Chapter Eleven #3
Long before their train was to leave for New York, Nelson DeWitt showed everyone his new leaflets.
He’d paid a great sum to have them made up in Denver, but even at that, he said, it cost less than it would have in New York, and they’d just been delivered to him.
He’d a stack of thin, ten-page brochures, with his picture on the front cover, entitled, “Nelson DeWitt, An American Thespian.” He was privately thrilled with them, but said he needed to get everyone’s opinion before he could be sure they were good enough to give away to directors, producers, and fans.
That was the only polite way he could be sure his fellow performers all got a good look at them, and took a sample apiece.
A man never knew where his next job was coming from, after all.
Hannah thought they were dreadful, and so exclaimed as she leafed through one, “Oh, how wonderful. You look so…ennobled as Hamlet, Nelson, you really do. I’d no idea you ever played him. Nor Charles Barlow in ‘School for Scandal’!” she cried, seeing the next photo, “I am impressed!”
She was only impressed at how badly he looked, affecting the same, jut-jawed pose in each picture, although he wore different costumes in each.
Each photograph faced a page of selected reviews.
He was a far better actor than the stiff, postured pictures hinted at, but he’d paid a fortune for the brochures, and they were done, so what could she say? Burn them?
“Yes, well,” he said with pleasure, looking over her shoulder as avidly as if he’d never seen them, “everybody’s saying publicity’s the newest thing.
The girls can get their pictures on cigarette cards and chocolate boxes, but even men are making their faces familiar these days.
They’re putting out decks of stage playing cards with theatrical faces now, too, just thought I’d get a self-start this way.
A man’s got to move with the times, and a picture is worth a thousand words—though I’ve got those, too—in the reviews. ”
And all those thousand words say the wrong thing, Hannah thought sadly, because although the camera didn’t lie, it couldn’t act as well as Nelson could.
She flipped through the leaflet, seeing how the camera kept cheating Nelson, robbing him of his living grace and charming smile, emphasizing instead the narrow shoulders and weak chin she’d never really noticed before, and she asked, “May I keep one, please?”
Soon after, Maybelle and her gentleman tenor announced that they’d heard of a Patience being done in Chicago, and so they’d be leaving the company at the Aspen train station, not at Grand Central Depot in New York. Two dancers decided to go with them and try their luck.
The day after that, Frank Dupree, their resident villain, collected his mail, and after he’d read it, announced that he’d be leaving the troupe when they got to New York, and taking the next train up to Buffalo.
Where, he said with not so much of a twitch of his dark mustache, he was himself going to be married—and then, begin work with his father-in-law in the lumber business.
For good, and forever, he said, the look in his eyes forbidding any jests, because he’d have a family to support, and her family felt, as well he knew, that he couldn’t do it as an actor.
There was a long, shocked silence after he’d spoken. He received hasty pats on the back from the men, and hurried hugs and quick kisses from the ladies, as they tried to hide their sobs and tears. Then they hastened away from him. They acted as though a dear friend had died. But so he had, to them.
Three days after she’d begun it, Peggy’s wedding dress was done, and she insisted that she had time, between performances and meetings with Royal, to sew a fine new one for Hannah to wear to her wedding. And heedless of Hannah’s protests, began it.
The next night. Gray tried to get Hannah to come out with him for the fourth time since Thanksgiving, and this time she’d an even better excuse than the other times, because she had to help Peggy finish the dress.
The night the troupe gave their farewell performance, they took their bows, then went out and drank and wept and told each other and themselves the usual lies about their future plans.
But they didn’t stay out too late, because they knew there was a wedding in the morning they had to attend, before they got on the train to make the long trip home.
Royal and Peggy sat at a separate table and talked in low voices—that was, when they stirred themselves from their dazed content to do more than hold hands.
Gray sat at a long table with all the remaining troupe, and joked and sympathized and kept everyone such good company that Hannah couldn’t claim he was her escort more than he was anyone else’s.
She stole glances at his hard profile every now and again, as often as she caught him watching her, and was rewarded with his widest smile when he caught her at it.
But in all, he was behaving exactly as she’d asked him to.
So she’d nothing to complain about but cruel fate, and she’d done that often enough in the past; so it was hard to know why it was so hard to swallow whenever she thought of all she’d be leaving the next day.
Weddings present reminded people of weddings past, she decided, and tried to let it go at that, even though she knew very well she was lying.
It was long after everyone had said good night, when she’d slipped into her nightgown and was staring out the hotel window at a crescent moon so close she thought she could reach out and hang her hat on it, that Peggy spoke to her about more than wedding plans and dresses, at last.
“Hannah, dearest,” Peggy said from the depths of her adjoining bed, and from her hesitant voice, Hannah feared she’d talk about good-byes. She sighed, because she really thought she couldn’t, not now, not tonight, not just yet.
“May I ask you a question?” Peggy asked softly. “I know I ought not, for all I want to, but you’re my best friend, even if my friends from New York were here, you’d be, you know.”
Hannah was touched and proud. Until Peggy added, “I suppose you could say ‘tis the sort of thing I should ask my mother, but it isn’t, I promise you. Och, well, she told me all a girl has to know. But she told it fast and turned her head away as she did, and I don’t know to this day which of us was more embarrassed by it, and her having been with child more times than I’ve fingers on my two hands. ”
Peggy chuckled, but Hannah’s heart grew colder, anticipating what was coming.
“I know that part of it,” Peggy said, “and I trust Royal knows what I might not. But I want to know more than the way of it, plain and simple like my mother told me. I want to know how to make him happy with it. And that’s never a thing she told me, ah, well, I suppose she couldn’t, could she?
Even if she knew…but you’ve been married, Hannah dear, and I thought…
“You don’t have to tell me word for word,” Peggy said, the sudden thought making her sit straight up in bed.
“I’m not after embarrassing you, or me. But I— I’m a plain dab of a girl, Hannah, that I am and that I know,” she said, cutting off anything Hannah might have protested, “and he’s everything any girl would want. And so good to me.
“Why, when he first asked me to wed him,” Peggy said in dreamy accents, “I didn’t say yes right off.
I wanted to, for all I haven’t known him long.
I’ll never know him better. There’s no doubting he’s the one for me.
But I knew my obligations. It broke my heart, but I had to tell him my family needed the money I was making.
Never think he only offered me money to send to them each week— as if that wasn’t more than enough!
No, not he. No, he said he’d welcome them coming to live with us, every blessed one of them.
He said the house was big enough and could always be made bigger; the boys could help out, and the West needed women—even if my sisters aren’t old enough to be women, and my poor mother’s neither a widow nor a wife, still that way I’d always have company.
I was so happy—but then I recalled the way of things at home, and asked him if there was a problem with the Irish here, too.
He laughed and said, ‘Yes—there’s not enough of them. ’
“There never was a better man,” Peggy vowed, “or a luckier girl. But I…I’m more than grateful to him.
When he kisses me, I…ah, Hannah, there’s got to be more to it than what my mother said.
I see those scarlet women and saloon girls, and I know they know.
He’s promised to be faithful to me, and I believe it, but I don’t want him regretting it.
I want him to have the best. And you, you are my best friend, and you were a married lady.
I’ll be a married woman tomorrow—and though I want to be a lady, I want him to be satisfied…
Please, can you tell me anything I ought to know? ”
Hannah lay very still. What should she say?
Her own hard-earned truth? That nature knows nothing of love, and so for all the love in the human heart, still sometimes the body cannot follow the heart?
But from all the reading she’d done in all her medical books, she knew that was only once in a thousand, thousand times.
She’d speak from her dreams then, and not her experience. Peggy, too, deserved the best.