Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (20 page)

She had already dressed for the occasion. She wore her New York/London Opening Night Gala outfit, which was a black and white dress with black pumps covered by rubber boots that came halfway to her knees—

––and so there was nothing left to do but tape to the door the note that she had already written saying:

THANKS—GOT ANOTHER RIDE!

And descend the stairs with this man, whoever the hell he was.

The buildings, signboards, restaurants, curio shops, florists, dogs, cats, people, and roads of Bay St. Lucy had all become part of the ocean, and, although the rain had decreased slightly in its intensity, it was still not so much falling as attacking. Falling implied dropping vertically, as in parachuting; attacking implied straight-on-over the hill DADADADADADA DADAAAAACHAAAAARGE! coming right at you, as though each individual drop were running as fast as it could and carrying a bayonet.

She kept her eyes closed during the five minute drive, not knowing whether to be more frightened that Ichabod Crane would slide off the road—which was only a sheet of fast flowing dirty gray water—or that he would be attacked by the Headless Horseman, in which case where would she be?

They reached the mansion. She’d always pictured the restored Robinson place as The Titanic raised and turned upright, so opulent were its furnishings. Now though, it was as if they’d gone back a notch farther in time to watch the raising itself. The huge building lay on the bottom of the ocean. Water was everywhere, blowing from the Spanish moss, which stretched horizontally in the still brutal winds like gray wrapping paper—and figures moved about like divers, all of them carrying weakly glowing searchlights as they paddled here and there, unable to speak, and communicating by feeble gestures.

Finally, she realized they’d come to a stop beneath a huge canopy, which she could hear drumming with the rain.

The main entrance door opened, and, an instant later, her own car door swung out, revealing a teenage boy dressed in a suit several sizes too big for him, and wearing black rimmed glasses several sizes too big for anybody.

“Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes.”

“Could you come with me?”

“Sure.”

“Just right this way. I’m Justin—I’m kind of an errand boy with the company!”

“Hi Justin!”

She followed through the entrance hall and along a corridor that snaked into the interior of the mansion

“Bad storm,” remarked Justin.

“Yes, it is.”

“Can’t postpone the play, though. Too many technical issues. Too many people here.”

“I understand.”

What I don’t understand, she heard herself wondering, is where I’m going.

She found out quickly.

“Just a second, Ms. Bannister.”

Justin knocked softly on a door which had magically appeared to their right.

“Ma’am?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“Ma’am,
 
it’s Ms. Bannister.”

“Bring her in.”

The door opened.

She stepped forward into a dressing room, with mirrors everywhere, and a thin stream of cigarette smoke rising from an ashtray which sat on a counter covered by jars of makeup.

The reflection of Helen Reddington stared at her.

Helen was not alone.

Seated in the far corner was John Giusti.

This is not good
, Nina found herself thinking.

It wasn’t.

The door closed.

“John and I wanted to see you, Nina. To tell you something.”

“What is it, Helen?”

“Clifton talked to me half an hour ago. Just before we went into makeup.”

“What did he tell you?”

“It’s over.
 
He doesn’t want me any more.”

“Oh, Helen…”

“We’re supposed to go back to New York tomorrow.
 
We’ll seem happy. The perfect married couple. Then next week his attorneys will announce the divorce. There’s still some question as to whether it will be mental cruelty or infidelity, but it will be my fault. The bottom line is that most of it will be kept out of the papers, on the condition that I take what he condescends to give me. And no more. All the money that the company—which is basically him—has been paid to come here, will go to him. I shall get a small monthly allowance.
 
Grandmamma will be allowed to keep the house until she…”

“Yes.”

“But the rest of Grandmamma’s money—the money grandfather made—will be gone.”

“Helen—have the proceedings begun?”

“No.
 
They will be initiated next week.”

“Then perhaps someone can reason with the man.”

She shook her head.

“No.
 
No chance of that.
 
Interesting that he told me about this thirty minutes ago. Before the performance. He’d like me to have it in my mind as the play moves forward.
 
