Edith Holler, page 8
5.
Front of house.
This is where the public knows.
I took my shoes and stockings off so that my naked feet might feel the carpet. Lush, it is. All so grand and so expensive. Such space now! How to do it all justice? Seats for seven hundred and fifty-two people at a time. That may help you picture a size, but it cannot complete the portrait. When fully packed, as the theatre most often is, it feels as if all those people were a great wave that might crash upon the stage.
What drama has occurred front of house:
Once someone swallowed their tongue.
Heart attacks: three.
Twice, our dramas have broken women’s waters.
A gentleman’s false leg fell from the upper circle into the stalls, causing a concussion.
A woman got locked in an upstairs lavatory and screamed and screamed.
A young man, in the balcony, slashed his lover’s face.
Proscenium arch of a card theatre.
An old and ill man came here to die and did die. (How the actors hovered around the body, to look for clues to improve their own performances.)
* * *
• • •
I ran fast and silent away from the safety curtain. Oh, it is all so threadbare on the stage side! There are no carpets, there is no thick red wallpaper, there is no gold paint; the mirrors lack great frames; there are no cherubs on the ceiling, no golden masks of comedy and tragedy like those out front. (Painted plaster, these last, but most convincing—except where cracked or flaked.) All is plain, all is working space, but in this other land, just a few steps away, all is luxury—though the cheaper the seats, the farther from the stage, the less of luxury there is. It is indeed quite plain up high in the balcony—so high you are almost in the heavens, and indeed we call it “the gods” there. The rake of those lofty seats does terrify many a person; some will watch a whole show clinging to the metal handrail, for fear that they should go tumbling down into the maw of the stalls.
The whole of it—from the stalls to the royal circle, to the upper circle, to the balcony—is kept upright by scaffolding supports and by my uncle Jerome. He is the front-of-house manager, the master of this half. He opens the doors and lets the people in, he takes all the money. Jerome is a very fine-looking gentleman, and when the theatre is closed, his region is all about tidiness and order. Then all his cleaners come in and brush and polish and sweep and wipe and clean to a sparkle. Jerome is the great enemy of dust and smear. He is very like a theatre man: He wears the face of tragedy in the morning, but by evening, when the public comes in—whether we are playing sad or not—he always becomes comedy. He puts on such a smile for the public.
That is where I fled, to Uncle Jerome’s land, that great country of red velvet. It is true, some of the plaster molding is no longer present, and in places the velvet is a little worn and some of the seats are loose at the seams, and some of the old hinges do scream horribly when you unfold them; and it is true, in some places the red wallpaper is stained and scratched, and there are many darker marks that talk of Beetle Spread. And it is true as well that some of the mirrors have lost a portion of their mercury, leaving black blotches upon the glass, so that anyone looking into them will think themselves beset by the bubonic. Norwich is no stranger to pestilence; in 1579 we lost a third of our population to plague. And it is true that when it rains hard upon Norwich it sometimes rains a little inside the Holler Theatre, and then will Uncle Jerome be in a panic and come rushing with a pail. Up he’ll go, trying to find where the new leak is coming from, trying desperately to stop rain before the audience is let in. There are indeed water marks here and there. But I don’t notice these things, they are small pocks on an otherwise beautiful face.
It is quite the grandest place in all the world, and I do come here often when I feel an urge majestic.
The best of it all are the two huge oil paintings. One is of my ancestor Victor Holler, my great-grandfather, in the role of Hamlet. He is holding a human skull, of course: indeed, the skull in the painting is the likeness of a real skull, which once belonged to the seventeenth-century Norwich doctor called Sir Thomas Browne who wrote a great deal about death. We rent the skull from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital when we do the Danish play; it was my great-grandfather who started this, and it is a wonderful piece of local business for the people of Norwich.
The other painting is of my father playing King Lear.
(There is no painting of my unhappy grandfather Richard Holler.)
The portrait of Father describes a man so much older than the portrait of his grandfather. An odd thing, that the young one is long dead and the old one is still full of living. Whatever their age, these are the most dramatic and wonderful artworks in all of East Anglia.
My great-grandfather Victor Holler began, according to family legend, as a street performer in Norwich’s Market Place. He recited small one-speech tragedies and comedies, and he did it so well that he was hired as a juvenile performer at what was then called the Theatre Royal. By his thirteenth birthday, Victor was playing Osric, then Laertes by his sixteenth, and when he came eighteen Hamlet himself. Once he’d got his teeth into Hamlet, there was no stopping him. He became such a Norwich spectacle that soon the Royal was forgot and the theatre became the Holler Theatre. In time Victor grew so successful that he bought the theatre.
The painting of Victor has death all about it (I say so), and the one of my father has always upset me, for it shows him howling at the storm, full of distress. When I was younger I would stand before the painting for as long as I could, but after a time I would always run away from it in a terror, imagining that something awful had happened to Father. Between the two paintings are our three busts. The largest one is of Mr. Shakespeare, and that I damaged once when I climbed up upon it in my early childhood. If you know where to look, and I do know where to look, you may see a crack or two, even a few glue marks.
