Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  In the noisy buzz between shows, the floor teemed with waiters bearing silver trays laden with orders or cleared debris. Austen and Julia were ushered to a round table in the center of the room, directly in front of the stage. Max and Dolly Clark were already seated, a silver ice bucket beside them. Duveen greeted Goldsmith and gestured him into the adjacent seat. Ogling the room, the Clarks paid no attention when Austen and Julia were served champagne from their bottle.

  Austen lifted his glass and touched its rim to Julia’s. “To Oregon timber.”

  “And Harlem hoopla.” They spoke sotto voce, even though no one was paying them any attention. If the Clarks were tourists, Julia felt like a stowaway on their voyage to the Camelot Pablo called “Ethiop,” watching their fawning delight from the forgotten shadows.

  “Here we go,” Austen whispered, eyeing a corpulent man about to join their table. “The dicey fellow himself.”

  Duveen scrambled up more quickly than his bulk might suggest. “Mr. Timson. It’s an honor.”

  Timson positioned his chair with his back to the stage and welcomed them to Carlotta’s, “the finest entertainment this side of Paris or Berlin.” He was middle aged, with a cowlick pushing sand-colored hair up from his right temple. His eyes were small and wide set. Between his brows ran a strong vertical dent that suggested either perpetual confusion or anger. There was something ominous to the look of Eva’s boss. Julia was no shrinking violet, but she was beginning to understand that Eva, despite her trusting and gentle demeanor, was far more seasoned than she in the rough ways of the world. Eva apparently took men like Timson in her stride.

  Timson lifted his hand, and a waiter materialized at his shoulder. “Like our champagne, Mr. Clark? That one’s on the house. Want more? Good. Keep it coming, Leroy. And tell the kitchen to send whatever’s particularly fine tonight.”

  They were beset with another ice bucket and two more bottles, each uncorked and poured into shallow glasses all around. An array of dishes followed, including platters piled with deep-fried chicken and pork ribs bathed in a red sauce. Dolly Clark exclaimed at what she called the jungle food and filled plates for herself and Max. Julia chose a small tournedos of beef, wrapped in fatty bacon. On closer inspection it was overcooked.

  She was still chewing when the lights dimmed. A tuxedoed orchestra at the rear of the stage awoke with a wailing high note, trumpets over winds. The crowd instantly quieted.

  Julia had no sooner wondered why champagne had been poured for the vacant place to her right than a figure eased into the seat. In the fading light she saw a man of about forty, blond hair brilliantined back from his forehead. His evening jacket was perfectly cut and pressed. When he reached for the glass, a starched white cuff, anchored by a gold monogrammed stud, emerged from his sleeve. He leaned a shoulder toward Julia and whispered a brief apology for his late arrival. She nodded, observing the complex scent borne by his cheek. French.

  The man twisted to look at her. His arm moved across his lap, and he took her hand. “Martin Wallace,” he breathed. His eyes were blue, alert. He did not smile. He continued to hold her hand as Julia murmured her name in reply. He leaned closer to listen. His grasp faintly rolled her fingers like the swell of an ocean wave. The scent brushed her again as he repeated her name before straightening to face the dark stage.

  Without moving her eyes from the spotlighted orchestra, Julia saw every contour of his immaculate head, motionless beside her. She registered the spotless gleam of his collar, the heat of the shoulder not two inches from hers. When she reached for her glass, he mirrored her movement—the stretched arm, the lingering sip—but his eyes also never left the stage.

  The fabled Carlotta’s floor show had begun.

  CHAPTER 8

  The orchestra settled into a lively jazz melody, and a column of pink feathers streamed onto the stage from each far corner, joining in front of their table. Costumed in lavish headdresses, skirts of three-foot-long feathers, and glittering halters, twenty or more dancers whirled and dipped through a complicated pattern of maneuvers. They seemed almost printed, to Julia’s bookish mind, each was so alike: tall, lithe, and pale. Arms linked, they ebbed and flowed toward the audience, huge smiles and high-focused eyes never faltering.

