FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I considered what secrets an inquiry into my late mother’s early life might unmask. Probably nothing, but then again . . . I preferred her to be a faint tintype in a velvet-lined case that, closed, would fit in the palm of my hand. A mother was a notion alien to me, as it must be to Irene. I could indeed sympathize with her instinct to leave well enough alone.

  Unfortunately, Pink Cochrane and Nellie Bly had never done any such thing in their entire conjoined lives.

  20.

  The Show Must Go On

  The wearing of mourning is a time-honored institution. . . .

  To be sure there is no inherent quality of consolation

  in the black garments themselves—they are merely a silent

  but appropriate expression of grief.

  —THE DELINEATOR, 1891

  Once Irene had decided to investigate her own past, there was no holding her back.

  That very day we returned to Union Square on a round of revisiting the persons she now knew had shared her mostly unrecalled childhood.

  This time she intended to squeeze every droplet of memory out of them.

  And this time we were three again: Irene, Pink, and me.

  Numbers were no match for fate, however.

  At Tiny Tim’s boardinghouse, we found him gone, indefinitely.

  “What wonderful good fortune!” trilled Mrs. McGillicuddy in answer to our inquiry for him. “He was offered a long-term tour of the West with Balambo, the Levitating Levant. After years of not working, can you imagine that!” A frown darkened her excitement. “I will have to advertise for another tenant, of course, and Timothy was such a quiet resident . . . for a former drummer.”

  “Imagine that,” Irene remarked tartly as we descended the brownstone’s exterior stair. She caught my eye with a look that Miss Pink, busy hunting up a gurney, couldn’t notice. As a “New Yorker” Pink seemed determined to show us that we were on her ground now and she knew it like no other.

  I understood Irene’s unspoken message: could Tiny Tim’s sudden decampment be too timely to be accidental? Had he fled for some reason, or had someone seen to his swift removal from the scene?

  Someone with power or money. Or both.

  “Where to next?” Pink was asking impatiently at the gurney’s gaping door.

  “The matinee and Madame Salamandra. The New Fourteenth Street Theater and drive like the Devil!” Irene tossed this last aside to the coachman high on his seat.

  Had I not read Dr. Watson’s horribly biased account of Irene’s first brush with Sherlock Holmes and her hasty wedding to Godfrey—with Sherlock Holmes in disguise as an impromptu witness! (something I doubt even bride and groom knew)—I would have never known that her parting instruction parodied Godfrey’s command to the driver on their wedding day.

  Pink, of course, thought nothing of Irene’s call for speed. New York streets were so clogged with pedestrians and vehicles of every description that making time through them required the patience of a Job. No wonder New Yorkers had taken to setting steam locomotives on tracks high above the city streets, to huff and puff above the madding crowd, adding to daily reek and din. The “El” the lofty track for these demon engines was called, perhaps a shortening of the word “elevated,” but I couldn’t help hearing it as the Cockney version of the road to “ ’ell.”

  Our timing was impeccable. My trusty lapel watch, recovered from the scene of my greatest distress during our recent Paris adventure, read half past three. Surely the matinee program would be ending as we arrived, and that was indeed the case.

  Pink lifted her pretty but rather straight brows as Irene immediately made for the stage door . . . where we were admitted by an old fellow in antique muttonchops who greeted Irene like the Duchess of Devonshire paying a call on Windsor Castle.

  Irene always had made a point of meeting all the humble folk employed around the theater, a practice that had begun during her childhood performing career, no doubt.

  “Snub a prima donna,” she had told me years ago, “and she will skewer you with ugly looks for at least a fortnight. Idly overlook a stage doorman, or a dresser, or a supernumerary, and you will ever after rest as uneasy in a theater dressing room or on stage as Duncan in Macbeth’s castle.”

  I would have put it differently: Blessed are the meek, for they will never forget someone who remembers them.