Perhaps he wants to experience a truly mad Ophelia. He may have the chance.”

“Helen, if there were anything I could do.”

“There’s something I can do,” said John, quietly.

“John,” Nina said. “You can’t be violent with this man.
 
He has all the cards.”

John shook his head.

“I’m not going to be violent with him. But I’m not letting him have Helen, either.”

Helen interrupted him.

“John and I have spent time together in the last few days. It’s been…well, very special to me.”

“We’ve been careful,” added John. “With all the press, a husband like Barrett…we couldn’t be seen. And we weren’t.
 
But we’ve talked about a lot of things.”

“Oedipus,” smiled Helen, weakly.

“Yeah.
 
That too.”

“But,” Helen continued, “the bottom line is that I’m staying here. That will be all Clifton needs, of course, to have the perfect divorce. ‘Old flame rekindles for young actress.’ That sort of thing. And, despite that, he’ll be furious when I tell him.”

“When are you going to do that?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll do it together,”
 
John added.

“Be careful when you do it,” said Nina.

Helen nodded.

“We will.”

“If he tries anything…”

She shook her head:

“Don’t even think about that, John.
 
That can’t happen.”

He nodded.

“I know.”

Silence for a time.

Then Helen to Nina:

“You’ll be sitting with Grandmamma, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Take good care of her during the show. I must tell you…she knows about all of this. I was hoping to keep it from her, hoping against hope that the divorce could be put off.
 
But the way things are now, with my having decided to stay…I simply had to tell her. As far as she’s concerned, no one else knows.”

“How did she take this news about you and Clifton Barrett?”

“She was very angry with him. She saw the slap, too, and can’t forget it. But she’s taking it bravely. She would, of course, have every reason to be outraged at me.
 
I’m the one who made the disastrous marriage and lost the family’s money; but she’s been kind and understanding.”

“Of course. That’s Hope’s nature. She couldn’t hurt anyone, and she would certainly never be mad—or stay mad—at you, Helen.”

“No. I suppose not. But sit with her tonight and be a comforting presence, will you?”

“Of course I will.”

A bell rang.
 
The door opened.

“Five minutes, Ms. Reddington.”

“All right.”

“I have to go, Helen,” said Nina, getting to her feet. “John…”

“Yes, Nina?”

“Are you going to see the play?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think I could take that.
 
I don’t want to see the man.
 
Onstage or anywhere else.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“I don’t know. Wander around the garden. Sometimes when I walk, well…I’m not so angry.”

“And then?”

“I’ll probably stay in town tonight. I have a bed at the clinic. It’s necessary sometimes when there are emergencies.
 
I’ll sleep there, then go over to the Reddingtons tomorrow morning.
 
Then we’ll tell that…”

“John,” said Helen, quietly.

He checked himself, then continued:

“We’ll tell her husband about the situation.
 
If he wants to get furious, then let him.
 
But Helen never gets on that plane with him. As for money, I’ve got enough of it.
 
I can give the Reddingtons all the help they need.”

“All right, John,” said Nina, opening the door. “Just promise me that you’ll be careful tomorrow morning.”

“I will. I really will.”

“All right, then.
 
And Helen, good luck tonight.”

“Thank you, Nina.”

Nina left, closing the door behind her and thinking:

“Good luck to both of you. You’re going to need it.”

CHAPTER 13:
 
GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE

Hamlet
began in and not in the rain, after the curtain went and did not go up, and Francisco and Bernardo got and did not get wet.

Elsinore.
 
A platform before the castle.

Bernardo:
 
“Who’s there?”

Francisco: “Nay, answer me:
 
stand and unfold yourself!”

Which Bernardo did, causing the crowd in the theater to crane their necks and peer upward, the opening action taking place in midair, at least twenty feet above what should have been the stage.

Ooooohh!

Aaaaahhh!

