I found I could open every crate but two without a key. Inside, it was true, there was a lot of moldering cloth, which I set into two piles: the fabric I could recut into bodices (Liddy) or matronly capes (Mrs. Niffen) or gaudy vests for a villain (Thaddeus); and the fabric so far gone that it had to be thrown away. I was disappointed because there were no hats and nothing like a cane, which I particularly wanted. In spite of the small window cut into the back wall, the space felt dark and closet-like, and it reminded me of the small room off the dairy where my father kept his cleaning equipment.
I opened one of the side doors to let in more light, when I heard a voice coming from the auditorium. Although it was directly behind the stage, the green room had two doors on either side that led to stage left and stage right, where the actors waited for their cues—technically the wings, I suppose, although the space was as cramped as an upright coffin—and I went out there to see who it was.
Hugo was standing on the stage facing an imaginary audience. “In the old country,” he was saying in his broadest English accent, “magic was street entertainment.”
I must have made some noise, for he stopped and turned his head.
“Who’s back there? Mrs. Niffen? Come out here a minute if you don’t mind.”
When I walked onto the stage, I saw with some surprise that the velvet curtains in the auditorium had been rolled down to block the afternoon light, and six small lighted lanterns formed a circle around a wooden chair that faced the audience. Hugo stood within the lanterns’ dim light with his hand on the back of the chair. Next to him, also within the circle of light, was a small table with a folded handkerchief and a glass of water.
“May! I thought you were Mrs. Niffen. No, no, even better,” he said as I started to leave. “Sit here in this chair, will you? I want to practice my patter. All that nonsense with the postmaster’s boy made me want to try out my act again. But I do better with a live volunteer.”
I noticed that he had stuck a few cotton handkerchiefs into the cuffs of his shirt, and as he waved his hands they shifted a little with the movement, but not much. Silk would work better, I thought.
“I’m not a volunteer,” I said, removing the tea towel I had draped over my shoulders on account of my dripping hair. “Rather conscripted.”
He made the smallest of smiles, just a movement of the chin. As I sat down on the chair I could smell the mixture of washing soda and powdered ammonia that Leo used to clean smoke from the lantern glass. I’d never before been on the stage, facing the audience, imaginary or otherwise, and I was glad there was not really a line of coughing and spitting men who stomped their feet if they liked something and booed if they didn’t. In New York theaters there was more distance between the actors and those who watched them, but on the Floating Theatre it seemed as if good manners alone (and those not always prevailing) drew the line. I was wearing my plainest brown dress, something I would never allow onstage on anyone else because it bled right into the woodwork.
“In the old country,” Hugo began again, “magic was street entertainment.”
He produced a coin from behind my ear just as he had done a few weeks before with Charles Mundy. He said, “Gasp as though you’re surprised.”
I gasped as though I were surprised.
He showed the coin and two more like it to the imaginary audience, fanning them in the mouth of his fist. I guessed what was coming: an old trick called the Jumping Coin, which I had seen many times. I knew what couldn’t be seen from the audience: a fourth coin palmed in his hand. With a limp flourish—the cotton handkerchiefs still refusing to flutter—Hugo dropped one coin into his pocket and wrapped the other two in the handkerchief.
“Magicians often performed in private homes in London during the season. My own father was once in the home of Lady Margaret of Kent and made a Spanish doubloon appear from her bodice.”
He unwrapped the handkerchief to reveal all three coins inside. He put one coin in his pocket and then tapped his leg and found it in his boot. He put it back in the handkerchief with the other two coins and then shook the handkerchief out, but now nothing was in it.
“I daresay you think moving a coin into the bodice of a lady the height of impertinence.”
He took my hand and shook it. A coin dropped from my sleeve onto the stage floor.
“So did Lady Margaret. She sent him off on the next boat to America.”
He shook my hand again and another coin fell.
“And so you see me here, happily plying my trade in America, all because my father found his coins in the rudest of places.”
