The Americans

by John Jakes

  CHAPTER I

  THE TROUPERS

  i

  IN 1873, NEW YORK had been the first state to adopt the thirtieth of May as a holiday honoring the Civil War dead. Now the holiday was widely observed throughout the North. But Memorial Day offered no respite to a theatrical company on tour—and that was the case on this last Thursday of May 1889. While most citizens relaxed and enjoyed a day of leisure, twenty-seven-year-old Eleanor Goldman, her husband, and the members of their troupe were rattling eastward through the Allegheny mountain valleys in a dingy Pennsylvania Railroad coach. According to Regis Pemberton, the company manager, they were about a half hour from the town in which they were scheduled to give a show that evening.

  The company had been sent on tour by Augustin Daly, one of the half dozen most successful producing managers in the United States. Daly’s Theater was one of New York City’s best playhouses, and Daly’s productions were almost always hits because he mounted them lavishly, neglected no details, and insisted on absolute personal control of every phase of a show. The newspaper writers called him “the autocrat of the stage” with good reason.

  Daly was also a prolific playwright. Every season he turned out several scripts, both original ones and adaptations. Eleanor and her husband were touring in a very successful comedy called A Night Off, which Daly had adapted from the German of Franz von Schönthan six years before.

  Tonight’s performance would be professional, but certainly no pleasure, Eleanor thought. She felt tired and depressed this afternoon. She sat by the grimy window, her chin in her palm and her dark eyes fixed on the misty dark green peaks passing slowly above her. An unread letter lay in her lap. She was hungry. She’d overslept and had had no time for breakfast before boarding the train. And when she’d awakened, her first sight had been an upsetting one— Leo, standing by the window of their hotel room and gazing out at the streets of Pittsburgh. On his face was a forlorn and faintly bitter expression which was becoming all too familiar.

  What tricks life can play, she thought then, before he realized she was awake. An outside observer would study the visible evidence and conclude that everything was going splendidly for the Goldmans. The truth was quite different.

  Leo sat beside Eleanor, dozing and swaying with the motion of the train as it switchbacked along a track above a racing creek. A few raindrops spattered the window. From two seats behind, one of the actresses sighed, “More rain. That’ll keep the audience at home.”

  “Maybe not, Minna,” Pemberton said. “This place is supposed to be one of the best theater towns in Pennsylvania. I’ve never played here myself, but Daly told me the houses are usually excellent. And the town’s accustomed to springtime floods. People are used to going out in bad weather.”

  “Seems like it’s been raining all month,” someone else complained. “Won’t we ever see the sun?”

  Pemberton again. “Don’t count on it soon. The Pittsburgh paper said the Signal Service is predicting another big storm today or tomorrow.”

  His voice blended with that of the company stage manager across the aisle. The stage manager doubled in brass as Prowl, a minor character in the play. He was saying to his assistant, “We’ve been guaranteed possession of the Opera House by three-thirty. I told them that if we couldn’t start shifting our scenery by four, there’d be no performance. The house manager promised to make sure the patriotic program ended on time. Of course the start of the program really depends on when the parade finishes.”

  “I hope to hell it doesn’t pour before we arrive,” the assistant grumbled. “If it does, we won’t be able to find any pickup laborers.”

  The voices droned on, punctuated by the sudden loud laugh of an actress reading a copy of the humor magazine, Life. Eleanor wished she could find something to laugh about. Leo’s mood made that almost impossible these days. Why couldn’t she soothe or humor him out of his despondency? Why, when so many things were going just right for them?

  Professionally, their position was enviable. They were well established in the organization of a fine manager. Daly was temperamental, but he tolerated no temperament in his actors and actresses. He also despised the star system, and refused to permit it in his shows. As a director, his chief goal was to achieve an excellent performance by the ensemble. He never permitted one actor to shine at the expense of others.

  That held true even in New York, where four of the most accomplished performers on the American stage formed the core of Daly’s stock company. The so-called Big Four—leading man John Drew, the son of Mrs. Louisa Drew of the Arch Street Theater; the two comedians Jim Lewis and Mrs. John Gilbert; and the ingénue Ada Rehan—all knew better than to try to upstage one another, or anyone else in the company.

