by Jess Walter
Rye sat in this warm cookie-brandy-Ursula goodness, looked up at the walls of books, and suddenly began to weep.
Seated in the chair next to his, Ursula leaned forward and touched his arm. “Ryan. Are you okay?”
He nodded. He cleared his throat and asked Brand, “I don’t suppose you have War and Peace by Count Tolstoy?”
Brand looked around at his books as if he’d never seen them before. Then he looked at Willard, who had been standing by the door. Willard nodded.
“All five of them?”
Willard shrugged and nodded again.
It was too much. All of it, too much, and Rye cried at the too-muchness of it. This incredible room of books—how he wished Gig could spend a single day in such a room, two stories of leather and gilt volumes and a heated floor and brandy so sweet and rich it coated your insides. The thought of his bookish brother in that stone jail while he was here—it was all just too much.
The unfairness hit Rye not like sweet brandy but like a side ache—a physical pain from the warmth of that heated floor and the softness of that chair and Gig not knowing any of it—and Lace and Danny and Ma and Da, too—Rye never could have imagined it, either. But now he knew, and he would know the next time he was curled up in a cold boxcar, that men lived like this, that there was such a difference between Lem Brand and him that Brand should live here and Rye nowhere.
He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.
He remembered last winter hopping an open boxcar with Gig and seeing a body in the corner. He’d seen played-out bums before, but this one appeared to be a young woman, her long hair iced to the floor of the boxcar, frozen or starved or kidnapped or run off or just made dead somehow. How was it this girl was trash in the corner of a rattling freight box while Rye had hot water running through the floor and warm brandy in his guts? He wept for that girl, too, for what a learned man like Gig might’ve called humanity, a poor girl born in hunger and dirt, destined to die in a cold boxcar without ever imagining this room existed.
Lem Brand offered him a handkerchief, stitched, like everything, in gold. Rye stared at the handkerchief, and at Brand’s clean, rounded fingernails. It was the softest thing he’d ever held to his face. Rye hated that he’d cried in front of Brand and did his best to fill the thing with dirty hobo snot before handing it back.
Brand waved that he should keep it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dolan,” he said. “I imagine it’s been a strange couple of weeks for you. And now you’re probably wondering why you’re here.” He leaned forward and Rye finally got a full picture of the man: pale, balding, wide-faced, with a trim mustache. “I thought you might consider working for me.”
Rye wasn’t sure he’d heard right.
“This request comes at the suggestion of my friend Ursula”—she looked at the ground—“who asked me to intervene in your brother’s case. As I explained to her, I have no real power in these situations. This fight is between the police and the unionists.” Mr. Brand swirled his drink. “As I told Ursula, this is a matter for the courts now. But, like many, she exaggerates the power of a simple businessman. Still, I might be able to see about getting the charges against him reduced, although, as you might imagine, I am not eager to go out of my way to help a man who makes trouble for the agencies I rely upon to provide labor and security. Not without getting something in return.”
Ursula was studying the heated floor. Rye couldn’t imagine the thing of value he could supply in return for helping Gig. “Like what?”
“I understand you met a young woman yesterday?” Lem Brand said. “A Mrs. Jack Jones?”
Rye said nothing.
“Listen, Ryan,” Brand said, “I am not a political person. This business with the Wobblies and the police, I don’t like it. Were it up to me, I’d put every English-speaking man in Spokane to work. I am a businessman, and this is bad for business. But I also have responsibilities, and partners. And to satisfy those responsibilities, I need information. That’s all I’m asking from you. Information.”
“What kind?”
He shrugged as if it were nothing. “Plans, meetings, developments. Say a union organizer like Mrs. Jones comes to town. Basic news of the street.”
Rye looked down at the glass in his hands.
Brand leaned forward. “I wouldn’t ask you to put anyone in danger or do anything that goes against your ethics.”
Ethics? Did Rye have those? He’d slept and shat in people’s yards and stolen their food, he had been drunk and sacrilegious and disparaging. Was the peak of tramp ethics seeing a dead girl on a train car and not going through her pockets?
“I only ask two things,” Brand said, “that we keep this in complete confidence, which is to your benefit as well as mine. And that you answer my questions honestly. That’s it. For that, I will do my best to intervene in your brother’s case.” He looked over at Ursula. “And as long as your information is correct, I will pay you twenty dollars a month.”
Rye took a drink to keep himself from making a noise. He didn’t imagine he’d had twenty dollars’ worth of information in his whole life.
“For instance”—Brand pulled a twenty-dollar note from his pocket as if it were nothing—“tell me about the man who beat up the police sergeant on the river that day.”
“Early?” Rye asked before he thought better of it. “What about him?”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” Rye chewed his lip. How did Brand know about Early? “He said he was going to Seattle.”
Brand leaned forward and handed him the twenty. “See how easy that was?” The bill was crisp and flat, like it had been pressed. Brand leaned back in the chair and watched him. “Your father worked the Golden Sunlight strike in Montana.”
Again, Rye wondered how he could know. He nodded.