He gave me the handkerchief and I opened it. Inside were all three coins. I lifted them out to show the empty benches and Hugo clapped for himself.
“Your father was sent here by Lady Margaret of Kent?” I asked as Hugo folded up the handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He pushed the table an inch upstage and looked at it. In two steps he was off the stage and in the front row, evaluating the table from there.
“No, of course not,” he said as he jumped back up on the stage to move the table again. His movements were like the forest pucks my mother used to tell me about as a child: one minute here, one minute there, his gait something between a leap and a skip.
“My father never set foot in America. That’s just my stage patter. There is no Lady Margaret of Kent.”
My face heated suddenly. “No Lady Margaret? All that’s a lie?”
“Not a lie. I told you. It’s stage patter.”
“Stage patter,” I repeated. A hot, dark circle seemed to start under my rib cage and radiate out. I’d been so ashamed when I saw little Charles Mundy crying, and I hadn’t even been the one who lied; I was remorseful because I didn’t correct the lie. But here Hugo was actually practicing a falsehood without the slightest compunction at all.
“I don’t see any difference between saying your father was sent here by a lady in England who doesn’t exist, and telling a boy that there will be magic in the show when there is not,” I said with some vehemence. But Hugo only glanced at me and then went over to the windows.
“The difference, May, is that my act is a kind of fiction and the audience knows it. When a man gives me money and I give him a ticket, we’ve made ourselves a deal: I will try to make him believe something that is not true, and he will to try to believe it.”
He rolled up the velvet curtains and wound the rope ties carefully around the wall hooks as if he were securing the boat to a tree. Sunlight poured in, hitting the stage at a slant.
“That’s just buffalo talk,” I said.
“Oh, no, May. Not a bit of it. Think back on when you’re sitting in an audience. At first you’re aware that you’re on a plush seat, or a hard bench, or maybe you’re standing in the pit, but in any case there are people around you who, just like you, paid to be in this place, and you spend some time looking at them, what they’re wearing, who they’re talking to, and so forth, maybe even listening to what they’re saying.” He went to the next curtain and began rolling it up. “You might know some of them, but even if you don’t, you know that you are all from the same place and speak the same language and so on. Then the bell rings and the actors come out on the stage and the scene begins—let’s say it’s a country scene and maybe it’s in Italy or somewhere else far off—and for a moment, even as the players start their speeches, you are still you and the town you live in is still just outside the closed theater doors. But then, rather quickly if the actors are any good, something happens and somehow you drop into the fiction of the Italian countryside, and there you are. You forget all about the people around you because the only people that exist are the actors onstage, and the only world is the world they are playing out for you. You’ve lost yourself in the fiction. Afterwards, do you feel cheated? No. You might have liked the performance, you might have hated it, but it doesn’t strike you as a lie . . . it’s more like a window. And you’re complicit. You wanted to look in that window and you did.”
The puck was gone; the director-teacher had returned. There were eleven curtains on each side and they were so heavy and thick with dust that so far he had raised only five. At night no one would notice the dust—especially if, as Hugo was trying to convince me, they so fully believed in the story on the stage that for them there were no curtains, there were no windows, there was no boat. But could that really happen? It had never happened to me.
“I never sit in the audience,” I told him. “I’m always offstage helping.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But on the other days, when you aren’t working . . .” He went to the next window.
“I never go to the theater when I’m not working. I’ve never sat in an audience in my life.”
Hugo stopped and turned to look at me. “You mean to tell me you’ve never seen a play from the seats?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Why? A fair question. I didn’t like to sit for any length of time without doing something with my hands—that was one answer. Another answer was that I simply had no desire to do so. Hugo watched me as though my face might answer his question as well as any words. Above us the bell sounded for supper.
“Well, why should I?” I said at last, defensively, when I saw that he was not going to stop waiting for an answer.
