by John Jakes
“No,” Eleanor answered. She was tempted to laugh delightedly at Leo Goldman’s nerve. She didn’t dare or she’d offend Charlie.
But she admired anyone who confronted obstacles in a determined way, and did whatever was necessary to overcome them. That was exactly what she’d done in order to attend meetings of the Association. For that reason, and others she didn’t fully understand as yet, it would be far from unpleasant to see the dark-haired boy again. Of course she didn’t dare mention that to Charlie, either.
The rest of the trip seemed to pass in an instant. The coachman delivered them to Hutter Hall at two minutes after eight.
Chapter XIV
At the Booth Association
i
AFTER FOUR SPEECHES, Charlie stopped them.
Leo Goldman cleared his throat and peered at his handwritten side. Eleanor had a similar sheet containing the lines and cues for her role. Sides were necessary because no printed text of the complete play was available.
She was standing next to Leo on a low platform which served as the stage. The only piece of stage furniture was a wooden box about two feet square.
She had never been in such a state of nerves. The misery of life at home had been completely driven from her thoughts when she walked into Hutter Hall.
The moment she’d arrived, Leo Goldman had hurried over and greeted her warmly. He’d seized her hand, shaken it, and given her a direct but not discourteous look that nevertheless made her blush.
Leo’s clothing was noticeably poorer than that of the other members. It consisted of heavy work shoes, old wool trousers, a cotton jacket from which the dark blue dye had faded in several places, and a dingy gray flannel shirt. Every item was clean but shabby.
Yet Leo’s good looks and confident smile seemed to overcome that. He moved with an intensity, an energy, altogether lacking in the more affluent boys who didn’t have to scramble for a living. His physical proximity only increased Eleanor’s nervousness—as did the fact that they were the first couple asked to read. They’d barely started when Charlie called a halt.
Leo glanced toward the wooden chairs arranged in semicircular rows in front of the platform. Charlie was seated among eleven boys whose ages varied from fifteen to nineteen. In addition, three other girls were present as guests. All were at least three or four years older than Eleanor but the difference wasn’t pronounced; she looked as mature as any of them.
The girls were quite taken with Leo, she noticed. She resented that, though she didn’t know why she should; she disliked her own, quite uncontrollable interest in him. She wanted no part of him—or any boy. Yet she frequently found herself glancing in his direction.
Behind the seats stood a crate draped with a piece of green velvet. On the velvet lay an old polished gavel, and a copy of the Booth Association’s constitution. On the rear wall hung a litho portrait of Edwin Booth which, like the platform, was put up and taken down every Tuesday evening.
“Let’s start over, Goldman,” Charlie called. “Give your character a little more—a little more tension. If you can.”
A boy behind Charlie snickered and whispered something to a girl next to him. Leo scowled. Eleanor could have punched the club members for being so condescending. They were just jealous of Leo’s good looks and fine voice.
Charlie Whittaker could be faulted for his faintly snide tone, but not for offering criticism. The Association prided itself on advanced methods, and tonight Charlie was acting as director of staging, a job that was just finding its way into professional theaters.
In the past Eleanor knew from her reading, stage business and acting technique had been left largely to the discretion of the actors, and thus to chance. If the cast was competent and happy, a fine production resulted. If they were incompetent, or so jealous that they intentionally blocked one another’s positions or jumped one another’s lines, the result could be chaos. Stage directors were supposed to take charge, plan the performance and prevent that sort of thing.
“And, Eleanor—”
“Yes, Charlie?” She felt every eye on her, including Leo’s. His, at least, was friendly.
“When you and Goldman are exchanging your remarks, don’t stand upstage of him. That’s a fundamental lesson you must learn. Position yourself next to him on an imaginary line from stage right to stage left. Otherwise, don’t you see, you force him to turn too far. We lose his face. Also, you make him speak too loudly. Professional acting no longer consists of a continuous shout. Booth made it acceptable for an actor to vary the intensity of his voice. But Goldman’s forced to shout if you make him face the upper wall.”
Her cheeks felt fiery, but she accepted the criticisms with a meek nod. “All right.” She couldn’t be thin-skinned if she wanted to learn. She was glad Charlie had corrected her; she hadn’t even been aware of moving a few steps upstage of Leo.
Charlie snapped his fingers. Leo began the scene again.
“Pearl, what does this mean?”
“Oh, it’s only a little cloud that I want to clear up for you.” As Eleanor read, she was conscious of the reedy sound of her voice in contrast to the richness of his. She had to get control of her nerves or she’d botch everything.
“Cloud?” he went on. “How? Where?”
“Don’t I tell you I am going to tell you? Sit down here by me.”
She managed to lower herself gracefully onto the wooden box. She heard a murmur in the gaslit hall, but didn’t dare look to see whether it signaled approval or scorn.
She and Leo Goldman were reading from one of the most successful plays of the melodrama genre—Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight. The famous author-manager had written and produced the drama during the 1867 season. One of the elements contributing to its immense popularity was a sensational spectacle scene in the third act. Daly’s original mounting at the New York Theater was still talked about for its realism; men had cringed and women had fainted as a train seemed to rush at the audience, then roar by.
