Femme Fatale (36 page)

“Nell! You can’t mean that.” She began to giggle at the very notion, but I had never been so sincere in my life.

“I have never meant anything more. Since . . . meeting Sherlock Holmes I have come to see that the ardent pursuit of knowledge, any kind of knowledge, produces more honest learning than all the rote exercises in any schoolbook. It is a fine thing to be able to quote enormous numbers of Greeks and Romans, and there is wisdom there as well as snobbery, but unless the quotes are applied to something practical in modern life, they are only so much make-work.”

To this she had no answer, and thus was discovered gaping at me when her (my) ring was answered by . . . no one.

The door swung open as if by mechanical hands.

We gazed ahead, mutually stupefied, and were hardly an advertisement for either a classical or an eclectic education.

“Well, if it isn’t an arguing pair of Brobdingnagians,” announced a Lilliputian voice at the level of our knees.

We glanced down. A small, thickset woman in a miniature morning gown was awaiting our answer.

“Madam Thumbelina?” Irene asked.

“No madam and no longer Thumbelina,” she answered in a piping but gruff voice. “What do you want?”

“You,” Irene replied. “Professor Marvel—”

“What’s that old fraud up to now?”

“He doesn’t strike me as fraud,” I put in.

“We are all frauds. I’m not Thumbelina, but Phoebe Cummings, dwarf. Who are you?”

“Irene Adler, opera singer,” Irene replied as forthrightly.

“Penelope Huxleigh . . . not much of anything.”

“Former opera singer,” Irene amended her vocation quickly, “and Miss Huxleigh is a former governess, clerk, and typewriter girl.”

“Well,” said Phoebe Thumbelina Cummings, “I am a former
curiosity, and being such, am curious enough to wonder why two such accomplished ladies with such glorious pasts would call on me.”

“To explore your own glorious past, of course,” Irene said, “and mine. I am the former Rena the Ballerina, Merlinda the Mermaid and assorted other incarnations.”

“And Miss Huxleigh here?”

“I have had no assorted other incarnations,” I said quickly. “I am a parson’s orphaned daughter and former employee of whosoever would employ me, alas, therefore a nobody.”

“English?” Phoebe asked Irene.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oooh, I like the breed. Very ladylike. So, come in, ladies. I haven’t any tea to offer, but a glass of lemonade. Rena, you say? I begin to get the picture. I get a lot of pictures. A living album, amI. I’ve thought of penning my memoirs.”

She waddled—and there is no other way to describe her shortlegged hesitating gait—down a hall in which advertising circulars had become an impromptu carpet, to a door that she stretched up to open (despite Irene’s hand twitching to assist her) by herself.

We entered a doll’s house, where every stick of furniture was child size and no framed playbill or painting was hung higher than our waists.

I felt like Alice after she taken the mushroom that had made her bigger in Wonderland.

“Have a seat,” Phoebe suggested, a wicked glint in her eyes.

We settled on a tiny tapestried rocking chair and a miniature sofa that had our knees almost up to our chins.

Phoebe hoisted her small frame up onto a child’s rocking chair, grunting like a roughrider trying to tame a bucking bronco from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

I bit my lip and decided that if Phoebe could lever herself about in such obvious pain, I could certainly commune with my kneecaps without complaint.

“We’ll talk first,” Phoebe said abruptly.

I began to understand that she could not speak long without grunting, which made her speech seem abrupt. “Then I’ll decide if you’re worth the lemonade.”

I understood that she referred to the effort of serving us. I myself didn’t know yet if we would be “worth the lemonade.”

“Do you remember me?” Irene asked gently.

Phoebe’s features, which were blunt and full-sized compared to her stunted body, puckered to indicate both searching her memory, and a resentment of the effort.

“Pretty lady,” she said finally, and shook her head.

“As a child,” Irene amended.

Phoebe looked again, long and deep. “What child?”

“Rena the Ballerina.”

“Oh, you grew! Didn’t you? That’s why I couldn’t place you at first. We used to be of a size, you and me.”

“I was the baby, though,” Irene admitted, appealing to our hostess’s greater age.

“Baby, yes. They took me for a baby until I was, oh, twenty. I had the longest childhood of any human on the East Coast. Then suddenly, it was over. I was ‘grown,’ though I hadn’t added an inch. I wasn’t interesting anymore. I was just a . . . freak. A dwarf. A Something. And nobody would pay me for that.”

“We were all freaks,” Irene offered.

Phoebe gazed at her for a long time, seeking sincerity. And found it.

“Yes, we all. Were. Freaks. Do you want some lemonade?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Irene said. And remained seated while Phoebe threw herself off her chair and waddled into an adjoining room.

I started to lift from my cramped chair, but Irene nodded a vehement “No” to me and I settled back down into that most uncomfortable of positions.

By the time Phoebe returned with a glass of lemonade in each
hand my back was aching and my legs were developing those prickling tingles that will make standing again an exercise in pain and futility.

I clasped the glass and balanced it on one knee. Irene did likewise.

Phoebe pushed and manipulated herself back into her chair.

“Thank you,” Irene said, sipping from the glass as if we sat on Mrs. Astor’s back porch, did Mrs. Astor deign to have such a lowly American annex on her Newport castle-cum-seaside cottage.

“The city can be hot this time of year,” Phoebe noted, lifting her own glass of previously poured lemonade from the tiny table at her side. “What can I do for you ladies, besides wait on you?”

