Mr. Frohman chuckled, leaning on a stick. He said, “He’s in his office.”
“Where’s that?”
Gurdy stared past the pointing stick and saw a cream face of columns
and windows. He saw the stone above a ring of heads. People were gaping
at his calm acquaintance as if this plump, tired man was a kicking
horse. He remembered civility and asked, “How’s your rheumatism?”
“Better,” said Mr. Frohman and limped away.
Gurdy pushed scornfully through the gapers and trotted into the white
vestibule of the theatre where men were arranging flowers--horseshoes
of orchids, ugly and damp, roses in all tints, lumps of unknown bloom
on standards wrapped in silver foil. A redhaired, hatless youth listed
the cards dangling from these treasures and told Gurdy to go to hell
when Gurdy asked for his uncle but another man nodded to stairs of
yellow, slick marble. On the landing Gurdy found a door stencilled
in gold, “Carlson & Walling.” The door opened into a room hung with
photographs where Gurdy saw Mark sitting on a table, surrounded by men.
Mr. Carlson, already sheathed in winter furs, bullied a carpenter who
corrected the lower shelf of a bookcase. Gurdy stood wondering at the
furious shades of neckties and the grey hard hats which Miss Converse
thought vulgar.
“My God,” said Carlson, “Mark, look at that comin’ in!”
Mark groaned. He had a compact with Mrs. Bernamer that the borrowed boy
shouldn’t enter a theatre until he was twelve. He was tall enough for
twelve but he was only nine. He stayed in the doorway, studying the red
walls of the room, his white socks far apart and his hands thrust into
the pockets of his short, loose breeches. The callers stared at the
tough legs brown from summer on the farm. The boy’s one patent beauty,
his soft, pale hair, was hidden by his English sailor cap and his white
blouse was spotted with ink stains. But the men grinned and chuckled,
admiringly. Gurdy made no sound when Carlson set him on the top of the
bookcase but gazed contemptuously at the crowding men and let himself
be petted.
“When d’you inaugurate, Mark?”
“Eight fifteen, when you’ll be in bed, sonny.”
Gurdy drawled, “I don’t get to bed till quarter of nine and you ought
to know that by this time.” He frowned, partly closing his dark blue
eyes, as the men laughed. “What are all those flowers for?”
A man in a corner lifted his white face from a book and whispered,
“Those are gifts the Greeks brought.” This caused stillness, then
unpleasing chuckles. Gurdy climbed down from the bookcase and went
to talk to Mr. Fitch. They talked of French lessons and the vagaries
of governesses. The other callers complimented Mark on the boy’s
good looks. The flattery was soothing after the strain of the last
rehearsal. Mark knew it for flattery. Gurdy’s face was too long,
his sober mouth too wide and his jaw prematurely square. But the
compliments were the due of a successful actor turned manager. He sat
for a little watching Mr. Fitch lazily chat with the boy as though he
were a grown man. On the playwright’s warning he had lately published
a careful interview announcing Gurdy and Margot as adopted children
and his relationship to them. But people still probably reported Gurdy
an illegitimate son and Margot his daughter by Cora Boyle. Mark sighed
and took Gurdy down through the flowers to see the cream and gold play
house where men were squirting perfume from syringes along the red
aisles, killing the smell of paint. He let Gurdy have a syringe and
went into the vestibule. The redhaired clerk listing the gifts of other
managers handed him the card wet from its journey in a ball of pink
roses.
“Mrs. Cosmo Rand.... Who the devil’s Mrs. Cosmo Rand, Billy?”
The clerk scratched his ear and grinned. “You’d ought to know, sir.”
“But I don’t. Cosmo Rand? Heard of him. Loeffler’s got him in
something. Who’s she?”
“Miss Cora Boyle,” said the clerk and strolled off to insult a
messenger bringing in more flowers.
