He contemplated the hotel, the awaiting bed, but he knew the night was not over. She would show up. She always did on a night like this. So he waited, and in a couple of minutes there she was, storming across the dark boards, the ultimate, the memorable, the sublime stage mother. He would listen, she would storm, and he would wind up his day.
“Fire that act,” Ethel Wildroot said. “I don’t want to be in a show with Mrs. McGivers. It’s a blot on my name.”
“I think you’re right,” he said. “Of course the monkeys saved us.”
“Saved us! They drove everyone out of the theater. The show’s dead in Helena.”
“They broke the ice, Ethel. They returned the compliments. After that, it went perfectly.”
“I’m putting you on notice; we’ll leave the show unless you unload that immoral woman and her tropical parasites.”
He yawned. “That it?”
“I’m just getting started.”
“Pull up a stool.”
“No, I’ll stand, and you will sit, and you … will … listen.”
August had succeeded in the business by being agreeable, but now he knew she was going to discover his limits.
“LaVerne’s ready to move up. She’s been rehearsing. She’s got the songs, and she’s ready for the big time. The East Coast circuits big time, not here. I thought you might want to show her off. Get rid of the deadwood around here, like the monkey act, and that fat old Mary Mabel Markey. She makes me want to screech. I won’t even be in a theater when she opens that cavern of hers and bats fly out.”
Ethel was alluding to the star of the show. A little shopworn, but still capable of packing them in.
“I hadn’t thought of her songs as bats,” he said. “They’re said to carry rabies.”
“She’s got a thousand bats nesting in her gums. But LaVerne, she’s young, shapely, and she can wow the crowds. She has her own teeth.”
“And you want to pull her out of the Wildroot act?”
“Certainly not. She holds it together. The girls are stupid, she’s not.”
This all was odd. LaVerne was actually a niece, and the other girls, Cookie and Marge, were Ethel’s daughters. Ethel was a stage mother in reverse.
“She’s got the songs. ‘Sweet Rosalie.’ ‘Empty Stockings,’ and ‘You’re a Daisy.’ You’ve got to listen. Better yet, throw her in as an olio act. She’ll show you a thing or three.”
“Nice to have your counsel, Ethel.”
“I’m not done yet. You think you’re getting off easy? Not this opening night in this dumb town. It’s worse than Peoria. And Peoria’s the end of the line. Now that hotel room, it’s impossible. There’s four of us and two beds. LaVerne needs her own room, and since I’m her manager I’ll join her.”
“One room, one act,” he said. “That’s how it is.”
“What a cheapskate.”
“And I’m getting rich by mistreating you,” he said.
She laughed. There was that about her. “Make LaVerne a separate act, and then she gets a room.”
“You’ve got three salaries in your act. Buy a room for her.”
“If we don’t walk out on you first. This show, it’s an embarrassment.”
He didn’t say they were welcome to.
She whirled into the gloom, and he heard the theater door snap shut.
Everybody wanted something. He felt the lonely, dark theater around him. In rare moments it was bright-lit, packed with cheerful people, a certain mysterious joy rising from the crowd. But mostly it was like this, a hollow place waiting for those few minutes.
He wanted things, too. A show on solid footing. A hit act or two.
He’d been at it since age nine, when he hung around theaters, wanting the pennies or the occasional dime he’d collect to run an errand, get a sandwich for a showgirl, take tickets to someone, carry a stagedoor Johnny’s bouquet to his dream girl. He never knew his old man. His ma started raising him fiercely enough, in a basement cubbyhole, but then she would go away for days, and then show up and feed him, and then go away for weeks, and he had only his wits and a little knowledge that at stage doors people wanted something or other, and he could run it down and get a tip—sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes he spent a hungry night atop a steam vent in the big city, the dank warmth the only thing between himself and bitter cold. But there was always the next show coming in, and actors who wanted stuff, and he got good at getting it, and got good at understanding how it worked. And there came a time when people on the streets would ask him if a show was good, somehow trusting in a boy’s verdict, and there came a time when he had actual jobs, sometimes taking tickets, sometimes doing the books, sometimes working as a stagehand. By the time he was eighteen he was a veteran of show business, and by the time he was twenty-three he was doing his own variety shows—not big time, but on the roads of rural America. He’d never done Broadway; he’d made his way in smaller venues. And now the new thing, vaudeville, cranked out by Tony Pastor, clean stuff, good for ma and pa and the brats. His shows were a little more gamy. He was playing to miners and cowboys and their silky ladies. But it was vaudeville, the new thing, and it drew crowds.
