Divine Sarah

“And you’ll begin working in the theater today?”

“That is our plan. A solid run-through.”

“I am genuinely elated at the notion that my theater will soon be transformed into the Parisian stage. Genuinely. Now is there anything I can do? I intend to be there during the day to help, and make myself available.”

Max glanced quickly to Sarah.

“Anything?” Kinney asked.

“The only thing that I am concerned about besides getting Madame’s car down to the pier,” Max said, trying to gain the upper hand, “is in making sure that we have a spotlight that is ready and working. I believe in the contract you said that you would furnish the necessary supplies for the lime light.”

“And remind me of those again.”

“We have the equipment, but we asked you to supply the calcium carbonate.”

Kinney reached for a pad and pen from his breast pocket. “Now let me write this down. Calcium carbonate.”

“Lime,” Max said. “It’s the name for lime.”

“I do remember now. I have one of my staff on it, in fact. For some reason he has had some difficulty in locating it, but last I heard there was hope with a builder in Pasadena. Is it absolutely necessary?”

“It will not work without the mineral. And yes, it is absolutely necessary to staging the show. Madame Bernhardt”—he spoke as though she were not there—“is fully committed to the aesthetic of selective realism. The entire play is designed around the stylized set that suggests the essence of the era and location. She sees it as another character.” Max continued to explain the importance of the concept, no doubt posturing to gain the respect and position of Abbot Kinney, and then he launched into the science of the calcium carbonate (lime, he kept clarifying, in order to reinforce his expertise) and the oxyhydrogen torch, and how the heat creates the incandescence, continuing on with all the nuances that only the most skilled craftsmen could truly master.

Sarah drifted in and out of the conversation, not wishing to involve herself in the power struggle that was playing out in front of her. She laughed to herself at the notion of someone who barely understood science explaining it to someone also equally ignorant, and how their mutual nescience seemed to oddly bond them. Max didn’t talk like this when they had gone to visit Thomas Edison during that first tour of America. In fact, Max didn’t speak a word, equally terrified at being seen as gay as at being identified as simple. They had been playing La Dame aux Camelias in New York, and that particular performance had extended nearly an hour. Seventeen curtain calls after the third act. Twenty-nine after the fifth. New York has always appreciated her. And somehow in the midst of all this, the promoter Jarrett had arranged for Sarah to meet Thomas Edison at his home in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Jarrett had clearly thought that there were some good photos and press to be had, and he basically hoodwinked both parties into the summit, convincing each megastar that the other wanted to have the honor of the meeting. Max had been opposed from the start (given they had to leave New York in the morning for Boston), but even then he was especially afraid of contradicting a promoter. So out they rode in the middle of the night, wearing tomorrow’s traveling clothes (just in case), with the snow falling, and the carriage sliding almost sideways the entire trip, the tread barely catching the ice.

They finally reached his home at some unusual hour, and she remembered seeing it lit up on the hill, the incandescent lights glowing, showing off the white of the multistory home and making the dark shutters look even darker. The carriage pulled through the picket fence with the opening curiously at the house’s side. When they got out, Edison and his wife, Mary, were both waiting on the porch, alongside a newspaper reporter and some other local dignitaries. Mary had been fairly gracious, almost speechless when faced with the stage star, but Edison, in contrast, had appeared to be cold and stiff. He politely took Sarah’s hand and respectfully shook Max’s, but his diffidence was loud and clear. It’s not like Sarah had really wanted to be there either. She had just come off one of the shows of her life and would have rather celebrated the success in a Manhattan nightclub than on a carriage bound for New Jersey. But there she was. And there he was. Younger and not quite as thoughtful-looking as she might have imagined.

It was clear from his expressions and lack of conversation that Edison had been expecting a host of idiotic questions about his inventions followed by a few smiles and quotes for tomorrow’s papers. She knew it by his eyes. She understood the feeling of being trapped in a room with people who know what you do but have so little understanding, and then think a few basic questions and a twenty-minute tete-a-tete will make it all clear. It displayed little regard for the intellect and training and practice and study that were all labored over for years and years; instead it was concocted into a final product that appeared so basic in its shamelessness.

Question: How do you do it?

Answer: Well, how do you breathe?

Edison had been so prepared for the bombardment that he didn’t consider he was facing someone who experienced the same issues.

At one point in the evening, after many of the guests had gone, Sarah had been wandering the house and ended up in her host’s study, tracing titles on the bookshelf. She felt a presence behind her and turned to see the inventor. “I was just admiring your collection of Shakespeare,” she had said. “I am impressed and intrigued by the fact that you have five different volumes of Hamlet.”

“When I finish reading it, I go out and buy another,” he explained. “That way I never feel like I am rereading it. It is always a fresh book. Each time I am so moved by his indecision, by the crossroads of emotion and reason.”

“I have played Hamlet countless times, and I understand exactly what you feel.”

“I envy you. I would do anything to have the opportunity just to feel what it is like to suffer Hamlet’s indecision.”

“Perhaps you could invent it.”

With that Edison laughed. His shoulders had relaxed, and for one moment he opened his eyes wide enough to appreciate that he was in the presence of someone who understood. “Would you like to see my lab?” he asked. And then he took her hand and guided her out a side door, away from the social farces, out into the snow and down the road to his compound of invention. They trudged across the fresh pack, past the office library and into the lab, just in front of the machine shop that bordered the railroad tracks that he said ran toward Mine Gully. He twisted a switch, and light spilled through the room from the incandescent lamps attached to the inverted T-shaped gas fixtures from the ceiling. It was almost a Provence glow, made soft by the streaking sheen along the slatted wood ceiling and matching floors. Then she saw rows of tables with dining room legs, topped by test tubes, wires, stray bits of glass, and rows of tools that all looked like variations of tweezers. In the back of the room sat a pipe organ, whose glowing brass pipes ascended on the right until the final tube nearly touched the ceiling. The room smelled sweetly of grease and oil, and the intangible fragrance of passion and intellect.

“I am honored,” she said.

“Over here.” He motioned her to the front table. His eyes both charming and mad. “Sit here.”

Before her sat a beautiful base of polished wood, and balanced across the top was a brass-looking cylinder with two mismatched ends, one jutting out like the wide barrel of a pistol, and the other squat and mechanical. A masterwork of sculpture. “This is your phonograph?” she asked with awe in her voice.

He merely smiled, then touched his bent fingers to the apparatus and worked the small machinery. He looked up at the ceiling while his recorded voice, distant and mangled, was heard singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” through the open-mouth cone.

Sarah let out a laugh. A glorious freeing laugh from all the pressures and expectations and loneliness that had accompanied her magnifying glass tour. Tears formed in her eyes as she felt the beauty and imagination of possibility that was singing to her in a shaky off-key voice. It was all she could do not to hug him. “Thank you,” she said, once the song had ended. And never before in her life had the words innately carried the gratitude that their true meaning intended.

“Now may I ask a favor of you?” His voice had the quivery quality of the recording. He looked down at his brown shoes that tapped the floor. “Would you recite something from Hamlet for me?”

“It would be my honor.” She moved between the row of tables and stopped before the organ. She looked to her audience of one, a lone figure of appreciation with the mind of a thousand, and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from