A Moment in the Sun (114 page)

Diosdado has eaten lizard, gratefully, and made a belt of hemp to hold his uniform pants up when his leather one rotted to pieces in the damp jungle camps. His men are a hollow-cheeked, spindly-limbed band, as phantoms must be, and the droning camp conversation always reverts to meals once eaten. Kalaw is the master of this, his descriptions of his mother’s saint’s day feasts so detailed they make hard men weep with longing.

And every day they cut the wire.

“The wire is the voice of the oppressor,” Diosdado tells his men. “The wire is his eyes and his ears. If we let the wire stand he will never be gone from us.”

The best tactic is to cut the line halfway between one garrison and the next, to wait in ambush for the Signal Corpsmen and their escorts, far enough away that the sound of gunfire won’t summon reinforcement. The
yanquis
have implemented mounted patrols, though, on the roads that permit it, whooping troopers too big for their skinny Filipino ponies, dashing along with pistols drawn to shoot anything that moves. They’ve begun to set their own ambushes as well, Diosdado losing a fighter from La Union and three good rifles when they were surprised on the footpath to the Candaba–Santa Ana road.

At the beginning of October a messenger came all the way from wherever General Aguinaldo was hiding out that week, telling them to hold fast and not despair, telling them that the Americans were about to hold elections and that the challenger for president, a great orator named Bryan, pledged to pull their army from the Philippines if he won. The messenger waited while Diosdado explained this to the men, explained just what an election was and that Bryan was a great anti-Imperialist who refused to be nailed to a cross of gold and that no, he wasn’t a Catholic, but a fervent believer in the Almighty nonetheless.

“General Aguinaldo says if we can keep them fighting till November,” said the messenger, “if we can keep them sick and sleepless and longing to go home, then victory may be within our grasp.”

Only Sargento Bayani was not filled with hope by this.

“Whenever the Spanish sent us a governor who considered reform,” he said, “the friars would have him recalled. Friars or not, the Americans must have someone who will destroy this great man of words.”

Then the messenger told them they were to stay in Pampanga, to haunt the countryside around San Isidro and Las Ciegas, to remind the people that they were still free Filipinos and that if they betrayed the Republic they would be executed.

Diosdado gets up from the dike and crosses the road to the telegraph line. He is hungry and tired and unshaven, a phantom in the remnants of a lieutenant’s uniform with a rope belt and boots that have given up the cause. He presses his ear against the telegraph pole, feels a tiny buzz against his skin, hears the singing of the naked wire above. The Americans are talking to each other with electricity. He hopes they’re talking about Bryan.

CELEBRITY

They hide Teethadore in the library. Once he is alone he runs his fingers along the spines of the leather-bound Shakespeares, many, no doubt, once pored over by the Prince of Players himself. He is too nervous to read, though, and paces the long rectangle as he waits, employing the character’s distinctive strut rather than his own gait. He was unable to stifle a giddy laugh earlier as he stepped between the gas lamps and in through the front entrance. How many times has he strolled around the private, padlocked greenery of Gramercy Park with one eye fixed upon the brownstone façade with its columns and balconies, hoping to spy some adept of the Craft or other notable entering or leaving? And often rewarded—Augustus Saint-Gaudens, his profile chiseled from New England granite, banker Morgan with his angry turnip of a nose, burly, ginger-haired Stanford White who designed the interior of the club, rascally Samuel Clemens with an evil-looking cigar in his mouth, and once, on his very first visit to the great city, Edwin Booth himself passing on the walk. After the shock of recognition, the strange realization that they shared the same diminutive stature, there were the eyes—sad and shy, begging not to be hailed or complimented. He let the great man, appearing old beyond his years, pass unlauded.

Teethadore is well aware that performers of his caste are not ordinarily welcome at The Players. His own father was a lowly Tommer, traipsing the tank towns as Arthur Shelby, the old darky’s first owner, a thankless role if there ever existed one. But it was at least a play, not, as he derisively snorted when his son debuted as a joke-spouting juggler, “a carnival attraction.”

