That Summer's Trance

Salamanca, J. R.

ISBN 10: 1566492203 / ISBN 13: 9781566492201

Published by Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001

Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1566492203I4N10

Synopsis:

In That Summer's Trance his subject is betrayal, both of oneself and of others, in a culture of material rewards. It is an unforgettable story of one actor outdone by another, and it tells us more about role-playing, and the theater of everyday life, than I would have thought possible.—Charles Baxter

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

That Summer's Trance

By J. R. Salamanca

Welcome Rain Publishers

Copyright © 2001 J. R. Salamanca
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781566492201

Chapter One

Benedict and Priscilla Oakshaw spent at least one eveninga week at the Kennedy Center. Since the late seventies, when things hadstarted going really well for them, they had bought yearly subscriptions tothe Washington Opera season, the National Symphony, the Washington Ballet,and a series of twelve theatrical productions at the Eisenhower. Theseevenings were the zenith of their social and cultural lives, and, in Ben'scase at least, of some other life which he liked to consider metaphysicaland which gave the appearance of being so, since it included elements ofthe transcendental and the ideal as well as the worldly and the frankly festive.In his nature these elements were combined in a nameless passion forcelebration, one that no New Year's party, or homecoming game, or MardiGras, or mass could satisfy. It was certainly not religious?it involved vanityand display too conspicuously to be mistaken for piety?but it was almostecclesiastical in its gravity and like religion expressed itself in the periodicobservance of a rite in a temple of some kind, in this case one furnishedwith gigantic crystal chandeliers, acres of pile carpeting, haute cuisine, finewines, and an atmosphere of exhilaration, gallantry, and grace. Like mostmen who have been poor in their youth, he liked elegance, and for himan evening at the Kennedy Center was an occasion of unrivalled elegance,one justified by a concern for culture and solemnized by ritual, its handmaiden.He did not admit this passion, even to himself?his urbanitywas too hard-won to admit anything that might resemble bathos?buthe felt it and rejoiced in it, mindlessly, like a man steeping himself inthe vapors of a steam bath. Nothing gave him such a secret exaltation asto stroll, and be seen strolling, through the vast, high-ceilinged, deeply carpetedGrand Foyer under the glittering chandeliers, past the enormous,oddly leprous looking bust of John F. Kennedy, the champagne booths,the wonderfully civil program vendors whose decorum was almost thatof acolytes, feeling himself one of the chosen, one of this fraternity of animated,softly laughing, expensively dressed men and women who, gatheredin this convention of light and luxury, gave confirmation of his ownand of America's success. In them and in the occasion, not only was thisexquisitely confirmed, but all things took on for him a glowing, quietlyecstatic conformation. This was where it all came together, Ben thought.This was the meaning, almost certainly, of life, and certainly of civilization?thishour of tranquil, titillating anticipation, of recognition and reward,this sweet, sacramental thrall of The Performance.

    He and Priscilla always reserved a table for dinner at six thirty at theGrande Scene on the third floor, and when they had been escorted to itwith priestly gravity, and were seated, and he glanced discreetly aboutthe murmurous, magnificent room, twinkling with crystal, silver, and galaxiesof diamonds sprinkled through the dusk, tinkling with sounds of decantedwine and of equally delicious and effervescent gayety, he felt hisheart swell with a sense of the divine congruity of things. All this was ordained.It was inherent in the first appearance of shaggy man on the smoulderingearth. It was the coming to fruition of years?of centuries,millennial!?of industry, sacrifice, and faith, of unyielding adherence to thecreed of aspiration that bound them all together in their hour of consummationand communion. And not only his private life was thus beatified,nor those of his fellow communicants in the Grande Scene, nowdevoutly dispatching their Tournedos Rossini, but those of the performers,somewhere beneath them in the vast honeycomb of dressing roomsand rehearsal halls, tuning their violins or applying grease paint to theirfaces. For them, too, this was the apotheosis of their lives. Their years ofanonymity, indigence and struggle, of the harrowed preparation of auditionscenes or the endless rehearsal of arpeggios in cold water flats in theVillage or the Left Bank or Notting Hill Gate, had been brought, likethat of Ben and his fellow diners, to epiphany. There were ushers andprograms to certify their talent, their perseverance, their right to renown.People would read the chronicles of their adversities and achievementsin the program notes, nod gravely, and whisper to their consorts bits oftestimony to the reality and verity of this experience, as if from The Livesof The Apostles. The house lights would go down, there would be a momentof silence like that heralding the Transubstantiation in the mass,the great velvet curtain would sweep up, the performers would step forwardbathed in an unearthly radiance, there would be a burst of applausefrom the vast dark auditorium, and All would be Redeemed. All wouldbe redefined and justified and pronounced good: the world, humanity,virtue, capitalism, Christianity. God would be reborn. There was nothingto fear, nothing to regret; grief, uncertainty, dissent were swept awayby the tide of beauty and ceremony that swept over them, as obscenitiesscrawled in the sand are swept away by the sea. Certainly there was noreason to feel shame.

