FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I imagine,” he said with a twinkle, “that the detective work suited you because you were as clever as a vixen fox and a mighty fine all-around actress by then. But now who is still plying these old stages who would have been older than you, and therefore remember more than you about your own past, yet would notice this mystery woman in black? I assure you that this poor man’s Queen Victoria would not normally draw much curiosity around a theater, not when we have sword-swallowers and rope dancers and all sorts of exotic women to pay attention to. Let me think.”

  He rose from his deep armchair and went to a bureau, from which he drew a sheaf of playbills.

  “Ah, these go back a good ways, and that’s what is required, something to jog the memory, even that of a world-famous mentalist. Missing mothers were hardly my onstage speciality.”

  He wet his forefinger as if about to test the wind, then began paging through the yellowing pile.

  “Hmmmm. Madame DeSoto. No. Too old. Ah. The Mazeppa of Manhattan. No, that was a trick riding act and those who work with animals seldom notice mere humans coming and going. But she had a fine figure . . . a shame to bind it to a horse’s back every night. And Little Dollie Doiley was too young at the time to notice anything, especially a quiet figure like a woman in black. So many wore mourning then anyway. When were you born?”

  “I was told ’fifty-eight.”

  “And you were performing by ’sixty-two. Right in the middle of the Civil War, wasn’t it, then? Though daily life went on here in New York, many a mother lost a son or husband to that bloody conflict in the South. I well recall the clusters of black that bloomed during those brutal years and only now are diminishing as those poor bereft women follow their menfolk to the graveyard.”

  “Professor Marvel!” Irene admonished. “We are not here for a lesson on the futility of war, and if I searched among women who lost sons and husbands in the Civil War I should grow gray and wear black, like Mr. Whistler’s mother, myself by then.”

  He shrugged and continued to page through the playbills.

  I contemplated for a moment the American Civil War, of which I had, of course, heard, but had never regarded as a phenomenon of women in black appearing on the domestic scene and not dying out for more than two decades, long after the idea of a disunited United States seemed ludicrous. Mothers who survived to rear their children, it occurred to me, were in danger of outliving them, and that must be the saddest thing of all time.

  Could the woman in black have been one of those doubly bereaved women who had lost children to illness or war or misadventure, visiting the motherless children of a theatrical troupe?

  Such a woman was not necessarily the actual mother of any child in the troupe, but merely one seeking to reclaim a lost child in another guise.

  “Ah!” Professor Marvel beamed foolishly at a particular playbill he had flourished from the pile. “Thumbelina. Of course! She is retired, but she had a memory like Jumbo the Elephant! Almost like myself. And she lives not far from here.”

  He jotted the address down on one of the many slips of paper that populated his rooms. He was a man, I realized, who thought in short bursts, which was what allowed him to remember so many trivial and arcane things.

  “Thumbelina.” Irene stared at the figure of a fairylike little creature in ballerina’s tutu. “I remember her!”

  Only I understood what a triumph this was, for while I had many recollections of my early years in Shropshire, Irene had proved herself strangely bereft of childhood particulars during her return home to New York.

  I had not said anything to her, of course, but as former governess I felt a growing disquiet at the utter lack of childhood memories she demonstrated. Either the theatrical life was so chaotic that it distracted her from the usual sort of things a person would remember . . . or there was something lacking in her own makeup that prevented her from recalling what a child from the most ordinary upbringing might remember.

  I had come to look upon Irene as a sort of Wonder of her world, perhaps as Sherlock Holmes was regarded in his. The Irene I knew had confidently inhabited a world that was London and Paris and major cities at points east. I had no doubt that she could have been the operatic performer of her age, had petty kings and circumstances not conspired against her. She was the consummate mistress of stage and self, and, when I had stopped being intimidated by her, I had admired and trusted her as no other.

  Now that I had returned westward to the place of her origin, the wonder to me was that from such vague and eccentric and mostly forgotten roots she had grown into the magnificent bloom of a woman that she was.

