Epitaph (6 page)

S
HE DID NOT TELL HER PARENTS SHE'D QUIT PIANO.
She and Dora Hirsch and their friend Agnes Stern spent the time holed up in Dora's room instead. Talking about boys. Poring over illustrated fashion magazines. Studying hats and sleeves and bustles, not music. Or rhetoric or history or mathematics. She never mentioned how she and Dora screamed with excitement when Agnes arrived one afternoon bearing a newspaper announcing that the French actress Sarah Bernhardt would tour America, or how thrilled she was when she realized that she would soon be breathing the same air as the extraordinary Jewess who'd set the world on fire with her boldness and courage on stage.

Soon, however, everyone in the country was talking about Bernhardt. Sadie herself filled a scrapbook with dozens of articles celebrating the Divine Sarah's extravagance, her sexual exploits, her genius, her madness. Bernhardt slept in a coffin. She took lovers. She made no effort to conceal her son's illegitimacy. She traveled with a cheetah, a parrot, three dogs, and a monkey named Darwin. She wore trousers when the very word was unspeakable in polite company. She dismissed bourgeois respectability with the breezy declaration,
“Quand même!”
It's all the same to me!

Condemned by anti-Semites and snobs, Bernhardt said and did
anything she pleased, and she didn't just get away with it. She was adored for it!

Bernhardt allowed her astonishing, springlike hair to burst out all around her face; Sadie's own tight curls became a point of pride. Beneath strong dark brows, Bernhardt's magnetic eyes were rimmed by dark lashes; Sadie spent hours gazing into her mirror, practicing intense, dramatic, mysteriously tragic glances. Bernhardt was thin and her breasts were small, like Sadie's still were. The ideal beauty of their times was voluptuous and well-endowed, but—
Quand même!—
the Divine Sarah was the object of every man's lust in Paris, London, and New York. “Kwand meem,” Sadie would murmur, imagining herself equally desirable, hearing applause in her imagination.

AMERICA HAD HARDLY RECOVERED
from Bernhardt fever when the nation was stricken with a new mania. Gilbert and Sullivan's
H.M.S. Pinafore
spread like a contagion from the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York to the Adelphi in San Francisco, infecting thousands of community stages in between. There were children's productions, Catholic versions, Yiddish translations, all-male and all-black and minstrel performances. Suddenly everyone was whistling “We sail the ocean blue,” or humming “Poor little Buttercup.” Just say the word “never,” and you'd be drawn into the patter. “What, never?” “No, never!” “What,
never
?” “Well . . . hardly ever!”

When the Pauline Markham
Pinafore
Troupe arrived in San Francisco, it didn't take much persuasion to get Mrs. Hirsch to accompany Dora, Agnes, and Sadie to a children's half-price matinée. Once was enough for Evelyn Hirsch, but the girls were enthralled and begged to see the operetta again and again. All of them were stagestruck, but when Agnes revealed that Tommy Tucker the Cabin Boy was played by a girl, Sadie was lost.

“You mean she's wearing trousers? Like
Bernhardt
? Agnes, are you sure?”

“I most certainly am.”

“In grand opera,” Dora informed them, “it's called a
Hosenrolle
—a young man played by a contralto in breeches.”

Dora could be a know-it-all.

The next time they went to the theater, Sadie watched for a telltale jiggle beneath the cabin boy's blue jacket that might give a girl away during the sailor's hornpipe. The dancer seemed a bit heavier than when the operetta opened two weeks earlier, but Sadie still couldn't believe it.

“Agnes, you're wrong,” she whispered. “That's a boy.”

“You'll see soon enough. Tommy Tucker is . . .” Agnes dropped her voice and leaned over to say,
“ . . . en famille.”
A lady one row back hissed at them, so Agnes waited a moment before murmuring, “Pauline told me so.”

“Pauline? You mean—?”

“Miss Markham, yes. I met her at a party.” Ignoring the insistent
“Shhh!”
behind them, Agnes bestowed her most momentous news in a dramatic whisper. “They're casting for a new cabin boy at the end of the San Francisco run.”