The sharp comment merited a brief smile from Irene. “You can do a great deal. We came at Professor Marvel’s suggestion because my memory of my youngest years is faulty.”

“You grew up,” Phoebe complained. “We used to be the same, only I was older. Much older, but it didn’t show. Now you’re a giant.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” Irene answered.

“Nor I.” Phoebe sipped her lemonade again and made a face. “I got used to being praised for being tiny and clever. Now I’m just tiny and old, and everyone could run me over in the streets in an instant and hardly even notice.”

“You know how to outwit their blindness, though,” Irene commented.

“I do, but I resent having to do it.”

“So do I,” Irene said.

For a moment Phoebe looked angry, like a spiteful child.

“The world,” Irene said, “has many excuses to overlook all sorts of persons. What I was when you knew me would be ridiculed by some people who know what I supposedly am now.”

“And what are you?”

Irene considered the question, then lifted her head with a smile. “I am still a performer, though I am not paid for it much
anymore. I am still a student, if you understand that we learned much from our colleagues. I am still . . . a mystery to myself.”

“And this one, your companion, what is she?”

Irene turned to regard me and I quailed at what her summing up of me might be, since she had been so humble with herself (for humble was not a word I would normally associate with Irene; I was perversely pleased that was the case, as my own history had condemned me to be humble).

“Nell . . . prides herself on being predictable, but her strength is in surprise. I believe that is your strength, too.”

“Hmmph.”

Phoebe struck me as a sour and stunted individual in more than stature, yet she grimaced a smile as she glanced from myself to Irene.

“I should hate you to your toes,” she told Irene. “You grew straight and beautiful and tall, though we used to dance duets together. You dress like someone on Mrs. Astor’s guest list of four hundred and yet you hunker down like a Red Man to sit on my chairs. You have a friend, and I have none—”

“No longer,” Irene said, her voice suddenly as taut as a strangled violin. “I have lost my past, and am here to reclaim it, and my friends. There is something wrong. I can’t remember what I should.”

Phoebe glanced at me, her mud-colored eyes narrowing in alarm.

“Nothing wrong,” she said gruffly, “except that you were sold young into the hands of that damned maestro.”

28.

Fairy Godmothers

Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?
When your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall!

“You needn’t gasp, Miss Huxleigh, I am plainspoken,” Phoebe said. “I see no point in painting pansies on the truth when it is an ugly and cracked vase that will only please when it admits what it is.”

She glanced at a white-faced Irene, who apparently was taking the notion of being “sold” as badly as I was.

“The others, of course,” she rumbled on in her Billy Goat Gruff voice, “being the type of performers who can afford to lie to themselves, and each other, doubtless thought it was a good thing and would be shocked by my opinion. I didn’t regard what happened as much better than Miss Wilhelmina running off to play from the age of fifteen with any man who wanted a peek at her garters.”

“Wilhelmina,” Irene repeated in as much of a daze as she ever allowed herself to be.

I knew her well, and had never seen her so off balance.

“We just saw Mina before coming here,” she offered, concentrating on a subject matter far removed from her own stupefaction.

Phoebe burst out with a derisive chuckle. “ ‘Mina’? Is that what she’s going by now? I’d heard she married far above us all, but there’s many a slip between the lip and the wedding ring, and Wilhelmina made them all.” She leaned toward Irene. “Don’t you remember all the hush-hush about her being delicate and suffering consumption and missing so many performances? Overconsumption, that’s what she suffered . . . first of spiritous liquors and then of the men who bought them for her.”

“I suppose,” I said weakly, “such sad stories are not unheard of in the theater.”

“The Theater, miss? I wouldn’t know about the Theater. We were all lowly variety performers. Freaks and oddities. How’d you like to grow up with me for a godmother, maybe small enough to be a fairy, but not pretty enough?”

She leaned so far forward in the rocking chair that I thought she’d tumble off the place she’d struggled so to sit upon. Miss Muffet on her tuffet, I thought, waiting for the spider that terrified her. Or was
she
the spider? I couldn’t stop myself from leaning away from her, not repulsed by her stunted stature, but by her vehement unhappiness. I was reminded of Rumpelstiltskin from the tales, an embittered old man who liked to suck young girls dry of hope.

“Godmothers.” Irene plucked one word from the diatribe and held it up before us like a jewel. “That is what I grew up among,” she went on, almost dreamily. Her voice was as mellow as a solo cello, low and soothing. A soft answer turneth away wrath. It also mesmerizes and Irene had long since mastered that bizarre process.

Phoebe’s tightened facial features loosened a bit. “You was a charmer, a natural little sunbeam, you was. Not a minx like Wilhelmina. . . . Still, for all her selfish ways from the time she was in
baby skirts, I’d not wish upon her the fate that she found. I thought you’d escaped it.” She regarded Irene sternly, but there was a suspicious sheen to her eyes before she continued.

“But then they were all for you studying The Voice with that maestro fellow, who wasn’t even one of us, but too good for all of us. And then you left, and when you came back you hardly knew us, or we knew you, and finally you came back not at all and then the next we heard you had left for Europe, without a word for any of us. Moved up and forgot us, as she did, Wilhelmina, only her way was a rough one, and you used to be as upset as the rest of us about it, until you went off with the maestro and never came back yourself again.”