All Other Nights (37 page)

Jeannie leaned toward the man, her face pure confidence. “What is your name, sir?” she asked.

“Captain Strathmore, miss.”

“Captain Strathmore, would you do me the honor of joining me onstage?”

The crowd clapped as a man in an elegant officer’s uniform made his way up the grand staircase to the landing. Now Jacob could see that unlike most men in the room, Captain Strathmore was entirely able-bodied, a genuine active-duty officer, his uniform’s cloak bulging from the holsters at his hips and his chest decorated with medals. He was about Jacob’s height, with blond hair, a blond mustache, a tall forehead, and an unmistakably smug expression on his face. As he took his place onstage at Jeannie’s side, he reminded Jacob of William Williams.

“Welcome, Captain Strathmore,” Jeannie said, and curtsied. “Thank you for your generous contribution to Chimborazo Hospital. And thank you also for your service to the cause at Andersonville.”

“My pleasure,” the man said.

This struck Jacob as a rather inappropriate reply, but the audience applauded as Jeannie offered him her hand. Jacob watched as the officer brightened, initiating a deep bow to her and kissing her fingers—far too warmly, and for far too long. Jacob burned with jealousy as Jeannie smiled.

“Now would it be correct, Captain, to say that escapes from Andersonville were few and far between?” she asked, fluttering the fan in his direction as she spoke.

“That would be correct, miss,” the officer answered. “And none of them were on my watch.”

“I see,” she said, as though thinking aloud. “So it is quite unlikely that even an experienced escape artist, if imprisoned there, would have been able to liberate herself from beneath your watchful eyes.”

The officer grinned at her, relishing his moment beside her onstage. “Well, it would have been rather difficult, since the guards were each armed with at least two pistols. But Miss Van Damme, I wouldn’t dream of underestimating you,” he added, his voice gallant. The old William Williams queasiness returned to Jacob’s stomach. He shook his head, fighting it as he listened.

“How gracious of you. I do appreciate it,” Jeannie said. She stepped closer to him, which clearly cheered him, and flicked her fan in his direction. “What sort of persons were you guarding at Andersonville, Captain Strathmore?”

“Mostly Yankee privates, miss. Many in rather sickly condition.”

“Tell us, Captain: were there any ladies among your prisoners?”

Now he laughed, blushing, as the audience laughed along with him. “No, unfortunately. I expect I would have enjoyed my responsibilities quite a bit more if that had been the case.”

Jeannie laughed too, standing right at his side. “I expect you would have. But as the situation stood, those sickly Yankee privates had your full attention,” she said, waving her fan softly back and forth.

“I should hope so,” he said, with a chuckle. His eyes were glued to Jacob’s wife. Jacob watched as the officer’s gaze traveled along her body, down to her dress’s generous neckline and her breasts beneath it.

“Captain Strathmore, I take it that you are armed this evening, as is customary,” Jeannie said.

“Indeed,” the officer nodded. His eyes, Jacob noticed, were still on her breasts.

“Do you truly find it necessary to be armed at a ball?”

Captain Strathmore paused, surprised by the question. “Well, it is customary, as you say,” he said. “It seems a poor idea to leave valuable weapons unattended at the barracks, what with all the deserters and the like. And one prefers to have protection of some kind, if one appears in uniform.”

“I see. And how many pistols are you carrying at the moment?”

“Two, miss.”

Jacob immediately knew what was about to happen, because it had happened to him. He smiled to himself, relishing the moment, immeasurably proud of his brilliant wife.

“Are you certain, sir?” she asked. Then she raised one foot, letting her skirt fall so that her leg was revealed halfway to the knee. The eyes of every man in the room bulged, including Jacob’s remaining eye, as Jeannie reached up along the outside of her own leg, her hand hidden beneath the skirt of her dress. “Because I only found one,” she announced. Her leg returned to the floor, and the audience gasped as she raised a revolver high in the air.

The officer’s jaw dropped. He looked down at his hip and hopelessly pulled his cloak aside to reveal his own right holster, which was empty. He stared at his own raised pistol in Jeannie’s hand, flabbergasted.

