The Mercury Waltz (29 page)

And ever after Haden will remember every facet of this moment, the fecund smell of the river, the sound of the splashing boys, the feel of Frédéric’s lips upon his, seeking, taking: though he will barely recall how he dressed, for he did dress, and they did move somehow away from the bridge and through the streets and up to his own rooms, to lie together at long last in delirium and tenderness, discovery and panting joy, on the swampy bed beneath cracked windows, in the wreckage that Haden has not noticed until now: slewed table and haphazard broken chair, Ovid flung on the floor by the bed and “I have that edition, too,” says Frédéric; his voice sounds differently to himself. “Though my Latin isn’t really very good….
I’m
not good, you know, I’m unworthy of you, I’m a coward and a liar,” breathlessly, passionately, as if all truths can now be told. “Can you ever forgive me? It was dreadful to say those things to you, to do as I did, but I thought—I never, never thought—”

“Well, I lied about my boys, didn’t I. I’m not to raise them at all, I’m to use them.”

“And I lied to everyone about everything, God and my parents and Herr Hebert and Marie Mariette. And the rooming-house man! Except about my name—it is my name truly, you know, Frédéric-Seraphim.”

“Mine,” shyly, for he has never told anyone before, “is Hadrian.”

“Hadrian,” says Frédéric, tasting, savoring the name. “Hadrian! Why, it’s noble, it’s entirely heroic. It suits you.”

“You suit me,” says Haden, as Frédéric turns his head and they kiss again, and again, Haden’s arms tight around him, Frédéric’s scent on his skin, their bare bodies in the narrow bed their heaven of union achieved: for if there is heaven at all, any heaven worth the having, it is here, it is now: like a winning hand in a game of lansquenet, like the spread of Taroc that tells of fated love, like the spreading light and the birds that call—insistent, raucous, eternal—as if from the very heart of Eden, when all love was newly-fashioned, and no evil, yet, to fear.

As if a curtain has been parted, a long drama ended or begun, that evening’s last, gurgling, Biblical rain has cleansed the city of its festering humors, so a cooler, more stringent view can prevail, the autumn freed at last to make its play. The shopgirls at the counters have stopped yanking out each other’s hair; the cab horses have stopped biting; the teaboys dodge and march across Crescent Bridge, tips having improved somewhat with the weather’s change. The choir of St. Mary of Dolors gives a stirring performance of “The Lights of Paradise Do Shine for All,” with applause led by the archbishop himself, as in the Cemetery, dances are arranged and staged to lesser if more sprightly tunes, though behind double-locked and guarded doors, for the constables’ patrols are growing ever more frequent and intrusive. In the Park, the lemonade stands close and the chestnut stands reopen, the Lady’s Garden glows brilliant with chrysanthemums of every hue, and the whores sit at the scrolled benches beside the mammas, eating figs and watching as their future customers lob pennies at the fountain of Diana, aiming, with success that varies, for her jutting marble breasts. The gypsies find, to their benefit, that pessimism is no bar to superstition, and that those who contemplate new enterprises—to start a boot-blacking stand; to begin the study of law; to leave this city for another city, the aging wife for the mistress, the mistress for a younger maid, before it is too late—often make their first stop the Wheel of Fortune, to spin and watch the colors clack and the little man run his course, an outcome of
sum sine regno
meaning only that they must pay their coins and diligently spin again.

At the train station, travelers arrive and depart with greater regularity and purpose, whether their destinations be the continent or the provinces: young soldiers in particular, whole crowds of them, are very much on the move. One pair of ladies, one old and one young, leaves the city without so much as a backward glance, though if Miss Marie Mariette notes as she goes the nearly naked Mercury, it is with a freshly disillusioned eye: this is what comes of studying the Greekish gods, this weak and lying license, this complete moral collapse! For did she not see with her own eyes the real reason why Frédéric, her former fiancé, the former love of her life, had spoken so mysteriously of a “dark cloud,” did she not go against her aunt’s sound advice—that aunt now sleeping, mouth half-open, bonnet propped against the window—to approach on her own the strange and threatening precincts of the Mercury Theatre, of which Frédéric had, he said, in some way written (and what a confusing, half-told tale that was! Has he not been writing Christian tracts at all, then? Is
anything
he said the truth?), and so seen there, oh, what she had seen there! That blue-eyed, roundheeled, round-bellied little—peasant, that girl who claimed in some sort of accent halfway to uncivilized that no, there was no such person as Herr Blum, and if there was, here was not where he would be, and if he was, to be seen any visitor would first have to be known so
Who are you?
the awful girl had demanded, unashamed to stand there in the doorway with her bulging—with her— It was too awful. Finally, almost weeping, she had stammered out
Tell Frédéric, then, that I have called. Tell him that Miss Mariette—

