Chapter Fourteen
But pressure has never broken me. In fact, it fuels me. And the stage, though entirely new, feels like home.
Sure, it’s not a quiet studio, and here I’m asked to jump and kick and dance for all to see, pushing my body to the point where my breath comes as stabbing rasps. But it’s all just performing, really. It’s what I’ve been doing for years. Only now I am allowed to act like I’m alive.
I fall in with the girls in the chorus line the next day at rehearsal as Mr. Scharf and Mr. Martin watch from seats in the fifth row.
I allow my movements to be guided by the plunking of the piano, by the metered steps of the chorus girls all around me.
It comes perfectly naturally to me, so much so that by the end of my hour-long trial rehearsal, Mr. Martin pulls me and Mamma aside and makes an announcement. “All right, part’s yours, Miss T.”
I can barely stanch my elation, so I bite down on my lower lip as he goes on, explaining in a matter-of-fact tone that I’ve got a spot dancing and singing with the chorus.
He doesn’t mince words: I have a month to learn it all before opening night—the songs, the steps, my cues, the costume changes.
My role will be that of the “charming Spanish Maiden,” part of the ensemble, but I do get one dance sequence of my own.
Showtime will be seven o’clock six nights a week, plus matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
At the end of each week, I’ll be paid fifteen dollars.
This in addition to what I’m making as an artists’ model.
Mamma and I will finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief, begin putting some money aside to eventually bring Kit up north to a bigger apartment.
To me, the Casino Theatre is a place of wonder and joy.
Sure, it’s a job. It’s grueling—the rhythms of painting and then unpainting my face, quick changes into complicated and constricting costumes, hot lights on my skin, exhausting steps requiring all my stamina, punishing physical exertion that must always be done with a smile and a song, over and over.
And that’s just rehearsals. Once the show opens, there will be a mercurial crowd to be wooed and won each night.
But none of that feels hard. Being hungry for days on end is hard.
Being cold in the winter when you can’t afford fuel is hard.
Losing the person you love most in the world, selling everything you have, and finding yourself without a home—that’s hard.
The Casino is in the heart of the Broadway theater district, and I’ve walked this city enough to know that there are girls my age working only a few blocks away, in the quarter known as the Tenderloin, filling the brothels and the betting houses—that is hard work, and I know what a short walk it is to get there.
Or just west to Hell’s Kitchen, or down to the Five Points, the slums where even a bed in a brothel would seem a luxury for the girls my age.
When it comes to performing in the theater, I know how to do this.
I know how to become and embody a part. And at least here onstage, I’m not alone.
For the first time in recent memory, I’m surrounded by girls.
My guess is that I’m the youngest, though I don’t breathe a word about my sixteen years to anyone.
But still, it’s a company of girls! After years of solitary work and the loneliness of speaking with only Mamma, maybe now—I allow myself to hope—I might even make a friend or two.
I put everything I have into studying the other girls, watching the ways they speak and sing and move, learning their names.
They all sound so impossibly glamorous: Penny May, Annissa Sweet, Trixie Vaughn—who tells me with half a smirk that she’s only recently joined this company after starring in The High Fly.
“It’s a burlesque,” she says with a wink of her heavily kohled eye, and from the way Mamma blanches when I ask her what burlesque means, I can tell that it’s not something on which Mr. Comstock and his Society would look favorably.
I make my first friends with a pair that poses as sisters, Dinah and Dolly.
“The Goodhue sisters,” everyone calls them, inseparable as they are.
They like to rouge their cheeks a fiery shade of red, not too far off from the matching red hairstyles that make them easy to spot instantly in any room.
But as I study them up close, I begin to suspect that they are in fact a mother-and-daughter duo; perhaps they, like me, are here with Mr. Martin’s admonition not to offer up any unnecessary truths.
Dolly looks young and is a chorus dancer.
Dinah, who appears to be in her mid-thirties, has a bigger role, singing a solo at the end of the first act.
And by golly, can she sing. She’s got a pair of pipes that send vibrations through my own chest when she hits her high notes.
As I watch her and the others, I feel inspired to be good like them.
More than good. Perfect. I want to be perfect.
And the only way to make that happen is to pour everything I have into practice.
I’ve got a few weeks to master the steps and nail my role before the curtain goes up on opening night. Mamma has mercifully been able to put off my modeling work for a few weeks, informing the artists that I have the flu and need to rest to regain my strength. They accept this for now.
So, with my days cleared for the first time in years, I give everything I’ve got to the stage.
When I take my spot in between the other girls and that orchestra strikes up its first jaunty notes, it feels like a current begins to pulse through me.
The music pulls like the strings of a marionette.
I imagine that the sea of empty chairs is filled with our eager audience, and I dive deeper into my role.
Soon enough I can feel how my legs grow stronger, my breath comes easier, my lungs feel less squeezed. At first my calves and thighs would ache each morning when I’d rise from bed, but now I can hop right out, able and limber. I can do this, I think, and I find that I really do believe it.
With just a few weeks to go, the set and costumes begin to appear.
It’s all so wild: The bright panels of painted wood and silk, made to look like a lush tropical island.
The costumes as colorful and rich as jungle flowers.
One night, as I’m sitting before the long row of mirrors in our crowded dressing room backstage, about to dab my cheeks with some of the ever-present rouge that all the girls avail themselves of, I see Dinah appear over my shoulder in the mirror’s reflection. “Here, you need this, kid.”
I swivel in my seat to see what she’s holding out. “What is it?”
“Poudre de riz,” she replies with a playful flourish, then quickly clarifies: “Rice powder. Gives you that porcelain look that all the gents want. Then you put the rouge on over it. And don’t skimp.
