Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
E VELYN WAS NOT MUCH INCLINED TO MATHEMATICS, BUT AFTER meeting Thomas Gallier, she spent the entire walk to her boarding house doing arithmetic—namely, subtracting her expenses from the money she had saved.
She was confident she wouldn’t go hungry, at least. She’d never met a man she couldn’t talk out of a dinner or a bag of donuts—even in her current state. Housing, though? That was another matter entirely.
She had been living at the Matterly Ladies’ Theatrical Bath and Boarding House for so long that it didn’t seem right that a little thing like lack of funds could force her to leave it. The boarding house wasn’t particularly expensive. For four dollars and fifty cents a week, one was treated to a room, hot water for bathing, two square meals a day, and companionship from other like-minded professionals. Still, if tomorrow’s audition with Thomas Gallier didn’t result in a paycheck, she might not be able to remain in her little room. The thought nettled her. Bea, the founder and matron and her best friend besides Jules, would doubtless extend her charity, but she wouldn’t take it. She was too proud for that. However, she didn’t need a crystal ball to imagine her future nights spent shivering in the street—or worse.
As she made her entrance, she found the usual gang assembled in the parlor. She spotted some of her old faithfuls—among them, fluffy-cheeked, redheaded Rose McKinnon with her French horn; Annie, the ambulatory wheelchair user whose skills as an illusionist helped her escape a lifetime of bilking suckers in her father’s so-called faith healing ministry; and Natia, the stout Georgian radical of their group. Busy with tuning their instruments and stitching their costumes in between illicit sips from the flasks tucked away in their cases and sewing baskets, not a one of them seemed to recognize Evelyn’s flush and fluster, which still lingered from her encounter with Thomas Gallier.
Usually, Evelyn was a professional. She left her craft—stage and otherwise—outside of the boarding house doors. Tonight, he’d made her break that streak. Damn him.
“Hiya, girls,” she greeted, forcing a smile just like she would have if she were in the spotlight. Which, in a way, she was. “What’s good?”
“The Mission down the street if you don’t have your rent paid on time,” Rose snarked, waving a valve brush dismissively in her direction.
Evelyn’s pride bristled, but she tried to keep her tone light. “Who says I haven’t paid rent?”
“I’m no snitch.”
“Can it,” Annie snapped, making a show of brushing Rose away with a thick handful of lace. “No one’s said anything, Evelyn. Work’s just … well, bookings are just hard to get all around, you know? Even Nathaniel can’t find work. Too many whiteys corking up and singing about plantations.”
The room went silent then. Nathaniel Fry was a friend of theirs. A colored man who’d left Wilberforce University when he discovered his passion for tap dancing, he was one of the greatest performers of the modern stage. A genius, really. Anyone who saw him dancing wasn’t just witnessing art; they were being given a gift. They were getting to see the very act of heavenly creation in person, with their own eyes.
For him to be losing gigs—that was a sign that things were not as they should be.
“It’s their loss,” Evelyn ventured, as though that made it any better. “How dull and boring and artless and pathetic their lives will be without us.”
“We were just wondering if you were having the same trouble, Evelyn. That is all,” Natia interjected, her accent curving the corners of her words like a splash of bathtub chacha .
“I mean, look at me!” Annie cried, trying to inject some warmth and cheer back into their bleak futures. “I’m wasting away over here. My stomach’s near enough to touch my backbone, that’s how hungry I am.”
“No, you’ve just got your laces tied too tight.”
“Yeah, the lack of air is getting to your brain.”
“Lay off her, or I’ll show you what it’s like to really stop breathing—”
It didn’t take long for conversation to devolve. It never did. Idle chat gave way to an incessant overlapping of self-satisfied jokes and gallows humor. Everyone was hungry. Everyone was broke. Everyone’s looks were fading and their acts were stale and their social calendars were barren for want of a date on their precious one night a week off. But somehow, in the middle of the verbal slings and arrows, the knots in Evelyn’s shoulders unwound and all thoughts of Thomas Gallier slipped from the forefront of her brain. She settled into the safety of this place—the sanctified air of her messy, chaotic, wonderful home.
