She needed a new act. She knew the entire art of making a joke. She wondered whether she could make it as a comedienne, making fun of some male oaf. Turn the tables. Would these miners enjoy the switcheroo? Could she pull it off? She sure didn’t know, but she needed an act, and she knew how to do an act, and it would work if she could find the right foil, a male who’d be her punching bag. There had to be somebody in the outfit, but she couldn’t think of anyone. Could she make wiseacre comments as Harry juggled? Could she and Mrs. McGivers trade insults? Could she work out a comedy routine with August? She sure didn’t think so. August was practically a saint. She’d never heard him give offense to anyone. Too bad. That was one reason it was a third-rate show touring weary little burgs out in the West, far from the big time. Really big-time operators always wounded everyone around them.
10
GINGER. SHE would never be anyone else. She would have no surname. She would be known only as Ginger. She was not sure she liked the name, but it was as far removed from her real name as she could make it. Her real name would be buried this day, all three parts of it, and never again spoken. That part of her had ceased to exist.
Some of it was to conceal herself from her family and its minions, who would be watching hawk-eyed for the young woman with the birth names she had abandoned. By choosing to be Ginger, she was escaping a velvet prison. She was taking great care not to be discovered and forcibly restored to her mother and father. She was an only child, and that had been part of the trouble.
Weeks earlier, she had bought coach tickets that would take her to Butte, Montana, on a roundabout route. She hoped to meet Destiny there in the mining town, but there was no assurance of it. She only knew she had to do this, was desperate to do it, and would have no regrets, no matter what the outcome.
Her father was the supervisor of the Union Pacific division that probed from Utah up into the mountainous reaches of Idaho, and served the mining towns scattered across the state. She had lived most of her life in a generous home in Pocatello Junction, a haven of space and sunlight and comfort, even as the rude town bloomed into a civilized city serving ranches and reservations nearby.
There, in sunny circumstances, her parents had doted on her, and turned her into a musical prodigy, through constant employment of the best tutors. She could sing sweetly, and with all the nuance of an educated voice. She could play the family’s Steinway as masterfully as she could sing ballads, opera, light opera, and hymns. She was a prodigy, a marvel for her eighteen years, a peer of anyone ever taught in the salons of New York.
She had practiced dutifully, performed for her parents and their affluent friends, won the attention of choir directors and orchestra conductors. Her mother doted on her, found vicarious delight in her, boasted of her, demanded that she continue her musical career, and insisted that she surrender everything else in her life. All of which was seconded by her father, who offered to spend whatever it took, bring in whatever tutor was required, to turn her into the most accomplished daughter in all of Idaho, if not the West.
All of which had grated more and more upon her as she realized how totally she was her parents’ puppet, the rag doll who was permitted no ambition of her own but was simply the hope chest of every dream her mother harbored. That she was an only child only made matters worse. That she lived in a small town, just setting aside its rude frontier beginnings, only threw a light on her, and made her much more visible than if she had been a prodigy in, say, San Francisco, or Chicago.
But this nightingale in the gilded cage had discovered that the attention lavished upon her was a prison, that no one had ever asked her what she would like to do with her life, that no one had noticed the deepening melancholia as she watched the world through barred windows. She had few gentleman friends; her parents would not allow her to cultivate any.
She had struggled to carve some liberty out of her schedule, but all these efforts, timid at first, and then more urgent, had been sloughed aside, dismissed with a maternal smile, a small joke, a wave of a ring-encrusted hand. Somehow, in the preceding months, she had realized that she had to escape or die. Yes, she believed, die. If she stayed longer, her mother would own this daughter, possessing everything.
Ginger, a chosen name, was as far removed from her nature as she could imagine. Ginger was sharp and bright. Ginger was spunky. And there never had been a Ginger in her father’s family or her mother’s.
She had to escape. Vanish and never be found. She hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do, and didn’t even know how to make a plan and execute it. But as adulthood approached, so did desperation. One day, while reading the Pocatello paper, she discovered a tiny story about a vaudeville company traveling through the Northwest. The Beausoleil Brothers Follies would play in Helena that November, then Butte, then Philipsburg, then Missoula, and then head for the coast. She barely knew these places. She barely knew what sort of acts appeared in a vaudeville show. But they employed singers, and she could also play the piano with virtuoso skill, or so they said. And she had secretly mastered a few ballads, not just arias or hymns, but songs real people sang. Ballads about love.
She wished to audition in Butte. In vaudeville! The Union Pacific would take her to Ogden. The Utah & Northern would take her to Butte. She knew something about railroads; her father ran them. She was not lacking in cash. She had always been free to indulge herself in dresses and suits and skirts and shoes and parasols and gloves. Cash was there for the asking.
She knew a little about vaudeville, or at least variety theater. Small shows had come to Pocatello, gotten a crowd, and left. Her parents had disapproved of them. Barbaric entertainments, not suited for people of substance. She didn’t know whether she approved of them, but now she saw the Beausoleil show as a vehicle, a carriage to a new life, whatever that life might be.
