Spider Dance (20 page)

We all fell silent, for singing was the one thing Irene had been forced to give up by circumstances. Once forced into hiding by the King of Bohemia more than two years ago, the arc of her career had vanished like one-half of a rainbow into a cloud.

“But there is more to the past than performance,” she said with the air of moving firmly beyond any melancholy. “There is still the Woman in Black who visited me backstage during my youngest years before vanishing forever. It seems I am doomed to investigate my own mystery for a change. And I’m hoping you can point me in a direction that will identify my lost mother.”

“I? What makes you think that?”

“You know everything,” I said.

His genial face, mostly nose, ears, and multiple chins, shone with self-deprecation.

“So my advertising placards boast, Miss Huxleigh, but you know that theater is nine-tenths fraud and one-tenth luck.”

“And six-tenths talent,” Irene said. “Your area of expertise may be abstruse, Professor, but I believe it can’t be underestimated.”

He shrugged, pleased despite himself. “How can I help you?” he asked Irene.

“You have an encyclopedic memory. I suspect that a woman named Eliza Gilbert, who was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in mid-January of 1861 may have something to do with my birth. Yet her obituary is not in the
Herald
for that date.”

“I hate to point this out, but New York City is rife with newspapers. Perhaps you should consult them all.”

I couldn’t help groaning aloud. “No more ‘dragons’ and no more ‘dungeons,’” I entreated Irene.

The professor frowned his understandable confusion at my comment, but Irene grasped it entirely.

“A person buried in Green-Wood would be prominent enough to merit attention in every paper,” she said, “and the
Herald
is no fly-by-night journal, but has been established since the early years of this century.”

Professor Marvel reached flying fingers into the innumerable pockets of an invisible coat, miming his own stage act, producing facts from the air.

“Eliza. The desperate mother fleeing over the ice floes in a river from an evil slave-owner in a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. W. S. Gilbert, a British composer of light opera. Humphrey Gilbert, discovered Newfoundland for Queen Elizabeth the First.

“But no Eliza Gilbert, Irene. I’m sorry. I’d love to produce a magic card, some tangible map that would reunite you with your mother, but the name means nothing to me.”

Irene produced the purloined copy of the
Herald
. “Her tombstone exists. Nell and I and . . . someone else saw it. It reads January seventeenth. I checked the papers on either side of this most likely date. Eliza Gilbert is nowhere to be found.”

He took the paper and scanned the page to which it was turned, moving his spectacles over the actual type like a magnifying glass. “You are as observant as ever, my dear Irene. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I only pretend to know everything.”

“You come close,” she said with a smile, disappointment still peering through it.

Irene had made a career of a world of make-believe, and there was still in her that childlike sense that something wonderful could possibly happen at any moment.

For young Edith, rescued from an isolated, obscure penury, that had been true, partly through Irene and my efforts, which made me very proud. For Irene, though, my great grown-up charge and dear friend, the magic was thinner and more infrequent, and my heart ached for her doomed quest.

Perhaps it was best this kind old man, who had known her as child, should be the end of the obsession. She had at least reclaimed the people from her past, even if they were not blood relations.

“My, look at this headline.” He chuckled at a story on a page opposite the obituary listings. “I remember that, but had forgotten it, if that makes sense. How things have changed, and not changed. Look at this story of the arrest of Kid Glove Rosey, the shoplifter. Saints and sinners have always been with us, and they often make the newspapers, the sinners more often than the saints.

“I wonder if there is any mention of a theatrical sort? Those were the days. I was doing a mind-reading act then.”

Irene’s rueful eyes met mine. Our “clue,” obtained by ridiculous lengths, had become a path down memory lane for our aged friend.

Edith came in bearing a plate of raspberry tarts . . . goodness, so we each took one while the professor rambled through the faded ink of yesterday, and we waited politely for him to recollect our presence. The old are like that. I saw that Edith knew that too. She smiled at us and bided her time until he should notice that she had a sweet to offer him.

“That rascal! Biggest thief in office until the present lot.” He rattled the pages to find new sources of indignation or nostalgia.

And then he stood. “I have indeed heard the name Eliza Gilbert, by God,” he thundered. “But only once, so long ago that I’d forgotten it.

“I and the world knew her by another name for years, you
see. A few of our performing lot went to the interment, quite a crowd for one so fast fallen from fame. Later, when the headstone had been placed, I returned to visit her grave. I had to check the site with the office, which finally directed me to ‘Eliza Gilbert,’ and I soon forgot that forgettable name. Why she was buried under that mystifying name I don’t know, but it ensured the obscurity of her grave.”

Irene had stood up, the tart dropping to the floor.

Her face was drained of everything but astonishment, as empty of expression as a milliner’s mannequin. She was suspended on the professor’s next words.

He looked over the edge of the yellowed pages just then, equally astonished. “Irene, the paper is full of this woman. Here, on the front page.”

“The front page!” I looked at it. “There was nothing but type about politicians and a series of their sketches.”

“A sketch, yes, though nothing like the others I have seen, but a full story as well.” He turned the front page to face us. The few illustrations were as small as a large man’s thumbprint, and all of men, except for one woman.