“I owned that mine,” Brand said. “I worked it myself after my father died. Started on the muck line and worked my way into the sluice and the mill. These agitators—your Gurley Flynn, she doesn’t care about men like your father or me. Or you. All they want is revolution. You’re a pawn in that.
“Look, I’m not saying you always get a fair deal in mines and timber camps. But you’ll get worse from them. They come from Berlin, from drawing rooms in New York City. Do you think they care about you? About this job-shark business? They want to upend everything. Blow up the world. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Gurley Flynn. Ask her where this all ends. Ask, if you get rid of the job agencies, get a higher wage for workers—will that ever be enough?”
Rye looked down at the floor.
“People like her, they only want to get you killed and then go on to the next battlefield, because that’s what they really want. A war. I’ve seen it for twenty years. They call themselves WFM or IWW or socialists or syndicalists, they rile up the locals, get you arrested and killed, then go back to New York and tell their friends how they fought in the revolution out west.”
He was getting himself riled up, Ursula shifting uncomfortably like she’d heard this all before. “Do I use workers?” he asked. “Yes. I use them to extract silver and to fell trees and to pull beer in my saloons. But I pay them for it. And that’s all I want to do, pay good men for good work, the way I was once paid to dig silver. Do you know the difference between me and them, Ryan?”
He shook his head.
“This?” Brand waved around the room, the house, the grounds, the mines and hotels and saloons, the world that he owned. “I want you to have it, too. I want you to have every opportunity I had. With them, nobody gets a chance at anything.”
This was when Ursula finally spoke. “Ryan?”
He looked over at her and could see she m
ust be tired of Brand’s ranting.
“Do it for Gregory,” she said.
If Ursula thought she had to remind Rye of his brother during Brand’s speech, she was wrong. He wondered just what sort of ethics a person needed to survive so long in cages with cougars. Rye looked down at the twenty-dollar note in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. He took a deep breath.
Ursula the Great
A WOMAN owns nothing in this world but her memories—a shabby return on so steep an investment. The First Ursula taught me this. The other thing she taught me was how to climb in a cage and sing to a mountain lion.
I was the Second Ursula. I met the First in the spring of 1909. She’d been doing the act for ten years, nearly half her vaudeville life. By the time I met her, she was putting her stage makeup on with a putty knife, dying her hair every morning, and every night wrestling her rangy tits into corseted captivity like two escaped criminals. Then she would walk onstage and try not to get eaten by a cougar.
It was a bear, the first creature Ursula performed with, and the reason she was called Ursula, “Ursa being Latin for bear,” according to her fatstack manager, Joe Considine, who hired me to replace her. This was in Reno, Nevada, where I answered a simple newspaper ad for “Actress, singer, calm demeanor.”
I was from an East Coast performing family, my mother an opera singer, my father a playwright. Just two years earlier I’d wowed six hundred a night on the San Francisco stage as Fanny LeGrand in Sappho. But two years is a hundred in actress time, and I had chosen badly in romance and found myself in Reno in a limited engagement called desperation. That’s when I saw the ad.
For my audition, Joe Considine led me to the stage of an empty variety saloon, and I sang, “A Woman Is a Woman but a Good Cigar Is a Smoke.” I wasn’t even to the second puff when Joe said, “And can you dance?” and I showed him tap and a high kick and he said, “And what about your tits?” and I asked if we could keep those out of it, and he said, “Then how do you feel about animals?”
I met the First Ursula the next afternoon backstage at the theater where she’d been performing for the last month, co-billed with an Orientalist seer. She wore a flowing gown of reds and oranges, her hair wrapped in a scarf, four dollars in costume jewelry on her fingers and neck. Behind her, her costar lay in a ten-by-ten cage, asleep in a narrow slant of sunlight beneath a high window.
Ursula seemed resigned to giving up the act, and gamely showed me the tricks, although, from what I could tell, the main trick was to not get mauled.
“Why are you leaving?” I asked.
“I am not leaving,” she said. “I am being replaced. A week ago, Joe informed me that he was taking out an advertisement for a new Ursula. And look, here you are.”
I chose not to apologize. “Why would he replace you?”
“As he explained it to me, our receipts are down, the show is rarely extended beyond our two-week contracts, and he has begun to suspect my age is an issue in marketing this spectacle.”
“So, you’re too young,” I said.
“Yes, very good.” She smiled. “No, according to Joe, a more mature Ursula reminds them of their mothers and wives, and they have begun to cheer for the cat.”
“What is the age,” I asked, “when a woman becomes more entertaining as meal than singer?”
“I am thirty-six,” she said, “or so.”
Or so. No way First Ursula had seen thirty-six this century. Not that I held any reverence for the accurate measure of one’s age. I had told Considine I was twenty-four, a number I had scrupulously maintained since turning twenty-five a few years earlier.
First Ursula was slated for three more shows while she trained me, and after that I would assume the role, meaning I had only two performances in Reno to get the act down. After that came a two-week run in Boise, followed by Butte and Missoula, then it was on to Spokane in the fall, where we had an open engagement at a theater First Ursula said was the finest house in the best city this side of San Francisco.