Until, inevitably, the conversation shifted back to her.
“So, Evelyn,” Natia prompted. “We return to the point. How is it for you out there?”
A shadow crossed the doorway and a new player entered their drama. Beatrice Matterly, to whom Evelyn hadn’t paid rent in three weeks, raised one eyebrow and asked dryly, “Oh, yes, Evelyn. Do tell us.”
Evelyn chewed the inside of her cheek. “As it happens, I might have gotten a job offer today.”
“ Might have?” Annie feigned shock, then wiggled her eyebrows lasciviously. “Did Miss Evelyn Cross not manage to seal the deal?”
Evelyn gave what she hoped was a coy shrug. The whole room knew she was usually a professional when it came to games like the one she and Thomas Gallier had played tonight.
Usually.
“Well,” cracked Rose, “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
“The gentlemen of Fifth Avenue are weeping. Ash and sackcloth as far as the eye can see. Evelyn Cross has lost her sensual touch,” said Natia.
Bea huffed a sigh and reached up, clanging the curfew bell a full three minutes before the nearby clock would have agreed with her. “All right, ladies. That’s quite enough. This is the sort of conversation for which the Manhattan Board of Female Social Hygiene would not stand. Don’t lose me my license, now. To bed—all of you.”
Groans and shuffling, but no real argument. As the rest of the women retired, Evelyn and her landlady withdrew to the small office where they so often spent their evenings. The two women had been friends for years. They understood one another. Beatrice, for all of her hard-nosed respectability now, had once been rather like Evelyn. Not a performer on the stage but, instead, of a different kind. As a wealthy man’s mistress, she’d been gifted this very house as a love nest. However, after the panic of ’90, she’d ditched the now-broke man, kept the house, and opened her doors as a boarding house. Evelyn had been her very first boarder.
Beatrice’s office was the sort of tidy space one might expect of a headmistress. Stacks of paper and piled books covered the surface of an expensive, but not ostentatious, desk. Shelves covered in respectable knickknacks and walls lined with miniature portraits. Dark curtains. A few chairs on either side of the table. Modest lamps for late-night reading.
However, it was to a hidden decanter of brandy that Beatrice marched the second they entered that room. She helped herself to a generous measure.
“Settling in?” Evelyn asked, dropping herself into a chair.
“This sounds like a good story,” Beatrice replied. “I want to make sure I enjoy it.”
Then, she fixed Evelyn with one of those stares. The kind that could just as easily have belonged to one’s best friend as much as one’s landlady.
“I met Thomas Gallier today,” Evelyn started.
Bea choked. “Thomas Gallier? The Emperor and His Little Empire Thomas Gallier?”
“One and the same.”
“And what was he like?”
Disgustingly handsome. Strict. Disciplined. Principled, even . I couldn’t have been more available if we were in the midst of coitus and yet … he would barely look at me, much less do anything with me. He was confusing and stoic and professional and clearly a masochist and I can’t stop thinking about what it might have been like if he’d let me have my way with him tonight and —
“Tall.”
“My, I do hope the coppers don’t call you in to describe a suspect. They’d never catch their man.”
Rolling her eyes, Evelyn recounted the night—seeing him in the opera box, welcoming him into her dressing room, the proposition, the rebuff …
Oh, the rebuff. She wasn’t necessarily making it common knowledge, but she’d had more and more of those lately. She was used to being scandalous—men had always hesitated to be seen in public with a vaudeville star—but they had never objected to having her in their beds, their carriages, or on the available surfaces of her various dressing rooms. It seemed Alban’s newspaper screeds and advertisements like a certain Miss Banting’s had contaminated the waters of her pool of eligible suitors.
And now that she considered it, maybe it hadn’t been Thomas Gallier’s principles that had held him back. Maybe he was as repulsed as the rest of them. But that didn’t make sense, did it? He’d as good as said he wanted her.
Was it better or worse if he was simply a devotee of convention, willing to sacrifice what he really wanted on the altar of other men’s taste?
