Heaven and Hell (31 page)

Charles really didn't care how much Trump had rewritten Moliere.

Like most of those out front, he was taken with Willa Parker's stage presence. From her first entrance, she'd captured everyone. Not with conventional beauty but with some intangible power that drew the eye and held it when she was on stage. Maybe all great performers had that quality.

He extended his hands over the rail, still clapping. The movement drew Willa's attention to the box. Charles had paid for a bath and beard trim and had bought an inexpensive brown frock coat and matching trousers.

Pfl

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trousers. Willa saw him, recognized him, and reacted with what he perceived as surprise, then pleasure.

Charles nodded and smiled. Suddenly Willa's glance shifted to a box on the opposite side. An empty box, though the curtain still moved, stirred by someone leaving.

The stage curtain rolled down, revealing painted messages about restaurants and shops. The applause died. The audience of men and a very few ladies with escorts began to file out. Charles wondered what, or who, had brought that flash of anxiety to Willa's face.

Eager and surprisingly nervous, he hurried around to the stage entrance, where he'd stopped the teamster from beating his horse last year.

He handed the doorkeeper half a dollar, being pushed from behind by other gentlemen equally intent on going inside. Because of his height, Charles could look over most of the well-wishers, stagehands, and performers backstage.

He saw Sam Trump at the entrance to a corridor leading to dressing rooms. In order to visit anyone, people had to pass Trump and compliment him.

Charles did so enthusiastically. Eyes glassy with joy, Trump said,

"Thank you, dear boy, thank you." Brown dye trickled from behind
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his ears. "Yours is a familiar face. Was it Boston? I have it! Cincinnati."

"St.

Louis. I have a beard now." He extended his hand. "Charles Main."

"Of course. I remember it clearly." He didn't. "Frightfully glad you caught us tonight. I'm anticipating sold-out houses starting tomorrow."

His eyes had already hopped over Charles's shoulder, hunting the next admirer. Charles slipped by, smelling sweat on Trump but no spirits. Willa must have succeeded in drying him out.

All the dressing-room doors were open except the last on the right.

He suspected that was hers, since a short, neatly dressed man was already waiting outside. .

As Charles approached, the man turned. Instantly, Charles recognized the unnaturally stiff posture, the trimmed goatee and waxy mustache points, the shoes with a high polish, the clothes without a wrinkle.

Willa's admirer was the man who'd kept him out of the Army.

Captain Harry Venable.

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Charles's nerves wound tight as he walked up to Harry Venable.

The dapper officer apparently didn't recognize him, though he understood Charles's intent. Charles read the lettering painted on the door. mrs. parker. He stepped forward to knock and Venable slipped in front of him.

"Excuse me. Mrs. Parker's engaged."

Charles looked down into the glacial eyes, tilting his head to exaggerate the height difference. "Fine. Shall we let her tell me that?"

He reached over Venable's shoulder and knocked.

Venable turned scarlet. Willa called out, asking him to be patient a moment. Venable said, "What the hell are you smiling about?"

"Handsome Harry Venable--" Charles began rubbing the knuckles of his left hand--"West Point class of '59."

Flustered, Venable tried to identify the bearded stranger. Charles continued, "Last time we met, you had some helpers. I see you haven't any now. If there's some sort of dispute, perhaps we can settle it fairly this time." His teeth gleamed in his beard but the smile wasn't friendly.

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He kept rubbing his knuckles. Venable recognized him.

Then the door opened. All in a rush, Willa seized him and hugged him. "Charles! I couldn't believe it when I saw you in the box--" She stepped back, gripping his arms while she studied him. She wore a pastel wrapper, an outer layer of gauzy material with opaque satin beneath.

Delicate transparent butterflies decorated the gauze. Although tightly belted, the gown didn't quite hide her cleavage. A spot of cold cream glistened on her nose. With strands of her silver-blond hair hanging free, she looked unkempt and absolutely lovely.

