by Rex Baron
Lucy, the singer, had fallen under far less coercion than her sainted counterpart. She was moved, not a matter of feet, but half way across the world, by a single woman.
She wanted to destroy Helen because she had cost her the pain of humiliation in love and even a small piece of her career, but mostly because she had caused her to fail for the first time in her life. She had thought of killing her, in some way ending her life, but her mind could not imagine the circumstances of where and how it might be done. It was better to start again, to go home and find solace among friends and those who truly admired her abilities.
The Deck steward blew his whistle and instructed the passengers from the starboard side of the ship to assemble on the promenade deck for lifeboat drill. There were no exceptions. Even the most Patrician travelers were forced to mingle with the maids and serving people. The only consideration for survival was one of sex rather than social standing, and, as is the time-honored custom of the sea, women and children took predominance over even the wealthiest of men.
As Lucy and Mrs. Mullridge struggled with the complicated engineering of the lifejackets, tucking in the extra bits of cord hanging ominously here and there, they were herded into a strict formation and given lifeboat numbers for evacuation. Lucy had not heard the number. She was still musing about Helen as her stateroom number was called.
Her plump companion hopped about from the cold, rubbing her sides vigorously, and complained of needing immediate first aid in the form of a brandy.
The ship's horn sounded a series of blasts, loud and jarring, two short, then, two long, repeating the cycle, until everyone on board nodded their head in recognition of the full alert, abandon ship signal.
“I'm certainly glad we won't have to hear that awful sound again for the rest of the voyage,” Mrs. Mullridge said, as they handed their life vests to the cabin steward and headed for the clubroom.
Two nights later, seven hundred and fifty miles at sea, they heard the sound again, waking them from their sleep. Hours before dawn, the cacophonous sound pierced the blackness of the restless horizon.
Lucy awoke from a fitful sleep and slipped into a robe and shoes. She stepped out into the corridor that was alive with people, noisily hurrying in both directions, and pounded on the door of Mrs. Mullridge’s cabin. She rattled the handle and the door swung open. She realized, at once, that her companion had already gone, leaving her on her own. She ran up the nearby stairs to the promenade deck in her dressing gown, and stood at the railing, trying to find some point of reference in the shapeless darkness. The moon was shrouded in thick clouds, making it impossible to tell where the night sky met the black water.
Suddenly, the landscape shifted as a few rays of light filtered through, revealing a horizon line that angled up at forty-five degrees before her eyes. She understood immediately that it was the ship and not the sea that had gone off its axis. It was sinking, dropping hard, taking water from the aft end.
Her feet slipped out from under her on the wet deck, as frightened passengers hurried aimlessly behind her. Heedless of the instructions of the crewmembers, they screamed the names of the missing and clung to the rail without life jackets or even shoes.
The shrieking voices mingled with the coarse insistence of the ships alarm and Lucy realized, after a time, that she too was screaming. She scanned the deck, searching, for Mrs. Mullridge, hoping to see that she had made her way to one of the lifeboats that had already been deployed and were rowing urgently, out of the range of the sinking mass that would drag them down with it.
An elderly woman fell from sight, below the deck, as she tried to climb into a lifeboat while it was being lowered.
Lucy heard her name called, and shifted her focus from the number ten on the side of the lifeboat just above her, to Mrs. Mullridge, wrapped in her fur coat, wearing her bright orange life vest over top like a pinafore. She waved to Lucy, shouting instructions with urgency.
“Come, hurry,” she called, “it's nearly filled now.”
Lucy started toward the boat as in a dream. But she had no sooner let go of the safety rail, when the ship shuddered with a great explosion, throwing her to the icy deck. The floorboards below her creaked and groaned as the ship listed dramatically, causing her to slide along the cold, wet surface, gathering speed and momentum with every second. Her fingers scratched at the wet lacquered wood as she collided with other hapless passengers, who had also fallen and were swept along by the force of gravity, pulling them down, in the direction of the breach in the ship’s shattered hull.
There was blackness all around, and all Lucy could hear was her own screams mingling with the anguished cries of those already in the water. Within seconds, she heard the sound of her own body striking the water, and an excruciating pain that forced the air from her lungs. She was no longer screaming.
She moved slowly and calmly as if in a dream. There were others in the water, some struggling to cling to the surface, gasping and sputtering out indiscernible words. Others were peaceful, floating effortlessly on the current, their faces turned downward, as if distracted by something of interest on the ocean floor.
Lucy climbed onto a wooden crate that was floating by and lay against it, half submerged, trying to get her breath. Her lifeboat had been number ten, the number of transformation and completion, she thought. She remembered her dream, so like what she saw before her now. She remembered how her grandmother and the others rose from the water and stood on its surface for an instant, glowing and transfigured like resurrected beings, then, ascended into the starry sky toward their mother the moon.
“Rise above your emotions and the illusion of life,” she whispered her grandmother's familiar words aloud. Her hands slipped from the slick wooden surface of the crate, and she plunged deep into the darkness.
