Face to Face (15 page)

38

Orrin Steyne's revue opened to notices that read as though they had been scribbled during an orgasm rather than sedately composed in its aftermath. It had been an uninspired theatrical season, and the time was hot for critical passion.

Or perhaps it was the legendary Orrin Steyne luck. He had never had a flop; and, in the unkind little world in which theatrical producers lived and labored, success was spitefully expressed in gambling terms, not in the context of a talent for the game.

About Lorette Spanier there could be no semantics. A performer by definition performed; the only question was how well. The answer, headlined and shouted, was unequivocal. The critics acclaimed her Broadway's latest love,
Variety
said
STEYNE FIND BOFFO
, Walter Kerr himself pronounced her the logical successor to Glory Guild,
Life
scheduled a profile of her, the in-groups debated whether she was high camp or low, and the squares queued up at the box office and laid siege to the stage door to fight for her autograph. Selma Pilter got her Lorette Spanier on a management contract—the old woman had been working on an oral understanding—with Armando's instant blessing: “You are better off signed with Selma,
cara
, than letting yourself be exposed to every sharpie in this cutthroat business.” And there was a cherished cable from West Berlin:
I TOLD YOU TO KEEP PROJECTING LOVE MARTA
.

The revue opened on a Thursday night. Friday afternoon Ellery telephoned Kip Kipley's unlisted number. “Can you get me two tickets for Orrin Steyne's
Revue?
I've tried everywhere with no luck.”

“When do you want them for, a year from Christmas?” the columnist asked.

“Saturday night.”

“This
Saturday night?”

“This Saturday night.”

“Who do you think I am, Jackie Kennedy?” said Kipley. Then he said, “I'll see what I can do.” He called back in ten minutes. “Why I scratch your back when you still owe me God knows how much
pro quo
I'll never understand. They'll be at the box office.”

“Thanks, Kip.”

“You can shove your thanks, Charlie. Give me something I can print, and we're buddy-buddies.”

“I wish I could,” Ellery sighed, and hung up. He really did.

For, novel and deadline notwithstanding, the Guild case kept niggling him. He had no idea why he had suddenly decided to see the revue. The decision had nothing to do with the magnitude of Lorette's talent; he was willing to take Broadway's word for that. And as a rule he avoided musicals. Still, putting it down to a vague professional itch to keep his finger on the pulse of the cadaver, Ellery took his father by the resisting arm—to the girly-girly-brought-up Inspector, musicals had died with Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll; he had thought
Oklahoma
! rather dull and
My Fair Lady
a lot of fancy nonsense—and on Saturday evening they set off for the Roman Theater.

Their taxi had to fight the usual good fight with the traffic (no New Yorker in his right mind took a private car into the theater district on Saturday nights); they exchanged the usual nostalgia-spiked imprecations on the honkytonk atmosphere of the new Times Square; they did the usual elbow work on the unneighborly line at the
THIS PERFORMANCE
window of the old Roman; and eventually they found themselves seated in the orchestra on the aisle, sixth row center, that Valhalla of the hit-show devotee's dreams.

“Mighty nice,” the Inspector said, partially mollified. “How did you do it?” He did not know about Ellery's appeal to Kipley. “These seats must have set you back half a week's salary. My salary, anyway.”

Ellery said sententiously, “Money isn't everything,” and settled back with the playbill. There were some things a man didn't tell, even to his father.

And there it was.
Songs … Lorette Spanier
, at the end of the first act. Everyone in their vicinity, it seemed, had the program open to the same page; Ellery squinted here and there to make sure. It happened once every ten years or so, that lightning something in the air of old theaters that smelled like brimstone. It could be detected only at the birth of a new star. You could almost hear the crackle of the sparks.

Even that died away after the blackout preceding her appearance, leaving a silence so heavy it seemed about to burst from its own weight.

The darkness was as palpable as the silence.

Ellery found himself crouched on the edge of his seat. He felt his father, the least impressionable of men, doing the same thing beside him.

