Winifred Elze

Sample Chapter








Chapter 1


Della went to the theatre early that Saturday afternoon, carrying her beaded dress in its cleaner’s bag, and peeked in the stage door, expecting to find a rehearsal in progress. Instead, the wings were empty, the stage empty, lit only by a single work light. She gave a little snort and walked toward the stage. Just because this wasn’t New York, that didn’t mean the actors should slack off. The heavy door creaked shut behind her, and the plastic cleaner’s bag rustled as she moved, but the theatre was otherwise silent.
She stepped onto the set of Fifteenth Century Florence, all fancy gilt work and red velvet, incongruously lit by the electric work light on its spidery metal frame, and looked around. Up close, the columns and capitals were coarsely painted, and the backdrop covered with splatters of different colored paints. Considering how much they'd paid that scenery person, she thought he could have done a neater job. Maybe she’d deduct something from the final check because of sloppy workmanship. No point trying to get Eugene’s approval: he was too soft with these people.
She turned toward the house. It was dark, the seats and aisles invisible, with nothing to define the size and nature of the space except the exit signs floating at intervals but giving no illumination to their surroundings. Outside the work light’s harsh circle, the world was blank.
Della’s eye caught a flicker of movement at the circle’s edge. She turned and saw the maintenance man coming from the wings, a tall, thin figure who looked like a shadow cast by the work light. She didn’t know why Eugene allowed him to wear that mustache and pony tail. He, in turn, saw her, and moved backward. What was his name?
“Will!” she called out, remembering just in time to keep him from melting into the darkness. He stood there staring glumly at a point on the floor and to her left. “Where is everybody?” she asked him.
He looked at her then, evidently surprised. “They open tonight,” he said.
“I know that,” Della said impatiently, rustling her party dress in its bag. “Why aren’t they rehearsing if they’re opening tonight? You’d think they’d want to get it right.”
“They never rehearse the day of a performance.”
“I hope they know their lines,” Della said. Will just stared at her. The man was really stupid, Della thought. “I suppose that means they didn’t have any donuts delivered?”
“No,” Will said. “No donuts.”
Della smiled. Her mother had often told her no one could resist her dimples, and she had never questioned this truth. “Will, darling, would you be an angel and run down to the coffee shop for me? I haven’t had any breakfast and I’ve got so much work to do. And on a Saturday. I don’t get to sleep in like these actors and stage hands.”
Will motioned vaguely toward the wings. “Well, I’ve got to...”
“Whatever it is can wait, I’m sure,” Della interrupted.
Will shrugged. “What do you want?”
“Oh, anything. I’m not fussy,” she said, walking toward the stage door. “Just a couple of donuts, no, make that two danish. Any kind. But nothing with coconut or that horrible red filling. And please be a dear and make sure they put paper between them, so the fillings don’t smear each other.” She paused in the doorway. “And bring that to my office.”
She stepped into the arcade and walked past the music shop and gift shop, heels clicking on the marble floor. Publicity posters lined the walls: Colin Webb as Cesare Borgia, very Aubrey Beardsley in style, taking full advantage of Colin’s handsome profile. He was dressed entirely in black velvet, which called attention to the pale face and the long-fingered hand holding a mask. And below the mask, in red, the title of the play: “The Borgia Prince.” Della still hadn’t been given a poster for the office. If they didn’t give her one soon, she’d just have to take one of these.
The box office was opposite the stairs that led to the floors occupied by management, and Della noticed that new girl, Fiona something, behind the ticket window. She was shifting about on the hard chair the theatre provided, Della having insisted that it wasn’t wise to make these people too comfortable if you wanted to get any work out of them. The motivational aspects didn't seem to be having any effect at the moment, since the girl was clearly doing nothing. She seemed flustered when Della approached, as though she were hiding something, but then she leaned forward on her elbows and smiled in a friendly enough way. Della wondered why she didn’t do something about her hair. You hardly ever saw that shade of dishwater blonde any more, with hair dyes so readily available.
Della paused before going upstairs. “Keeping busy?” she said to the girl.
“Not really,” Fiona said. “It’s been slow.”
“I’m surprised you’re in so early, even if there is a show tonight.”
Fiona shrugged. “They told me to come in at noon, so here I am.”
“Is it past noon already?” Della said. She shifted the weight of the garment bag slung over her shoulder and looked at her wristwatch. “So it is. Carol must really trust you, to put you on alone when you’ve just started.” The girl didn’t say anything, and Della thought there was something furtive about her expression. She considered her more closely. Fiona had the kind of thin bridged, tip-tilted nose Della had always secretly wanted and so resented on anyone else. It wiggled impertinently when the girl talked. “Haven’t I seen you working somewhere else?”