  Something was very wrong, I felt, and it had very little to do with lost mothers. Or perhaps I was missing something vital. It would not be the first time, for I was not a consummate mistress of anything, but I was, at least, exceedingly loyal.

  By now Irene had become utterly engrossed in the search for some abiding woman in her past.

  She would never admit it, and I would never make her admit it, but there is no doubt that her finger hesitated over the bell of the boardinghouse where Thumbelina resided. Irene never hesitated. It was her greatest strength, and her greatest flaw.

  I made so bold as to lift my hand and push her finger down on the button.

  Her eyes flicked to mine, startled. I almost never took the lead in anything. At least before Transylvania.

  “Now is no time to play the indecisive schoolgirl,” I explained.

  “It’s just that I do remember her now, Nell, and I am afraid of what we will find. She was a dwarf, enchanting to everyone while she was a child and a young woman. She must be past forty today, and—from what Professor Marvel said, and did not say—no longer well. I dread seeing what has become of her.”

  “The dread becomes you, but you cannot stop now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she has heard the bell ring. You don’t wish to abandon her as if you were a mischievous, cruel child, do you, who comes near only to run away?”

  “No! Of course not. The die is cast.”

  “Now where did you get that—Caesar crossing the Rubicon—if you were so ill-educated as your background implies?”

  “Professor Marvel? He knows everything. Perhaps I am a compilation of quick facts and that is all.”

  “Nonsense! You have outwitted Sherlock Holmes and the King of Bohemia, and Jack the Ripper. You are more than a compilation of ‘quick facts.’ ” I took a deep breath that was too determined to be taken for a sigh. “Irene, I know that you stand on foreign ground that is also old to you. You mustn’t let it overwhelm you. We are investigating a puzzle that happens to be your past. It need not be . . . personal.”

  At that she laughed. “Look at me! I’m as nervous as a schoolgirl, which is quite absurd, for it’s quite obvious from my history that I never went to school.”

  “I disagree,” I replied in my strictest governess tone. “Having met your former associates, it’s clear to me that you did course work with the most eclectic and amazing scholars of your generation. Professor Marvel alone is the sum of at least fourteen Oxford dons.”

  “Nell! You can’t mean that.” She began to giggle at the very notion, but I had never been so sincere in my life.

  “I have never meant anything more. Since . . . meeting Sherlock Holmes I have come to see that the ardent pursuit of knowledge, any kind of knowledge, produces more honest learning than all the rote exercises in any schoolbook. It is a fine thing to be able to quote enormous numbers of Greeks and Romans, and there is wisdom there as well as snobbery, but unless the quotes are applied to something practical in modern life, they are only so much make-work.”

  To this she had no answer, and thus was discovered gaping at me when her (my) ring was answered by . . . no one.

  The door swung open as if by mechanical hands.

  We gazed ahead, mutually stupefied, and were hardly an advertisement for either a classical or an eclectic education.

  “Well, if it isn�
�t an arguing pair of Brobdingnagians,” announced a Lilliputian voice at the level of our knees.

  We glanced down. A small, thickset woman in a miniature morning gown was awaiting our answer.

  “Madam Thumbelina?” Irene asked.

  “No madam and no longer Thumbelina,” she answered in a piping but gruff voice. “What do you want?”

  “You,” Irene replied. “Professor Marvel—”

  “What’s that old fraud up to now?”

  “He doesn’t strike me as fraud,” I put in.

  “We are all frauds. I’m not Thumbelina, but Phoebe Cummings, dwarf. Who are you?”

  “Irene Adler, opera singer,” Irene replied as forthrightly.

  “Penelope Huxleigh . . . not much of anything.”

  “Former opera singer,” Irene amended her vocation quickly, “and Miss Huxleigh is a former governess, clerk, and typewriter girl.”

  “Well,” said Phoebe Thumbelina Cummings, “I am a former curiosity, and being such, am curious enough to wonder why two such accomplished ladies with such glorious pasts would call on me.”