The woman is so hard
Upon the woman
.
—TENNYSON, “THE PRINCESS”

Irene shook the paper she had snatched from his hand in the professor’s face.

“The headline mentions no name, only ‘Foreign Dancer Dies in New York City.’ This is not Eliza Gilbert.”

“This is, however,” he said mildly, “a lady I can tell you much about, for a finer likeness of her than this postage-stamp sketch hangs on that wall and she did die on the date you mention. Also,” he added, “a cartoon of her from the papers at midcentury inhabits one of the myriad pockets in my Coat of Many Memories.”

Irene glanced at the wall he indicated, which was papered with theatrical posters and photographs. She then stalked over, the folded paper in her hand.

I leaped up to follow, for I had not yet studied the newspaper page and was mad to see what woman we had overlooked.

Practically bouncing up and down behind Irene’s shoulder to see the paper folded in her hand, I watched her examine every female image on the wall.

There were a good many, and a good many of them wore the scandalous pale tights, colored pink in actuality, of a variety performer. The costume was reminiscent of medieval
gentlemen in tights and puffed pantaloons and quite shocking to see on a modern, corseted woman instead of a skirt.

At last Irene stopped searching the wall high and low and left to right. She paused before one likeness. Which was a very good thing, because I had grown quite dizzy without having yet had a clear look at the sketch in the newspaper.

“This must be the woman.” Irene nodded at a photograph set dead center of the entire display, a dignified portrait, I was relieved to see, with indeed only the woman’s hands and face exposed. No tights. No long lower limbs utterly revealed.

The photographed woman sat by the base of a large classical pillar, clothed in a great dark swath of velvet sleeves and cloak, almost like a tent. Little could be seen of her hair, for a soft velvet hat edged with a large feather concealed it. Only the narrow white border of a collar and cuffs contrasted with the dark dignity of her figure. Her face was as blandly pretty as her drooping white fingers, and in her right hand she held a most out-of-place object, a slender riding crop.

This photograph had so snared Irene’s interest that I recalled her American singing master. He had mesmerized her to erase a particularly gruesome shock that had, for a time, stolen her singing voice. The trances had also erased many good memories of her girlhood.

Yet now a quite different force held Irene entranced. This was fascination, perhaps with an alternate image of herself. This woman was dressed as Irene might have been for an operatic role. Knowing the way Irene’s fevered theatrical mind would erect serial novels from the slightest hint of a story, I suppose she envisioned her possible mother as a great stage performer, a Shakespearian actress perhaps.

Certainly a woman as circumspect as I, a modest parson’s daughter, would happily claim the serene woman in the portrait as a mother, even if she had been so unsuitably employed upon the stage.

The professor had come up behind us. “That is my favorite likeness, even though it’s perhaps the most unlike her, oddly enough. She had a face that could launch a thousand
ships, but in other ways she had a thousand faces. The most fascinating woman of my era.”

“Your era—?” Irene had turned to interrogate him. Despite the gentle, familial nature of her quest, she was as focused as a hunting dog on a scent.

He shrugged, disarranging his loosely tailored coat. “I mean a time when I was young, or still could be considered young, the forties and fifties.”

“She died young?” Irene glanced back at the classical figure in the photograph.

“According to her.” His smile was cryptic as well as fond.

“According to you and the
Herald
, in January of 1861. I would have been two or three then.”

“If you had truly been born in 1858, as you were told,” I pointed out.

Irene frowned over her shoulder at me. She wanted to hear of no more uncertainties in this tenuous quest.

“And there,” said the professor, lifting an age-spotted hand to another framed picture on the wall, “is a newspaper sketch done when she first crossed the Atlantic to our shores.”

Irene and I gasped in tandem, like overworked horses in the same traces. We stared at a drawing of a leaping woman in a ballerina skirt that barely covered her knees. She was poised in a small boat with a swan figurehead and Cupid, the bow pointing his arrow at a shore crowded with the crowned heads of Europe. The caption was “Europe, farewell! America, I come!”

Irene immediately dropped her eyes to the tiny faded print on the yellowed page of the
Herald
.

She read aloud the first sentence: “‘Some of the City’s first citizens commented today on the passing of a woman whose name was known to so many’—all right, then, so what is it?—‘but who was personally known to so few.’”

Irene declaimed salient phrases: “‘many warm friends . . . generous to a fault . . . excitable to pity and kindly sympathies.’”

I nodded approval.

“‘Many acts of generosity, especially to poor people . . .’”

Even as Irene’s voice grew more and more disbelieving, I rejoiced the more.

“‘Generous . . . forgiving and affectionate . . .’ What was she, a performer or a saint? And what the devil was her name? Ah, here. At last. A whole string of them . . . ‘Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana
Gilbertl’”

“She was Spanish?” My enthusiasm rapidly waned.

“Yes. Then she must have married a Gilbert.”

The professor chuckled behind us.

“Ah, some mention of her position in life.” Irene read approvingly, “‘Her natural talents were of the highest order . . . her accomplishments manifold—’” here she fixed me with an I-told-you-so look—“‘and in some respects, marvelous.’”

The professor’s chuckles had become an elderly giggle.

Irene frowned and stopped reading aloud, although her pace of silent reading quickened.