This is how my lady dies.
She dies precisely at seven o’clock, but the theater at Rowan Court is full for at least an hour in advance, when the doors first open. In that hour there is little luck getting from the doors through the lobby, or from the lobby to the vestibule, to the boxes, the mezzanine, and the front row without a god’s strength and a saint’s patience. Everywhere there is satin and lace, beaver skin and mink fur, gold and diamonds, violet and ochre, laughter, greetings, and pardon-me’s. There are always lavishly arrayed ladies and gentlemen in the vestibule, and not those lower classes that slip through now and then; these ladies and gentlemen linger wherever they like, because they know they belong there.
There is no hearing one’s own thoughts in the bedlam, so we must settle for others’—always spoken in the best of spirits—
“I have not seen you in ages! How have you been?”
“Is this not a lovely evening?”
“Lord, I do wish we were not at the end of summer already!”
“How is your mother, dear?”
“Traffic? Hardly any at all—till one gets to the theater. I’d forgotten how popular this little affair is! And of course one must dodge those agitators. Why do you suppose they are carrying on here, of all places?”
The noise is no better through the doors and up the stairs and through the doors again, in the theater proper. Here people are pilgrimaging up and down rows and to and from boxes, visiting, gossiping. And watching. (“Where is Miss Winning? Did they not say Miss Winning would be here tonight?”) And in shimmering evening gowns that catch the burnished glow of the gaslights like errant fireflies, refusing to set such radiance free, they go there and back in order to be seen. (“There struts the eldest Medwit girl—newly engaged, I hear!” “Yes, and doesn’t she know it, by the look of her!”)
The theater is a mirage of color and motion and sound, swimming with heat. Ladies gently flap fans at their necks, while the gentlemen pose stoically with their arms at their sides and glisten. Their eyes are always ranging farther than the people they are talking to or whatever they are thinking about; their eyes, like the globe lights along the edge of the stage, burn with a single-minded intensity: “How soon to seven o’clock?”
At a quarter till, every pilgrim gives his and her adieu and takes to a destined seat. They leave behind a small crowd in the lobby: lazy gentlemen having come too late and looking very annoyed, or couples in world-weary church clothes of a meaner class that do not hold a candle to the elegance that has migrated away from them. They all persist in arguing with a granite-faced house manager who follows his instructions exactly.
“You are certain there are no tickets to spare?”
“Sir,” or “Ma’am,” the manager says, as necessary, “there aren’t any more tickets for tonight. People come for them early. Week in advance, sometimes. If you don’t come to buy tickets by midmorning the day of—usually a day or two before, to be safe—you’re not much likely to get any.”
“Well, what about standing room?” a lazy gentleman suggests, magnifying his displeasure by peering at the manager through his monocle. “I will pay to watch from the back of the theater, where no one will notice.”
“Sir, others have already done the same,” the fellow is obliged to answer, “and there isn’t any more of that left, either.”
The theater seems to sprawl for miles between the rows farthest off and the stage itself. Or perhaps that is time and impatience they are noticing, not distance. “What time is it, anyway?” some people ask their neighbors. They must still nearly yell; the din rings as high as the curvature of the ceiling, where a hundred years ago a master they now pay homage to in museums had painted clouds and winged creatures and a saint very few of them can recall the name of. “It looks like a cathedral,” muse the very few who are looking up, who have not been here before. There are sometimes newcomers like these; what the reporters outside have always found amusing, however, is how many of them have been here more than once—a dozen times—as regular as the winged creatures gazing down at the thousands below.
“A cathedral?” The jesting gentlemen who hear this sort of thing usually reply, “But the Church is not much likely to give this its blessing, is it?”
The stage is solid, much like the rest of Rowan Court; like the rest of Rowan Court, it is exceedingly old, but proudly so: its age a mark of prestige and legacy, not of ill health. The seats have all vanished beneath the whispering skirts and sighing coats of tonight’s ladies and gentlemen. Till half an hour ago, they were all carefully brushed crimson cushioned seats, ordered in rigid red columns like an army of centurions prepared to parade behind their master in a glorious Triumph through the streets of Rome.
The stage, however, is empty. They have remarked on it as being rather plain. “There is no backdrop—no props. Only that short wooden stool.”
But that is all our lady needs.
Five minutes to seven, the din sinks like a dying wind in the eye of a storm. They will still talk and smoke; but now they know to look for her. The stage is never curtained before my lady emerges—it is only afterwards, at the end of the performance: when the audience knows it can talk loudly again, and when it finally remembers to breathe.
The hush thickens without their knowing. It deepens. It is a strange air to breathe in, the silence of several thousand motionless bodies. A very singular light it is, one gilded with a scattered array of smoky lamps, pinpricked by an entire midnight sky’s inheritance of staring, waiting, radiant eyes.
Into this light, all at once, there is the lady.