The scene Charlie had chosen came from the play’s first act, which got the needed exposition out of the way. Pearl’s remarks to Ray contained a revelation about the past of her cousin Laura, who was Ray’s sweetheart. Caught up in the dialogue and anxious to make it sound realistic, she soon forgot her surroundings. The scene only contained thirty-one speeches before Pearl’s exit. They were at the end almost before she realized it.
She swung into Pearl’s last few lines, trying to develop volume without resorting to the bombastic yelling that was passing out of fashion.
“Mother made me promise never to tell anybody this, and you would have known nothing had not Laura made me speak. You see, she would not conceal anything from you. Ray, why don’t you speak? Shall I go after Laura? Shall I tell her to come to you?”
Leo’s mouth opened and closed in a decent approximation of shock as she went on.
“Why don’t you answer? I’ll go and tell her you want to see her. I’m going to send her to you, Ray!”
And with a last challenging look at her partner, she turned and stalked away, the sheets of the side clattering noisily in her fingers.
She nearly stumbled and fell off the platform when she heard one or two of the members applaud.
ii
Charlie Whittaker didn’t join in. Since she was his guest, that would have indicated undue favoritism. But even one of the other girls was clapping. So was Leo Goldman. His applause was the loudest of all.
Eleanor turned pink. The most wonderful sound in the world, she thought.
In a moment Charlie stood up. Eleanor felt warm and content as she took a seat. Leo followed and sat close by, though he left one chair between them. He smiled at her. In the euphoria of the moment, she returned the smile. Then, flustered, she glanced away, realizing he’d think she was encouraging him.
Charlie’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
“All right, time for a critique.” A hand went up. “Shad?”
“I thought Goldman mugged horribly.”<
br />
The criticisms ranged from substantial to petty. Eleanor tried to evaluate each one without emotion, to see whether it contained some bit of helpful information. Leo Goldman fared worse than she did, although she honestly thought he had a more natural talent. His good looks helped him create strongly masculine characterizations with hardly any effort.
In any case, she believed he drew an unfair share of criticism. His eyes tended to flash when the boy named Shad Conway spoke; he was an especially sarcastic sort. But Leo accepted the other criticisms without visible annoyance, and wrote several of them on a little tablet. Eleanor looked over at the tablet and was oddly touched by the block capital heading:
WAYS TO IMPROVE
That told her Leo Goldman not only had the looks a leading man needed—he also had the ambition.
Other couples read the same scene and received a critique. All of the young ladies had a chance to try the role of Pearl. Shad Conway’s remarks were uniformly merciless. At one point he made a disparaging comment about the dress a girl was wearing. Leo jumped up and called him a cad—a popular word these days. Conway sneered and started to turn away, saying Leo was too outspoken for a “newcomer” but his brashness was understandable since he was a “Hebrew.” At that Leo rushed forward, grabbed Conway and invited him to step into the street without his coat.
Conway turned white. Charlie and Donald Brace, the president, stepped in to make peace. They forced the glowering adversaries to apologize to one another. Additionally, Conway mumbled an apology to the girl whose dress he’d criticized.
“Shake hands,” Charlie insisted. They did. Leo’s grip must have been powerful, because Conway turned whiter still. Eleanor relished every moment. She was not only learning how to move and speak onstage, she was receiving valuable lessons in how to behave with other actors.
Once the readings were over, the boys rushed away to cluster beneath Booth’s portrait—all except Conway, who sat and sulked. Charlie was grinning when he returned to make an announcement whose purpose Eleanor couldn’t guess. At the other meetings she’d attended, only a group reading, with everyone seated in a circle, had taken place.
“Members present have voted,” Charlie said. “We declare the following point totals for those guests who essayed the role of Pearl.” He consulted a chit. “Miss McDuff, four points, Miss Bartholomew, five points.”
Leo grinned in an encouraging way. Eleanor caught her breath. She couldn’t believe it when Charlie beamed and read the fourth and highest score.
“Miss Kent, eleven points.”
A splatter of applause and some whistles. Leo Goldman silently repeated the name Kent, surprised by it, somehow. Conway peered at the toes of his boots and pouted. Charlie raised his hand for order, then continued officiously.
“Now before all you charming ladies rush pell mell to the offices of the various producing managers, I must remind you in my role of stage director for the evening that the club’s evaluation scale consists of twenty points. So even an eleven is only about halfway to perfection. The aim of the Booth Association is to promote practice and improvement. We shall repeat the same scene next week, with Mr. Farnsworth as director of staging.”
The president whacked the gavel. The meeting was adjourned.
Eleanor was still happy over her surprising success. And for nearly two hours she’d quite forgotten the real world, including her parents and the pain of living with their hostilities. No wonder actors loved the theater.
As she collected her bonnet from the cloak room, Leo Goldman followed her in.
“Congratulations, Miss Kent.”
“Thank you, Mr. Goldman. The success of the scene was due as much to your efforts as to mine.”
How handsome he is, she thought, almost against her will. His dark cheeks gave off the strong but pleasant smell of homemade soap. He leaned in the doorway.