I don’t know a “Fradaric.” Piss off, why don’t you,
as an ugly little dog bristled and barked from the dingy alley, where a man as bristling with knives sat and leered at her, calling out
Missy, hey Missy!
as she fled back to the waiting cabriolet. It was all too sordid, it was all
A blessing in disguise,
said her aunt as she packed for both of them in their suite at the Baltic,
that young man was completely unsound;
a fact her father was at that very moment energetically pointing out to a shattered Mr. Blum, having already received the aunt’s long, expensive, thoroughly damning wire. The engagement is of course dissolved, dowry damage will be paid, and Mrs. Mariette will energetically petition the Ladies’ Sodality to forever revoke the membership of Mrs. Blum, on grounds of moral turpitude.

On the train, Marie Mariette puts her handkerchief to her eyes for one last tear, then puts Frédéric Blum forever from her mind. She cannot know it, but she will in less than an hour meet the man who will become her husband, at the station where her aunt disembarks, a three-track station presided over by no leering, fleet-footed fabricator but a stand of tight white petunias and a bronze sundial, and the red-bearded junior stationmaster who will much appreciate a well-brought-up, financially situated, lace-making young lady who can sing like a bluebird, who in her turn will appreciate a man whose beliefs are chiefly in supper at seven and ensuring that the trains run on time. Thus do the gods find ways to reward true love.

Meanwhile the city’s newspapers have reported, with varying degrees of innuendo, malice, and accuracy, the outcome of the theatre competition, one at which no one is surprised, though many are disappointed, several bitterly, Gilbert Fairgrieve most bitterly of all: Simon Cowtan’s Cleopatra has taken the title of First Municipal Theatre. The silver trophy cup (inscribed, perhaps forebodingly, with several lines from
Macbeth
) now sits upon a marble stand in that theatre’s lobby—not authentic marble, yet, but plans are in place for its replacement—as its owner basks in that owning, while recalling that his namesake was a canny careerist, and so would have congratulated him most on the license to present without hindrance, though that gift is to be kept
Fully
sub rosa,
of course,
said Tibor Banek warningly.
With things the way they stand.

Herr de Vries had been the one to actually award the prize, a rather deflated honor in the banquet’s backwash of tumult and confusion, the servants trooping in with buckets to slop up the spilled wine, Mrs. Cowtan trying not to weep from nervous prostration, Frau de Vries losing her temper with Frau de Metz in a most unladylike display, barely worthy of a parlor-girl; in the salons she is now called, snickeringly, “Frau de Virgo.” Herr de Metz, absent from the dais, apparently returned much later, very drunk, some say, or battered by a boulevard tough, say others, nursed in solitude by his wife, whose startling outburst during the bandit players’ equally startling appearance has the city talking, too; for they were bandits indeed, several items of jewelry went missing in their wake, or several maids were ravished, it is hard to be sure what perfidy was actually accomplished but assuredly it was very bad. The
Globe
is calling for a full investigation, a task suited in every way to the Morals Commission and Martin Eig, whose great desk is now complemented if not matched by a somewhat greater office, larger windows facing the avenue, his own telephone and even “A place especially for you,” says Martin Eig with a dry smile to Costello. “You’ll report to Bernd, in the old office; I’ve had them put in a chair.”

Costello nods with a certain nervous diffidence; not that Mr. Eig was ever friendly before—not a hard gentleman, no, but never a friendly one. But there is something else present now, something Costello feels as one feels the draft from a reaching hand that grasps instead the unlucky man at one’s side, so “Whatever you say is best, sir, I’m sure. What about that St.-Mary, sir? Is he to have a chair, too?”

“I’ve told you before, don’t worry about Mr. St.-Mary,” again not unkindly but in such a way that Costello leaves the office as quickly as he may, to sit in his new chair beside the paper-heaped desk of Bernd, in a new coat of distinctly Puritan cut, and take out his snuff tin with a gloomy air: “He’s different now, an’t he? It’s not to be about what it was all about before.” He and Bernd share a look, but—because of the natures of their separate offices, of this office around them and their own natures as well—whatever further foreboding Costello owns, or Bernd suppresses, must remain forever unshared.