“I work at the library,” Fiona said. “Part time. They can’t afford to hire me full time.”
“The same problem we have,” Della said. “Budget problems everywhere. But welcome to the Empire Theatre. I hope you enjoy working here.”
“Thank you,” Fiona said.
Della smiled, then climbed the stairs to the arcade’s second story. She stopped at the receptionists area to dash off a note telling the box office manager that the new girl, Fiona, was sitting around doing nothing all Saturday afternoon, and that her bored attitude was making an unfavorable impression on the customers. She put the note in Carol’s mailbox, but supposed it wouldn’t do much good: these part time people expected to be paid just for being there, whether they did anything or not.
Della picked up her own messages and continued down the hall, past the frosted glass doors of all the closed and empty theatre offices on her right. She took care not to touch the guard rail that kept people on this level from falling off to the left into the arcade. She didn’t think maintenance kept it all that clean.
At the far end of the hall, she climbed the winding stairway to her own office, solitary on the third floor, the words “Della Masoti, Finance,” in gold letters on the glass. She unlocked the door. The air conditioner hummed, controlling the temperature of the lingeringly warm autumn days. Overhead, the ceiling light burned, but the light it gave was washed pale by the noon sunshine. Della hung her dress on the coat rack and smiled as she inhaled the light fragrance of the potpourri that sat in china bowls around the room. She locked her door, slipped off her shoes, and walked across the thick carpet to her desk, where she settled comfortably into the padded chair. She picked up the letter opener and slit open the envelopes containing her mail and messages.
The first was a reminder from the company that supplied the candy counter that the bill was past due. It was a polite letter, and they didn’t charge interest on past due balances, so there was no reason to pay it yet. Might as well keep the money in the bank and let the theatre get interest on it. When they threatened not to deliver, that’d be time enough to pay them. She dropped the letter into her wastebasket.
The next was a memo from Kip Wayland. It was about his income tax again, and he wasn’t at all polite. Yes, she’d made a little mistake on his taxes, and when she’d sent the corrected paperwork to the IRS, she’d forgotten to mark that it was a correction. But it wasn’t her fault the IRS thought he’d gotten his salary twice. She’d explained this to Kip and didn’t know why he couldn’t straighten out his personal problems himself. She certainly didn’t have time to deal with the IRS for him.
The next envelope contained a check and a letter from some lady explaining that she was making this donation to the theatre because the maintenance staff had been so nice and helpful when she’d had car trouble after the preview performance. No sense letting the maintenance people get a swelled head; they were hard enough to discipline as it was.
Della felt hungry. Will ought to be back with the danish soon; she decided to make a pot of tea in the meantime. She went downstairs to the second floor coffee station, leaving her office door open for once since there was no one else in the management section of the building, and took her teapot down from its shelf. She added teabags, then water from the coffee machine’s hot water spout. The machine was one improvement she’d insisted on: when she came, they’d had a coffee machine that only let you heat up water by pouring it through the coffee maker. Disgusting. The tea always tasted like coffee.
While the tea brewed, she reached for her jar of honey.
Where was it? She looked on the shelf, moved a box of Sweet ‘n Low and a jar of sugar, but it wasn’t behind them. That was so annoying. Nobody else used honey in their tea, in fact, most of the people drank coffee. Why couldn’t they leave her things alone? She slid the nondairy creamer and the stirrers aside, and finally found, not her own honey, but a little jar saying it was from Manfred Clark’s bees. Somebody probably broke her jar and replaced it with this much smaller jar, which they’d probably gotten free. Manny was always giving away honey.
Oh well. She discarded the tea bags, stirred a few spoonfuls of honey into the tea, and took the pot up to her office.
*****
After Della had walked away from the box office and gone upstairs, Fiona said, “Okay, Carol, she’s gone. You can come out now.”
“You’re sure?” Carol said from the recesses of the box office.
“Yes. She went upstairs. She didn’t seem all that bad to me. Very pleasant, and smiles a lot. After what everybody’s told me, I was expecting her to have two heads.”
“No, just two faces,” Carol said, peeking around the corner of the ticket window. Evidently satisfied, she went back to filling the staff’s requests for tickets for opening night. “Now remember, the tickets in this box are comps, so don’t include them in your tally of tickets sold.”
“What are comps?”
“Complimentary tickets. And we don’t go out of our way to remind Della that we do this.”
Fiona was puzzled. “Why are you so afraid of Della, Carol? You’re as important as she is.”
Carol snorted. “Nobody’s as important as she thinks she is. And I’m not afraid of her, I just find I’m much happier when I can successfully avoid her. That’s part of your job, by the way: helping me avoid her. That’s why I hired a friend.”