It was called the Comique and it was owned, in secret, by a mining magnate named Lemuel Brand—secret, she said, because “his wife remains blissfully unaware of his fondness for actresses.” She was quite taken with this Brand, whom she described as “a cup of charm in a gallon of largesse.” Brand’s wealth came from silver-mining the Coeur d’Alenes and the rather broad range of vices his workers spent their money on—cathouses, saloons, hotels, opium dens, and theaters in Spokane’s tenderloin, positions he held behind a series of paper partners. “Lem likes to say that every dollar that goes out in payroll,” Ursula said, “comes back through bed, brothel, and booze.”
Ursula and Lem Brand had carried on for her entire two-month run in Spokane. He’d even made her a promise: that when her career was over, she could manage one of his flop hotels and turn it into a proper boardinghouse. She planned to open its doors to old variety-show actresses like herself, to teach them secretarial and operator skills so they wouldn’t be reduced to taking on loggers at four bits a throw. Of course, she said, a hotel full of former actresses also appealed to a patron of the arts like Brand.
That’s why she was staying with the show as far as Spokane, so she could dismount the stage for the next segment of her life. She had even picked out a name for her boardinghouse: the Phoenix.
That morning she’d sent a telegram to Brand saying that she would be coming to Spokane with the show, was eager to see him, and hoped to discuss taking over the management of his hotel. “I am ready,” she told me. “I have been at this for too long.”
“May I ask,” I said, “what happened to the bear?”
“Ah, the bear.” This question softened the corners of First Ursula’s eyes. “Boryenka. He fell quite in love with me, I’m afraid. Backstage, he would growl whenever Joe raised his voice. Onstage, he would sit patiently, panting like a dog, his eyes following me everywhere. He was heartsick, and he would moan for me to come into his cage, to sing to him, to stroke his jowls. He was so gentle the audience began to laugh.
“Joe found it unseemly the way the bear looked at me. I suggested we play it as a comedy, the bear my suitor, perhaps add a wedding scene, but Joe feared the ministers would be scandalized by us suggesting what happened in the wedding bed, or worse, that audiences would be disappointed not to see that. Of course, I had fallen quite far in the theater, as you apparently have, too, dear, but I was not about to become one of those acts.” She smiled gently. “In the end, Joe sold the bear to a traveling circus out of Denver, and we went with a mountain lion after that.”
Mountain lions were more reliable for snarling and baring teeth, Ursula said. But she still missed Boryenka. “I understand he is quite a star in the circus.” Her eyes drifted to the window. “The last I heard, he had learned to play the banjo while riding a bicycle. He is quite a talent.”
Those first few days in Reno, First Ursula showed me the basic staging and blocking: come out, sing my first number, and dance three laps around the cage. Then open the door and go inside for the next song. She showed me how to sew raw steak strategically into the corset to enhance my profile, and how the cat would growl and wait while I ripped off the corset, and that a quick throw was the real trick, for if I hesitated and held the meaty corset in my hand—
Then, with my back to the audience, singing in full voice, I was to grab the robe hanging from the stand at the back of the cage. Depending on which city we were in and its variety-theater laws, I could either show my tits or not. She had not shown hers in a year, “but this is more for gravity’s sake than for decency’s.”
One other thing to remember: The robe stand could be used to fend off the cat should things go badly. This was the way she described being attacked by a cougar in front of a screaming throng—“should things go badly”—the loveliest bit of theater decorum I’d ever heard.
We had a fine time in Reno, First Ursula and me. I’d watch her perform and then we’d stay up late in her hotel room, sharing stories while we drank a s
trange plum wine that she had acquired a taste for in Spokane’s Chinatown.
In the mornings, she would go to the front desk of the hotel to see if Lem Brand had answered her telegram about the Phoenix. When, after three days, no answer came, she sent a second telegram, and then a third, but these also went unanswered, and as the week wore on, I felt an aching sympathy for her.
On the fourth night, we stood backstage together. There was no announcement that the actress playing Ursula was changing; the barker simply said, “Ursula the Great!” and I went out instead.
There was a whistle, some light applause. We’d spent most of our rehearsal time on the bits with the cougar, for obvious reasons, and while the show itself was simple, I found myself overtaken with a surprising and savage bout of stage terror.
The heat of the lights, the growl of the cat, the smell of workingmen in the front rows: It all combined to make me nauseous. I hit my notes and the cougar was professional enough, but I left the stage thinking I might not be cut out for this. There were only three things these yokels wanted to see: Two of them were my breasts and the third was a cougar attack; the singing and dancing to which I had devoted my life were very much beside the point.
I came off after that first performance feeling bereft, what she called having “fallen so far in the theater” weighing on my soul, and that is when I saw First Ursula, standing backstage, her hand over her mouth.
“Dear God,” she said. “Your voice.”
Since the rehearsals had focused on staging and safety, I hadn’t really invested in the songs and had almost forgotten the effect my voice could have at full release, its unlikely power and register, which at one time had secured parts and performances for me at the best theaters in San Francisco.
“Thank you,” I said, and she said, “No. Thank you,” and began to cry. She enveloped me in a shuddering embrace.
We separated and she looked out at the dingy Reno theater. “These dusty heathens have no idea. You could be singing in Paris for monarchs.”