He turned down the lamp and watched it blue out. The theater was black and yet he knew his way. He’d been in so many that they were no mystery to him. Some of these opera houses had towering flies, where curtains whirled up out of sight. Some had draw curtains, flooding across the stage. Those were the cheaper deals, and they slowed the show.
He felt the rush of cold air, and eyed the empty street for footpads. The hotel was four blocks distant, but the editorial sanctum of the Independent was two blocks straight down the gulch, and next to it was the Herald. He’d go see. Sometimes he could get a good idea of how the show would go in a town by reading a review.
The Independent was well lit. Light flooded the street. He saw within a couple of compositors, someone in a sleeve garter who was reading proof and a walrus-mustache man who looked to be the one putting the morning edition to bed. He entered. The place was hot.
He headed for the one who was poring over some handwritten pages.
“I’m Beausoleil, from the show. Have you a review I might look at?”
“Suit yourself,” the gent said, not moving.
August Beausoleil had been in plenty of printing plants, and knew something about ink. It leapt out at you. While you were protecting your front, it nabbed you in the rear, and sometimes ruined a coat or a shirt. He edged gingerly toward the compositors, who were garbed in grimy smocks, which did little to protect their hands, which looked like they’d never wash clean, and in fact they didn’t wash clean.
“Got a review for the show?” he asked one.
The man nodded. The review was sitting in a half-filled form consisting mostly of pre-cast advertisements. Beausoleil couldn’t read the backward type, but he knew what to do. On a spike next to the form were the galley proofs, so he gingerly tugged his way through until he found what he wanted. It was lacking a headline. The compositors would add that later. He yanked the galley proof free and smeared a thumb with sticky ink. He laid it on an empty stone and read.
“So-so show at the Ming,” was the opener. It started with an all-out condemnation of the monkey act, but then had a kind word about The Profile, Wayne Windsor, whose humor was “piquant.” It announced that Mary Mabel Markey was so-so, and looking a little shopworn. But it had a good word for the opening act, the Wildroot Sisters, who were “fresh and maidenly and a delight to the eye.”
It praised the other acts readily enough, and even encouraged readers to lay out a little for tickets and an evening of good fun.
Well, no disaster there.
The Herald was less active, but there was one duffer setting type.
“Got a review?” Beausoleil asked.
“Review? Nah, he went to bed. Try about nine. We hit the alleys about eleven.”
Beausoleil stepped into deep dark, not having the slightest feel how the Beausoleil Brother
s Follies would fare in the cold capital of Montana. There would be three more shows: Friday, Saturday matinee, and Saturday evening. And a lot of bills to pay.
3
WHEREVER MARY Mabel Markey went, she hunted for a confessional. She always had a lot of confessing to do. She was guilty of the sin of vanity, which was a version of the sin of pride, which was one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
The Vicariate of Montana did not have large congregations, except in Butte, which was Irish and Italian. But there was a nondescript redbrick church in Helena, off the gulch, which she soon discovered. She needed to confess for the good of her soul. Being a big draw in vaudeville was something that needed forgiveness.
Late that morning, the top-billed performer with the Beausoleil Brothers Follies found her way to the Church of Saint Helena, and discovered an empty confessional and a waiting priest on the other side of the screen.
She plunged in and settled herself.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said.
