Prima Donna: A Novel

by Megan Chance

  Johnny said, "Not a bad idea, honey. Not bad at all."

  "But the money has to come first," I said.

  "That could take a while."

  "It's not a race, Johnny. Better to do this right."

  He nodded slowly. "All right. I'll see what I can do. But I don't suppose it could hurt to write San Francisco anyway."

  "We need the stage first."

  "Building this place up will take months. Investors will need to see more than footlights," he pointed out. "They get nervous with their money. They'll want to know real entertainment is waiting in the wings."

  "The last thing we want is for a troupe to come up here and discover they're playing in a glorified brothel. We'll never get a second chance."

  "I'll just advise Tom that you and me are changing things up here, and to keep an eye out."

  "Don't mention me," I said quickly--too quickly; Johnny's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  "Why not?"

  "I ... because ... because I'm a woman. He might not look kindly on your partnering with me. He might think you aren't serious."

  "Hmmm." Johnny went quiet and thoughtful.

  "Your friend won't want to deal with me anyway. You know that. He'll just assume I'm involved because you're fucking me. He won't listen to anything I have to say, and he won't trust you if it looks like you are."

  "I suppose you're right about that."

  "I am right." I slid off the edge of the desk and stood. "So we're agreed? You'll look for investors first?"

  "We're agreed," he said with a nod.

  "Then I'll get back on the floor."

  I was at the door when he said, "Margie--"

  I glanced at him over my shoulder. "Yes?"

  "What the hell made you change your mind about this?"

  "I just saw the sense in it," I told him. "And I guess ... neither of us wants to work a boxhouse forever."

  He nodded and waved me away, but there was a thoughtfulness in his expression that sent a little frisson of discomfort into me. I told myself I was imagining it. I'd just given him what he wanted. What else mattered?

  NOW THAT I'D said yes to Johnny, things seemed strangely different, as if I were looking through a glass into another world. The Palace was ugly, I knew that, but tonight it did not seem so irredeemably so; tonight when I looked at the stage I didn't see the splintery and warped platform or the rickety steps leading to it. Instead I saw what it was going to be. I found myself mulling over how the footlights would be placed and whether we would get the fittings to turn their colors from yellow to green or blue or red. How we would build wings to hide the steps leading to the orchestra loge. Whether the drop curtain should be blue or green or crimson.

  That night, the shadows were not so very dark as I'd thought, the men not coarse and rude but simply honest laborers looking for a little fun, ready to laugh and be teased, and the girls were more likely to break into a smile, as if they too sensed that something had changed. They missed fewer notes; even Billy's playing improved nominally.

  The place stayed full a long time that night, and it was closer to dawn than to twilight when the crowd finally lessened enough that I could take a break. I stepped out the back door and onto the stoop and breathed deep. Cool air, but not cold, and tinged with damp from the harbor but not from rain. It would be spring soon. The sun would not be unwelcome.

  The back door creaked behind me. I turned, expecting it to be Duncan coming for another keg, and was surprised when it was Charlotte instead, her hair frowsy and falling from its pins.

  "I thought I saw you come out here," she said.

  "Is something wrong? Do I need to go back in?"

  "No, no, nothing like that." She sighed and came up beside me, crossing her arms over her breasts, shivering a little. "It's dying down. Johnny just told me I could go home if I wanted." She sat down on the edge of the stoop. "You seem happy tonight. The whole place feels it."

  "I don't think it's just me. There's something in the air."

  She tilted her head at me. "Oh, it's you, believe me. When you're a bitch the whole place feels that too."

  "How sweet."

  She shrugged. "What happened today?"

  "What makes you think anything happened?"

  A heavy, impatient sigh.

  I sat down beside her. "It's your fault, in any case."

  "My fault?"

  "I decided to do what you suggested. I'm going to help Johnny remake the Palace into a real theater."

  "And that's what's got you so happy?"

  "Yes." I turned to look at her. "Shouldn't it?"

  She laughed a little and shook her head. "If that's all it took, why the hell did you wait so long?"

  "What you said made the difference," I admitted quietly.

  "You and Johnny ... you were both right. About my living in the past."

  "So what're you going to do? Apart from getting rid of the whores."

  "We're not getting rid of you. At least not yet."

  "I don't see much fucking going on in places like Squire's."

  "Don't fool yourself," I said wryly.

  "Oh yeah?" The faint glow from the streetlamp on the corner glanced over her face, softening the sharp outlines of her cheekbones, her nose. She teased, "How do you know that, Marguerite? Let me guess ... you and Johnny do it there at Faust?"

  "Don't be absurd."

  "All right, so what did you mean?"