All three are now draped in black tulle, black silk, black cotton, and most of all Norwich Black Crape. The bust of the dead old queen has a veil over it, as if she were a magic trick, so that when we take the veil away I wonder if the buried queen’s likeness will quite disappear. Beside her is our newest bust: Edward VII he is, like his mother before him heavy with royalty. We are very modern and up to date. Poor Edward was the understudy for so long that when he was finally allowed to put on the costume, he was no longer looked upon as Hal but tended rather toward Falstaff.
On the opposite wall, you may observe my stained christening gown in its frame.
* * *
• • •
There is a saying here, a code known to all who work front of house. All are taught it, and on their very first day of employment. One must never call, “Fire!” they learn, even when there is a fire, because then the public are wont to panic and there shall be screams and havoc and what is already bad will grow much, much worse. People will panic and get trapped, and there may be a stampede and consequently people trampled upon, and then death will be in the theatre—and we encourage only fake deaths, not the real ones. The public likes to feel safe when they come to see the terrible things on the stage, because the terrible things must only ever happen to us on the stage, not to them in the seats. So then, never say “Fire!”
If there is a fire, this is what you say to your fellow front-half people before carefully and calmly ushering the public to the twelve exits:
“Mr. Jet is in the house.”
I remember, as a child, being so thrilled and terrified by that sentence. Mr. Jet is in the house, I would say to my cardboard theatre folk, Mr. Jet is in the house. Once my front-of-house uncle heard me say it when the theatre was closed—but Mr. Jet was not in the house—and, though I whispered it so quietly, and to a brass fire extinguisher in my make-believe, still he was in such a fury with me over it. You are never, Edith Holler, said Uncle Jerome, to use that particular sentence. Not unless—and only if—Mr. Jet is indeed in the house. Nor would my uncle allow me to enter the locked chamber called the Fire Room, which is where his fire extinguishers and buckets of sand are kept.
You might suppose that Mr. Jet is merely a code word for fire.
And yet: There is an actual individual called Mr. Jet.
I have seen him. Once.
I was about seven at the time. I had gone front of house to watch the show, and was darting in among the public, to be seen with them as Father had instructed me. One winter evening, I was wearing my greyest and shabbiest outfit, with ash upon my face that I get from the first furnace and wipe all over me—this Father has always encouraged, and it is a great favorite with the public. I don’t mind it, no indeed it is wonderful, to walk among the Norwich populace, but Father reminds me that I must keep silent or the spell will be broken. How I make them scream oftentimes as I walk greyly about them! Well done, Father always tells me afterward, to fright the people of Norwich.
As everyone was being seated, and the last bell had been rung to warn the public that the performance was about to begin, I was under the rotunda, looking down the great stairs, when I suddenly heard a whooshing sound. The gaslights trembled and dimmed—this in itself was not unusual, as the lights are always dimmed and then fully illuminated as a final warning that the doors will be closing—but this time the lights didn’t come up, they stayed down. It was dark and there was no one else beside me, though there had been so many very recently. And yet then there was someone: I could just see him, a latecomer ascending the stairs. A tall and dark figure, in a long black cloak and with a great black top hat. He made no sound as he came rushing up the stairs—which seemed most strange to me, a man of that size not making noise. (The stairs do creak, you see.) And there was, I detected now, a certain fog that came with him, his own greyness emerging it seemed from under his great coat, and spreading all about until it seemed to me that everything was growing so very foggy, as if the bad weather had been let inside. I was suddenly aware of how hot it was; even my feet felt strangely warm, as if the carpet itself were smoldering. I let out a gasp then, and so doing inhaled some of the fog, and in the taste I knew it was smoke, that there was fire in the theatre. And still the tall figure was moving up the stairs, and was just ascending to the level where I stood, when I let out my gasp. He heard me, the tall and thin man did, and he turned and then, oh then I saw his face. Such a long strange face, with two black holes for eyes and a shriveled twist for a nose and a wide-open hole for a mouth, and the dark figure was floating now toward me, the smoke about it growing more and more thick.
Suddenly there was my uncle, come running from a different place, and with him some five or six ushers, each holding a heavy fire extinguisher, and they were pointing the hoses at the tall man with his mouth agape. He seemed to dance then, the tall thin man, to waltz and swerve away. But so many hoses were at him now that he could not avoid the spray, and was caught in it, and as the water touched him so the figure thinned and spindled, reduced, became smaller and weaker, though the great mouth was still open wide as if in a scream.
Then the light seemed to come back to the theatre, and the fog to reduce, and other ushers opened the windows and out into the night flew the long tall man in his black coat and top hat. Like a black kite he was, lost up in the air outside, an umbrella swept away . . . and then gone, and we were ourselves again back in the theatre, with our own air to breathe once more.
“Who was that?” I stammered.
“Mr. Jet,” said my uncle Jerome. Or did I make it up? Uncle Jerome will not admit to it now, but did he not say, as I recall: “Mr. Jet was just now in the house. But we have chased him off, and may he not hurry back again. Someone, of course, let him in. We must discover who, and that person must be punished. But now let us dry the carpets, make all well again. Come, my lads, stir yourselves. Be quick! Let there be no traces of our recent visitor!”
