Rehearsal for Murder (Maggie Ryan) Read online

  “Okay.”

  “And then when the Chairman says ‘Two!’ Nick and Larry leap out, one through each side of the vee. Land center stage, maybe five feet apart. Strike a pose, mirror images.”

  “Waving top hats,” suggested Larry.

  “Yes, something like that. We’ll work out the details later. And we go straight into ‘Dizzy and the Grand Old Man.’”

  Rehearsing was hard work. Twenty actor/dancers, years of sacrifice and training behind them, more years of sacrifice and training ahead of them, followed the complex instructions with intense concentration. There were few actual missteps even this first time, but hours of rehearsal would still be required to get knees at precisely the same level, fingers and canes at the correct angles, transitions timed. From behind the line, Nick—who shared their folly—wondered again at the foolish passion that led otherwise normal adults to sacrifice and sweat, beg and lie, for the opportunity to—What? Not make money; they’d all do better driving cabs. Not become famous; Ramona was the only one with a part that might bring fame, and she had it already. He and Larry had a chance of being noticed, especially Larry, if he could keep his solo. But the others were basically chorus members, their brief turns in the spotlight too ephemeral for lasting attention. He watched Jaymie: slim, serious, dark wavy hair pulled into a ponytail, bouncing through the kick-line steps, then hurrying to Ramona’s place on Victoria’s throne and shifting to a stately queen. Once, during a five-minute break, he teased her, “Don’t you think you’re working too hard for scale?”

  “Oh, it’s not the money,” she said earnestly between gulps of Sprite. “You know that, Nick. Hell, my mom made me promise I’d never think of the money. She did and regretted it ever since. Married Dad, and he made her quit. And then ran off with someone younger, and by then Mom was in her thirties—Anyway, she must be right. Look at Ramona. How old she is, and people still love her!”

  “Not her husband, babe,” observed Daphne cheerfully.

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I mean. It’s the energy, Mom said. You give it, you get it back from the audience. She said no amount of money could buy that.”

  True. They would all slave in exhausting anonymity, poorly paid, briefly appreciated by an audience that would promptly forget them and leave the theatre discussing Ramona. And when the show closed, even if it had a good run, there would be only an extra line in their résumés to help get the next job with similarly ridiculous working conditions. If there even was a next job.

  And yet they considered themselves lucky. Those instants of communication with the audience, that sense of being an instrument that revealed the spark of divinity in ordinary humanity—even chorus lines had those moments. Jaymie’s mom was right; money couldn’t buy it. And as Ramona had admitted, that was even the reason for wanting success. Fame itself was only a means to that end.

  But was it enough? Nick wondered. Was he sacrificing Sarah’s future to the whimsical god of show biz?

  “Running an empire alone—all alone,” the chorus was singing.

  “Not quite alone,” amended Cab, as Chairman. “Queen Victoria had the help of her prime minister. And not just one prime minister. Two!”

  Nick leaped through the wall of the kick line and landed together with Larry, their upstage hands raised with the hats, twin smiles directed at the nonexistent audience.

  “Fine,” said Daphne, and showed them the routines for their duet, an almost vaudevillian soft shoe involving lots of high-spirited prancing and spinning together, bent elbows linked. “Okay, give it a try. Let’s just honk through it.”

  Nick and Larry waved their hats, gave a preliminary prance to the piano’s rollicking phrases, and began.

  “Oh, Gladstone and Disraeli, Victoria’s glorious pair! There’s fame enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man to share!”

  The Chairman waved a hand from his podium at the side and announced, “Mr. Gladstone, the Grand Old Man!”

  Nick stepped forward. Even in his bedraggled rehearsal sweats he radiated the energy and righteous zeal of the famous orator. “I’m William Ewart Gladstone,” he sang. “My talent’s heaven-sent. I try to work God’s purpose in the halls of Parliament! I work for fallen women, for the Irish, for the crowds! My heart is with the people!”

  “His head is in the clouds!” sneered Larry, elbowing Nick aside to claim center stage. He exuded a languid cleverness, the perfect foil for Nick’s pompous enthusiasm, as he sang, “I’m Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory with a twist. I’m known as wit, as Jew, as Brit, as great imperialist! I work to find what’s useful in Gladstone’s woolly dreams. I work for Queen and Empire!”

