“Puck!” Arby boomed from across the circle. “I keep telling you, will you slow down! We’re acting this play in England! It’s their language, it’s called English—you can’t help sounding like an American, but at least you can be in-tel-li-gi-ble!
“Sorry,” I said.
“A southern drawl has a certain charm,” Arby said. Everyone was looking at him now. He smiled his famous warm smile at me, crinkling his eyes—and then suddenly the smile dropped away and his face was sour. It was as if a light had gone out. “But a southern gabble is hideous. Vile. You sound like a cross between a monkey and a duck.”
There were some muffled sniggers around the circle. I wanted to disappear through the floor. From behind me a girl’s calm voice said, “It’s okay, Arby—we’ll work on it, Nat and I. Hey—you chose these guys for their talent, not their accents.”
It was Rachel Levin, and I could have hugged her. She was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and she was attached to the company as Arby’s assistant and our voice coach; I guess they felt we’d be able to relate to her because she was so young. They were right. I glanced around at her and she shook her long hair back over her shoulders and winked at me. The light glinted on the tiny diamond stud in the side of her nose.
Arby looked at her expressionlessly for a moment; I was waiting for him to yell at her. Rachel looked calmly back. Suddenly he grabbed up his soccer ball, which was still beside him on the floor, and threw it violently right at her.
Rachel caught it, smooth as silk, though it rocked her backward. She smiled. “Voice coach and dragon’s assistant,” she said. “Rachel Levin, from Cambridge, Mass.” She tossed the ball back to Arby, gently, and the rehearsal went on.
“He’s so mean,” Eric said. “He’s mean to everyone. Is he always like that?”
Rachel was rummaging in her backpack. She laughed. “I don’t think so. He lives with Julia, and she’s quite the liberated lady.” She produced a glossy green apple from the backpack, took a big noisy bite, and passed it on to Gil Warmun.
“Don’t take it personally, Eric,” Gil said. “Or you, Nat. He just wants everyone to know who’s the boss.” He bit into Rachel’s apple and held it out to Eric. We were all sitting on the tired grass of the riverbank, beside the Charles River that flows slow and brown through Cambridge and Boston to the sea. Rachel had been hearing Gil and me do one of our Puck-Oberon scenes, and Eric was there because, well, because he was always there. It was a hot day, with only a whisper of breeze, and the air felt thick as a blanket. Joggers pounded by on the path a few yards away, glistening with sweat, and sometimes bicyclists whirred past them, perilously close. On the river, long slender boats zipped up and down, rowed by one oarsman or two, four or even eight; they were amazingly quiet, and you heard only the small smack of oars against water as the boats rushed by. Cambridge seemed to be a very competitive place.
I said, pointing, “Arby is like that!” A single oarsman was sculling furiously upriver, very close to our bank. As he came by you could see the intensity tight on his face, and hear the rhythmic gasps for breath.
“Obsessed,” Gil said.
“Yeah.”
“Nothing wrong with that, though. If he hadn’t been obsessed with getting a boys’ company to London, he wouldn’t have got the money from that millionaire, and we wouldn’t be going.”
“It’s not obsession,” Rachel said. She reached out and took the apple back from Eric, who was already into his second bite. “Not like crew. I know people who row—if you want to be really good at that, it has to be like a religion. But theater? It’s not a sport, it’s not about winning, it’s about people.”
“And applause,” Gil said, needling. “All those lovely hands clapping. That’s what we all like most.”
“Not true,” Rachel said.
He grinned at her. “An actor’s not much use without an audience.”
“There you go then,” said Rachel. “It’s about people.”
This wasn’t a real argument though, it was cheerful bickering. We all knew Gil was as obsessed as anyone could be—in his case, with Shakespeare. He’d read every single one of the plays, and knew huge chunks of them by heart.