It was at this point in her train of thought that she caught Bea’s expression out of the corner of her eye and realized she had stopped talking a full minute before.
Dash it all.
Evelyn crossed her arms. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
A dimple appeared in Bea’s left cheek. “Because you have the chance of a lifetime waiting for you tomorrow at noon and yet all I’ve heard you talk about is how the man wouldn’t take you on your dressing room floor.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve gotten many a job on my dressing room floor.”
“Oh, I know. And that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“What, precisely, is that supposed to mean?”
Sipping at her brandy, Beatrice only shrugged. “It’s just that I can’t remember the last time you spoke to a man who wanted you for something more than your body. Could be a dangerous thing.”
A NOTE FROM THE HISTORIAN
In the history of vaudeville, there are few friendships more confounding than that of Thomas Gallier and Dr. Andrew Samson.
As the newspapers of the time suggested, when Thomas Gallier arrived on the rock known as the island of Manhattan, he had no connections—not just in high society, but anywhere. His money opened certain doors, but after micromanaging his contractors to the point of alienation, engaging in protracted fights with every creditor in the city, and facing rejection from quite a few society circles fussy about his connections to the scandals of showbiz, it quickly became apparent that he needed some assistance if he was going to make inroads with the circles he longed to join.
Enter: Dr. Andrew Samson. You may recognize the name. The Samson Library? The Samson Wing of NYU’s Medical School? The Samson Ramble in Lower Manhattan?
In the early 1890s, Andrew had thoroughly shamed his family by entering the medical field. It seemed, for a time, that he was estranged from them for this reason—but by 1895, when Thomas Gallier came to town, he’d returned to the family fold, formally hung up his stethoscope, and begun apprenticing under his father to one day inherit their various businesses.
As for Thomas Gallier: while there were plenty of reasons one might disparage the man in the early days of The Empire’s development, no one could suggest that he wasn’t a dogged worker.
In records from the time, those who knew him noted his visible lack of sleep, his anxious refusal to take meals, and his single-minded devotion to his work.
Devotion that led to disaster when, at the conclusion of an investor presentation, Thomas collapsed on the mercifully plush carpet of his host’s morning room.
Andrew, who had been shadowing his father that afternoon, leapt into action. Dr. Samson’s early forays into the medical field were primarily charitable in nature, and while ministering to street rats was not deemed acceptable by polite society, the room didn’t mind taking advantage of his expertise now that there was a body on their floor. He roused Thomas, assured the assembled investors that their investment was not in jeopardy, and whisked his new patient away.
After a small, private meeting between the two men, an agreement was struck: Thomas would appoint Andrew as the theater’s resident physician—a position that would not only allow Andrew to monitor Thomas’s health, but that of their staff and performers as well, truly a revolutionary boon for a workplace at the time. In return, Andrew would assure the public that Thomas wasn’t going to expire before seeing The Empire to its triumphant opening night.
This arrangement wasn’t met with enthusiasm in the Samson home. However, Andrew eventually convinced his father that he was only returning to medicine in the interest of protecting his family’s investment in Gallier’s theater. Meanwhile, by Andrew’s account, he and Thomas became fast friends. Though prickly and determined to keep his employee at a distance, Mr. Gallier treated Andrew as his only close confidante.
Andrew made himself invaluable not only by providing public relations support vis-à-vis his boss’s health, but also by acting as a charismatic countermeasure to his brooding, exacting new associate. By morning, he could be setting a stonemason’s broken arm at the construction site, and by evening, he might be smoothing Thomas’s way through a high society party. He was always on hand for coffee, for negotiations, for cocktail hours, and to be the friendly ear it seems Thomas Gallier never had.
Thomas Gallier tried to refuse that friendly ear. He made repeated attempts to keep his and Andrew’s relationship strictly professional. However, Thomas Gallier could not remain an island forever.
Certainly not with a man like Dr. Andrew Samson in his life.
And certainly not when Evelyn Cross walked through the doors of The Empire.