  I wasn't surprised at the question, what was surprising was the lack of fear I felt at it. Perhaps it was only that I was in a good mood. The past seemed far away for once, too far to hurt me, and she had been honest with me about her own life. Didn't that create an obligation to answer with mine? And I wanted to tell her something. Not the truth ... or at least not the whole truth, because I knew it would change the way she felt about me and I was afraid of that. But something else. Surely there was something else I could tell her, something small, something to show how much her friendship meant to me.

  I found myself saying, carefully, anxiously, "I traveled theaters all over the country with him."

  "With who?"

  "A musician. He was a pianist." I let out my breath slowly, relieved when the words caused no pain, when they were as simple as they sounded. "I met him when I was very young and I fell in love with him."

  "Was he famous?"

  "A little," I said. "No one you've heard of, I'm sure. I think you'd have to have worked in the business to know of him."

  "Ah." She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, which was nothing but a hazy darkness above our heads. "What happened?"

  "It ended, that's all."

  "Bad?"

  I nodded and tried not to think of it.

  She said, baldly and irreverently, "So that explains it then. No doubt the two of you fucked your way through every theater in America."

  I laughed and she laughed with me until Duncan stuck his head out the back door and said Johnny was looking for me, and we went back inside.

  MY LIFE WAS moving on, whether I went with it or not, the things I'd agreed to put into motion. Johnny spent nearly every night speaking with men I didn't know, men wearing suits and vests and hats, who looked nothing like the miners and lumbermen who were our usual customers. The Palace had always had its share of respectable merchants and businessmen slumming, but none of them had ever looked it over with such interest. I stayed out of their way mostly, as I stayed away from the respectable parts of town in general. Once or twice Johnny came downstairs dressed in the suit I hadn't seen until the night of Faust, and he'd give me a wink and leave the Palace for some meeting or another, and I felt both anticipation and anxiety at how quickly he worked the plans I'd put into his head.

  And my friendship with Charlotte progressed just as quickly, as if now that I'd opened the dam, the flow could not be contained. I found myself telling her things. Some things were small enough that they could be detached, they could be said, and with each saying the tight, hard knot of my memories lo
osened a little more. I told her I had a nephew I hardly knew and a sister I no longer spoke to, and Charlotte said families were strange things, bound together by blood but not necessarily by affection. I told her I had a brother and my parents wanted nothing to do with me, and she said her father had been such a mean son of a bitch she'd spent every waking hour hoping he would die. And so it went on, truths and half-truths and omissions all bound together, so I could not always remember what I'd said or how I'd phrased things, but it was becoming easier to breathe, and my nightmares were easing, occurring not so often now.

  Then, one day in early April, as Charlotte and I walked back to the boardinghouse room after a breakfast at nearby Miller's Restaurant, she asked, "How did you meet him? Your musician? In the beer hall?"

  The memory came unbidden. The door opening, a gust of air through the smoke, my brother's bright hair shining, his laughter as he turned to the dark-haired young man who'd come inside with him. The calling of orders back to the kitchen, the beer foaming as Papa drew a glass from the keg, the music from the polka band onstage. And then Willa moving through the crowd to take his hand.

  Talking about him was not easy--I could not think of what wouldn't be dangerous to say. But to tell her nothing would offend, and so I cast about for something and landed on The Barber of Seville. Warily at first, in the event she would recognize it, I lied. "He'd watched me from afar for some time. He said he'd admired me, but he never dared to speak to me because I was so young, and my brother was very protective of me. And his father and my father had been enemies for years."

  The day was warm for the time of year, and bright and beautiful enough that it made it easy to forget the muddy squalor of winter. The Mountain shone so whitely it was hard to look at without squinting. We passed a lilac tree in someone's yard, and I snagged the branch and snapped a blossom from it, holding it to my nose, closing my eyes for a moment to breathe deeply of its scent.

  "Enemies?" she asked.

  "Rival beer hall owners."

  "So how did you meet?"

  I smiled, thinking of the scene in Barber as we'd played it onstage, a painted balcony, myself perched on a ladder behind, gasping in delight at an impromptu serenade. "He sang to me. One night, he stood below my window and sang to me. I think I loved him from that moment."

  "It sounds like a fucking fairy tale."

  "It was very romantic. When I called out for his name, he didn't tell me his real one, because he knew Papa and my brother would keep him away."

  "Such an honorable man," Charlotte said sarcastically.

  "It wasn't like that. He wanted to meet me and he knew they would object. What was he to do?"

  "How about walk the hell away?"

  I twirled the lilac stem between my fingers, watching it spin. "When Papa advertised for a music teacher for me, he came in disguise and pretended to be one."

  She snorted. "And then you ran off with him."

  "How did you know?"

  "Ain't that how all those stories go? Hell, it's even how mine went."

  We climbed the ramp to the boardinghouse door, and then up the stairs to our room. The sun filtered in through the faded curtains, and the little room was hot. Charlotte pounded on the sides of the window to force it up through the swollen sill, and I laid the lilac sprig on the table before it. The sprig seemed to swell in the sun, exploding with scent. The hot metal smoke of the foundry next door came in, along with the faint blood smell of the butcher's on the other side, but the lilac was so fragrant it held sway over the rest.

