Raintree County (125 page)

Time, time, time. The Cost keeps rising all the time. They build much taller buildings now, and instead of stairs they go shooting straight up in elevators. But do they still find a Forbidden Room on the top floor?

What was I seeking up that stair? What was I doing up there anyway?

For I was lost among the moneychangers. I wandered in the chambers of a gilded age. I wanted to find love even in the City, where the trains are always changing in the station and the Cost is rising all the time. For I had faith even in the City, heard its seductive language, thought that its meanings were my meanings.

And now if I went back, would I ascend the Grand Stair again? Would I want to taste the City once again from its red mouth smeared with ointment? And now if I went back, would I retrace the last steps of my gilded days? O, would I walk down streets and streets to find my little City sweetheart

of New York City, Miss Laura Golden had promised Mr. John Shawnessy a private performance on their return from Pittsburgh. Just what she had in mind, he didn't know, but his curiosity had become an obsession by the time he arrived before the Broadway Theatre on Wednesday evening and read the playbill announcing:

A BELLE OF THE BEAUTIFUL WEST
Starring M
ISS
L
AURA
G
OLDEN
and a Distinguished Supporting Cast
Also
‘The Mississippi Minstrels'
Minstrel Comedians
and
Burlesque

His excitement increased tenfold when he sat in the steepwalled womb of the theatre looking at the drawn curtains, shrouded entrance to a world of mystery and revelation. When at last the curtains rolled back, he watched the vulgar pomps and promenades of the supporting numbers as if they concealed some wondrous secret—young ladies of the burlesque, clad in a travesty of Greek costume, giving the audience saucy glimpses of legs and breasts; corkblack comedians grotesquely clacking their lips in tiresome jokes.

And when the main show started and the Heroine, Brave as she was Beautiful, rode out to conquer with her Virtue and her Beauty the Untamed West, he felt that he saw a drama greater than its stage, an emotion stronger than its gesture—and as such typically American. Costumed America seemed incapable of any but tinsel gestures before the footlights, but behind the scenes a greater drama strove like a buried titaness, convulsive in her bonds.

Outside the theatre, he went by a side alley around to the Stage Door, where several gay gentlemen were pressing for admittance. He showed a card and was admitted behind the scenes of the Broadway Theatre.

He walked through the dim, cluttered world out of which were born the painted postures that he had been watching. Here the colossal artifice of the theatre became nakedly plain in the daubed faces of the women, the white necks of the Negro comedians, the cheesecloth backdrops, the mouldy canvas tombs, the echoing vault filled with platforms and cables where the stage crew toiled at swinging ropes like mariners in a crazy ship.

In the cellared world beneath the stage he found a door with the sign

MISS LAURA GOLDEN

and knocked.

—Who is it?

The voice had come to him musical and muffled, as from a cave.

—John Shawnessy.

—Come on in, dear.

He opened the door. There seemed to be no one in the little dressing room.

—I'm back here, Laura said, speaking from behind a folding screen. Just make yourself at home. How was I?

—You were completely lovely and charming, my Little Belle of the Beautiful Unwest.

He heard her laughing above a silken rustle of clothing.

—You know, he said, I've never been behind the scenes in a big theatre before. This is the real theatre of course. Most of our life is lived behind the scenes, don't you think? Only now and then we manage to get the right props together, smear our faces with makeup, and appear briefly for a little playacting. My own life, I'm sure, has been a rehearsal for a big show that never quite came off. Pardon me—I sound like the Professor tonight. I'm a little sad.

—Don't be sad tonight, dear, she said, her voice thrillingly distinct behind the screen.

The walls of the little dressing room were thick with photographs, pictures of Miss Laura Golden in various roles that she had made
famous. One picture in especial took his fancy. A penned inscription at the bottom said

Daphne Fountain, 1865.

The girl in the picture was rather thin, with great eyes in a broad, sharply contoured face. She was standing in half-profile looking back over her shoulder. Something about the posture and the girl's eyes gave him a dreadful start. He passed his hand over his forehead.

