FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “You must tell me,” she said so softly that both he and I leaned over the table to hear better, “why I had lost my voice.”

  “That is far better forgotten,” he said, the words seemingly pulled from him like salt water taffy candy is drawn from a machine. I thought again of ectoplasm, and invisible spirits, and how we all draw into ourselves much that is unseen, yet that shapes us.

  We all exhale invisible drafts of our pasts, and breathe in the future like smoke, hardly noticing it.

  My own breath caught in my throat when I realized that Irene was hypnotizing the old man. It was true that she only turned the tables on him—again I thought of the mobile table at the séance, why could I not get those images out of my head? I had not even been there to see them, like Pink.

  And then I understood that Irene was also calling on the dead, as much as any medium, invoking the past, asking the maestro to commune with his own lost past self, and hers.

  “Why had I lost my voice? Literally lost it, couldn’t speak or sing?”

  “Couldn’t sing,” he answered at last. “Could speak, but didn’t like to. They told me what had happened, and then I understood, or at least partly.”

  Irene exhaled a perfect O of smoke that distorted as it drifted upward, reminding me of the tormented face of a ghost at some séance in the upper air.

  The maestro’s weak blue eyes followed the smoke ring until it vanished. “You young women lived in a theatrical boarding house, sharing rooms and a common water closet.”

  “How young were we?”

  “Oh . . . you were seventeen when you began studying with me, and I had already trained you for half a year. Your voice was a wonder and you had already been acclaimed on stage for it, but in musical terms you were still a little savage, with not the slightest grasp of technique. We had much more work to do.”

  “And we did it. I didn’t leave New York until I was past twenty.”

  “Past twenty,” he repeated dully.

  Irene quietly laid the cigarette case on the snowy white linen.

  All around us echoed the clatter and conversation of a wildly successful restaurant. Our table seemed encased in a bell jar of extraordinary quiet, almost as if time had stopped and begun to run backward.

  A waiter hovered with the wine bottle, but Irene’s swift head shake sent him skating away.

  “What happened,” she asked again, “when I was seventeen and living at the theatrical boarding house?”

  “A tragedy. Not an unheard-of one, but a tragedy. And so close to home. Mesdames Sophie and Salamandra brought me the news when you refused to come to your daily lesson. First one, then the next. They explained that you could not sing.”

  “Why, why couldn’t I?”

  “I never understood that. Oh, I understood the shock that brought on your strange, self-imposed strangling of your greatest gift, yet I never knew why it had taken that form. It was as if you had become a nun under a vow of silence. You had always been a vibrant child, so self-possessed, so attuned to others. You had even then the air and the empathy of a great performer of the stage, who can make each audience member believe you speak and sing to him or her alone. A Patti or a Bernhardt.”

  “Did I?” Irene asked, truly doubting.

  “And you didn’t know it, which made you all the more remarkable. You didn’t even see the small jealousies among the other young performers, the precocious young ladies who were prone to putting on airs about abilities that were the mere shadow of your own.”

  “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “That’s because I didn’t want you to. I wanted you unspoiled. And once the solution to your musical muteness came to me, I realized that I could . . . repair so much more than your broken voice.”

  I saw alarm flash through Irene’s eyes, although they never left the old man’s face. She was not one to submit to “repair.” Even I saw the presumption in his statement, the arrogance of the teacher, or parent, who believes his word and perceptions are law to the pupil, or child.

  Irene’s fingers tightened on the talisman of her cigarette case. I could visibly see her fight to avoid reacting to this last shock, to first ask the most central questions before facing any other unpleasant surprises.

  “What happened to silence me? You must explain this now. A lie of omission becomes one of commission if too much time is allowed to lapse.”

  He then uttered the words that chill my soul, because I used to employ them myself before I knew better. “It was for your own good, every bit of it. You had been brutally confronted with the saddest fate a young girl may meet, and had to see that only by promising to serve your voice and your music and paying attention to nothing else could you avoid a similar useless, brutal end.”

  “Tell me!”

  “It was young Winifred, though it could have been her sister. They were inseparable, as twins often are, and their mind-reading routine was truly remarkable. Lovely girls, with a mother who had retired as a wire-walker to mistress a man of business on Wall Street. Later they performed as Pansy and Petunia, and once they turned sixteen she often presented them at her parties, like dolls to be petted and admired. I believe they enhanced her hold on her gentleman friend. She was not as young as she had been.”

  Irene visibly winced, but he didn’t notice. His eyes remained on the wreaths of blue-white smoke she sent ceilingward like some elegant Indian princess sending smoke signals.

  “Why were their names changed?” she asked.

  “They were called something else as children, but when they became girls they performed under Pansy and Petunia. Petunia had grown so sophisticated after her debut at her mother’s affairs that she was demanding to be known simply as ‘Pet.’ ”

  Irene glanced at me, her lips tightening. “Yet we all roomed together, and performed together . . . and bathed apart. That common water closet plays a part in your story, doesn’t it, Maestro?”

  “How would you know? Would guess . . . remember?”

