The Understudy

At half past four on Thursday the tenth of November, 1949, three and a half hours before the curtain went up on the first New York performance of All the Rooms Upstairs, Mara came down the alley beside the Lorimer Theatre on West Forty-Fifth Street and pulled open the stage door.

Pop Cassidy was in his cubby inside, under the bare bulb, with the racing page and a cold cigar. He had been the doorman at the Lorimer since before the war, the first one, and he looked at Mara over his spectacles the way he looked at everybody, as if he had seen them come and seen them go.

"Early," he said.

"I couldn't sit at home."

"Nobody can, opening night." He turned the sign-in sheet around on the ledge. "Understudies sign at the half-hour. You can sign now, it's no skin off mine."

Mara signed, under the column headed COVERS, in her best schoolroom hand. Jessie. It looked very small on the page. Above it the principals' names were printed in Nettie Lasko's square capitals, waiting for their owners: LOWRY. ASHCROFT. DANE. FISK. Nobody had signed yet but the crew.

The call-board beside the cubby was crowded with telegrams already, pinned in rows, yellow envelopes and yellow forms, from agents and mothers and producers and people who had been in other plays with other people. BREAK A LEG. KNOCK THEM DEAD. ALL MY LOVE TONIGHT AND ALWAYS. There were none for Mara. Nobody sent telegrams to an understudy.

Mara went through the pass door and out onto the stage.

It was dark, except for the work light: a single bare bulb in a wire cage on a tall iron stand, downstage center, the way every stage in America was left when nobody was on it. In its flat white glare the boardinghouse kitchen of Mrs. Moira Delancey stood waiting, Pittsburgh, 1931: the iron range, the oilcloth table, the stairs going up to the rooms where the lodgers lived, the window over the sink, the pantry door, and set into the scrubbed boards in the middle of the floor, a square lid with an iron ring, which was the trap to the coal cellar. Beyond the footlights the house went back into the dark, a thousand and fifty red plush seats under dust sheets.

Mara stood in it for a while and breathed.

Stage left, past the edge of the set, the pin rail ran along the side wall at shoulder height, a long iron bar studded with wooden pins, and on every pin a manila rope was tied off, rising straight up into the dark, to the flown scenery hanging out of sight above. Some ropes had a strip of white tape tied around them at the height of the rail. Beside the rail, against the brick, stood the prop table, a long trestle covered in brown paper, with every prop in the play laid out on it in a drawn outline of itself, and next to the table a narrow iron stair went down through a hole in the floor to the trap room underneath.

Stage right was the prompt desk: a tall slanted desk with a hooded lamp and a row of little switches for the cue lights, and on it, closed, the prompt book.

Mara knew the whole play by heart, every word, everybody's. That was the job. Mara had mouthed Jessie's lines in the back of the house through every New York rehearsal, and walked the moves at home in a rented room on West Fifty-First, with a chair for the range and a suitcase for the trap.

There was a sound behind, from the pass door. Mara turned.

It was Laurie Dane. Laurie was the original Jessie, the one the Boston papers had written about, twenty-two years old and from Allentown, Pennsylvania, small and quick, in a camel coat with the collar turned up, and looking, in the white work light, as if Mara were the only person on earth.

"You too," said Laurie. "I couldn't sit in the hotel. I've been walking around the block since three."