Olivier de Garmont

WHEN ECKERD SAID his play would change my life, I expected he would somehow shatter it. Still, I followed him.

It is said in Paris that Americans do not like the theater, that they go to church instead and never drink. The truth was found on Chatham Row where, inside Eckerd's Elysium, I found a theater like a wedding cake and the gods more Greek than Christian. That is, as Eckerd led me to my seat, a lady's stocking floated down, as gentle as the seed of a dandelion. I mean, the audience was mixed, and had bought their tickets for different reasons, some as simple as thumping their boots and singing "Yankee Doodle" whenever they got bored. There was a gross of bankers and their families but also a good sprinkling of those wispy-bearded New York clerks and their girls and mechanics and British sailors ashore and a party of blond Germans staring at the curtain so they would avoid whatever wickedness was being presently enacted above their heads.

The Elysium was red velvet like a knocking shop, a kind of maze through which the great Eckerd guided me, touching my elbow like a tiller on a shallow run. He was so circumspect, so delicate. From his fingers I felt a dreadful sort of pity, as if I must be kindly killed.

"Sir," said he, "your good bride."

I was a stupid man. I felt an awful dread. I clambered over merchants' knees and stood on their wives' squeezed-up little toes-poor peas in pods too small for them. Mathilde took my arm. She was warm against my side, her soft breast against my arm.

I thought, Clearly it is Eckerd who is coughing up the money. I said, "Young Olivier has been writing to me."

She plucked a pigeon feather from the shoulder of my coat and examined it closely. Did she see I was a pigeon not a cheeky parrot, a lackey who carries messages bound to his scabby skinny legs?

Mathilde asked me did my master wish me to go back to Wethersfield.

I said, "Where is the money coming from?"

But the curtain rose, and she was saved.

The backdrop showed an idiot's idea of France from a bad engraving. Never mind, it did not matter. Miss Desclee was beautiful, unrecognizable beneath her powdered wig. Her English was a treasure, an entire language learned in something like eight weeks. She was an aristocrat from somewhere on the Mississippi, or so I guess, for she sounded like the captain of the Zeus, who was Natchez born and bred.

The play yawned ahead, eternity.

Miss Desclee's lover was a bourgeois revolutionary. If he was a historic figure who can say. He was a London actor with the hair of Danton but he was lightly built so I wondered was he Robespierre but he did not have that fellow's priestly turn. In any case, it was clear that the playwright, taking the example of Shakespeare, did not care to be constrained too much by history.

Miss Desclee had a fine and noble house painted twenty feet tall. This I examined closely. In certain aspects I thought it the Empress Josephine's Malmaison, even to the gum trees out the back.

There was a scene with a great herd of actors all calling for Miss Desclee to be guillotined. The audience was surprisingly upset. This would have puzzled my father's friends but it was the human factor I was later told.

Miss Desclee sang. It suited her.

The lover sang. It did not suit him half so well.

But all in all, Eckerd knew his Americans, and he delivered his hero and heroine in front of a backdrop which faithfully represented the city of New York. Here both hero and heroine declared Revolution won.

I thought it awful. But the audience went wild, as Peter von Gunsteren would say, throwing fruit and nuts.

I rose. A firm white hand was laid upon my knee. I thought, She loves me. Then I understood I was being instructed to stay seated for reasons stated thus: CODA: THE FREE BIRDS OF AMERICA.

Darkness fell. There was a flute, I think. A figure materialized, so slowly it seemed like one of those pictures that appear behind the eyelids when they close. It was the actor who had played the part of lover. The lights dimmed and brightened, and there stood, in the same bright green garments as the lover, our very own poor twisted charcoal Watkins, like a tree blossoming after fire.

"Good God," I cried. "What's this?"

It was our sensitive friend exhibited in his monstrosity. He stood, alone, uncomforted, a paintbrush in his hand. Some lout laughed, and then the audience took refuge in a certain hush of horror.

But he was not Tiny Ted the midget or the lady with three legs. He was Algernon Watkins, an artist of the first degree, and as the idiot audience shouted its amazement or upset, I bawled out my rage against it all.

He was a great artist, not a clown.

Mathilde whispered that Watkins represented the troubles of the Revolution and the promise of America. If so, it was in no way clear. Watkins sold his engravings in the foyer. I thought, He is not a circus dog.

The commerce was very brisk and occupied the best part of half an hour. Afterward, we were led up beyond the balconies, past the ropes and pulleys where we were escorted into the small apartment Eckerd had built beneath the roof.

I will come to this apartment presently. It was a minor miracle, and was later famous in a murder and divorce. But at the time I set upon the owner angrily, for I had seen Watkins sell an engraving for fifty cents. The unlikely connoisseur was a gentleman with gray-striped pants and long frock coat. He folded the precious print in four and slipped it inside his shirt.

"It was unbearable," I said to Eckerd.

"I am not an artist," he said, and I refrained from saying that was evident in every aspect of the play. It was grotesque to attach poor Watkins like a tail.

"I am not an artist, but I look after my friends," he said.

So he had not given a damn for his play. I suppose I had known that when I saw him make it up. He had chopped and sawed and nailed it, like a man making a tannery on a riverbank, adding Watkins to the script as if he were an outhouse or a shed.

Eckerd questioned me until he understood exactly what my objection was. He was very civil. He poured me a glass of bright red sparkling wine.

"So," said he, placing the glass in my hand. "You disapprove of what I do. But what would you do for Mr. Watkins? Or for your wife?"

Of course I had no answer.

He smiled, raising his glass. "The stage is clear for you. Please go ahead."

When I turned my attention to Mrs. Watkins, I understood she had been shaking her head at me these last minutes past. I looked to Watkins and saw his furrowed features twisted on themselves, the pink scar showing his upset. It was Mathilde who came to my rescue, who took my hand, who owned me with a kiss upon my rough-shaven cheek.

"What a shame it is," said she, "that you must go away."

Let me explain more carefully where it was we were.