    In addition to this bath of beatitude which he enjoyed every Fridayevening in the Patron's box, Ben learned things at the Kennedy Center thatwere useful to him socially and in his business, which was advertising.He had become growingly familiar with the scores of the major classicaland romantic symphonies, had learned to identify half a dozen pianoand violin concertos, was no longer startled by the advent of the specterin Le Spectre de la Rose, and regularly sang in the shower, in an exuberant,errant tenor, arias from Puccini, Verdi, and Rossini. He took pride in thefact that he was able, at parties, to speak of these composers with some confidenceand even, on occasion, to offer opinions on Purcell along with afew bars of Dido and Aeneas. In the field of drama, his judgments werefar less adventurous, effusive, or gratuitous than those he offered on symphony,the ballet, or the opera, and this was because it was an art he understood.He understood it better, in fact, than most of the people in thetheatre, including any critics who might have been present and many ofthe performers themselves. He knew more about the stage than mostmen living, and the feelings that moved in his breast when he watched aperformance of Shaw, or Ibsen, or Shakespeare were complex, too complexfor Priscilla to make out in the shadows of their private box when hemurmured?as he often did?lines that he knew by heart, or closed hiseyes and lowered his head in dismay, or smiled and breathed deeply. Heunderstood the stage with a profound intuitive insight, and had onceperformed on it with brilliance; some had said with genius.

    As a young man, three years before he had abandoned it to found hisenormously successful agency, Razullo, Inc., he had attended the RoyalAcademy of Dramatic Art in London, where he had been a student of greatpromise. His three years at that institution had been the consummationof a passion that was born in him at the age of eighteen when Miss FlorenceReplogle, his English teacher in Groveland, Florida, high school,had asked him to read the part of Romeo in a classroom recitation of Shakespeare.Until that moment he had done nothing well in his life, nor hadthe opportunity ever arisen for him to discover that he could. His entirelife, except for the hours he spent in school, had been spent diggingsweet potatoes, cleaning chicken coops, and weeding strawberry beds onthe ten sun-blasted acres of his father's truck farm in the pine barrens ofcentral Florida. He performed these tasks with a dumb resignation andchronic weariness, since he was physically small and frail. At school, hewas no happier or more successful. He had a mysterious inability to organizefacts, apply basic principles of physics, or understand numericalrelationships that made his attempts to acquire an education a prolonged,desperate farce. He could not hit a curve ball, watch a quadratic equationbeing written on the board without the nauseating certainty that hewould be called upon to solve it, and with the exceptions of IndependenceDay and the discovery of America he could not remember the date ofanything of significance that had ever happened on the earth. His lackof stature and evidently of normal intelligence produced a sense of shameand shyness in him that reduced him to paralysis before his fellow classmates?especiallythe girls?and persons of any authority whatever, frompolicemen and teachers to the bus drivers and janitors. A wan, spectralsense of unreality possessed him in the presence of adults of almost anykind with the exception of Miss Replogle and of his pale, sad, carewornmother, whose faint, distracted fondness was all he knew of love. As he grewinto adolescence, he sank into his own ignominy; he became shy to thepoint of invisibility; he might, indeed, have disbelieved in his own existenceif it had not been so scathingly certified by his shame and loneliness, bythe impatience or dismay of most of his teachers, by the cruel, ironicgrins of his classmates, and the tyranny of his dark, despotic father, an illiteratetenant farmer whose relationship to Ben was much like that of aploughman to a mule.

