Authors: Dara Horn
J
ACOB HAD WORRIED, AS HE RETURNED TO HIS CHEAP ROOMING
house and changed his suit in preparation for a society evening, that he would attract more attention than he might want at the Cary sisters’ ball. Except for his own wedding, he hadn’t been to any sort of party since before the war, and his wedding had hardly been a society event. He peered into the dirty mirror on the wall of his rented room, observing the long red scars that radiated from the patch that covered his missing eye, examining how deeply his shoulders hunched as he leaned onto his cane. How could he make any kind of society appearance, looking the way he looked now?
He arrived at half past eight, both out of fear of being the first guest and out of adherence to the Manhattan society stricture instilled in him before the war—that only persons of no consequence have the naïveté to arrive on time. He didn’t know, then, that the New York custom of arriving “fashionably late” was actually the sole invention of August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ New York agent and the great playboy of the circles to which his parents aspired. If Belmont had remained, as he was initially destined, a rabbinical student in Bavaria named Schoenberg, then no one in New York would have ever felt that appearing on time was a sign of social weakness. Richmond society, Jacob immediately discovered, had remained untouched by his influence. At half past eight, he entered the Cary sisters’ home to find the party well underway, the enormous front hall crowded with people dancing and laughing as musicians played the most upbeat tunes. As he looked around the room, he saw that all of his fears about high society were entirely misplaced.
He had nothing to be ashamed of with his eye patch and cane at the Cary sisters’ starvation ball, because there was barely a man there who had all of his limbs. As he entered the room, bumping his elbows into arms that stopped at the elbow or higher, he saw that the One-Legged Orchestra—a lively string quartet, exhibited on the exceedingly grand and wide staircase landing that served as a dramatic stage in the enormous marble-tiled front hall—was, as advertised, composed entirely of one-legged musicians, performing proudly in their Rebel army caps. There were a few able-bodied men here and there, most of them either old or dressed in officers’ uniforms. But the hobbled and the crippled ruled the room, perching on stools and chairs that were scattered around the dance floor. The one-armed men were dancing with ladies who gracefully endured their flapping sleeves, while the men with crutches each attracted their own share of ladies who gathered at their sides. Everyone was in the highest of spirits; if anyone knew of the horrifying possibility Benjamin had mentioned to Jacob that afternoon, no one let on. A slave approached him, holding out a platter of wineglasses full of white wine. He took one and had already brought it to his lips before he noticed that what he thought was wine was nothing but water, dyed a slight golden color by filth. He discreetly poured it into a houseplant. But when he looked around the room, he saw that the other guests were holding their glasses full of dirty water, toasting one another with them. It was all an elaborate game, a dream. He was still distracted by this delirious scene when two blond young ladies, one tall and one short, approached him, smiling. At first Jacob looked behind him, unable to believe that they could be smiling at him.
“Good evening, sir,” the taller one said. Both of them, he noticed, were the sort of women who reminded him of pieces of straw: flat blond hair, pale pink complexions, blank smiles, and figures straighter than his own. But he was hardly in a position to be critical of anyone’s looks. “I do hope you won’t mind if we take the liberty of introducing ourselves. It’s always a pleasure to see new faces. My name is Antonia, and this is my sister Imogene,” she said. Imogene curtsied, and blushed. “We’re cousins of the Carys,” Antonia added. Face powder, it seemed, had become a luxury item; the two sisters had made up for it by scrubbing their skin so brightly that they almost shone. They looked at him, smiling, anxious.
Never in his life had Jacob been approached so directly by women; it had always been his burden to chase after them himself, and it seemed to him that the ladies had always been trained to be pursued, not the reverse. But here only the women were able-bodied enough to follow anyone around a room. He adjusted his cane, and bowed. “A pleasure, ladies. My name is Jacob.” He had thought for an instant of using an alias, but decided against it. Perhaps Benjamin was part of these circles as well. But he hoped they wouldn’t ask for his surname, in case he needed to reserve a way out.
They didn’t. “Jacob, you said?” Imogene asked. The orchestra had stopped playing, but it was still quite noisy in the room.
“Yes, Jacob. Like the patriarch,” he replied, injecting as much drawl as he could into his voice. He had become a master at the accent, if nothing else.