“I can't,” she said. “I don't know how.”
She opened her eyes and stared up above her. There was no sliver of light to mark her salvation. There was no soft whirring of machinery that would deliver her from the dressing gown that tangled her limbs and dragged her down. The darkness around her and the fear of suffocation were so familiar, and yet, she knew she was not rising up from under the stage at the Metropolitan Opera. There would be no opera, and she would never sing again. All she could see above her now was the black square crate slowly disappearing, as she sank deeper and deeper. She thought of Paulo, felt the cold penetrating into her bones and realized how much she wanted to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Helen’s apartment, New York
The gramophone blared a scratchy facsimile of a foreign orchestra playing Tristan and Isolde, as Helen stood at an ironing board in the bright sunlight from the kitchen window. She was just about to put the iron to the damp cloth, when a knock sounded at the door. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror of the foyer and, smoothing the front of her dress with her hands, opened the door. The hospitable smile she had planted on her face disappeared as she saw Claxton, framed in the doorway, leaning against his silver headed cane.
“I see you're overcome with joy to see me,” he said with sarcasm, as he virtually pushed past her into the small kitchen.
It was a charming place, larger than the bungalow where Helen had lived in California. Painted a pale, soothing green, above a pristine white wainscoting, the welcoming room gave more the impression of an English teashop than the kitchen of a modest New York apartment. A green and black, checkered linoleum stretched its way to a cozy drawing room where the phonograph blared amidst embroidered satin pillows and faithful reproductions of fine antique furniture.
Helen drew herself up against Claxton’s intrusion.
“What are you doing in New York?” she asked in an unwelcoming tone.
Claxton sat down at the kitchen table.
“This opera business has done rather a lot for you,” he said, pushing the dirty dishes away from his crisp linen sleeve. “I'd say you might run the risk of getting quite a swelled head, if it weren't for my
coming here to see that you don't.”
Helen did not answer. She busied herself by pulling the damp skirt from the ironing board and folding the board back into the place in the wall, behind the little door where it hid from view.
“Some thought I was a great fool to give up doing films for a while to follow you here, but I say I'm only looking out for my interests,” Claxton said with a smirk.
“You think that if you continue to help me, you'll get a share of the profits... is that it?” Helen asked matter of factly.
“You are, after all, my protégé,” Claxton said with a penetrating look that Helen pretended to ignore.
He tasted the cold coffee in one of the long-standing cups and scowled.
“Fortunately, your talents lie in less tangible areas than domesticity. I'm afraid you'll never adapt to a rose-covered cottage and homemaking for some virile and mindless young husband. By the way, I hope you've got that silver-plated starlet, Paulo Cordoba, out of your system. By my estimation, we have bigger fish to fry.”
Helen detested the glibness with which he manoeuvred the parts of her life around and dismissed her feelings as vulgar and stupid. She had her own estimation of where her life was going. She had planned a success at the Metropolitan, and with the amulet securely in place around David’s neck, such a success would be ensured.
“You know I can read your mind,” Claxton said, lowering his eyelids intriguingly. “You have every intention of following our Lucy to Germany and nudging her out of what's left of her career. You realize, of course, that I'll be going with you. I'm your Svengali. I created you and you know you can't exist without me.”
Helen moved to the sink and plunged her hands to the elbows into the basin filled with cold water.
Claxton leaned back in his chair and contemplated the seemingly domestic view she presented. He puffed his chest with self-satisfaction that she did not protest.
Helen threw back her head and roared with laughter.
The audacity of the hideous little creature, she thought. And yet, there was much he could teach her, much that she could not achieve on her own. She would let him come to Germany. She would let him help her with her career, until she learned all the secrets he could impart. Then, she would decide what was to be done with him.
She filled the room around them by adding her voice to the strains of the love duet that drifted across the linoleum from the drawing room gramophone. She shifted her weight on her feet, like a housewife bored with the routine of her work.
In her hands, under the water in the basin, she held a small tin model of an ocean liner. On its side, painted in nail polish, was the name, TROUBADOUR.
“Don't worry about our Lucy,” she said with an effortless smile. “I've already taken care of her.”
END OF BOOK TWO
Author Notes
Rex Baron
October 2019 - Fountain Hills, AZ
HEXE: Before Movies could talk they were filled with singers
I’m so grateful to you for reading HEXE and want to share some background on how the series came to be and some of the elements of research or personal experiences that have become a part of it.
Mute movies
A number of years ago, while I was waiting to get a haircut, I came across a magazine article that described an idea that struck me as unusual at the time... namely, that opera singers would be brought to the sleepy little town of Los Angeles to appear in moving pictures... in the early days before movies had sound. What would be the point of that? I asked myself. If you couldn’t hear the performer sing, why would anyone want to go to all the trouble and expense to bring in singers from the world of opera to appear on film? The answer, the article enlightened me, was because the public wanted to know what these famous people looked like “in person”. This idea was the inspiration for creating the character Lucy, the German opera singer, in book one of HEXE.
