  When Peggy awoke in the early-morning sunshine that slanted into her room, it was not yet six o’clock. She reached over to shut off the alarm so that it would not ring at seven, the time she had decided to get up for her big day. “People say that actors live in a dream world,” Peggy thought with a smile. “Maybe that’s why I seem to want so little sleep. I get enough of dreams when I’m supposed to be wide awake!” Recognizing that it would be useless to try to doze off again, she quickly slipped out of bed and quietly set about her morning routine of washing and dressing. The extra time gained by her early awakening would give her an opportunity to select her reading for the Academy, Peggy told herself as she stepped into the shower. But first things first; before she could think about the reading she would need a clear mind, and that meant that all the many details of packing and dressing must be taken care of. As she wrapped herself in an oversized bath towel, Peggy was already mentally choosing her clothes. An hour and a half later, when Mr. and Mrs. Lane came downstairs for breakfast, they discovered Peggy, dressed and ready for the trip, sitting surrounded by books at the big desk in the “library” end of the living room. Her suitcase stood fully packed in the front hall, a large traveling purse leaning next to it like a puppy sleeping by its mother. “My goodness!” Mrs. Lane said. “What did you do, stay up all night? Why, you’re ready to board the plane this very minute!” “Not quite, Mother,” Peggy answered with a smile. “I still haven’t settled on what to read tomorrow, and I want to do that before I go. Otherwise I’ll be carting so many books with me to New York that we’ll have to pay a fortune in extra-baggage charges!” “Oh, I’m not worried about you,” her mother said. “You’ll have your mind made up and your part memorized before we even leave, if I remember the way you go at things! Now you can just put the books away until after breakfast, because I’m going to need some help in the kitchen.” As Peggy stood up, her mother looked approvingly at the costume she had chosen for the flight. It was a smart beige suit with a short jacket that was well cut to accent Peggy’s trim figure, and its tawny color was the perfect complement for her even summer tan and her dark chestnut hair. A simple pearl choker and a pair of tiny pearl earrings provided just the right amount of contrast. “Is it all right?” Peggy asked. Noting her mother’s admiring nod, she added, “I packed my gray silk suit and two dresses—the green print and the blue dress-up, in case we go someplace. I mean someplace dressy, for dinner or something. And I have the right shoes packed, too, and stockings and blouses and toothbrush and everything,” she added, anticipating her mother’s questions. Mrs. Lane smiled and sighed. “Well, I suppose there’s no use my pretending that you’re not all grown up and able to take care of yourself! You pass inspection with flying colors! Now, let’s get that jacket off and get an apron on—we have some work to do!” Peggy and her mother went into the kitchen to prepare what Mr. Lane always called his “traveling breakfast,” a huge repast of wheat cakes, eggs, sausages and coffee, with plenty of orange juice to start, maple syrup to soak the wheat cakes in, and more coffee to finish up on. While breakfast was cooking, Mr. Lane was on the phone, confirming their plane reservations and, when this was done, arranging for hotel rooms in New York. The last phone call was finished barely a minute before the first steaming stack of wheat cakes was set on the kitchen table. “Well,” he said, sitting down to look with satisfaction at his plate, “everything’s under control. We leave at two this afternoon, which should have us in New York by five. That gives us plenty of time. We’ll leave the house about one.” “Plenty of time!” Peggy wailed. “What about my reading? I’ve got to get started right away!” She gave a fairly convincing performance of someone who must get started right away, except for the fact that she showed not the least sign of moving until she had finished her breakfast. During the meal, the talk was all of reservations, changing planes at Chicago, what kind of rooms they would have at the hotel, and all the many little details of a trip, but Peggy hardly heard. She was still sorting out plays and roles in her mind and trying to make a decision. By the second cup of coffee, her decision was made. “I’ve got it!” she announced in triumph and relief. “I’ll prepare three short readings instead of one long one! That’ll give them a chance to see the kinds of things I can do, and if I’m bad in one, I’ll have two more chances!” “Makes sense,” her father agreed. “What three parts do you think you’ll try?” “I’m not completely sure,” Peggy said, “but at least I know what kinds of parts they’ll be, and that will make the job easier. One of them will surely be Viola in Twelfth Night because I’ve done it, and I’ve always felt that it was me, and besides, it’s Shakespeare, and I think I ought to have one Shakespeare anyway.” “That’s a good choice,” Mrs. Lane said. “Now I think you’d better pick out one that’s more dramatic and another that’s something of a comedy or a character part, don’t you?” “Exactly what I had in mind,” Peggy answered. “It shouldn’t be too hard to select, now that I know what