The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He smiled. “No. No, I suppose it isn’t.”

  Stanley nodded. THAT IS THE BEST THING YOU CAN EVER DO. ADMIT THINGS ARE PLEASANT, IF ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE. He erased what he’d written, and wrote: LET ME TALK TO HARRY. I WILL TRY AND MAKE THINGS BETTER. FOR NOW, PLEASE TRY AND FORGET ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED.

  “It won’t be easy,” said George.

  He wrote: NEVER SAID IT WOULD BE.

  “All right,” said George. “If you say so.”

  Then Stanley laid a hand on George’s shoulder, his long fingers gently touching the back of George’s neck. As he removed his hand his fingers trailed down George’s arm as though he wished to feel more of him. It made George uncomfortable to experience that, here alone on the rooftop with this much older man, but he was not sure why.

  They heard someone calling their names. They went back to the stairwell door and found Colette there, shivering in her thin coat.

  “Thought I saw you two come up here,” she said. “What the hell were you doing?”

  “Seeing the sights,” said George. “What happened?”

  “It’s Kingsley,” she said. “He can’t get out of his bed. It hurts too much, he said.”

  George and Stanley exchanged a glance and followed her downstairs.

  Kingsley lay on his bed, pale and sweating and nearly unconscious, while Silenus and the rest of the troupe looked on. He dreamily insisted that they place his marionettes beside him, and Stanley was given the unenviable task of carrying these up to his room. When he laid a hand on one of the boxes he wept silently.

  “Should we take him to a doctor?” asked George.

  “No,” whispered the professor. “No doctors.”

  “But you’re ill, Kingsley,” said Colette. “Look at you. You can’t even stand.”

  “No doctors,” he said again. “I’ll be fine. Just need some rest.” Then he pulled one of the boxes to him and held it in his arms as though he were embracing a small person, and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  Franny’s Secret

  Silenus took over Kingsley’s spot as the opening act of their performance. George was told he was a splendid monologist who could enrapture any crowd, but he was unable to witness it for himself; as the one member whose job could be done by a theater employee, he was assigned the task of looking after Kingsley, to his dismay.

  George spent hours in their flophouse hotel holding a cold rag to Kingsley’s head and mixing tinctures of opium and guaiacum for him. Kingsley at first prissily resented George’s attentions, but he eventually relented, too exhausted to be difficult.

  “Tell me,” said Kingsley once after George had given him his tincture. “Does he value you?”

  “Who?”

  “Harry. Does he value and love you? Is he a loving father?”

  “I don’t know,” said George. He sniffed. “But maybe I’m getting used to being unappreciated.”

  “He doesn’t know how lucky he is,” said Kingsley. He coughed, and said, “I should have very much liked to be a father. I feel I was meant to be one.”

  “Have you ever been married before?” said George.

  “I was, once,” said Kingsley.

  George was surprised. He couldn’t imagine anyone could live with someone as irritable as Kingsley.

  “Children are miracles,” said Kingsley. “We are all miracles. Do you believe that?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “That is good. Not… not everyone does. It is the role and purpose of men and women to bear children, and give them everything that they can. It is the only true fulfillment in life. I am sorry to hear that Harry does not do this for you.”

  “Did you and your wife ever have any children?”

  The professor looked away out the window. He sipped a little more of his tincture, and said, “Yes,” before falling into a deep sleep.

  George watched him for a moment before slipping outside to walk down the hallway, intending to go to the theater to try to see his father and Colette. As he passed one room a voice within said, “Is he gone?”

  He turned and saw Franny sitting inside on the edge of her bed, staring into the floor. “What?” he asked.

  “Has he died?” she asked.

  “Kingsley? No! No, he’s fine.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. It won’t be long now.”

  “He’s… he’s not dying,” said George. “He’s just sick, is all.”

  “No,” said Franny. “He’s dying. He will die, and soon. And it will be painful.”

  “How do you know? Are you a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are you so certain?” he asked.

  “I know these things,” said Franny.

  “Nobody knows for sure.”

  She shook her head. “I do.”

  “How?”

  She looked up, and seemed to debate something. “Would you really like to know?”

  George hesitated. The way she said it made him think she’d been waiting for him to ask for some time. But he said, “Yes.”

  “All right. Then come in.”

  He walked to the doorway, but did not fully enter. The emptiness of her room made it feel very large, and the little light within was gray and unhappy. Franny sat on her bed like a little doll left behind by a child, mummified to the chin in coats and sweaters and scarves.

  “You’ll have to come in, George,” said Franny, and she smiled sleepily.

  He did so. Her bed was completely undisturbed. She must have not been sleeping there, he thought, and then remembered she said she never slept at all.

  “Shut the door,” said Franny.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because this is private.”

  “If it’s private, then why are you telling me?”

  “Because you asked. And because I want you to know.”

  George began to feel unsettled; besides that brief, furious moment with Colette in Hayburn he had never been alone with a woman in a bedroom before. He shut the door, and Franny motioned him to come and sit by her on the bed. He hesitated again, but Franny seemed such a limp and empty thing that he could not imagine her doing anything outrageous, and he went and sat beside her.