  “For selfish Dizzy schemes!” Nick, scornful too, shouldered him aside in turn and began the argumentative refrain: “Extend the vote!”

  “The Empire!”

  “God’s will!”

  “And glory bright!”

  “There’s fights enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man to fight!” they chorused together, spontaneously flashing their canes in mock swordplay as they skipped around. The other actors were chuckling.

  “Both happily married!” announced the Chairman, and Edith and the actress playing Mrs. Disraeli joined them from the chorus.

  Nick and Edith held hands in an affectionate but thoroughly proper manner. “A ragamuffin husband and a rantipoling wife, we’ll fiddle it and scrape it through the ups and downs of life!” They two-stepped neatly around the stage; but Disraeli and his wife high-kicked. The contentious prime ministers quarreled on through three more stanzas. Then as Jaymie stepped regally down from the rickety chair that was standing in for a throne, Nick launched the final chorus. “There’s land reform!”

  “There’s India!”

  “Peace!”

  “War!”

  “And jubilee!” Jaymie broke in. The prime ministers looked at her, astonished. Increasingly assured, she went on, “And majestee! And dynastee! There’s work enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man—and me!”

  The three linked elbows and skipped around the stage to the closing chords.

  “Super!” Derek enthused. “Funnier than I thought! I’m rather taken with that sword fight with the canes, aren’t you, Daphne?”

  “Love it. We’ll keep that. Larry, I like that scarecrow quality you’re giving Disraeli. But tone it down just a little in your choruses with Nick, so it looks like the same dance.”

  “Okay. Nick isn’t exactly a scarecrow.”

  “Yeah, everybody tells me. Woolly mammoth. Prince of Whales,” grumbled Nick.

  “It’s going to be cute. Nice job, Jaymie,” Daphne said, and Jaymie glowed. Then Daphne added almost casually, “Okay, Derek, what’s next?”

  A little pulse of tension ran around the room. Everyone knew what was supposed to be next. But Derek, as casually as Daphne, said, “‘Top of the Greasy Pole.’ Disraeli’s solo.”

  “Oh, can that,” said Larry vehemently. “What’s the point in rehearsing it?”

  “We’ll save it,” said Derek. “It’s important to the show.”

  “Ramona wants the show to be perfect,” Nick said. “She’ll see reason.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Larry bitingly. “Quite the expert on her state of mind, aren’t you? Especially when she’s in a coma.”

  “Yeah, in my spare time I practice telepathy.” Nick and Larry glared at each other.

  “Let’s go, Larry!” Derek broke in briskly. Obediently Larry and Daphne began working on the number, a philosophical reflection on the joys and pains of leading a great empire, salted with bits of Disraeli’s wit. But some of the zest had gone out of Larry’s performance, and worry about Ramona gloomed over them all.

  “And what was your favorite?” asked Edith.

  “Hamlet, of course,” said Larry.

  “Oh, God, the biggie! Where did you play him?” Edith stretched an arm past Nick and across the scarred table of the booth to tap cigarette ashes into the dented metal ashtray in front of Jaymie. Mike’s Place, read the ashtrays before
they were filled with butts. This was not Mike’s Place. The sign painted on the window said Guarneri’s Coffee Shop, but for all Nick knew that might have been recycled too, like the Mike’s Place ashtrays and the Gimbels bags that enclosed the take-out sandwiches and coffee. Anna Maria, the plump owner, was not a spendthrift.

  “In the Oregon boonies,” Larry answered curtly.

  But Edith, who had just confessed over a cottage cheese and pineapple salad that her own favorite role had been Fräulein Schneider in a road company ofCabaret, seemed determined to keep the conversation away from their worries. “What’s so great about that part?” she demanded. “I mean, from an actor’s point of view. Not a professor’s.”

  “Lots of solos,” said Larry bitterly, then thought better of it and gave her a quick grin to pretend that it was only a quip. In a more civilized tone he went on, “Actually the complexity is what’s fascinating. This Oregon thing was a summer festival. A good experience because I had time to work with the part and with the director. Not your usual stock situation, where you’ve got maybe a week to plumb the depths of a character and figure out how to get it across. And Hamlet is so human—frail, frightened, full of passionate love and passionate hate.”

