So that rainy night Carina was in the audience with a friend she had made here in town, a woman who brought the muffins to my house when I had more than a few guests; Carina had struck up a silly, girlish friendship with her, and there they sat in their complimentary house seats, dead center. Carina turned and waved at me. Her eyes were brown like her daughter’s, and in some ways her face was a more conventionally pretty face, but she did not have that “thing” that Lena had.
When the show began and Lena appeared, there was a hearty applause at the mere sight of her; that is how much she was already loved in this town and on this stage. She did a nice freezing thing, the way they must teach actors when this happens, to just stop herself—in character of course—and then sail into her line. I had not seen her perform before, though she had offered me tickets on opening night two weeks earlier. I had turned her down then with a vague excuse, but really I had no one to go with, and as much as I was mesmerized—oh, that is too strong a word—by this pair in my house, I had not wanted to sit next to Carina, knowing that I would have to breathe toward her and receive from her a cloying adoration regarding her girl. I should not have worried; I did adore seeing the show. I watched far more attentively than I had imagined I would, and I sat next to the one woman in town I can claim as a friend, though much of the time she tires me, this friend—a school librarian who had also found herself alone in midlife. She was wearing a scent that night I had not noticed on her before; it gently came through the smell of dampness all around.
At intermission my friend wanted a glass of wine, or rather a plastic cup of wine, and I stood with her in the lobby and introduced her to the sparkling-eyed Carina who was filled with liveliness at the success of the whole show, and most especially of course with the success of her daughter. I believe I drank from a bottle of water I bought when my friend got her wine. And then a drowsiness came over me, as though I had had the wine, and not my friend, but it was distinct and peculiar, to feel so apart from the bustle of everyone else as they took their seats for the final act.
Lena, as Laura, told her stage husband she was leaving, and off she went, and then she returned in her thin dress, holding her coat, her dainty feet in their shoes, and I watched as she began to sway, putting her hand to her rather flat chest, and her words became incoherent, and for a few seconds, or minutes, I simply can’t tell, looking back, I think we all thought it was part of her performance. I think it was Carina who caught on first that something was wrong, for in my memory she stood, and started to move past all the people in their seats; and by the time Lena was slumped over, just motionless, Carina was already calling out, “Get a doctor, get a doctor!”
I suspect I am not alone in saying that I have never been in a theater when such a thing has happened, and there was great confusion, onstage as well as in the house; and because there was no curtain we saw the agitation of her fellow actors building, with great speed, as they were pulled out of their characters and began to call out for help. Lena stayed completely motionless, she had fallen in such a way that her head hit the stage and her hair somehow flew from its pins. Oh, it was unnerving. Unnerving.
No one, I believe, expected the worst, although Carina later said on one of her television interviews that she had known right away. The rest of the audience, according to those who spoke to reporters later, thought she had collapsed from exhaustion or a sudden illness, or even, though it seemed unlikely, a terrible and savage onset of stage fright.
There was chaos, naturally there would be. And it must have been the stage manager who finally got people organized and asked them to leave in an orderly fashion. There was an understudy—Lena had never thought much of her—but there was no talk of the show going on, so I learned that shows do not always go on. I went back to my house straight away, thinking that would be the place to help the most in whatever capacity I could, but Lena and her mother did not make any appearance, and in the morning I learned that poor Lena had died, right there onstage. There would be an autopsy, perhaps a sudden blood clot or aneurism, of course nobody knew, and when Carina finally appeared back at my B&B she was drugged to the gills and in the company of the muffin maker who had stayed all night with her at the hospital. And the waiting began. Endless cups of tea for Carina and the muffin maker, and for a friend of Carina’s who arrived from upstate, and then the police—oh, they tramped through the house and were terribly officious; it was all dream-like. It still is, really, a lot of the time, for me.
Finally the preliminary reports of drugs, of poison perhaps, but no, not that after all, back to drugs, and Carina just went wild because there was talk immediately, I suppose as there would be, of suicide. Almost as much as the death itself, this suggestion threw poor Carina into higher fits of hysteria. No. No. No. Lena loved life. She loved her life, her mother’s life, the life of her friends, and her men friends, no no no no. To be truthful, I was not sorry to see Carina go when that fellow Luther finally showed up.