Isis Read Free

and stay at fine hotels and see plays or wander art museums and eat creamy cakes and tarts at tea. I expected to see our father on these trips, but he did not return from his war business, though we received telegrams and letters from him constantly.
     
    On bright days, our mother would take us into the village. While my brothers wandered the streets, poking their heads in and out of shops and meeting the local boys and girls, I would go with my mother to her Ladies’ Club, where, in late July and August, the charity theatricals were organized, much to my delight. These mostly were for children, and they were required to be educational as well as entertaining, so my mother managed to steer the ladies toward Greek and Egyptian myth and drama, for she had played Medea and Persephone in her own youth and knew many of these dramas. The summer I was twelve, we did the Tragic Tale of Isis and Osiris , written by a Mrs. Wilfred Jasper of London. It was a mercifully brief series of skits with very little dialogue, as part of a local theatrical fundraiser for the Wayward Girls Sea Cottage that the nuns of Saint Pedrog’s ran.
     
    My brother Harvey played Osiris, Spence played Set, and I was Isis. “I don’t understand,” Harvey said, when he read the play over. “Why does Isis keep having to do this?”
     
    “What?” I asked. “She seems wonderful to me.”
     
    “That’s because you’re playing her,” he said. “But if Osiris is dead, why doesn’t she just let him be?”
     
    “Yes!” Spence laughed, clapping his hands. “Let him just be dead.”
     
    I felt my face grow warm from a kind of sadness, for I took the play and my character of Isis very seriously. “Because she loves him. She doesn’t want him dead.”
     
    “Rubbish. She’s just being obstinate,” Spence said, with a big smile on his face as if he were talking about me instead of Isis herself.
     
    My mother played the goddess Nut, who also was the storyteller of the playlet. Others from the village and the local shops played parts in this and other short plays based on classical themes, and most of the village turned out for the event. The girl backstage painted my face so that I looked exotic and fairly wicked.
     
    We didn’t have an Egyptian headdress, so, instead, a crown was made of tinfoil and paper. I felt as if I had turned into a woman when I put it on my head. As Isis, I might have been the star of the show, but Spence, as Set, hammed it up and got all the applause. The twins were sixteen at the time, and not terribly happy to be forced into the Ladies’ Club charity show, but once they saw pretty girls in the audience, they perked up.
     
    Harvey, poor Osiris, didn’t like the part where he climbed into the trunk at the banquet. He told me before the play began that it scared him to be in such a small space, particularly with Spence shutting it up and laughing like a devil when he closed him in. During rehearsals, Harvey nearly shivered when he looked down at the trunk, and my mother had to pull him aside and speak softly to him in order to get him to lie down in it. “You’ll only be in it for a moment or two,” she told him. “It will remain unlocked. I promise I will make sure.”
     
    He had glanced over at me and whispered, “Sometimes being scared is silly. I’m too old for it, aren’t I?”
     
    And I called him “Silly” and told him that there was nothing to be afraid of in a box.
     
    I had an idea to help him overcome his fear. I drew him close to me. I whispered in his ear, behind which his birthmark lurked, and told him, “Don’t be afraid. When you get in, close your eyes and count to ten. By the time you open them, you can get out of the box.”
     
    He grinned, and messed up my hair with his hand. “Sometimes you’re smarter than me, and that’s when I worry.”
     
    He kissed me at the edge of the lips, and I felt warmth on my face from that kiss through the whole play.
     
    He played his part gamely