“What I like best is the smell, backstage,” I said. I was thinking of the little theater back at home, where I’d played an evil little boy in a grown-up play last summer. It had been our space, my space, a kind of home. “Theater smell. Dusty. Safe.”
“Good word,” Gil said, sounding surprised. He reached out and gave me a quick pat on the shoulder.
“Safe,” Rachel said thoughtfully. On the brown water, a pair of mallard ducks paddled slowly past us, and she threw one of them a piece of apple. The duck looked at her scornfully, and paddled on.
Eric said, “My mom thinks theater’s dangerous. My dad had to talk her into letting me come.”
Gil fingered his beard, looking at him deadpan. “She thought her beautiful little boy’d get attacked by nasty molesters? Not with that hair, kid.”
Eric looked uncomfortable. “She’s . . . religious.”
“Arby had to do some convincing, with the younger boys’ parents,” Rachel said. “They couldn’t understand why they couldn’t go to London too.”
“Why couldn’t they?”
“This company is a family!” said Gil, in a perfect imitation of Arby’s booming voice. “Families only have one set of parents!”
Eric looked at me. “Did yours care?”
“My what?”
“Your parents, did they get on your case?”
Oh please. I came here to get away from this. I thought I could get away from this.
I said, “I don’t have any parents.”
They all stared at me. Those faces stunned out of movement for an instant, they always look the same. An eight slid past us on the river; I could hear the rhythmic creaking of the oarlocks, and the small splash of the oars.
“Oh, Nat, I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
“I live with my aunt. She didn’t mind me coming, she thought it was a great idea.”
Don’t ask me, please don’t ask me.
Eric asked, direct, young, a hundred years younger than me: “Are they dead?”
“Yeah.” I got to my feet, quicker than any of them could say anything else. “I gotta go pee—I’ll see you back at the school.”
And I was off, escaping, the way you always have to escape sooner or later if you don’t want to be clucked over and sympathized with and have to listen to all that mush, or, worse, have to answer the next question and the next and the next. If you have to answer questions every time, how are you ever going to learn to forget?
It would be better in London, it would be better in the company; I wouldn’t be Nat there, I would be Puck.
TWO
I loved London. It wasn’t like any of the American cities I’d seen: Atlanta, New York, Boston, Cambridge. Looking down from the airplane, you saw a sprawling city of red roofs and grey stone, scattered with green trees, with the River Thames winding through the middle crisscrossed by bridge after bridge. When the bus first drove us in from the airport, everything seemed smaller than in the United States: the houses, so many of them joined together in long rows; the cars; the highways. There were tall office buildings, but not gigantic; there were supermarkets, but not the same greedy sprawl. An English taxi-cab wasn’t a regular yellow cab with a light glowing on the roof; it was a boxy black car whose shape dated back, Arby told us, to the days when it had to have enough room for a sitting-down passenger wearing a top hat.
Arby was full of stuff like that. He mellowed, the moment he looked down from the plane and saw all those lines and curves of little red-tiled roofs. He’d lived in England once, though nobody knew when or why he’d come to the United States, and somehow nobody had ever asked. Once he started talking to English people again, he began to sound a lot more English than he ever had at home.
Some of the Company of Boys stayed in a London University hostel n
orth of the River Thames; some of us stayed in regular houses, each with a family. Most of these people were Friends of the Globe, members of a group who’d spent years helping to raise money to build the new Globe Theatre, the copy of the one where Shakespeare worked. My foster family was called Fisher. Aunt Jen had been nervous about letting me go stay with strange foreigners, until she had a long transatlantic telephone conversation with Mrs. Fisher and they both ended up swapping recipes for baking bread, which seemed to make her feel much better.
The Fishers lived in an apartment in a big ugly concrete block with a great view of the River Thames. There was a daughter, older than me, called Claire, and a son who was spending the summer doing a course at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I used his room. It had black wallpaper and several paintings of very strange, squashed-looking people, so I didn’t ask too much about him. Claire was a serious girl whose favorite subject was politics, and she was always asking questions about the U.S. that I couldn’t answer. She was very nice to me though; they all were. When I talked about living with my aunt, it didn’t make them inquisitive, it made them keep their distance; like, oh, there’s something private here, something we mustn’t be nosy about. Maybe the Brits are all like that.
