Chapter Eight #2
“Oh no, no, please can I come in?” Polly asked in a rush of a whisper, looking behind herself, and looking even more fearful as she did.
When they’d hurried Polly through the door and barred it against whoever she was fleeing, they were shocked to discover that it was Polly’s mother she’d fled.
“If she knew I was here…oh, you mustn’t tell her,” the girl said in an agonized whisper, looking from Hannah to Peggy, who stood around her in their white nightdresses and with their long hair unbound, looking like two distracted angels hovering about a junior member of their heavenly choir.
“No, of course, certainly not,” Hannah assured her, before she asked hesitantly, “Umm, but what is it that we mustn’t tell her?”
“It’s about my doublet—for Fauntleroy…” Polly said, producing it from beneath her night robe and then hanging her head until her black sausage curls covered over her heated face, “I tore it again.”
“Why, but that’s nothing, nothing at all, my dear,” Peggy said at once, inspecting the split seam in the side of the bright blue doublet. “ ‘Tis the work of a moment, I can run it up right now, if you want to wait.”
Hannah smiled at Peggy over Polly’s bent head, thinking about the crystalline purity of a child’s conscience, when Polly added in a choked, tear-glutted voice, “Won’t do any good. It’ll only tear again. I bind tight as I can, but they’re getting bigger every day.”
It took only a moment for the women with her to realize what “they” were, and then they both stared down at the heavily ruffled front of Polly’s robe. And since there was nothing to be seen, neither knew what to say.
“They get bigger every day, I swear it,” Polly cried in anguished tones.
Then she said tearfully, “I’m fifteen, though Mama tells everyone twelve.
But I’m small for my age, and Mama’s small there so she thought I’d be, but I’m not anymore.
She’d kill me for sure if she knew I was here, but I knew you’d know sooner or later, because you sew my clothes, Peggy, and you’d mention something to Miss Hannah, and everyone knows Miss Hannah is sharp as can be.
So I waited until Mama was asleep and the halls were quiet…
Can you make the doublet bigger or something, because it’s not that I’m a coward or a complainer, like Mama says, but it hurts to bind them so tight.
Truly it does. Can you do anything, please? ”
Hannah and Peggy looked at each other.
“Surely, if you told Kyle…?” Hannah began, but Polly looked up wild-eyed and cried, “Oh no! We need this job! It’s only for a few more weeks, like Mama says, oh please,” she pleaded. “I’m scared to even talk about it, the walls in this hotel are so thin, but what else can I do?”
Peggy nodded and went to get her measuring tape and sewing box. “Let’s have a look,” she said when she returned to Polly’s side. “Come then, we’re all females here, and I can’t sew for what I can’t see.”
She’d only meant for Polly to open her robe, but with the trusting literalness of youth, Polly removed her robe, and averting her head, quickly undid the drawstring on her nightgown, pulling it down to show two small, firm, uplifted breasts.
They were not half so big to the other women’s eyes as they were to Polly’s own, but upon seeing them, both the older women remembered the pride and confusion they’d felt when they’d first noticed the change in their own bodies.
And seeing Polly wince as Hannah gently drew her gown up to cover them again, they both recalled the exquisite sensitivity of those newly formed breasts.
Peggy put down her measuring tape, “I’ll let it out, make a double seam, and an extra yoke,” she said in very businesslike tones as she sat to begin the repairs.
“I don’t see why we can’t just forget the belt, too, do you?” Hannah added.
“Aye, long and boxlike, it’ll be smart as paint,” Peggy assured Polly.
“Now,” she said, “you get on back to your room, and I’ll have this by morning.
Then you get your other costumes to me, and just see how I alter them.
No one will be the wiser. But don’t bind so tight anymore,” she gestured to Polly’s chest with her needle, “you hear? Or you’ll have pancakes by the time you’re twenty. ”
Hannah began laughing, and then, for a wonder, so did Polly, and Peggy joined in, so that it was a few minutes before they could let her go back to her room.
“Thank you, oh thank you,” Polly said fervently, as Hannah opened the door. “How can I thank you?”
“Hush, no need,” Hannah said, “but be quiet, we don’t want to wake the neighbors.”
Polly grew still, poised on the doorstep, “Who’s next door?” she asked fearfully.
“I’ve no idea,” Hannah whispered, “but actresses have a bad enough name. Let’s not make it worse with late-night carousing.”