This was the familiar ritual. She was an Irish girl. Her name wasn’t really Markey; that was a theater name. It was O’Malley. Her birth name was Mona O’Malley.
“I have committed vanity,” she said.
“Well, the Lord requires humility,” the priest said. “But I don’t quite grasp what it is that gives offense.”
“I am too proud. I’m in show business. I’m in vaudeville. I’m at the top, and proud of it. I fought my way up, and now there’s no one better.”
“Ah … I wonder a little about this, my daughter.”
“Pride is the worst sin. It excludes God from my life,” she said. “I confess it whenever I reach a new town.”
“Ah … I’m sure the Lord is most merciful, but perhaps you could say a little more about this.”
“Father, show business is wicked. And I’ve climbed the ladder. The higher I’ve gone, the more wicked things I do, so I need to confess them all and be forgiven.”
“I wonder if you could tell me a little more,” the priest said, sounding a little confused.
“I insist that the posters and playbills put my name first.”
“Well, that’s wicked, all right, if you don’t deserve it.”
“But I do deserve it. The company wouldn’t be profitable without me.”
The priest paused. “I think it might be wicked to think it if it’s not true, or if you attach more importance to your presence than is merited, my daughter. But I find no sin in assuming your rightful place.”
“Well, that’s just for starters. I make a point of abusing my rivals. I’ll never say a good word about anyone else in the company.”
“Yes, that’s a venial offense,” the priest said. “You would do better treating others as you wish to be treated. Yes, there’s something that needs repentance. But I don’t quite see it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.”
“Well, I do. Take my word for it. I could spend twenty minutes giving you a list, but there must be others waiting. I’ve done it all. I’ll do whatever you say. Just give me my absolution and penance and I’ll be gone.”
A pained silence exuded from the other side of the screen.
“Daughter, penance for what?”
“For all of it. For being in vaudeville.”
“How is being in vaudeville sinful?”
“I put myself on display and sing.”
“Do you sing things that offend our Lord?”
“No, but maybe He thinks I do.”
“Do you behave in a manner that evokes lust or evil thoughts?”
“No, but who can say?”
“Are you dressed modestly?”
“Mostly. But the corset’s so tight I have no breath.”
“You’ve examined your heart and believe there is wickedness in the very business? Vaudeville? It compels you to sin?”
“Yes, Father, that’s just it.”
“Then it would seem you should leave vaudeville. But you can always be forgiven, even in vaudeville. Temptation is one thing, sin is another.”
“I knew you’d say that. Thank you, Father. I’ll say a few extra prayers.”
More odd silence, a sigh, and then the mumbled absolution in Latin, the words strange and puzzling, strangulated as they passed through the screen. It felt just right.
She enjoyed that. He would never forget it. His first encounter with a vaudeville star. Tonight, he would be mulling it in his mind, confused and unhappy. Hers was not the usual act of contrition. That was how she affected people. She departed, knowing she would feel just fine until the company reached Butte, the next venue. Then she’d have to find another confessional and unload. Meanwhile, she thought, she was free to be whatever she felt like being. Whoop-de-do!
She had grown up in the jammed tenements of Gotham, the daughter of desperate Irish parents who had fled the Famine, traveling steerage to the New World and hope. The cold tenements were worse killers than the famine. One in five died each year of consumption, and indeed, the lung disease soon took her mother. But little Mona O’Malley, as she then was known, survived, and so did her father, who first swept streets and then delivered bags of coal for the parlor stoves of the comfortable classes.
There was one bright thing about Mona’s mother, Eileen. She could sing. She brought from Ireland a whole repertoire of ballads, lullabies, and sometimes strident songs full of pride and fight. And these she sang, and these did Mona absorb, somehow delighting in each song. Her mother sang until her last hours, sang even after consumption had ravaged her throat and her voice was a hoarse and crackling rumble and there was blood on her lips. And when she died, Mona’s father said it had to be; everything had to be. He was a fatalist, and whatever happened had to happen, and Mona kept wondering why her mother’s death had to be, and why her father didn’t grieve.