“I didn’t realize your last name was Kent. I used to run newspapers from Printing House Square, and I once met a gentleman there who had the same name. He was connected with the Union. Handsome chap. Wore a leather patch—” He touched his left eye.
“My father.”
“Your father! What a coincidence. I thought it might be an uncle or something—”
It had the sound of idle conversation. Leo’s dark eyes kept darting here and there, watching the others coming and going in the cloak room. Eleanor didn’t understand his nervousness until a moment later, when the club’s vice president and one of the girls walked out with their wraps and she and Leo were left alone.
He rushed forward, shielding her from observation by standing between her and the doorway. A strong hand, the back lightly matted with black hair, closed on her forearm. He lowered his voice.
“I want to see you again. Call on you in proper fashion. Bet you’ve never had a beau from the ghetto. I won’t be there forever, though. One day I’ll be as rich and famous as any man in America.”
“Wait, wait!” she exclaimed, both amused and appalled. “You can’t call on me, Leo—”
“Parents won’t allow it? I’ll speak to your father. I can persuade him.”
All at once she was terrified by his confidence. Over his shoulder she saw Charlie waiting and watching them. She blurted the first objection that came to mind.
“I’m not old enough to have a beau.”
“You’re seventeen or eighteen, aren’t you?”
“Fourteen the end of May.”
“Come on!”
“It’s true. I don’t have beaux and”—she remembered the misery at home, and slowly choked off the excitement produced by the touch of his hand—“and I don’t want any, thank you very much.”
She started to pull away. His chin thrust out. “You’re fibbing to me. I can tell. I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I’ll find out. When I want something, I don t give up.”
She managed to free her hand, and wave. “I’m coming, Charlie. As soon as Mr. Goldman stops talking.”
She threw Leo a sharp look and brushed by him, still tingling from the physical contact and telling herself it was wrong.
Leo Goldman’s expression grew angry as he watched her leave Hutter Hall with Charlie. Then the annoyance faded, replaced by a look of determination.
iii
“Charlie, that was absolutely grand.”
The carriage was hurrying them back to London Terrace, where she’d creep in the back door of the Whittakers’, dash out the front and return with Mills to that dreadful house. How she wished she didn’t have to do that. How she wished she could lose herself in a performance every night. If only she were as old as Leo Goldman thought, she’d be free to do whatever she wanted. Free to pursue a career.
“Didn’t I say you had a first-class talent?” Charlie replied. “The members endorsed my view. Say—what did that Jew want in the cloak room?”
“You mustn’t keep calling him a Jew in that tone of voice. If you do, he’ll have every right to call you the son of a quack medicine peddler.”
Charlie bristled. “Taking his part pretty hotly, aren’t you?”
She was aware of warmth in her face again. She struggled to keep her tone casual.
“I’m only trying to be fair.”
“You didn’t tell me what he wanted.”
She shrugged. “He was just paying a compliment.”
“Yes, I saw him rolling his damned eyes at you all evening!”
“Now, Charlie, don’t carry on. Leo means nothing to me.
The falsehood put scarlet back in her cheeks. Shameful images filled her head all at once. Her mouth against Leo’s. Their bodies touching, without clothing, in some idyllic, sun-bright glade where, together, they sank down to perform the mysterious act she’d only heard about—
Stop. That sort of thing only brought pain. She must remember that.
She calmed down, maneuvered the conversation in a different direction.
“I decided something tonight, Charlie. I’m definitely going to be an actress.”
“You mean you weren’t sure?”
“Not entirely. Not until I read that scene.”
“Well, I’d say you have an excellent chance to fulfill your ambition. Maybe we’ll even appear together one of these days.” Then, adopting that man-of-the-world tone, he added, “Tell me, how soon do you plan to leave the family fireside and take up trouping? Tomorrow? Next week?”
Lamps on a passing carriage cast a harsh glare in Eleanor’s oval eyes for a moment. Her face lost its soft quality.
“Don’t joke that way. Things are terrible at home. I promise you this. I’ll leave as soon as I can.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” She pressed her gloved fist against her skirt. “As soon as I can.”
Charlie retreated into puzzled silence. Eleanor had the mercurial temperament of an actress, right enough. Her declaration just now had been almost as strident as the one she’d made while they were on their way to Irving Place.
He didn’t understand why she felt as she did, but it was very evident violent emotions were churning within her. Charlie liked Eleanor Kent. He hoped those emotions—or the unhappy situation with her family—wouldn’t bring her to grief.
Chapter XV
The Birthday
i
THREE DAYS BEFORE Eleanor’s fourteenth birthday, Gideon again spent the evening at home. He was doing it more and more frequently of late. Around eight thirty he finished reading Will a section of a new Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Then he lifted his son off his knee and shooed him to bed. He went upstairs ten minutes later to be sure Will had followed instructions.
Will was in bed with the sheet pulled up to the collar of his summer nightshirt. Gideon sat down on the edge of the bed and mussed his son’s hair affectionately. How sober his eyes were. More appropriate to a man of eighty than a boy of eight.
“Will, do you ever give any thought to what you want to be when you grow up?”
“Some,” Will admitted. In that reply, as in everything he said or did, he was hesitant, as if he might be criticized or punished.