Mark had a curious, disheartening shock. He didn’t bow to Cora Boyle
on the street. What right had she to send him flowers? It must be a
passing rudeness. She might remember that he disliked pink roses. Mark
rested on the ledge of the box office, brooding. But she might mean to
be pleasant. Her manager, Loeffler, was on bad terms with Carlson.
This might be a dictated, indirect peace offering. Mark patted the
florid carved stone of the ledge and thought. Cora’s new play wasn’t
a success. The reviews had been tart. She might be tired of Loeffler.
Mark was perplexed but the hunt for motives always wearied him. A
scarlet petticoat went by outside the vestibule and led off his mind.
He bade his treasurer telephone for the motor and stood joking with the
man through the box office window until a flat stop in the noise behind
him made Mark turn his head. The florists and clerks were motionless,
regarding the street. A coupé had stopped. A footman was helping a
woman and a tumult of varied flowers to the sidewalk. She came toward
the doors gallantly, her face quite hidden in the enormous bouquet but
the treasurer said, “By gee, I’d know her in hell, by her walk,” and
chuckled. She tripped on the sill and screamed gaily to Mark, “Au s’
cours!”
Mark jumped to catch the sheaf of yellow roses. Miss Held waved her
grey gloves wide and dipped her chin. “Je t’ apporte une gerbe vu que
t’es toujours bon enfant, Marc Antoine! And ’ow does Beatriz get along
to teach you French?”
“Pretty fair. Haven’t had much time lately. Thought you’d taken your
show on the road, Anna?”
“Nex’ week.” Up the staircase some one began to whistle “La Petite
Tonkinoise.” The little woman vibrated inside the grey case of her lacy
gown and pursed her lips. “Oh, but I am sick of that tune! Make him
stop.” The whistler heard and ceased. Miss Held swayed to and fro among
the flowers, noting cards. She adopted a huge orchid for her waist and
smiled down at it. A dozen grins woke in the collecting crowd. Mark
was aware of upholsterers oozing from the theatre. Miss Held hummed
from gift to gift, murmuring names--“Le Moyne.... ton institutrice....
Ce bon vieux David.... Nice lilies.” She moved in a succession of
swift steps that seemed balanced leaps. One of the florist’s girls
sighed a positive sob of envy. The curving body and the embellished
eyes kept the crowd still. The soft gloves drooped on the hard lustre
of the stirring arms. Mark wondered at her cool, sardonic mastery of
attention. She was bored, unwell and her frock was nothing new. She was
Anna Held and the people were edging in from the sidewalk to look at
her.
“Like to see the house, Anna?”
“Oh, no. I very well know what that would be. All red, and gold fishes
on the ceiling, eh? No. I must go away.” She strolled off toward her
carriage, chattering sudden French which Mark did not understand. He
heard an immense discussion surge up in the vestibule as he shut the
coupé door, walked through it into the theatre where two upholsterers
were quarrelling over the age of the paragon and where Mark bumped
against a man in brown who seemed to inspect the gold dolphins of the
vault.
“Clumsy,” said the man, briskly.
“Didn’t see you, sir.”
“I meant the decoration.” The man flicked a hand at the ceiling and
the red boxes, “Like Augustin Daly’s first house but much worse.
We should have passed that. Gilt. It’s the scortum ante mortum in
architecture.” He jammed a cigarette between the straight lips of his
flushed face and went on in a rattle of dry syllables. “Some one should
write a monograph on gold paint and the theatrical temperament. Plush
and passion. Stigmata.... Sous un balcon doré.... Can you give me a
match?... Where’s Carlson’s office?” He bustled out of the foyer.
Mark wearily tore Cora Boyle’s card in his tanned fingers and nodded.
The stranger was right. This new theatre was stale. The gold sparkled
stupidly. The shades of velvet were afflicting. But Carlson liked it.
Mark sighed and thought, rather sadly, that his patron’s whole concept
of the trade was vulgar and outworn like this gaudy expense. Red
velvet, heavy gold, bright lamps--the trappings of his apprenticeship.