Mona was very thin, and sometimes weak from not getting anything to fill her, and she took to wandering the bustling city, a pale child of ten, looking for anything to snatch for her stomach. Even the seed some people fed to birds. One day she saw a street entertainment: a man with an accordion and a monkey with a cup, looking for pennies and dimes. And she saw people listen to the man, who had great mustachios, and put coins into the monkey’s cup. Mona hastened back to the tenement, a room she and her father shared with five other people she barely knew, and there she found a cup that no one had stolen. She took it.
She hastened uptown to a place where there was a little park and people strolling, and they looked clean and pink compared to everyone in the tenement, who was waxy and gray. She set her cup on the grass, back from the paving stones, and sang. She didn’t mind it if people stared. She had utterly no self-consciousness. She knew her mother’s songs, so she sang them, and soon people listened, and some smiled and drifted on, but sometimes someone put a coin in her cup. Later some boys stole the coins, but her career was launched in that hour, and she sang the ballads, and when mothers with perambulators came by, she sang lullabies, all six her mother had sung, and the women listened and studied Mona and sometimes added a coin. She learned to empty the cup frequently, and slide the coins into a pocket, and after that she kept what had been given.
Then she bought things her body cried for. She bought pastries at a bakery. She bought an apple. She bought some potatoes to take to her father. She presented them to him proudly when he returned at dusk after a day working for the coal and ice merchant. He eyed the potatoes, and her, and flew into a rage.
“Stealing are you, shaming me are you?” He smacked her.
She didn’t reply.
“You get what you deserve,” he added. “That’s the way of things.”
She had an old sweater and a couple of pinafores, and these she gathered, tied into a bundle, and walked away. It wasn’t cold, not yet. She never saw her father again, though once she saw a wagon like his, with a man like him, driving across a street ahead. She had no wish even to find out whether it was John O’Malley, the fatalist who thought everything was meant to be excep
t that his daughter had earned an honest living.
She was not yet eleven.
Now she patrolled the crooked streets of Helena, blotting it up. It was a city in flux, barely a state capital, without a capitol building but with a good commercial district that hemmed the winding gulch that had turned a few miners into rich men and spawned a busy city. She saw bureaucrats in suits, and far more men in dungarees. She saw few women, and wondered why. Up a hill was a modest governor’s residence, only slightly larger than a comfortable private home. She wondered where the legislature met, and where state offices were housed. Maybe it scarcely mattered. Montana was a work in progress.
She liked to get a feel of a place, but Helena was eluding her. She thought she would do better in the saloons, and that was where she was headed anyway. It was a bright fall afternoon, and the saloons would be empty, but that didn’t matter.
Most of them lined Last Chance Gulch, and some bore the usual names she had encountered in the West—The Mint, Stockman, Pastime—but some carried evocative names: O’Leary’s, The Shamrock, Harrigan’s.
She chose O’Leary’s, pushed into a wall of sour odor, and let her eyes open to the gloom. A wide barkeep with a soiled apron eyed her.
“Sorry, lady,” he said.
It was not customary for a single woman to pierce these male sanctuaries.
She saw only half a dozen patrons, all with mugs of ale before them. Not a whiskey glass was in sight.
“I will sing,” she said.
“Lady, I said, there’s the door.”
“I’m Mary Mabel Markey and I will sing.”
“Who’s that?”
“You can buy tickets. Seven at the Ming.”
“Mark, let her sing,” a gent said.
She placed her portfolio on the bar and withdrew some sheet music. There were several titles, which she fanned out.
“Fifty cents, signed by Mary Mabel Markey,” she said.
She stood back a bit, selecting a spot where all six of the guzzlers could study her, and then she paused, drew a breath, and sang. This one was a lively jig, one of her mother’s, rhythmic and rollicking. Her voice carried outward. The barkeep scowled. She knew he was thinking it’d soon be over and she’d be gone.
Anything Goes Page 2