Instead of asking questions, the Fishers made sure they were even nicer to me. They had a flyer for our plays stuck up on their refrigerator door, and a poster out in the hallway to advertise us to the rest of the people in the apartment building, THE AMERICAN COMPANY OF BOYS, it said, with weird bright pictures of Bottom in his ass’s head and Caesar with blood all over his toga. “We have tickets for both your opening nights!” said cozy Mrs. Fisher happily. “We’re looking forward to it all so much!”
Mr. Fisher was a tall, bald man with a voice that rang out like Arby’s, though he wasn’t an actor; he worked in a bank. “But I’ve done a lot of amateur stuff, y’know,” he said to me. “Trod the boards, after a fashion.” There was a faintly apologetic note in his voice. Because we were to play at the Globe, and perhaps because we were foreign, he seemed to think of us as professionals even though we were only boys.
Gil Warmun was going to be a professional someday, that was for sure. The more I rehearsed, with him playing Oberon, the more I learned about Puck. I was a mischievous spirit but I was also a king’s servant, and Gil never let me forget it. I ran lines with him every day before rehearsal, and had acrobatics lessons—they called it “tumbling”—with the other youngest boys, from an English friend of Arby’s called Paddy, who had first been an Olympic gymnast and then worked in a circus. I was really happy. We all were. We thought about nothing but the two plays, and the day when we’d be up there performing them. Though we had classes every day, they were no more like school than chocolate cake is like rice pudding.
I had speech lessons often too, from Rachel, early in the morning at the house Arby and Julia had rented in Southwark, not far from the theater. It was a tall, narrow house made of brick, with a tiny front garden full of roses. I was amazed how many London houses had flowers on and around them, even if only in window boxes. Rachel lived in this house too, sharing a room with our stage manager Maisie, a quiet, chunky girl who knew how to yell like a drill sergeant.
Gil was there as well, in a tiny attic room at the top of the house. He and Rachel were a sort of couple, though they kidded around all the time. They’d each in turn been Arby’s star pupil at the school where he taught drama, though Rachel must have been two years ahead of Gil. Next September he’d be joining her at drama school in New York. Someday I’m going to go there too.
I knew all my lines by now, and Gil’s too.
“I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile—”
Rachel said, “‘Jest—to.’ Two words, Nat.” We were having an early rehearsal in the kitchen, while Julia answered phone calls in the living room. I guess you have a lot of phone calls to answer when you take twenty kids across the Atlantic for a month.
“Okay. I jest to Oberon, and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal—”
She turned her back to listen as I went to the end of the speech, and then held up a hand and turned around again. “It’s good—the speed’s just right now.”
“And not too southern?”
“Nat—Arby knows as well as I do that you probably sound more the way they did in Shakespeare’s time than anyone in this company. Or even any English actor.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“It’s true,” she said. “The English and the Scots who settled those Carolina and Georgia mountains of yours, they took their accents with them. And because they didn’t hear too much else up there, they didn’t change, the way everyone else did.” She turned to the sink and started rinsing the breakfast dishes.
“My gentle Puck,” said Gil, “you’re a fossil.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Maybe I should try to match him,” he said to Rachel. He jumped up, spread his arms out to me and put on a heavy fake southern accent. “Ma jennel Perk, cerm hithah!”
“Poppa!” I said in a high falsetto, and flung my arms around his waist. Gil was a lot taller than me.
He laughed, rumpled my hair with one hand and shoved me away with the other. Rachel rolled her eyes, and closed the dishwasher. “Time out, comedians,” she said. “You’ve got twenty minutes before rehearsal.”
