Finally he asked, “How did she die?”
“My mother?” said George.
Silenus nodded. He did not meet George’s eyes.
“In childbirth,” he said.
“You never knew her? At all?”
“No. I was raised by my grandmother. Alone.” A pause. “You remember her now?”
Silenus nodded again. “It was a very long time ago.” He sank low in his chair as though this news put a great weight on him. He thoughtlessly moved to rub one temple, but when it pained his eye he winced and rubbed his nose instead. “And your grandmother told you it was me?”
“She let it slip by accident after you left Rinton. I kept asking until she told me everything. She said she knew it was someone in your troupe. Then she went digging, and found a photo of you in the newspaper.”
Silenus steepled his fingers. “And she saw the resemblance.”
“Yes.”
He chuckled mournfully and shook his head. “If I’d have known,” he said. “If I’d have known that you were, well…”
“Don’t tell me that you’d have come back for me,” said George.
Silenus looked at him, startled. “Of course I would have come back for you.”
“Why? Why would you?”
“Well… I told you about my lineage, my bloodline… We’re precious creatures, you and I.”
“So not because you wanted a son,” said George. “Not because you cared about my family, about me or my mother.”
Silenus was silent at that. Stanley shook his head over his shoulder. “I don’t know what to say,” said Silenus. “I don’t know anything about any of this. You’ve got to give me some slack, kid, I just found out about all of this in the past hour.”
“I’ve been carrying this my whole life,” said George. “It ruined my family, you know. It almost killed my grandmother. Do you know what that’s like? Carrying something like that around your neck, every day?”
Silenus laughed. Again, there was no humor in it. “Unfortunately, you and I have something in common there, because that’s a sensation I know all too well.”
“I’m not being funny,” said George.
“Neither am I.”
More silence ticked by. Stanley looked back and forth between the two of them. The stars behind the window seemed to shift and swoop slightly, as if spelling out strange messages.
“You think I do not like you,” said Silenus suddenly.
George blinked. The idea of Silenus discussing people in terms of “like” was almost unthinkable.
“You think I don’t care for you,” Silenus continued. “That I don’t want you, or that I hold some disgust for you. That I think you some failure, something pitiable and little. Is that it?”
George was so stung that he could not speak. He only nodded.
“That’s not the case,” said Silenus. “In all honesty, I just don’t know what to think of you, George. You left home at the age of sixteen under your own devising, and with nothing but talent and stubbornness managed to work your way far enough into the circuit to track me down. All while dodging dangers and threats that I’m sure I can’t imagine, not the least of which was simple starvation. You found a home in the heart of a business that is famed for being impenetrable, even hostile, to outsiders. All while carrying something very precious, very dangerous, and very heavy within you. That’s… that’s remarkable. Do you not know that you are remarkable, George?”
George could not think of anything to say. He shook his head.
“I didn’t know what to do with you when I first saw you,” said Silenus. “And I still don’t.”
“Didn’t you ever suspect it?” asked George. “When the wolf looked at us and said we were family, didn’t you wonder?”
“I thought you might be a relation of mine, yes,” said Silenus. “Like I said, my features are pretty predominant throughout my family. That’s why I did all this research. But a, a son… I thought it was impossible. I’ve been on this Earth for a long damn time, George, and I have never fathered a child. I just didn’t think I could. And yet, here you are…” He shook his head. “You think you have every right to be angry with me. Perhaps that’s so. Saying that I didn’t know is an excuse for why I never came back to you, maybe. But it’s not one for your mother. Nothing I can give you could ever make up for that, George.”
George nodded, and was glad to hear Silenus admit this. “You didn’t trick her, did you?”
“Lord, no!” said Silenus. “She chose me of her own accord.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t see what she saw in me, do you?”
George tactfully did not answer, but Silenus smiled. “Not all of us start out old and fat and irritable, George. These things are done to us, not by us. None of us are the creatures we were in our beginnings.” He sighed. “So the question still remains the same. What to do with you? I think you know my suggestion.”
“You want me to stay,” said George.
“I want you to stay with us, yes,” said Silenus. “Of course I do. I want you to travel the circuits with us, performing, as we’ve done for so many years. It’s what you wanted, why you came, isn’t it? To join me in vaudeville?”
George nodded.
“And I need you by me,” said Silenus. “No, I want you by me. For many reasons. Some concerning our mission, yes. You are a very valuable person, George. In addition, I think you would want to have what’s in you removed, and I’m probably your only chance of that. But also because you belong with us. With me. I have never had a child before, so I don’t know much of raising or teaching one, especially one that seems to have been nearly raised already… but I’m willing to try, and give you what I can. Does that sound amenable to you?”
George considered it. He had not seen this side of Silenus before; he seemed vulnerable and uncertain. Finally George said, “I’ll leave whenever I wish. If you hit me, or abuse me in any way, I’m gone.”