Antonia smiled as she and Imogene curtsied again. Their faces were almost painfully strained by the scrubbing and the smiles; being this carefree with nothing but dirty water at one’s disposal required the utmost effort. “And I see you’ve also been wrestling with angels,” she said.
“Only with the better angels of my nature,” he replied. The sisters laughed. Jacob was flattered, and cheered. It had been years since he had heard a woman laugh.
“Where were you wounded?” Antonia asked.
This, it seemed, had become the latest and most fashionable version of “Where are you from?” He was relieved to have a neutral answer. The command had been right; the constant lying was exhausting. “Mississippi,” he said. “At Holly Springs.”
“Holly Springs!” Antonia cried, and gestured to her sister, whose mouth was hanging open. “Imogene’s husband was captured there! Major Rufus Halliday. Did you know him? She’s quite anxious for any word of him, anything at all.” The two women gaped at him, eager, and suddenly he understood why they had cornered him. Every new face was an excuse for fresh hope, a renewal of delusion.
“No,” he said.
He watched as Imogene’s face fell, her gaze fixed to the floor. “Do—do excuse me, please,” she murmured. She turned and quickly crossed the room, escaping into a corridor. Jacob watched as her fingers fluttered up to her eyes, and felt the space behind his own missing eye throb with someone else’s pain.
Antonia had been scrubbed clean of all empathy. She turned back to him and grinned. “It was worth asking,” she said cheerfully, and turned toward the stage. “Oh, look, there’s Miss Cary.” The one-legged musicians, he saw, were putting away their instruments; some slaves were helping them down from the landing, while others busied themselves with hanging a sort of makeshift velvet curtain over the ordinary doorway at the landing’s back wall. Once the landing was vacated, a thin young woman with a severe blond bun of hair proceeded up to it, where she banged a spoon against her dirty-water-filled wineglass.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “welcome, and thank you all for your generous contributions to Chimborazo Hospital.” The room quieted. “Please make yourselves comfortable. In just a moment, our main performance will begin.”
Glasses clinked as people set them down around the room, the men on crutches settling into their seats. “Miss Van Damme is next,” Antonia whispered to Jacob. “Have you ever seen her perform?”
Sweat beaded underneath his eye patch. But he couldn’t help himself. “Yes,” he said.
“Really!” Antonia gushed. “Everyone says she’s sensational. Is it true?”
“It is,” he said.
Antonia had him by the elbow now, trying to steer him toward the stage. He remembered what Rose had said, and stopped. “Please, go ahead. I would prefer to stay back here,” he said, gesturing toward a row of seats along the side of the room.
“Nonsense,” Antonia said. “I shall stay with you.” Apparently he was now Antonia’s escort for the evening. The prospect revolted him, but his legs gave him no choice. She pulled up a chair and offered it to him, as she herself sat down on a stool beside it. He made his best attempt at a bow to her as he accepted, swallowing his shame at how the roles had been reversed. All the men were ladies now.
“Of course, her reputation precedes her,” Miss Cary was saying as he took his seat. “Many of us are privileged to remember her performances before the war, from her debut in Washington as Ophelia in
Hamlet
when she was only fourteen years old, to her appearance as ‘The Illusionist’s Assistant’ here in Richmond. Since her return to the stage, her audiences have only become more devoted as she delights us in our darkest hour, performing as actress, illusionist, and conjurer. We are particularly honored to have her with us for tonight’s special performance, where she will provide us with a demonstration of some of the tricks of the escape artist’s trade—a trade which Miss Van Damme is known to have mastered, both onstage and elsewhere.” A laugh and a cheer rose among the guests. Miss Cary waited patiently, smiling, attempting to speak and finally giving up as the cheer spread. At last she threw out her arms, a broad gesture of welcome to the guests. “Without further ado, it’s my pleasure to present to you this evening’s ‘Escape Artist’—the exceedingly talented Miss Eugenia Van Damme!”
Miss Cary stepped aside, proceeding down the stairs and into the crowd. The newly hung curtain behind the landing stirred, and everyone with at least one leg rose as Jacob’s wife stepped onto the makeshift stage.