Hugo frowned, and then laughed, and then shook his head. “You are a strange duck,” he said, “living with actors all year round and not interested in seeing a play.”
“Are you interested in costumes? In sewing?”
“Not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
The bell rang again. I was annoyed because I hadn’t finished going through the crates in the green room and because Hugo was a hypocrite, notwithstanding all of his fine words about what was a lie and what wasn’t. But mostly I was annoyed because he now knew that I didn’t like plays. I don’t know why that last bothered me so much except that I wanted to keep my job and I knew how much theater meant to him.
“Look here,” he said instead of answering me. He came up to me and showed me the same three coins again, and then palmed them.
“I’m hungry,” I said impatiently. “All the pie will be gone.”
Hugo said, “There are a few things you ought to learn if you’re working in my theater. One is the willful suspension of disbelief.” He rolled the phrase along in his strongest English accent. “Ever read Coleridge, May?”
“No.”
Once again he made the coins appear from behind my ear, then in one of his pockets, and then in the other one.
“We want to believe a story is true. We use our imagination to convince ourselves. We can’t help it. Now, you know that I didn’t find this coin in your palm”—he was shaking my hand—“but here it is, and so your imagination says it must be so. And what a delightful feeling it is, believing something that we know isn’t true!”
“My cousin has always maintained that I have no imagination.”
“If we can believe something that isn’t true,” Hugo went on, “the possibilities become endless. And then surprise, when it comes, is no longer frightening but rather a pleasure. And you know, May, that there is always a surprise at the end.”
Now he drew close enough to put his hand in my pocket, and for a moment I could smell the dark, rich balm he put in his hair, a spicy smell that seemed to bring with it the very taste of a faraway place, but one that I could never get to either by boat or by land. His fingers found my dress pocket and slid in, and for a moment his warm arm pressed against mine. Then he drew something out of my pocket and stood back.
He held out his hand. “Look what I found.”
It was a long brass key. The key to my stateroom, I guessed. And at that, I confess, I did make a short gasp in surprise and pleasure.
“Right there in your pocket all along,” he told me.
• • •
In my travels with Comfort I’d had many keys given to me: heavy iron keys and small thin keys that might just as well have been hatpins, keys to dressing rooms or boardinghouse rooms, keys to prop cabinets. My mother kept all her keys on a ring, which she carried in a basket. She used the same keys nearly all her life, but my keys changed with the theater season. Some landladies gave Comfort and me only one key for our shared rooms, and one wouldn’t give us a key at all. “My people are all respectable,” she’d told us, “and I trust you are, too.”
I was unusually pleased to have this new key, and later, at supper, I found myself reliving the moment when Hugo leaned in to put it in my pocket. I was surprised at the rush of sensation and the pleasurable tingle that stayed with me, which I prodded like a sore tooth, though it wasn’t painful—rather the opposite. He remembered I wanted the key, he had looked for it and found it, and he had given it to me in a surprising way, to amuse me, as entertainment. I knew it wasn’t magic, but I still felt happy. At the table I sat where I usually sat, between Liddy and Celia, but every once in a while I touched the brass key through the fabric of my dress pocket.
“Aren’t you hungry, May?” Hugo asked me from across the table. I looked at his eyes, trying to determine if he had felt the same pleasure giving the key as I had felt getting it. Liddy was telling a story about how once, when she was playing Juliet, she became so far gone into the part that she actually drank the poison (black ink) instead of miming it, and while she spoke Pinky stared at her intently. I noticed how Pinky’s eyes shone whenever he looked at Liddy, and I fancied he liked the excuse—listening to her tell a long story—to watch her face, which was, indeed, very lovely with her downturned eyes and happy smile. She carried a small yellow pocketbook around with letters inside it, and sometimes she opened one and read it under the table. Were they love letters? I wondered. Pinky, if he noticed her reading one, went a bit red in the face. His ears drooped forward but other than this he was a handsome man with a fine straight nose and cornflower-blue eyes that crinkled like an Irishman’s when he smiled.
