Spider Dance (38 page)

“Exaggerations, no doubt,” Irene said. “And I have heard of your American triumphs.” Irene delicately did not say for how long. “How charmingly you keep! You are still the elfin child prodigy you were in Grass Valley.”

Lotta sat, her long strawberry-blond tresses and the flounces of her short skirts bouncing with equal vigor.

“Oh, I am a long way from Grass Valley. How did you hear of that?”

“First,” said Irene, “I have followed your career with admiration. Alas, I left New York as you arrived.”

“You left for Europe. Of course you are a prima donna, and I a mere coquette and songstress.”

“‘Mere’ does not adequately describe your talents,” Irene returned.

Lotta eyed Quentin in the mirror. “And this is your husband. I heard you had married a prince.”

“Mr. Stanhope is a prince among men, and among Englishmen, but not my husband, who is in Bavaria at the moment.”

“No! I had heard you’d married the king of Bohemia, but now you say it is the king of Bavaria. I hear . . . what can I say? . . . that he is quite mad . . . not for marrying you, I’m sure.”

“No, not for marrying me, for he has not. King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria died three years ago, and his brother, Otto, assumed the throne. He is mad, that is certain. I am not married to either the past or present king of Bavaria, alas. I am wed to an Englishman.”

“Not this Englishman, though,” she said, studying Quentin.

He bowed. “Alas, not. I am unwed. So far.”

He had not let loose of my left hand, which twitched in his light custody.

Lotta shook her head at all this intricacy of who was and was not married to whom. “I’ve never married,” she announced in her merry, piping voice, “and never will, any more than I shall ever sing grand opera.” Her eyes returned, fascinated to Irene. “You sang at Milan and, and . . . someplace German.”

“That was Prague, in Bohemia. The rulership is German.”

“Ah, the king you did not marry. But you wore a fabulous spray of jewels somewhere, I saw in the newspapers here.”

“The Tiffany corsage of diamonds,” Irene admitted. “I wore it for my debut as Cinderella at La Scala in Milan.”

“Yes! I drooled over that sketch for days. I even looked into purchasing the piece, but was told the Rothschilds had scooped it up.”

Irene only nodded, not volunteering that the priceless necklace was in her custody in France, a gift from Baron
Alphonse de Rothschild for services rendered and to be rendered. Indeed, Godfrey was laboring on behalf of the Rothschild interests in Bavaria even now.

“Of course,” Lotta went on, bending toward the mirror to dust her hair with some red powder or another, “I had made my fortune playing merry little boys, so I have little call for such imposing pieces on stage. And I do not have your stature to wear it.”

“Great jewels become whomever they deck.”

“I would not care to compete with them for attention, I suppose.” She saw me watching her powder her hair. “Paprika,” she explained.

“Isn’t that a pepper?”

“A spice made from a very hot pepper, but I don’t have to eat it. It adds a lovely sparkle to my hair onstage and off. Now, Madame Norton and company, is there anything I can do for you?”

“There is indeed,” Irene said promptly, “but perhaps we could adjourn to Delmonico’s for supper first?”

“Oh, no. I prefer to head home directly after a performance, but pull up some chairs and we can visit awhile.”

Quentin promptly did the pulling up so Irene and I could do the sitting and visiting.

“I don’t know quite how to broach the matter,” said Irene, who could, and did, broach the Prince of Wales on the subject of his rakish ways. “I’m searching for my mother, you see.”

“Is she lost? Mine is at home, waiting for me. She has been a stalwart support during my entire career.”

“We were separated at birth, my birth,” Irene explained.

“Oh, how tragic! I don’t know what I would have done without my mother. She would sew my costumes when I was just a tiny thing, and before you knew it the miners were throwing golden nuggets at my dancing little feet. Can’t your father help you find her?”

“I never knew him either.”

“I’d be sorry for you,” Lotta said, “but if I had never seen my father, my mother and I would be richer for the trunk of
gold he ran off with when I was six. As much of my earnings as he could carry. I hear he went to England and lived like a gentleman on it.”