  “I would deduce, my dear Maestro,” she explained, quieting his wild queries. “I worked for the Pinkertons even as I concentrated on my vocal exercises for you. I became astute on two quite different fronts. ‘Mystery and music,’ my husband says, are my forte.”

  “You have a husband? He is a good man?”

  “He is a great man, and a superlative barrister, and a quite charming Englishman.”

  “Ah.” His sigh expressed relief. “You are a married lady. Then perhaps I can tell you—”

  I was not a married lady, and perhaps he should not tell Irene anything so apparently shocking in my presence, but I was not about to miss this confession for the world! Especially after waiting so long to hear it teased out of the maestro that I’d been forced to actually sip the after-dinner wine, which was quite sweet and rather better than most wines, actually. Why had no one ever told me that wines could be other than the sour French variety?

  “Tell me,” Irene urged, moving her hand from the cigarette case to his veined and arthritic-swollen hand across the table. The look she gave that sadly ruined hand before her straight, young fingers folded over it would have brought tears to a stone. “Maestro, please!”

  He took a deep breath, much like an actor about to deliver an enormously long speech. Shakespeare, say, or one of the French classicists.

  “My dear girl, I fear that reviving that memory will revive your awful bout of muteness. That would kill me.”

  “I am too recovered to relapse, Maestro. I have the libretto and music for a specially commissioned one-woman piece in which I portray the six wives of Henry the Eighth. It is a . . . series of roles any soprano would kill for. I will not lose my voice again. I am past thirty now, after all, and an expertly trained singer.”

  Her bow to his tutelage pushed the old man over the brink of hesitancy. “What a fine piece you speak of! I must hear it.”

  “You will, as soon as I have memorized it. So you see, I must have my entire memory returned to me, now that I k
now some of it is missing. That realization is more damaging now than anything the past might hide could ever be.”

  He nodded, and began speaking as if he too had been held mute, and now reveled in releasing the censored words.

  “It was quite accidental. Your entering that water closet, robed and towel in hand, for what we used to call the ritual of ‘the Saturday night bath.’ Despite your theatrical background, you had been pampered and protected and were a sweet, innocent girl, as much as we all could see to, and we old theatrical folk knew we were your only kin and parents and took that responsibility to heart.

  “Unfortunately, the twins were quickly becoming what was known as ‘fast’ women. I blame their mother, so you are very fortunate to have escaped such a malign influence in your own life, however much you may have missed knowing who your mother and father were, believe that.”

  Irene was far too canny and in control of herself to interrupt the fountain’s flow now that it had come unstopped, but I saw several unnameable emotions cross her face at this speech.

  “One girl, the self-named ‘Pet,’ it was determined later, had found herself irrevocably compromised. It pains me to speak these ugly truths to a woman I had known as a sweet and innocent girl, but you insisted. She had discovered she had been left with child, and that is the sort of condition that becomes less inescapable with every week and day.

  “She had retired to the water closet, drawn a bath, laid herself down in it and slit her wrists and throat.

  “When you knocked and called, as the boarders always did, there was no answer; no occupant, you thought. The door was unlocked. You entered. You saw a sea of blood and your young performing compatriot floating in it like Ophelia. I understand the bath water had run crimson, and overflowed the tub, that she was as pale as porcelain.

  “You screamed, as who would not? But . . . my dear little Irene, you had a Voice. You screamed and screamed, an operatic aria of screams that woke the entire house, the neighborhood, sent people sitting up in their beds for blocks around with chills running down their spines.

  “You would not stop. It was as if only Song could express your horror. And when you finally did stop, you would Sing no more.

  “That is how they brought you to me, days after Pet’s funeral.

  “You spoke only in a whisper, when spoken to. No one could do anything with you. I was . . . at my wit’s and wisdom’s end. I knew that only your Voice would cure you, but how to bring it back to life? Then I remembered Adler and his mesmerism technique.

  “I applied it. Slowly, surely, you recovered. You would whisper a scale. Then speak it, And finally hum it. It took patience, it took months and months, my dear. And sometimes you would stop and stare out the second-story window overlooking Union Square. . . . I finally realized that it was not enough to mesmerize you for the vocalizations alone. I instructed you to forget. To forget that awful moment you found the dead girl, to forget anything in your past that might trouble you, to forget your past and go on to a carefree and productive, and very vocal future. It worked.”

  He stopped like an automaton whose winding had run down, and drained a full glass of wine at one swallow. I saw a diadem of sweat beads circling his wrinkle-seamed forehead.

  The telling had been as arduous as the acts he recounted.

  This time when the wine waiter came around, Irene nodded, her face as pale and stiff as parchment.

  My glass was refilled, the maestro’s, and her own, which was only half consumed.

  We none of us spoke. Later, we left together and parted ways outside, Irene seeing the old man into a cab, and taking my arm to walk the long way back to our hotel.

  Not one glass at the table we left behind was anything but empty, including my own, yet I have never been so sober, and so sorry for it, in my entire life.

  And I was not even in France.

  42.