“I will do my best to give you no reason to leave,” said Silenus. “But if you stay, you must stay under my rules. You’ll be by my side, yes, but you’ll be among a troupe, boy. We’re a traveling company. We have procedures and laws. We pull our salaries from the same pool and treat everyone as equally as we can. You know what that means?”
“I wasn’t expecting any favoritism,” said George.
“I didn’t say you were. But the others will certainly expect it. So I’ll ride you hard, George. You’ll do more than the others, much more. I’ll expect perfection from you, and apply higher standards to everything you do.”
“So my reward for staying with you is to be punished?” said George.
“Punished?” said Silenus. He took out a cigar and cut off the end. “It would be punishment if I didn’t think you could do it. But I’m convinced you easily can.”
George blinked, and then a small smile trickled into his face. For the first time since Colette had praised his performance, he felt the small, hot coals of pride lighting up inside his belly.
“So,” said Silenus. “Will you stay?”
“Yes,” said George. “I’ll stay.”
“Good then,” said Silenus. “I’m happy to hear it.” He stood up, the unlit cigar still in his hands, and walked around to George. As he came near he seemed to grow awkward, as though he was not sure what to do. He frowned for a bit, and stuck out his hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said.
George had been expecting something more—an embrace, at least—but he shook Silenus’s hand, rather disappointed. It felt like they’d made a business transaction rather than begun any kind of relationship.
Stanley stood up from the bay window and approached as well. He was blinking back tears, but George was not surprised to see such a show of emotion from a gentle thing like Stanley. He fumbled with his blackboard, and thought for a long moment about what to write. Eventually he scrawled out: WELCOME TO THE TROUPE. Then he embraced George, and was reluctant to let go.
As Silenus walked George to the door, George sai
d, “I did tell Colette about this. She didn’t seem very… pleased.”
“So I fucking heard,” said Silenus. “You leave Colette to me.” When he opened the door to let him out, the awkwardness returned. Silenus eventually managed, “Get some sleep, kid,” and gently ushered him out into the darkened hallway.
Silenus called for a group meeting the next day to make the announcement. They all gathered in his dressing room backstage, and Kingsley and Franny, the only two who still did not know, seemed to expect some bad news concerning their salaries. Silenus began with, “I suppose you have all been wondering exactly how George caught up with us in Parma.”
“No,” said Kingsley with some surprise.
“What?” said Franny, who had not been paying attention.
“Well, that’s what you should have been wondering,” said Silenus angrily. “As it turns out, George had been trying to catch up with us for some time. The reason behind this is that he, defying all logic and possibility, is my son, who I never knew existed until last night, and he was seeking me out.”
Their reactions to this were not quite what George had expected. Kingsley was flustered and panicked from the start, and assumed Silenus would be giving George a managerial position and a pay raise, despite Silenus’s immediate assurances that he wouldn’t. But the most surprising reaction was from Franny, who gasped and nearly fell out of her chair when she heard the news. It was the most emotion George had seen her display yet.
Silenus then made several speeches denying any favoritism, or at least half-speeches, as Kingsley and Franny kept interrupting halfway through, Kingsley voicing some suspicion of George’s position, and Franny asking about George’s mother. “Who was the girl?” she kept saying. “Where is the boy’s mother? What have you done with her?”
Silenus took these accusations more personally than George would have expected. “Don’t be upset with me!” he said to her. “I didn’t hurt anyone! Why would you think such a thing?” But Franny would not be persuaded, and remained furious.
Yet the most disheartening response was Colette’s: she sat with her arms crossed and her eyes boring into the empty wall before her, refusing to look at either George or Harry. George attempted to catch her attention once or twice, but she studiously ignored him. What he had done to offend her was beyond him.
“I know this is a startling discovery for us all,” said Silenus, “but we can’t let it trip us up. George is staying with us, and that is that. Now we’ve all got work to do together, whether we like it or not, and we need to get back to business. There’s a show today, and within three days we’re moving on again. So go on.”
Mumbling and muttering, they all stumped out except for George, who dawdled behind to speak to Colette. But when he walked out he found she was waiting for him next to an old discarded backdrop of a plantation. George wondered if she was going to apologize to him.
Those hopes were dashed when she fixed him in a glare and said, “You must feel pretty good about yourself, don’t you?”
“I what?” he said.
“You’ve got yourself all set up. You’ve got a company, a circuit contract—of a sort—and an in with the manager. A big in. Everything seems to be going your way.”
“Not everything,” said George, who could not bring himself to meet Colette’s eyes.
“Do you even know what you’re getting into?” she asked. “All of us in the troupe, we’re here because we have no other choice. Harry gave us something we could never get anywhere else. But you can just walk away, just like you said last night, and take what you please.”
“I can’t,” said George. “It’s the same way for me.”
She seemed to take that as an insult. “How?” she demanded. “He’s got something I can’t get anywhere else, too,” George said.
“He’s my father, Colette. I hardly have anyone else. I’ve got to be with him.”
Colette softened a little at that. But still she shook her head. “Are you so sure? How well does he fit the role?”