“Way I see it, an actor can’t be too familiar with himself and his own reactions,” he said when Liddy finished, “since every night you have to say your lines as though for the first time. You have to feel it each night.”
“This new style, what they call the American style—lots of feeling there,” Jemmy put in.
Sam, sitting next to Jemmy, nodded. “Quite loud,” he said.
I thought of Sam as one degree beyond Mr. Niffen: Sam spoke, but not much, and usually only words of one syllable.
Thaddeus warmed to the subject. “That’s just the ticket! Make your words sound important and put the audience all in a maze and a muddle. Edwin Forrest and his lot, they never just walk through their parts. They have strength, you know, and power. I met Forrest once.”
“To my mind those blokes go too far. It’s a lot of empty ranting,” Hugo said. He held a piece of pie in his hand and as he spoke he waved it around, scattering small flakes of crust.
“They get the audience’s attention, though,” Thaddeus said.
“Only by tearing up the language.” Hugo waved his pie again. “Too much mouth, in my opinion, and not enough art.”
Cook put another pot of coffee down on the table. “Let me get you a fork, Cap’n,” he said.
“No, no,” Hugo said. “Don’t bother. I come from farm people in the north. Sheffield. We all eat our pie this way.”
I decided this was probably a joke, since I knew from all our talks as we walked into town together that his parents had both been stock actors in London. But Mrs. Niffen leaned toward him and said, “Quite right, Captain, quite right. Pies were originally like sandwiches, you know. A fine old tradition. The plowman taking his break. We should all eat our pie in just that way.” She declared that from now on she herself would always eat her pie with her hand and would encourage everyone else to do the same.
“Isn’t that right, Celia?” she asked her niece. “You and I will eat our pies with our hands like the fine farm folk in, er, Neffield.”
Celia, who unlike her aunt
had not yet finished her pie, put her fork down, her face reddening. Hugo winked at her from across the table.
Satisfied that the issue was settled, Mrs. Niffen wiped her mouth with the corner of her napkin and said she must now “see to her housekeeping,” a phrase I never understood (it was her usual way of quitting a room), since it was Leo who did most of the chores: emptying our stove ashes every morning, for instance, and sweeping the floors, and scrubbing the barrels that held our drinking water.
After she left, I waited for a minute and then I left, too. Down the guard, as I suspected, Mrs. Niffen stood with her hand on the doorknob to my stateroom. She looked over as I approached with no indication of wrongdoing either in her expression or her manner. Her hand remained on the doorknob.
“I’ve been looking for a book I’ve misplaced,” she said evenly. “I thought it might be here in Helena’s room, in one of those trunks.”
I pulled the long key from my pocket, fitted it into my door lock, and turned it. For a boat lock subject to wind and moisture, heat and cold—and possibly all that in one day—it was surprisingly smooth. The mechanism turned over with a satisfying click.
Mrs. Niffen looked down at the key and then up into my face with surprise. The nights were getting warmer now, and her silver-gray hair was curling near her forehead with the humidity. Her face looked even pinker than usual.
“It’s my room now,” I told her. “And the book isn’t here. There is nothing of yours in here, Mrs. Niffen.”
I turned the doorknob while pushing the door with the flat of my hand to make sure it was locked, and then I returned the key to my pocket and walked back to the dining room, leaving Mrs. Niffen standing there with nothing to do.
• • •
A few days after this Hugo made an announcement at breakfast: he wanted to change up the show midsummer, right about the time the Ohio met up with the Mississippi River, and put on a three-act play.
“It’s never been done on a riverboat that I’ve heard of,” he said. He had risen from the table to address us all, first beating a spoon against his water cup to get our attention. The hair on the right side of his head stood straight up, probably from him running his fingers through it, and as he spoke he began walking backwards, still talking, toward the windows. I was reminded, again, of a puck.
The Underground River Page 13
