Spider Dance (39 page)

I did all this in San Francisco, where five thousand cheering men greeted my arrival, drawing my carriage on their backs through the streets. I danced. I argued with the editors who printed the lies that had followed me from the Old World, though the Jesuits had not penetrated the American continent as far as this, its extreme western end.

And then I went inland to live in my beloved Grass Valley, where I spent the happiest days and years of my life before then, and after. And there, isolated in the wildest part of this unspeakably large land, America, at the age of . . . hmmm, past thirty, shall we say? . . . I found myself becoming teacher and mentor to the many adorable children entertaining the miners, and longed to be a mother at long last.

What has worked this great change in Lola? For one thing, child entertainers were worth their weight in gold in California, a rough-and-ready—a town near Grass Valley was actually named that: Rough and Ready—area of men mostly without women, unless they were Chinese seamstresses. Or whores.

So these astounding, prancing tiny tots brought gentler memories of home and hearth to the miners’ rude hearts, who threw gold coins and nuggets onto their stages as wildly as San Francisco had accepted and feted your own Lola.

Every Christmas in Grass Valley I held a party for the little girls, so few and yet so precious (as I had never felt precious, but only a burden to be sent away from my own mother).

There was little Matilda Uphoff, all of three, whose parents ran a bakery. And Susan Robinson—La Petite Susan or the California Fairy Star. Her family of traveling players had settled, as had I, in Grass Valley. Ah, only eight years old, and already able to twirl the banjo, dance the clog, and sing “Black-Eyed Susan,” not to mention doing the Shawl Dance, a far cry from my own Spider Dance. A golden shower of dollars greeted her petite toes whenever they touched stage, even in the primitive areas far from San Francisco.

Ah, my gifted fairy girl, my black-eyed Susan! One dreadful June day in ’54 her skirt caught fire from the footlights in El Dorado County. So the gold and the glimmer ended, though she survived her severe burns to perform again. But some things do not survive such tragedy, and she never found the path to greater fame.

I remembered all the times I had flirted with the footlights, stamping the flowers thrown to the stage as if they were attacking spiders, my hems foaming like shore-tossed waves. . . . I have started many conflagrations in my life, but I have never been burned.

And then there was Lotta, six years old, a gamine with bright red hair. What a born minx! I took her immediately under my wing, of course, and taught her the fandango and the Irish jig.

I well remember the day I brought this tiny tot to a blacksmith shop in nearby Rough and Ready. My horse needed shoeing, so we fetched up at the smithy of W. H. Flippens. The big burly man set about to enchant the red-haired elf by showing her how his hammer could play a tune on his anvil.

It was then that I lifted Lotta onto the anvil itself, where her wee feet matched the strike of his hammer until a crowd gathered to laugh and applaud.

Oh, if only I had been granted a guide when I took the momentous step of supporting myself by dancing on the stage. The whole valley talked of the red-haired mite dancing on an anvil.

Lotta. Her family name was Crabtree. Of all the Grass Valley girls, she alone was destined for greatness. I urged the mother to take her to Paris, but California was a world away from the Continent, and the idea was too bold for Mary Ann Crabtree. Instead she took Lotta away from me to tour the mining towns.

She ultimately guided her daughter to Broadway, and there little Lotta grew older but not up and reigned while I took New York’s lecture circuit by storm and then . . . now my role is offstage, and the footlights fade for me, but not for darling little Lotta, long may she reign.

I’ve come across a letter from Ludwig, King of Bavaria, dated 1853. He wrote and spoke English, but not easily. Reading again his words returns me to that country that I loved better than India.

My Lollita:

I am glad the gold comb in the shape of a crown is favorable to you in California, the place of gold lying on and inside the ground. I am glad that you have your swan bed with its curtains of silk and the ebony-and-pearl furniture and the nine-foot mirrors and gilt and the pearwood table with ormolu and most of all the love seat upon which you look so beautiful. I see all these things I keep as you left them and I see you. Now they are all in that rustic world of California, where you have bears for pets, and I am not amazed that tame them you will.

It is with sadness, much, I did as you write two, three month ago: pack things you so favored during your stay in Munich, in the palace I fitted for you as if a queen.

It is with great happy that I know you to be peaceful at last in this place of California. I am remembering of the mountains in my own land, and the simple folk who there dwell.

I see you there in your white silk gown, wearing the rubies that speak for your heart of great feeling, among the bears and the men who mine, yet an island of beauty and the stateliness of Europe.

Then I hear word here from the castle at Aschaffenburg, where Theresa my queen keeps. My two nephew saw a lady dressed all in black, her face veiled so as to be unseen. They spoke, but she did not answer. She passed them into the servants’ quarters.

The princes followed, they are good boys, curious. The servants had seen no one. So all, servant and prince, went to Queen Theresa and asked if she had seen this dark lady.

Her face went white, they say, as if a specter she had
see. She said the Black Lady who appeared foretold the death of a member of the royal family.

I thought of you, my Lollita, when I heard this story as I worked in Munich to ship to you those pieces of your time here in Bavaria you longed for. I remember then the tale of the Black Lady, a princess of my house who has been dead for a century, or more. Once, like you, she danced at a ball, and after her death was often glimpsed dancing among the living, years later. Immediately, a member of the royal house of Wittelsbach had died.