She first comes to the stool, which waits for her in the center of the barren expanse of the stage, and sits. They say she sits because it gives everyone a chance to look at her. They say this is because (they laugh as they say it) that for all of the watching that people do in the moments before, awaiting her arrival like a coming from heaven, it is often quite easy to miss her because she emerges slowly, in silence.
Tonight they quickly realize she is there. So they stare.
Our lady, if we must remember nothing else, is dressed in silk. It is a silk dress in cerise, but people remember the look of the cloth as much as the color. Our lady is very thin, and rather pale. She is raven-haired. Her braids are pinned up modestly, but in the lights along the stage, they are luminous. They are luminous like her eyes, which glimmer like diamonds or pond stones in the noon sun. They do not know who she is watching; but they are certain—or at least they are hopeful—that she is looking at someone in particular, in the seats where they sit.
Our lady is motionless for some moments. She is a calm that seems to breathe a cooling breeze around the theater, gracing the flushed faces of some, chilling the spines of others. She is the calm of an early spring morning in the shadow of a church—or just beside it, within the cemetery. She is silent, and she is sad—or maybe she seems so because she does not smile.
At a moment known only to her, our lady stands from her stool and takes one step closer to the audience. She stops at one place on the boards she seems to have memorized, for it is the same place each time. She does not speak, still. There are those who wish she would.
It is as she is staring out at them, while they are staring back at her, that a coil of her hair seems to pull away from her head, as if tugged by a playful breeze. The braid teases one way, then vanishes behind her, briefly. Then there it is again, being teased on the other side of her head. This coil is teased all the way around, from one side of her head to the other, as if this sudden wind swirls capriciously.
But there is no wind; there is only silence. And still the hair continues to curl.
It curls round her head again, and now it carries across her forehead. This is the moment when the newcomers (they are always unmistakable, if you are looking for them) cover their mouths or press their temples. They are, perhaps, reaching for what our lady is now missing. Because the curl has carried around her head again, and with the hair, a strip of her forehead—the skin, and the skull as well—is missing.
It is clear, suddenly, that the top of our lady’s head is gone. There is no crown or curve. There is also no brain, no nerves, no blood. Our lady has not moved, nor spoken, nor looked away. But that cannot remain true for much longer. Because as the curl continues to be carried along by gravity, pirouetting slowly round and round her face, the curl comes down to her brow, and then next, her eyes.
All at once the eyes have vanished, carried away on the curl. And the curl continues.
Tonight it is a long, narrow, unbroken curl. It carries away, curling and curling, round and round the lady’s nose, and lips, and neck. There is no skull left behind like the sort you would see grinning in a university, a macabre puppet wired in place. With the lady, there is nothing but empty air above: and some have said (that is, said so afterwards; the theater is silent now) they do not know what would be worse—to see a skull and a spine and bones, all of which they know to expect beneath that kind of human beauty, or nothing but the silence and dark backdrop of the stage itself.
The lady is standing on the stage without a head.
There is less and less of the lady as her skin, her body, her dress come away together in the slow, unraveling curl. Tonight the curl—the riband, they call it—breaks at last at her waist, torn in two by gravity and by its own airy, deceptive weight. When it breaks, it simply sinks to the boards at her feet and does not stir again.
Their eyes follow the fall; but already there is another tear, another curl of cerise dress. The lady, still standing upright, with half of her body missing—still silent, still graceful—continues to curl away. It continues past the hem of her dress. It continues down to her feet where they are nearly hidden by the liquid drape of silk.
Slowly, finally, there is nothing left of her except for those remains, the curlicues that have softly cascaded in front of her four-legged stool.
In the silence, after a pause, the curtains sigh into the space between her and the lights and the gaping audience. These curtains are the newest accoutrement of the theater, because cloth, unlike the solid beams and crown molding, age quickly; like the seats, but not as bright as the lady’s dress, they are a rich, velvet maroon. The color of wine or of drying blood.
There is a spasm of breath that flutters through the rows. But it is quiet still. No one thinks to move—no one is willing to—for several moments afterwards. Ought they to clap? Is it strange if they do not applaud on our lady’s behalf, or is it stranger if they do?
Tonight they choose to clap—though they do not always. A smattering of hands, like another spasmodic breath, dragging them back from the depths of a dark water onto the sands and back to life. Soon the audience entire applauds. And with the noise, with breath coming freely at last, the ladies and gentlemen feel far more themselves. They are recovered. Even the lights in the theater seem to glare more brightly and cheerily.
Once more they are talking. They stand, they move around, they say good evening and goodbye.
“Wonderful go of it, this one.”
“Yes, quite exquisite.”
And elsewhere, here and there, between people in the aisles above and the rows below: “I am slated to go every night this week.”
“I will have to show my cousin before she goes to America.”
“I say, this was your first performance, wasn’t it. What did you think? Will you come tomorrow?”
My lady will die tomorrow, at seven precisely.
Tara Dugan is a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied Comparative Literature and Latin. She was the previous Submissions Editor of “Paperbark Literary Magazine,” while her work has appeared in “The Millions” and “Writing the World.”