  “To explore your own glorious past, of course,” Irene said, “and mine. I am the former Rena the Ballerina, Merlinda the Mermaid and assorted other incarnations.”

  “And Miss Huxleigh here?”

  “I have had no assorted other incarnations,” I said quickly. “I am a parson’s orphaned daughter and former employee of whosoever would employ me, alas, therefore a nobody.”

  “English?” Phoebe asked Irene.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oooh, I like the breed. Very ladylike. So, come in, ladies. I haven’t any tea to offer, but a glass of lemonade. Rena, you say? I begin to get the picture. I get a lot of pictures. A living album, amI. I’ve thought of penning my memoirs.”

  She waddled—and there is no other way to describe her shortlegged hesitating gait—down a hall in which advertising circulars had become an impromptu carpet, to a door that she stretched up to open (despite Irene’s hand twitching to assist her) by herself.

  We entered a doll’s house, where every stick of furniture was child size and no framed playbill or painting was hung higher than our waists.

  I felt like Alice after she taken the mushroom that had made her bigger in Wonderland.

  “Have a seat,” Phoebe suggested, a wicked glint in her eyes.

  We settled on a tiny tapestried rocking chair and a miniature sofa that had our knees almost up to our chins.

  Phoebe hoisted her small frame up onto a child’s rocking chair, grunting like a roughrider trying to tame a bucking bronco from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

  I bit my lip and decided that if Phoebe could lever herself about in such obvious pain, I could certainly commune with my kneecaps without complaint.

  “We’ll talk first,” Phoebe said abruptly.

  I began to understand that she could not speak long without grunting, which made her speech seem abrupt. “Then I’ll decide if you’re worth the lemonade.”

  I understood that she referred to the effort of serving us. I myself didn’t know yet if we would be “worth the lemonade.”

  “Do you remember me?” Irene asked gently.

  Phoebe’s features, which were blunt and full-sized compared to her stunted body, puckered to indicate both searching her memory, and a resentment of the effort.

  “Pretty lady,” she said finally, and shook her head.

  “As a child,” Irene amended.

  Phoebe looked again, long and deep. “What child?”

  “Rena the Ballerina.”

  “Oh, you grew! Didn’t you? That’s why I couldn’t place you at first. We used to be of a size, you and me.”

  “I was the baby, though,” Irene admitted, appealing to our hostess’s greater age.

  “Baby, yes. They took me for a baby until I was, oh, twenty. I had the longest childhood of any human on the East Coast. Then suddenly, it was over. I was ‘grown,’ though I hadn’t added an inch. I wasn’t interesting anymore. I was just a . . . freak. A dwarf. A Something. And nobody would pay me for that.”

  “We were all freaks,” Irene offered.

  Phoebe gazed at her for a long time, seeking sincerity. And found it.

  “Yes, we all. Were. Freaks. Do you want some lemonade?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” Irene said. And remained seated while Phoebe threw herself off her chair and waddled into an adjoining room.

  I started to lift from my cramped chair, but Irene nodded a vehement “No” to me and I settled back down into that most uncomfortable of positions.

  By the time Phoebe returned with a glass of lemonade in each hand my back was aching and my legs were developing those prickling tingles that will make standing again an exercise in pain and futility.

  I clasped the glass and balanced it on one knee. Irene did likewise.

  Phoebe pushed and manipulated herself back into her chair.

  “Thank you,” Irene said, sipping from the glass as if we sat on Mrs. Astor’s back porch, did Mrs. Astor deign to have such a lowly American annex on her Newport castle-cum-seaside cottage.

  “The city can be hot this time of year,” Phoebe noted, lifting her own glass of previously poured lemonade from the tiny table at her side. “What can I do for you ladies, besides wait on you?”

  The sharp comment merited a brief smile from Irene. “You can do a great deal. We came at Professor Marvel’s suggestion because my memory of my youngest years is faulty.”

  “You grew up,” Phoebe complained. “We used to be the same, only I was older. Much older, but it didn’t show. Now you’re a giant.”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” Irene answered.