In the early days of the movie business, in the first two decades after 1900, part of the “experience” of going to the moving pictures was to see famous people who were world renowned for their talents, or sometimes merely for their celebrated good looks. Everyone, on every continent, wanted to see how the Russian Romanov princesses wore their hair in the 1910s, or how baseball player Ty Cobb looked as he smiled for the camera. People felt like they knew these celebrities when they saw them on film, and for the first time were able to develop a kind of intimacy by watching the famous people they admired on the movie screen. This newfound connection with “greatness” produced the relationship that we refer to today as a fan base... those people who followed the every move of the celebrities who interested them, just as someone might today on facebook or twitter.
So, it was not as unusual as it seemed at first that California movie companies would pay top dollar for famous singers to be captured on film in the same way that they exploited the filmed images of risqué dancers like Isadora Duncan or famous actresses and actors from the “legitimate” stage.
The fact that I remember the clearest from the article... that made its way into the early part of the story, HEXE, was that one such celebrated soprano was offered a dollar for every minute of California sunshine that shown down on her as she appeared in the soundless picture plays of the nineteen-teens. It was a publicity stunt, of course, showing to what lengths the filmmakers would go to please the public, but the extravagance of such a gesture was not far off the mark, and many famous actors and singers made a small fortune with such an undertaking. Sometimes, their earnings far exceeded what they might make in a full season working at La Scala opera house in Milan.
The “Influencers”
The character of Lucy, in the first books of HEXE, is inspired by stories of celebrities imported into silent films, and her popularity as an “influencer” is largely based on the early Twentieth Century opera star Geraldine Farrar. Alice Geraldine Farrar was an American opera singer who was celebrated for her Bel Canto singing, which means that she was lyrical in style, producing rich tones that were appreciated for their emotional context rather than their technical perfection. She was very beautiful and modern for her time and generated a huge fan-base of young girls, who referred to themselves as Gerry-flappers and emulated her fashion of wearing makeup in public and dressing in the latest couture. She was an international celebrity and was reported to be the mistress of the Crown Prince of Germany. Although Ms. Farrar’s career peaked a bit earlier than Lucy’s, and she retired in 1922, the very year that the story of HEXE begins, there are many similarities between the two women... one being that they both broke tradition by allowing their names to be used to advertise products. Farrar was highly paid to be the face of Creme Nerva moisturizing cream, and, In HEXE, Lucy’s face promotes everything from throat spray to root beer.
Another group that were in high demand were the showgirls from the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. Showman Florenz Ziegfeld produced the most lavishly staged extravaganzas imaginable at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York, from 1907 to 1927. His shows “glorified the American Girl”, by featuring scores of beautiful girls who simply stood on stage, wearing elaborate costumes. The grand finale of most of the long running shows was a procession of gorgeous young women, with uniformly curvy bodily measurements, descending a massive staircase to the strains of composers like Irving Berlin. Hundreds of girls would slowly descend at the same time, each with her arms outstretched to display her dazzling costume, and each cosmeticized to perfection, smiling at their admirers beyond the footlights, happy to be earning one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, making each of them among the highest paid performers in show business.
If someone was a Ziegfeld girl from the follies, she had more marriage proposals than she could remember, and countless pieces of diamond studded jewelry, always delivered in a dozen roses... just for agreeing to go to dinner with some wealthy playboy or young industrialist. These girls were widely celebrated and their popularity and influence can only be compared today to pop stars like
“The Spice Girls”, from a few years back, or someone like Madonna or Lady Gaga.
The Opium Den Scene
In the first books of HEXE, that center around the early movie industry (Lucy’s story), I was inspired to include the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to the opium den because of a meeting I had with a lovely old woman who had been in the follies. Years before it was written, when I was living in Manhattan, I had been invited to a cocktail party on the Upper East Side. There, amongst the other guests was a glamourous old gal, holding court over at least a dozen ardent admirers. I took my place amongst the other young men and listened attentively to her reminiscences of her days in the theater. In spite of being what I estimated to be in the neighborhood of eighty-something years old, she held us spellbound, not only by her amusing and exotic tales, but also by the unmistakable poise and glamour that she could still pull off, in spite of her advanced years. When she spoke of associating with people, whose names you had only heard of or read about, you felt as if you were in the presence of living history.
One of the reminiscences she shared was one in which she and a handful of girls from the Ziegfeld Follies had been brought to Los Angeles to be in the silent films. She said that people from other parts of the country, who could hardly afford the price of a ticket to the upscale entertainment in New York, were clamouring to see what these famous showgirls looked like, and what all the fuss was about. She knew they were meant as window dressing for the film, but they had been paid well and were sure to get “scads of expensive gifts”. She recounted that on this particular trip to LA, a character actor from her picture play, loaded her and a few others into his roadster one night and took them up the coast to a speakeasy gambling casino with an opium den hidden underground, out of sight from the motorcycle police that patrolled the highway. Much of what she described as her experience that night is what I drew upon to create that scene in HEXE.