    All that redeemed this melancholy evidence of his presence on the earthwas his mother's occasional wracked smile or faltering caress, and someunaccountable but inextinguishable auspice he was able to perceive in thequality of light. Nothing could explain or repress the elation he felt inthe blithe play of morning sunbeams on the water of the swamp, in theblaze and pomp of noon, however cruelly it failed him at his chores, orin the grave and tender eulogies of sunset, which seemed to promise andto celebrate something far more profound and enduring than his own misery.He would raise his head sometimes above the dusty vines where heknelt digging and, quite inexplicably, smile into the sky. "All will be well,"he read in the concatenations of light among the great white clouds andin the shimmer of moonlight on the water of the lake. "It will come true,"he saw inscribed in starlight across the dark vault of the autumn skies,and when he gazed into the woodstove on a winter night, he saw this promisewritten like a rune in lambent letters, or billowing in the firelight like avolatile, rose-colored painting of some fabulous scene that he would oneday behold: he saw ardent lovers holding out their unborn arms to him,or the boiling, molten bullion of a yet unminted treasure that would oneday spill between his fingers.

    Later, when he entered his senior year of high school, a small part of thepromise was redeemed in the joy of sitting every day in room 115 in the presenceof Miss Florence Replogle. Miss Replogle had eyes of the palest lavender,like Confederate violets, a color suited perfectly to her ambrosialTidewater accent, her diaphanous dove-gray gowns, and the soft elegiacquality of her smile which seemed to commemorate some distant, doomedand valorous event in which her role had been to fold bandages and readthe Psalms to dying men. Everything about her suggested mercy, for whichBen thirsted, and room 115, over which she presided, became for him ashrine and sanctuary, a haven from the suffering he was subjected to onthe football field, in the gymnasium, in Mr. Steinberg's algebra class,and in the sun-baked sweet potato fields. On the wall above her desk shehad had inscribed in gold-leaf Gothic letters a quotation from "TinternAbbey," abridged to fit the size of the space and her own modest discontents:

The Mind that is Within Us, so Impress with Quietness and Beauty and so Feed with Lofty Thoughts, that neither Evil Tongues nor all the Dreary Intercourse of Life can e'er Prevail against Us.

    Miss Replogle's own thoughts often seemed on the point of bearingher aloft with them, like a rare and volatile gas. Listening to one of herstudents recite Mrs. Browning's "How do I Love Thee, Let Me Countthe Ways," she would become dangerously unstable, listing ethereally fromside to side while she gazed out at the live oak trees that lined the playground,her head rising and falling with the meter like a bright yellowballoon filled with helium and tugging at her earthbound body in a galeof similes. Ben loved everything about her, especially her instability. Hisown attachment to the earth was so precarious that he could appreciate thefeelings of anyone who showed a disposition to depart from it. Everyweek she assigned a pair of recitation exercises, one for girls and one forboys. These were delivered from a little dais she had had installed at thefront of the room, while she stood beside the window, her elbow supportedby the palm of one hand, the fingers of the other laid delicately againsther cheek, on the very verge of levitation. For girls, her assignments ranto Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sarah Teasdale, or the love poems of Mrs. Browningfor boys, the theme generally combined the martial and the sacrificial:"The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Gunga Din," or "To Lucasta, On Goingto the Wars." Ben's first assignment in her class was a narrative poemof Browning's entitled "An Incident of the French Camp," about a messengerboy who heroically completes his mission of bringing Napoléon thenews of the taking of Ratisbon before falling dead at his beloved commander'sfeet. It concluded with these verses:

Then off there flung in smiling joy, And held himself erect By just his horse's mane, a boy: You hardly could suspect?(So tight he kept his lips compressed, Scarce any blood came through), You looked twice ere you saw his breast Was all but shot in two.

The chief's eye flashed; but presently Softened itself, as sheathes A film the mother-eagle's eye When her braised eaglet breathes; "You're wounded!" "Nay," the soldier's pride Touched to the quick, he said: "I'm killed, sire!" And his chief beside, Smiling the boy fell dead.

