“No. I only found out about it because my cleaning lady’s daughter is a typist at the paper. She told me about it yesterday. I thought that the least I could do was warn you.”
“How much do they know?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Not everything.” He leaned forward. “They know we were married and that we split up after all the newspaper gossip about me and Jessica Corbet. That’s all.”
“Are you sure?” Her lips were white.
“Yes.”
“I—see. Do they know we’re still technically married?”
“Oh yes, that’s the juiciest info of all from their point of view. Christopher Douglas’s secret wife and all that rot.”
“Oh, Kit,
why?”
she almost wailed.
“Why
did this have to happen?”
“I’m sorry, Mary,” he repeated.
“You should have divorced me ages ago,” she said. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want to,” he answered coolly. “Like you, I saw no necessity. You are the only woman I have ever wanted to live with permanently.”
“You didn’t want to live with me,” she contradicted him in a low voice. “You just wanted to sleep with me. Unfortunately, you had to marry me to do that.” He pushed his hand through his hair once more and she smiled a little at the gesture. “I don’t blame you, Kit, not anymore. I was as much at fault. I shouldn’t have married you.”
“Well, you did,” he said in an odd voice, “and here we are.” He looked slowly around the room and his eyes stopped at the overflowing bookcase. “Are you happy, Mary? Do you have what you want?”
“Yes,” she answered, ignoring the pain that had unaccountably appeared around her heart. “I’ve made a place for myself in a world I’ve always loved. Yes, I’m happy.”
I’m glad. But surely you take a break from academia once in a while? What are you doing this summer? Not more research?”
“No.” She lifted her chin proudly. “This summer I’ve been invited to lecture at Yarborough.”
His head came up, poised and alert. “Have you really?”
Yarborough College was a very small school on the shores of a New Hampshire lake. It had, however, over the past ten years acquired considerable national prominence because of its summer dramatics program. The head of the drama department, George Clark, was a bit of a genius, and the small campus theater was a gem of acoustical and dramatic engineering. The combination of the two had produced the Yarborough Summer Festival, in which top drama students from all over the country were given the opportunity to work in a theatrical production with a few noted professionals. Each year the festival did one play and concentrated on one period of theatrical history. A prominent scholar of that period was always invited to lecture and the college gave graduate credit to all the drama students who attended.
“They’re doing the English Renaissance this year,” she said, “and as you know that’s my period. So, for the price of a few lectures, I’ll have a lovely New Hampshire vacation.”
“What play are they doing?”
“They’re being very ambitious. It’s
Hamlet.”
“Hamlet!
And who is to play the lead?”
“Adrian Saunders,” she said, naming a young English actor who had made a hit in a recent British series run on public television.
“Ah.” He smiled at her, the famous devastating smile that was calculated to turn every woman’s bones to water. “It sounds like fun.”
She rose to her feet and he rose also. “I think it will be.”
He stood for a moment, looking down at her. “I’m afraid you’re going to be bothered, Mary. Just refuse to answer all questions. Don’t worry about being polite. Refuse all interviews. It will all die down in a short while, I promise you.”
“I suppose so.” She sighed and then suddenly became very formal. “Good-bye Kit. It was kind of you to have come.” She did not offer him her hand.
“I’m sorry it was on this particular business,” he replied gravely. “Do you know, no one has called me Kit for years.” He turned and walked swiftly out the door.
She heard his car door slam and the engine start up.
In a minute he had backed out of her driveway and had disappeared up the street. Mary sat down in her pine rocker and looked blindly at the sofa where he had sat. She had not felt so upset since the last time they had met.
She would have been even more upset if she had heard the conversation Kit had with his agent early the following day. “Chris!” said Mel Horner genially when his secretary informed him who was on the phone. “What are you doing in New York?”
“Never mind that Mel,” Kit replied. “I want you to book me into the Yarborough Festival this summer.”
“What!”