“I can’t believe your own father robbed you!” I expressed my outrage.

“Quite thoroughly, Miss . . . Huxleigh, isn’t it? Well, my mother had come to this country by way of India and met up with John Crabtree in New York City. ’Twas he wanted to go west and find gold, but my mother and I were most successful in mining the camps via my feet. I suppose he left me with a memorable last name that looks well on a marquee, and the sense to invest my money wisely.

“But—” She turned to Irene again. “I sympathize with your lack of a mother. Mine has been a foundation to me all my life.”

“That’s why I’ve sought you out. I’m told, by some, that you might have known my mother years ago, when you were a mere child, and I was a mere mote in the future’s eye.”

Irene had been as delicate as possible in softening the years that lay between them, her being the younger by eleven years, yet Lotta Crabtree was tressed and dressed like a girl many years Irene’s junior.

“Knew your mother? Really?”

“I refer to . . . Lola Montez.”

This was the second living person who had actually met Lola, and the first woman, though she had been but a child.

Lotta perked her lively eyebrows, and whistled through her tiny teeth, a boyish whistle she must have employed in her trouser roles.

“The Countess of Landsfeld. Land o’ Goshen! I haven’t thought of her in years, nor anyone much else from Grass Valley either. Oh, she was a human hurricane, Lola Montez, impossible to ignore when present, but, like all forces of nature, easy to forget when gone.”

“A rather tragic epitaph,” Irene noted.

“Oh, but she had fun when she was here!” Lotta’s laugh rang out sweet and loud. “Smoked like a gold-camp chimney! Always had her pouch of tobacco by her side, the way
other ladies had their fancywork. She would roll one of her smokes, inhale like a fire breather, and after four or five puffs, dampen it and roll another and smoke that.”

Lotta’s child-size hand reached for a case on her dressing table and opened it. “I suppose these are my legacy from Lola. Care to try one, Madame Norton?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Irene took one of the thin, dark cigars, as did Quentin!

I shook my head and the box never even came within sniffing distance.

Quentin took Lotta’s matches and lit first hers, then Irene’s, and finally his own smoke.

I watched aghast as smoke and memory silently filled the small dressing room, and I “smoked” by proxy, simply by continuing to breathe. And cough. Why is it that smokers believe all around them inhale the same clouded air and enjoy it as much?

As if reading my thoughts, Irene laid down her cigar after two or three puffs. And Quentin excused himself and retreated to the hall.

Lotta Crabtree, however, went on smoking as if every inhalation retrieved a memory.

“She charmed all the gentlemen, of course. Gracious, she had married and divorced a San Francisco businessman named Patrick Hull before he quite comprehended either state. She horsewhipped the editor of one newspaper and challenged the other to a duel over critical reviews of her dancing. But mostly she retired to Grass Valley and held a sort of salon where anyone of note or artistic leanings eventually showed up.”

Irene kept nodding at each of these bits of scandalous information, as if begging for more . . . and she got it.

“What a horsewoman she was! She taught me to ride. And insisted on teaching me the fandango and the Highland fling. She wasn’t the best dancer, to be frank. I had better rhythm and grace at six than she did at . . . what?”

“Thirty-six, she would have been then,” Irene said
quickly. Without calculation. She had been reading long and thinking hard about Lola Montez.

Lotta shook her abundant curls. “She went later to Australia, I think, and finally back to New York, where she died, right here, wasn’t it?”

“Very near here,” Irene said.

“I’d bet she left her heart in Grass Valley.”

“With that man she married, Hull?”