Old actors told Mark that this was a variant of the first Daly theatre.
The stranger was right, then. Mark wondered and went upstairs to the
office but the flushed man was gone.
“That feller Huneker was in tryin’ to get me to hire some orchestra
leader,” Carlson said.
“But I thought Huneker was a young man,” Mark answered.
Mr. Fitch whispered from his corner, “He hasn’t any particular age.
What was that riot downstairs, Mark?”
“Anna Held dropped in and left some flowers. She ain’t lookin’ well.”
The playwright closed his magazine and lifted himself from the chair,
assuming his strange furry hat. “We have just so much vitality. She’s
losing hers. But if she died tomorrow it would make almost as much
noise as killing a president. And that’s quite right. Presidents never
make any one feel sinful. Good night.”
Carlson asked, “You’re comin’ tonight, Clyde.”
“Not feeling right, thanks.”
Mark followed the bent back down the stairs. Fitch was stopped by a
lounger at the doors, loaned the old fellow ten dollars and passed,
unobtrusive, along Forty Fifth Street. He went shadowlike in his vivid
dress. Liking the man, Mark frowned. The exhausted courtesy, the slow
voice always left him puzzled; it was as though the playwright’s
prosperity kept within it a dead core of something pained, as if the
ghost of an old hunger somehow lived on under the coloured superfluity.
Mark’s motor arrived outside. He went to whistle Gurdy up from an
investigation of the orchestra pit. All the bulbs burned about the
house. For a second Mark liked the place then the gilt and the mulberry
hangings bothered him. He chased Gurdy up an aisle to the vestibule.
The treasurer slipped from the box office to say, “Young Rand just
called up. I said you wasn’t here.”
“Who?”
“Cora Boyle’s new husband. That English kid.”
Mark shrugged and shoved Gurdy into the dull blue limousine at the
curb. The motor took him away from the theatre and away from several
beckoning hands on the sidewalk. His shift to managership had changed
the fashion of salutes. People now beckoned him with a posture of
confidential affection and earnestness. They had friends to recommend,
deep suggestions. Carlson had warned him, “Mind, you’re a kid with a
pocketful of candy, now. You’ve stopped bein’ just one of the gang.
Better ride in cabs if you want to get anyplace.” Well, the motor, with
its adorable slippery blue crust, kept people at a distance. Mark
wound an arm about Gurdy and pulled himself into a corner of the seat.
The car was hampered by a dilatory van that lurched ahead of its hood.
The chauffeur cursed in Canadian French and a messenger boy on the
van’s tail cursed back, joyously foul, emptily shooting accusations of
all sins in a sweet, sexless howl that pierced the glass about Mark and
made him grin, absently amused.
“He’s mad,” said Gurdy, dispassionately.
“No. He’s just talking, son.”
“Huh,” Gurdy grunted, trying to match the words with ordinary
conversation. This messenger boy was plainly an accomplished fellow.
The van rolled off over Broadway in a shock of light and dust. Gurdy
saw “Red Winter” on a poster and asked, “Is this Red Winter a good
play, Mark?”
“Pretty fair, honey.”
“Well, can I come to it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Too dirty,” Mark said, then, “All about killin’ folks, son.”
Gurdy argued, “Well, Lohengrin’s all about killing people and Miss
Converse took me to that and it was in Dutch.”
“German, sonny.”
“I like French better’n German,” Gurdy yawned, waving a leg in the air
and went on, “I think Broadway’s ugly.”
“You’re right,” said Mark, enchanted by such taste.
