Sometimes the real Bernhardt would come onto the stage trembling so badly she could only indicate her gestures. What was behind the histrionics? Were they diversionary tactics dreamed up so that one eccentricity might conceal another?
At dusk Harriet found a bed for the night in a hunting lodge full of the smell of wood smoke. There were Spartan rooms with narrow cots for mountain climbers, for people pitting themselves against nature, testing themselves to the limit, not for tourists who needed bedside tables and lamps so they could read themselves to sleep. She never lingered, taking off at daybreak before anyone else stirred. Sometimes she woke to a dense fog that obliterated everything. She was marooned like an icebreaker in Arctic waters, forced to sit by the window, drinking coffee and watching the mist lift and the mountain return like a dinosaur’s back, so close that she could extend her hand and touch it. Then it was time to leave, and she strode out so hurriedly with her actor’s gait that onlookers imagined an assignation, a rendezvous.
Bernhardt had tried to orchestrate her death just as she choreographed her life, arranging the mise en scène, choosing the hour of her last performance. She kept a coffin always in readiness, even (they said) taking it with her on tours. It was made of rosewood and lined with white satin. She posed in it for the photographers, lighting a tall white candle and holding a sheaf of lilies. “I often think about death,” she said, “but only to reassure myself that I shall not die until I am ready.”
Bernhardt was full of weaknesses, reckless passions, vanities, affectations, but she turned every liability into a triumph. She travelled with an entourage of sycophants and accumulated a menagerie. She bought cheetahs and monkeys and parrots and turned her household into a circus. What was that but a publicity stunt, something to scandalize the bourgeoisie? Her genius was that she made her antics add to her stature; they didn’t leach from it as certain drugs leach calcium from the bones. Her wretched husband and her misbegotten sister were morphine addicts, but Bernhardt herself was abstemious. She even sipped champagne abstemiously, liking the idea better than the taste. If she needed to ease her pain she used the theatre instead of drugs.
When the Duchess of Teck asked how she could bear the strain of acting, Bernhardt said, “Altesse Roy ale, je mourrais en scene; c’est mon champ de bataille” — “I will die on the stage; it is my battlefield.” No sordid deaths for her — accidents above the frostline on mountainsides, crumpled cars, rumpled beds, and bottles of pills in cheap hotels, notes scribbled to harrow the survivors.
Harriet would have no survivors; she had to face it: there was no one in whose affections she stood first. She had no children, only an ever-changing troupe of players straight out of drama school; no lover but a series of leading men. She had no home and no family, and she’d never saved a penny. She didn’t even have a voice of her own, only a ragbag of hand-me-down phrases from the parts she’d played.
She tried sometimes in the late afternoon to pass the time of day with waiters when restaurants were deserted. “Slow time of day,” she’d say, or “Has it been busy?” The question sounded ridiculous, like an operatic soprano attempting a popular song. She had no small talk, could only declaim theatrically in a carrying voice that filled the house.
“May I have ... a refill?”
“Were you an actress?” a waiter asked. The verb tense stabbed her.
Age hadn’t stopped Bernhardt. When she was sixty-three, older even than Harriet, she’d given a series of farewell performances, playing Hamlet and the son of Napoleon Bonaparte. Two years later she’d played Joan of Arc. All Paris turned out to laugh at her. But she carried it off triumphantly. The crucial moment came during the scene with the Grand Inquisitor:
“Quel est ton nom?”
“Jeanne.”
“Ton age?”
“Dix-neuf ans.”
There was a moment of silence and then the whole house burst into wild applause at the sheer audacity of it. They did the same thing every time she played the scene.
When she was in her seventies, Bernhardt played with one leg amputated, played on and on until she couldn’t move across the stage without assistance. But she always managed to seduce the audience, make them fall in love with her over and over again. When she played an aging woman painting her face “in order to repair the irreparable ravages of years,” she flung her arms out in a wide appeal and spoke the words softly. The audience gave her a standing ovation, and in response she even managed to stand up, balancing on one leg, hanging on to the throne with one arm, and with the other returning their love.
“The last bright banners of ego and happy selfishness.”
“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Bernhardt hadn’t lost both parents. She hadn’t had two parents to lose. She hadn’t even had one. She’d been born to a sixteen-year-old Jewish courtesan, unmarried, of course, who farmed her out at birth. She’d spent the rest of her life making up for that deprivation. And who could blame her? Yet she’d idolized her son and been devoted to her granddaughters. That was love, wasn’t it? Round and round went these thoughts in Harriet’s head, and every one brought her back to that moment when her memory had failed and chaos had ensued.
Another morning, another chalet, another lake, another national park. When Harriet stopped at the toll booth to pay, she thought that the altitude and the mountain air were causing her to hallucinate, for her name leaped out at her in bold letters from the notice board beside the window.
“That name,” she told the park ranger. “That’s my name.”
“Do you want to use the phone to call home?” the woman asked pleasantly. “Just pull over.” So Harriet drove to the grass verge, left the car, and went inside the little hut.
At first she thought it must be radio work; why would anyone trust her to do more than read from a script? But, no, he assured her it was a “bony fidey” play. The place was a small prairie city, and it was a play by an unknown playwright. His tone was contemptuous. He had the script in front of him and said it wasn’t promising. It looked like one of those docudrama things they put on these days about famous couples, but given the circumstances.... He had the title, but he couldn’t remember the details.
She didn’t need the details; the title told her everything she needed to know. If it had been any other title, she’d have turned it down flat because, even if she didn’t mess up, it was humiliating. It was only one step above a play in a church basement put on by the preacher’s wife.
“Listen, Harriet, I’m doing you a goddamn favour. Take it or leave it. But I gotta know soon. So don’t fuck around. All right, then, by six o’clock tonight. I don’t hear and you’ve lost the part.”
The time ’twixt six and now / Must by us both be spent most preciously.
She drove down the main highway looking for a quiet place where the roar of traffic was muted by pine trees. At Red Rock Canyon, she parked the car and joined a line of people going around the ravine in single file, like ants round a crack in the pavement, falling behind as she pondered the signs:
The mudstone contains iron. Exposure to the air oxidized the iron, like rust on steel, forming the red mineral hermalite.
You could hang in bravely to the very end, like those doddering English actors on Masterpiece Theatre, too old to remember big parts but doing what were euphemistically called “guest appearances” and “cameo roles”! They were magnificent, their voices still resonant, and they won awards, too, for supporting roles — Lady Bracknell, Lord Marchmain, an elderly missionary in the last days of the Raj.
The creek is like a giant conveyor belt carrying the mountains piece by piece back to the sea.
Should she accept gratefully? Go through the motions with as much dignity as she could muster? Or should she decline proudly — refuse to be put on display as Cleopatra scorned captivity, preferring death? But she knew that death didn’t