  “Do you really want to know how I know he will die?” she asked in her quavering voice, still smiling sleepily.

  “I suppose.”

  “I was not always a strongwoman, you know. Once, before these stage days, Harry and I were in the same act. He juggled and did magic tricks, and I… I told fortunes. And I was very, very good at it. This was because,” she said calmly, “the fortunes I told were absolutely true.”

  “True?” said George. “So, wait… are you saying you can tell the future?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. If I try.”

  George laughed. “Are you being serious?”

  “Very serious,” she said. “And I do not find it funny.”

  “Oh,” said George, and he coughed.

  “People started asking me bad questions, in those days,” said Franny. “Questions about stocks, and horses, and women. Harry said it wasn’t the kind of show we needed to be doing. So he made me stop.”

  “How can you tell the future?”

  “It’s my time,” she said. “Time has a very different bend for me, George. It moves differently. Think of it like a river you and everyone else you know is floating on. You can only see the rushing waters, the jagged rocks, and the next curve. But I am not on the river. I am sitting on the bank, watching everyone go by. And I can see all the curves ahead.”

  “And you see the professor dying in that future?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  George smiled a little. He was still not entirely sure she was telling the truth. But then, Franny was difficult to take seriously at any time. He pitied her then, this androgynous, loopy woman with her mittened hands and dozens of scarves. “How does he die?”

  “He will be eaten,” she said gravely. “Eaten in the night, by animals.”r />
  “By animals?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you see yourself dying in this future?”

  “No.” She shut her eyes, and breathed deep. “Not that one. My death is much later, and it will not be my first one. That is in the past. But my second death is something I’ve watched for a long, long time.” George wondered what she could mean. Second death? Yet she continued on: “It grows nearer every day, but I can’t tell its specifics. I see a few things—the moon’s face broken on the black waters of a strange sea… I am smiling and laughing, and holding something very heavy in my hands. And I have no name in that time. But that is all I see.”

  George’s smile slowly faded. He was no longer quite sure this was all a joke. “Do you see how I will die?”

  Franny looked off into the corner. “No,” she said.

  “No? You don’t?”

  “No. I don’t see it at all. I think, George… I think everything will end before you die. And you will be the only one left when that end comes. When I look, there is no one and nothing else in the world but you, and you are weeping. After that there is nothing. There is no more time that I can see.”

  George began to feel very unsettled. It was the way she said it, as if she were trying to remember a very trivial thing, like where she’d mislaid her bag. “Can you really see things like that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “They are very obvious to me. As they would be to anyone else who has fallen out of time.”

  “You’ve… fallen out of time? What do you mean?”

  She became queerly alert then. She looked at him, and he thought she might have been afraid. “Do you really wish to know that? It’s a great secret.”

  George wondered if he really did, but said, “Yes.”

  “The reason is very simple,” she said. “It is because I am dead, and have been for some time. And the dead are not a part of time at all, are they?”

  He stared at her. It took a moment for him to process what she’d said. “What?”

  She nodded as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “That can’t be. You can’t be… be dead. You move and talk and walk and such.”

  “That does not mean I’m not dead.”

  “Well… how do you know?”

  “Because I remember it,” she said. “I remember dying. I cannot remember how long ago it was… Time has lost a lot of meaning for me now, since it passed me by. But I am dead, George.”

  “Then how are you here? How are you… alive?”

  “I was brought back,” she said, “as an arrangement I made before I died. One I made with my husband. At least, that’s what I think happened… I don’t have many memories of before, and it’s hard to keep track of any new ones. Everything’s wrapped up in cobwebs, up in my head.” She rubbed at her temple with two fingers. “I don’t even remember what my name was. It wasn’t Franny. I wasn’t Franny, not then. I’m not the same person anymore, because I have almost none of her memories, so I can’t… I can’t have the same name, can I?”

  “I don’t know,” said George.

  “No. So it was one I chose at random. Franny. Franny Beatty,” she said, as if she was trying to remind herself of what it was.

  “How were you… brought back?” asked George.

  Franny once again debated something. Then she said, “I’ll show you.”

  She stood up and removed her mittens, and her scarf, and her very large overcoat, and then her sweater, and underneath her sweater was a blouse, and she began unbuttoning that, too…

  “No,” said George, confused. “No, no, what are you doing? Don’t do that!”

  But Franny ignored him, and kept unbuttoning until her blouse was open, exposing a brown stripe of naked skin running down the front of her torso, only it was ribboned with curls and skeins and strings of deep dark black. Then the blouse fluttered to the floorboards.

  She stood stooped before him, naked from the waist up, and though she was a skinny thing she was not emaciated, or unlovely. But she was tattooed over every inch of her skin with countless symbols and glyphs, many of them queerly positioned around her chest and belly and back, and some of them seemed to move, somehow, twisting or rotating very slightly under some force of their own. George wanted to look away from her, but could not; he had never seen a woman’s body before, and he shamefully stared and tried to ignore the hot flush blooming in his belly.