  I fell back on the bed, crossing my arms under my head.

  She stood at the window, looking out. "And it ended the way all them stories do, didn't it? You ran off with him, and things weren't the way you'd thought they would be."

  "That didn't happen for a long time. We were happy for a while."

  Charlotte's glance was penetrating. "Is he the one gave you that scar?"

  Would I have answered that? Could I have said anything true about it at all?

  I don't know what would have come out of my mouth; I was hardly conscious of thinking, only that she was watching me as if I might for once give her some truth she wanted, and I wished nothing more than to keep that look upon her face, the look that told me we were friends, that she trusted me.

  But the knock on the door startled us both.

  "Miz Olson? Miz Rainey?" Mrs. McGraw's voice was harsh as a seagull's caw.

  "One moment!" I rose and went to the door to open it.

  Mrs. McGraw stood in the hallway, her face wreathed in an anxious smile, her browning, missing teeth hard to look away from. "Oh, I've got good news, Miz Olson! Mr. Clemmons is moving at the end of the week, so Miz Rainey can have his room, just as I promised."

  I stared at her in stunned surprise. "Mr. Clemmons? Are you ... are you certain?"

  "He gave me his notice this morning. Ain't that good news? Now you needn't share."

  "Yes," I said slowly. "That's good news indeed."

  "Thought I'd tell you right away. I know it's been a trial, waiting this long, but now you can have your room to yourself again."

  I nodded, but I didn't hear her words any longer, only a slow buzzing, and when she said her good-byes and left us again, her footsteps clattering down the warped boards of the hallway, I closed the door and turned back to Charlotte, who was looking as stunned as I felt.

  "Mr. Clemmons is leaving," I said, as if she hadn't just heard the same words I had.

  "Your own room back at last," she said, smiling weakly. "I guess it'll be a relief."

  The lilac bloom was fading in the harsh sunlight; its scent was suddenly unbearable, too sweet, almost rotten. "A relief," I agreed.

  From the Journal of Sabine Conrad

  JUNE 11, 1873--Today, flowers from Leonard, along with a small box from Tiffany with a diamond pave barrette. Very beautiful, though Gideon turns his nose up at it and says "Jerome had best do better than that if he wants to keep Belmont at bay."

  Leonard also pens that he must leave town for a few days and so will not see me before I go on tour, and the clip is "for good luck." Gideon has me write him back to say that I shall think of him, and hope that his affections do not diminish in the coming months, as mine will not.

  All nonsense, of course.

  SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 20, 1873--The tour has been a resounding success. I have been too busy to write, and now we are in San Francisco, where I can hardly move without being nearly assaulted by a mob. They have thrown flowers at the stage every night, and I have sung so many encores I must drink warm honeyed water each night to soothe my throat. There have been too many dinners and toasts and prominent people to remember them all. I have received jewels in nearly every city--a diamond star with a ruby in the center, a pearl fan, and three diamond rings--oh, and a brooch in the shape of a butterfly and studded with jewels of every color, from a French marquis who was visiting New Orleans and happened upon my performance and came every single night. My notices have been too many to mention and all good. But here in San Francisco, I am more adored than I could have imagined!

  Last night there was a crowd gathered at the backstage door when I came out, which is not so unusual, except that they had unfastened the horses from the carriage that was to take me back to the hotel so that they could draw me there themselves!!!! "We shall act as your horses, Miss Conrad," said one young man, and then they harnessed themselves and took me through the streets of San Francisco. Oh, I never laughed so hard, and even Gideon was moved by it. When I arrived at the hotel, they waited below, shouting and refusing to leave until Gideon said I must say something to them, so I stood on the balcony and threw flowers and Gideon whispered in my ear: "Look at them. They'd eat you alive if they could, sweetheart."

  Barret is becoming known as quite the impresario for arranging this tour. Even the newspapers mention him as being the force behind my success, which is ironic, because it has all been Gideon. Everyone in the business already knows this, of course, though
none of us say it, and the papers can only state what is publicly advertised.

  AUGUST 22, 1873--I have insisted on having our photographs taken--me and Barret and Gideon together--in a little shop near the hotel. I wore the double strand of pearls that Gideon bought me for my nineteenth birthday (how old I am now! I shudder to think it!). I sent the one of me and Barret to Papa and Mama (in the hopes that they will remember how they love us), and Gideon had the one of me alone made into some cartes de visite for us to hand about, but my favorite is the one of Gideon and me together. I have framed it and my own copy of me and Barret, and I mean to put them on my bedside table in every hotel I stay, but I confess I put the one of me and Gideon forward so I can see it better. We look like we belong together, and he teases me every time he sees it and says that now I will not forget him. As if I ever could!