American Dreams (2 page)

The tramp planted his feet a yard in front of her. The sleeves of his coat shone like a greasy skillet. 'Hello, girlie.' Fritzi swallowed, thinking desperately.

Even upwind of the man she caught his stupefying stench mostly liquor and dirt. He was burly, obviously much stronger.

He winked at her.

'Girls out wanderin' by theyselves this time of morning, they're either runaways or little levee whores.' His baritone voice was thickened by hoarseness and phlegm. He stuck out his arms, wiggled his fingers with an oafish leer. His nails were broken and black with dirt.

'Come give us a kiss.' He dropped his left hand to his pants. 'Anywhere you please.'

For want of her usual weapon of defense, a long hat pin, Fritzi called on her primary talent. She replied in a loud and almost perfect imitation of his wheezy baritone: 'Don't let this long hair fool you, bub. You've got the
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wrong fellow.'

The tramp's eyes bugged. He was confounded by the male bellow issuing from Fritzi's chapped lips. She'd always been a keen mimic, sometimes getting into a pickle because of her rash choice of subject, especially schoolteachers. The tramp's confusion gave her the extra seconds she Actress

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needed. She sprang to her bike, wheeled it onto the path, ran and threw a long leg over the saddle. She took off in a flying start; pedaling madly.

Flashing a look back, she saw the tramp thumb his nose, heard him shout something nasty. She sped around a curve, snatched her tarn off and let her curly blond hair stream out. She laughed with relief, pumping harder.

At least her talent proved to be worth something this morning. It could be worth a lot more in New York City.

Time to go . . . ..." -11

Of that she was certain. And never mind the trouble it was likely to cause.

As Fritzi pedaled away from the lake shore, she reflected on all the things that had driven her to the emotional epiphany this morning.

Shapeless things, like the growing malaise of living day after day under

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the roof where she'd been raised but definitely no longer belonged.

Silly things, like a little easel card noticed on a cosmetic counter at The Fair Store.

I

OVER TWEN1YFIVE?

LUXOR CREME PREVENTS AGEING

Ironic things, the most recent being a well-meant remark by her father only last night. The family had been seated at Abendbrot -- literally, evening bread, the light supper traditional in German households. lisa, Fritzi's mother, remarked that she was still receiving compliments on the lavish anniversary party which the Crowns gave annually for close friends, Joe Crown's business associates, and others they knew from their years in German-American society in Chicago. The party in early October had celebrated thirty-seven years of marriage.

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The General agreed that it was indeed a fine party, the best ever. He then turned to his daughter with a thoughtful expression:

'Fritzi, my dear, your birthday will be on us in another month. We must plan. What do you want most?'

Fritzi sat to her father's right, on the long side of the dining table. Her older brother Joey -- Joe Crown, Junior -- sat opposite, sunk in his chair i

and his customary, vaguely sullen silence. Poor Joey was a permanent

¦

boarder. In 1901 he'd dragged himself home from the West Coast, crippled 6

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for life in a labor union brawl. Under a tense truce with his father, Joey worked at Brauerei Crown, doing the most menial jobs. He and his father traveled to and from work separately, the General in his expensive Cadillac motor car - he had become an avid automobilist - and Joey on the trolleys.

Fritzi

thought about asking for motoring lessons, then reconsidered. The General believed women had no place at the wheel of an auto. She said,

'I haven't an idea, Papa. I'll try to think of something.'

'Please do. How old will you be?' It was a sincere question. Her elegant silver-haired father was in his sixty-fourth year, occasionally forgetful. He had never lost the accent he'd brought with him as the immigrant boy Josef Kroner from Aalen, a little town in Wiirttemberg that had been the home of the Kroner family for generations.

'Twenty-six.' Somehow it sounded like a sentence from a judge.

With this latest realization of her age thrust on her, Fritzi spent a restless night in her old room on the second floor - the room she'd occupied since she had returned to Chicago almost a year ago.