  “Greetings, Mr. Fisher,” Irene hailed her new friend. “Have we come in time to catch Madame Salamandra cooling her heels, and the rest of her inflammatory self, in her dressing room?”

  “Certainly, madam. You missed a fine act today, though not as spectacular as the one you assisted in yesterday.”

  “Act?” Pink sailed through the door on a hail of arrow-sharp questions. “Why are we visiting this Madame Salamandra? A fireproof woman, I presume. And . . . Irene, you were onstage? Performing! On a variety bill? Recently? Irene? Wait!”

  Irene bustled along the dim hallway paralleling the theater house’s unseen length, turning at the end to take an iron spiral staircase to the lower level at a clip I, and especially Pink, were hard put to match.

  I distinctly heard Pink’s foot clang against the railing’s tight metal curve, and would have tittered, except that my own skirts screwed into a narrow sheath and I almost tripped before I touched the cold brick floor beneath the stage.

  Above I could hear muffled thumps and roars. The program was not quite finished.

  Irene paused only to knock at the door we had first broached yesterday, and how she knew it from several others that lined this lower hall, I cannot say.

  “Yes?” inquired a voice within.

  Irene nodded at us with satisfaction to find the quarry at home.

  “It’s Rena the Ballerina,” she caroled back.

  Pink’s jaw dropped. I must admit the sight was most pleasing to me, and unflattering to her.

  “Come in, darling little Rena,” the woman’s voice cried. “I have been thinking so much of the old days since you called upon me yesterday.”

  Come in we did, and despite the mirrors, the three of us crowding in made the costume-cluttered dressing room seem the size of a freestanding wardrobe.

  Madame rose from her chair, a fluttering vision in apricot and orange gauze, to take Irene’s hands in welcome.

  “The bill has changed order today, and I am to close, so I haven’t much time, but sit where you can and we will chat while we may.”

  As Pink and I competed with piles of gauze and chiffon to find a sit-worthy surface, Irene installed herself behind Madame Salamandra at the dressing table and finished her coiffure with an expert application of pins and flame-colored silk flowers.

  “You look incendiary, my dear,” she told the diva of apparent self-immolation. “Did you know that our Tim left suddenly on a contract to tour the West?”

  “Tiny Tim? No! Gracious. I hope he remembers his act. Who on earth would hire him?”

  “Balambo.”

  “No! There’s hope for us all.”

  “Speaking of hope, dare I assume that you’ve recalled anything more about my misspent childhood since I called yesterday?”

  Madame Salamandra spun around in her chair to regard her hairdresser. “That is a better coiffure than I have ever had, but I must thank you most for saving my life. Dear little Rena.” She took Irene’s hands again. “I realized, in afterthought, how careless we had been in those days. We were so young! I was so young, barely past seventeen. We seemed a family, all of us young people who performed. We seemed sufficient unto ourselves, in our peculiar private world that we expected no one else to understand. So we questioned nothing. You do know what I mean?”

  “The young don’t think,” Irene said quickly, unable to keep a note of disappointment from her voice.

  “No, they don’t. Nor did we. We accepted everything as it was.”

  Irene nodded, pulling her hands away, as if not wanting to return to that time when questions were not asked.

  I returned for an instant to
my own childhood, when Shropshire and its ways seemed the bounds of the whole earth. I could never go back there, never see it as I had so long ago. The thought almost made me weep even as I understood that I never wanted to return to Then and There either.

  That made one almost an orphan, didn’t it? From one’s own past.

  “But,” Madame Salamandra said, “I did remember a few trivial things after you had left.”

  “Trivial?” Irene asked guardedly.

  Madame Salamandra sat down, facing us, her dyed crimson hair a curly flame around her slightly age-paled features.

  “I remember,” she began with a heartwarming smile, this fireproof woman, her eyes only for Irene.

  For a moment I was struck dumb. There was no mistaking the fondness she had felt for the young Irene, it was there in the warmth of her tone, the delight with which she began her tale. I too had felt such maternal moments, spinster that I was and had long been, with some of my young charges when I had been a governess. There is nothing to match telling avid young faces something that opens their eyes on the world like flower petals unfolding.

