Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford

Author:Charles Willeford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

Beryl had never looked any lovelier in her entire life, not even when we were first married. The long old-fashioned white dress, the parasol, and her long, soft hair falling to her shoulders, made her resemble a portrait by Gainsborough; and the pancake make-up successfully hid the tiny sun wrinkles around her eyes. I didn’t need Gladys to remind me of these things when we went out onto the patio for a smoke at the end of Act One.

“Your wife is beautiful, Richard. And you must be very proud of her tonight!”

“Yeah,” I replied noncommittally.

“You sort of robbed the cradle, didn’t you, sport?”

“Beryl’s twenty-seven. If you call that robbing the cradle!”

“Honestly? She doesn’t look more than nineteen or twenty.”

“I’ll get us some coffee.”

At the end of Act Two I didn’t go outside for any conversation with Gladys. I went to the men’s room instead, and stayed there smoking until the buzzer warned for the beginning of the last act. The second act had given Beryl confidence, and she over-played hell out of her role in the last act, but even so, tears ran down my cheeks as the curtain started down. I didn’t wait for it to lift for the first curtain call, and I knew there would be at least five or six. I patted Gladys twice on the knee, muttered “see you,” and scooted out the exit to my car.

I knocked off the review hurriedly, grateful for the feverish activity, but scarcely knowing what I was writing. For a change, I beat the deadline by fifteen minutes. Ordinarily, I was overtime five or ten minutes, and had Harris growling at me. I cut out the cast and credits from my program, pasted them on a sheet of paper to precede my review, and turned it in. With the extra time I had I wrote a two-column head, marked it 24-point Gothic, and gave it to Harris.

‘LILLIOM’ GRABS GOLD RING IN CIVIC’S MERRY-GO-ROUND

Harris looked at my head, and then shook his green eye-shade as if there was no hope for me in this world or the next. He slashed slanting lines through the letters, making the all caps upper and lower case, and then made a notation to set the type in Coronet instead of Gothic.

“Play any good, Hudson?”

“Lousy.”

“It figures,” he said with grim satisfaction, nodding his eye-shade. The eyeshade, the damned green eyeshade! That’s all he was, and I’d never seen him without it. Without a greenish cast on his face I wouldn’t have recognized Harris on the street. Some day I was going to rip off this eyeshade and expose the bastard for what he really was—the Phantom of the Opera!

Before going home I stopped at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and a toasted English muffin. There were some bad, bad days ahead of me—this much I knew—and somehow, I would have to get the upper hand again. Beryl had shown me up as a failure, and she had done it deliberately! But why? Why? Why would she

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