Alone in his fine office, Martin Eig drinks tea stunningly hot, poured for himself by himself from the beautiful silver pot; he is alone in this office by choice. Bernd he can speak to with the speaking tube, he has the telephone, has runners to bring him papers and take papers away, has Costello when Costello is needed—though now there are constables and the lieutenants of constables to wield, with far more force than one operative can provide, if less personal loyalty; what need for the personal, when one has the State? And beyond the runners in the hallways, and between the Prefecture and this office, he has others in the streets, men and sometimes boys to summon when needed, pay and dismiss when done; what he does not have, will never have again, is Haden St.-Mary.

St.-Mary—how could he have misjudged that man so entirely? Ambition, yes, and animal cunning, and even the refusal to fully take the bit: all of these are qualities to prize, qualities St.-Mary has, and could have been helped to develop; and might thus have been made into something uniquely worthy, a weapon no one else could ever deploy. But to shun such superior protection and instead ally himself with those players, with Hilaire in particular—flouting and flaunting and grinning under his hat, dancing about with a puppet—a man he would have raised with his own hands, had so offered to raise, more than once!—that is what stings.

In a sense—as he pours, sips, nods to himself; as runners and telegraph boys and lesser administrators pass one another in the hallways, on the stairways, the rooms of inquiry have never been so busy—in one sense it is all quite understandable: some men, despite their talents, will always find the gutter more congenial, and like calls to like, for Hilaire is also a true son of the gutter, paid by all and owned by none. And then there is the additional lure of the sodomitical, no doubt one of the reasons why St.-Mary has left his garret to take up residence at that theatre. He had not seen, at first, that such is the case with the writer Seraphim Blum—the man was betrothed, apparently, and his bourgeois family seems sound enough. But now one can see where his true sympathies lie, allied with St.-Mary, there at the Mercury with his gang of boys; the whole place is a kind of brothel, which is fitting, considering its owners’ origins, that would-be Hellfire Club they created for men like de Vries. Even their serving girl is a demonstrable whore.

Nevertheless—pouring more tea, drinking more tea, reaching for paper and pen—he had summoned St.-Mary to his office one final time, in the nature of a last assessment, and St.-Mary obeyed; he has not gone completely senseless, after all. But the manner of his coming, the even more flamboyant suit, the private, nearly constant little smile—

You seem quite happy, Mr. St.-Mary. I trust it’s for a wholesome reason?

“Trust’? Don’t you usually know such things?

I know some things. I know, for example, that you’ve recently changed your lodgings—

You, too,
with a measuring look around the new office, a theatrical peek out the windows.
Congratulations, sir. You’ve got a fine view of Minerva’s arse.

—
and that the ranks of your young fellows have been affected by a venereal outbreak—

Half the whores in town have the green knickers, boys
and
girls, I imagine you know that, too. Not from your own stick, of course, likely Costello told you. How is Costello?

He’s well. He asks after you often. I also know that your boy Lucien Topps was found dead, after a petty brawl over opium pills,
which took the smile from St.-Mary’s face; it seemed he might have spoken on that topic, surely he wanted to, but in the end said nothing. Does he know, St.-Mary, how that young man really died? De Vries is certain that no one knows, no one but his servant who dealt with the aftermath; de Vries believes that everything he does is well-concealed, a belief that is so absolute as to be almost comic. De Vries is even certain that no one knows the dead whore was staying in his townhouse, though that is manifestly untrue: even St.-Mary knew that, and came with his little army to correct it, though was unable to reverse his servant’s loss; it is the mark of an ineffectual leader that—Never mind. He need not think more of St.-Mary, himself bold enough, there in the chair with his hat on, ankle on knee, smelling of liquor, refusing tea, to ask
When you sent me to the Mercury, you already knew all you wanted to know, an’t you? You said “These fellows, what they intend, the Commission doesn’t know.” But you knew.

What they intended was, I think, very little, despite their foolishness of kings and insurrections. They are only gutter players, after all.

It might depend on who’s playing the fool.

Yes, it might. And for your own foolishness at that banquet, I could have you up on charges, serious charges, of trespass, and wanton destruction of property; I might do so still, at any time. But the soundness of your past work argues for clemency—though I’ll have no such work for you, of course, again or ever. So I’ll bid you good-bye now, Mr. St.-Mary, until we should meet again.