She smiled at him. The guests, recovering from shock, at last burst into applause. Jeannie stooped down, placing the gun on the wide flat surface of the banister before straightening up again suddenly, as if she had forgotten something. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I was mistaken,” she said loudly, cutting the applause short. “You did indeed have two.” Then she reached behind her back and pulled out another revolver, which she pointed straight at the ceiling. But this time, before the audience could even regain its breath, she pulled the trigger—causing Captain Strathmore to drop by reflex to the floor. The gun only clicked.

“I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t loaded,” Jeannie said with another smile, as Antonia gasped at Jacob’s side. Jeannie reached out to hand the gun to the officer. Captain Strathmore jumped back up to his feet, visibly shaken, taking the gun back from Jeannie like an obedient child. She then took the other revolver from the railing, holding it in the air again as she turned to the audience.

“As you can see, the mental constraints of expectations are what the escape artist must first overcome, after which she may help herself to whatever she finds useful for a physical escape,” she said to the crowd. “In fact, if I wished, I should find it quite simple to rob Captain Strathmore at gunpoint.” She paused, her eyes narrowing as though she were trying to decide what to do, before adding, “Except that that would be—” She looked back at the shocked Captain Strathmore and smiled, waiting until he regained his senses enough to smile back at her. Then she reached into her décolletage, pulled out a billfold, and concluded, “entirely unnecessary.”

The crowd was silent for a moment, astonished, before finally cheering as she handed the money and the second gun back to the bewildered officer onstage.

“She’s a witch!” Antonia said to Jacob over the crowd’s applause. “Truly a witch! Heaven help whichever man she marries!” Jacob looked at his wife, resplendent with brilliant beauty, and glowed with unearned pride.

“I thank you for your sportsmanship during this demonstration, Captain Strathmore,” Jeannie said, and kissed his limp hand. “And I hope that you will never again make the mistake of underestimating the ladies. Fellow Rebels, please join me in a round of applause for the captain!” The officer descended the stairs quickly, chagrined as the audience cheered. Jacob clapped his hands as hard as everyone else, fighting to keep himself from weeping.

For the rest of that evening, Jacob watched as his wife liberated herself from handcuffs, wriggled free from a ladderback chair onto which she had been tied by another audience volunteer, and concealed herself completely in a bale of cotton—from which she emerged wearing a different dress. As promised, she popped out of a barrel that had been nailed shut, and out of a steamer trunk bound with chains. During the course of her performance, she also “borrowed” numerous items from people in the audience, all without their knowledge, and all returned to their great surprise—personal effects ranging from handkerchiefs to daggers. The audience was amazed, amused, laughing at each trick’s finale, wondering what might happen next. But to Jacob, the tricks were almost irrelevant. The very fact that she was alive was the most astounding feat of all. As Jeannie made yet another demonstration of the escape artist’s trade, he suddenly understood what had happened on that Yom Kippur two and a half years before.

“Borrowing weapons and breaking free from shackles, of course, are often convenient ways to escape from an unpleasant situation,” she was telling her audience. “But occasionally one finds oneself under certain constraints—in a prison cell, for example—in which more dramatic means are necessary for redirecting the attention of one’s guards. In those sorts of circumstances, I have found that the most effective way to distract people is by suffering an apoplectic stroke.”

The guests leaned toward her, their applause from her previous act still fading as they eagerly awaited whatever was coming next. But Jacob thought of the newspaper article that had destroyed his life. Could it possibly be? “Now, I know what many of you are thinking,” Jeannie said. “Even an amateur performer might be able to feign certain ailments with relative ease, but simulating something as severe as an apoplexy must surely be impossible. Inconceivable, isn’t it?” Some of the guests nodded, though most simply watched her in silence—prepared, as the invitation had warned them, to be astounded. “Well, then,” she said, with a wide smile, “why don’t we see just how inconceivable it is?”

Of course,
of course
; why hadn’t he thought of it before? Jacob watched, for the second time in his life, as Jeannie Levy voluntarily dislocated her jaw.

It was even more appalling than the first time he saw it. The entire lower half of her face appeared to fall right off of her head, her mouth distended beyond recognition, her jaw dangling by one corner in an unimaginably ghastly way. It was like watching a botched decapitation, just before the spurting of blood. The men in the room had surely all seen their share of gruesomely wounded soldiers, but witnessing a beautiful young woman becoming instantly and catastrophically disfigured onstage was something altogether different, and atrocious. Every person in the room gasped. But this was not enough for Jeannie. She let out a long, loud moan, a dark rattle of pure animal suffering, and collapsed on the landing, her body lying in a heap on the Cary sisters’ carpet as her eyes rolled back into her head.

