tage-whisper rasped the length of the
dressing room.

Martin stood up. "Yes, Sid?"

Sid's voice stayed a whisper but went from desperate to ferocious.
"You villainous elf-skin! Know you not the Cauldron Scene's been
playing a hundred heartbeats? 'Tis 'most my entrance and we still
mustering only two witches out of three! Oh, you nott-pated
starveling!"

Before Sid had got much more than half of that out, Martin had slipped
around the screen, raced the length of the dressing room, and I'd
heard a lusty thwack as he went out the door. I couldn't help
grinning, though with Martin racked by anxieties and reliefs over his
first time as Lady Mack, it was easy to understand it slipping his
mind that he was still doubling Second Witch.

VI

I will vault credit
and affect high pleasures
Beyond death.
--Ferdinand

I sat down where Martin had been, first pushing the screen far enough
to the side for me to see the length of the dressing room and notice
anyone coming through the door and any blurs moving behind the thin
white curtain shutting off the boys' two-thirds.

I'd been going to think. But instead I just sat there, experiencing my
body and the room around it, steadying myself or maybe readying
myself. I couldn't tell which, but it was nothing to think about, only
to feel. My heartbeat became a very faint, slow, solid throb. My spine
straightened.

No one came in or went out. Distantly I heard Macbeth and the witches
and the apparitions talk.

Once I looked at the New York Screen, but all the stuff there had
grown stale. No protection, no nothing.

I reached down to my suitcase and from where I'd been going to get a
miltown I took a dexedrine and popped it in my mouth. Then I started
out, beginning to shake.

When I got to the end of the curtain I went around it to Sid's
dressing table and asked Shakespeare, "Am I doing the right thing,
Pop?" But he didn't answer me out of his portrait. He just looked
sneaky-innocent, like he knew a lot but wouldn't tell, and I found
myself think of a little silver-framed photo Sid had used to keep
there too of a cocky German-looking young actor with "Erich"
autographed across it in white ink. At least I supposed he was an
actor. He looked a little like Erich von Stroheim, but nicer yet
somehow nastier too. The photo had used to upset me, I don't know why.
Sid must have noticed it, for one day it was gone.

I thought