“Oh,” Polly said with relief. “I thought it was one of the troupe, or something. I’ll go. And thank you.”
“That mother,” Peggy said firmly when Hannah had closed the door, “should be shot, she should.”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said, as she climbed into her bed. “What would they do if Kyle fired them now? How would they get home? Poor Polly’s womanly charms are an inconvenience and a danger to her—but then, I suppose every unprotected woman’s are.”
Peggy put down her sewing and stared at Hannah. She wanted to refute every painful word she’d just heard, but then picked up her needle again and shook her head, because she couldn’t.
The first show went like clockwork, in that it seemed mechanical people were performing in it—or so, at least, Kyle said afterward.
“We got enough applause,” a singer heatedly rebutted him.
“They even threw coins!” another put in.
“That crowd,” Kyle said laconically from where he leaned against a table in the backstage of the saloon theater, where he held the post-performance conference, “would cheer anything they could focus on. Which wouldn’t be much.
Anything would please them. We must be better than anything, so we draw audiences, not just entertain those too drunk to stagger away from the bar when the performance begins.
That is the purpose of this tour. If I’d wanted good enough for a saloon, I wouldn’t have bothered handpicking the finest cast I could. ”
Several of his performers felt his words fall like warm rain upon their parched pride, but the singer spoke up plaintively again, “It’s not our fault, since Bill and Hildy left last night and took John with them, we sound no-count as a chorus.”
“Odd,” Kyle commented. “I didn’t know that.
I’d think the five of you could cope. How many does it take to make harmony?
I’ve heard barbershop quartets that sounded more than adequate, why, I do believe that Mr. Handel’s great Messiah only requires four soloists—but then, I’m not a singer, so how should I know?
What do you think, Miss Flora?” he asked his featured female singer.
Miss Flora, very well aware that if anymore of her chorus left, she might as well begin packing, too, said at once, “I thought we sounded fine. But—perhaps a bit dispirited…?”
“Ah. Just so!” Kyle said, slipping from the table he’d perched upon to stand and face them.
“The key to any performance, and all; spirit. I’d hoped we’d do so well here, we’d have Aspen awaiting our arrival with bated breath,” he sighed, neglecting to mention that if they didn’t do well enough to be booked for an extra week here, he’d that much less money to pay for their room and board in the town he’d have to play before Aspen.
With the inspiring thought of even his diminished troupe eating their heads off without working for a week, he urged them, “With spirit, my friends, we can become a legend in Leadville in our own time! Why, with the amount of cheering and laughter and wild applause we could generate, to spill out from behind these swinging doors like radiant light upon the streets of town, we could make those leaving the Tabor across the street jealous of what they’d missed, and vow to visit us the very next night.
No, you hadn’t thought of that, had you?
I thought not,” he said as he saw the faces around him brightening, “so I suggest you do now. And that will be all I’ll ask of you for tonight. ”
As they rose and gathered their things in order to leave, he added negligently, “…Except for Little Polly, if you please. And you. Miss Hannah.”
But four people remained after the others had gone: Peggy, standing a bit aside, fussing with her workbasket as though she’d a reason to, and Mrs. Jenkins, of course, as usual, took the invitation to Polly as one for herself as well.
“Only a thought,” Kyle said lightly. “No need to look so defensive, ma’am,” he added to Mrs. Jenkins, to get her chin down a notch, “but I find Fauntleroy a bit daunting for Miss Lottie’s repertoire, ah—please let’s keep that betwixt ourselves, ma’am, eh?
” he added, with the warmest smile they’d ever seen light his dark face, to the point that Mrs. Jenkins colored in pleasure, and she looked, for an instant, like the girl her Polly was.
“And The Drunkard,” he mused, “though it elicits much applause, is perhaps not the happiest choice for the venues in which we presently play—or so, at least, the proprietors tell me. A man feels a bit awkward, I understand, ordering another drink, when he’s just seen a playlet in which a drunken father is responsible for the death of a little angel like our Polly, here.
It is, I’ll grant, a problem,” he said on a sigh, as Hannah’s eyes widened, because she’d never seen any man in the audience do more than wipe his eyes before he’d ordered another.
She’d heard bartenders say the play was better than pretzels for business.
Temperance leaders might adore The Drunkard, but so did every drunkard, since they always thought the moral applied to every other man but the drinking man watching it, as everybody in the theater knew.