I’m looking for.” But it wasn’t easy, either. Peggy spent the whole morning carefully looking over her collection of play scripts. Every time she thought she had the right role, she found there was no single scene that seemed to be right for a short reading. There was no trouble over Viola, because Shakespeare always wrote good scenes and speeches, and because there was no need to sketch in what had led up to the scene in the play, since everyone was sure to be perfectly familiar with it. But everything else seemed to be a problem. It was not until her parents were all packed and there was only half an hour before leaving, that she finally made up her mind. For the comedy reading, she determined to do Sabina in the first scene of Skin of our Teeth, which had much more to it than simple comedy. The business of Sabina’s stepping out of character to talk directly to the audience as a disgusted actress criticizing the play and its author gave added dimension to the reading. For her dramatic role, Peggy chose the part of Miriamne in the last scene of Winterset, a hauntingly beautiful tragedy. She selected this, she explained to her parents as they drove to the airport, because it was one of the few dramatic, poetic parts written for a girl of her own age, and she felt that she could identify with the character. Then, book in hand, she started to study. They waited for the passenger call Peggy continued to read all through the arrival at the airport, the business of checking in and loading baggage. They waited for the passenger call, then walked up the steps into the plane. When she was settled in her seat by the window, she lowered her book and turned, wide-eyed, to her mother. “Do you know,” she said in slow, awed tones, “that this is my first time on an airplane, and I’m just sitting here reading?” She closed the book on her lap. “That’s just going to wait for a while, until I see what’s going on!” Looking out the oval window, she saw the steep steps being wheeled away from the plane. A red fuel truck drove under the wing and sped across the wide concrete runway. Then the plane’s engines whirled, coughed once and started, and the plane lumbered down the runway slowly. Reaching the end, it deliberately turned, stopped for a moment, then suddenly gathered up strength, leaped forward and sped into the wind. Peggy watched, fascinated, as the ground dropped away and the shadow of wings below grew smaller and smaller as the plane rose. She watched until the tiny farms, winding ribbons of highway, and gleaming rivers disappeared beneath a puffy layer of cloud. Then she looked back to her mother. “Well,” she said, “it looks as if my new career is off to a flying start! Now I’d better study these plays, or I’m in for an unhappy landing.” Reluctantly tearing her eyes from the fantastic cloud formations that floated past, Peggy once more opened her book and was soon deep into the even more fantastic world of Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. The quick flight to Chicago, the change of planes, the landing and take-off, scarcely attracted her notice, and the three hours flew by at faster than air speed. Peggy had finished reading and marking Sabina’s role, and was deep into Miriamne’s when her mother interrupted her. “They want us to fasten our seat belts again,” she said. “We’re coming into New York now.” This time Peggy noticed! Spread below her, stretching out as if it would never end, was the maze of streets and avenues, rivers and islands, towers and bridges, that was the city of New York. The late afternoon sun touched the windows of skyscrapers with fire, gilded the steelwork of the bridges, cast deep, black shadows into the streets and over the rooftops of low buildings. Giant liners stood tied at docks; others steamed sedately up or down the river, pushed or pulled by tiny tugs. Even from their soaring height above the scene, New York refused to look small or toylike. It stubbornly looked only like the thing it was—the busiest, tallest, most exciting city in the world! Turning in a great, slow arc, the plane descended until it was skimming only a few feet above the waters of a broad bay. Peggy wondered if they had flown in on a seaplane, and if they were to land in the water and have to take a boat to shore, but even as the thought occurred to her, the rocky shoreline suddenly appeared beneath her, and the plane swiftly settled down on the long, concrete runway of New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It was the rush hour, and parkways and streets were jammed with homebound cars, but their cab driver knew his way around back streets, and turned and twisted around one corner after another until Peggy lost all sense of direction. Her father, though, seemed to know exactly where they were at all times, and kept pointing out buildings and parks and bridges to Peggy and her mother, telling the name of each and how it figured in his memory. People, trucks, cars, buses, cabs, motor scooters and little foreign autos filled the streets. Mr. Lane called out the names of famous avenues as they came to and crossed them: Park Avenue ... Madison Avenue ... Fifth Avenue.... The taxi passed by store after store, their windows like so many stage sets. By the edge of Central Park, they drew up in front of their hotel. Bewildered, excited, dazzled, delighted, Peggy