d still be
doubling Second Witch. And he was hissing, "Places, please, everybody.
On stage!"

With a sweep of silver and ash-colored plush, Miss Nefer came past
him, for once leading the last-minute hurry to the stage. She had on
the dark red wig now. For me that crowned her characterization. It
made me remember her saying, "My brain burns." I ducked aside as if
she were majesty incarnate.

And then she didn't break her own precedent. She stopped at the new
thing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers over
the yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: a
virginals.

She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning an
enchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I told
myself, the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths of
Ballard and Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say she
didn't) one of his raids, that long long forefinger tracing crooked
courses through a crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling at
the dots of cities that would burn.

Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings inside
the virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering of
Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a black
swooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, I
beat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing across
the mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wanted
to make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he'd see
reality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronism
of that menacing mad march music was shrilling in my ears.

III

Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall
sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a pair
of sheeres.
--Old Play

My sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls' third
of the dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private.

When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pasted
and thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives me
security: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the
_Times_ and the _Mirror_, a torn-out picture of the United Nations
building with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, and
hanging in an old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by Willy
Mays. Thin