    Ben didn't like the poem. Even in his barely literate state, he was embarrassedby its vulgarity and dishonesty, but he saw in it an opportunityto express his own depthless adoration for Miss Replogle, and so he readit as a love poem addressed to her. He pretended that she was his commanderand he the unfortunate messenger, and the boy's four final wordshe made an impassioned avowal of his willingness to serve her, suffermortal wounds, and die for her sake. He never knew what instinct guidedhim in the performance, but the delight and power he felt in the secret wisdomthat governed his voice and set his body at perfect ease before histwenty grinning classmates was that of an epiphany. He knew withouthesitation, beyond any doubt or fear of failure, exactly how to speak thewords to make them peal with devotion and a desire for self-sacrificethat, he rejoiced to see, reduced Miss Replogle to a state of unprecedentedrigidity. The most mysterious and delightful thing about it was that it wasso easy; it was, he thought, like that uncanny intelligence that set TravisMcCullough's feet flying at the crack of the bat to the exact point in theleft center field where the fly ball would end its long high arc in his carelesslyuplifted glove. This was what it was like to do something well. He felta joy that warmed him like a sunrise.

    When he had finished, Miss Replogle, clinging to the windowsill, pressedher lips between her teeth and said in a constricted voice, "Thank you,Benedict. Thank you very much, my dear."

    The next week she altered her curriculum to include the reading ofRomeo and Juliet, which Ben was happy to discover was poetry of a very differentkind. She asked Ben to take the title role, and Peggy Kaufmann, adark and winsome girl, the prettiest in the class, to read the part of Juliet.Peggy was a girl whom Ben had long and furtively adored and whom hewould not otherwise, in twenty years, have dared to ask the time of day. Yet,kneeling in front of the little platform on which she stood at the front ofthe room, the textbook trembling in his hand, he gazed up at her lustrousolive eyes and murmured with an ardor that poured from his parchedsoul as miraculously as the waters of Rehoboth from the desert sands:

I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far As that vast shore wash'd with the furthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise.

    After a moment of startled silence Peggy replied to this in a hushedtremolo so perfectly suited to the lines that many an experienced actresswould have envied it:

Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek ...

    No one laughed, or stirred, or tittered; and when the scene was finisheda strange disconcerted silence possessed the room, in which Peggy gazedsteadfastly at the floor and Miss Replogle's eyebrows twisted in a strickenlook that might have been mistaken for anguish. When the bell rang,she asked Ben to stay for a moment. He stood beside her desk, scratchingthe edge of it with his thumbnail.

    "You read that scene very beautifully, Benedict," she said. "Very beautifullyindeed. I haven't been so moved in this classroom in years. I wantto thank you for it."

    "Thank you, ma'am."

    "You know, we do an annual stage production, every spring. I'm thinkingabout doing Romeo and Juliet this year."

    "That would be real nice," Ben said.

    "I wonder if you'd like to play Romeo?"

    "I couldn't ma'am. I have to work after school. I wouldn't be able torehearse."

    "You have to work?"

    "Yes, ma'am. I help my daddy on the farm. He couldn't get alongwithout me."

    "Not even for a couple of afternoons a week?"

    "No, ma'am. It's a lot of work, and they's not but two of us to do it."

    She laced her fingers together, laid her hands in her lap and gazed atthem for a moment. "How old are you, Benedict? Eighteen?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "You'll be graduating in the spring, won't you?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "What do you intend to do then? After you graduate? Will you go to college?"

    "No, ma'am. I'm not smart enough." He looked up at her and smiled."Or rich enough."

    "You'll go on working on the farm?"

    "Yes, ma'am. I reckon so. Until I get called up."

    She turned her head and looked out of the window. After a moment shesaid, "I wish I'd known." Ben shifted his feet and stood waiting. Sheturned back to him and said, "I wish I'd known about you, Ben."

    "Known what, ma'am?"

    "That you had a gift of this kind. I feel that I've failed you."

    "No, ma'am, you've been real nice to me. I appreciate it." He resumedscratching the edge of her desk with his thumbnail.

    "Do you have to go?" she asked.

    "Well, right soon, ma'am. I got to catch the school bus."

    "I see." She breathed deeply and frowned. "I suppose you'd better goalong, then, I want to thank you again for reading so beautifully for us."

    "Yes, ma'am. I enjoyed it."