Yet Carlson really liked to stroll on Broadway and Cora Boyle had
often led Mark for dusty hours through this complexity of hesitant,
garrulous people, along these sidewalks where there was nothing to be
seen. He rubbed his jaw and thought of Paris, viewed last summer, of
the long, swooping street at Winchester gilt in an afterglow. Oh, after
dark Broadway was tolerable! Then the revolving people were shapes of
no consequence and, with a little mist, these lights were aqueous,
flotillas of shimmering points on a hovering, uncertain vastness. Now,
the roadway was a dappled smear of bodies wheeled and bodies shod. The
sidewalks writhed, unseemly. But Cora Boyle liked it. The pretty, black
haired dancer just then lodged at Mark’s cost had rooms overlooking the
new width above Forty Second Street. And she liked that.... And she
liked the scenery of “Red Winter.” Poor stuff, he thought. He cursed
scene painters. Charles Frohman had heard of a fellow who’d studied
the art in Berlin and made astonishing sets. He must telephone Frohman
and get the man’s name. He was tired. “Red Winter” had tired him.
The leading woman had a way of saying “California” through her nose
that had vexed him all week. A poor play. His head was full of jagged
swift ideas, of memories; Eddie Bernamer milking a young cow against
a sulphur wall and laughing when Mark tried to sketch him on the fly
leaf of an algebra; Cora Boyle swaggering into Rector’s in a blue
dress; Clyde Fitch telling little Margaret that her name was Margot;
Stanford White shouting with laughter because Mark softened the ch of
“architecture.” Why hadn’t they given White a billion dollars and let
him build the whole city into charms of tranquil, columnar symmetry?...
Gurdy knew that his uncle was oppressed. When Mark thought hard he
stroked the scar on his jaw. Gurdy wanted to talk, now, and tossed a
leg over Mark’s black, rocky knee.
“What’re you thinkin’ about, Mark?”
“Just bosh. What’s Margot been doing all day?”
“Havin’ a bellyache.”
That terrified Mark. He sweated suddenly and called through the tube
bidding the driver hurry. Spinal meningitis, he read, began with
nausea. But when he ran into the panelled library of his house Margot
was playing with her largest doll and the angular governess assured
him, in simple French, that a pill had set things right. Margot lifted
her black eyes and said, rubbing her stomach, “I was ill, papa,” in
her leisurely way.
“Ate breakfast too fast,” Gurdy said, in grim displeasure, watching
Mark double his lean height and begin to cuddle Margot.
Margot stared at her cousin with an aggrieved, brief pout and then
wound herself into Mark’s lap. The large doll was named Aunt Sadie for
Mrs. Bernamer. Margot said, “Miss Converse fixed Aunt Sadie’s drawers,
papa,” and her brown face rippled as she displayed three stitches. Then
she righted the doll and gazed at Mark devotedly, solemnly, preening
her starched skirt of pink linen. Pink went with her black hair and
her tawny skin. Mark touched a roaming mesh of her hair and her face
rippled once more. Her skin had this amber haze like the water of a
pool in the pine forest behind the farm. In that pool he had bathed
with her father through endless afternoons, idling on until other
boys lagged off and the shadows were ink on the crumbled ocher clay
of the margin where pink boneset grew. And now Joe was dead and his
blackhaired wife was dead ... an unskilled cook before marriage, half
Irish, half Italian, a good, sleepy woman who ate with her knife and
wore a chaplet blessed for her Roman mother by some Pope. Margot would
never know them. He kissed her hair. She was this warm bubble enclosed
in his arms.
“Love me any, sister?”
“’Course,” said Margot.
Gurdy snorted and stalked away. Mark talked to the stiff governess and
patted Margot. Miss Converse sewed and chatted about Conrad’s novels,
then getting fashionable. She assented, “Very interesting. Romantic, of
course. I dare say the colour attracts you.”
“Of course,” said Mark, “and what if they are romantic?”
She had some vague objection. If she bored him, Mark was still grateful
that she hadn’t tried to marry him. She was necessary to the training
of the children but her buff, bulky face wasn’t alluring and her gowns
hurt him by a prevalence of mole embroidery and rumpled lace. She was a
gentlewoman, wonderfully learned and obliging about his pet airs on the
piano. Mark talked and wished that he could escape, like Gurdy who went
to practice handsprings in the white hall and slid downstairs at the
note of the doorbell.
