The Empire of Night

2

As it was, he didn’t do anything but watch for the last few moments of the play. Then the curtain fell, and when it rose and the calls began, he was gone for good.

The audience clapped loudly and the rest of the cast came and bowed and lined up on the sides and they joined the applause as my mother appeared. She bounded downstage center and the women in shirtwaists and suffragette ribbons all stood up and cried, “Bravo! Bravo!” and my mother bowed deeply to them as a man and then she straightened and flounced her hair and she curtsied as a woman. The suffragettes cried, “Brava! Brava!”

All the while, the rest of the viewers were applauding loudly, some of them rising to their feet as well. As did I. My mother did not look my way.

A boy brought roses from the wings.

I’d seen bigger ovations for my mother, but the few actresses who’d done Hamlet before had been pilloried in the press and heckled from the cheap seats. I hadn’t read her reviews, but I heard not a single rude sound from this audience, and that seemed a triumph to me.

I lingered to let the crowd murmur its way out of the auditorium after Mother had finally stopped taking bows and the house lights had come on. Then I crossed before the front row. But instead of going left, up the aisle to the exit doors, I went to the right, up the steps and through the stage access door and into the wings with its smells of greasepaint and sweat and dust burning on the electric stage lights. The actors had all vanished, and squaring around before me was a lanky man in shirt sleeves and bow tie. The stage manager, I assumed.

I was ready to explain myself to him, why I felt privileged to go through an unauthorized door and head straight to the dressing rooms, but he immediately said, “Mr. Cobb.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you like to see your mother?”

“I would.”

“This way.” He turned on his heel to lead me toward a door at the back wall.

I stepped up quickly to walk beside him.

“There was a man with a gun up on your fly floor,” I said. “Are you surprised?”

He stopped. He turned to me.

“A gun?” he said.

“Inside his coat.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m surprised.”

“Do you know who he might have been?” I asked.

The stage manager hesitated at this. He was thinking in ways that I could not clearly interpret. Then he said, “Not if he was in my flies.”

“And if he hadn’t gotten that far?”

“Your mother has fans.”

This was no fan.

He turned and moved on. “Please follow me,” he said.

Something was odd here, but I didn’t push the point.

As we passed through the doorway at the back of the stage wings, I said, “How did you know me?”

“Your mother has a picture of you in her dressing room.”

This didn’t surprise me.

I followed him along a short passageway and we cut back at the next turning and entered an enclosed staircase.

Her dressing room was on the second floor. The door was ajar and emitting female laughter.

The stage manager knocked and the laughter faded.

“Prithee show thyself,” my mother called out, using the lowest Hamlet register of her voice.

More female laughter.

The stage manager leaned his head past the edge of the door to look in. “Your son,” he said.

I did not hear her reply, if she made one. Perhaps she gestured. The stage manager pulled back at once and opened the door and I stepped in.

She sat with her back to her makeup mirror, still in her costume of trunk hose and doublet, the doublet unbuttoned, however, showing a finely embroidered lace blouse beneath, straight from a Mayfair shop no doubt, her own private joke throughout the night’s portrayal of Hamlet, a secret assertion of her modern womanhood. She was flanked by four suffragettes, two on each side, their uniform dark skirts and white shirtwaists making them look like a ladies string quartet about to go off to play in a palm court at a local hotel.

I stopped a single pace into the room, my hat in my hand. My mother rose. Quite formally, even solemnly. Then she took a step forward and opened her arms. “My darling Kit,” she said.

I came to her and we hugged and she smelled of greasepaint and mothball camphor and she felt all bones and sinew inside her man’s clothes.

“Isn’t he handsome, my dears?” she said.

The women simply made little muttering sounds in response, ready for the vote but not for boldly voicing the sort of sentiments my mother was challenging them to have.

I focused on her suffragettes, as my mother resisted my incipient withdrawal from her arms, assessing them as she would have them assess me.

They were varying degrees of young — Mother had brought only the more impressionable acolytes into her closest circle — but three of them did not hold my eye even for a moment. One, though, had a strong-jawed, wide-mouthed sort of farm girl prettiness, the kind of girl you’d enjoy trying, briefly, to pry away from her horse.

Mother was letting go of me now, pushing me back to arm’s length but keeping her hands on my shoulders. “Where have you been for the past year?”

Where she had been was a more interesting question, but I politely did not ask it in front of the young women for whom she was still performing.

“Ah yes,” she said, as if just remembering. “I read your stories lately. What a fine writer you are. I taught him to write by making him read a thousand books in countless star dressing rooms on three continents.” The “him” was the only indication she’d suddenly started to talk directly to the other women, as her eyes kept fixed tightly on mine, shining that light of hers on me, making me a willing part of her present performance.

She said, elaborating on her perusal of my stories, “But Constantinople of all places,” she said. “All those poor people suffering under the Ottomans. A terrible business. Why would you ever go out there? I thought you were the great chronicler of bullets and cannon shells and men in battle dress, my darling.”

I did not have a chance to reply.

“And your ordeal on the high seas,” she said, the light changing in her eyes, giving off more heat and less illumination. “Did you get my telegram?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t know where to send it.”

Then you already knew I didn’t get it. But I didn’t say this.

“He was on the Lusitania,” she said.

The suffragettes clucked softly in sympathy.

“Closer to three thousand,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Utter non sequitur, my darling,” she said.

“The number of books you had me read. I figured it out not long ago.”

She brightened.