  “And passionate wit,” said Nick.

  “That too. Black humor. And when you come right down to it, can any motive be more powerful than revenge? A father killed, a mother stained—that complicates a guy’s life, even without that ghostly cheering section. Anyway, I’d hate to try the role with a New York rehearsal schedule. This cartoon version of Dizzy is about the deepest you can go in the short time you get here.”

  “What about you, Nick?” asked Cab.

  “Oddly enough, no one ever thought to cast me as Hamlet,” Nick confessed, running a hand self-consciously across his bald head. “But one brave fellow cast me as Cyrano once in summer stock. I loved it. It was a great change from the businessmen or evil kings or clowns that I usually get. Wildly romantic.”

  “Not that you got the girl,” Larry said.

  “Sure I did, spiritually!”

  Larry snorted but Edith the peacemaker headed off the incipient quarrel. “Jaymie! What was your favorite role?”

  Jaymie had been sitting pensively, listening quietly to the others and sipping on a Sprite. She raised her eyes now and said, “Hedvig. InThe Wild Duck.”

  “Hedvig?” Edith frowned.

  “That’s the little girl, isn’t it?” asked Nick. “The one who shoots herself to prove she loves her father?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I was twelve when I played her. A rep company in a Chicago suburb jobbed me in.”

  “What was fun about it, honey?” asked Edith, mystified.

  Jaymie pushed the can away and frowned. “Not fun, exactly. Just—a revelation.”

  “That’s funny. You’ve done a lot of musicals, haven’t you? I think they’re more fun. Did you like it just because it was different?”

  “Yes, partly. I’d always done these little-girl things. Song-and-dance, like showing off for Daddy before he—Or you know, baton twirling, tap dancing. So Hedvig was the first time I’d really acted. Got out of myself into someone else’s skin. Before, I was always little Jaymie the trained dog, you know? Good at jumping through hoops. But in that show I learned there was much more to acting than that.”

  “Yeah, that’s a heady moment,” Nick agreed. “When you find you can be anything. You’re not limited to your own boring self. Suddenly you have a ticket to infinity.”

  “Yes. And after that the other stuff seemed different too,” Jaymie said. “I might be doing Queen Victoria or Annie Oakley, but I wasn’t just going through the motions anymore. I could really be Annie Oakley, even though she has these silly songs.”

  Anna Maria appeared by their booth, teetering on thick-stacked clogs, a pad in the too-tight band of her black apron. Frugal with personnel as well as ashtrays, she ran the place with a part-time waitress and a part-time cook to assist her, filling in all the gaps personally. She peered at them through heavily mascaraed eyelashes and inquired, “Anything more, you guys?”

  “No, we better get back upstairs,” said Edith.

  Anna Maria pulled a pencil from the dense frizz of her hair and began to calculate. Larry, suddenly jovial, said, “Anna Maria, you’ve been onstage!”

  She smirked, glancing at him over the edge of the pad. “Only in high school, you know that!”

  He gave her the full dazzling benefit of the Palmer smile. “And what was your favorite role?”

  She pursed her mouth and drew down her brows in fierce thought for a moment. “It’d have to be Hedda Gabler,” she said.

  Nick managed to swallow the guffaw inspired by the thought of plump Anna Maria as the athletic, tragic Norwegian, but an unseemly snorting escaped Larry. Anna Maria stiffened indignantly. “Well, I know it’s a gloomy play and all,” she argued, “but she was trapped, you know? After that play I told myself, Anna Maria, you’re going to get a good job and hang on to it, or you’ll be at the mercy of some nerd just like Hedda Gabler was. So you needn’t laugh, chum,” she flung at Larry.

  Edith said hastily, “It’s a wonderful play, Anna Maria. You’re right.”

  “Well, I own this place, right?” She ripped the bill from the pad and smacked it onto the table. “And I daresay it’s more than you guys will ever get out of the theatre!”

  “Ouch!” said Larry, fixing her with contrite dark eyes, all humor erased from them now. “Anna Maria, you are the most cruel woman alive. And the most honest.”

