The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines

there were any other option.” Her eyes drifted to the dieffenbachia while dread stripped the room of its heat.
    That was how I got a cat.

6 Mrs. Warren’s Profession
    M Y AUDITION WAS AT THE National on East Houston and Second Avenue. I bypassed the physical scrutiny and was asked to do a monologue and sing ten bars of an up-tempo song. As Jayne had forewarned me, I was being considered for two shows: a bleak war piece and a bad musical comedy revival. The director for the war drama was an intense man who looked like he hadn’t slept in two or three years. The director for the musical was much more jovial and well rested. He was a rotund fellow with such a sustained smile that I wondered if he’d just had dental work done.
    “Name?” asked the more somber of the directors upon my entrance.
    I clicked my heels together in a regrettably Gestapo fashion and stopped in the center of the stage. “Rosalind Winter.” The dramatic director seemed to perk up at the sound of my name, but it was probably just gas.
    “I hear you brought a cat to the audition,” said Fat and Smiley. Word had spread fast; Churchill was, at that moment, in the lobby terrorizing the other actors.
    “You know what they say,” I said. “Make ’em remember you.”
    “What will you be doing for us today?” asked Dull and Dramatic.
    “I’ll be doing a monologue from The Duchess of Malfi .” Dull and Dramatic maintained his expression. Fat and Smiley became stout and sulky. He was not a fan of Elizabethan tragedy.
    “And what will you be singing?” he asked.
    “‘Tea for Two’ from No, No, Nannette .” Fat and Smiley earned back his name while Dull and Dramatic sighed at the punishment he was going to have to endure. I waited for a sign they were ready, then plunged into John Webster’s poetry. The monologue went off without a hitch. AsI looked into my imaginary Antonio’s eyes and intoned, “The misery of us that are born great! We are forc’d to woo, because none dare woo us,” a single tear slid down my cheek.
    I was so feeling the Duchess’s pain that when the accompanist started serving up my tea I couldn’t shake my somber mood. The song was dangerously approaching funereal, so I decided to pep it up with some fancy footwork. Alas, I forgot where the edge of the stage was. As I bounced along to, “Nobody near us to see us or hear us, No friends or relations on weekend vacations,” I lost my footing and fell into the orchestra pit.
    I lay immobilized for ten seconds before somebody called out, “Are you all right?” I replied that I was, though, to be square, I would’ve been much better off if the musicians had taken their instruments home.
    “Thank you,” I said as I dusted myself off and climbed out of the pit. “Best of luck with your casting decisions.”
    They didn’t ask me to stick around.
    I gathered my cat and headed home. In the Shaw House foyer I checked my post box. Instead of V-mail from Jack, I had a note from my ma reminding me that if things didn’t work out I could always come home. Since pets were strictly prohibited at the house, before I stepped into the lobby, I shoved Churchill into my bag.
    Belle greeted me from the front desk. “Hello, stranger. Long time no see. Why so scarce?”
    I froze. It was just my luck she’d be waiting for me. A bottle of Seagram’s said she’d been staking out the lobby since noon. “Oh, you know how it is with the holidays.”
    “Get any work?” Belle was wearing a purple velvet robe trimmed in feathers. She had been half of a vaudeville act twenty years and fifty pounds before and was partial enough to the costumes that she continued to wear them on a daily basis.
    “That’s a fine how-do.”
    Belle stuck a pencil in her hair, where it would likely remain until she rolled over in her sleep. “You know the rules, Rosie. I don’t makeem.”
    “By my reckoning, I still have four days left. It’s not going to matter anyhow. I auditioned for two shows