“I kind of figured that,” Fiona said. She leaned forward and looked down the arcade. “A customer! Oh no, it’s Colin Webb.” She watched him come toward her, a tall figure in a long black overcoat that swirled elegantly around him. He tossed his hair back in a gesture designed to let the admiring crowds know he acknowledged them, and Fiona giggled, because the arcade was empty.
“Don’t laugh at Colin,” Carol warned. “It upsets him, and I’m sure he’s nervous enough as it is, with the opening tonight.”
“I promise I’ll be good,” Fiona said.
Colin breezed up to the window, looked directly into Fiona’s eyes, and smiled. It was a warm smile, and seemed meant just for her. She understood then why so many women liked him. She smiled back.
“A new face,” Colin said.
“Hi, Colin,” said Carol.
“Carol, darling. Is that a new hairstyle? Very gamine,” Colin said, shifting his attention. Then, without waiting for her answer, “Would it be too terrible of me to ask for more comps at this late hour?”
“No, it’s fine, Colin.” Carol moved to the ticket window, edging aside Fiona, who suddenly found it a struggle to maintain her perch on the stool.
“I’m not sure I altogether like the sound of that,” Colin said. “Isn’t it well sold?”
“We’re pretty solid for about a month,” Carol said. “I think we’ll sell out if the reviews are good. But I kept an extra row of house seats for opening night. How come you’re here so early?”
“Just passing through. Errands. Flowers for the ladies, that sort of thing.” He handed her a slip of paper. “Here are the names. Just two. I told them they could each bring a guest, but all four don’t have to sit together.”
“No problem,” Carol said.
“Will I see you at the party tonight?” Colin asked, and managed somehow to give Carol and Fiona each a glance that said the question was intended for her alone.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Carol said.
Colin was off then, toward the far end of the arcade. Carol returned to her work, and Fiona was able to center her balance and let go of the counter.
“Wasn’t it nice of him to notice my hair?” Carol said, running her hand over the brush cut she’d gotten that morning.
“I think it makes you look like Peter Pan.”
“Nobody asked you.”
“A tall Peter Pan. Do you have a claim on Colin or something?”
“On Colin? I’d have an awful lot of competition if I did. Why?”
“I’ve never heard you care that a man noticed your hair before. It’s unusual behavior for you. But maybe it’s the environment. Schenectady’s your home town, not mine, and I don’t know the undercurrents.”
“I’m sure you’ll be riding them soon enough,” Carol said.
Fiona looked across at the posters. “He’s almost as good looking as his pictures.”
“He’s better looking,” Carol said stiffly.
Uh oh, Fiona thought. She’s got it bad.
“That’s funny,” Carol said, looking at the paper Colin had given her. “This one name, McCreedy. Sebastian’s already put in a ticket request for him, and I think... Yes, Doree has, too.”
“Maybe they’re different McCreedys?”
“With the same first name? I doubt it. If Slim is a name, which I also doubt. Sebastian said he’s a film producer who’s interested in the show, and I should give him the best seats. Doree and Colin probably found out he was in town and invited him. But what am I supposed to do, give the man three sets of tickets?”
“I wonder why they didn’t talk to each other about it,” Fiona said. She gazed hopefully down the arcade, wishing someone would come in.
“Competition. Every man for himself,” Carol said. “What the...” Carol’s voice trailed off. Fiona looked at her friend, and saw Carol frowning at a sheet of pink paper she held in her hand.
“What’s the matter?” Fiona asked.
“It’s a note from Della. She says not to give any comps to a Mr. McCreedy, no matter who requests them. I’m to send the tickets up to her office, and Mr. McCreedy, too, when he gets here.”
“Why?”
Carol shook her head. “Something’s going on. And I don’t like being put in the middle.”
“Well, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. She’s not your boss. Gene’s the executive director,” Fiona said.
“You don’t understand how things work,” said Carol. “People who cross Della have a way of getting fired. The person who writes the checks is in a great position to harass everybody else. Plus she goes into Gene’s office and sits there and cries and tells him how hard she works and how mean everybody is to her, and he believes her. Della gets away with murder around here.”
“So you are afraid of her. What are you going to do?”
The open box of comps was sitting inside its lid. Carol picked up the box, set the note down inside the lid, and put the box back down on top of it. She smiled sweetly. “Isn’t it a shame I never saw that note from Della until it was too late to do anything about it?”
“Four years as college roommates and you have this deceitful side I never knew anything about,” Fiona said.
“I’m learning survival,” Carol said, carrying the box of comps to the paid reservation window.
Fiona returned her attention to the arcade just in time to see Will go upstairs carrying a bag from the coffee shop.