Stuart Kaminsky - Show Business is Murder

When next I spotted him, he was standing among a crowd that had gathered to watch two constables pull a boy from beneath a hansom’s wheels. His body was mangled and crushed. A strange gurgling sound arose from within him. His head rolled and spurted blood with equal abandon. But his legs. Ah. His legs hopped around much in the same manner of that other great expirer, Edwin Forrest.

It seems only fitting that EF would pattern his death scenes after the snuffing out of a lower class soul. EF was all blast and bombast in his dying. His whole body would spasm and his arms shoot heavenward. Then he would fall and roll along the floor, his legs kicking out with as much grace as that poor urchin who lay in the street. EF didn’t understand finesse in dying.

I watched MacCready study that poor boy-draw closer and peer over him until the constable eased him aside. And all the while, I watched him watching. I could tell the moment when he dismissed the boy’s demise as beneath his study.

After a time, he sauntered away and I sauntered after him. Watched him walk along the cobbled street, opening and closing his fist just as the boy had done.

He stopped outside the Three Bells Oyster Bar and lifted his hand to the gaslight. Slowly, he contracted his fingers and spread them out again. He shook his head once, dropped his hand and went inside to dine.

I followed him. Studying the man who studied the dying. I leaned against the wall nursing a mug of flat beer while MacCready sat at a table for one, and a plate of oysters was placed before him. I watched him lift the corner of the napkin, shake it, and fold it into his shirt collar. Then his hand made a graceful arc toward the plate. In one deft movement, his fingers closed around a shell, while MacCready stared into the oyster’s face.

Slowly he brought it to his lips, all the while his fingers throttling the shell. My own throat closed against the beer I had been drinking, and I had to spit out the mouthful onto the floor.

Later that night in my rooms above the Majestic Theatre, I practiced bringing my hand to the light, clenched and unclenched my fingers as MacCready had done. When finally I put out the lamp and went to bed, I was filled with a sense of purpose that I had never known before.

Every night, I watched him from the stalls; Lear, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello . It didn’t matter, though I liked his Hamlet best. Afterwards, I would wait with the crowd at the stage door until the great man appeared. Sometimes he would catch my eye, and a thrill would shoot through me. I felt his kindred spirit. And I was sure he must have felt mine.

I took a job with the theater company as a bit actor just to be near him. To witness the discovery of some new detail-the tiniest nuance that could be incorporated into his death scenes. I, too, learned to die-as a Roman soldier, a Capulet, a Nubian slave. Even when I wasn’t dying, I stood on stage watching MacCready take his final breath. Night after night, I watched him as a lover might watch his beloved. I stayed in the wings after my exits, went early for my entrances, practicing his gestures as he performed them on stage.

During the breaks at rehearsals, I engaged him in conversation on his method of acting, staying away from the manner of his deaths, lest he become wary of my interest.

On our days off, we would find ourselves at separate tables at the oyster bar. It wasn’t so unusual. The oyster bar was a few doors away from the theatre entrance. I didn’t care much for oysters. I was always waiting for a grain of sand to crunch between my teeth, sending a shiver down my spine. But I ate oysters, platefuls of them, just to be near my mentor.

Sometimes, we would meet by chance in the street. Then he might invite me for a pint and I would take my place at the bar next to him, soaking up his presence. We would part with a hearty handshake and go our separate ways.

Only my way was his way, though he never knew it. I would follow, unseen, behind him, down the streets of the town, marking his unending quest for the perfect death scene that would enhance his own.

We witnessed (separately, for he never knew I was there) several deaths during that time, but none out of the ordinary, everyday kind of expiration. A rather amusing tumble down a flight of steps by an old washerwoman, unmentionables flying out in all directions as she bounced and squealed to the bottom. Nothing that could be used. A straightforward heart failure at the entrance of the Mercantile Bank. It was over before it began. Disappointing, since the fellow looked to have some promise about him.

Once we stumbled onto a woman that was hemorrhaging on the stoop of a tenement building. MacCready stopped to watch. I wanted to run to him. Tell him not to waste his time on so paltry a dying. He should witness the death of great men of wealth and intelligence and make them his own. But before I could budge from my hiding place in a doorway across the street, MacCready had moved on.

Every night I followed MacCready through the streets, stopping when he stopped, taking up his pace again. And while MacCready searched for death, I was perfecting my own dying. Not that it was noticed. I was only one of many bodies, roiling about the stage beneath the clang of metal swords and the clop of horses’ hooves made by the beating of a spoon against a wooden barrel just off stage left.

I don’t remember when I first began to formulate my plan to aid MacCready in his search for the perfect death. Winter was coming on, and the nights were damp, with the wind cutting like a knife around the corners of buildings. I didn’t mind being uncomfortable, but I could see that MacCready did. His wanderings became shorter. The stops into pubs more frequent. The stay longer. I waited outside, stamping my feet and hugging my hands beneath my armpits to keep warm. Impossible for me to join him in the pub, and I was afraid that if I went into another, I would miss his exit.

And then one night, a Saturday I think it was (we had just finished Twelfth Night, a dreary play as it had no commendable death scene in it). MacCready wandered in the direction of a derelict section of town. Prostitutes huddled in doorways and opened their cloaks just long enough for a man to catch a glimpse of their wares, then wrapped up tight again. Drunks lay on pillows of hoarfrost, neither alive nor dead. Windows were shuttered tight, only an occasional wink of light escaping through the chinks. I couldn’t understand why MacCready had chosen this section of town to look for death.

I found myself wishing he would go home. There was no one here that was worthy of the great MacCready’s talent.

A carriage pulled to a stop ahead of MacCready. He slowed his pace. I slowed mine and watched. The carriage door opened and a man in evening dress virtually fell from the top step.

And suddenly I knew what MacCready was about. Clever MacCready. A gentleman might die comfortably, undramatically at home, eased into death by a scented handkerchief dabbed at his brow, his fluxes and vomitings carried discreetly away. But here in the streets, where no one knew him, he must enter death with the kicking and squirming of lesser men.

The man tossed coins toward the driver then wove toward a door in one of the nondescript brownstones that lined the street. After a moment, the door opened and light and noise spilled into the night air. The man entered and the door closed behind him leaving the street once again dark and silent.

I have to admit that I was a little irritated at my idol. I thought I knew what he was hoping for, but it would be a long cold winter before we might stumble across a robbery or murder if a man insisted on alighting from his carriage at the very door of his assignation.

The carriage pulled away and, like a great curtain, revealed a quartet of men coming our way. They were a gay bunch, drunk and singing and lumbering toward me like a giant multi-headed beast. MacCready was intent on the closed door of the brownstone and didn’t see when they knocked me into the gutter.