“You heard me,” Kit replied testily. “I want to work at the Yarborough Festival. They’re doing
Hamlet,
with Adrian Saunders.”
“But if they have Adrian Saunders for Hamlet, what will you ...” The agent’s voice trailed off in bewilderment
“I’ll play whatever they’ve got left.” His client’s voice was clear as a bell over the three-thousand-mile connection. “Laertes, Claudius, the gravedigger—I don’t care.”
“But Chris,” his agent expostulated, “that is exactly the sort of thing you always avoid like the plague. The media will swamp you, wanting to know why you're taking such a small role...”
“Goddammit, Mel,” Kit said savagely, “I don’t want a lecture. I want you to get me into that festival. I don’t care what I play, or how much money they offer. I just want
in.
Is that clear?”
“Yeah,” said his agent faintly. “I’ll get on it right away.”
“Good,” said Kit, and hung up the phone.
* * * *
Four days after Kit’s visit the storm broke over Mary’s head.
Personality
hit the stands with a picture on the cover of her standing on
the
steps of Freemont Hall. “
CHRIS
DOUGLAS
MARRIED
!” screamed the headline. “Wife University Professor!”
“Huh,” said Mary when she first saw it. “I wish I
were
a professor.” Then her phone started to ring and it didn’t stop until the end of the term when she fled the campus and went into seclusion.
She went to Nantucket, where her oldest brother had a summer cottage. Her sister-in-law was in residence with the three children and Mike came out from Boston on weekends. Kathy was a warm and intelligent person who had the tact to leave Mary to herself and not burden her with unwanted sympathy. Mary played tennis with Kathy and went bicycling and swimming with the children. There was no television in the cottage and the only paper Mary saw for two weeks was the local
News.
It should have been a thoroughly relaxing time for her. She was with people she loved and who loved her, and she was doing all the recreational things she liked best to do. It was therefore disconcerting to find herself so restless and dissatisfied.
She knew what was bothering her—more precisely, she knew
who
was bothering her. She had thought she was over him. She had put him out of her life and her work and that, she had thought, was that. She had convinced herself that her happiness lay with things of the mind, not with a dark, slim man who had once torn her life apart and almost destroyed her in the process.
The day before she was due to leave Nantucket for Yarborough it rained. After lunch Mary took an old brown raincoat of Mike’s and went for a walk. She went down to the beach and there, with the rain falling on her face and the waves crashing on the sand, she thought back to those innocent undergraduate days of five years ago when she had first met Christopher Douglas.
She had heard of him long before they met. He was in the graduate drama school at her university in New Haven and had been something of a celebrity on campus for over a year. For one reason or another, Mary had never been to any of the drama productions in which he had starred. She herself was very busy, and in the English department something of a celebrity in her own right. She was, for example, the only undergraduate ever allowed to take the famous graduate seminar of the university’s leading professor of Renaissance literature. Mary O’Connor, ran the talk in the English department, had all the marks of a real scholar.
Her commitment to her work scared off a number of boys who would otherwise have wanted to take her out, but she didn’t lack for dates. At twenty-one, tall and slender, with long black hair, dazzling pale skin and absolutely blue eyes, she was stunning enough to be forgiven for her brains. She was the youngest of five children and, her brothers and sisters all said affectionately, the smartest. That was why her mother had relented and allowed her to attend a secular, coeducational university. Both her older sisters had gone to a Catholic college for women and upon graduation both had taught school for two years and then married.
“Mary Kate is different,” her sister Maureen had told her mother. “For one thing, she’s ten years younger than I am and seven years younger than Pat. That’s two generations in today’s age, Mom. She shouldn’t be bound by the same rules we were.” And her conservative, apprehensive, but deeply caring mother had relented. Mary had gone to school in New Haven, only a few miles away from her native Connecticut town but worlds away in outlook and philosophy.
She had loved it. And she had not, as her mother had feared, been “corrupted” by bad influences. At the beginning of her senior year she still did not smoke pot or get drunk every weekend; and she was still a virgin.