    She did not speak to him again about auditioning for the school play,for which, on further thought, she chose Charley's Aunt rather thanRomeo and Juliet. It may have been that, in her mercy, she did not wantto instill false hopes in him of a theatrical career. She knew the factshe had laconically imparted to her were true and inexorable: he wouldwork on his father's farm until he was drafted into the army and sent toVietnam; it was the destiny of most of his male classmates in the graduatingclass of 1966. She may have been led to reflect on those destiniesin a personal and poignant way that had not occurred to her before; orperhaps her thoughts were not sufficiently lofty to render her immuneto The Dreary Intercourse of Life that was taking place in Southeast Asiaat the time; and perhaps those events had tarnished for her the rhetoricalsplendors of "An Incident of the French Camp." At any rate, shedid not assign any more dramatic recitations for her class, and for the remainingsix weeks of the semester was unusually pensive and grave. Shegave Ben the only A of his academic career for a final grade. When hebrought her a quart basket of strawberries as a parting gift, she pressedher lips together, closed her eyes, and after a moment of tremulous silence,gave him her blessing, introduced with the question, "Benedict,do you know what a prodigy is?"

    "No ma'am, I'm not sure," Ben said.

    "A prodigy is a person who has the ability to perform in an artisticfield in a way that cannot be explained. He has been given a gift from God.The kind of gift that made it possible for Mozart to play the piano when hewas three, and to compose symphonies when he was twelve. This kindof gift cannot be understood, and it is not only a great privilege but agreat responsibility. Whoever has been given it has the duty to cherishand develop it, and to serve mankind with it. It belongs to the world as wellas to him. He has been chosen by God as a vessel through which tospread the message of goodness and truth and beauty. That is his missionon the earth. I believe you have such a gift. You have in my opiniona prodigious talent for acting. I have seen a good deal of acting in my life?Ihave seen Maurice Evans and Katherine Cornell?and I say this advisedly.Unfortunately, Mr. Evans, at the time I saw him, had a speechdefect which was the result of orthodontal work; but even with this handicaphe gave a performance of MacBeth that I shall never forget." Shepaused for a moment as if gathering her thoughts, which seemed to bestraying slightly.

    "Yes, ma'am," Ben murmured.

    "I believe very much in destiny," Miss Replogle went on. "I believethat God has ordained a course of life for each of us that is inexorable." Shefrowned. "That is not the proper word. Immutable, that is the word I wassearching for. Immutable. It cannot be altered or avoided. It is the comingto fruition of the spirit, the soul's inheritance." She lowered her voiceand tilted her head at him, looking with a pained intensity into his eyes."And I believe that somewhere, in one of the great theatres of this world,on some appointed day, you will come into your spiritual inheritance. Youwill find your destiny. I want you to believe that, Benedict. Can you believethat?"

    "Yes, ma'am," Ben said with an assurance that she breathed like nard.

    "Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that." She reached out her hand andlaid it on his shoulder. "I don't know what will befall you until that day, butyou must promise me to take very good care of yourself."

    "Yes, ma'am, I will," he said. No one had ever expressed such concernor regard for him before; he seethed with the innocent desire to rewardit.

    "And if ever there is anything that I can do to assist you as you journeytoward that hour of your destiny, you must not hesitate to let me know. Iwill consider it a privilege to do so." He nodded speechlessly. She raisedher hand from his shoulder and laid it on his hair. "Bless you, dear youngcompanion of my spirit," she said.