Of course she could say nothing, not even express a wish. She would horrify her singing coach, her piano teacher, her other tutors, and her parents. Vaudeville? That would be like throwing away her life.
One day she bought a coach ticket to Ogden, and another from there to Butte. She would need to intercept the vaudeville company and audition for it. Her heart was not aflutter. She would plan and execute this escape, and if it failed she would find something else. She would be unescorted, and she knew that could pose dangers, but there was no point in worrying about anything. She was not anxious. The day she decided she would no longer be a prodigy, she ceased worrying. She accumulated greenbacks, eventually acquiring a hundred dollars, which she concealed in various pockets.
She wondered whether she might feel a pang upon slipping away. These were her parents, after all, Will and Mazeppa Jones, and they had nurtured her, given generously to her, developed her skills. She knew she would miss her father; he always distanced himself from her mother’s obsessions. Her mother she would not miss. She bore no love for her daughter, who was little more than a shell to carry a bag of ambitions.
When the cold day arrived, she marveled at how calm she felt. Anything at all would be better than the oblivion she faced at home. She dressed discreetly, not wishing to call attention to herself. She shipped one bag ahead, via express, and would collect it in Butte. The other bag she nonchalantly carried with her. An inner voice whispered that all this was harebrained, but what did it matter? It beat being a prodigy. She had given little thought to what she would say when she contacted the vaudeville company. Nor had she created an act, a performance. All that would come.
She was, at eighteen, handsome. Thin but not slight. A warm-eyed oval face framed with brown hair. She lacked the curves gentlemen liked, but it didn’t matter. She could sing, and she would get paid for it, and that mattered. What she would do with herself if she got on board the show, she didn’t know. That was part of the pleasure of it. She hadn’t the faintest idea how she would live, who she would befriend, and what her future might be. She supposed she was all innocence, given her cloistered life as a prodigy, but she knew she wasn’t. Her parents wer
e urbane people who lived in a wide world, and she had a good idea of what lay ahead.
She boarded the train unobserved, settled into the green horsehair seat, and felt the engine yank the couplings and roll the wheels of the coach under her. The conductor, stern in blue serge, took her ticket and smiled.
“We’re on time. You’ll connect,” he said.
She murmured her thanks. She realized, too late, that she knew many of the conductors in that division; they knew her father. But she was lucky this time. In Ogden, she boarded the Utah & Northern, a plainer coach with wicker seats. And again, no one knew her, the red-nosed conductor was no one she had ever seen, and soon she was rolling north, to the mysterious copper mining town of Butte, and Destiny.
She watched the untouched wilderness tick by, caught whiffs of smoke from the engine ahead, heard its mournful whistle, and waited to begin a new life.
Butte finally rose up ahead, a haze of gray smoke, a sloping city, the largest in Montana, surrounded by breathtaking alpine vistas. It bristled with life and grit. When the train finally squealed to a halt, and its engine shot steam from its valves, she clambered to the gravel station platform, bag in hand, wondering what came next.
She corralled an open hack, driven by a skinny gent in a stovepipe hat, and in turn received a once-over from the man. She realized she was an unescorted woman.
“I wish to be taken to a proper hotel,” she said. “Near the opera house.”
“That would be the Butte—if you can stand the tariff,” he said, still puzzling her out.
She nodded. He slapped lines over the croup of his dray, and the bony horse clapped its way up a gentle grade, which grew steeper as the roadway headed toward the forest of headframes ahead, where shafts plunged into the hillside, taking men into the darkness below and bringing rich copper ore up by the carload.
So this is where she’d meet Destiny, she thought.
“You in show business?” he asked, impertinently.
“I’m not in any business.”
“Butte Hotel, it might not want show people.”
He annoyed her. He was fishing. She kept her silence and let him wonder about her.
He turned, at last, and halted at a smoke-grayed structure.
“This is East Broadway. The playhouse’s west, West Broadway, almost in sight,” he said.
The hotel seemed nondescript, but so did all of Butte. She paid the man his thirty-five cents and added a dime, and headed into the hotel, where a clerk looked her over with pursed lips. It puzzled her. Butte was famously uninhibited.
But a dollar and a half in advance put her in a generous room with a water closet down the hall. Butte was electrified, and she enjoyed the novelty of incandescent light when she pushed the switch.
It was deep in the afternoon. She didn’t know what to do next, but saw no virtue in mooning about, so she descended two flights of creaky stairs, reached the cold street, and headed west on Broadway, looking for Maguire’s Grand Opera House.
It was not hard to find, its pretentious front shouting its importance. It was dark. A playbill on its side advertised the Beausoleil Brothers Follies, beginning the next evening. Mary Mabel Markey was the top-billed act, and half a dozen more were listed, none of them familiar to her, but she knew they soon would be. There was an empty box office with a small sign that said reserved seats were available at several places it listed.
She spotted a side door, found it open, and started up a gloomy stair. Far above, she saw warm light. Well, nothing like asking. She headed upward, reached a second-floor foyer, and found a small reception area, and beyond it an office, where two men were conversing beyond an opened door.