—What are you doing out there, dear?

—Looking at pictures of you. Are they all you?

—Most of them.

—You look like a hundred different women.

—I am a hundred different women, dear.

—I like this one taken in 1865. That's the girl I almost met in Washington.

—I was skinny then. You would like me much better now, dear.

He stood for a long time studying the pictures, listening to the sound of a woman dressing behind a screen. The secret of a soul lay feline and recumbent in the mystery of the passing years, elusive in a gallery of faded photographs.

—Here I am, dear. Let's go.

She came out from behind the screen. Her gown was a black velvet trimmed with gold, drawn very tight at the waist, following and flowing on the curves of her hips and thighs. From this black dress, her neck, arms, and shoulders shone with a sensual pallor. Little gold balls swung from her ears. She wore a heavy gold ring set with a black stone. Her red mouth glistened with ointment. Her face, her full cheeks, her forehead had a kind of pale radiance in the bad light of the little dressing room. He had never seen anyone look so costumed, so contrived. She looked impossibly, stonily beautiful.

He could not repress an exclamation.

—Laura!

—I knew you'd like it, she said, supremely conscious of his admiration. An Egyptian touch—for our play, you know.

She led the way up the stair. In the darkness, he could see only her white neck and gold hair and the beginning of her back with its graceful furrow. He followed this floating disembodied head, faint in the scent of her perfume. Backstage, the lights were out except
for a single gasjet. Everyone had already gone. Turning, Laura tossed her head triumphantly.

—This is my world, Johnny! she said. Here I am queen!

She led the way through the wings out upon the stage, still set with the closing scene, dimly illumined through joints in the scenery. Her face was a pale moon floating in this nocturnal world.

—The West! she said. It's ridiculous, isn't it, dear! My whole life is just make-believe. But it's only by making believe that I've become anybody at all.

She seemed preternaturally excited.

—Let's take a curtain call, she said.

Together they pressed through the drawn curtains. Beyond them was the pit, empty of spectators, a great cave of shadows. He couldn't see her face at all now.

—You see, Mr. Shawnessy, this is the way
I
express myself. You sit in a room and make your gorgeous words and think your noble thoughts. And I—I go before the footlights and become a hundred different women.

—In order to keep from being whom?

—Myself, maybe.

She had been speaking in a great stage whisper, of which there were innumerable repetitions in the empty theatre. She was hovering very close, enunciating her words almost in his ear with wonderful distinctness.

—You know, dear, she said, I do believe that everyone has gone home. We're quite alone.

Yes, they were quite alone, quite, quite alone, he and someone on an empty stage. Suppose now he fulfilled one of the ancient images of his life and took this woman in his arms. What better place to enact the beautiful audacity of love than the stage of the Broadway Theatre? But he was paralyzed by a strange anxiety. He was afraid of this woman who walked beside him in the dark. It seemed to him that if he were able to illuminate her face suddenly, he would find that it was the face of someone he had forgotten or someone he had dreamed once in a dream or someone he had never seen before and would never see again. It might even be the face of someone who was dead.

—Johnny, she said, you're strangely quiet.

—We're in
your
world now, Laura. You talk.

—All right, she said, I will. In your play, you have the hero attempting to realize an old image—that of finding a little actress waiting for him in a costume closet, someone to love in the great modern City.

—Yes?

—And the woman who comes to symbolize his passion is a woman of a hundred masks and moods.

—Yes?

—But some innermost part of what she is is hidden—kept, as it were, in a Forbidden Room.

—Yes. I suppose each of us has a Forbidden Room, containing some photographs, somethings that we'd rather not have the world see.

—You, too, Johnny?

—Yes. But here, we talk about you.

—Well, suppose you were baffled by someone and that someone gave you a key to her Forbidden Room, do you think you would understand her any better?

—Perhaps.