* * *

    If Miss Replogle had apprehensions about his career in Vietnam, Bendid not share them. He didn't really know very much about Vietnam.His family did not subscribe to a newspaper or own a radio. Their interestin world affairs did not extend beyond the fences of their farm, andthe only discussion he ever heard at the dinner table was brief, churlish,and infrequent, and concerned rat damage, the price of chicken feed, orthe necessity of digging a new privy. His only knowledge of the war camefrom the occasional impassioned declamations of his teachers and the conversationof his classmates. One of these, a girl named Juanita Splaine, hada brother named Justin who had quit school the year before, joined theMarines, and landed with the Third Division at Da Nang. He had subsequentlybeen wounded, hospitalized, discharged, and sent home withmost of his left foot missing. As the war was very new and public sentimenthad not yet turned against it, he was regarded as the first war herofrom Groveland. A picnic had been given in his honor at Flagler Park, andBen had seen him leaning on a cane under the live oaks chatting withthe mayor, Mr. Grayson, the high school principal, and other dignitaries,his chest covered with medals and campaign ribbons and a somewhatstealthy smile playing about his lips. Ben, who was adept at the interpretationof human facial expression, was a little disconcerted by the smile buthe liked the blue and scarlet dress uniform, the medals, the public acclaim,and the fact that two weeks after Justin's return, Baker Bros. Oldsmobile,on Osceola Street, hoisted a plastic banner above their used car lot thatread: THANK A WAR HERO? BUY YOUR USED OLDS FROM JUSTIN SPLAINE.He did not consider the Marine Corps as a permanent career, but it wasa step toward one. It gave one respectability, employment, the gratitudeof one's countrymen, a handsome uniform, food, shelter, money enoughto buy beer and cigarettes, and a measure of hero worship on the part ofpretty girls that would probably enable him to take a certain number ofthem to bed. Above all, it offered escape from his father's farm. Life heldno other comparable prospects, and it seemed to him like a golden opportunity.It did not occur to him that he might be accepting these amenitiesin exchange for the realization of his destiny, the joy of fulfilled talent,the hope of ideal love, the fellowship of peers, and the possibility of immortality.He did not for a moment believe that he would suffer the fateof Justin Splaine, that he would be maimed, deranged, demoralized, orthat his benefits might include a pious epitaph. "Take the money and run,"is the way he would have put it, in the vernacular of his time, and thesentiment would have been understood by the millions of young menbefore him who, in exchange for their birthright, had taken the king's shillingand a day at Ludlow Fair.

    He didn't wait to be drafted. Two weeks after he graduated from highschool he got up in the middle of the night, took a burlap sack from underhis cot in which the night before he had put his birth certificate, aslice of cornbread, a tangerine, a toothbrush, and his copy of Romeo andJuliet, stolen from the school library. He hitchhiked to Orlando, sought outthe Marine Corps recruiting office and enlisted for a four-year hitch of duty,smiling, as he signed the register, the last smile of his innocence. Afterhis basic training at Parris Island and two months in the Ea Drang valley,his smile had changed somewhat. It had grown to resemble that of JustinSplaine, a wary, ragged grin that matched the stealthy panic in his eyes.Sent to a Rest and Rehabilitation Center on Cam Ranh Bay after his companyhad been decimated at Chu Prong, he sat down and wrote a letterto Miss Replogle. He had done a good bit of combat duty, he explainedto her, and felt that he was qualified to apply to the elite Marine GuardSchool in Quantico, Virginia. With the training he would receive there,he would be better able to serve his country and its inspired leaders, which?likethat of the boy in "An Incident of the French Camp"?was his deepestwish. Did she think there was any way she could help him securesuch an appointment? Without embarrassment or inconvenience to herself,of course. He remembered that she had told him not to hesitate to ask,if there was anything she could do to assist him; otherwise, he would notbe troubling her.

    The only thing that might have troubled her in his appeal was its unfamiliartone of pragmatism and its compelling ingenuity, which her devotionto him did not permit her to recognize. Neither did it permit herto follow his injunction not to do anything that might embarrass or inconvenienceher. She did so, wholeheartedly. Miss Replogle had attendedFlorida State University where she'd met the partner of the single indiscretionof her life?an undergraduate escapade at Homecoming week?whohad since become the representative from her Congressional district.Nothing could have persuaded her to seek favors of the man for herself,but she did not hesitate to do so in Ben's behalf. The congressman, witha zeal that expressed the depths of his indebtedness to her, wrote to theCorps Commander, endorsing Ben's application to the Marine GuardSchool. The Corps Commander was impressed, and shortly after, Ben wasassigned to Quantico where, sustained by a wholly novel power of motivation,he did famously. On his graduation, he was sent to London wherehe spent the next two years guarding the American Embassy in GrosvenorSquare. He took with him the last relic of his youth, the link that boundhim indesseverably to his past and to the golden vision of his future thathad kept him from despair in the sweet potato fields, the barracks at ParrisIsland, and the mud and blood of Vietnam: his now-tattered copy ofRomeo and Juliet.