No one shuffled or coughed.

A tall pure white cone suddenly sprang down from the proscenium to center stage. Bathed in its brilliant light sat Lorette, at a vast rose piano, pale hands folded. A black velvet backdrop with a gigantic American Beauty rose embroidered on it was her background. She was dressed in a flashing sequined evening gown of the same color as the rose, with a high neckline and no back at all. She wore no jewelry, and her white skin and golden hair seemed stamped on the velvet. She was looking, not at the audience, but at the hands in her lap. It was as if she were all alone somewhere, listening for something not audible to ordinary ears.

She held her indrawn pose for fully thirty seconds. Then she looked up and at the conductor in the well. He raised his baton, holding it aloft deliberately. When it came down, the orchestra burst into an anguished fortissimo chord, heavily brassed, and there were gasps.

All at once the chord segued into the soft teasing introduction to Gaudens's already acclaimed “Where O Where?” the introduction died away, and Lorette raised her hands. She played a swift caressing arpeggio, threw her shining head back, and began to sing.

It was very nearly the same voice Ellery had listened to on that day of rehearsal, but not quite. A dimension had been added, an intangible something that made the difference between quality and style. Whether she had soared to the challenge of her opportunity, or Marta Bellina had taught her some unique secret of the singer's art, the fact was that Lorette now had both. The quality was Glory Guild's; the style was Lorette's own. In that sense Walter Kerr had been precisely right. In the same way that a generation sprang from its parents, carrying their genes but adding combinations of its own to become something altogether new, the niece was indeed “the logical successor” to her aunt.

There was the old Guild vocal intimacy, inner-directed to the individual ear in its faintly throbbing passion; what made it new was a curious preoccupation with self that Guild had never had, as if Lorette were conscious of no audience at all, the inner direction being result rather than cause. It was as if she were singing to herself in the privacy of her bedroom, allowing herself an erotic freedom of expression that she would not have dreamed of expressing in public. It turned every man and woman in the audience into a sort of Listening Tom, ear squeezed to a forbidden door; it raised the blood pressure and made breathing difficult.

It was smashing.

Fighting the effect on his nervous system, Ellery tore his attention away from what was happening to him to observe what was happening to the people around him. His father was pressed forward, eyes half shut, with a grin on his old lips that had pain as well as remembered pleasure in it. The few others he could make out in the near darkness were just as embarrassing to behold. Each face was stripped of social controls, oblivious of decencies and restraints, nakedly isolated. It was not a pretty sight, and it revolted as well as fascinated him. My God, Ellery thought, she'll become a destructive social force, she'll turn neighborly communities into packs of slavering lone wolves, she'll disperse the herd yearnings of the young and replace marijuana and LSD in the college dorms. She could not possibly realize the dangerous potentialities of her power. She'll sell tens of millions of records and there ought to be a law against her.

There were five other songs: “Love, Love”; “You're Trouble to Me”; “There's No Moon Ever”; “Take Me”; and “I Want to Die” …

Lorette's hands returned to her lap.

The roar that shook the theater she did not acknowledge; she did not even look around. She simply sat there, as she had begun, hands folded, eyes lowered, lost in her own echoes. This was at Orrin Steyne's direction, Ellery was sure, but he did not think she would have reacted differently had Steyne never said a word.

They would not allow her to stop. The first-act curtain came down, went up, came down, went up again; still she sat there, a glittering little figure at the great piano on the otherwise empty stage.

More!
More! MORE!

It became a thunderous growl.

Lorette swung about on the bench then, all flashing rose in the spotlight; for the first time she looked her audience in the eye.

The ploy was startling. It brought instant silence.

“I should so much like to sing and sing for you,” she murmured. “But there's a great deal more of Mr. Steyne's wonderful show in store, so I have time for only one encore. I don't believe Billy Gaudens will mind if I reach far back into the past. This song lyric was written by some one you probably remember in a field worlds away from music, James J. Walker; the music was by Ernest R. Ball. It was first published in 1905, and it was revived and became famous in the late Twenties, when Jimmy Walker was Mayor of New York. It was a very special favorite of Glory Guild's—my aunt.”