In 1905, during a late summer heat wave, the General had suffered a fainting spell only later diagnosed as a mild heart attack. He collapsed on a platform from which he was quietly and reasonably defending the brewers of beer, attempting to separate them in the collective mind of his audience from distillers of hard spirits. The audience wanted none of it, because he was presenting his message to a temperance society.

lisa Crown had called her husband foolish for agreeing to appear. None of his colleagues who ran breweries in Chicago had the nerve to speak to a cold-water crowd. The General insisted he'd faced worse in the Civil War and Cuba in '98 (this lisa reported to Fritzi later). Besides, he might do
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some good.

Twenty minutes into the speech, he clutched the podium, his knees gave way, and he fell sideways.

lisa's telegram reached Fritzi in that mecca of culture, Palatka, Florida.

She was appearing with the Mortmain Royal Shakespeare Combination, a seedy professional company with which she'd apprenticed in 1901. The Mortmain Combination brought the Bard and other classic dramatists to the border and cotton South -- what Ian Mortmain's collection of washed up artistes called 'the kerosene circuit' because Southern theater owners apparently had never heard of electric footlights, or were too cheap to cast technical pearls before swinish audiences .

Moments after reading the telegram, Fritzi gave her notice to Ian Actress

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Mortmain. That night she caught a train for Chicago, to help take care of her father. Never entirely smooth-tempered, the General would not be an ideal patient for Fritzi's mother. His recuperation in bed would tax lisa; she, too, lacked the patience and energy of her younger years.

Though lisa didn't ask her daughter to come home, Fritzi believed she could help, and thought it her duty. Besides, after four years of midnight train rides, bug-ridden hotel rooms, gallons of greasy white chicken gravy and biscuits hard as stove bolts - after repetitive visits to dreary mill and cotton and tobacco towns, each with its enclave of Negro shanties - after sloppy rehearsals with the male actors hung over, sleazy productions with the flats threatening to totter, not to mention audiences that wouldn't know fine acting from hog calling -- after all that Fritzi felt she'd learned as much as she could from her four-year apprenticeship.

The General left his sickbed far too soon for lisa or his physician. He went back to driving himself off to the brewery at six every morning, to put in his usual ten- to twelve-hour day. Fritzi had planned on staying only a short time, and her father never invoked his illness to induce her to prolong her visit. Somehow it just happened.

To fill her time she kept as busy as possible. She was faithful about daily exercise -- morning sit-ups in her room, tennis, cycling, swimming in season. She joined a local amateur dramatic society, playing everything from a heroine in a Clyde Fitch melodrama to Mrs. Alving in a private reading of Ghosts -- private because Mr. Ibsen's play was still too controversial for the group to perform publicly.

When she wasn't rehearsing, she painted scenery, sewed costumes, distributed leaflets to drum up trade. She soon realized her ambition went beyond that of her fellow players, who wanted little more than praise from
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Aunt Bea or Cousin Elwood, whether merited or not. A few who were married sought furtive liaisons. Fritzi had rebuffed one such masher with her trusty hat pin.

The wind raked her face and hummed in her ears as she pedaled into the downtown, where sleepy citizens were dragging to work and even the dray horses seemed to move with an early morning lethargy. The wind's murmur couldn't hide a faintly taunting inner voice.

You 'd better get on, my girl.

The voice belonged to an imaginary companion who'd been with Fritzi for years. She was the magnificent and regal Ellen Terry, goddess of the international stage. Fritzi had seen Miss Terry as Ophelia opposite Henry Irving's Hamlet when the couple toured America in the 1890s. The great 8

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lady was pictured in a colored lithograph hanging on the wall above Fritzi's bed. The litho reproduced John Singer Sargent's famous full figure portrait of Terry as Lady Macbeth. Fritzi had stood endlessly before the painting when it was exhibited at the 1892 Columbian Exposition.

Ellen Terry had not been her initial inspiration for an acting career; that was a magical production of A Midsummer Night's Dream she had attended with Mama and Papa when she was seven. As Fritzi walked out of that matinee into the glare of the day, her course was set forever. Miss Terry later became her favorite star, the supreme emblem of her ambition.

That

Fritzi held silent dialogues with a nonexistent person didn't strike her as bizarre, though she didn't make a habit of telling others. She considered the conversations a natural part of the life of the imagination, and she had a very vivid one. Typically, Ellen Terry offered comments about Fritzi's shortcomings, something like a personified conscience.

