Chapter Ten #2
“Of course they will. They’re performers. They’re professionals, they’re of the theater….” he said with grandeur, before a small, sad smile touched his lips, and he added, “…and they’re a long way from home.”
John Griffin and Jersey Conrad walked down to the train station and then onto the train that would take them back to New York.
But John was only an extra alto, and the chorus could get along as four, as Kyle had said, as well as with five.
Jersey Conrad had seen his day, and while it had been nice to have another character actor, it was, as Kyle reminded the rest of his diminished troupe: not necessary, merely nice.
The rest stayed. They shrieked, they howled, they said dreadful things and threatened worse, then they grumbled and got back to work.
Just as Kyle said. But they didn’t like it. And Hannah feared worse.
Lottie, for example, Hannah thought as she watched her being dressed for opening night, was not behaving as she ought.
Or rather, Hannah thought, biting her lip, she was behaving as she ought, but not as she usually did, or should, considering how angry she’d been.
Instead, she’d been unusually calm, almost regal, and although subdued, altogether reasonable.
That wasn’t like Lottie, nor was the sudden look of unholy glee Hannah caught every so often in her bright blue eyes.
Now those eyes gazed at Hannah in the dressing- room mirror, and the slow, small smile that grew beneath them chilled Hannah.
“You look beautiful,” Hannah said, to dispel the eerie air of mystery Lottie had grown; for even in her white gauze draperies, sparkling with sequins and gilt, and with all the artificial flowers caught up in her mesh of sparkling, plaited hair, still Lottie looked more a Borgia than a Titania.
Not that Hannah believed Lottie would actually poison Kyle, or even set the theater on fire, like the first wife in the third act of Jane Eyre, but she looked capable of it at this moment.
“Ah, is there anything I can help you with before you go on?” Hannah asked her hesitantly, all too eager to be away from that odd, secretive smile.
“No, no,” Lottie said with amusement, and Hannah exchanged one frowning look with Peggy, who was putting the finishing touches on the costume, before she nodded and left them in the little dressing room so she could be away to wait, and pray.
There was little else to do this late on opening night.
Kyle stalked the backstage, pacing and muttering, attending to last-minute details, and fretting.
Hannah waited, as she’d always done when her parents were on, in the wings with hands folded, watching and wondering, knowing it was too late to do anything but worry.
But tonight she went to the side curtain and peeked out, to see who was in the house.
It was a huge house. There were the usual masses of poorly dressed men, sitting boot to boot, with their hats in their hands.
There was an occasional female among them.
But this time the front seats, the best seats, were taken up by masses of the best dressed men and women she’d seen since she’d left New York.
She scanned the crowd quickly, row by row, and her eye stopped immediately when she came to the third row, front and center.
Royal was there, freshly barbered and in a new suit, with his Stetson on his lap and his long legs crossed.
But the seat beside him was empty. Hannah let her bit of curtain fall and stepped back. She didn’t need to see more.
Lester came out first, as ever, to warm the audience up.
This early in the night, he was still sober, but his antics set the audience to laughing and set the stage for more.
Then their lone magician did his turn and made it brief, because the audience was restive.
The handbills had promised an: “ALL NEW MAGICAL PRODUCTION OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM,” and a rabbit in a hat or a stream of colored handkerchiefs come streaming out of a skinny chap’s pockets didn’t compare to the “SPECTACLE, DRAMA, AND FANTASTICAL SPECIAL EFFECTS” the bills had also promised, in full color, on every lamppost, all over the town.
Little Polly did her new solo song, and even if her voice wasn’t wonderful, her rendition of “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead” was money in the bank, just as Kyle predicted, with any audience.
Not only were the miners and ranch hands clearing their throats, but a few of even the fanciest ladies and gentlemen present were softly sobbing when she was done.
She took a pretty bow, and then raced backstage to get into her costume as Puck—since Harrison Pompey had quit back in Leadville, an inspired notion of Kyle’s had given her the part.
The quartet and Miss Flora came out next and sang old favorites, as well as a few new songs Kyle had picked up in New York, and from listening in the audience at other theaters in Denver.