An appreciative and collective gasp from people who’d never experienced a production paid for by tons of Robinson money and designed by experts who, a bit strange though they might be, still knew a thing or two about sets and lighting.

It was, thought Nina, the lighting that was so unearthly, so unlike anything she’d ever seen before. If soldiers and guards wanted to walk about on platforms hanging in mid air, why that was their business, and she was not so naïve as to doubt that gravity could be defied by a mix of strong scaffolding and invisible wiring.

But the eerie green lighting that bathed them as they strode about in their armor plates and visored helmets; the incessant rain that poured down on their glistening armor—

––she knew where the rain was coming from.
 
It was the same rain that still engulfed Bay St. Lucy, but it had been hired by The Company to perform in the play; and so, the roof of the theater having been rolled back and three mirrored sheets of Plexiglas inserted in its place, an outlying, dying, fringe of Hurricane Deborah was now drenching and not drenching the parapets of young Prince Hamlet’s castle, making the audience say softly to themselves:

“How can they not be getting wet? It’s pouring all around them!”

And Hope, seated in the front row beside Nina, whisper:

“It’s very realistic, isn’t it?”

It became more than realistic when Horatio and Marcellus
 
entered from the back of the hall—except another twenty feet higher than they were supposed to be standing—waved to their countrymen still hanging somehow above where the stage should have been, and shouted:

“Friends to this ground, and liegemen to the Dane!”

It was off and running.

Motion. Constant motion, nothing stationary on or below or about or behind or outside of or inside of or even having to do with the stage itself, which disappeared while the Cosmos of Norway floated around it. Trumpets sounded from Heaven, drum beats rolled up from Hell, lights came and went like meteors and then it all stopped. Stopped completely still, the storm itself extinguished, the green coral reef lights disappearing beneath a now quiet sea, the elevations flattened, the stage back again and tightly compressed, one candle only burning…

…and Hamlet alone, thinking.

“Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self slaughter!”

My God, he’s good!
 
thought Nina.

They were all good.

Claudius was good Horatio was good Laertes was good Voltimund Cornelius Rosencrantz Guildenstern Osric the Gentlemen the Priest Marcellus Bernardo the Players Fortinbras Gertrude and Ophelia were good they were all good scene after scene after scene after—(To be or not to Be!) scene after scene––so that it was only slightly surprising that when–– Act III, Scene IV—Hamlet exclaimed:

“How now!
 
A rat?”

And followed it with:

“Dead for a Ducat!”

And
 
thrust
 
his sword through the mammoth tapestry that now constituted the north wall of The Robinson Castle of Norway…

…making a figure stagger out, mortally wounded and uttering the words:

“Oh!
 
I am slain!”

… that when all of these things happened…

…Hope Reddington would spring to her feet, horror stricken, one hand slapped upon her forehead, another pointing, trembling, at the stage, and shout:

“It’s Polonius!”

––and no one would be surprised.

Since the same rules apply in the theater as they do in church (Never be the only one laughing)—the audience remained silent.

The actors remained silent for a third of a second.

Hope sat and whispered to Nina:

“Polonius didn’t have any business being there!”

Nina nodded, and whispered back:

“I think the play affirms that.”

Then the action continued.

As it had to continue. And as it wound towards its inevitable end, an observer of the theater might have been tempted to comment on the most essential difference between amateur and professional productions. For in the former, Hope Reddington’s outburst might have been the highlight of the evening. People, all in love with Hope, would have said for months afterward:

“Did you hear Hope?
 
Wasn’t that precious?”

Whereas this particular performance made everyone forget Hope, since the highlights occurred onstage and not off it, and since they simply kept coming.

They kept coming partially because of Helen Reddington herself. The community felt a sense of pride during the early scenes, when the young woman they remembered as a precocious teenager bounded onto the stage in the guise of the youthful and enthusiastic Ophelia, who was simply another precocious teenager who happened to live in Norway and was enamored with a strange and moody man who saw himself not as a jock but as a Goth.

