Walking the Labyrinth (18 page)

Afterward Thorne and Fentrice had a huge row. Thorne told Fentrice never to do that again, and Fentrice complained that she wasn’t being given enough to do.

February 5, 1935. Aboard the
S.S. Homeric.
Haven’t written for a while because we’ve been so busy with rehearsals and our regular performances. We’ve decided to take a break for now, until we reach England.

Corrig had insisted on traveling first class. I worried a little about what he had planned, but when he came to dinner he was dressed very well, for him—white shirt and tie, dark brown pants and matching jacket. Over that, though, he had on the long bulky coat he wears on stage, with the enormous pockets that people think he hides his props in. The gentleman sitting next to him wore an evening coat and starched shirt. The man turned away in obvious disgust.

Corrig did nothing to annoy Starched Shirt until he passed him the fish. Shirt looked down at the platter Corrig handed him, and one of the fish winked. Shirt started up out of his chair. He sat back slowly and stared at Corrig, who looked at him with an expression of the purest innocence. When Shirt reached for the platter again a breaded tail waved at him. He excused himself and went to his room.

February 15, 1935. London. As usual everything went wrong in rehearsal and wonderfully well on stage. There was some unpleasantness with a woman calling herself the Première Danseuse, who insisted she be billed in the choicest spot, the one before the closing act. We had been promised this spot, and after some shouting and brandishing of contracts we got it.

The critics were lavish in their praise. I left Thorne happily cutting out clippings for her scrapbook and went out into the city.

February 23, 1935. Fentrice is gone. She didn’t make it to the show last night, and when we looked in her room this morning we saw that her bed had not been slept in. We can work around her, of course, but I’m still worried. Is this what Verey and Lanty were afraid of?

February 26, 1935. Fentrice back. She refuses to tell us where she went. But this afternoon I overheard her and Grandmother Neesa talking, and I think Neesa guesses or knows where she was.

“Did you walk the labyrinth, my dear?” Neesa said.

“What—what do you mean?” Fentrice asked.

I was in the theater, walking through the backstage corridors to the stage, hoping to come up with a way to improve a bit of business in the show. Neesa and Fentrice were in the greenroom and I stopped to listen, to eavesdrop perhaps. In my defense I can only say that this is how we live, all of us on top of each other; we have little privacy left.

“I think you know, dear,” Neesa said.

“I went off to be by myself, that’s all,” Fentrice said. “I had to get away.”

“Did you?” Neesa said. “Let me tell you something, a story. A long time ago I did what you are doing now. We have such power, and sometimes it’s such a temptation to use it.… But I was wrong, very wrong. I’ve come to forgive myself, come to realize that no one can be perfect, that we are not saints. But I’ve lived with pain and sorrow and regret for many years—I live with it now, in fact. I don’t want to see you make the same mistake I did.”

“What mistake?”

“The best use we can make of our power,” Neesa said, “is in the service of nothing at all. Corrig understands that—he seems to have understood it from the day he was born. I sometimes think he’s the wisest of us all.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” Fentrice said.

Neither did I. Neesa had never seemed to regret a thing. Was she thinking of her treatment of Lady Dorothy? But she made amends for that, long ago. And what had she meant by that odd question about the labyrinth?

I had a feeling Fentrice knew some of it, though. She ran from the room, nearly colliding with me. “How long have you been standing there?” she asked angrily.

I held up a placating hand. “Just walking through,” I said. “Why are you acting so guilty?”

She stormed off down the corridor.

March 2, 1935. Last show in London. Tempers were high and nerves frayed, but we managed to pull it off. At the end Corrig showered us with confetti and sequins and streamers—we were knee-deep in the stuff by the time we bowed off. Afterwards we broke out the champagne, and toasted ourselves and the success of the show.

March 5, 1935. Sailing home. Fentrice has disappeared again, but at least this time we know where she is—every so often we see her in second class. She comes back with a trumpet player, Tom somebody.

March 31, 1935. Traveling west—Minneapolis, Kansas City, Denver. We’re excited about seeing Edwina and all the cousins in California. Tom is with us—Fentrice has somehow convinced Verey and Lanty that we need a trumpet player.

