The Joys of Love (5 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: The Joys of Love
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I wonder when I first began to love him? she thought, and it seemed to her that it had been from that very first moment she saw him, that April morning when he had come walking into Mr. Price's office and she had realized at once that he was different from everybody else in the room. And then there was
the first night they went walking on the boardwalk together. They had barely been there a week and it was opening night of the season.
 
That whole evening had been a wonderful one for Elizabeth, starting with the moment when the apprentices put on their long summer evening dresses in preparation for ushering in the first audience of the summer. Elizabeth was grateful that she had been on the Ivy Chain at college and that being on Ivy meant a pastel evening dress. She had made her own, a long corn-colored dirndl skirt and a deeper yellow blouse that bared both her shoulders.
“The reason I stick to dirndls is that they're inexpensive and easy to make,” she had confessed to Jane, “and I'm really no seamstress.”
“They look wonderful on you,” Jane said, rather wistfully, “and they make me look dumpy. Look, honey, I have a big sort of dark amber cummerbund thing that would look gorgeous with that outfit. You take it. I never wear it.”
“Oh, but I couldn't—”
“Listen,” Jane said, rather sharply, “don't get your back up again. It is also blessed to receive. We're all perfectly aware that at the moment you are—shall we say—short of cash. Okay, that's a fact and what difference does it make? We know you aren't trying to milk us dry or take advantage of us or anything. Now take the dratted cummerbund or I'll think you think I don't have any taste. Oh, lawks, maybe that's the root of it. Do you think it would look awful?”
“No. I think it would look wonderful,” Elizabeth said. “I thought of a sash of a darker color when I sewed the outfit, only for Ivy we had to be all one color.”
“Well, will you take it then?” Jane asked. “Please. Or you'll really hurt my feelings.”
“Thanks ever so much.” Elizabeth knew that her gratitude was clumsy and ill-expressed. “I—just thanks, Jane.”
“Oh, forget it,” Jane said. “Here, let me put it on for you. Oh, Liz, it does look elegant! Come on, hon, we have to dash. If you're head usher you ought to be there before anybody else.”
The opening went beautifully. The audience loved Mariella Hedeman, the company's character woman, as the crotchety old lady in the wheelchair, and Kurt Canitz as her murderer got three solo curtain calls and several shouts of “Bravo.” The apprentices, standing in the back, jumped up and down and shouted and cheered. Afterwards they all went backstage. They were imbued with a glowing sense of vicarious importance. After all, Ben was really one of them and he was assistant stage manager; and Mariella Hedeman gave them voice lessons; and Huntley Haskell, who played the rather sweetly pompous young Englishman, was their acting coach. Even Marian Hatfield, their movement teacher, who had not been in this play, had joined everyone backstage. The apprentices felt they belonged in this company; they were part of a professional theatre; these were their friends and colleagues who had just given the audience a pleasant and exciting evening.
Ben had met them anxiously. “Did you notice I was a little late on the second act curtain?” he asked with a worried frown. His blue shirt was moist with nervous perspiration and his
shadow loomed grotesquely on one of the flats like a beanpole of a giant.
“No,” Jane said, “it looked perfect to me. I don't think it should have come down a second earlier.”
“You mean you don't think anybody in the audience noticed it, then?”
“For crying out loud, no.” John Peter sounded exasperated.
“Well, Kurt swore at me like mad. I didn't think it was late. Maybe he just had the jitters like the rest of us,” Ben said, sounding relieved. “We're in, anyhow. They loved it, didn't they?”
“Wasn't Kurt wonderful?” Elizabeth cried.
“Oh, he was okay,” John Peter said. “I've seen the part done a lot more subtly. Kurt doesn't know the meaning of shading. And of course his accent was out of place.”
Elizabeth knew better than to argue with John Peter in the backstage crowd, especially as Jane was nodding in agreement. John Peter was opinionated at all times, and here, with people milling around, she would have no chance even if she shouted. “We'll discuss his performance later,” she said. “I want to go see Miss Hedeman now. See you later, kids.” She moved across the stage toward the long passage off which the dressing rooms were located.
Kurt Canitz's dressing room door was open. He was sitting at his table in his dressing gown, his makeup still on, talking to a group of people. He looked up as Elizabeth passed and called out to her.
“Yes, Mr. Canitz?” She stopped and waited to hear whether he wanted a cup of coffee or a fresh tin of Albolene.
“I want to talk to you. Wait for me, will you? I won't be long,” he said, and smiled at her.
“Yes, Mr. Canitz.”
Elizabeth went down the corridor and spoke briefly to Miss Hedeman and Huntley Haskell. A group of apprentices was in Dottie's dressing room. Elizabeth had not liked her performance. “You can't play that girl with glamour,” she had whispered indignantly to Jane. “The thing that gets her audience's sympathy is that she's pitiful and frustrated and doesn't know the score. Wouldn't you think that Kurt—or somebody—would have stopped her? Dottie, I mean?”
“It's a tough job trying to direct
and
act in a play,” Jane whispered back. “Anyhow, I don't imagine La Dawne's easy to direct.”
Elizabeth was rather disgusted at the overgracious way Dottie (and whatever
was
her real name? No one was christened Dorothy Dawne) was holding forth, and she was angry with the apprentices for fawning over her simply because she had made two or three grade-B movies. I don't suppose she's any older than Jane or I, she thought, and she certainly doesn't have as much talent. Either of us would have been better in that part.
She did not admit to herself that Dottie's lack of talent was not the only thing that annoyed her.
In spite of his promise not to be long, it was after one on opening night when Kurt was ready to leave. Most of the apprentices and the company had already departed. They had gone down the boardwalk to Irving's, the nightclub that was very popular among the company and the more affluent apprentices.
Jane and John Peter had been there once that first week, and had said that once was enough, but this evening they tagged along with everybody else.
“After all, there's only one opening night to a season,” John Peter said. “Coming, Liz?”
Elizabeth was glad she had a legitimate excuse. “Nope. Can't. Mr. Canitz asked me to wait.”
“What for?” Jane asked curiously.
Elizabeth shrugged. “I don't know. Letters to type or something, I suppose.”
“As long as he doesn't ask you over to his hotel to show you his etchings,” Jane said.
Elizabeth laughed. “Don't be a nut.”
She waited in the corridor outside Kurt's dressing room. When his last visitor left he stuck his head out and saw her.
“There's my good little Liz,” he said, “though not so little, are you, Liebchen? Come in and sit down.”
She went into the dressing room and watched while he finished removing his makeup, wiped it off with cotton saturated with witch hazel, and repeated the process three times.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“And this is your first experience in the professional theatre?”
“Yes, Mr. Canitz.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
She nodded. “Terribly.”
“Yes. You look happy.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “This tiny little dressing room! Really, it's more like
solitary confinement than a place for an actor to prepare for a role. Do you suffer from claustrophobia?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I do. I thought if that mob of well-meaning but stupid people didn't leave me alone I'd scream or at least be stupidly rude. And the thought of going to Irving's, that mediocre little
boîte de nuit
—I should get claustrophobia all over again if I went there. I think that I shall telephone and say that I have a headache and have had to go home to bed, and will everybody please have a drink—two drinks—on me. No. Better yet. I shall donate the entire party. That would more than make up for my absence, don't you think? That would make up for anybody's absence.”
“No, they'll be disappointed,” Elizabeth started, and meant it.
“Rubbish,” Kurt said. “Anyhow, it is myself I am thinking of. I saw you passing by, looking so fresh and cool and clean as I was surrounded by that ravening mob, and I thought to myself, Kurt, if you could do as you chose this evening, what would you do? And my answer was, I would go for a walk and a talk by the ocean with Elizabeth Jerrold. Will you go for a walk and a talk by the ocean with me, Elizabeth Jerrold?”
“Yes, thank you. I'd like to very much.” Her heart beat with excitement. Me, she thought unbelievingly. He wants to go for a walk with me! And on opening night!
As though reading her thoughts, he said, “So much is made of opening nights, and by now opening nights and stupid parties are an old story for me. I'm going to call Irving's and then we can go.”
Afterwards they walked on the boardwalk. Kurt talked and Elizabeth listened. He told her of his childhood in Sweden, of the beautiful castle where he had been born and brought up, of the cold, tragic woman who was his mother and the lecherous degenerate who was his father. His voice was taut with remembered unhappiness.
“Did you have a happy childhood, little Elizabeth?” he asked her. “The pastoral childhood that seems to be the birthright of all American children?”
She shook her head. “I don't think all American children have such happy childhoods, Mr. Canitz,” she said. “That's just a myth.”
“Please, please,” he cried. “To you I am Kurt! Everybody else calls me Kurt, so why should you, you the most charming and unusual of all, be formal with me? Say ‘Kurt.' I want to hear it from you.”
“Kurt,” she said softly.
He put his arm tenderly around her and felt the sudden uncontrollable rigidity in her spine. “Liebchen,” he murmured, “you are twenty and you are bursting with a great talent and yet you stop suddenly still when I touch you, like a young doe startled by the sight of a hunter crouched in the hill. Why?”
She shook her head mutely.
“No answer?” he asked, and he took her face in his hands and turned it toward him and kissed her gently. Still holding her face, he pulled away, holding her gaze. He put his arm back around her and they continued walking in silence until he asked, “Elizabeth, forgive me, but was that the first time you have been kissed?”
She answered in a low voice. “No. But it might just as well have been.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the first time it meant anything to me.”
“It did mean something to you?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“It meant something to me, too,” he said.
 
