairs in the rehearsal room, everyone was milling around, looking for places to hang or drop their coats and scarves. They greeted Jess with enthusiasm. What they really felt, who could tell? She’d been away a long time now.

Walter walked in, clapped his hands, and gathered them around a scarred oak table in the center of the room. The stage itself wouldn’t be available for rehearsals until the sets were finished, three weeks at least. They were all used to rehearsing in rooms like this. Jess found the shabbiness comfortingly familiar.

The first thing Walter said to them, once he got them to stop chattering and doing somersaults and other physical warmups on the carpeted floor, was that Nick Griffin was not going to attend rehearsals.

“You’ll have heard,” Walter said, “that Nick and I have had some disagreements about casting.” Everybody pointedly avoided looking at Jess. “Luckily for our show, I have prevailed. In the interests of harmony, Nick says he’d rather stay out of it entirely. If there are questions we can’t resolve among ourselves here, I’ll go see him and get his input. On no account will he come barreling down here, criticizing and carping and rewriting lines out from under us, like most first-time playwrights at this stage of things.”

At Jessamyn’s side, Anthony Sinclair cast his eyes heavenward and intoned, “Thank you, Jesus!”

Jess couldn’t stop herself from coming to Nick’s defense. “Nick’s had experience in the theater. He’d know better than to come around nitpicking.”

“Good,” Anita MacNeil said. “I’d just as soon not have the writer shooting me pained looks during rehearsals.”

Bella Mason, who played the matriarch of the fictional family in the play, carried on with the knitting she had brought with her. “What about changes we want, though? I have a couple of lines that need editing. It’s just little things, like finding someplace to breathe.”

Walter, his hands clasped on his belly, nodded solemnly. “I’ll take your requests to him, of course, but let’s remember, this isn’t a workshop production. Try to keep change requests minimal, and get them in early, folks.

“Now, can we try a read-through of the first act?”

In their sweats and jeans and sweaters, sipping bottled water to keep their mouths moist, they began reading the play aloud. The second time around, they stopped after each scene to discuss it. They were like a chamber music group running through a score for the first time.

This was the part of theater work that Jess loved the most: the early days, when everybody was equally ignorant, hesitant, and experimental. Nobody expected anything of anybody yet, so it felt as if anything was possible: any insight, any revelation, any achievement.

In reality, of course, Walter already had a firm idea in his mind of how the play should look and move and sound. His job was to nudge them, more or less subtly, toward their places in his vision. He had the reputation of being very good at this. More importantly, they all knew enough about him so that they felt they could trust him not to let them make fools of themselves on stage.

So there was a good atmosphere in the rehearsal room, tingly with apprehension and anticipation but basically confident. Jess basked quietly in the warmth and excitement that she’d been missing so much since the accident.

She thought about her lines as she read them, impatient to find the passionate center of the doomed and prescient Eva and establish it as a touchstone for everything else. It was too soon, but you could only get there by starting somewhere; after so long away, she was starved for some sense of competence and craft in herself.

As for the others, she hoped for the best. Bella Mason was a known, dependable quantity and a comfort to have on board. Jess knew Anita MacNeil, who had gotten the lesser part of Magda, and she had heard of Anthony Sinclair for years but had never worked with him before. The other four were strangers.

Before long they would become closer than the family they portrayed on stage.

Afterwards, they dispersed for a first look at their dressing rooms. Jessamyn’s was a small space, crammed with an illuminated make-up mirror, a table, a couple of chairs, and no window. A wicker wastebasket occupied one corner. There were two patched places on the pale green walls.

A vase of flowers, some pictures, and a colorful calendar would help. You had to make your working space into a temporary home. She thought of a pretty little music box that she had used in her last dressing room, that horrible closet in a much fancier theater—but no, the box had been given to her by Nick, and Nick didn’t want her here at all.

She’d have given an arm to see him pop in here and make some wise-ass joke which meant, “I love you, I hope you do well!”

Instead, she had her victory over his exclusion. The taste was as bitter as it was sweet.

So
, she thought, sitting down at the makeup table,
I win this round.
Maybe it would lead to a reconciliation. If the play was a success, he might come see it after all and fall in love with her again.

Meanwhile, damn him to hell if he does anything to ruin it for me!

Someone was out in the hall, a stout woman with a belligerent jaw, walking up and down peering at the dressing room doors.

“Marie,” Jess exclaimed. “Are you working in this show?”

“I’m your dresser, Miss Croft,” the woman said. “As long as they can afford me.”

Jess smiled. She had worked with Marie before. She recognized Walter’s hand in this—hiring extra help they could probably ill afford. But by doing so he had done his best to give Jess a stalwart and completely partisan ally at the Edwardian.

“Come on in and have a look,” Jess said, giving Marie as much of a hug as that sturdy person would accept. “It’s no palace, but it’s not a cell in a Turkish prison, either.”

* * *

Marie knew how to “dress” spaces as well as people. By the third day of rehearsals, she’d added some touches of her own: a porcelain figurine of a seventeenth century gallant bowing on the windowsill, a beautiful batik cloth from Indonesia hung to mask the worst wall of the room, and a colorful rag rug, a peaceful oval shape, hiding the worn center of the painted concrete floor.

“Oh,” she said, “and there’s something else, I almost forgot. Here, this was on the chair over there, a gift from an admirer.”

Jess laughed. “An admirer of what? I haven’t done anything yet!”

“Well, neither has anyone else,” the dresser said tartly, selecting a blusher shade and trying a feather-touch of it on Jess’ cheek. Marie’s sentimentality over the theater and its folk was well disguised in briskness colored with cynicism.

Jess turned the gift-wrapped little parcel speculatively in her hands. “You don’t suppose it’s from Anthony Sinclair. He’s known for wooing his leading ladies.”