A shrewd stroke of Steyne's—Ellery was positive Steyne had inspired it—this uttering GeeGee Guild's name aloud, hauling into the light what lurked in the darkness of everyone's thoughts.

Lorette turned back to her piano.

The same electric silence crackled.

The same breaths were withheld.

She began to sing once more.

It was perhaps an unfortunate choice musically and lyrically. Ball's music was sticky sweet; Walker's lyric, especially of the verse, evoked images of birds in gilded cages and poor sewing-machine girls:

Now in the summer of life, sweetheart,

You say you love but me,

Gladly I give all my heart to you,

Throbbing with ecstacy.

But last night I saw while a-dreaming,

The future old and gray,

And I wondered if you'll love me then, dear,

Just as you do today.

Refrain
(molto espressivo):

Will you love me in December as you do in May,

Will you love me in the good old-fashioned way?

When my hair has all turned gray,

Will you kiss me then, and say,

That you love me in December as you do in May?

Lorette gave it
molto espressivo
, English music hall style. Ellery shook his head. It was a mistake, and he was willing to bet that before many performances had passed Orrin Steyne—or Billy Gaudens—would see to it that Lorette's encore number was less in the nature of a parody. From the throat of any other singer he could think of the song would have aroused smiles, if not titters. It was a tribute to Lorette's power that her audience was as passionately rapt by this song from another world and time as they had been by Gaudens's cunning music.

Listening to Beau James's youthful effusion—
Beau James
was what Gene Fowler had entitled his biography of Jimmy Walker—Ellery was reminded that the theme of Walker's sentimental lyric, especially that of the chorus, had evidently haunted him to his dying day. According to Fowler, some four decades after the original publication of “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?” which Lorette Spanier was now singing almost twenty years still later, as the one-time Tin Pan Alley aspirant, trial lawyer, state senator, mayor, and playboy politico sat in his darkened room during his last illness, he had suddenly turned on a light, reached for a pencil, and begun to compose the lyric to a new song. It had concluded with the lines:

There'll be no December

If you'll just remember,

Sweetheart, it's always May.

* * *

After four decades and two world wars Jimmy Walker had come full circle.

I wish, Ellery found himself thinking, I could do the same with the Guild case.

There'll be no December …

Ellery sat up as though touched by a live wire. As indeed, in a way, he had been. The coincidence would have been amusing in other circumstances. He had shifted his left elbow on the arm of his seat, and the movement had caused the sharp edge of the seat's arm to press into the hollow behind his elbow and the sensitive nerve beneath. The unpleasant shock almost made him cry out.

Inspector Queen shushed him angrily, intent on the song. To the Inspector, what Lorette was singing was a piece of his youth.

But to Ellery it was a foretaste of the immediate future. He would almost have cried out even if the nerve had not been shocked. For he was shocked in a far more vulnerable place.

“Dad.”

“Shut up!” his father hissed.

“Dad, we'll have to leave.”

“What?”

“At least I'll have to.”

“Are you out of your mind? Now, damn it, you've made me lose the end of the song!” Lorette had finished, and the applause rose from all around them in crashing waves. She rose from the bench and stood unsmiling, white hand on the end of the rose piano, blue eyes glittering in the spot; all of her glittered. Then the curtain came down, and it stayed down. The house lights went up.

“I swear I can't imagine what comes over you,” the old man complained as they shoved their way up the aisle. “You're a natural-born spoiler, Ellery. Man, what a voice!” He went on and on about Lorette; or perhaps it was about himself.

Ellery said nothing until they reached the crowded lobby. He was scowling in some sort of pain. “You don't have to go, dad. Why not stay and see the rest of the show? I'll meet you back home later.”

“Wait a minute, will you? What's eating you?”