  Franny gazed down at herself, apparently unaware that what she was doing could be in any way strange or shameful. Her long, thin fingers probed her brown skin, caressing the symbols that had been inked there. “Each of these keeps a part of me functioning,” she said. She indicated one below her left collarbone. “This one whispers to my heart, and asks it to beat. These here,” she said, and thoughtlessly touched two below and to one side of each of her breasts, “these speak to my lungs, and fill them with air. This one my spine,” she said, and turned and showed him a dense, complicated highway of tangled hieroglyphs running down the middle of her back, “and these my innards,” and she turned again and gestured to the mass of black ink that curved across her belly. “On my scalp, below my hair, are hundreds more. They give me my mind. A part of my mind, at least.”

  Her words were anatomical, almost bored. Then, to his horror, she sat back down next to him, slumped forward and expressionless, her bare elbow kissing his. “The professor speaks of marionettes,” she said. “But I am a human one. I don’t know who is pulling the strings anymore, or what act I’m putting on. My strength is an effect of the marks that help me live—many of them work a little too well, and allow my muscles and bones to do things normal ones would not, even if it hurts me. But I am a dead thing, George. I am dead.”

  George watched her from the side of his eye, cringing and trying not to look upon her. She smelled like camphor and old clothing, and the stooped way she sat made her small, firm breasts gather together between her arms.

  “It is so tiring,” she said. “Everything is muted, and dull… I am achingly tired and cold, George, and all I wish for is sleep. But I never can. I am always awake. Always.”

  “Please get dressed,” George said softly.

  “Dressed?” she said, puzzled.

  “Yes,” said George. “Please. Please get dressed.”

  She smiled and said, “All right.” Then she put back on her blouse and coat, and sat down next to him again. “I can feel the world flowing over me, like in a dream. Time is a breeze and we are simply feathers floating on it. One day I will wake up, George. I will wake up, and float away on it too. Or I hope I will. I hope I will wake up.”

  George waited for more, but she did not say anything else. He slowly stood up and she did not blink or look at him. She seemed totally unaware of anything going on around her. He watched her, remembering the color of her skin and the endless crawl of tattoos, and opened the door.

  “Where are you going, Bill,” she said softly. He turned and saw she was not looking at him, but was speaking to the floor. “Where are you going,” she said again.

  He waited for her to say something more, but she did not. He walked out and shut the door behind him and stood there, breathing hard.

  He looked down and saw his hands were shaking. Then he looked up and down the hallway. There was no one. He slowly walked back to his own room. His legs felt faint and funny beneath him, like at any moment they might fail, and he went to his bed and lay there with his eyes open, listening to the wind whistling in the gaps of his walls and the murmur of voices in the rooms around him, and he hated himself more than anything in the world.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Professor’s Miracle

  George did not tell anyone what had happened. It was easy to avoid Franny when he tended to Kingsley, but the few times she came near he grew shameful and hot and had to excuse himself. He felt sure she would tell someone, and then the rest of the troupe would look at him with disgust and throw him out onto the street. But Franny did not tell
anyone, apparently; she seemed to have forgotten it the moment it happened, and was unaware that anything wrong had occurred.

  He was not sure why he had reacted the way he had. That brief, painful glimpse of so much brown skin had filled him with a warm, sweet wetness, a cold and trembling flame. Yet he did not desire Franny in any way. He wondered what could be wrong with him.

  George did not have long to think about it, for despite all his tending Kingsley got worse and worse. He started entering bouts of delirium, speaking incessantly of children and babies and infants, and in many cases he cried that the children were in pieces or parts, or were horribly mangled or eyeless. He would become so terrified in these fits that he would weep for hours, yet in his more lucid moments he could never recall them.

  It was in one of these rare clearheaded moments that Kingsley said suddenly to George, “Lucille.”

  “What?” said George, who had been mixing a new tincture.

  “My wife’s name,” said Kingsley. He propped his chin up on his blanket. “Her name was Lucille.”

  “Oh. Yes, I remember asking you about her the other day. What was she like?”

  Kingsley was quiet. “Proud,” he said. “And beautiful. We lived in Maryland, in a very small town. I was a lawyer there.”

  “I didn’t know you were a lawyer. You didn’t start out in show business, then?”

  “No,” said Kingsley. He smiled a little. “And I am not a professor either, George, though I am probably the most overeducated person I know of on the circuits. And my last name is not Tyburn,” he said softly. “My real name is Kingsley Harrison. Very few people use their real names on the stage. I doubt, for example, that your father’s real name is Heironomo.”

  “How did you get into the business?”

  Kingsley’s eyelids lowered slightly. “That was Harry’s idea. It was a deal we made, you see.”

  George stopped mixing and turned to listen, curious. “A deal? In exchange for what?”

  Kingsley was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “For children. Harry said he could give me children, if I wanted. And I did. In my old life my wife and I had encountered a great difficulty conceiving, you see. And when we finally conceived, we were so happy. But when she was seven months pregnant the doctor came and felt her belly to make sure that everything was all right. And he said it wasn’t.”