  Applause swept the dancers back through the curtains as the music shifted. Two comical figures in padded raggedy clothes and tar-black painted faces bounded toward center stage, bellowing an exaggerated dialect. After their nonsensical repartee set the audience to laughing, the comedians broke into a more intelligible but still dizzying dialogue. Each wore a huge wig of woolly Negro hair. Pointing to her partner’s nest of kinky curls, the woman bawled, “Man, you got mailman hair!”

  “Mailman hair?” the man shrieked. “Whachu mean, inky pink?”

  “Each knot’s got izzown route!”

  The audience roared. The man pranced around his partner and sang, “Child, yah hair looks mighty good.”

  The woman patted the stiff hanks, ironed flat in the current fashion, covering her ears. “Yeah? Well, Madame Walker just been over.”

  Her partner gripped her shoulder and spun her around, where the back of her hair was every bit as full and springy as his own. “Yeah? Well, she fuhgot t’ walk through yuh kitchen.”

  Her hands flew up to wrestle the wad into a bandana scarf, the audience hooting and clapping. The act went on for several more minutes, their mugging and startling slang reducing the crowd to helpless laughter.

  Julia had been to several cabarets in Paris and London. This show was similar in its pace and kaleidoscopic variety, with lavish chorus numbers blending into dancing blending into a ballad blending into comedy, and so on. She knew that, as a headliner, Eva would have the most extravagant number, likely near the end.

  In fact, when Eva did appear, Julia did not at first recognize her. Following the tap-dancing Barney Brothers—who repeatedly leaped high into the air, newsboy caps secured low over one eye, and landed with heels skating in opposite directions across the polished floor—the stage went dark and silent.

  The lights came up on a tight huddle of half-naked men in the center of the stage. They made a great knot of muscle and bone that began to throb to a low drumbeat, soon joined by a clarinet’s sullen sob. As the men began to dance, writhing as a single pulsing form, their deep voices wordlessly echoed the drum’s throb in a counterpoint rhythm. Bare feet sliding in an intricate weaving motion, the circle slowly released first one thrusting arm and then another, and another, each fissure revealing glimpses of something shiny and motionless in its center. The mound began to sway in a slow-drifting circle, then spin. In some impossible choreography, the men danced faster and faster, heads and arms still knit together at the shape’s center. The pounding of their feet rocked the floor. Julia steadied her chair’s slight wobble. The whirling form seemed about to fly apart when, with a clash of cymbals, it suddenly froze. The men sprang up to their full heights, arms outstretched. With another cymbal strike they lunged toward the center again, then arched back, their thighs straining as shoulders hovered over heels. They teetered in tense balance, spines curved in crouching backward Cs.

  Julia realized her mouth was open. Her heart hammered. It was impossible not to be caught in the swirling web of energy. It was a human fountain, a spring of life and power bubbling up out of some inchoate form and finally bursting free. A creation myth? There was something frightening in the sheer power of this potent mass blooming into men. Julia moistened her lips and folded her hands, glad for the darkness. She was an adult. She mustn’t gape like a five-year-old at whatever spectacle came next.

  Another keening high note from a single clarinet. One thin white arm, its hand splayed wide, rose from a folded mound of flickering gold. Slowly a head appeared above the men’s splayed forms. Beneath a fantastic headdress of heaped gold chiffon, fixed by thin gold chains draped across her brow and over her ears, Eva’s face emerged. A few loose layers floated to her shoulders. Expressionless, eyes closed, she rose, slowly
unfurling her body’s full length. Her shoulders and arms were bare, but her torso and legs were swathed in more gold chiffon, secured by long coils of chain that circled her hips, waist, ribs, and throat. From each chain-wrapped wrist hung a polished gold ball the size of a tangerine. No part of Eva moved. Except for a faint pulse at the base of her throat, it was as if she’d left her body.