Once the guests overcame their astonishment, they waited, still leaning forward, for Jeannie to rise and conclude the trick. But Jeannie offered them no such relief. Instead she languished in her awful pose for one endless minute after another, as the audience’s anticipation gradually faded into animated terror. A whisper rushed through the crowd.

“My word!” Antonia exclaimed, her scrubbed face turning pale as she pressed her fingers to her lips. “She must be—she must be—” Jacob pressed his own lips together, struggling not to laugh out loud.

Jeannie lay on the landing, immobile and deformed, for a very long time. Even Jacob worried for an instant, before reminding himself of who she was. But the guests had never seen anything like this before. The stillness of her body was lasting too long, the wait for her next move becoming indefinite, frightening. The audience rustled, the guests’ confusion bordering on panic. At length, a one-armed man from the front row hastened up the stairs, pushed forward by the people around him. The man stooped down, standing just above Jeannie’s head so that her body and disfigured face were still within the audience’s view. He winced as he inspected her distorted features. “Miss Van Damme?” he asked meekly.

Jeannie did not move. The man scrutinized her, and hesitantly placed his remaining hand on the bare skin just above her dress’s low neckline, inches from her corset. The crowd held its breath, but Jacob wondered, as he saw the man pressing his palm against her bosom, whether he was secretly enjoying it. The man looked back at the audience, his face flushed. “The lady isn’t breathing,” he announced.

At that moment, Jeannie raised her hand and slapped the man’s wrist. He jumped up, startled, and then quickly lost his balance and tripped backward down the stairs, his fall broken only by three ladies who caught him by his remaining arm. The audience was still gasping when Jeannie sat up, took hold of her own jaw, and set it back into place with a loud, repulsive snap.

“Sir, even a dead lady deserves more respect than that,” she said, adjusting her décolletage and smiling at the man in the front row. “But as you all can see, it is quite possible, when the situation calls for it, to feign an apoplectic stroke.”

The crowd cheered as Antonia scowled at Jacob’s side. “The lady is a witch, an actual witch,” she repeated, with open disgust. “It’s all some sort of Oriental witchcraft. I’m sure of it.”

Jacob nodded, bewitched. Onstage, Jeannie was already moving on to her final act—demonstrating how, once dead, one could hypothetically proceed directly to the morgue, in order to conveniently escape just prior to one’s own funeral. A long pinewood box was brought up to the landing, and now Jeannie was climbing into it with great flourish, lying down dramatically in her own coffin after inviting several volunteers up to the stage to nail it shut. As his wife was hammered into her casket, Jacob began to add up the pieces in his head. He thought of the hysterical attack that the newspaper had reported, and suddenly he understood precisely how she had done it: her feigned stroke must have gotten her carried out of the prison and into a hospital, and then from there she had continued to the great beyond. Some pieces were missing, to be sure, leaving him raging with curiosity. It was one thing to fool people at a ball, for instance, but how could she have convinced doctors in a hospital of her supposed death? How could anyone have reported her death to the newspapers, with no body to show for it? How had she made it out of the hospital, or out of the morgue? After she escaped, how had she managed to cross the lines and return home? But he already knew that for Jeannie, these were mere details, the predictable limits of other people’s expectations. She would have transcended them all.

The volunteers left the stage, their task completed. The coffin on the landing rattled, and then it was still.

The silence lasted quite a while. Everyone in the room watched the casket, waiting. It occurred to Jacob that for the other guests, the scene must have been familiar, even if not consciously so: they had all been trained since childhood to expect a body to rise up from its coffin, to anticipate a resurrection. But Jacob saw the casket and thought of a different story, one his Hebrew tutor had taught him long ago: that when the Romans conquered Jerusalem, a certain rabbi saw the danger and had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin, so that he could find a refuge for his students where they could reconstruct the edifice of life. He knew that Jeannie would never do something as predictable as rising from a coffin; her imagination was far too large to be contained within it. And so Jacob was the first person to notice when Jeannie emerged like an apparition, wrapped in a gauzy white robe—at the top of the staircase, looking down on them all.