In America by Susan Sontag Read Free Book Online

or Schiller or Slowacki, pivoting in her unwieldy costume, gesturing, declaiming, sensing the audience bend to her art, she felt no more than herself. The old self-transfiguring thrill was gone. Even stage fright—that jolt necessary to the true professional—had deserted her. Gabriela’s slap woke her up. An hour later Maryna put on her wig and papier-mâché diadem, gave one last look in the mirror, and went out to give a performance that even she could have admitted was, by her real standards for herself, not too bad.
    *   *   *
    BOGDAN WAS so captivated by Maryna’s majesty as she went to be executed that at the start of the ovation he was still rooted in the plush-covered chair at the front of his box, hands clenching the rail. Galvanized now, he slipped between his sister, the impresario from Vienna, Ryszard, and the other guests, and by the second curtain call had made his way backstage.
    â€œMag-ni-fi-cent,” he mouthed as she came off from the third curtain call to wait beside him in the wings for the volume of sound to warrant another return to the flower-strewn stage.
    â€œIf you think so, I’m glad.”
    â€œListen to them!”
    â€œThem! What do they know if they’ve never seen anything better than me?”
    After she’d conceded four more curtain calls, Bogdan escorted her to the dressing-room door. She supposed she was starting to allow herself to feel pleased with her performance. But once inside, she let out a wordless wail and burst into tears.
    â€œOh, Madame!” Zofia seemed about to weep, too.
    Stricken by the anguish on the girl’s face and intending to comfort her, Maryna flung herself into Zofia’s arms.
    â€œThere, there,” she murmured as Zofia held her tightly, then let go with one arm and delicately patted Maryna’s crimped, stiffened mass of hair.
    Maryna released herself reluctantly from the girl’s unwavering grip and met her stare fondly. “You have a good heart, Zofia.”
    â€œI can’t stand to see you sad, Madame.”
    â€œI’m not sad, I’m … Don’t be sad for me.”
    â€œMadame, I was in the wings almost the whole last act, and when you went to die, I never saw you die as good as that, you were so wonderful I just couldn’t stop crying.”
    â€œThen that’s enough crying for both of us, isn’t it?” Maryna started to laugh. “To work, you silly girl, to work. Why are we both dawdling?”
    Relieved of her regal costume and reclothed in the fur-lined robe, Maryna sponged off Mary Stuart’s face and swiftly laid on the discreet mask suitable to the wife of Bogdan Dembowski. Zofia, sniffling a little (“Zofia, enough!”), stood behind her chair embracing the sage-green gown Maryna had chosen that afternoon to wear to the dinner Bogdan was giving at the Hotel Saski. She put the gown on slowly in front of the cheval glass, returned to the dressing table and undid the curls and brushed and re-brushed her hair, then piled it loosely on her head, looked closer into the mirror, added a little melted wax to her eyelashes, stood again, inspected herself once more, listening to the ascending din in the corridor, took several loud, rhythmical breaths, and opened the door to an enveloping wave of shouts and applause.
    Among the admirers well connected enough to be admitted backstage were some acquaintances but, except for Ryszard, clasping a bouquet of silk flowers to his broad chest, she saw no close friends: those invited to the party had been asked to go on ahead to the hotel. And more than a hundred people were waiting outside the stage door, despite the foul weather. Bogdan offered the shelter of his sword-umbrella with the ivory handle so she could linger for fifteen minutes under the falling snow, and she would have lingered another fifteen had he not waved away the more timid fans, their programs still unsigned, and