  I so hoped Irene would glimpse a lost garden of youth with Madame Salamandra’s next words.

  The performer went on, slowly, precisely. “I remembered that although the playbill listed you as ‘Rena the Ballerina,’ we—all of us around the theater, curtain-raiser, opening or closing act, sweeper—we all were to call you ‘Irene’ offstage.”

  The spell broke, for me, when she pronounced the English name I-reen-ie in the vulgar American fashion, I-reen.

  The spell did not break for Ireenie, or Ireen. “Who? Who demanded I have that name?”

  “Someone I hardly recall. I was barely out of childhood myself then, you must understand. I was self-absorbed as only a child of seventeen going on adulthood could be. A woman came around, a very . . . exotic woman.”

  “You call her ‘exotic’?”

  Madame Salamandra smiled. “I was only a song-and-dance girl then.” She hesitated. “She was a bit odd. Such eyes, like stabbing blue flames, and yet . . . her personage was . . . fading. How else can I put it? She made a great impression on me, but I always felt she was not central to anything. Now that I think of it again, I see that she had a great, even fierce, personal interest in you, and yet bore a deep sadness in her soul. Now that I am a woman, I pity her to the depths of my heart. But I have so little to pin my feelings on, an instinct, that’s all. We all of us were either part of a large theatrical family, like Sophie and me, or solo artists, like you and Tiny Tim, orphans really, foundlings come to join our noisy troupe. We welcomed you, but we never understood you.”

  “Understanding,” Irene said quietly, “is the last thing I have sought in life.”

  “Understand this,” Madame Salamandra said. “That woman cared for you; she came to see that you thrived. And you did. No child grows up on stage who is not strong.”

  Pink had breathed not a word during all of this.

  This was too good to last, but I too felt a sense of revelation of times and personalities past, of mystery and regret, of something that resounded in every soul’s life. Of growing up. And wondering. Always wondering. Maybe there was no growing up, only wondering we choose to forget about. For some reason, I suddenly thought of Quentin.

  While I was thus distracted, Pink finally gathered her reporter’s wits.

  “Are you saying, Madame Salamandra, that Irene’s mother came to the theater to check on her?”

  The fireproof woman regarded Pink as if she were a cinder that had drifted down a chimney uninvited.

  “I am saying that we theater folk are a family, and we play many roles. And some may be ‘mother’ and some may be ‘child,’ but we are sufficient unto each other. Miss.”

  Pink lowered her head and her voice. “I have been both mother and child in my own life,” she said levelly, “though I am not theatrical.”

  Irene laughed suddenly, a sound innocent of tension. “Not theatrical! Pink, my dear Pink! You are the most theatrical of us all.” She turned back to Madame Salamandra. “You remember nothing else of this woman?”

  “She dressed in black.”

  “Mourning!”

  “Or . . . practicality. I remember I thought of—You will think me foolish.”

  “I think no memory foolish,” Irene said quickly.

  “I thought of the widowed Queen of England. Queens of England were mighty high figures to young American girls at the time, you will remember . . . or maybe you will not.”

  “You thought of Victoria, in widow’s black?” Irene pressed.

  “Yes. The lady possessed great dignity. And sorrow. I chose to think of her as a dethroned Queen, appearing in our midst in disguise. She seemed to need a champion, like a knight.”

  “A dispossessed Queen,” Irene mused.

  “Dispossessed, exactly yes! She seemed to be uneasy here. I remember thinking that such a lady would be uneasy anywhere. I felt sorry for her.”

  “But not for me.”

  “You were our darling little dancer, my dear. We spoiled you and watched out for you and made you our own.”

  “Your own.”

  Madame Salamandra nodded. “I am so happy to see you again, older, wiser, and well. In the theatrical world people come and go, but they are never forgotten. And you still use the name ‘Irene,’ how remarkable. She got her way, that woman, for whatever reason she wanted it.”