He certainly felt the freak last night at Proctor’s 23rd, with election returns projected on a white sheet lowered over the olio curtain between each act, his turn as TR greeted with cheers and jeers by the house, packed to the rafters with partisans celebrating their affiliations at the top of their lungs. Spectacles off, a van Dyke slapped on with spirit gum, he was able to push out of the theater without being spotted as a performer or misidentified as the bully little candidate. The crowd was just as dense outside, thronged all the way down from Longacre Square to Madison Square where the
Times
bulletin was hung four stories up on the side of their new building, a stereopticon flashing election returns as soon as they were telegraphed to the newspaper. Thousands cheering as the first Massachusetts returns favored Bryan, and thousands more when Queens and New York counties tallied for McKinley. For entertainment in between reports there was the searchlight hired by Croker and the Tammany crowd, mounted atop the Bartholdi Hotel and blazing advertisements for Bryan and several local Democrats, as well as for soap, whiskey, and a remedy for dyspepsia, upon the face of the rapidly deteriorating Dewey Arch at 24th.

Caught up in the good-natured spirit of it, he grabbed the trolley and rattled down to witness the even larger horde assembled around Newspaper Row, citizens jammed together from the bridge to the post office, filling City Hall Park all the way to Broadway. Over a hundred men in blue were needed to clear a path for the trolley to come to a stop, Teethadore nearly losing his feet several times in the crush. Each of the great papers had their own screen hung on the side of their massive buildings, stereopticons mixing hastily scrawled polling figures with photographs, illustrations, and burlesques of the candidates, a few augmenting these with moving kinetoscope views—marching soldiers, steaming battleships, and once, to great amusement and applause, his own shenanigans as TR chasing a bear cub up a tree. It seemed that a full half of the throng, from uptown swells in raglan overcoats and silk hats to entire families of East Side flockies, had purchased some sort of noisemaker—rattles, tin horns, buzzers, bells, and, for the vocally inclined, cardboard megaphones—from the scores of little street fakirs peddling them.

One of these, alarmingly yellow-tinged for one not of the Confucian persuasion, took pause from whirling his rattlers to accost Teethadore directly.

“You look just like him!”

“Like whom, may I ask?” All this shouted, of course, as the multitude demonstrated at great volume its approval, opprobrium, or boredom with the latest despatch.

“Like
Ted
dy, who d’ya tink? I seen him once in person, Tanksgivin at the Newsboy’s Home. You shave that chin-warmer off, put on some specs, an yer the spittin image.”

“I’ve never heard that before.”

“Then yer deaf as a post or people aint payin attention. Rattler?”

By eight o’clock even Hearst’s
Journal
conceded that McKinley was the victor. One fellow, squeezed very close to him, primed with perhaps too much liquid enthusiasm, had tears in his eyes.

“Who I feel bad for is poor Adlai Stevenson,” he lamented for the former but not future Vice President. “Where is an old man like that going to find a new job?”

His companion, bulging coat laden with McKinley–Roosevelt buttons, who had obviously already enjoyed his “full dinner pail” and a couple pails of something with foam on it, was in brighter spirits.

“Mac’s the man for the new century,” he beamed. “Just you wait and see.”

The crowd was still in the thousands, a surprising number of them ladies, when Teethadore pushed through and headed north to his MacDougal Street garret. Hundreds of citizens were out with him for the entire walk, passing dozens of huge, crackling political-club bonfires, everybody full of energy and good spirit whatever their affiliation, this on not the balmiest of November nights, and he had occasion once again to be thrilled to be a New Yorker.

Mr. Oettel, Booth’s dresser in his later years and now chief functionary at the club, steps up into the library with John Drew. There are voices below, laughter.

“Mr. Brisbane?”

John Drew,
the
John Drew, is offering his hand. A manly handshake, a deep and hearty voice, the looks as striking in person as on stage. He stands back to look Teethadore over.

“My God, they were right about you! A breathtaking resemblance.”

Teethadore has the spectacles on, of course, and has ventured to buy, at considerable expense, something very like the suit the new Vice President has been wearing for his campaign appearances.

“I’m not sure what you—”

“A few characteristic remarks should do it. The fellows are down there lubricating themselves—we’ll see how long it takes them to smell a rat.”