    On the eve of his first twenty-four-hour pass in London, he bought acopy of the Telegraph and read the entertainment section in search of suitableamusement on his first free evening in the great city. Many such diversionshe knew were unadvertised: the delights of Soho, Bayswater Road,and The Windmill were celebrated among his fellow marines, but Benhad loftier diversions in mind. He read the theatre section with awe, astonishedat the number of legitimate theatres offering stage productions:more than he had known existed. Among them he recognized the nameof the most legendary, The Old Vic, and the fact that on that very eveningit was presenting a production of Romeo and Juliet seemed augury, alink in a mystical concatenation of events that was leading inexorably?immutablywas the better word?to his destiny.

    It was the first professional stage production Ben had ever seen, and onesuch as neither he nor Miss Replogle had ever dreamed of. He sat transportedin a six-shilling seat in the first tier while young gallants swaggeredand dueled and jested in the stone streets and palaces of Verona, theirsword hilts and medallions and the brocade of their doublets twinklingin the sunlight of the plazas and in moon-drenched fatal gardens wherethey poured out their pride and passion and infatuation with life in atide of eloquence and ardor that made Ben clench the arms of his chairand tremble with delight. Here was magic, beauty, grace, gayety, renown,such as he had never known existed. Here was a world of illustriouscompanions, splendid artifice, and the magnificent transformation of reality.The warm and nebulous radiance that had called to him and comfortedhim throughout his boyhood was suddenly condensed into substanceand swept into a stately architecture, like stardust being swept into a constellationin the void. He felt that he was witnessing the birth of the cosmos.It took shape all about him in this vaulted, glittering playhouse, thisstately temple that framed the human tragedy before him like arches of thefirmament, this stage illuminated with the light of galaxies, jeweled withtears and blood and ringing with laughter and rapier blades and the vowsof lovers, this rapt, transfigured audience of angels, this home of revelations.

    Why in the name of God, he wondered, riding back to his barracks inthe tube train, would a man want to become a computer programmer,an accountant, an insurance salesman? Here was a life of eternal magicand romance and, for anyone sufficiently gifted and resolute, fame and fortune.Miss Replogle had told him he had the first of those qualities, Vietnamhad taught him that he had the other. He sat rocking in the plungingcar, simmering in the flames of consecration, and before he arrived athis station he was sworn to his profession.

    Every weekend for the two years of his tour of duty in London, hewent to the theatre, and on his summer furloughs he went to Stratford andEdinburgh. He saw Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Congreve, Chekhov,Coward, Pinter, Osborne, Schaffer performed by the finest actors in theworld, produced with unmatched excellence and splendor in a theatricaltradition that went back four hundred years to the Globe. At night inhis barracks he read tattered Penguin paperbacks of plays that he boughtfor sixpence on the sidewalk stalls of Tottenham Court Road and ChurchStreet, and spent his evenings and Sunday afternoons browsing throughthe print shops and bookstores of Charing Cross Road where, with agonizinglycounted-out shillings, he bought eighteenth-century prints ofCovent Garden, the Haymarket, Drury Lane, Sadler's Wells, and Tuppence-Coloreddrawings of Garrick, Forbes-Robertson, Mrs. Siddons, HenryIrving, Mrs. Woffington. Every other penny of his pay he saved, andwhen he was sent back to the States to be discharged in the summer of1973, this, together with his severance pay, totaled twenty-five hundred dollars.He bought an airplane ticket and within a week was back in London,ensconced in a bed-sitter in Notting Hill Gate.

    It was August, within a week of the yearly auditions for the Royal Academyof Dramatic Art. Ben had three years of entitlement to study on theGI Bill of Rights. His chances for admission, he knew, were very limited;there was a yearly quota of only ten non-British applicants accepted. Theknowledge only increased his determination. He applied, memorizedthe required speech of Hotspur's from Henry V and, for his Optional,the lines that he had spoken to Peggy Kaufmann in Miss Replogle's classand murmured to the moon through the tattered fronds of palm trees inthe Asian jungles: "It is my lady. Oh, it is my love ..."