“In an idle moment,” I said. And then, to the others: “She and an ever changing cast of theater people she enlisted taught me everything I knew, before I knew to teach myself.” As she had done, I did not look directly at the suffragettes, letting the pronoun suggest I was addressing them.

Mother let go of my shoulders.

She introduced me to the young women, and I smiled at them and shook their hands, their grips still limply disenfranchised, but I did not endeavor to remember any of the names. Even, though it went against my natural inclinations, the name of the pretty one. Immediately after the introductions, my mother ushered them all out of the dressing room, everyone fluttering ardent good-byes and comradely good wishes every step of the way.

Mother closed the door and leaned back against it. “Was I splendid tonight?” she asked.

The question was not rhetorical, though I knew she knew the answer. “You were,” I said.

“Yes I was,” she said.

“Does all of London realize it?” I asked.

“Much of London.”

Some of the critics surely sneered at any woman playing the role. But she seemed content, so I did not ask.

“Poor Bernhardt,” she said.

Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in London in ’99 to vicious reviews. Mother was inviting the comparison. “You did better?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I was referring to her leg. They cut it off only a few weeks ago and she gave it to a university.”

From Isabel Cobb’s Hamlet in London to Sarah Bernhardt’s losing a leg, service to my government had put me behind in my reading.

“Gangrene,” my mother said.

“So you’re doing better than the Divine Sarah in legs as well,” I said.

Mother lifted her face to the ceiling in a loud bark of a laugh. But when her face came back down, she grabbed a chaw of my cheek between her thumb and forefinger and gave it a squeeze and shake to match the laugh. “I feel bad for her,” she said.

I have a pretty high threshold of pain, but like those Chicago thugs going soft about their mothers, I felt the same at thirty-one years old about Isabel Cobb’s uninhibited mother-cheek-pinch as I did at ten: it hurt like hell.

She finally let go, and she sat down in the chair where she’d been presiding over her suffragettes. I sat in the chair at the idle makeup station next to her. Edged into the frame of her mirror was my formal portrait in a cabinet card, a thing she’d insisted I do for her six years ago upon hearing that the Post-Express was sending me off to Nicaragua on my first war assignment.

She caught me looking at it.

“I carry you with me everywhere,” she said.

I turned to her.

In spite of her being made up as a man — a melancholy man, no less — and being an age that tormented her always for what she no longer was, my mother was still beautiful, her face, in impact, all dark eyes and wide mouth, both restlessly shaping and reshaping in attentiveness to whoever was before her.

It had long pleased me to be able to make her eyes and mouth abruptly freeze. Like now. “Can you think why a tough guy with a gun would be stalking you?” I said.

But I had her for only the briefest of moments. Then, with a tilt of the head, her eyes veiled themselves like a cat showing its trust, and her mouth made a dismissive moue. “Not at all,” she said.

She sounded sincere. But she was arguably the greatest living actress of the American stage. She could sound however she liked. What I needed to figure out: had the oddness of the question itself been enough to make her pause for that brief moment or had it revealed she was now lying?

I had good reason to suspect the latter.

Last year she got involved in some undercover detective work in New Orleans while she was trying to make an escape from the theater.

“Are you still in bed with Pinkerton?” I said.

“What do you take me for?” she said. “Old man Pinkerton’s been dead for thirty years.”

She winked.

“Okay, Mother,” I said. “I usually let you get away with ending a serious conversational topic with an ambiguous theatrical gesture. Not this time. Does the wink mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but if he were alive it would be a different matter, or does it mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but you may still be working for his detective agency?”

This stopped her face once again.

She squared around to me, leaned forward, straightened her back, and pressed her hands onto her knees. A manly gesture. A man with more backbone than Hamlet. But I recognized it from a lifetime with this woman as a no-nonsense Isabel Cobb gesture. She said, “Listen to me, my darling. Consider my ego. Did you think I would be happy to play that role for long? Going after two-bit hoodlums for a corporation of private dicks?”

I kept my own face still. I wasn’t going to let her get away with the ambiguity of a rhetorical question.

She knew. She smiled a that’s-my-boy smile. “It was beneath me,” she said. “I am not now nor will I ever again work for the Pinkertons or any other detective agency.”

She held my eyes steadily with hers.

Okay.

“Okay,” I said.

She didn’t move.

“That leaves the man with the pistol in his coat,” I said. “He was in the flies above you.”

She didn’t flinch. Her face was placid, but she said, “That’s unsettling.”

How to read my mother? That had been a daily challenge for much of my life. It probably made me the hell of a good newspaper reporter that I was. Right now I believed what she was saying about the detective work; her reasoning acknowledged who she was behind the mask. This quiet in her also felt real. I supposed. But she was perfectly capable of playing, from her actor’s book of tricks, Placid and Calm. Playing the untrue thing was her life. If the calm were true, wouldn’t she be squeezing every flinch and flutter from a fictitious endangerment?

She said, “Maybe the theater put on some security. A woman playing a man provokes a lot of people on both sides.”

“Your stage manager said he didn’t know who he was.”

She nodded faintly. Then she shrugged. “We do only a matinee tomorrow and the run ends Thursday night.”

There wasn’t much left to say about this. It worried me. But this was my mother I was dealing with.

I let her change the subject. “Do you tour on from here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

A few moments of silence clock-ticked away as we looked at each other, as if casually.

“As Hamlet?”

“Yes,” she said. “And you? Will you be waiting in London for the German bullets and cannon shells to arrive?”

Another beat of silence and then she smiled. And she winked. She was reminding me that we’d long ago tacitly agreed not to question how we led our lives.

“I’ll be touring on,” I said.