SNEAKING MONEY FROM THE BAKERY TILL
and skipping school, Sadie returned to the theater twice more that week to check the choreography. Locked in the bakery storeroom, she practiced the hornpipe madly. When she wasn't hopping on one foot or hauling on imaginary ropes or giving charming nautical salutes, she was upstairs in her room, gazing into a hand mirror and working on her “Mysterious and Tragic but Courageous” expression, while making up a story about being an orphan whose lifelong dream was to join the Pauline Markham troupe and travel the world to earn the applause of audiences everywhere—nonsense that rattled right out of her head the moment she stepped through the stage door at the Adelphi.

Surrounded by a chaos of packing crates, costumes, props, and rolled-up canvas scenery, she waited to be noticed, which she was, but
mostly by stagehands who shouted at her to get the hell out of the way.

“Hebe?” a refined baritone asked curiously.

She turned, offended. “I beg your pardon!”

“What part are you auditioning for? Cousin Hebe? The Captain's Daughter? Surely not Dick Deadeye.”

She needed a moment to recognize him. The First Lord of the Admiralty was a pompous old man, and she'd paid little attention to that character. Without the ruddy makeup, the admiral's costume, and talc-whitened hair, the actor was much younger than she would have imagined. He had a gallant bearing and tawny leonine hair sweeping back from the kind of forehead she'd learned to call “lofty” from reading novels.

“Come, child! We sail upon the tide! No time to waste!” he cried with merry urgency before adding in the low tones of intimacy, “I do hope you're not trying out for the role of the Captain's Daughter. Miss Markham is herself a ‘plump and pleasing person,' but she'll die before giving up the lead to play Buttercup.” His face displayed a kindly expression combining equal parts tolerant amusement and reassuring tenderness. “So, if not Dick Deadeye, then . . . ? ”

“Oh. Um, Tommy Tucker. The Cabin Boy.”

“Very wise!” the actor declared with twinkling eyes that hinted of shared mischief. “Randolph Murray,” he said, offering his hand, kissing hers.

Smiling at her flustered pleasure, he bestowed the complete and practiced attention of his intense brown eyes upon the child before him. Dressed like a schoolgirl in a plaid worsted skirt, a navy jacket buttoned over a crisp white blouse. Tightly plaited hair, wrapped round her head in the Dutch fashion. Seventeen, he judged. And a virgin.

I'll have her
, he thought with Richard III's serene confidence,
but I will not keep her long.

Placing a cool finger under her chin, he lifted the girl's face and turned it from side to side, studying her nose. “A daughter of Abraham, I presume.” He could see her wondering if that would help or hurt her
chances. She straightened her back and nodded. A Bernhardt devotee, no doubt. “And your name?”

“Sarah Marcus, sir.”

He quickly moved his finger to her lips. “The Glorious Pauline despises the Divine Sarah. Professional jealousies are rife in our profession,” he confided, knowing she'd be thrilled by that
our.
“Have you a stage name?”

“Well, sir, my first name is really Josephine, but nobody calls me that, and my father always—”

“Oh, but it's perfect! Jo Marcus! Ambiguous! Androgynous! Just the name for a dancer playing Tommy Tucker! Pauline, darling,” he called, pivoting on a heel. “We have an ambitious little girl here! Come and tell me what you think of her.”

Minimally concealed by a silk wrapper that drifted open to reveal impressive amplitude above and below a loosened corset of sturdy linen, the Glorious Pauline Markham was everything the Divine Sarah Bernhardt was not: tall and blond and soft, with a glowing pink complexion that bordered on the florid.

“This is Jo Marcus, darling,” Randolph Murray said smoothly. “She would like to replace Miss McConnell.”

“Ah, yes. The
unfortunate
Miss McConnell.” The Glorious Pauline gazed meaningfully at the Serene Mr. Murray before turning toward the new girl with an expression that was, apparently, quite friendly. “What an
interesting
little girl! Can you dance, interesting little girl?”

“Yes, Miss Markham. I know the hornpipe by heart already.”

“Well? Go ahead,” the actress urged.

“Now? Without music?”