It was shortly before the Christmas break that a boy she had been dating invited her to see the drama-school production of
Twelfth Night.
“Christopher Douglas is playing Orsino.” he told her, “and he’s supposed to be terrific.”
“Okay,” said Mary casually, “I’d like that.”
She went, and her whole life changed.
* * * *
She would never forget the first, time she laid eyes on Kit. The lights in the theater had dimmed, the curtain had slowly risen, and there he was, alone in the center of the stage, reclining carelessly against some brightly colored cushions. The first thing she had noticed was his voice. It came across the footlights, effortlessly audible, deep and velvety with just the suspicion of a drawl.
If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.
She listened, breathless, caught in the magic of that voice. Then he rose and moved toward the front of the stage and she really looked at him for the first time. He was a splendid young male, beautiful and tall, slim-hipped and black-haired, with a virility whose impact she felt even across the distance that separated them. She sat rooted to her seat throughout the entire performance. She had never dreamed, she thought, that a boy like this could really exist in the world.
Afterward she and her date, whose name she never afterward remembered, went out for something to eat. They stopped around first to see a friend in one of the dorms, so they were late getting to the local eatery they had made their destination. When they came in the door the place was crowded. Her date had taken her arm and was steering her into the room when someone called his name. They turned and saw a tableful of students eating pizza and drinking beer. One of the students was Christopher Douglas. The boy who had called to them spoke for a minute to her date and then, as they were turning to leave, her escort said to Kit, “We just saw
Twelfth Night.
It was terrific.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” the beautiful voice replied pleasantly. He looked at Mary and stood up. “Why don’t you two join us? I’ll round up a few extra chairs.”
Before she quite knew what was happening, Mary found herself sitting next to Him. “Did you like the play as well?” he asked her.
“Yes, I did,” she answered. “Very much. Your interpretation of Orsino was fascinating.”
He raised a black eyebrow.
“Oh?”
She subjected him to an appraising blue stare.
“If
you were even the
slightest
bit effeminate,” she said at last, “you couldn’t have gotten away with it.”
He grinned appreciatively. “Do you know the play?”
“Yes. The English Renaissance is a particular interest of mine.”
“Ah. An English major.”
Her date caught his last words and leaned across her. “Not just an English major, a summa cum laude English major.”
Mary flushed with annoyance. “Perhaps I ought to tattoo it on my forehead in case anyone should miss the fact,” she said lightly. The remark passed completely over the head of her date but
he
looked at her even harder.
“Hey, Kit,” called one of the students from further down the table. “I meant to ask you if you’d seen the latest production at the Long Stage.”
“No,” he answered, easily pitching his superbly trained voice down the length of the table, “I haven’t.” A jukebox was playing and a few couples were up in a small dance area. “Would you like to dance?” he said to Mary.
“Why, all right,” she replied, startled, and he took her by the hand and led her out to the floor.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get your name,” he said, drawing her competently into his arms.
“It’s Mary O’Connor. Did I hear someone call you Kit?”
“Mm.” His mouth wore a faint smile. “After Kit Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright. Jim thinks I look the way he must have.”
Mary thought of Marlowe, brilliant, poetic, and dead in a barroom brawl at the age of twenty eight. She laughed. “He may be right.”
He pulled her closer until she could feel the whole hard length of his body pressed against hers. The music was slow and dreamy. Mary felt herself relaxing against him, relaxing into him. “Do you live on campus? Can I take you home?” he murmured into her ear.
The music stopped and she pulled away from him. “No, you may not take me home,” she said with what she hoped was firmness. “I came with someone else and
he
will take me home.”
She turned and made her way back to their table. Her date looked both grateful and relieved when she sat down and immediately began to talk to him. They stayed for another thirty minutes during which time she could feel Kit’s dark gaze boring into the back of her head. When they got up to leave she smiled generally around the table and refused to meet his eyes.