Femme Fatale (33 page)

Professor Marvel got her meaning at once.

“Indeed you were, dear girl, which is why we all took you under our wings . . . however well our wings were suited to deal with a young and precocious creature like yourself. Sophie and Salamandra dreamed up your infant acts, for money was needed to keep you and we all earned little enough to keep ourselves in those days. Luckily, you were an amenable child, and quite versatile. Indeed, sometimes
you
kept
us
!”

“I belonged to no one? No one paid for my keep?”

“You were an independent lass from the first, and quite a pet of ours, I might add. The theatrical life is a solitary one, save for the lucky couples who enter it, like Houdini and his Bess. Yet we are a family in a larger sense, and someone was always available to take you in hand when needed.”

“But why was I among you? Surely someone claimed me?”

Professor Marvel looked down at the buttons on his coat. “Do you know that my performing coat weighs forty pounds? That it contains sixty pockets filled with fifteen-thousand such bits of knowledge I have written down and can grasp in an instant? That I can answer any questions from the audience with a scrap of paper I can lay my hands upon in a split second? I am a walking encyclopedia. I know everything that a man or a woman in the audience can ask. But I cannot answer your question. Ask the women.”

“They are dying. Sophie and Salamandra gone, and Abyssinia the snake charmer.”

“Acts die, little Rena.”

“These acts ended in murder,” Irene said.

“Such tragedies, but does it matter how we die? We are old troopers and play a command performance for death when called.”

“I fear that these deaths had something to do with me, with my childhood, when I performed with you all.”

“And who would know to trace you through those long-forgotten years, more than two decades, my little chameleon? You yourself evolved through a half dozen stage names before the maestro took you in hand.”

“The maestro? Who was he?”

“You don’t remember?”

Irene passed a gloved hand in front of her face, almost brushing the extravagant brim of her hat.

We women had gone from modest perched bonnets to shadowing, wide-brimmed hats in a year or two, it seemed, and had not caught up with the latest demands of our attire. Fashion was like that, a taskmistress who ever demanded new skills and tricks.

“I don’t remember.” Irene sounded alarmed by her own confession. “Why have I forgotten so much of my childhood?”

“You grew up too fast.” Professor Marvel bit his bloodless lip. “I didn’t approve of you apprenticing that man, but the women were all for it. It was your chance to perform for the legitimate stage, they said, as if we were all illegitimate.”

“No!” Irene was revolted by the old man’s rejection of his own history. “I was the illegitimate one. I must have been. The wages of sin whom no one would claim.”

“I paid no attention to that. Let the women worry about it. There was—”

“Was what?”

“A . . . woman who came around. Gowned in black. A widow? Now that I think of it, she showed an interest in you.”

“Was she the only one?”

“No, my dear. You were adorable! The women in the audience all gathered around you, cooing like pigeons on rooftops or on those damn telephone poles that line the streets today. Of course there were none of those wires overhead when you were a lass. We kept you safe, never fear. You were our ward.”

“But who gave me to you? Someone must have.”

The old man shook his head. “I know everything, did you know? But I don’t know that. I don’t think I much cared.” He smiled his foolish-wise smile. “You were a gift, as well as gifted. I can’t recall that you were ever any trouble. Or if you were, the women kept it to themselves. They cherished you. Our lives don’t allow much for routine domestic arrangements. You were our little orphan girl, and we made sure you never noticed it.”

Irene sat back with a strange expression. “Maybe that’s why I never remembered much.”

“You? Not remember? There wasn’t a melody or a dance step any of them could show you that you couldn’t repeat exactly almost at once.”

Ruefulness passed over her features like a mask. “And I remember bits of them today, now that you mention it. I meant that I seem to have forgotten the important things: whys and wherefores, even some of the whos.”

“
Hmmm
. I don’t know what to advise someone suffering from forgetfulness.” He leaned forward suddenly, his watery blue eyes alight. “I know! Wee Wilhelmina. She was of an age with you. You often shared a bill with her and her twin sister Winifred, especially when you were younger and had not yet branched out into your array of eclectic acts, and before you began to concentrate on vocal studies. I don’t know who decided that, come to reflect. One of the women, no doubt. They made our rambling lives into a semblance of order. Look up Wilhelmina. You do remember her?”

Irene shook her head, too embarrassed to voice her demur.

“I do,” I put in. Her startled face snapped to view me. “I noticed the names on some of the playbills we’ve seen lately, along with an illustration of an impossibly wasp-waisted young woman in flesh-colored tights. At least I presume they were flesh-colored, the drawing was in black and white, of course.”

Irene turned back to Professor Marvel. “Is she still performing?”