By the time the interval applause was heard, the carpets were dry. All evidence of Mr. Jet erased.
After the performance, when the unsuspecting public had all returned to the street, Jerome called everyone—ushers, barmen, ticket tearers, sellers of ices, cloakroom attendants—into the hall. Who had let Mr. Jet into the house? he demanded. Someone must know, someone must say. There shall be no going home until the person steps forward.
The answer was soon given. It was a poor young man from Trowse Millgate, on his first evening there. Believing that all the public had entered, he had just stepped out to have a little woodbine on the sly. The moment he struck his lucifer, he looked up and there before him stood a tall fellow in a topper. The boy, not knowing otherwise, bowed, dropping his smoldering woodbine, and opened the theatre door—to Mr. Jet himself.
The boy was instantly dismissed.
Norwich is no stranger to fire. It has been our constant companion, and many have perished by it. In 1004 Sweyn, king of Denmark, murdered Norwich completely by fire. In 1507 the fires took seven hundred houses away. The whole city nearly fell again in 1751, as a fire destroyed the Bridewell to ash. Our Norwich hair is wicks, I do say. And of late our heads have suffered from many a rushing redness. There have been calamities in flames, whole houses have been burned quite to nothing. And how many of our missing children have been lost through fire?
There is no fire today perhaps, but tomorrow one is surely coming. I have seen buildings destroyed from my vantage up on the roof. Whole churches have been consumed, whole streets of houses with Norwich lives still in them. Even our neighbor the Assembly House caught fire once, smoke pouring from its windows, though they got to it quickly and no great harm was done. Theatres, too, have died of flame, all those stories burned to dust. The Grand Theatre on St. Giles Street went up in flames just two Augusts ago. I watched it up on top, screaming, Come not here! Come not here! We received many actors afterward, let them on board as though they were being pulled from a sinking ocean liner.
As of now, we are the last working theatre in all of Norwich. Though Mr. Jet has called, he has never yet been allowed to stay. For this reason, I am terrified of Mr. Jet. I know he is real. He may make himself very tall and thin and stretch himself up to high windows and tap a little on the glass and sometimes through a small gap he may find a way in. O Mr. Jet! And yet whenever I ask Uncle Jerome, he tells me that to speak of it is bad luck, that we’ll have the place up in flames if I go on about it so.
For this reason, my uncle disagrees with my father: he does not approve of me dressed in ashes. Now that I am playwright, he says, I must put away my childish wonderings. That I must acknowledge A Doll’s House was written by Mr. Ibsen and not only Peer Gynt. I must not get confused between what is actual and what is merely pretend. Yet I was fed on fancy as a baby and have thrived on it, it has made me what I am; my profit on’t is, I know how to dream.
“Edith, you are twelve now, and must be sensible. Be wary, my dear, of letting the strange and the fanciful, the tales of dread and terror, the world of imagination grab you and infect your blood. Many a member of this family has drowned because they have let some unwanted fairy get into their lungs or a goblin to their livers. Don’t go that way. Be sensible.”
“But I am sure, when I was younger, that I saw Mr. J . . .”
“No, Edith! We’ll have none of that here!”
“Do you believe in nothing at all, Uncle?”
“I believe in pound and shilling and pence, for I have met them often enough and they are substantial. Go dream on your side if you must, but not on my carpet!”
* * *
• • •
That first day of the great change come upon my life, I took refuge in the cloakroom. It is a large and capacious room, of course it is—ours is a great and grand theatre, probably the greatest for hundreds of miles around—and when the expensive people come to our theatre, they come in all their finery. I have often wondered, during the cold months, how it might be to be out in the weather, to feel the wind gallop down the street—to find an actual fog that is not dry ice, for dry ice is just the solid form of carbon dioxide, like people’s breathing trapped into bricks.
I was allowed in the cloakroom when old Mr. Turner was in charge of coats and hats, but then poor Mr. Turner died and Mr. Penk took over, and Mr. Penk does not love the coats and the hats as Mr. Turner did. He has opinions, does Mr. Penk, he judges a person; he will, I think, curse the poor man with the much-repaired overcoat, and will purse his lips when a tip is too small or is not at all. After a year of an object not being picked up, the kindly Mr. Turner would allow me to have it. (It is how I come by my fanchon bonnet with its lace ties, my pearl drop hatpin, my top hat, and my black silk mourning parasol.) Not so Mr. Penk, who sells off all unretrieved objects after two weeks. He tells no one this, but I have seen him running out into Theatre Street with a paisley shawl that was never his tucked up under his arm, and come back a little later with a smile and a thin cigar within it.
Mr. Turner took all as it came, and was always grateful.
“For this is life, Miss Edith. And we get to witness it from the cloakroom and it is our privilege to see all the life, and all of life’s coats and hats.”
* * *
• • •
It was safe there in the cloakroom that no-matinee afternoon. I felt finally alone. I thought I could be calm now, calm enough to consider the coming mother. And yet that was not to happen, for when I turned around in that room of hooks I saw the unexpected: someone else in the cloakroom. An unknown boy sitting on one of the benches. Like a piece of property someone had neglected to retrieve.