April 2, 1935. Denver. An act called Bob Jones and His Savage Animals appears on the bill before us. The savage animals—a lion, a tiger and a panther—are thin, mangy, riddled with fleas. Like all traveling performers we put pots of oxalic acid under our bedposts, but these are mostly good for keeping ants away and in the morning we wake up covered with flea bites.

Today I spend some time watching Bob Jones rehearse. He works the animals hard with his whip—by the end of the rehearsal the tiger is bleeding. After Jones leads them to their cages I ask, “How much would you let the tiger go for?”

“You’re kidding,” Jones says. “I had to go to India to get Jewel—bargained with a maharajah for her. He didn’t want to let her go, but in the end I discovered that he had a fondness for emeralds.”

(Later today I learn, unsurprised, that Jewel is actually an African tiger.)

“Fifty dollars,” I say.

He pauses in the act of locking the cages. “You deaf? I won’t let her go for any price. She’s been to Europe, played before the crowned heads.”

“Fifty dollars, and I won’t tell anyone why you had to leave Philadelphia in such a hurry.”

He stops, leaving Jewel’s cage unlocked. Red blood streaks her flanks, mingling with her stripes. “Who are you?” he asks. “You the cops?”

“No.”

“You really want her? No tricks?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I couldn’t let her go for under seventy-five.”

“Seventy,” I say.

“Seventy, okay,” he says.

I go to my room, check the money in my grouch bag. I have seventy-two dollars. It’s only after I’ve paid him that I wonder what Verey and Lanty will say.

April 3, 1935. The family approves—everyone agrees that the tiger will add something to the act. We rehearse the bit with the statues again, and this time Thorne turns into the tiger Jewel before becoming a statue.

April 7, 1935. Oakland. In the morning we had a terrific reunion with the rest of the family and then moved to the boarding-house to be closer to the theater. I’m excited to see everyone again, excited too to be playing the Paramount, my favorite theater in all the world.

I take the trolley to the theater, watching the streets as it pushes its way through the dreadful modern traffic. When I finally get there it feels like visiting old friends. The lobby with its green ceiling, its fountain of yellow lights, its frieze of golden women on the walls. The auditorium is more cavernous than I remembered, paneled with women and vines and warriors on horseback. Above the stage Poseidon flies out of the ocean, surrounded by stars and horses and waves. And over everything the amber light that seems to glow only here, in this special place.

I leave the auditorium and go out into the corridor, nodding to the cleaning staff. A woman vacuuming the floor plugs her hose into the wall—one of the staff once told me that the hoses all connect to a great vacuum in the basement of the building. I go backstage and find Jake trying to get Jewel settled.

“You guys never had a tiger in the act before, did you?” he asks.

“No, she’s new.”

“Beautiful,” he says, admiring her. She’s filled out a little in the short time we’ve had her, and her wounds have started to heal.

“Want to go for lunch?” I ask.

“In a minute. I have to make out the deposit for last night’s take first.”

Because of the Depression theaters all over the country have had to let some of their people go, so Jake acts as stagehand, usher, and bookkeeper all in one. Sometimes he even takes a turn at carpentry or plumbing, if the problem is simple enough. Like a lot of guys these days he’s happy just to have a job, and he works long hours for very little pay.

I follow him to the office. He goes toward a painting of a woman putting down the mask of Comedy and lifting that of Tragedy. He swings this to one side, revealing the safe set into the wall.

I watch him as he twirls the dials on the safe and pulls open the door. “Shit!” he says. “My God. Shit.”

“What is it?”

He can barely speak for fear. “The money. The money’s gone.” His face is very pale.

“What?”

“I put it here last night, I swear. It’s gone. I’ll lose my job for sure.”

“Maybe you put it somewhere else.”

“I remember putting it here. Right here. Oh, God, they’ll have my job. They’ll think I stole it.”

“What about backstage?” I ask. “Maybe you left it there.”

It’s an absurd suggestion, of course, but by this point Jake is willing to grasp at anything. It’s easy enough to lead him backstage and, once there, to start searching. We rummage through all the strange things people have left over the years, boxes of books and costumes, a false mustache, a guitar pick, a cloth flower, a glass eye. Jake finishes one box and goes to another, closer to Jewel the tiger.