  “Nor I.” Phoebe sipped her lemonade again and made a face. “I got used to being praised for being tiny and clever. Now I’m just tiny and old, and everyone could run me over in the streets in an instant and hardly even notice.”

  “You know how to outwit their blindness, though,” Irene commented.

  “I do, but I resent having to do it.”

  “So do I,” Irene said.

  For a moment Phoebe looked angry, like a spiteful child.

  “The world,” Irene said, “has many excuses to overlook all sorts of persons. What I was when you knew me would be ridiculed by some people who know what I supposedly am now.”

  “And what are you?”

  Irene considered the question, then lifted her head with a smile. “I am still a performer, though I am not paid for it much anymore. I am still a student, if you understand that we learned much from our colleagues. I am still . . . a mystery to myself.”

  “And this one, your companion, what is she?”

  Irene turned to regard me and I quailed at what her summing up of me might be, since she had been so humble with herself (for humble was not a word I would normally associate with Irene; I was perversely pleased that was the case, as my own history had condemned me to be humble).

  “Nell . . . prides herself on being predictable, but her strength is in surprise. I believe that is your strength, too.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Phoebe struck me as a sour and stunted individual in more than stature, yet she grimaced a smile as she glanced from myself to Irene.

  “I should hate you to your toes,” she told Irene. “You grew straight and beautiful and tall, though we used to dance duets together. You dress like someone on Mrs. Astor’s guest list of four hundred and yet you hunker down like a Red Man to sit on my chairs. You have a friend, and I have none—”

  “No longer,” Irene said, her voice suddenly as taut as a strangled violin. “I have lost my past, and am here to reclaim it, and my friends. There is something wrong. I can’t remember what I should.”

  Phoebe glanced at me, her mud-colored eyes narrowing in alarm.

  “Nothing wrong,” she said gruffly, “except that you were sold young into the hands of that damned maestro.”

  28.

  Fairy Godmothers />
  Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?

  When your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall!

  “You needn’t gasp, Miss Huxleigh, I am plainspoken,” Phoebe said. “I see no point in painting pansies on the truth when it is an ugly and cracked vase that will only please when it admits what it is.”

  She glanced at a white-faced Irene, who apparently was taking the notion of being “sold” as badly as I was.

  “The others, of course,” she rumbled on in her Billy Goat Gruff voice, “being the type of performers who can afford to lie to themselves, and each other, doubtless thought it was a good thing and would be shocked by my opinion. I didn’t regard what happened as much better than Miss Wilhelmina running off to play from the age of fifteen with any man who wanted a peek at her garters.”

  “Wilhelmina,” Irene repeated in as much of a daze as she ever allowed herself to be.

  I knew her well, and had never seen her so off balance.

  “We just saw Mina before coming here,” she offered, concentrating on a subject matter far removed from her own stupefaction.

  Phoebe burst out with a derisive chuckle. “ ‘Mina’? Is that what she’s going by now? I’d heard she married far above us all, but there’s many a slip between the lip and the wedding ring, and Wilhelmina made them all.” She leaned toward Irene. “Don’t you remember all the hush-hush about her being delicate and suffering consumption and missing so many performances? Overconsumption, that’s what she suffered . . . first of spiritous liquors and then of the men who bought them for her.”

  “I suppose,” I said weakly, “such sad stories are not unheard of in the theater.”

  “The Theater, miss? I wouldn’t know about the Theater. We were all lowly variety performers. Freaks and oddities. How’d you like to grow up with me for a godmother, maybe small enough to be a fairy, but not pretty enough?”

  She leaned so far forward in the rocking chair that I thought she’d tumble off the place she’d struggled so to sit upon. Miss Muffet on her tuffet, I thought, waiting for the spider that terrified her. Or was she the spider? I couldn’t stop myself from leaning away from her, not repulsed by her stunted stature, but by her vehement unhappiness. I was reminded of Rumpelstiltskin from the tales, an embittered old man who liked to suck young girls dry of hope.