But then Ophelia went insane, taking Helen with her.

Or perhaps it was vice versa, only true actors knowing which was which.

So that when the queen said “Let her come in,” in the fifth scene of Act Four, and Ophelia/Helen crept in from stage left, the audience could not withhold a gasp.

The woman before them moved like an animal, insinuating herself by Horatio as though she were nothing but a shadow passing through him. No, her hatred was for the queen, and Nina could not help thinking of Clifton Barrett kissing this woman when she heard Helen intone, in a voice deep enough to be guttural but smooth enough to be serpentine:

“Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?”

Where indeed?

The queen was afraid of her and stepped back.

The actress playing the queen was afraid of her and stepped back.

The town in the audience was afraid of her and would have stepped back but the seats didn’t go anywhere.

“How now, Ophelia?

That was a lot, Nina found herself thinking, to ask Helen Reddington at this point.

How now?

Her husband was leaving her and ruining her, her life was in shambles, and she wanted the man dead.

‘Perhaps he wants to experience a truly mad Ophelia; he may get the chance.’

They all were getting the chance.

But there was no way to answer, ‘How now, Ophelia?’ in the sane world and so Ophelia/Helen descended/ascended into another world, and began to sing.

There was no accompaniment; there could not have been, for the ‘song,’ if one could call it that, was played not by an instrument but by a glare––fixed, haunting, black, and merciless:

“He is dead and gone, lady.”

Oh my God, thought, Nina. She’s talking about her husband.

“He is dead and gone.

“At his head, a grass green turf.

“At his heels a stone.”

The audience, stunned, had no choice but to remain seemingly motionless while the tide that was Ophelia’s madness sucked them into Helen’s eyes and voice and body, and then spit them out again.

She was gone.
 
They could breathe for a second.

Then she was back again, ‘fantastically dressed, with straws and flowers.’

It was a horror of a gown, splattered with horrible orchids, and almost sprouting death weeds, white and blighted; it seemed to have eaten half of Helen, who peered mournfully out of it as though it were quicksand.

She should have been picking flowers for Laertes, but she crept downstage, knelt, and began picking them for the audience.

Except that they—the flowers and not the audience—were invisible.

They were not invisible to Helen, though. She took petals off each, one by one, and blew them out to people on the first two rows, letting her voice sift whispering through the breaths that carried the petals:

Then, looking straight at her grandmother, and no more than a few feet away, she stretched her hand forward, looked at another invisible blossom, studied it, frowned at it, and finally, terrifyingly, let a smile grow around it and take root in it.

Then she whispered:

“There’s rosemary; that’s for remembrance.”

Nina forced her mind to go blank for a time.

When she was able to refocus, the Helen/Ophelia creature had left behind both the stage and an audience of empty shells that had come as people.

The play was never the same, of course, but it did not give up.
 
It had plenty of fight left in it, even after Ophelia’s drowning.

And if, in fact, anything could have caused a sane person to forget Ophelia’s forgetting, it was the final scene.

Hamlet is killed by the poisoned sword of Laertes.

The stage begins slowly rising toward the roof of the theater, and Hamlet begs Horatio:

“If thou dids’t ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

Rising, rising…

…then stop the stage…

…and open the roof…

…completely.

No Plexiglas.

There is the summer sky of Bay St. Lucy.

Completely clear.

And precisely in the middle of the opening above the crying Horatio and the dying Hamlet.

The moon.

The full white moon.

With not one cloud passing over it.

While Horatio says, first to the figure who has just died in his arms and then to heaven:

“Good night, sweet Prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Utter silence in the theater.

And all the lights go out.

Pandemonium.

Voices voices voices voices and people getting up and going this way and that way and
 
trampling over each other on the seats and in the aisles and everyone moving out of the theater and everyone moving back into the theater towards the stage and some people shouting and some people crying and the technical people up on catwalks congratulating each other and gradually, gradually, the whole thing getting louder and more raucous because people were beginning to drink.