“The show must go on, regardless of circumstance. We play some very primitive venues.”

Hesitantly, she began the dance, but before she'd completed more than the first few steps, Randolph Murray stopped her.

“Jo, dear, we cannot see your legs. Lift your skirt, if you please.”

“Look, Randolph!” Miss Markham cried delightedly. “She's blushing! Isn't that adorable? Rosy little Josie!”

“Theater life requires a certain blithe indifference to bourgeois convention,” Mr. Murray said. “No place for decorum here!”

Miss Markham aimed a downward smile at her own dishabille. “Costume changes in the wings, you know.”

Their unblinking eyes rested upon her. Curious, expectant, skeptical. A good girl would have been frightened, nervous, embarrassed. Then again, a good girl wouldn't have been there at all. And that was how Josephine Sarah Marcus discovered that she wasn't a good girl—that she had never been a good girl, not even when she was six years old, making sailors smile. She
wanted
eyes on her. She wanted an audience all to herself, challenging her, daring her to be worth watching. She wanted to be
seen.

Reaching behind herself, she unbuttoned her skirt and stepped out of it. She pulled off her petticoat as well, tossing garments and modesty away with a careless theatrical gesture that became the first figure of the hornpipe. Jaunty now in her navy jacket and calf-length cotton drawers, she did a boy's dance with a boy's grin that got wider as she saw skepticism become surprise, and surprise turn into approval.

The music was so familiar they heard it in their minds. Even stagehands stopped to watch and clap in time. When she was finished, everyone cheered and she took her first professional bow.

I did it, she thought, breathless and exhilarated. I changed their minds! I made them believe!

An instant later, Mr. Murray shouted, “Back to work, everyone! We've got three hours to make the boat to Santa Barbara!”

Equally brisk, Miss Markham said, “You're hired, Rosy Josie. Go home and pack
one
valise—we've no room for more. Be back here in an hour.”

SHE HAD FOUND HER PROPER ELEMENT.
The wide world beckoned. She could already hear its applause.

She flew home, went to her room, stuffed a few things in a bag, and told her mother, “I'm spending the night at Dora's house!” On the way through the bakery, she gave her father a quick peck on the cheek, as she always did on her way to “piano practice” on school-day afternoons.

She gave no thought to her girlfriends, or to Mrs. Hirsch, or to what her family would think when she failed to come home. Her only moment of doubt came back at the theater, when the fully and elaborately dressed Miss Markham beckoned her close and spoke for her ears only.

“Now listen carefully, Rosy Josie,” the actress said in a low, hard voice. “Nobody here gives a ‘big, big D' what you do on your own time. But if you do the big, big F with the charming Mr. M.? Be sure he uses a French letter every
single
time! Do
not
get yourself knocked up. Understand?”

On that Thursday afternoon in San Francisco, Jo Marcus had no idea what Miss Markham was talking about, though she knew she was being warned about something.

By Sunday, Randolph Murray had explained it all—that and a great deal more, for he'd always enjoyed developing natural talent and found Jo Marcus a gratifyingly eager student.

“Take your voice down an octave. I want to feel your voice
here
,” he told her, laying a hand on her chest. “It should resonate between your lovely little breasts, not vibrate out your nose.”

“Don't flirt like a schoolgirl! Don't be so obvious! You're beautiful, and that will draw eyes. Silence is your tool,” he told her. “Stay quiet in a crowd. Smile to yourself—like this!—as though you are amused by the interest your beauty arouses. Lower your eyes demurely. Keep them down, but then bring them up slowly, to meet a man's own. I promise you: The effect will be devastating.”

“You have no idea how powerful you can be,” he told her. “You can have any man you want. Just look into his eyes. Think,
I want you
, and
he'll be yours. But don't be too quick! Let him think about you for a while. Let him wonder.”

He taught her how to give satisfaction and to expect it for herself, how to control the rhythm and to tighten at the end. “Most women just lie there like logs. No one has taught them what to desire. You know that now, Jo. You will be able to tell a man what you want and when you want it.”

He knew from the start that others would benefit from his instruction. The only thing that surprised Randolph Murray was how soon he was replaced.