She was vastly more beautiful than he had remembered her. Time and suffering had left their impressions on her face, but the effect was to deepen her dark eyes and soften her mouth, broadening her disarming smile. Her hair hung in dark wild curls around her shadowed throat. She was wearing a red dress with a low décolletage; the pregnancy and birth had apparently protected her from the gauntness he had noticed in Rose. If the baby had changed her figure, it was only to render her body more spectacular than before, less like a girl’s and more like a woman’s, her hips more emphatic, her breasts more pronounced. Jacob sat captivated, barely breathing. Every moment that he had ever spent with her flooded back over him as though the past two years had never been. He could feel her hair between his fingers, taste her skin against his tongue, sense his hands shaking as he struggled to untie her corset, remembering the last time he touched her naked body, his last night in their married bed, the night before he fled. To think she had been his! But now he was nothing but a spectator, no different from any other man in the room, drooling over an unattainable star. It would be impossible even to catch her eye. He watched as she walked with grace toward the edge of the landing. She raised her arms out toward the guests, and he squinted his remaining eye and saw that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. She made a sweeping curtsy before the audience, her arrival alone warranting the crowd’s applause. It was fortunate that Jacob was crippled, because if he weren’t, he would have leapt onto the stage and carried her away.
“I was told that she was stunning,” Antonia whispered in his ear. “But I rather think she looks a bit Oriental; wouldn’t you agree?”
It was a euphemism he hadn’t heard since his old society days in New York. He would have laughed, but he was too enchanted. “A bit,” he whispered back, relieved when Antonia finally turned away from him, scrutinizing the figure on stage. He stared at Jeannie, his living wife, and held his breath, suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude to God. It was all he could do to keep himself from weeping as she began to speak.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for welcoming me here tonight.”
He heard her actress’s voice, the voice she had used the moment they first met:
Gladly, Mr. Rappaport. But only if you will allow me to repay you.
For an instant it was as if time had not passed, as if he had just stepped into the front room of the Levys’ house—seeing, for the very first time, Jeannie and her three sisters curtsying before him, standing on the precipice of their family’s destruction. But now he watched, and began to imagine, for the first time, how Jeannie had managed to escape.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
the art of escape is quite complex, involving many different skills which I hope to demonstrate for you this evening. But once one masters it, it is possible to find one’s way out of almost any situation. And perhaps some of you will even take from my demonstration a measure of hope for these dark times.” The audience began to cheer again, and Jeannie waited patiently until they had stopped before she continued, producing a fan almost out of thin air and waving it gently at her side. “Now the phrase ‘escape artist’ tends to suggest a rather pedestrian set of skills. Most of you are probably expecting me to tuck myself into a barrel or a steamer trunk and simply pop out of it—as if every smuggler on the Potomac hasn’t been doing precisely that for the past four years.” The crowd laughed as Jacob remembered folding himself into the barrel that took him on his first journey to hell. He listened as Antonia giggled, aware of how his scars made it difficult for anyone to notice how he blushed. “Of course I wouldn’t dream of disappointing you, and I do promise to pop out of a barrel at least once during this performance.” The guests laughed again, and he could feel how they were warming to her, leaning toward her, eager to see where she might lead them. “But the technique that any escape artist must master first isn’t the art of escaping from physical constraints, but of escaping from mental ones—that is, liberating oneself from the expectations of others.” The guests were silent now, captivated. Jacob could barely breathe.
Jeannie smiled, waving her fan. She had taken ownership of the landing, pacing across it and sweeping her wide skirts along its worn carpet. “I see that we are privileged to have many soldiers and veterans with us this evening,” she announced, leaning forward as she gazed out at the crowd. “Perhaps some of you might be able to assist me in my demonstration of the escape artist’s trade. Please tell me, gentlemen, if you will: are any of you experienced at guarding prisoners?”
A man at the front of the room raised his hand. Jacob couldn’t see him well from where he was seated, but when Jeannie gestured to him, Jacob heard him clear his throat, his voice tight with pride. “Yes, miss,” the man announced. “I was serving at Andersonville down in Georgia until last Easter.” Jacob held his breath. Even in New York, the rumors about the prison camp at Andersonville had been widespread, and frightening. Apparently those who returned from there had come back as living skeletons, if they returned at all.