  A Mesmerizing Experiment

  With one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his

  eye—with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other

  Trilby, his Trilby—and make her do whatever he liked . . .

  you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would

  not have felt it. . . . He had but to say “Dors!” and she

  suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could

  produce wonderful sounds.

  —GECKO, TRILBY, 1894,

  GEORGE DU MAURIER

  After pretending to sleep, I arose the next morning to find Irene still semi-sitting in our parlor, still dressed.

  “What does one do, Nell,” she asked, “when the people who mean you the most good have done you the worst damage?”

  Well, I would obviously have to be one of those “people who mean you the most good,” and hope that I did no more damage.

  I sat down in an opposite chair. Irene was slumping in her seat in an inexcusable fashion, like one who had been up all night . . . or like a careless schoolgirl . . . or like Sarah Bernhardt during one of her interminable death scenes.

  “You claim to have come to America to trace your origins,” I said. “I suspect you came to America purely to drag me away from the Old Country and the shocks to my system its ancient evils administered. You are always thinking of others, Irene, and it has to stop.”

  “I? I am a prima donna!”

  “You are theatrical, certainly, and have a certain flair at arranging events, but you are far too dedicated to spare your friends the heartache and shocks of . . . whatever Shakespeare said, so apparently notably. I do not see it.”

  “Shakespeare or my situation?”

  “Either. You came here, purportedly, because you had no family, no parents, no brothers or sisters. Since we have been in New York, I have met no one but people who cared about you. You have had a multitude of mothers and fathers, Irene, and you don’t need Pink to show you that.”

  “They smothered my past.”

  “They are Americans! They do not value pasts. Goodness, most of them do not go back as far as one of Buffalo Bill’s Indian trackers. This is an utterly new land. I have seen that. I may not like it, but I have seen it. You have managed to leave footprints in both New World and Old. That will be the future. Forget your past. I have ancestors going back to medieval pig thieves, and I can assure you that such ties are overrated. What you have as a past is people who care for you, and that is worth any pedigree.”

  “But they are dead, and dying.”

  This I couldn’t answer.

  “Because of me.”

  “Again the prima donna!”

  “Because of me. Because of something I don’t know, but should have,” she said quite humbly. “Because of something that was kept from me. For my own good.”

  “Perhaps. I’ve found myself quite liking these strange theatrical folk. They remind me of honest Shropshire villagers, that no one gave much accounting to, but who remain foremost in my memory when I think back to my childhood.”

  “I can’t do that, Nell. I have a muddled memory.” She rose and pressed the small smooth sun of a gold watch into my palm, as one would feed a Gypsy fortune teller coins. “I want you to mesmerize me.”

  “Mesmerize? I can’t!”

  “I am, apparently, an able subject. You have seen me work with this method. All you must do is swing the watch before my eyes until they blur, and encourage me to be peaceful in my soul. You are a parson’s daughter. Such counsel should come naturally.”

  “I can’t take that responsibility.”

  “There is no one else here who can.”

  “The maestro—”

  “Has proven himself biased. He meant well. I can never blame him for that. I need someone stronger, though.”

  “Me?”

  “Someone I truly trust.”

  “Irene, please!”

  “Nell, please!”

  And thus, at the age of two-and-thirty, an Anglican became a Mesmerist.

  How foolish I felt! Rather like a wo
man who made a living belching cheesecloth. Yet she was dead, that woman, and I was tired of tracing the people from Irene’s past, only to find them dead.

  I swung the watch, back and forth. I watched her face, feeling foolish. She fixed her gaze upon that swinging watch as if it were a passing bell, tolling.

  She was determined to be mesmerized. I was determined to mesmerize. This was an enterprise too much dependent on necessity.

  “Irene,” I said. Intoned like a church choir.

  “Yes, Nell.”

  “I want you to watch . . . the watch.”

  “Yes, Nell.”

  “I want you to think . . . or rather, to not think. Imagine the . . . the . . . the mongoose Messalina.”

  “Yes, Nell?”

  “Such a supple, smooth creature, all fur and muscle. Bright eyes and flashing teeth, like a Spanish dancer.”

  “A Spanish dancer?”

  “Such grace and . . . passion. Like a metronome. You have heard, seen a metronome. That is the rhythm of music. Left, right, like this watch. Left, right, regular like a pendulum. Stamp, step. Dance, sing. Left, right. Like time.

  “Like . . . the past.”

  “Like the past. Your past. Left, right.”

  Her eyes fixed on the watch and grew filmy. I couldn’t believe my effectiveness. Then, on the brink of success, I desperately wanted to break the rhythm, deny this power, wake us both up.

  Except it was working. I wracked my brain for what was needed here. Irene was suddenly at my mercy. She had put herself into my hands. I must conduct this orchestra. I must understand what mysteries needed to be unveiled.

  I was both the shepherd and sheep.

  “Irene.”

  “Yes, Nell.”

  How pleasant this was. “Yes, Nell” had never sounded so sweet, although, now that I heard it so easily, I realized that I much preferred “No, Nell.”

  I smiled. I was indeed ready to do something for another’s good, because I no longer needed to cater to my own lesser needs.

  “Irene, I want you to remember.”

  “Yes, Nell.”