stepped out of the taxi and stood for the first time on the sidewalks of New York! The temptation had been strong to give in to all the glamour of the city, to go for dinner in one of the famous restaurants, to ride in a hansom cab through Central Park behind a plodding old horse, to race through the bright streets and gather in all the excitement of New York in one whirling evening. The temptation had been strong, but Peggy had bravely fought it off. She had work to do before her tryout the next day at the New York Dramatic Academy. After a fine but hurried dinner in the hotel’s handsome, formal dining room, Peggy and her parents went upstairs to work on her readings. She read first the passage she had marked out from Twelfth Night, since Viola was a familiar role for her and she needed only a short time to work on it. The speech she selected was the best known in the play, and for that reason it was probably the hardest to do, for everyone who would hear it would have his own idea of how it should sound. Any actor knows how hard it is to put new life into old, familiar words, and Peggy was well aware of this. Still, because this short speech gave her a chance, in only a dozen lines, to indicate the whole character of Viola, she thought it was worth the risk. Viola, pretending to be a boy, tells the Duke Orsino of a sister she never had, and by so doing, confesses her own love for the Duke. The first difficulty of the speech lay in making Viola seem both a boy and a lovesick girl at the same time. The second difficulty was to make the imaginary sister of the speech seem like a real person. Mr. Lane began, reading the Duke’s lines, in which he says that no woman can love as deeply as a man. When the speech was done, Peggy spoke, sounding at first completely feminine, “Ay, but I know—” She broke off the phrase in well-acted confusion, as Viola quickly realizes that she has spoken as a woman, rather than as the boy she is supposed to be. “What dost thou know?” “Too well what love women to men may owe,” Peggy answered firmly, saying the line with boyish confidence. Then she went on, in a confidential, man-to-man tone: “In faith, they are as true of heart as we/My father had a daughter loved a man,/As it might be, perhaps were I a woman,/I should your lordship.” “And what’s her history?” Mr. Lane said. Now Peggy subtly shifted the character, and when she replied, after a short pause, it was not in the manner of either the lovesick girl or the confident, manly boy. Now she spoke dreamily, a story-teller, a poet, as Viola fell into her own pretended character, half-believing in the “sister” she had created. “A blank, my lord. She never told her love,/But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,/Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,/And with a green and yellow melancholy/She sat, like Patience on a monument,/Smiling at grief—” She was interrupted by a round of applause from both her parents, and responded with a start, suddenly realizing that she was in a hotel room, not in the court of the Duke Orsino or even on a stage. “But there’s more to the speech!” she said. “You shouldn’t have applauded yet!” “Couldn’t help it, Peg,” her father said. “Besides, I’m afraid that if you work on that any more, you might ruin it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfect just the way it is. You can do the whole speech tomorrow.” “Oh, you’re just being a loving father,” Peggy answered, in pleased confusion, but she knew that there was more to his comments and compliments than this. She remembered how, during the weeks when she first struggled to breathe life into the character of Viola, her father had read lines with her and criticized sharply every time she did something not quite true to the role. Remembering this, her pleasure now was doubled. Even so, Peggy insisted on reading the whole speech, then doing it several times over, before she would go on to her next marked reading. Sabina, in Skin of Our Teeth, was a complete change of pace. Peggy worked on the satirical, comic, sometimes silly-sounding lines for two hours before she felt she was ready to go on. Then, two more hours went swiftly by as she developed the poetic, passionate lines of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, working on Miriamne’s death scene. When at last she was satisfied, it was a little after midnight, and Peggy felt exhausted, as if she herself had died with Miriamne. “I should have done Sabina last,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t feel so much as if I had just been murdered after three acts of blank verse!” “On the other hand,” Mrs. Lane said, “you might not have been so ready for sleep as you are now, and sleep is what you need most, if you’re going to do as well in the morning as you did tonight.” “That’s right,” added Peggy’s father. “We have just time for eight good hours of rest and a decent breakfast tomorrow before you go to keep your ten-o’clock date with destiny. Let’s go.” Peggy didn’t argue. She kissed her parents, went to her own adjoining bedroom and, in three minutes, was curled up between the crisp, fresh sheets. Tonight she was too tired to think about the excitement to come. She had barely settled her head on the pillow before she was deep in a dreamless sleep. |
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