    He auditioned on a morning in mid-August in a Georgian room thatlooked out onto fabled Gower Street, facing a rampart of oak tables at whichwere seated eight people of a smiling severity of countenance seen onlyin nightmares. For the week of agonized suspense that followed he entertainedhimself recklessly, saving not even enough money from hiscapital to buy an airplane ticket back to New York; so far as he was concerned,the only alternative was oblivion. On the seventh day a brownenvelope arrived beating the Royal Crest and the news that he had beenaccepted and would be required to report on the fifteenth of the followingmonth with a pair of plimsolls, a foil and fencing mask, and a copyof the Oxford edition of the plays of William Shakespeare. He did not knowwhat plimsolls were, but the esoteric sound of them seemed to confirm thefact that he had been admitted into a mystery. It was the first step towardthose distant evenings at the Kennedy Center which he had so long andso radiantly foreseen. He did not foresee that he would not be situatedon the stage on those occasions, but in a patron's box; and he would nothave believed, at the time, that it would not matter to him.

    In his three years at RADA he more than justified Miss Replogle'sfaith in him, and in the impulse that had brought him there. When hegraduated, at the age of twenty-five, he had earned a Diploma with Merit,signed by Gielgud, Olivier, and Dame Sybil Thorndyke; the firm respectof his fellow students and instructors; and the promise of an illustriouscareer. His performances, which were never less than skilful andoften quite startlingly beautiful in a way that he himself did not understand,invariably filled the Academy theatre with fellow students and their friendsand families, moved to admiration and often to tears by their originality,subtlety, and vitality. This was the more unusual because he had grownonly a couple of inches since his adolescence and had a sad, gnarledface and a reedy voice that was the despair of his diction masters. Hehad, however, that ineffable quality of intensity and dramatic wisdomthat make it possible for an actor to hold an audience by his silences, hispresence, his imaginative existence on a stage, far more than by imposingappearance or mere technical proficiency. He was also, for the first timein his life, popular and personable. Being engaged in the thing he was bornto do, among people who respected his talent, he flowered in confidenceand charm, and in a terrible determination never again to be poor, obscure,or scorned, a determination that furnished him with an inexhaustible sourceof energy. He became a kind of primitive hero, and in the little world ofRADA enjoyed an éclat much like that of Whistler, a hundred years before,in the salons of the West End. He was regarded as a noble savage,gifted, aboriginal, passionate, and free. He discovered that while a fewadmire the profound, all are enchanted by the picturesque, and that by thecultivation of that quality in himself he could endear himself to friends andbeguile audiences. He bought a cheap twelve-string guitar and sang Appalachianfolk songs at parties in a corncrake voice whose quality of genuinelament more than compensated for the fact that it was frequentlyoff-key. The Florida Cracker accent that he had once sought to disguise helearned was not only admired as colorfully barbaric, but was professionallyprofitable; it won him the lead in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which one ofhis instructors produced especially as a vehicle for him. That there was amarket value to the stigma of his youth was something he had not dreamedof, and there was irony in the discovery that it could be used as advertisementof the talent that enabled him to perform, on the stage of the mostdistinguished dramatic academy in the world, the plays of another rusticupstart whose fellow dramatists had described him scornfully as "a countrycrow beautified with our feathers." When he learned this, Ben took afierce pride in the fact that was very unlike the habitual humility of hisyounger days. The taste of humility had grown sour on his tongue, andto subsist on consolation now seemed to him like living on scraps thrownunderneath the table to a dog. He felt his powers and prospects stirringwithin him with a thrilling nascent tumult almost like that of puberty,and they demanded tribute. If it came in the form of infatuation withthe persona of the artless rural prodigy he had artfully created, he wasnot troubled by the fact; he would accept it as his due, as he came to acceptevery prize of his virtuosity. The business of living, he began to suspect,was very like the art of the actor?a skilful impersonation, cunninglyconstructed and sustained, which inspired trust, admiration and belief.This principle he practiced without apology or shame, but the true and terribleprivation of his youth he did not dramatize, or seek to invest withglamor, or consciously exploit, or willingly remember, or speak of, ever,to anyone but Priscilla.

Continues...

Excerpted from That Summer's Tranceby J. R. Salamanca Copyright © 2001 by J. R. Salamanca. Excerpted by permission.
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Bibliographic Details

Title: That Summer's Trance
Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
Publication Date: 2001
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket