The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I see,” said George. “Is this the procedure for every traveling troupe?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “This is the first one I’ve ever been with.”

  George was disheartened to hear his questions could cause any resentment. “Cheer up,” said Colette, who seemed elevated by the promise of a bed. She punched him in the arm, and it was surprisingly painful. “It’s better than being on the streets.” Then she followed the others down the hall.

  George looked back at Silenus, who was turned toward the bay window. “If I were you,” he said, “I would not mention to her that you’re getting paid. Our budget is slim enough as it is.”

  “How much did it cost to rent this room?” George asked.

  “But she is still right, of course,” said Silenus, ignoring him. “I’d mind your own business first and foremost.” He stretched his short legs up to lean them on the bottom of the bay window. Then he kicked off his shoes and, with dexterous, monkeyish toes, removed his socks. As they fell to the floor George saw his feet were discolored: the soles were burned a sooty black, as if the man had once walked across miles of hot coals.

  “Something else on your mind, kid?” said Silenus.

  “I suppose not,” said George.

  “Then run along and get some sleep. You’re in room eight.” He tossed a key over his shoulder, which bounced off of George’s leg. George scooped it up, threw one last glance over his shoulder at Silenus and his burned feet, and went out into the hallway. The door swung shut behind him, though he saw no one move to close it.

  George’s room was next to Kingsley’s, whose door was shut. He could hear Kingsley speaking to someone inside, though he could not understand the words. George opened the door to his own room, which was small and bare except for a bed and a washstand, and he set down his suitcase and lay upon the bed.

  He was extremely tired. He had not slept properly since he’d left Freightly. His eyes soon grew heavy, yet as they began to close he heard a conversation in the next room, which was now easy to hear from his bed.

  “… And will we be out of the dark then, Father?” said a deep, Cockney voice.

  “I don’t know,” said Kingsley’s voice. “I would like you to be, but I don’t know.”

  “Why not?” said a second, this one with a New York accent. “Why don’t you know? You should know, that’s what fathers do. They know things.”

  “Yes, but I don’t,” said Kingsley. “I don’t know.”

  “It will just take more, won’t it,” said a Southern, feminine voice. “It will simply take more.”

  There was a long silence. Then Kingsley’s voice said, “Perhaps. Yes.”

  George waited to hear more, but before he could he fell asleep.

  George must have been exhausted, because he slept for the better part of the next day. He woke well into the afternoon, and after cleaning up he stumbled down the hallway to try to find Silenus and ask him what he was meant to do today. Yet Silenus’s room was nowhere to be found: the wall continued uninterrupted between rooms six and eight, where the black door had stood.

  He went downstairs to find Colette in the hotel restaurant, half of which was a billiards hall. She was wearing a rather workmanlike green dress with short sleeves, and was lining up a shot on a billiards table when George walked in. “I almost thought,” she said, and took the shot, “that you were dead.” She stood up, spun the pool cue, and watched the consequences of her shot. She nodded in satisfaction and said, “I wondered if I’d need to come up to make sure you were breathing.”

  “Where’s Harry?” said George. “What happened to his door?”

  “It’ll be there when it needs to be there,” she said. She paced around the table, head cocked as she considered another shot. “Harry himself is out with Stanley. Until they’re back, you’re to stay within my sight, and not do a thing.” She leaned against the table in a decidedly unladylike way and fired off another shot.

  George sat down next to the table. “Where did they go?”

  “Asking a question like that definitely counts as doing a thing,” said Colette. “Which you’re not supposed to do.” She lined up a shot, and grinned up at him along the pool cue. “Frustrating, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That’s what it’s like, working for him,” she said. “It’s like trying to play pool in the dark, with someone describing how all the balls are laid out to you.” She shook her head, rejecting the angle of her shot, and resumed pacing around the pool table. George was reminded of a very pleased cat circling a treed squirrel. “Today is Sunday, so it’s our off day. We have rehearsal at the theater in the morning. The professor’s in his room recuperating, and Franny’s off doing whatever it is Franny does. But you and me, we’re staying right here. If you want some lunch, there’s money in my bag over there.”

  “How is the breakfast here?” said George.

  “Terrible,” said Colette. “Get used to that. All hotel food is terrible.” The waiter, who was nearby, heard her and scowled.

  George bought an egg sandwich that was the color and consistency of sand and watched as Colette played billiards. She did not speak much, but stayed supremely focused on her game. After a while he began to detect a sort of savagery to the way she played: it was as if when she struck the balls she did not wish to knock them into a pocket, but to make them explode. Any pockets she happened to make were a bonus. George was thankful for her extreme focus; she didn’t notice how wide his eyes grew when she draped herself over the pool table, her dark, downy arms wrapping around the pool cue, triceps undulating and snapping taut as she made her shot. She did once ask if he thought it was hot in here, as he was sweating very slightly, and George coughed and muttered something about how he was reacting badly to the sandwich, which he immediately regretted.

  Colette played billiards for several hours while George watched. She seemed years older and worlds more confident than he was. He hoped to impress her by discussing Wagner, about whom he’d just read several fashionable articles, and even though George had never heard or seen any of the man’s operas he felt sure he’d be a fan. But Colette only responded with a shrug, grunt, or nod. George wished he’d worn his tweed coat; he thought it made him look very mature, and perhaps then this girl, who had so enchanted him last night, would pay a little attention to him.

  Yet the girl playing billiards was very different from his idea of the girl in white and diamonds. He’d never seen a woman smoke cheroots at all, let alone with such ferocity, nor drink beer in such quantities, nor play billiards with such skill. After a while he asked her where she was from in Persia. She looked at him for a moment, and said, “Oh, Tehran.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s on the outskirts of Persia, on the coast. Where the Caspian Sea meets the Mediterranean. There’s a lot of shipping there. But it’s not Persia anymore.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope. Now it’s the Otterman Empire. It’s huge. It goes all the way up into Europe. It almost touches Germany.”

  “Were the Ottermans the ones who threw your family out?” he asked.

  She took a thunderous shot, which went awry. It was her first missed shot in some time. “Something like that.”

  “It sounds marvelous,” said George.

  Colette gave him a thin smile, and reracked the balls.

  She continued playing without interruption as afternoon wore on. Then several local men entered. They saw her pacing around the table and furrowed their brows, and went and spoke to the hotel owner. The owner quickly came over and angrily told her, “We can’t have you playing here!”

  Colette looked at him and the men watching her. “Why not?” she demanded, yet now her accent had changed in a way George could not identify.

  “We don’t allow coloreds in here!” said the owner. “I can’t believe the front boy even let you stay! How could I not have noticed you? Get your things and get out, right now!”

  Colette drew
herself up to her full regal height. “Zis is an outrage!” she said in an almost unintelligible French accent. “I am not a colored! I am Persian!”

  The owner and the men grew confused at that. “A what?”

  “I am a Persian!” she said. “And I am no girl for you to orders about! I am Colette de Verdicere of ze Zahand Dynasty, Princess of the Kush Steppes and third removed from ze rightful trone!” She took out an ornate amulet that was chained around her neck and thrust it in his face. “I am no simpleton for you to boss around! I come to zeese shores of my own accord, and you should be tanking me for every breath I draw in your shabby leetle ’otel!”

  Then she turned to George and, with the demeanor of someone airing a lot of grievances to a confidante, rattled off a long string of angry French at him. George did not know a word of French, but the end of her speech had the inflection of a question. He looked at her, then the hotel owner, then the men who had complained, and then back to her, and offered a tentative, “Oui.”

  “Exactly!” cried Colette.

  The owner muttered something about the vagueness of hotel policy when it came to Persians. He looked to the men who’d complained, but they merely shrugged.

  “Are you saying you are willing to turn away royalty?” said Colette. “Is zat honestly what you are telling me?”

  One of the men stepped forward. “I’m sorry, miss, we… Well, we didn’t understand. We don’t get too many foreign types in here. It would be a terrible thing to turn down the custom of a foreigner on account of a mistake.”

  “A royal foreigner, at that,” said one of the others, and they all nodded.

  “We just have a policy in this hotel that we don’t allow coloreds in,” said the spokesman for the group. “That’s all. It was an honest mistake.”

  Colette gave them a cold look. “Well, I suppose I may forgive zis one time…”

  “Well, we would thank you for that, really,” said the spokesman.

  “Zo I do have one request of you.”

  “What would that be?”

  She gestured to the billiards table. “I have seen zis game played before here, but I have never been taught, nor have I had ze opportunity to learn. I am very fascinated by it. Would one of you be able to teach me?”

  The spokesman beamed at her. “Why, certainly. We’d love to show you.”

  The group of men then huddled around the table and began to teach Colette the game she had been expertly playing for the last four hours, only now she was jittery, awkward, and woefully inaccurate. She laughed and put her hand to her brow each time she made a mistake, often with a breathy, “Zut alors!” and the men would all smile and shake their heads and tell her it was no issue; it was, after all, a very difficult game for a lady, requiring a balance and physicality not often found in her sex. When evening came on they ordered a round of drinks for themselves and the Princess Verdicere.

  George was not sure what was going on, but he stayed silent. Yet eventually he saw that the men behaved differently around Colette. It was in how they looked her up and down when she made a shot, or how they placed a hand on her back when explaining her errors, their fingers lingering below her shoulder blades just a little too long. George became so agitated by this behavior that he almost didn’t notice that they’d begun playing for money, and Colette had accumulated quite the payload.

  At the end of the evening Colette sang the men a song in French, and sent them out the door with a royal hand-wave, blowing kisses in response to inebriated cries of, “Goodbye, Princess!” When they were gone she smiled after them for a bit, and turned to George and delicately said (in an American accent), “I will be right back,” and walked out the back door.

  George waited for several minutes before going out to check on her. He found her leaning up against the wall with one hand, a small puddle of vomit on the ground before her feet. She spat repeatedly and wiped at her mouth, then stuck her finger down her throat and gagged. Nothing came up. “Fucking hicks,” she said.

  “Goodness!” said George. “Are you ill?”

  “No,” she said. “I did this to myself. Those bastards put a lot of booze in me, and I didn’t want it screwing me up any more than it already had. It was stupid of me to accept. I’d already had plenty to drink.”

  “Well, why did you say yes, then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess out of spite.” She stood up and wobbled a bit. As she regained her legs, thunder muttered somewhere up in the sky and a few fat drops of rain splashed against the hotel. “Oh, great,” she said. She sat down on the back step and put her head down on the tops of her knees. “I guess it’s my own fault. Thank you for pretending you know French.”

  George sat down next to her. “Pretending? What makes you think I don’t know French? Maybe I understood everything you said.”

  Though she did not lift her head, he could discern a bright, hard look in the corner of her visible eye. “People who know French,” she said, “generally do not look so dumbfounded when it is spoken to them.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Was it so obvious?”

  “Your mouth could have caught flies, it was so open. You were lucky they were fools.”

  “Are you really from Persia?” he asked.

  She was still for a very long time. For a moment he wondered if she’d really heard him. But then, in a very small voice, she said, “Yes,” but he thought he heard a note of fear somewhere in that word, and he thought it strange; while the girl in white and diamonds and the fearsome pool player seemed like very different people, he could not imagine either of them afraid of anything.

  George wondered how best to relieve her depression. “Do you ever miss it?” he asked.

  She rolled her head to the side and looked at him. “Do I what?”

  “Miss Persia. Your home?”

  “Oh.” She thought about it. “Yes. All the time.” And then, after more thinking: “No. Actually, I don’t.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. Do you ever miss wherever the hell it is you came from, George?”

  He considered it. He had not thought of Rinton in some time. It felt like years since he’d left his grandmother’s house in the dead of night to catch a train. Sometimes he missed her embrace, and her cooking, and the whisper of her rocker on the porch; but then he remembered the furious boom of her voice, and the way she’d go into hysterics whenever he thought of disobeying her, and especially how she’d refused to ever discuss the subject of his father. He would still be there, he thought, if she had not let her anger overwhelm herself the day after the Silenus Troupe left Rinton, and spat after their departing train. And that had been the one act George had been waiting for, the gesture that would give him a clue to who his father really was, and once he had it he’d seized upon it and dogged her with questions from morning till night, until finally she could stand it no more. She’d led him down into the basement, where she’d produced the piece of newspaper with a smudged photo of Silenus on it, and she’d pointed at it in the dark and said, “There. There.”

  How that face had haunted his dreams for so many nights… And how he’d clung to the theater bill he’d stolen from that gutter back home… And now he had found him, the man who he’d once thought would fill all the empty places in his heart. But now George was no longer so sure.

  “Yes,” he said. “And no.” He nodded, seeing her point.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I miss my home. But then I remember I’m not really remembering it right. I’m better off here, with Harry.”

  “You don’t ever want to go back?” he asked.

  “There’s never any going back.” She picked her head up and stared out at the rain. “God, I hate the sticks. And the sticks is all we ever seem to work. We never hit the big time, never try and get in close to the cities. Not unless we have to. You’ve heard of the Palace, haven’t you, George?”

  “In New York? I’ve read about it, certainly.” The Palace Theater was the epicenter of all of vaud
eville, owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith himself, the founder of the Keith-Albee circuit. To traveling vaudevillians, both big- and small-time, crossing those boards was the equivalent of transcending the Earth to take their place among the constellations.

  “Yeah,” said Colette. “I saw it, once, you know.” She looked at him, and George could tell he was meant to be impressed.

  “Did you?” he said.

  “Yeah. One of the few times we got to go to New York. I went all the way downtown to do nothing more than see it. It’s a weird building. It’s tall and thin, which I didn’t expect. I didn’t get to go in, because I didn’t have the money. All I got to see was the damn outside. But I knew that was where I should be. In there, on that stage. Not out here, in the sticks. With a bunch of rubes drinking moonshine and playing billiards.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s just a matter of hard work and knowing the right people,” George said knowledgeably.

  Colette gave him a piercing look. “And are you suggesting,” she said, “that I haven’t been working hard?”

  “No!” said George. “Well, I’m sure I can’t say. Sometimes these things just take time, you see.”

  “And what do you know about time?” she asked. “How long have you even been in the business?”

  George reddened. “I have been a very distinguished house pianist for over seven months,” he said with all the pride he could muster.

  Colette stared at him. Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, God,” she said. “For a moment there I was almost offended!”

  “I don’t find anything particularly funny,” said George. “How long have you been in the business?”

  “Four years,” said Colette. “Since I was your age, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s hardly any longer.” He very much wished he were wearing his tweed now. He felt sure this would have gone differently then.

  Still laughing, she shook her head, but seemed to catch something out of the side of her eye. “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s who?” said George. Then a bright spiderweb of lightning arched across the sky and he saw two figures making their way down the street carrying an enormous trunk between them. When they got near he saw it was Stanley and Silenus, and they were hurrying as fast as they could through the mud.