  Membership in the Daly organization was also desirable because Daly believed in modern acting methods. Like any art, acting was not static; during the century, it had gone through a steady evolution.

  The first great American star, Edwin Forrest, had summed up the evolution within his own career. He’d started as a disciple of the stately declamatory school of acting popular in Britain. Then he’d fallen under the influence of the stormy emotional style of Kean. By the time Forrest had done his last season in 1871-72, that style, too, was passé, and Forrest was dismissed by the avant-garde as a “bovine bellower.”

  Now a more natural and realistic technique was developing. Men such as James Murdoch and Edwin Booth exemplified it best. Of course, there was still an important place for performers who could shift to the style known as extreme emotionalism. Women who could cry copiously on cue were in great demand for the many melodramas staged every year.

  Once categorized as emotionalistic, however, an actor had few chances to try other kinds of roles. Eleanor had struggled to avoid that kind of pigeonholing by producers. She deliberately sought varied roles. She’d started her professional career as Eva in a traveling Tom show. She’d played Juliet, Ophelia and, in different productions of The Taming of the Shrew, Bianca and Kate. She’d understudied the title role in Camille; ranted and sobbed in three Daly melodramas; been menaced by revolvers while defending her virtue in frontier dramas—even done knockabout comedy in a revival of Harrigan and Hart’s huge hit of ten years before, The Mulligan Guard Ball.

  Unlike some of Daly’s performers, she enjoyed all sorts of plays, from ancient to modern. A lot of actors were traditionalists, despising modern playwrights such as Ibsen or MacKaye. Daly’s ingénue Ada Rehan, for example, loathed the work of both men and would appear in nothing that was not light, innocuous, and—to use her words— morally uplifting.

  Eleanor didn’t quarrel with Ada for holding those views, but she felt sorry for her. Just as there was a new kind of acting emerging, so there was a new, more realistic and powerful dramaturgy. In America, its foremost exponent was Steele MacKaye. His play Hazel Kirke, first produced in 1880, was still widely toured. Hazel Kirke took place in a mill and featured working-class characters—a shock for audiences accustomed to the convention that serious plays were only set in ancient palaces or upper-class drawing rooms. The new dramatists thrilled and excited Eleanor. The theater was a banquet, and she had no intention of settling for a one-course meal.

  Despite Eleanor’s efforts to keep from being categorized, it was happening. Like it or not, she was beginning to be thought of as an actress of the personality school. Such actresses developed a personal following; their audiences paid to see them regardless of the vehicle.

  Some personality actresses tended to be more than a bit bizarre; the famed Madame Bernhardt kept a lion cub as a pet and slept in a satin-padded coffin in her Paris apartment. Eleanor abhorred that kind of exhibitionism. Yet it was flattering to be thought of as one who someday might have roles tailored to fit her talents because she, not the play, was the reason the audience came to the theater.

  Since she and Leo worked regularly, they were able to put money away in the hope of one day realizing a personal and professional dream. They’d started talking
about the idea almost ten years before. They wanted to own and manage their own playhouse in New York. During seasons with Daly and with Mrs. Drew at Arch Street, they’d learned the business side of theatrical management. Lately Eleanor had begun to think they were almost ready to stop working for others and start working for themselves.

  Why, then, with everything going so splendidly, was Leo constantly unhappy?

  She knew, of course. The fault was hers.

  ii

  She turned to look at her husband. Her classically featured, dark-eyed face that men found so beautiful revealed nothing of her worry and unhappiness. She was a good actress. She never permitted herself to show emotion of the kind surging through her now. And no matter how miserable she became, she never cried. Never.

  Leo was still dozing. Sleep had smoothed away some of the strain on his face. One area of their marriage hadn’t worked out and never would, because of what had happened that night in 1877 when men had broken into the Kent mansion and driven Margaret Kent to her death, and cornered Eleanor and—

  She clenched her hands in her lap. Fought to blank out the memory of the pain, the humiliation, the incredibly soiled feeling as, one by one, those men—

  No. She would not dwell on it. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, failing to notice the letter slip out of her lap as she changed position.

