Dark Benediction

And then, he noticed she winced away from his sodden coveralls. And she wasn’t glad to see him at all.

“Thorny, how nice,” she managed to murmur, extending her hand gingerly. The hand flashed with jewelry.

He took it for an empty second, stared at her, then walked hurriedly away, knots twisting up inside him. Now he could play it through. Now he could go on with it, and even enjoy executing his plan against all of them.

Mela had come to watch opening night for her doll in “The Anarch,” as if its performance were her own. I’ll arrange, he thought, for it not to be a dull show.

“No, no, wool” came the monotone protest of the dud Andreyev, in the next-to-the-last scene. The bark of Marka’s gun, and the Peltier mannequin crumpled to the stage; and except for a brief triumphant denouement, the play was over.

At the sound of the gunshot, Thornier paused to smile tightly over his shoulder, eyes burning from his hawklike face. Then he vanished into the wings.

She got away from them as soon as she could, and she wandered around backstage until she found him in the storage room of the costuming section. Alone, he was sorting through the contents of an old locker and muttering nostalgically to himself. She smiled and closed the door with a thud. Startled, he dropped an old collapsible top-hat and a box of blank cartridges back into the trunk. His hand dived into his pocket as he straightened.

“Jade! I didn’t expect—”

“Me to come?” She flopped on a dusty old chaise lounge with a weary sigh and fanned herself with a program, closing her eyes. She kicked off her shoes and muttered: “Infuriating bunch. I hate ’em!”—made a retching face, and relaxed into little-girlhood. A little girl who had trouped with Thornier and the rest of them—the actress Jade Ferne, who had begged for bit parts and haunted the agencies and won the roles through endless rehearsals and shuddered with fright before opening curtain like the rest of them. Now she was a pert little woman with shrewd eyes, streaks of gray at the temples, and hard lines around her mouth. As she let the executive cloak slip away, the shrewdness and the hard lines melted into weariness.

“Fifteen minutes to get my sanity back, Thorny,” she muttered, glancing at her watch as if to time it.

He sat on the trunk and tried to relax. She hadn’t seemed to notice his uneasiness, or else she was just too tired to attach any significance to it. If she found him out, she’d have him flayed and pitched out of the building on his ear, and maybe call the police. She came in a small package, but so did an incendiary grenade. It won’t hurt you, Jade, what I’m doing, he told himself. It’ll cause a big splash, and you won’t like it, but it won’t hurt you, nor even wreck the show.

He was doing it for show business, the old kind, the kind they’d both known and loved. And in that sense, he told himself further, he was doing it as much for her as he was for himself.

“How was the run-through, Jade?” he asked casually.

“Except for Andreyev, I mean.”

“Superb, simply superb,” she said mechanically.

“I mean really.”

She opened her eyes, made a sick mouth. “Like always, Thorny, like always. Nauseating, overplayed, perfectly directed for a gum-chewing bag-rattling crowd. A crowd that wants it overplayed so that it won’t have to think about what’s going on. A crowd that doesn’t want to reach out for a feeling or a meaning. It wants to be clubbed on the head with the meaning, so it doesn’t have to reach. I’m sick of it.”

He looked briefly surprised. “That figures,” he grunted wryly.

She hooked her bare heels on the edge of the lounge, hugged her shins, rested her chin on her knees, and blinked at him. “Hate me for producing the stuff, Thorny?”

He thought about it for a moment, shook his head. “I get sore at the setup sometimes, but I don’t blame you for it.”

“That’s good. Sometimes I’d trade places with you. Sometimes I’d rather be a charwoman and scrub D’Uccia’s floors instead.”

“Not a chance,” he said sourly. “The Maestro’s relatives are taking that over, too.”

“I know. I heard. You’re out of a job, thank God. Now you can get somewhere.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know where. I can’t do anything but act.”

“Nonsense. I can get you a job tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“With Smithfield. Sales promotion. They’re hiring a number of old actors in the department.”

“No.” He said it flat and cold.

“Not so fast. This is something new. The company’s expanding.”

“Ha.”

“Autodrama for the home. A four-foot stage in every living room. Miniature mannequins, six inches high. Centralized Maestro service. Great Plays piped to your home by concentric cable. Just dial Smithfield, make your request. Sound good?”

He stared at her icily. “Greatest thing in show business since Sarah Bernhardt,” he offered tonelessly. “Thorny! Don’t get nasty with me!”

“Sorry. But what’s so new about having it in the home? Autodrama took over TV years ago.”

“I know, but this is different. Real miniature theater. Kids go wild for it. But it’ll take good promotion to make it catch on.”

“Sorry, but you know me better than that.”

She shrugged, sighed wearily, closed her eyes again. “Yes, I do. You’ve got portrayer’s integrity. You’re a darfsteller. A director’s ulcer. You can’t play a role without living it, and you won’t live it unless you believe it. So go ahead and starve.” She spoke crossly, but he knew there was grudging admiration behind it.

“I’ll be O.K.,” he grunted, adding to himself: after tonight’s performance.

“Nothing I can do for you?”

“Sure. Cast me. I’ll stand in for dud mannequins.” She gave him a sharp glance, hesitated. “You know, I believe you would!”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

She stared thoughtfully at a row of packing cases, waggled her dark head. “Hmmp! What a spectacle that’d be—a human actor, incognito, playing in an autodrama.”

“It’s been done—in the sticks.”

“Yes, but the audience knew it was being done, and that always spoils the show. It creates contrasts that don’t exist or wouldn’t be noticed otherwise. Makes the dolls seem snaky, birdlike, too rubbery quick. With no humans on stage for contrast, the dolls just seem wistfully graceful, ethereal.”

“But if the audience didn’t know—”

Jade was smiling faintly. “I wonder,” she mused. “I wonder if they’d guess. They’d notice a difference, of course—in one mannequin.”

“But they’d think it was just the Maestro’s interpretation of the part.”

“Maybe—if the human actor were careful.”

He chuckled sourly. “If it fooled the critics—”

“Some ass would call it ‘an abysmally unrealistic interpretation’ or ‘too obviously mechanical.” She glanced at her watch, shook herself, stretched wearily, and slipped into her shoes again. “Anyway,” she added, “there’s no reason to do it, since the Maestro’s really capable of rendering a better-than-human performance anyhow.”

The statement brought an agonized gasp from the janitor. She looked at him and giggled. “Don’t be shocked, Thorny. I said ‘capable of—not ‘in the habit of.’ Auto-drama entertains audiences on the level they want to be entertained on.”

“But—”

“Just,” she added firmly, “as show business has always done.”

“But—”

“Oh, retract your eyeballs, Thorny. I didn’t mean to blaspheme.” She preened, began slipping back into her