“You must dig deeper, Jake,” the tiger says. “Deeper than you’ve ever gone before.”

Jake looks up wildly. “Callan!” he says. “My God—the tiger said something.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I say.

“The tiger—” he says again.

“Your jewel lies hidden in the dirt,” the tiger says.

“Callan!” he says. “Didn’t you hear that? Am I going nuts?”

“You’ll be fine,” I say.

“I’m going home,” Jake says, unsteadily. “I feel terrible.”

“That might be the best thing,” I say. I watch him for a moment as he leaves, seeing what will happen to him, and then head back to our boardinghouse.

Fentrice is in her room, putting on makeup. She sees me in the mirror and beckons me inside. I sit on her bed, watching her.

“I’m going out with Tom tonight,” she says. She’s been more excited, more open, since she started seeing him.

I realize I haven’t seen Tom all day. “Where is he?” I ask.

“He’s staying in San Francisco with his family,” she says. “We’re going to Playland at the Beach.”

“Have a good time,” I say.

“Oh, we will,” she says.

April 8, 1935. Fentrice has started to confide in me for the first time since we were children. It reminds me of the times we hid in the bathroom on the train, when she would tell me about her petty struggles with Thorne. And then, I’m ashamed to say, Thorne would closet herself with me and tell me about Fentrice. It gave me a feeling of power that my two older sisters would put themselves into my hands this way.

This time, though, that feeling is gone, and I listen with nothing but pleasure to Fentrice’s account of her date the night before. Because of our old closeness I can even see her as she and Tom ride the roller coaster and explore the House of Mirrors. I watch as Fentrice expands to twice her size and Tom shrinks down to nothing but a head and two feet. I hear with them the hideous Laughing Sal, a huge and awful mannequin whose unstoppable laughter peals out continuously across the playground.

Later I see them go out for dinner, and listen as Tom tells my sister his plans. “I don’t want to be in the two-a-day the rest of my life,” he says to her earnestly. “I’d like to join a big band somewhere, play some hot jazz. I need monnney,” he says, caressing the word like a lover.

He’s a bit too superficial for her, I think. Too preoccupied with the surface. There’s even a hint that he might be using her, using the Allalie Family, to get ahead. I begin to wonder how I might change that, and then shake my head. This is my sister’s boyfriend, after all, not some man who has paid to sit in the audience and see wonders.

Perhaps because of Fentrice’s newfound happiness the performance this evening goes better than ever. When Tom plays she dances to his trumpet as if he and she were alone, the only people in the vast auditorium.

Later a newspaperman comes to interview us in the trap room and we put on a second show just for him. Even Thorne and Fentrice cooperate. For once I see clearly what will happen to the man: he will quit drinking, get married, raise a family. And near the end of his life he will become involved once again with the Allalies—but the vision goes dark here.

April 9, 1935. Oh, little brother, it was nothing at all like that. Yes, this is Fentrice, who’s just discovered your precious diary and read it all the way through. Does my nose really turn pink when I’m angry? You should see how you look when you join the fray.

Tom and I took the ferry to San Francisco, and then the streetcar to Playland. There was no room in the car so we sat on the cow catcher in back, where the conductor couldn’t reach us. I held him and he held me and I wished the ride would never end; I wished we could sit with our arms around each other like that forever.

Yes, we rode the roller coaster, and yes, we went into the dark of the House of Mirrors and came out into the bright lights and distorting mirrors. And we walked through the rotating barrels and spun on the carousel (he had the ostrich, I the lion), and we climbed the stairs and slid down the huge wooden slide. And Sal laughed and laughed, but she wasn’t at all hideous but somehow wonderful, as if she expressed my joy.

You’ve never been in love, have you, little brother? You say Tom is superficial but that’s because you’re superficial, you haven’t taken the time to get to know him. He’s an artist, a serious musician. Of course he wants something better than the daily grind of vaudeville. You love the magic act and the sense you have of playing God to these people—look what you did to that poor newspaperman last night, for example. But Tom and I walked the streets two nights ago, the stars shining down on us, and we both talked about our dreams, our futures. Can you see into the future for us, little brother? I don’t think we’ll be in the act much longer.