She was afraid to say what she hoped: that this might be a peace offering from Nick.

“Anthony Sinclair is way too old for you,” Marie said.

“I don’t care about age, Marie, but he’s a married man.”

“You still have a lot to learn about the theater if you think that makes a difference,” the dresser said.

Jess hid a smile. Marie plainly had a fannish crush on Sinclair, though she would die rather than admit it.

In the box, inside the wrapping, was a teardrop-shaped flat pendant in dark metal with brilliant silvery ornaments, tiny rosettes and stars, highlighting the fine black filigree work. The pendant was strung on a delicate chain of the same black, wiry swirls and turns, like exquisite, miniature wrought-iron work.

Jess was impressed. The pendant wasn’t flashing with diamonds or dripping pearls, but she knew fine workmanship when she saw it.

Marie stood back with her hands on her hips. “Well, that certainly doesn’t come from Mr. Sinclair. That’s an antique piece.” Marie collected costume jewelry. She knew what she was talking about. “The dark part is ‘Berlin iron,’ cast and lacquered, and the bright bits are cut and polished steel. Turn it over, you’ll see that it’s put together with tiny rivets—see there?”

“Is it valuable?”

“I’d say so,” Marie said, a covetous gleam in her eyes. “Of course at the time it was made it was the kind of jewelry marketed to comfortable bourgeois who couldn’t afford the rubies and emeralds of the rich. Collectors would drool all over this, but it’s not museum grade.”

“Good,” Jess said. Not from Nick, then, who was a wealthy man. In a present from him, rubies and emeralds—small ones, maybe, but precious gems nonetheless—would be more likely. “Something really expensive would make me nervous.”

Marie added shrewdly, “I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive. These days that kind of thing is still pretty valuable for its beauty. Look at the delicacy of the work.”

“It had better not be from Anthony!” Jess said with a laugh. “His wife would come down here and shoot me, and she’d be right, too.”

“Sally Sinclair would more likely shoot
him
. But don’t worry. The only way an actor can afford fine Victorian jewelry is by having a sideline in bank robbery.”

Marie was strictly theater people, with little admiration for screen personalities. To her, an actor did live performance, and, accordingly, never got rich.

“It couldn’t be fake, could it?” Jess said. “A reproduction, maybe?”

“No. That’s old work.” The dresser peered sternly at Jess. “Be careful, Miss Croft. I don’t know who left it, but you can bet he’s got something more in mind than watching you from the audience.”

“Well, so what?” Jess said. “He could be tall, dark, handsome, and rich enough to hand out antique jewelry as trinkets, and what would be wrong with that?”

“In my experience,” Marie observed, “the kind of man who sends jewelry looks like a toad and treats women like flies.”

“Erk!” Jess fitted the lid back onto the box. “You’re probably right. And I don’t have to accept it.”

“Not if you can figure out who it came from and give it right back.”

“Look, can you take it to the office safe later, Marie? Just until we know more about it. I’d hate to have something happen to this beautiful thing and then not be able to replace the value of it to whoever sent it.”

The dresser nodded, took the little package, and secreted it somewhere on her person so quickly that Jess couldn’t tell where it was. In earlier days, people said, Marie had done a stint as a magician’s assistant, among many odd theatrical and circus jobs. She knew a few tricks herself and amused herself by showing them off.

Anthony Sinclair came sweeping in to collect Jess for the Angels’ party.

“Time to get going!” he announced. “Mustn’t keep the investors waiting! Actually, this the ideal theater celebration—a party before you open, while everybody’s still full of hope and cheer!” He smiled his famous, fetching, crooked smile, radiating expansive warmth.

Could
he have sent the pendant? No, of course not—Marie was right. The man was a talented performer and he seemed to like Jess in a collegial way. But if he could lay hands on such a lovely object as this, he’d probably use it woo his wife back again.

The Sinclairs were famous for their long-lasting but wildly stormy marriage. At the moment they were in the fourth month of another separation. Sinclair had always taken back his beautiful Sally when she could be persuaded to return. He would undoubtedly do so again.

Jess wondered if she would ever find such a devoted life partner for herself (not Nick, of course; she must give up that idea once and for all). Suddenly she couldn’t wait to leave the cramped dressing room.

She rode uptown with Sinclair, preparing mentally to dazzle the subscribers and maybe help squeeze a little more out of them in contributions to the theater’s expenses. The party was on the penthouse floor of an apartment building on Central Park West. All the way there Sinclair told her theatrical stories of disasters and saves, ruins and triumphs. He complimented her on what she had done so far with the character of Eva.

“Thanks for the encouragement,” she said. “I don’t feel that I’m really up to speed yet. I’m blowing lines that are right there on paper in front of me, for God’s sake—”

“That’s only to be expected, Jessamyn,” Sinclair said. His voice, a deep baritone that could effortlessly reach the back of the largest theater in Manhattan, lowered even more with disapproval. “Though I don’t think Walter’s constant carping helps.”

“No, he
is
being helpful,” Jess said. “Everybody is.”

“Everyone except our author,” Sinclair said. “My bet is that he won’t even show up on opening night.”

Jess sighed. “Don’t blame him. The accident hurt him a lot more than it hurt me.”

“Well, he doesn’t deserve to have you sticking up for him,” the actor said warmly. “I know you and Griffin were an item, but I have to say it anyway and hope you’ll forgive me: maybe he just doesn’t have the nerve for the opening of his first stage play.”

“Anthony, don’t be unfair,” she responded. “It took nerve for Nick to sneak medical supplies through the lines at Sarajevo. And then to come back and write about it all so vividly—not just to live through the bombardments and the sniper fire and the deaths of people around him, but to relive it all for the script—”