  The moment of strain passed, the details of that harrowing night successfully pushed out of her mind. She opened her eyes, noticed the letter on the floor and quickly recovered it.

  The letter was from Papa’s brother, Uncle Matt—the man who had first encouraged Eleanor to try a professional stage career. Matt Kent had served as a genial and expert guide when she and Leo had honeymooned in Paris. Among the theaters they’d visited was the Comédie-Française, where Eleanor’s great-great-great-great-grandmother, Marie Charboneau, had performed.

  For a few moments she immersed herself in the letter. Its only real news concerned Tom, the son Uncle Matt had never seen. Before the boy’s birth, Matt’s estranged wife, Dolly—of whom he still wrote and spoke in the most affectionate terms—had gone out to the North-West Frontier of India as a schoolteacher for officers’ children. Now, Matt said, Tom was hoping for a career as an officer in the Indian Army—an organization not to be confused with the British Army in India, he pointed out. Down to the very last soldier of the line, those in the British Army in India were Englishmen. The Indian Army included many native-born noncommissioned officers and enlisted men.

  India was a colorful, if dangerous, place to soldier, Uncle Matt concluded. He wanted to visit it and sketch its sights one day. Eleanor suspected that what he really wanted was to get his first look at young Tom.

  She folded the letter and put it in her reticule. The train was rumbling past shanties and wooden tenements standing on mud flats beside a river, which looked unusually swift and turbulent. Across the river, large brick homes perched on a steep hillside, their fronts supported on pilings. The train passed a factory complex. Eleanor recalled Pemberton saying the town’s main industry was steel.

  But trivial things couldn’t keep her mind off Leo for very long. They had been married almost four and a half years. In all that time, despite mutual tenderness and consideration for the feelings of the other, they had been unable to solve the problem which was Eleanor’s legacy from that dreadful night in ’77. Her father had sensed the existence of the problem. Of course, she couldn’t discuss it with him.

  But the problem was so serious that discussions with Leo were inevitable. Time and again, she told him the difficulty didn’t matter. He agreed—or pretended to agree—then contradicted that attitude a day or so later by another desperate attempt to prove that the problem didn’t exist. He always failed.

  She repeatedly told him the fault was hers. But she couldn’t bring herself to do the one thing that might have convinced him. She couldn’t open the imaginary door and, by sharing the secret with her husband, destroy its power over her. She simply could not do it. And so Leo’s despondency and bitterness grew steadily worse.

  Now the train was rolling across a huge stone bridge at least fifty feet wide. The bridge carried four sets of tracks. “Looks like we’re coming in,” Pemberton said. “Our hotel’s the Hulbert House. It’s supposed to be the newest in town. Before we left New York, they wired that they were heavily booked. But I think we managed to squeeze everyone in.”

  “Leo?” Eleanor tapped his arm. His eyes opened. “We’re here,” she said, leaning over to kiss his closely shaved cheek.

  In A Night Off, Leo played Marcus Brutus Snap, an eccentric and flamboyant theatrical manager—a role far removed from the somber silence with which he regarded her now. Others in the company stood up, gathering hand luggage from overhead racks. On either side of the train spread a panorama of tenements and business buildings made indistinct by the rain and the dark sky.

  “Feeling a little more rested?” she asked.

  Leo shrugged. “I slept. I don’t think I got much rest.”

  She held back a retort. Melancholy was becoming a way of life for him. She hated that. She knew he had many more reasons than one for becoming embittered. Yet that understanding didn’t make it any easier to live with him.

  He tugged the brim of his derby down over his forehead, slouched on the seat and stared out the window. What he saw quickly soured his expression.

  “God. Someone in Pittsburgh told me they manufacture a lot of barbed wire here. A fitting product for such a depressing place.”

  “Regis said it’s an excellent theater town—”

  “Oh, certainly. In this weather I’m sure we’ll play to all of a dozen people.”