“Heavens, no! There was some dust-up even before you left the stage. Something the men didn’t know about and the women wouldn’t say. But I did hear later that she’d snagged herself a very wealthy man. Old Gilfoyle, titan of boxcars. Lives on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street now, like all the gentry rushing to build and inhabit mansions in the city. I guess she’d remember you if you called upon her, and, being of an age with you, she might recall just those things you have forgotten.”

“Wilhelmina, not Winifred,” Irene repeated the name.

“Yes, Willie goes by Mina now. You were always quite the actress. I guess you could pretend to remember her well.”

“Indeed,” Irene agreed readily. “Especially if she wears flesh-colored tights.”

Irene was unusually quiet as we walked back to our hotel. When I tasked her for being such a taciturn companion, she merely nodded.

It was only in sight of the Astor’s familiar façade that she spoke. “I rummage in my memory and it is like stumbling blind through someone else’s attic, Nell, dark and murky with unrecognizable shapes lurking in the shadows. I remember my life in England and hence forward as if every act and scene were recorded on stereopticon cards, but this, all these years, I can’t believe I have . . . mislaid so much of my childhood.”

“No doubt as you moved into the respectable theater you naturally wished to forget your vaudeville roots.”

“Ah! You recognize a ‘respectable theater’ now. You certainly did not believe in any such thing when I met you.”

“I had not seen much of the unrespectable theater until now! Compared to this, singing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta chorus is the next thing to joining the heavenly choir for respectability. I’m not at all amazed that you forgot the parade of improbable personalities marshaled through your childhood and youth. Nor can I imagine that any mother worthy of the name would have abandoned her offspring to such a life.”

“Yet I came out of it . . . how would you describe me, Nell, when you met me?”

“Oh, intimidating! Very. Amazingly observant and quick to act. A great lady of fashion, a defender of the downtrodden, and a woman of charity and high culture . . . I mistook you for a lady of quality. Of course that was all sleight of hand, most of it. You were as poor as I, your dazzling toilette was fashioned from flea market scavenging, and your grand airs were all acting.”

“I do not sound much different from the young woman who had graduated from the
Ecole de Vaudeville
. Do you know why that French word for a performance bill has come into fashion? Because it sounds more respectable!” Irene’s laugh faded into a sigh. “So how was I able to so well mimic all those fine, elevated, ladylike qualities, if I came from such an environment as this?”

“I don’t know, Irene. Natural intelligence, I would presume. And moving to London couldn’t help but polish your manners.”

“I see. I owe it all to the English.”

“Perhaps I have had some small influence on you during all these years.”

“And I on you also!” she riposted, her eyes glittering like the amber earrings swinging from her earlobes. “This will no doubt stand us both in good stead when we gussy ourselves up and call upon Mrs. Heywood Gilfoyle, formerly of the New Fourteenth Street Theater, at her city seat on Fifth Avenue.”

She linked arms with me as we swept into the hotel lobby through the double doors the liveried doorman held wide for us.

“Gussy?” I asked weakly. It did not sound at all like a refined thing to do.

“An American expression, dear Nell, for dressing to impress. You will be hearing a good many American expressions, I fear.”

Gussy. Irene was right. I did fear.

26.

No Place Like Home

On the first floor are the grand hall of tessellated marble,
lined with mirrors; the three immense dining rooms . . . parlors
and reception-rooms. . . . Other parlors on the floor above . . .
Fourth floor—servant’s rooms in mahogany and Brussels
carpet, and circular picture-gallery; the fifth floor contains a
magnificent billiard room, dancing-hall, with pictures, piano,
etc., and commands a fine view of Fifth Avenue
.

—JAMES McCABE,
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF NEW YORK LIFE
, 1872

During my long association with Irene Adler I had entered, not always invited, places no humble parson’s daughter would ever expect to see, including Ferrieres, the Rothschilds’ sprawling country house outside Paris, Prague Castle, and Sarah Bernhardt’s overstuffed Parisian parlor, which was probably the most dangerous, given its population of Big Cats and even bigger snakes.

Yet my powers of description balk at any representation of the new-built mansions that line New York’s Fifth Avenue like the cliffs of Scylla and Charybdis in the Straits of Messina, which were the downfall of many an ancient Greek sailor.

Some, with their classical pediments and marble-faced fronts, more resembled museums or other massive public buildings than private residences. In amongst them crouched the sober brownstone façades of “older” homes built twenty, thirty, and forty years before. There are sheep sheds in Shropshire that are far “older” than that, yet no one makes pilgrimages to see them, as we did now.

Irene had insisted we leave early enough to capture one of the rare hansom cabs. I think she felt the more lumbering gurney was not suitable transport for calling upon a former performing peer who was now part of the highest society New York City had to offer (which could not be much, I thought with a silent sniff, if everything was so intolerably
new
!). No wonder a woman with an undistinguished—one could even say scandalous—background could now queen it over the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street.