  “Irene. Yes.”

  I saw that “Irene” was most struck by the foreordained nature of her name, she who had never knowingly accepted a foreordained future.

  I saw that we all unknowingly carry the ordained wishes of others, even if we know them not. I wondered then what my dead father had truly wished for me, and what he would think of me now, and if that would change anything I thought of myself.

  And I had not a single answer to all these questions.

  21.

  All Fall Down

  Her coming has acted like the application of fire to

  combustible matter.

  —THE SAN FRANCISCO HERALD, 1853

  We left that place each musing on our own thoughts.

  I knew enough of Pink’s history to guess that her widowed mother and her stepfather, the deceased judge, figured formidably in them. I knew enough of myself that my parson father and my unremembered mother haunted my recall, and then I thought of Godfrey, my unrelated brother and Irene’s husband, and of how much he meant to both of us for different reasons.

  What Irene thought, I cannot say. I can never read her thoughts, as she can guess mine, and I often think that is why we get on so well together.

  I was hardly aware that we were exiting such a scandalous place as a theater until I dimly heard a burst of applause, and then more clamor.

  I put my hands to my ears. Really, this theatrical quest was most unnerving. Still the roar of the crowd penetrated my ears, and I finally realized that I was hearing not enthusiasm, but . . . screams and chaos and shouts and terrible, drawn-out howls!

  Irene stopped on the street outside the theater. She clapped her hands to her temples like a touring company Medea.

  “Mein Gott im Himmel!” she cried out in German, as if performing in a Wagnerian opera. “We have been overconfident.”

  She whirled to face behind us, reminding me of Lot’s wife, frozen into a pillar of salt.

  For an instant she stood frozen so, then she dashed back into the theater, past the ticket-taker, ignoring the stage door that had been our previous entree, storming the building like a trooper of another sort than the theatrical kind.

  Pink was on her heels and I on Pink’s.

  Inside, catastrophe choked the air and shortly after, we inhaled the smoke. The house was shrouded with a haze beyond that generated by the men’s cigars.

  We pushed against the tide of fleeing patrons down the central aisle toward the stage. Flames caught at the curtains like giant, fiery hands, and a massive scrim of smoke billowed over the en
tire stage. I recalled a parade of theatrical fires in the newspapers, a professional risk of the limelights, apparently.

  We coughed, ran, cried, wailed. It was impossible to say who did what. In an instant we knew the same thing: the identical crime had been attempted again, and this time had succeeded.

  I shut my eyes against the roiling billows of smoke and pictured Madame Salamandra again amidst her flaming costumes. Naphtha! Irene had named it. Hadn’t any stagehand prepared to detect it? Forestall it? Stop it?

  I populated the thick haze with ghosts: a woman in black bowed down in mourning, and insisting the tiny child be called “Irene.” I glimpsed a warm, living woman enveloped in flame, defying reality, recalling the past in all its soft, melting sorrow.

  Could we beat it out again, the fire? Could we reverse ill fortune? Could we retrieve any part of the past that some one, some thing, was determined to forever deny Irene? And me? And Pink?

  Could we keep little Rena from watching her entire world exploding in flames?

  Stumbling, choking, weeping from smoke and frustration, I stubbed my toes on the dark side of the stage stairs. I reached for Madame Salamandra as I had once dreamed of my own dead mother.

  And someone held me back.

  Held us all back.

  Firemen.

  Men in boots stormed the stage, turning it into one vast drum, a tympanum. They dragged long, uncoiling serpents of canvas behind them, that spat streams of water at the theatrical flames.

  They smothered flame to smoke.

  Amid the smoke, Salamandra lay, ashen from her complexion to her dampened gown, bereft of breath, and of memory. Mother to us all somehow, we three. We grieved, but none more than Irene.

  22.

  Ashes, Ashes