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

work it so that some Traverse-Three cop or park official doesn’t find out about me and raise a stink. Maybe Sid just throws a little more of the temperament he uses to keep most outsiders out of the dressing-room. We sure don’t get any janitors or scrubwomen, as Martin and I know only too well. More likely he squares someone. I do get the impression all the company’s gone a little way out on a limb letting me stay here⁠—that the directors of our theater wouldn’t like it if they found out about me.

In fact, the actors are all so good about helping me and putting up with my antics (though they have their own, Danu digs!) that I sometimes think I must be related to one of them⁠—a distant cousin or sister-in-law (or wife, my God!), because I’ve checked our faces side by side in the mirrors often enough and I can’t find any striking family resemblances. Or maybe I was even an actress in the company. The least important one. Playing the tiniest roles like Lucius in Caesar and Bianca in Othello and one of the little princes in Dick the Three Eyes and Fleance and the Gentlewoman in Macbeth, though me doing even that much acting strikes me to laugh.

But whatever I am in that direction⁠—if I’m anything⁠—not one of the actors has told me a word about it or dropped the least hint. Not even when I beg them to tell me or try to trick them into it, presumably because it might revive the shock that gave me agoraphobia and amnesia in the first place, and maybe this time knock out my entire mind or at least smash the new mouse-in-a-hole consciousness I’ve made for myself.

I guess they must have got by themselves a year ago and talked me over and decided my best chance for cure or for just bumping along half happily was staying in the dressing room rather than being sent home (funny, could I have another?) or to a mental hospital. And then they must have been cocky enough about their amateur psychiatry and interested enough in me (the White Horse knows why) to go ahead with a program almost any psychiatrist would be bound to yike at.

I got so worried about the set up once and about the risks they might be running that, gritting down my dread of the idea, I said to Sid, “Siddy, shouldn’t I see a doctor?”

He looked at me solemnly for a couple of seconds and then said, “Sure, why not? Go talk to Doc right now,” tipping a thumb toward Doc Pyeskov, who was just sneaking back into the bottom of his makeup box what looked like a half pint from the flask I got. I did, incidentally. Doc explained to me Kraepelin’s classification of the psychoses, muttering, as he absentmindedly fondled my wrist, that in a year or two he’d be a good illustration of Korsakov’s Syndrome.

They’ve all been pretty darn good to me in their kooky ways, the actors have. Not one of them has tried to take advantage of my situation to extort anything out of me, beyond asking me to sew on a button or polish some boots or at worst clean the wash bowl. Not one of the boys has made a pass I didn’t at least seem to invite. And when my crush on Sid was at its worst he shouldered me off by getting polite⁠—something he only is to strangers. On the rebound I hit Beau, who treated me like a real Southern gentleman.

All this for a stupid little waif, whom anyone but a gang of sentimental actors would have sent to Bellevue without a second thought or feeling. For, to get disgustingly realistic, my most plausible theory of me is that I’m a stage-struck girl from Iowa who saw her twenties slipping away and her sanity too, and made the dash to Greenwich Village, and went so ape on Shakespeare after seeing her first performance in Central Park that she kept going back there night after night (Christopher Street, Penn Station, Times Square, Columbus Circle⁠—see?) and hung around the stage door, so mousy but open-mouthed that the actors made a pet of her.

And then something very nasty happened to her, either down at the Village or in a dark corner of the Park. Something so nasty that it blew the top of her head right off. And she ran to the only people and place where she felt she could ever again feel safe. And she showed them the top of her head with its singed hair and its jagged ring of skull and they took pity.

My least plausible theory of me, but the one I like the most, is that I was born in the dressing room, cradled in the top of a flat theatrical trunk with my ears full of Shakespeare’s lines before I ever said “Mama,” let alone lamped a TV; hush-walked when I cried by whoever was off stage, old props my first toys, trying to eat crepe hair my first indiscretion, sticks of greasepaint my first crayons. You know, I really wouldn’t be bothered by crazy fears about New York changing and the dressing room shifting around in space and time, if I could be sure I’d always be able to stay in it and that the same sweet guys and gals would always be with me and that the shows would always go on.

This show was sure going on, it suddenly hit me, for I’d let my fingers slip off my ears as I sentimentalized and wish-dreamed and I heard, muted by the length and stuff of the dressing room, the slow beat of a drum and then a drum note in Maudie’s voice taking up that beat as she warned the other two witches, “A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come.”

Why, I’d not only missed Sid’s history-making-and-breaking Queen Elizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I