When the curtains drew shut, they stepped out in front of it to do a few more, so the stagehands could struggle out undercover to push the paper and composition trees and boulders that were to be “Midsummer’s” sylvan setting into place.
Hannah fingered the folds of her costume and sighed as Peggy hurried out to meet her.
With a pair of gauzy wings fastened on her back, and her hair covering her face, she, Peggy, and Mrs. Jenkins would be extra fairies tonight.
And if the remaining dancers who were not pressed into service in other minor roles, fluttered as vigorously as they’d been told to do as they pranced around Titania, no one might notice that there were very few of them in Titania’s court.
But Peggy had no gauzy wings with her. She’d only an expression of sheerest horror on her face.
“She’s not going on!” Peggy cried. “She’s playing dead!”
Lottie was not playing dead, or if she was, she wasn’t playing it very well. But she was playing at something. For she lay back on the couch in the stage manager’s room, all in her spangles and gauze, and moaned, one hand to her alabaster forehead.
“It’s the atmosphere,” Hannah heard her say, as she came hurrying into the room behind Peggy, to see Kyle glowering down at his Titania, while Nelson and Frank, her Oberon and Theseus, crowded around her.
“The height. I have altitude sickness,” Lottie announced.
“My head is reeling, I can’t hardly breathe, I can’t go on, I am ill. ”
“But you never were before…” Nelson said worriedly. Then Frank said, “…Try a glass of iced water, put some on your forehead.” Lester took a flask from his doublet pocket, and offering it to her, said, “One nip and you could dance on top of Old Smokey, I promise.”
“I cahn’t,” Lottie said with dramatic emphasis, “I cahn’t go on tonight.”
“I suppose that I might go on in her stead. I do know the part,” Maybelle announced from where she stood to the side, looking like a great velvet-upholstered couch that was standing on end, for all of Peggy’s artistry with her costume.
But then, the Queen of the Amazons did not have to be svelte.
The startled looks she got from all the assembled actors answered her, and she said defensively, “Well, it was, at least, a constructive thought.”
“No,” Kyle said softly, so softly everyone turned to look at him, “Lottie will go on.”
Lottie shot up to a sitting position. “No, I ain’t gonna,” she said triumphantly, tossing her spangled, flower-strewn hair back from her glittering eyes. “I’m sick as a dog, and nobody’s gonna force me to neither.”
“No,” Kyle said in that same toneless low voice that silenced the other’s exclamations.
“Nobody can, can they? But if you do not, no one will ever, ever ask you to go onstage, anywhere, again. It’s a rule of the business that personal feelings never interfere with our business.
Nor does sickness. Nothing short of death does, actually…
and sometimes I’m not too sure about that either, judging from some performances I’ve seen. ”
The others chuckled, but his next words, spoken in grim, slow accents, stilled them.
“No, Lottie,” Kyle said, staring at her, “we are not seamstresses. Or grocers. Or coal miners or ranchers or shoe clerks or millionaire investors. We are unique among all professions, in that of all the workers in this wide world, wherever we are: what we promise—we deliver. Or we never work in the theater again. If you do not go on this stage tonight, I promise, you will never go on the stage again. It is not just me,” he said into the silent room.
“I need do nothing. When word gets out, and it will, your career will be over.”
The others nodded. He’d said no more, if a great deal more eloquently, than they knew to be the truth.
Lottie looked from face to face, her eyes wide and uncertain.
Then she rose from the couch and began dragging off her costume with such rough hands that Peggy sprang forward to assist her, to save the costume.
“It doan make no difference,” she said, tossing her head.
“I got a gennelman in the audience waiting for me. A rich gennelman, a very rich one I met back in Denver, and he follid me here,” she spat at Kyle.
“He’s staying at the Jerome, too, but then he’s got a house and a carriage and a diamond necklace with a pair of matching earrings like you never seen waiting for me back in Denver.
And so whad do I care? E-nunciate,” she spat at Hannah.
“E-mote,” she shouted at Kyle. “Not me, no more. I played the rat- holes ‘cause I thought I was gonna go big here in Aspen. An’ whaddya know? I’m back inna rathole.
But not fah long. You can take your theah-ter and shove it, ‘Mister Theahter,’ ” she cried. “I’m through!”