” One look at Dinah’s flaming cheeks, and anyone could tell she certainly takes her own advice to heart.
She goes on, saying, “It may look like too much in the mirror, but think about the fella in the back row who wants to see your cheeks with that rosy blush—it’s got to be big and bold.
Everything in the theater has to be over-the-top. ”
One week before opening night, I enter the final phase of my initiation into the backstage alchemy that will turn me from Evelyn Talbot of Tarentum into Broadway’s Spanish Maiden.
Powder, rouge, lip salve, half a dozen spritzes of perfume.
The communal dressing room is a bouquet of lively scents, colors, and sounds.
It’s a place of art, not entirely unlike the studios of Mrs. Dawson or Mr. Gibson or any other artist, only here the tubes of oil paint are replaced with tubes of lipstick.
The paintbrushes are replaced with cosmetic brushes.
The canvases are the gorgeous faces and lithe bodies of the youthful girls who gad about the space, preening before an entire wall of mirrors framed in white circular bulbs.
I love it. I feel alive in the long rectangular dressing room, where the perfumed air thrums with the giddy energy and preshow jitters that spill out of each girl with laughter, boasting, encouragement.
The grueling rehearsals that lead up to our opening night turn us girls into a team, maybe even a family.
“Here, need a hand with those buttons?” Dinah is at my back in the dressing room a few minutes before we are to take our places for the dress rehearsal.
“Actually, yeah, I do. Thanks.” It’s now one day before opening night, my first time running through the entire show—any show—in costume.
I know the dance steps, my cues, the songs.
I know how to work in costume. But do I know how to do all of it together, all at the same time? For a live audience? We’ll see.
To become the Spanish Maiden, I slip into a wide peasant skirt that cinches tight at my waist, with scarves of emerald and purple, gold and scarlet, draped over it.
My frothy white blouse shows off my shoulders and neck, a row of buttons running up the back.
As Dinah finishes fastening the top one, she gives me a long look in the mirror and makes a clucking sound with her tongue.
“What a find Mr. Martin’s got on his hands,” she says, winking at me in the mirror’s reflection.
“The fellas are going to fall to their knees when they see ya, kid.”
—
And then, somehow, opening night is here.
A month has passed in a blur of work and memorization and practice and excitement.
And though we are prepared, all of us feel nervous—I can see it in the pulled-tight faces backstage as we put the finishing touches on our thick makeup. But is anyone as nervous as me?
The house, empty during our rehearsals, starts to fill as the theater doors open.
From where we stand backstage, the audience is just a low and distant buzz—the sounds of the expectant crowd filing in.
And they keep coming: men in top hats and smartly tailored suits, women with gloves up to their elbows, all manner of jewels brightening their limbs and upswept hair.
I can’t help but peek at them from backstage, hidden in my spot in the wings.
They all look so fine. All of them are theater regulars.
How will we measure up—how will I measure up?
I wonder if they will spot me in the chorus line and recognize that I shouldn’t be there, that I’m just filling the spot that another, more qualified girl vacated a month out from opening night.
The thought makes my nerves twist, white-hot and electric.
I stand motionless, in the shadowed wings of the theater, helpless to do anything but watch them.
Deep breaths, I remind myself. The air moves in and out but does not cool off the electric wires writhing in my belly.
I shut my eyes, thinking maybe if I can sing quietly to myself, I’ll be able to settle my nerves.
For some reason the words that fly into my mind in that frantic moment are those of an old nursery rhyme Daddy used to sing to me and Kit.
“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.” I imagine the white coil writhing like a snake in my tummy, and then I visualize it unwinding, and then I send it slithering away. Go pick on someone else, I tell the monster in my belly. But then a real voice pulls me from my reverie.
“Hey, kid, look, first time you’re in a playbill, right?
” Dinah is gliding toward me, looking calm as can be, perfectly bedecked for the role of “Island Dancer.” Dolly, at her side, is done up in a costume as colorful as a tropical flower.
I see that Dinah’s holding something in her hands, and I glance down at it: “Playbill.”
But my stomach clenches as I scan the list of names and roles. “I don’t see my name.”
“Here you are.” Dinah points to the words: “Spanish Maiden.” And then, right beside it: “Flossie the Fuss.”
“Flossie the Fuss?” I say, my face creasing in confusion—and annoyance—as I look up at my friend. “What on earth?”
“Oh, Mr. Scharf does that all the time. Why, you think Trixie was born with that name? Heck, our last name ain’t Goodhue; it’s Schwannstein. But we’re theater gals. We do what we gotta do to sell tickets.”
This irks me, and I chew on my lower lip a moment before I say, “I’ll sell tickets for Mr. Scharf and Mr. Martin and anyone else who wants to give me a chance.
” The nerves of just a moment earlier have evaporated.
“But I won’t do it pretending to be somebody else.
I’m Evelyn Talbot, and I can tell you that after tonight, I’ll be listed in the playbill with my name. ”
Dolly lets out a low whistle, looking to her mother—or her sister. And then, with half a grin, she turns back to me and says, “Look out, Mr. Martin! New kid’s got some spark.”
“More like sparkle,” I say. And I make a decision in that moment, as the last few nerves flutter away and a feeling like resolve settles in their place.
I decide that I’ll dazzle them all. I’ll sing and dance and hit every mark.
I’ll kick high, and then I’ll kick even higher.
And I’ll do it all with the brightest smile.
And then, tomorrow, I’ll insist on a reprint of the playbill.
And now, as the stagehand calls out to us—“Time! Places, everybody, places!”—and as Mr. Scharf charges past us one final time, setting a flurry of heeled feet into motion before we each settle onto our marks, I feel the nerves no more.
Deep within me, there burns only white-hot determination to shine even brighter than these blinding Broadway lights.