earring. The thin steel dropped against the wood. In silence.
“Madame Bernhardt, you don’t need to trouble yourself with the messy stuff. Chef Louis…”
She took out her room key from the King George. Long and thin, with sharp jagged cuts, and hooked to a metal-banded slip of paper with the number 511 handwritten in the middle. She rolled the fish to the side. Then placed the tip of the key just below its neck. Catching the sunlight.
“No need to soil yourself.” Abbot Kinney’s voice trembled for the first time. His hands grabbed with no true sense of purpose or direction. He looked back to the crowd at the end of the dock.
Sarah pierced the skin with her key. The flesh popped, and a thin clear fluid washed over her hands. A stale, saltwater smell followed an outpouring of heavy syrup. She drew in a deep breath. Her grip tensing around the makeshift blade. To imagine that anybody would challenge the morality of her life. Especially in the name of God. The same God that she had nearly married. Prayed to. Paid penance. And even had her soul, half Jewess and all, cleansed in his holy water. Accusations destroy and damage. Like a stray bullet fired from hatred straight into her heart.
She drew her hand forward, ripping an incision that seemed more of the genus
“Madame Bernhardt, there are reporters back in the crowd.” His pleas were lost against the siren chirps of vigilant gulls.
“It is amazing that they can see the dimness of this star.”
She wasn’t originally cast in
The Mother Superior had bowed her head. Her eyes softened then turned strict. Almost manlike. “You will not be given a part in the play. We have assigned a dog to play the part of the fish. He’ll walk on, then walk off. It is that small.”
“But I want to—”
“You don’t need to be in the spotlight. Stay fragile for God.”
Sarah could not make eye contact with the nun. She had turned on her heels and walked down the red stretch of carpet that rolled atop the marble floor. The eyes of a dozen Jesuses looking down on her. Knowing the Mother Superior didn’t understand. She didn’t get it. Sarah did not want to be cast in the play from vanity, or even as a public declaration of her faith. She wanted to feel the power of the angel. To experience the true strength of God that poured through that fish into the blind man’s eyes. To feel some connection of spirit. That’s all.
Abbot Kinney’s complexion turned pale. He edged back a step and averted his stare away from the fish carnage. “Madame Bernhardt, please. The kitchen staff has graciously offered…”
She looked up at him. Her hands still hewing the fish. A thumb slipped beneath the skin, reverently stroking. “Then help me gather my things, would you. Be a good boy.”
Kinney straightened up and looked back to the crowd slowly inching their way up the pier in line with the auditorium. His hands turned jittery. He scooped up the fishing rod. The line swung. The silver hook glowed, then dangled capriciously at his loafers.
“You’re not doing me much good just standing there.” She spoke without looking at him. Her hands now cleaving the fish’s belly into two halves.
Kinney wrapped the line around the pole, securing it with the hook. He tapped the butt of the rod against the pier, and then checked back to the crowd. He sighed. He looked down to see Sarah cradling her face in the fish’s innards. Her nose and mouth engulfed. The bass’s body spread like open wings across her cheeks. “For the love of god.”
The insides were warm against her skin. She swore the heart still pumped. Stomach grinding. Its lungs pressing for air. Blood and fluids that reeked of life on the edge of decay pooled across her cheeks, then leaked in slow streams down to her neck. Nearly fifty-three years later she has finally played in Mother Superior’s
THE CROWD GASPED. Boots and shoes inched forward. One could almost hear the scribble of reporters’ pencils. There was a contemplative silence, as though most people were still trying to decipher what they were witnessing. Maybe the light was playing tricks. Baker stood on his tiptoes, vying for more detail. He watched as Abbot Kinney fruitlessly positioned himself between the heathen and the onlookers. A stupidly long eclipse with a fishing pole in his hand, looking helpless and unusually voiceless.
But Sarah obviously heard the anticipation of the audience. She twisted her torso so that her face had peered around Kinney’s frame, the fish mask cupped over her nose. Then she rolled her eyes with a tragicomic smile up to the sky where just a wisp of cloud hung lightly, in order to both bring about a laugh, and also to reassure her fans of her character’s confidence.
Baker almost laughed out loud at the defiant clown who at once mocked and acquiesced. The precision timing, the exact body language, an expression contorted for effect without being prey to exaggeration. He had never seen her before, hadn’t ever really known much about her before the bishop’s wrath, but he always had a slight admiration for public defiance. In her small act, he could see her commitment to her art, and her extreme confidence in herself. In watching her on the pier, one wouldn’t ever suppose the intense controversy surrounding her and its cancerous effect on body and soul. But as she turned slightly to the right, Vince Baker was able to see both her eyes, shaped like turned acorns, pupils like wilted buds, and in them he recognized the gem of celebrity. One that twirls in the spotlight of the sun, hoping to catch all the rays that will burst it into one startlingly magnificent light for all the world to see. He almost left. He didn’t have time for that shit.
WITH A SLIGHT CHUCKLE from the crowd, followed by some scattered hand-claps, Kinney exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, you’re killing me with this craziness,” in the same voice of all those self-indulgent, where-are-they-now directors who schemed to keep her off the stage because true talent always threatens the stability of mediocrity.
Sarah fell out of view from the crowd with the drama of Hamlet’s last breath. Her fall braced by her free hand. The fish was turning deadly and rancid. Its soul long ago risen. The scales turned stiff and prickly. She slid the bass from her face, wiping its grayish remains with the sleeve of her blouse, and threw the spent carcass at Abbot Kinney’s dancing feet. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to the purity of the Pacific. The rich blue. Staggered whitecaps stapled across the water top. Mother Superior’s parable had come true. It took all those years to finally find the truth in her play beyond the dramatic verisimilitude. But here she lay, evil turned pure, and the blindness gone. Finally able to see.
She closed her eyes again to imagine herself now walking back into the Grandchamps convent in Versailles. The reds are still brilliant. Despite the age in her legs she still feels the same sense of fear and anticipation that she had the first time she entered as the nearly nine-year-old Henriette-Rosine. Mother Superior strides down the corridor. She hasn’t changed. A nose too large for her face. Cursory black eyes set back beneath the wrinkles. A figure stout and resolute, both womanly and sexless at once. She comes up and takes her pupil’s hand. “You understand what it is to see now?” she asks.
Sarah nods her head.
“What it means to anticipate what other people think of you.”
Again she nods.
“That you don’t need to think about those people, because God won’t let you down.”
Sarah moves back in nimble steps. Her bones ache. Her jaw is tired. She bites down on her lip. She can almost taste blood.
“You look unsure, Henriette-Rosine.” Mother Superior’s voice echoes through the great hall. “You can demur to his embrace.”
Sarah’s fingers roll into a clenched fist. She feels her carotid artery start to fill her neck in pride and valor. The wind takes hold of her chest in a stopped-up bellow. “I suppose I don’t believe it anymore,” she declares. “And I’m not sure I ever did.”
