In America Read Free Page B

crutches, the quotation marks.) But even those who said it was wrong seemed to temper their judgment when it came to Maryna. It was obvious how much everyone admired her, not only her husband and the man (Ryszard, possibly Tadeusz) who may or may not be her lover. I had no doubt that all the men and several of the women must be at least a little in love with Maryna. But it was more, or less, than love. They were enthralled by her. I wondered if I could be enthralled by her, were I one of them, not merely someone watching, trying to figure them out. I thought I had time, for their feelings, their story; and my own. They seemed—and I pledged myself to be like them, on their behalf—indefatigable. Yet this didn’t strip me of my impatience. I was waiting for quick relief: to hear something, a sentence, that would bring me the nub and drift of their concern. It occurred to me that perhaps I had been listening too avidly. Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t that I had to listen harder but should mull over what I’d already heard. (The phrase crisis of nerves had started to buzz in my head.) Perhaps, I thought, I should simply take off. (And what about abandon her public? ) Perhaps only if I went downstairs and out into the blizzard and walked for a while (or simply parked myself in a snowdrift near the coachmen perched on their boxes, near the patient horses) would I manage to understand what was engrossing them. I had to admit, too, that I longed for a gust of fresh air. When I’d entered the room, none of the guests seemed to mind the chill, but now they didn’t seem to mind that it was too warm. The bells of the nearby church struck eleven times, and I heard the faraway echo, raggedly synchronized, from other churches in the city. A fat, red-faced woman in a near-rhyming, tomato-red apron appeared with an armful of wood and, brushing past me, opened the little door of the stove and fed the fire. I wondered if the flue was drawing as well as it should, knowing that I could expect nothing better of the gas jets, unevenly fed and therefore leaking and sputtering as they always did then, before the advent of natural gas; but, however inevitable that I, a child of neon and halogen, would appreciate the look of gas lighting, unlike everyone else in the room I was not used to its acrid smell. And of course many of the men were smoking. Ryszard, who had been drawing caricatures of the guests to entertain the drowsy child I thought must be Maryna’s son, was puffing away on a large, ornately carved meerschaum pipe—exactly the fetish one might expect an insecure, ambitious young man to possess. Several of the older men had lit Virginia cigars. And Maryna, now installed in a vast wing chair, held a long Turkish cigarette in her languid hand—just the sort of mildly disreputable thing a celebrated actress would be given license to do. She could even wear trousers like George Sand if she liked, and I could perfectly imagine her as Rosalind; she would make a splendid Rosalind, though a bit old for the role, but that’s never stopped any famous actress: fifty-year-olds have appeared, and triumphed, as Juliet. I could also see Maryna playing Nora or Hedda Gabler, this being the period of the ascendancy of Ibsen … but maybe she wouldn’t want to play Hedda any more than she would want to play Lady Macbeth, which would mean she wasn’t a truly great actor, who’s never afraid of playing monsters. I hoped she hadn’t been made less of an artist by high-mindedness. Or by self-regard. She was talking to the impresario from Vienna, he was smiling cautiously, and others had drawn close to listen. My Tadeusz, having finally broken free of the speechifying leading actor—I heard, their last words, Sheer folly (from the actor) and Nothing is irrevocable (from Tadeusz)—now stood beside Maryna’s chair, his thumbs in the armholes of his yellow waistcoat: a most un-Wertherish