That had started it, that evening, that first evening on the boardwalk. With that kiss it had been as though Kurt had reached bodily into her and taken her heart, as though he had procured it for his personal possession. She felt helpless when she was with him, whenever she thought of him, and now she understood the blind look that came over Jane's face whenever she talked of John Peter.
“What are you thinking?” Kurt asked her.
“I was remembering opening night,” Elizabeth told him, “when we went for our first walk on the boardwalk.”
“So was I,” Kurt said. “Oh, Liz, what a nice kid you are!”
Elizabeth laughed. “What brought that on?”
“Every once in a while I realize all over again how nice you are, and I just thought I'd tell you.”
“Thanks.” She tried to keep the upsurge of pleasure out of her voice. In spite of everything, Jane took John Peter for granted, but Elizabeth could never take Kurt for granted, could never be sure from one moment to the next that the wonderful times she had spent with him had existed in actuality and not in her imagination. For one thing, professionally John Peter and Jane were on a par, but whenever Elizabeth
thought of her own relationship with Kurt she was reminded of the stories of her childhood, the prince and the daughter of the woodcutter, the peasant's child and the lord of high degree.
“Want to turn back?” Kurt asked.
“Not unless you do.” She did not want to turn back ever. She wanted to walk on and on with the houses thinning out so that on one side of them were sand dunes covered with harsh wild beach grasses and on the other the ocean reaching out in an ever-changing pattern to the horizon. “Look at the stars, Kurt. There are always more stars when there isn't a moon. Don't you love stars? Sometimes I love them so much I want to reach up and pick them and hug them the way I used to do with flowers when I was little; and then I cried because I crushed the flowers when I hugged them. Flowers don't like to be loved too hard. And my Aunt Harriet always tells me that people don't, either.” Although her voice carefully ended the sentence as a statement, there was a question in her heart.

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