Gurdy slid along the handrail of black wood so admired by callers and
jumped for the dining room which had doors of glass coated in blue
silk. These doors opened into the drawing room which Gurdy despised
for its furniture all black and silver and its hangings of cloudy
tapestry, impossibly noiseless when one bounced balls against them.
Yet people called it a lovely room. And now, peering through a rift
of the blue silk Gurdy saw the butler turn a visitor into this space
and the visitor looked about with brown eyes, seeming to admire. Gurdy
speculated and decided that the slight man was an actor come to talk to
Mark about a part. His hair curled, his overcoat clung to his middle
neatly, his white gaiters were unspotted, his pale moustache didn’t
overhang his little mouth. He was visibly an actor. Gurdy had examined
many through this spyhole. And like many the fellow went to glance at a
circular mirror above the cabinet with tiny doors which Miss Converse
called “Siennese.” As Mark’s feet descended, the man straightened
himself and began a smile. Gurdy listened to the jar of his high voice
against Mark’s fuller drawl.
“Mr. Rand?”
“Yes. Don’t think we’ve ever met. Daresay you know who I am and all
that?”
“Yes,” said Mark.
Gurdy noted the long pause. He held that actors were a talkative lot.
Mr. Rand worked with his moustache an indefinite time before he spoke
again.
“My wife sent me along--I’m a sort of ambassador, you know?... Matter
of business, entirely.”
Mark said, “I see,” wondering how old the man was. The moustache had an
appearance of soft youth. He smiled, wanting Cora’s third husband to be
at ease, and nodded to a chair.
“Oh, thanks no. Mrs. Rand wants to know if you’d mind meeting her. At
her hotel, for instance?”
“I don’t mind at all,” Mark lied, “Glad to. Any time.”
“Then she may let you know? Thanks ever so. Good luck to your play
tonight,” said the young man and walked out gracefully.
Gurdy came through the glass doors and asked, “Who’s he?” Mark lifted
the pliant, hard body in the air. He fancied that Gurdy must feel
something odd, here.
“How old would you say he was, darling?”
“Dunno. Who’s Mrs. Rand?”
“An actress.”
“Put me down,” said Gurdy, “My pants are comin’ off.”
Mark breathed comfortably, helped the boy on his knee tighten the white
trousers and passed into dotage. Eddie Bernamer and Joe Walling had
begotten these bodies. The fact mattered nothing. Mark was a father.
He had possession. When things went wrong he could come home to gloat
over Margot and Gurdy. He promised, “I shan’t be busy now for a week.
We’ll ride in the Park and feed the squirrels, sonny.”
“All right. Say, Mark, you’re all thin.--There’s the doorbell,
again.--Oh, say, a lady telephoned s’noon. Her name was Miss Monroe and
she wanted you to call her up.”
“I like her nerve!”
Gurdy jumped at this loud snort of his uncle.
“Who’s she?”
“She’s an actress,” Mark stammered, hoping the boy wouldn’t go on, and
Carlson came in, his yellow face splotched as though he’d been walking
fast.
“That Rand squirt been here?” he yelled at Mark.
“Yes. Why?”
“I passed him. What’s he want?”
“Me to meet her.”
“You goin’ to?”
“Guess I better, Mr. Carlson.”
Carlson jabbed Gurdy’s stomach with his cane and panted, “I can tell
you what she wants and don’t you listen to it, neither. She’s had a
fight with Billy Loeffler. He won’t put this whelp she married in her
comp’ny. I bet she quits Loeffler. Her show’s no good, anyhow. Well, I
won’t take her on. She’s a second rater. She’s an onion. I won’t have
her for nothin’. Don’t you get sentymental about Cora Boyle any more,
son!”
“You needn’t worry,” said Mark, patting Gurdy’s ear.
Gurdy sat up and inquired, “Is that the Cora Boyle grandpapa says was
a loose footed heifer?” So Carlson broke into screaming mirth. Mark
flushed and mumbled, sent the boy away and scowled respectfully at his
partner. Sometimes Carlson’s crude amusement stung him.