Remember how old you'll be next month.

She was annoyed; she needed no further reminders that, come January, she would be but a scant four years from thirty, the threshold of 'spinsterhood,'

a state devoutly to be avoided by proper young women.

Of course, proper young women didn't mount their bikes before daylight and go scorching off to greet the sunrise. Fritzi had long ago realized that she wasn't cut out to be proper, physically or temperamentally. Her Fleetwing, for example, was always her bike, never her 'cycle' or, God forbid, her 'velocipede.' No matter that she might have wished to be proper (never!) -- no matter how greatly her father and mother wished for it, too -- she was stuck with being something else entirely. Herself.

And how to define that? So far as she knew, she fit only one recognizable
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pigeonhole -- 'actress.'

The cold yellow morning light fell on the city's busy commercial heart as she headed south along Michigan Boulevard. It fell on telephone and telegraph wires, hack and wagon horses, here and there a humming electric or a puffing steam auto. It fell on the growing crowds of people hurrying along the sidewalks or charging across the manure-littered streets ahead of wheeled vehicles. Fritzi wove in and out of traffic, pedaling hard and swerving often to avoid collisions.

Near an intersection, a dairy wagon had somehow overturned, spilling metal cans and a flood of milk and blocking all of Michigan Boulevard.

Fritzi quickly rode up over the curb at the corner and shot east on Jackson two blocks to State, where she went south again. The sun was higher, Drifter 9

splashing a storefront near Van Buren that had been converted into a five-cent theater showing pictures that moved. The place was exotically named the Bijou Dream. Display windows were heavily draped, concealing, the public supposed, illicit behavior within. Tastelessly crude signboards on the sidewalk pleaded for patrons.

NEW PROGRAMS DAILY!

WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR GENTLEMEN,

LADIES, AND CHILDREN!

Fritzi sniffed in disdain. A boy in the play group worked at the theater, turning the crank of the projector. He gave his fellow actors free tickets; Fritzi always threw hers in the nearest trash barrel, because respectable people never set foot in such low-class places. As for appearing in one of the crude little story pictures - she'd sooner die. She was, after all, a legitimate actress from the professional theater.

Or would be, again, if she could summon the nerve to get out of town and follow her dream to New York.

2 Drifter

About the same hour, hundreds of miles to the east in Riverdale, a hamlet on the northern edge of New York City, Carl Crown was knocking on doors in search of work and food.

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Fritzi's younger brother had turned twenty-four in November. He'd been wandering without direction ever since Princeton cast him out at the end of his junior year. 'Bull' Crown had been a star on the Princeton football line, but a failure in the classroom. He was smart enough, but not diligent, or interested.

For a change Carl was shaved and barbered. In Poughkeepsie he'd swept out a barber shop in exchange for the barber's services. His oddly assorted clothes were reasonably clean - faded jeans pants, a blue flannel work shirt, a plaid winter coat with a corduroy collar, and high-topped hunter's boots, laced on the side. He did his best to keep clean, first because he had been brought up that way, and also because it made a 10

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better impression at a stranger's door. Most tramps looked like they crawled out of a weed patch, bringing the weeds with them.

All morning doors had slammed in his face. The afternoon was no different.

As the wintry sun dropped near the western palisades on the great river, he was discouraged, and famished. He knocked at the kitchen door of a neat cottage with a white picket fence and a small garden plot lying fallow for the season.

A woman in her early thirties, plain and pale, opened the door. She stepped back a pace, wary. 'Yes?' Carl tried not to look at two golden pies cooling on a kitchen table.

'Any work, ma'am? My name's Carl. I'm just passing through. I'm good with my hands.'

He showed them, clean, the nails kept short by a little file that folded out of his clasp knife. For someone as stocky as Carl, the hands were surprisingly slender and delicate.

The woman looked him up and down in the fading light. 'Well, my daughter Hettie wrecked her cycle last Saturday. If you can repair it, I'll pay you thirty cents. I'm a widow, not mechanical at all.'