  Julia felt a painful dissonance in her own shallow breathing. Her cheeks burned. She tried to see Eva through the dramatic lighting, tried to separate her from this unsettling scene. It was as if Eva—no, her body—had become a thing, some kind of trophy offered up for the spellbound audience. Two emotional undercurrents swirled in Julia’s pulse. One was horror that the Eva she knew had been so effaced. The other was a subversive pleasure to think Eva had retreated, that she was distancing herself. It was her body, her performance, but it wasn’t her. She’d even said as much the other evening. In a way, the scene enacted the humbling impotence everyone felt when forced to yield to those with greater power: the child asking pardon from an unjust adult, the doorman thanking a rude guest. Retreat—holding back one’s self—was the only sanctuary. No wonder Eva dreamed of going to Paris. Of taking her money and escaping into the relatively benign life of a writer.

  The room fell silent. Eva stood erect, both arms raised, the gold balls swaying from her hands. She began to sing. The sound came from deep in her throat, a wavering moan to answer the men’s throbbing chant. Her eyes drifted open, their gaze fixed high over the audience, and the music focused into song. Her voice had an ethereal quality, gaining clarity as it rose. The words of her song were so lost in the extraordinary timbre of her voice that only occasional fragments crystallized into a language Julia could understand. Over and over the phrase recurred: I’m just a slave of love. A dozen variations of it flowed through Eva’s lungs, her voice at times seizing, at other times rumbling.

  I’m just a slave to love

  Why do I crave his love?

  I can’t be saved by love

  Only betrayed by love

  I’m just a slave to love

  She began to move, the billow of weightless chiffon a cruel contrast to her chained torso. Bending back into the arms of two men, she thrust her right leg high and laid her ankle on the lowered shoulder of one of the dancers so that the chiffon fell away to her hip. Glinting in the harsh light was a thick gold cuff locked above her ankle. The slow dance continued, accompanied by a single drumbeat, the men’s chanting, Eva’s cries and moans, and the metallic clink of chains. As the pace quickened, two of the men took hold of her arms and seized the gold spheres swinging from her palms. They began to circle Eva’s outstretched arms, gradually unwinding the coiled chain as they danced. The choreography grew more frenzied, and the music, including Eva’s voice, gained power.

  I’m just a sla-a-a-a-a-ve to love.

  Soon all the dancers were leaping in tight circles around Eva, who dipped and spun furiously. Yards and yards of the thin, gleaming chain tumbled into the arms of her attendants.

  The frenzied music and motion held the audience spellbound. Julia too caught her breath as she realized Eva’s shroud would drop to her feet when she was freed from the final loop of chain.

  The scene froze. With agonizing tenderness a single dancer completed the last three circuits of Eva’s now-motionless body. She stood with her back to the audience, feet apart and arms again raised high, palms upturned. The last swath of chiffon slipped and wobbled. Finally, in silence, it drifted to the floor. Eva stood still as a statue, her back white as marble. She wore only her headdress and a thin halter and loincloth of pale-gold silk.

  Julia wanted to look away but could not. Silence roared in her ears. The room was too hot. She felt as trapped as Eva, seduced by the luminous beauty of this terrible dance of conquering power. Facing Eva and the rapt audience, the dancer held out his armload of gold chain, which spilled over his forearms. A rustle swept the room: the end of the chain did not hang free. It was still connected to Eva. As the murmur grew, she threw back her chin. She shook her head to loosen the filmy chiffon of her headdress and rattle the chains draped over her ears. At last she turned to face the crowd.

  For one stunned moment in the narrowed spotlight, everyone saw: the remaining chain dangled from a gold loop sewn to her halter so that it appeared to be pierced through Eva’s left breast. Then she grasped the chain coiled about her ear and tugged it free. The piled chiffon floated down, hiding her features in a diaphanous cloud. Gasps and cheers erupted.

  A shower of gold rings clattered at Eva’s feet. Julia twisted her jaw to ease the pressure inside her ears, like after a sudden plummet. Her bones felt hollow, pliant, as if she might slither to the floor if she foolishly tried to stand. What exactly had she just witnessed? For a moment she was aware of nothing but that last searing vision.

  A whirlwind seemed to buffet the place. Julia registered the visceral power of dance and music and theater to commandeer the breath, and also a fresh wave of horror. It wasn’t the erotic aspect per se—Julia had seen other risqué acts on the burlesque stage—but the scene itself, so enveloping one might not see it at all. There was something abhorrent about this gilded evocation of slavery, performed by Negro artists at the direction of rich white men who grew richer from it every night. That was the true obscenity. Julia cooled her face with her palms. It was almost another kind of slavery, violence disguised as art. She couldn’t make more sense of it than that. Not yet.