She knocked boldly, and they eyed her. One of them was the nattiest dresser she had ever seen. He wore a purple broadcloth suit coat, fawn trousers, a starched white high-collar shirt with an ascot tie, a black pearl stickpin, and spectacles.
The other gent was plainly dressed in a dark suit, but he had a sharp, hawkish gaze.
“Yes?”
“I’m seeking to audition for the variety show tomorrow, and I wish to know how.”
“Audition? You mean, as an act?” the natty man asked. “I’m afraid this isn’t the time or place. You’d need to do that when a show’s assembled.”
“I’m Ginger,” she said. “And I sing. I’m trained.”
“Well, young lady, I’m John Maguire. This is my theater. Ginger, is it?”
“That’s it, first and last and middle name. I sing, and I wish to be given an audition. At least tell me who to contact when the show arrives.”
The other one, the hawkish one in the dark suit, answered her. “I’m the man,” he said. “Charles Pomerantz. It’s my show.”
“You’re early?”
“I’m the advance man. Ahead of the show. Making sure it’s promoted, boarded, fed, ticketed, and all that. You are, you say, a singer? What’s the act?”
“When I sing for you, you’ll see. I’m a pianist, too.”
There was a long assessing gaze. “Ginger, my dear, I was just thinking about a libation and dinner. May I invite you to dine?”
11
POMERANTZ STEERED her to the Chequamegon Café, a fancy joint. The locals called it The Chew Quick and Be Gone, but it was often patronized by the copper kings. And the food was tasty.
“So, Miss One Name, what’ll you have to drink?”
Ginger hesitated. “I’ll let you order for me,” she said.
He got the message. She didn’t know one drink from another. For that matter, she probably had never been in a saloon or an eatery like this one.
“You old enough?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said.
That was honest enough. He ordered a bourbon and water for both of them. His gaze told him a lot about her. Her clothing was well made and tasteful. Her manners were cautious. Her clear-eyed gaze suggested that she was not afraid.
“So, you want to leap in, join the show,” he said.
Now he caught a flash of agitation. “I would like to try.”
“You ever seen a variety show? With acts? You got an act?”
She stared, registering that. “I’ll let you decide,” she said.
“I don’t do the deciding. August Beausoleil does.”
“He’s one of the brothers?”
“There’s only one. The name, Beausoleil Brothers, that’s for appearances. The more brothers, the bigger the show.”
“I guess I’ve learned something,” she said.
“In vaudeville, everything is for appearances. Why are you here, looking to get into vaudeville?”
She stared, dreamily. “I thought I might enjoy it.”
“You running away from home? There likely to be cops and warrants and detectives chasing you—and making life hard for me?”
“I’m Ginger now. That is enough. I won’t say any more.”
The waiter served the drinks.
“Cheers,” Pomerantz said. He sipped.
She sipped, grimaced, hid it, and sipped again, coughing slightly.
First one.
“You tell me,” he said. “What kind of trouble are you running from?”
“None. And I’m Ginger, and that’s all you’ll know.”
“You come from people with some money. You’re wearing it.”
“I am Ginger,” she said, sipping again. But she smiled. There was something feisty in her.
He ordered lamb chops for both of them, with a Waldorf salad and mashed potato.
“Okay, now it’s my turn,” she said. “What’s the top act in your show?”
“Mary Mabel Markey.”
“She sings. I sing.”
“And she wouldn’t want a rival around, Ginger.”
“I wouldn’t sing what she sings. I … would learn other songs.”
“Such as?”
“Sentimental favorites, things like that.” She straightened up in her seat. “I’m trained for opera. But I wouldn’t sing it.
That’s what they wanted, but not what I want. I’ll use what I’ve learned—but I’ll choose the songs. I’d sing ballads. I know lots of ballads. When I gargle, I gargle ballads.”
He smiled. That was funny. But none of that was a bit promising. He was slowly getting the picture now: a girl on the brink of adulthood, in a gilded cage, the canary chirping for her parents. She had fled. This is where she hoped to begin anew, and far away from her cage. He sighed. It wouldn’t happen. He’d occasionally dealt with people who wished to audition for the show, and it all came to nothing. A girl would dream, and the dream would crack apart. But he wasn’t prepared to shatter any dreams. Not yet, anyway.
She ate quietly, employing her tableware with daintiness and discipline. She had gotten manners somewhere. She sipped the bourbon carefully, in tiny measures, determined to master it. And she probably would. Anyone who could sip an unfamiliar and fierce drink like that must have an iron will. She seemed oddly innocent and yet formidable at the same time, which intrigued him.
“I’m simply the advance man,” he said. “I’m usually far ahead of the show, but Butte’s the big one. The opera house has a thousand seats, and we mean to fill them. If we make money here, we’ll be in better shape for the rest. And we’re scheduled to extend our stay if it’s worth doing.”
She was listening, eating slowly, and carefully observing everyone else in the place. He could only imagine what she was studying. She was the best-dressed woman in the café, and she probably knew it. He wondered if she had ever been out after eight o’clock.
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