Is she an omen, this Black Lady? I look upon the things we shared and loved, and think of death. Mine? Yours? My Maximilian, who now reigns in my place while I am a packing agent?

No, my Lollita, that was all months ago, numbering two. Now I can tell whom the Lady in Black was seeking. And it was not I, not you. It was Theresa. She had died of the cholera. I am what you call ‘a free man’ now, so much as any man who has been a king may be.

Sad days have come to Grass Valley. Hull and I are done. He shot and killed Major for being a bear. Lotta is gone. Her mother, Mary Ann, followed her delinquent husband, the former bookseller, to Rabbit Creek, where she will run a boardinghouse and Lotta will enrich the father’s coffers.

Even my dear maid, Periwinkle, is unhappy. She tells others she wants to return to New Orleans. I found her brooding on the porch, and when I asked why, she said, “I’m in a brown study on a deep subject.”

So I told her this: When I lived in India as a child I learned that when a man died his soul housed itself in a star.

Periwinkle lifted her eyes to the heavens, as I had intended. I told her of Paris and Alexandre Dujarier, a brilliant literary critic and editor of
La Presse
, a liberal Republican newspaper. What a perfect match we were, both still in our twenties. And I told her how perhaps the only man I truly loved had been drawn into a duel and an early death. I pointed to the sky, awash in stars. “There he is,” I said. “And
if I am still and alone in the woods, and wait for him to come to me, he does.”

“Who do I await to come to me?” Periwinkle asked in her low voice. “No one should live only with the dead.”

“No one,” I said. “We will make this house ring with merriment again, and drink Champagne and eat cake. And perhaps soon, we’ll go where the stars twinkle for all, somewhere far and wonderful.”

I missed the stage. I had lost too much in the mountains. My agent arranged a tour of another rough-and-ready land I hadn’t yet seen. Australia. I could form whatever company I wished. We first would play San Francisco for two months, then embark for another and I hoped kinder continent. Australia!

I mounted my horse and rode to Rabbit Creek. Mrs. Crabtree was running a second boarding house, and had a second child. The husband was nowhere useful to be seen. He was away scouring the goldfields, I was told.

I explained that I was forming a company for a world tour, and offered to take Lotta with me.

Mary Ann Crabtree told me she was relinquishing the boarding house. Her absent husband had been singing Lotta’s praises to the starry sky, and they would tour the mining camps, performing in smoke-filled rooms on crude stages with candles for footlights.

I was hardly one to object to smoke-filled rooms, but I pled for a wider world stage for Lotta. Mary Ann would hear none of it. I hid my disappointment in a last embrace with the heartbroken child, and left Grass Valley, forever.

Much later, I heard that Jack Crabtree’s daughter had thousands of gold coins thrown at her tiny dancing feet in the camps, and one night the failed prospector who was her father filled a trunk with her earnings, and left both wife and daughter far behind.

By then I had been to Australia and back, and my own life had changed . . . oh, so irrevocably.

One day Lola sat smoking a cigar. Periwinkle [her new maid] had never seen her do this before. “Mamselle,” she protested, “that is the tip of the devil’s tail!” Lola winked and went right on smoking
.
—THE
WOMAN IN BLACK: THE LIFE OF THE FABULOUS LOLA MONTEZ
,
HELEN HOLDREDGE

“What an impertinent snip,” Irene said in the hall when we three reunited.

“What, Lotta?” I asked, incredulous. She was such an endearing child . . . for forty-two.

“I well know,” Irene said, leading us along the passage to a broad stairway to the street, “how precocious a child performer may be. The mind and the body at five and six is a learning machine. There was nothing I couldn’t attempt, and master in my childish hubris, at that age: dance steps, songs, pistol target shooting. Nothing inhibits one. Anything is possible.”

She stopped to address Quentin and me, blocking our way. “Lola, on the other hand, was well past that age of innocence when she found her only future was to go upon the stage. She was almost eighteen. That is an ocean of difference. How dare that stunted Lilliputian ridicule Lola’s abilities in her thirties when she was attempting to pass what she had learned on to a promising student? How many veteran performers would sabotage rather than encourage a young pretender? I owe everything I am, and was, to those seasoned troupers who took me under their wings.”

Quentin and I eyed each other. We stood upon the same mined battleground.

“You’re saying,” I suggested to Irene, “that Lotta has some reason to denigrate the memory of Lola Montez.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” she retorted. “You’ve read those endless vilifications as well as the paeans of praise. There is no getting at the truth in such a situation. I myself have been bitterly misjudged, in public and in private, and there is no undoing such damage. You know that, Nell.”

I did indeed.

Quentin stepped in, offering an escort’s arm to both of us. “May I suggest supper at”—he glanced at me, all apology and persuasion—“Delmonico’s?”

Even I had realized that there was no more impressive after-theater venue to be seen in New York than Delmonico’s.

Irene seemed to have turned some personal corner. I understood that criticism of Lola Montez would not be welcomed. She had identified utterly with this woman almost forty years her elder, whose only course had been, apparently, infamy or destruction. Whether the creature was Irene’s mother or not had become moot. Irene saw one whom the fates had conspired against, and her operatic soul was committed, as well as her instinctive defense of the underdog.

At Delmonico’s we ordered oysters and Champagne . . . well, Irene and Quentin did. I cared for neither of those, but I cared for Irene and Quentin, so didn’t say so.