—Where are you, Johnny? I can't even find you.

He felt her cool hands catching at his, and his own hands touched her smooth arms and slid on the warm velvet of her back, his face brushed her sideheld head, her hips pressed momentarily hard against him, his foot tripped on the curtain, she seemed to elude him in the folds, her laughter was vaguely repeated in the darkened theatre.

—Come on, silly man, she said. We're late for the Ball.

Not until they were outside the theatre and riding in a carriage did he make fully sure that while they had touched each other on the stage, she had indeed thrust the key—a small plain one—into his left coatpocket.

On the way, they passed a square where a mass meeting was being held by people in sympathy with the Railroad Strike. He put this other world out of his mind, and he pressed his hand deep into the pocket of his coat, holding the little key.

In the ballroom of Laura Golden's house on Fifth Avenue stood Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles presiding at the punchbowl. Everyone was chattering about the Strike. John Shawnessy felt that he had stepped once more into a cheating stageset briefly peopled with these women in flamboyant gowns, these men in tails and ties.
But the world out of which this playlet had been engendered—the world Behind the Scenes—was simply the nocturnal City—its strewn alleys, gaslit parks, belching factories, masted harbor—where people toiled namelessly through dingy nights and days so that from time to time this waxen flower of gaiety might bloom briefly Before the Footlights.

Cash Carney appeared striding among the dancers with a rolled newspaper in his hand. Everyone gathered around him to know the latest news of the Strike.

—Public opinion is beginning to react in our favor, he said. My old friend Senator Garwood B. Jones made a humdinger of a speech yesterday, and it's quoted in all the evening papers.

Cash opened the paper and read a little from Garwood's speech. The Statesman from Indiana, serving his third year in the United States Senate, had begun by challenging any man to show more genuine concern for the welfare of the Common Laboring Man than he, Garwood B. Jones. But it was one thing for the laboring man to ask for a better wage, and it was quite another thing for a mob of hoodlums, incited by foreignborn bombslingers, to rape, burn, and pillage the fairest cities of the Republic. He, Garwood B. Jones, would be doing a disservice to the thousands that had made him their spokesman . . .

—By God, he knew he'd better get up and have his say, Cash said. We pumped a cold fifty thousand into his campaign fund.

The newspaper was passed around, and people read the Senator's address.

—Yessirree, Cash Carney said, and that isn't all. I have it on the highest authority that this thing will be killed and killed dead in a matter of days.

Mr. Carney stayed another five minutes and then, looking at his watch, spit a cigarbutt in an ornamental urn, and left.

—Jesus, the Perfessor said, doesn't Laura look stunning tonight! Ah, John, tell me now, where do they all go, these lovely girls, these lushloined girls!
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
John, I'll tell you a secret. The mistress of this mansion is mad about you.

—What makes you think so?

—I've talked with her since we got back from Pittsburgh, and we talked about you. She has you on her mind. You baffle her.

—We baffle each other.

—I swore on my mother's grave that I wouldn't tell you a word of all this, so keep it under your hat. But she asked some very searching questions about you. Unless I'm losing my acuteness, you're a candidate for initiation into that room on the top floor.

—Where is this famous room?

—Third floor up. Last door on the left, the Perfessor said. Once when I was here and no one was watching, I slipped up just for the hell of it and went all over the house. I found the room all right, but I couldn't get in. It was locked. You see, I too have knocked. But to him who knocks it shall not be opened. And he who seeketh not shall find.

Just then Laura approached.

—I want you two big cowards to come with me, she said.

They followed her into an alcove off the main hall where a glass decanter full of a pale green liquid stood on a table. She poured three wideglobed glasses brimming.

—There, she said. Just for us three. A toast.

—To what? the Perfessor said.

—To Johnny's play, she said.

Her eyes widened and then narrowed to their habitual heavylidded languor as she raised the glass and drank it off. John Shawnessy thought he never would drain the deep green pool of his glass. It had a taste of licorice and fire.