  Everywhere around her patrons were flinging tiny rings onto the stage. Shouting “E-va, E-va,” they stood and cheered. Duveen reached for a small bowl of hollow rings in the center of the table, apparently provided for this purpose, and gleefully tossed a handful toward Eva’s shrouded form. Both Max and Dolly welcomed the supply Duveen emptied into their palms and wildly threw them into the melee.

  Wallace simply covered his champagne glass as errant rings bounced onto their table. Julia reached shakily to do the same.

  The stage lights faded into darkness, and thunderous applause broke out. Shouts pulsing Eva’s name brought her back through the curtains. She bowed her head twice and disappeared again as the house lights came up.

  Timson sat back. Looking squarely at Max Clark, he said, “What’d I tell you? Hot show, in’t she? Only in Harlem, folks, only in Harlem.”

  Dolly swallowed. “Oh my.” Dark spots on her cheeks mottled the rosier tints carefully laid on earlier that evening. “It’s so, so—” She struggled to find a bold word.

  Taking her discomposure as a compliment, Timson brought his heavy forearm down on the table with satisfaction. He nodded as Duveen added exuberant praises. Goldsmith said nothing, but his color had deepened. But then no one could remain unaffected by what they’d just witnessed, so close they could see the trails of perspiration disappearing into the folds of performers’ costumes and smell the sweat that misted the air with each kick and spin.

  “Pure jungle energy!” Duveen crowed, to no one in particular. “Primitive splendor, jam-packed in one spectacular show!”

  Timson acknowledged this with a wave. “Hey, folks, want you to meet an old friend, Martin Wallace. Watch this fella. He’ll be Senator Wallace one of these days. It’s a real honor to have him join us.”

  Wallace demurred at the praise and circled the table, shaking hands as Duveen introduced their party. Resettling beside Julia, he refilled her glass before his own and told Clark he’d done considerable business out West. This and that. Clark’s interest was reply enough, and the two men conversed across the table for a few minutes.

  Leroy appeared at Timson’s elbow. Following his employer’s nod, he silently circled the table and slipped a folded bill beside Max Clark’s glass.

  “I understand you folks intend to visit some of our more quaint neighborhood establishments tonight,” Timson said, standing. Around them other patrons milled about, greeting friends, placing orders, and seeking the lavatories. “But you’re welcome to stop by my private rooms upstairs, meet m
y little songbird. You too, Marty, if you got a minute. Let’s show Clark here some Harlem hospitality. I’ll tell Eva to come up.”

  Duveen sent a furtive look of triumph toward Max Clark, who nodded to acknowledge that the rare privilege might cost him. Duveen thanked Timson and promised they’d be up shortly.

  Timson grunted and walked away. Clark dismissed the hovering Leroy with a careless toss of bills onto the table.

  CHAPTER 9

  One didn’t simply stop by Timson’s rooms. A pair of guards, guns bulging visibly beneath their open jackets, barred the stairs. They slid rough paws over the men’s torsos and thighs, taking brusque inventory of seams and accessories. Just as coarsely they palpated Julia’s and Dolly’s small handbags.

  Julia had never been so close to a gun. Duveen’s mention of Timson’s shady past had been offhand, as if warning them of a limp or tremor one mustn’t stare at. But there was nothing benign or simply awkward about the guns less than an arm’s length away. They were worn openly, not even buttoned inside a coat. In one swift motion these men could become killers. More importantly, those guns were the first (and only) thing you understood about them. They wanted you to be afraid. And she was—of anyone who wielded fear as a weapon more powerful than the gun itself.

  When satisfied no one posed a threat, one of the guards escorted them up another long flight of stairs. A landing halfway up opened to a narrow, dim hallway, silent but for the flutter of costumes and scurrying heels. Another sentinel stood at this landing, arms crossed and feet planted. He too scanned them carefully before allowing them to climb the last dozen steps up to Timson’s private sanctum.