Before George could respond, he heard Silenus’s rough shout echoing down the passageway. “George!” he cried. “Are you coming or not?”
He looked back to Colette. She shrugged and leaned up against the backdrop, crinkling the white columns and green fields of the plantation. Then she crossed her arms and looked away.
George reluctantly turned and ran up the passageway, calling, “I’m coming!”
PART TWO
The Big Time
When life seems full of clouds an’ rain
and I am filled with naught but pain,
who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain?
Nobody.
When winter comes with snow an’ sleet,
and me with hunger and cold feet,
who says “Ah, here’s two bits, go an’ eat!”
Nobody.
I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time!
And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,
I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!
—Bert Williams and Alex Rogers,
Nobody, 1905
CHAPTER 13
The Long Tour
Now came smoky, wintry days, days of drafty rooms and chilly floorboards, of sour meats and sleepless nights and yellowed bedsheets layered with grit, always the grit. It came tumbling down from the train tops to rest in your hair, on your collar, in your sleeves and mouth, a constant invasion of grainy cinders that turned white linen into graying sackcloth. You could wash, certainly, but what was the point if you’d be on the train again in a week, or a day, or even less? You would always be moving, adrift in a sea of dour, distracted faces and jostling elbows and the grasping spumes of smoky grit, and when that was done you were speeding along through leafless forests and sodden fields and tumbledown towns with the white winter sky weighing down upon you.
You lived for the afternoons and the nights, when you did your turn. Everything else was backstage, in a way: the train station, the railways, the hotels and the bars, all of these were just a long, drawn-out wait in the shadowed corridors behind the real performance. You bided your time among greasepaint clowns and acrobats and chorus girls (who scratched at their leggings until one of their partners slapped their hands and told them stop, stop, you’ll put a run in them) and teams of softly whining dogs in little dresses. To pass the time you idly bickered with them in your thieves’ cant of showbiz terms; you fought over billing, over originators of bits and lines, over the goddamn choosers who lurked in the audience and sought to plunder your act and apply it elsewhere. Why, I found some jake in Columbus who’d been doing my bit for well over a year, they’d say, and certainly, I put an ad in the monthly and called the fellow out, but he never replied, the coward, he certainly never replied.
Your dressing room was only desirable in terms of solitude; the actual conditions were often nothing short of deplorable. The first thing you did upon arriving was search the walls and corners for any peepholes (they would be there regardless of your sex), and fill them in with shoe polish (and yet how many times had you seen narrow, soiled fingers worming through the blocked-up holes, pushing past this obstruction to make way for a desperate eye?). Then came the rituals: you avoided looking at all the windows, for to spy a bird on one’s sill was sure to bring bad luck. If you found a peacock feather accidentally jettisoned from some chorus girl’s gown, you made sure not to touch it; to touch a peacock feather was to invoke the worst of all misfortunes. You made sure not to whistle, that was a death knell if ever there was one. You just pulled on your oldest performance shoes and turned your shirt inside out while mumbling your lines, perhaps shuffling widdershins two or three times as you did. Then you would be sanctified, consecrated, protected against all ills. Unless, of course, you were following an animal act; no luck could aid you in competing with dumb, trained creatures who somehow always managed to charm the hearts of the audience while leaving shit all over the stage.
Then
came your moment, the little splinter of time you’d been waiting for since you awoke that morning: they called your name and you took a breath and walked across the stiff cardboard floor (riddled with holes from previous props), the dark back of the theater full of gleaming, watchful eyes like a cavern full of roosting owls, and then you sang or bleated your little song, or made your little speech, or did your funny little dance. And it was easy, because after all you’d done it just the day before, and the day before that, and the dozens of hundreds of days before that. Had you always been doing this, you wondered, as you listened to the applause (sometimes a dribble, other times a roar)? Had you always been playing for these darkened people, rendered bodiless and invisible by the blazing footlights?
And then after the performance you returned to your barren flophouse room, frosted with moonlight from the many holes in the walls, the bed and sheets alive with dozens of creepy-crawlies who roved the folds looking for bare flesh to bite. You’d sleep shivering in a ball and awake with red and pink perforations lining your neck, your crotch, your armpits. But you did not want to slap yourself down with kerosene to keep them away, like some people advised, as the reeking fumes almost choked you in the night, so you suffered through their tiny bites. And when morning came you’d sit on the edge of the bed aching and stiff, your breath smoking and pluming, and you’d fear to touch your soles to the chilly floorboards… yet just before you did, you’d wonder what day it was. Surely it could not still be February? Could it really? Had it not been winter for many, many months?
George finally asked Silenus about the time once. It seemed to move slowly now that he was touring.
“We are traveling the thin parts of the world, George, the hollow parts,” he answered. “We seek out the fringes, the edges, the festering, open sores. Existence is breaking down here. Time doesn’t work right. It’s grown distorted. That’s why we come here to play the song. Then things will be right for these places, in time.”
The Troupe Page 17
