Isis - Douglas Clegg [4]
During the long stretches of summer, my mother felt better and seemed cured of her malady—at least for a handful of months. No boy rode a bicycle in with a package of laudanum, and no empty bottles of Dr. Witherspoon’s stood along the edge of her bedside table. We would go to London on weekend trips and stay at fine hotels and see plays or wander art museums and eat creamy cakes and tarts at tea. I expected to see our father on these trips, but he did not return from his war business, though we received telegrams and letters from him constantly.
On bright days, our mother would take us into the village. While my brothers wandered the streets, poking their heads in and out of shops and meeting the local boys and girls, I would go with my mother to her Ladies’ Club, where, in late July and August, the charity theatricals were organized, much to my delight. These mostly were for children, and they were required to be educational as well as entertaining, so my mother managed to steer the ladies toward Greek and Egyptian myth and drama, for she had played Medea and Persephone in her own youth and knew many of these dramas. The summer I was twelve, we did the Tragic Tale of Isis and Osiris, written by a Mrs. Wilfred Jasper of London. It was a mercifully brief series of skits with very little dialogue, as part of a local theatrical fundraiser for the Wayward Girls Sea Cottage that the nuns of Saint Pedrog’s ran.
My brother Harvey played Osiris, Spence played Set, and I was Isis. “I don’t understand,” Harvey said, when he read the play over. “Why does Isis keep having to do this?”
“What?” I asked. “She seems wonderful to me.”
“That’s because you’re playing her,” he said. “But if Osiris is dead, why doesn’t she just let him be?”
“Yes!” Spence laughed, clapping his hands. “Let him just be dead.”
I felt my face grow warm from a kind of sadness, for I took the play and my character of Isis very seriously. “Because she loves him. She doesn’t want him dead.”
“Rubbish. She’s just being obstinate,” Spence said, with a big smile on his face as if he were talking about me instead of Isis herself.
My mother played the goddess Nut, who also was the storyteller of the playlet. Others from the village and the local shops played parts in this and other short plays based on classical themes, and most of the village turned out for the event. The girl backstage painted my face so that I looked exotic and fairly wicked.
We didn’t have an Egyptian headdress, so, instead, a crown was made of tinfoil and paper. I felt as if I had turned into a woman when I put it on my head. As Isis, I might have been the star of the show, but Spence, as Set, hammed it up and got all the applause. The twins were sixteen at the time, and not terribly happy to be forced into the Ladies’ Club charity show, but once they saw pretty girls in the audience, they perked up.
Harvey, poor Osiris, didn’t like the part where he climbed into the trunk at the banquet. He told me before the play began that it scared him to be in such a small space, particularly with Spence shutting it up and laughing like a devil when he closed him in. During rehearsals, Harvey nearly shivered when he looked down at the trunk, and my mother had to pull him aside and speak softly to him in order to get him to lie down in it. “You’ll only be in it for a moment or two,” she told him. “It will remain unlocked. I promise I will make sure.”
He had glanced over at me and whispered, “Sometimes being scared is silly. I’m too old for it, aren’t I?”
And I called him “Silly” and told him that there was nothing