“For God’s sake don’t talk of her in front of the kids, sir!”
“All right, son. Goin’ to let Gurdy come to the show tonight?”
“Not much!”
The old man lounged into a chair and jeered at his fosterling. Mark’s
horror diverted him. He yapped, “Still think it’s a dirty show, do you?”
“Yes.... Oh, dunno! If there was anything to the slop but that second
act, I wouldn’t care. Nothing but Sappho over again. Old as the hills.”
“What’s new in the show business, son?”
“The Merry Widow is,” Mark laughed, “and you wouldn’t buy it. Savage
is bringing it in week after next. They were playing the music at
Rector’s last night.--Look here, the set for the last act’s all wrong,
still. Those green curtains--”
“You and your sets! God,” said Carlson, “you’d ought to’ve been a scene
painter!”
“I wish I could be, for about one week!” Mark let a grievance loose,
slapping his leg. “These people make me sick! You tell them you want
something new and they trot out some sketch of a room that every one’s
seen for twenty years. They never think of--”
“You ain’t ever satisfied! You act like scenery made a show--”
Mark sighed, “Well, we’re not giving the public its moneysworth with
this piece. The scenery’s--mediocre.--Come up and see Margot.”
The old man poked Margot’s doll with a shaking thumb and called her
Maggie to see her scowl, like Mark. The little girl’s solemn vanity
delighted him. He was also delighted by Gurdy who became an embodied
sneer when Mark fondled Margot. The boy watched Mark kiss this female
nuisance then walked haughtily out of the library and set to work
banging the piano in the upper playroom.
“All you need’s a wife and a mother-in-law and you’d have a happy
home,” Carlson said when Mark let him out of the front door.
“Think I haven’t?”
“I suppose you have. Ain’t any truth in this that you’re goin’ to marry
that Monroe gal?”
“No. I gave her a ring, last week. I suppose she’s been airing it.”
“Sure.--You big calf,” the old man said with gloom, “you always act
so kind of surprised when one of ’em brags of you. You ain’t but
twenty-nine and you’re a fine lookin’ jackass. Of course, she’ll show
off her solytaire! A gal’s as vain as a man, any day. One of ’em’ll
get you married, yet.--Yell at that cab, son. My legs are mighty
tired.--See you at eight sharp. Now, mind, I won’t have nothin’ to say
to Cora Boyle.”
Mark waited until the opening night of “The Merry Widow” for more news
of Cora Boyle. She deserted her manager, Loeffler, while “Red Winter”
was in the first week of its run at the 45th Street Theatre. Mark
saw her lunching in the Knickerbocker grill with her young husband
and a critic who always touted her as the successor of Ada Rehan. A
busybody assured Mark that Cosmo Rand was twenty. Cora was thirty
one. All three of her husbands, then, were younger. The oddity of
theatrical marriage still alarmed Mark. In Fayettesville it was a fixed
convention that girls should be younger than their husbands. But she
was luscious to see at the “Merry Widow” opening. Mark thought how well
she looked, hung above the crowd in the green lined box. She found
novel fashions of massing her hair. That night it rose in a black
peak sustained by silver combs. She kept a yellow cloak slung across
one bare shoulder concealing her gown. Against the gentle green of
her background appeared three men. Rand wore a single eye-glass that
sparkled dully when the outer lights were low. Through the music and
the applause Mark was conscious of the box and of Cora’s red feathered
fan. Her second husband, a thin Jewish comedian, went up to shake hands
in an entr’acte. Women behind Mark giggled wildly. He wandered into
the bronze lobby where men were already whistling the slow melody of
“Velia.” He was chaffed by an Irish actor manager born in Chicago whose
accent was a triumph of maintained vowels.
“An’ why don’t you go shake hands with Cora, bhoy?”
“Shut up, Terry. Come have a drink?”