  “Well—didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” She gave a flirty little simper to acknowledge Larry’s apology and clogged her way back behind the counter to help another customer.

  Reflecting on the unhappy raw truth that Anna Maria had presented to them, they settled the bill and dodged through the rain to the loft entrance next door. Upstairs, Derek was looking idly through the prop box, the stage manager was studying the prompt book morosely, and a few actors were warming up already. But they had to wait because Daphne was late. At last she banged through the door, tossing her damp raincoat into a corner and kicking off her clogs in the same general direction. “Fucking Human Services!” she fumed. “You get an appointment, tell them you have to get back to work, does it make any difference? They made me sit there twenty minutes while they drank coffee! And then they wonder why their clients can’t keep jobs!”

  “You ought to just walk out on them,” suggested Cab.

  “Hey, man, you’ve been on unemployment! This is worse! This is the third appointment I’ve had this week. Every other time I did walk out, but that doesn’t count in my favor, you can bet. Besides, the hearing is Friday afternoon.” She was stripping to her burnt-orange leotards. “And then they pop in with a home visit during working hours, and they pretend to be shocked to find a fifteen-year-old babysitting her little sister. Want me to get someone to babysit the babysitter. Christ!”

  Nick asked, “What right do they have to meddle?”

  “None! No right, man. Power is what they have. Raw power.” She was hanging her dashiki-pattern dress carefully on a hook. “See, they aren’t my kids. They’re my cousin’s kids. She OD’d two years ago, okay? And I took in her kids because we’d always been like sisters and because those kids need me. I mean, who else is going to be a mother to a fifteen-year-old black kid who’s been expelled twice?” She began to do a few warm-up stretches. “But the agency says no, I’ve been on unemployment too often, I’ve got a bad background, I’m not a fit mother.”

  Her words clanged in Nick’s mind. How often had he been on unemployment? How would he score on the fit parent test? He asked, “What do they want to do with the kids?”

  Daphne shrugged an eloquent burnt-orange shoulder. “Oh, there’s another cousin, a tight-ass schoolteacher, they think would set a better example. Kids hate her. Sort of a black Phyllis Schlafly, you know? I mean, the only reason Callie was expelled was that she talks back when her teachers put her down. Yo
u heard her mouthing off at Ramona, little idiot.”

  “Ramona mouthed off at her,” said Nick.

  “Hey, that’s the way this old world works. We had a heart-to-heart on the way home, about choosing battles. But hell, she’s a kid yet.”

  Jaymie asked anxiously, “They won’t really take them away, will they?”

  “Not while I live, baby! I’m ahead now because I’ve got good references and because the kids themselves vote for me. But those old bitches look at me and they see Angela Davis Junior. And they think I’ll raise the kid to be Angela Davis the Third. God!” Still propelled by anger, she bounded onto the platform. “I swear, that kid can be anything she wants as long as it’s not a social worker! Hey, let’s get busy. Where are we, Derek? ‘The Highland Fling’?”

  “Right.”

  They got busy.

  IV

  Wednesday evening

  March 7, 1973

  “See you tomorrow, Myra.”

  “Okay, Mr. Bradford. And listen, get some rest, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll try, Myra.” Steve smiled benevolently at his secretary. Myra Goodwin was competent and grandmotherly. Her own beloved son had unfortunately become a gambler and had left New York for the headier atmosphere of Las Vegas. Steve had inherited Myra’s motherly concern.

  “Yes, do try. You’re looking tired these days.” Myra ground out her cigarette in the big amber glass ashtray, then tapped an envelope that sat on the edge of her desk. “And here, don’t forget your wife’s plane tickets. I do hope Mr. Busby will be all right.”

  “Thanks. I’m sure he will, Myra.”

  He was lucky enough to find a seat on the commuter train, and glanced out the streaked window as they emerged from the tunnel. Gloomy and rainy; but warmer, at least, than yesterday.

  He’d seen Maggie again from a distance today, soaring through the drizzle toward her mysterious destination, a scarlet umbrella shielding her and the baby from the drops. Her smile had been so bright. And she moved with such grace. Those long legs—he let himself daydream a moment. Did he dare hope?