The imagery stings a bit, but trusting him to improvise implies a certain professional respect. “My entrance?”

“I’ll go down now and herd them into the Grill Room, announcing that we’ll soon have a special surprise guest.” Drew smiles, shaking his head and looking him over anew.

“If I didn’t know it wasn’t you—him—”

“The theater is full of assumed identities.”

“Which wouldn’t fool the biggest hayseed in the rear of the third balcony, much less the characters in the play. But you—my word!”

They go down then and he can hear conversations moving away from the stairwell. He has never been much for nerves before a performance, the public so—so easily
fooled
, so willing to believe that what passes above the footlights is what is meant to be happening. But this is not his usual house, full of shop clerks and newsboys and free-lunch despoilers, is not even an audience of his peers, these are—

Mr. Oettel is back to tell him that it is time.

He follows down the stairs into the reading room. He has seen such places on the stage but never actually been in one. Leather chairs that could swallow a man, a handsome Persian on the floor, the smell of tobacco, and the great marble mantelpiece flanked by Sargent portraits, one of Booth and one of Joseph Jefferson in character as Peter Pangloss in
The Heir-in-Law
.

And then he is waved through the Great Hall, Drew’s much larger frame shielding him from the view of the luminaries in the Grill Room.

“Gentlemen!” booms the actor, and the room immediately quiets. “We have with us, in light of recent occurrence, an extremely distinguished and very surprising guest.”

He steps away and Teethadore is on, strutting through the doorway with choppers ablaze, every man not already upright jumping to his feet to applaud. It is a strange business, accepting another man’s kudos, the warmth sincere but unearned. He uses it, though, fills himself with it, puffing his barrel chest out a little further, clasping his hands and shaking them over his head like a victorious prize-fighter—the Little Champion. It is difficult not to linger on their faces as he turns to acknowledge them all. These are, if not gods, at least royalty—a Richard III here, a Prince Hal there, a Cardinal Richelieu looming in the rear. Only one bear of a man—is it not Frederick Remington?—smiles slyly and whispers to the fellow beside him.

“I thank you for that reception,” he enthuses as the applause finally dies. “And I thank you for your support in the recent contest, though I believe I recognize a few Bryan men skulking on the fringe—here, no doubt, to settle their wagers.”

Laughter then, these famous players and men of influence so flattered by his presence that they are blind to the deception.

“The Vice-Presidency,” he continues, “though a great honor, is merely an understudy role—” chuckles here, “—waiting in the wings and hoping never to be pressed into service. I imagine I will serve the President as I did during the campaign—as his rather more mobile, and considerably more vocal—” good laugh here, “—rooting section. And in that capacity I come with a charge for you gentlemen of the stage.”

They are buying it, rapt. If he asked them at this moment to march on Tammany and tear it from its foundation they would follow him
en masse
.

“Our quest is to be a great—a
greater
nation. A great nation must have a great, a committed
the
ater!”

“Hear, hear!” says somebody in the gathering. He can see Belasco, the master of froth, begin to frown.

“Must our stage be only the purview of fools, the playground of children? Can it not deal honestly with the pressing issues of our day? Where are the works about labor unrest, about the crushing power of the trusts, the shows that address our desperate situation in the Philippine Islands—shows like the estimable
Florodora—
”

Stanford White’s booming laugh breaks the spell, and with that, the illusion.

“You’re a fraud!” cries William Faversham, who he so admired in the Wilde farce.

“A fraud?!” he cries back. “Does the public cry fraud when you don your tattered buskins and feign nobility? No, sir, they laud you to the heavens!”

Men are laughing now, though eyeing their compatriots to be certain it is allowable to be so fooled.

“If a near-sighted, less-than-statuesque politician can steam to Cuba and impersonate a military man—” a big, knowing laugh at this, “—why, then, may not an honest vaudevillian impersonate a politician, and to equal acclaim?”

Actual applause then, mixed with the laughter. He has touched a nerve.

“Yes, I am an imposter, a pro
fess
ional imposter, but if such illusion had no fascination with the public, think of how many of you gentlemen would not be here!”