Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

the back end of the dressing room, is exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of any child, including an unraveled adult who’s saving what’s left of her sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the regular costumes for Shakespeare’s plays, all jeweled and spangled and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we favor; Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Hilliard’s adaptation of Heinlein’s Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers’ Insect People, O’Neill’s The Fountain, Flecker’s Hassan, Camino Real, Children of the Moon, The Beggar’s Opera, Mary of Scotland, Berkeley Square, The Road to Rome.

There are also the costumes for all the special and variety performances we give of the plays: Hamlet in modern dress, Julius Caesar set in a dictatorship of the 1920’s, The Taming of the Shrew in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a dinosaur, The Tempest set on another planet with a spaceship wreck to start it off Karrumph!⁠—which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of extraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other monsters.

Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of space and time that you sometimes get frightened you’ll be whirled up and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you really are⁠—as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain around my neck (Siddy’s first gift to me that I can remember) and chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my eyes and squeezing the holes in the token: “Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Christopher Street⁠ ⁠…”

But you don’t ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your tummy chilled from time to time⁠—because you know it’s all make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children’s dress-up world. It gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever. It’s always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam⁠ ⁠… and the best sort of therapy for a potholed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can’t remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can’t ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong⁠ ⁠… and I remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come scuttling back.

The costumery’s good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the racks extend into the fourth dimension⁠—not to mention the boxes of props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of Furness’s Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I’d been boning up on. Oh, and I’ve sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.

In a less sloppily organized company I’d be called wardrobe mistress, I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I’m not that old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even Martin.

Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I’ve tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think she’d whang me.

And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my little whims.

I don’t mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But in spite of Sid’s whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its efficiency⁠—people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the leading lady’s face. In short, we’re a team. Which is funny when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest come from just everywhere.

Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room’s very coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while Martin and I police up the whole place, me