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Show 92 about her, even melancholy. She seemed older than seventeen, to be eighteen in July. She told me that her sister Helen was having trouble in her marriage, that her father had lost the cafe and was living alone and out of work in a rooming house, hating it and drinking heavily, and though I felt the weight of it, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know whether to kiss her or not, so she gave me her own instructions: "Just hold me," she said, and I held her very tightly. I wasn't sure whether or not she was crying. Then on other nights, she still quiet and melancholy, when we kissed she would give me her tongue in a hot demanding way that left me confused. I felt she was on the verge of giving me other instructions, but didn't. I remember sliding my hand under her coat to her waist, I remember the softness and the warmth of her waist as if it was yesterday. More and more I saw more and more of Kate. In the first act with her hair in pigtails she could seem young enough, with no serious cares, and now and then backstage she laughed and flirted with me, smiling with those grey eyes into mine. At the dress rehearsal and at the performance, she in her bridal dress with her black hair, I was amazed at how beautiful I thought her. Then as a married woman and mother she seemed to grow heavier with grief and age. I responded to her always, and near the end of the play when Emily has died and is in her grave, and my last scene is a wordless walk to her tombstone where I kneel in mute grief, I felt the situation deeply. My shoulders slumped in sorrow, my feet moved with a leaden shuffle across the stage to where Kate sat on a chair, which was Emily in her grave. I took off my hat to greyed hair and knelt there at her feet in black despair at my loss, then flung myself full length at her feet, while behind me the Stage Manager spoke the last words and brought down the curtain: "You get a good rest, too. Good night." Good night. People in the audience cried and I felt a sort of power, |