“Him? No. Men were fancies with her. She liked the gender, and always imagined that the Grand Passion was only one man away, yet she always found him wanting. Even when she was married to Hull she took up with a charming German baron. He called himself Dr. Adler, dispensing with his title in the West, and relishing such homely tasks as building Lola a wine cellar and fencing her property. They’d hunt together in the mountains, although she never shot game. Their forays were really nature expeditions. He knew the name of every flower. I suppose there are mountains in Germany. Anyway, I well remember the day Lola found it too cold to accompany him, and he never returned. Someone said an ‘accident’ was the cause, but no one learned much about it. And I was just a child, so no one bothered telling me.”

Adler. Irene and I exchanged glances. Was it possible?

“Did Lola take his death well?”

“Now that I think of it, Lola retreated from society after he was gone. Eventually she hired a French chef and began holding soirees at her home filled with all her European treasures. Dr. Adler’s wine cellar with the bottles chilled by an underground spring got constant use. He must have been a clever man.”

Lotta frowned as she drew slowly on her cigar. How bizarre it was to see that dark roll of tobacco visiting that cherubic little girl’s face . . . and shook her head.

“Lola often brooded in those days, wanting to be alone, though she was invariably generous to the beggars who came to her door. Still, her spirit was legendary. Once, when her Indian servant boy was shoved and called a ‘damned nigger’
by no less than the editor of the
Grass Valley Telegraph
, Lola seized her riding crop and went to the store where it happened. The editor fled the premises, and Lola stood guard over the boy, whip tucked beneath her arm, while he finished shopping. That was when I decided to make her acquaintance, for my mother could never stand up to my father. Lola liked to watch us arriving at the School for Young Children near her house. I was only seven, but one day I marched into her yard to pay her a social call. She adored my imitations of personalities in the town and began to tutor me. It was a wonderful apprenticeship; really renowned performers were always stopping at Lola’s house, the Booths, Ole Bull the violinist, Laura Keene, the actress of the day.

“What a house! Crammed with precious goods. She sold most of her marvelous furnishing and property before she left Grass Valley. I was only a child, but I’d seen much of life from the lip of a stage, and raw, gold-field life at that. She seemed to be unburdening herself of things. I felt a change in her, that she was fading . . . not just leaving. I knew I’d never see her again. I knew she’d never dance again, and that I would, for a good long time.”

“And so you still do today,” Irene said, “the most popular and highly paid star on Broadway.”

“I won’t die in New York City, though,” Lotta said, stubbing out her ugly little cigar. “I’ve places in New Jersey and Boston. I’ve donated a fountain to San Francisco. I intend to live for a good long while longer, and I don’t intend to fade.”

She reached for the powder puff and dusted her red-gold curls with more paprika, until a shimmering red glitter fell upon her blond, baby curls in the gaslight.

Irene snuffed the slow-burning cigar in the tray beside her.

“Thank you for that last portrait of Lola; only you could have painted it.”

“Do you think she was really your mother?”

“What do you think?”

Lotta grew unusually sober. “She loved teaching me and urged my mother to take me to Paris. There was no envy in her, of my youth or my talent. She was a second mother to
me.” Lotta stood, a childlike figure with her skirts about her knee. “Whether she was a mother to you or not, I couldn’t say.”

As I gazed at them, it would have been easy to mistake Irene for the mother, Lotta for the eternal child.

I“m sure,” Irene said, glancing about the dressing room filled with flowers, “she would have been very proud of you.”

And so we left that room of full-blown blossoms and cigar smoke and joined Quentin in the hall outside.

I recall Madam Lola . . . riding many miles over the hills to carry food and medicine to a poor miner, and more than once watching all night at the bedside of a child whose mother could not afford to hire a nurse
.
—RUFUS SHOEMAKER, EDITOR, THE
GRASS VALLEY NATIONAL

I might as well confess the worst first. When I came to California, I only horsewhipped one newspaper editor, challenged another to a duel, and married a third. I repented posthaste of my most grievous mistake, the marriage, and divorced him. (Some would say I shouldn’t have either wed or shed him, as my first husband was still alive and our divorce had never been sanctioned. Yet I can swear that I did both marry and divorce that
charming but impossible Irishman Patrick Hull, according to the laws of the place.)