We were all a bit edgy, a bit silly, because today would be our first time on the stage. Everyone was looking forward to that. For a week now we’d been rehearsing in a school hall in Southwark, a tacky little place that was a temporary extension to a grade school, with little kids’ drawings pinned up on fiberboard walls, and a smell of disinfectant. We had the oudine of the Globe stage, and the two pillars we had to play around, marked on the floor with tape, but it was a poor substitute for the real thing. We’d had only a quick tour of the Globe so far; the regular adult company was playing there, and had needed the theater all day for rehearsals as well as performances. But now they’d opened their last production, and we could have the mornings.
Arby had decided we shouldn’t see one of their performances yet, in case it influenced our own style. Gil and several of the older boys thought this was crazy, and intended to sneak off and watch, but Arby carefully kept us all working in the tacky school hall every afternoon—and the English company played in the afternoons, because that’s what the original actors did, in the days before artificial light. (Today’s company did 7:30 performances too, under lights designed to simulate daylight, but so far Arby had managed to keep all our evenings busy too.)
There was something really strange about Arby. He was such an intense guy, and yet sometimes he seemed to be coming from a great distance, as if he belonged to some other planet. He scared me a bit, when I first met him.
It was in Atlanta, and I was playing the small part of the Boy, in a Youth Theatre production of Henry V. Arby had come there on a recruiting trip for his Company of Boys, looking for actors good enough to come to his auditions. We all knew about those auditions; they were going to be held in New York two months later, for “boys between 11 and 18 with skills in acting, singing and acrobatics.”
We were playing Henry V in a community theater, and we all shared one big dressing room. Arby came backstage to talk to the boy who was playing Henry, but he kept looking across at me, with those intent blue eyes, and pretty soon I found him next to me.
“You were the Boy,” he said.
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“You were very good,” he said. “Very good. What’s your name?”
“Nathan Field,” I said. “Nat.”
And he laughed. It wasn’t as if he thought my name was funny; it was a weird laugh, sort of triumphant.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” The blue eyes were blazing at me; it gave me the chills. I could see a muscle twitching under his left eye. “Come to
my auditions, Nat Field,” he said, “come, or I’ll be back to fetch you.”
That stopped the chills, and anything else in my head; like all of us, I was longing to get into the Company of Boys. I said, “But on the application, it says ‘skills in acting, singing and acrobatics’—and I’m not a great singer.”
“You have the other two, so that doesn’t matter,” Arby said. “Doesn’t matter at all. Not for my purposes.”
He had the oddest look on his face, eager and crafty and mysterious all at once, and I couldn’t figure it out at all. But of course I went to the auditions, with Aunt Jen, and he chose me to play Puck. And that was all that mattered to me. Or to Gil, or Eric, or Ferdie, or any of us in the company. He’d chosen us, to play at the Globe.
We ran through the grey London streets toward the theater. It was an awesome place; right on the River Thames, facing the banks of pillared granite buildings and glass office towers on the other side. They’d built it to look just as it had in Shakespeare’s day; it was round, all white plaster and dark wood beams, with a real thatched roof made out of reeds, that ran in a circle around a gap. The middle of the building was open to the sky. It was a “wooden O”—that’s what Shakespeare called it himself, in a speech in Henry V.
As we swung around the last corner, I stumbled and nearly fell. I guess I thought then that I’d tripped on a paving stone. For that moment, though, I had a strange giddy feeling, as if the buildings looming around me were moving, circling. My head was suddenly throbbing. I thought I heard a snatch of bright music, from some stringed instrument like a harp or a guitar, and I smelled flowers, the sweet scent of lilies, like in my aunt’s garden—and right after it another scent that was not sweet at all but awful, disgusting, like a sewer. Was it real? I put my hand on the nearest wall, to steady myself, and Gil looked back at me.
“Nat? What’s the matter?”
The buildings were still and safe again around my head. “Nothing.”