  It hurt her to hear his sarcasm. These days he was so unlike the merry, confident, and outgoing Leo Goldman she’d first met at an amateur theatrical club in New York. He was still handsome. But the frustration caused by their failure to achieve a satisfying physical relationship seemed to be eroding his good looks as well as his good spirits.

  One indicator of his unhappiness was the frequency with which he reminisced about the past. Although he’d spent his boyhood in poverty on New York’s lower East Side, he already regarded that boyhood with great nostalgia. Often after a performance, he would lie on the bed in their hotel room, lock his hands under his head and deliver a long, rambling monologue about the days when there had been a mezuzah on the doorpost and pushcarts selling oilcloth, garlic, fish, and a hundred other items in the street. “After a skimpy meal, those carts could provide dessert if you were clever and fast. Apples went down your shirtfront, bananas up your sleeve.”

  He’d worked hard running newspapers from Park Row, but there had been moments of relaxation, too, wonderful moments. There were breathtaking vistas of the city to be seen from tenement rooftops, bright immies to be won in a marble shoot, a rubber ball to be solidly whacked in the Hester Street equivalent of a baseball game—

  “Good times.”

  That was his summation. He’d been among his own people, not constantly jostling against bigots who turned on him because of his name or his dark, Semitic face. He’d been full of hope and ambition. She blamed herself for most of his dreams going bad.

  Pemberton bustled along the aisle of the lamplit coach. He was a runty, red-faced man of sixty, inclined to be brusque. Now, though, he sounded like a mother issuing instructions to a brood of children.

  “Take hacks if they’re available—a trolley if they aren’t. It’s the Hulbert House, remember—”

  A conductor shouted the name of the town, but a screech of the wheels muffled it. There were twenty in the company traveling in the coach: five men and five women who took the principal roles in the play, plus musicians, scenery and property people, the stage manager, his assistant, and Pemberton. One of the musicians had evidently played the town before.

  “—that’s the Little Conemaugh out that way, and the Stonycreek there. The two rivers meet just above that stone bridge we crossed. What I don’t like abo
ut the place is the dam. It’s fourteen or fifteen miles up the south branch of the Little Conemaugh, and four hundred feet higher than the town.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” someone wanted to know.

  “It’s an earth dam. Largest in the world, and the reservoir behind it is the biggest artificial lake in the country. The dam holds back four and a half billion gallons of water. That’s twenty million tons. I guess the dam was safe once, but now it’s leaky as a sieve.”

  “My heavens, Waldo, why doesn’t someone fix it?” a young woman asked.

  “Laissez-faire, my dear Ellen. Laissez-faire. The dam was built forty or fifty years ago, as part of a rail and canal system connecting Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. When the system became obsolete, the land near the dam was put up for sale. Now the reservoir’s called Lake Conemaugh, and on the shore there’s a private fishing and hunting club for the Pittsburgh swells. The Mellons, Carnegie, Frick—that crowd. No one’s going to tell them how to run their businesses or maintain their property. They refuse to repair the dam. I’m glad we’re not staying here any longer than one—”

  Pemberton interrupted with a hard tap on the shoulder. “That’s enough, Waldo. The weather’s doing a fine job of depressing everybody. Don’t help out with scare stories.”

  “It’s no story, Regis. That dam’s been in wretched shape for—”

  “Waldo!”

  “All right,” the musician said, turning away with a sullen shrug.

  Eleanor knew Pemberton’s edict was not just a whim. A company’s mood had a significant effect on a performance; subtle influences could result in a superlative show, or a drab one. And audiences were quick to sense when a company wasn’t up to the mark.

  She saw no enthusiasm in the company this afternoon. The gloomy weather and the drab town had destroyed it little by little; Waldo’s comments hadn’t helped, either. Voices grew subdued as the train slowed for the depot. The women readied parasols that wouldn’t be of much use against the rain beginning to fall heavily outside. The sky had grown so dark, it might have been dusk instead of midafternoon. Lamps had already been lit in the station.