"Here, do come in while I take off the rest of this make-up." As 198

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she tugged him into the dressing room she dabbed a cloth behind her ear; it came away orange.

Through this, Venable stood rigid, shoulders back, unable to conceal his fury. Good actress that she was, Willa smiled and spoke to him graciously. "Colonel, I'm so sorry to refuse again. Mr. Main and I have a long-standing engagement. I'm sure you understand."

She closed the door.

"I have a long-standing engagement to beat the hell out of that little toad. He's the one who recognized me at Jefferson Barracks."

"Well, he's still stationed there." Willa snatched pins from the dressing table and began pinning up her hair. The small room was a confusion of costumes, personal clothing, make-up pots and brushes, playscripts, all the clutter increased by its reflection in the table mirror.

"He saw the play four nights ago and he's been hounding me ever since. Oh,'Charles, you've been gone so long."

"It's a long way to the Indian Territory." He found himself gazing into her blue eyes with more intensity than he planned.

"I know. And I thought you'd never get back. When I saw you, halfway through the first act, I nearly walked into that bench."

"I didn't think you saw me until the curtain call."

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"Oh, long before that. I kept dropping lines."

"I didn't notice."

"You aren't supposed to notice." On tiptoe, she kissed his cheek, then hugged him again. Her body felt very soft and ripe beneath the butterfly gauze. "May we have supper?"

"Absolutely." He grinned. "No snails this time."

"All right. Wait for me in the hall. I'll be ready in two minutes."

She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice.

In the hall, he saw no sign of Venable. It was a relief. He felt too grand to interrupt the evening with a brawl. He knew that, one to one, he could easily beat the small man, so a fight would mean an inevitable load of guilt afterward.

Just before Charles and Willa left the theater, she waved to Sam Trump standing in the wings with Prosperity, the theater cat, in his arrns. Trump broke off his conversation with a stagehand and nodded

to acknowledge them. He gave Charles a peculiar stare, then watched toem as they vanished through the Olive Street door.

On the sidewalk, something made Charles stop. She said, "What is it? Oh." She saw him too, across the street in the shadow cast by the

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wooden Indian chief in front of the tobacconist's. Discovered, Venable executed a right face and hurried around the corner.

Willa shivered. "What a strange man."

"Maybe he won't show up again, now that I'm here."

"Back at the dressing room there was a moment when he looked ready to murder you, Charles."

"He tried it once. Didn't get away with it." He reached over to pat the mittened hand on his right arm. "I'm for supper. The New Planter's House?"

"Why not? It's convenient. I've moved there. Yes, out of the scene loft." They began walking arm in arm through the night streets.

"The playhouse has been in the black since February. Not by much, but in the black. The company has established a local following, so the
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hotel management offered me rooms at a reduced rate. Evidently Mr.

Trump and Mrs. Parker are now welcome all over town."

He chuckled; the faint cynicism he heard reminded him of her maturity. He remarked on it as they sat in the familiar dining room, both of them with juicy venison steaks. This time, he'd ordered.

"You're flattering me," she began.

"No. Telling the truth. Not only are you very--well--worldly for someone your age, but you're brighter than most men I know."

A little gesture deprecated the praise. "If it's at all true, and I'm not sure it is, maybe it's because I grew up in the theater. Knowing plays made me hungry for other kinds of books. And my father was liberal about education for girls. He believed in it."

They fell to discussing what had happened to her since their last meeting. Trump's St. Louis Playhouse had assembled its permanent company. "Actors are now willing to sign contracts for a season, because I've convinced them Sam won't drink up the profits." The company had four plays in repertory and was starting to think about touring.

"Do you know there isn't a decent theater between here and Salt Lake City? I should imagine that all those new towns going up along the railroad would be ideal for a traveling company with its own tent."

"And the Army posts, too," he said. A waiter poured rich dark coffee from a silver pot. "You do love the life, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. But--here I go, brazen again." Her cheeks colored as she gazed at him. "I thought about you often during the winter."

That gaze ignited something in him. He knew he should retreat; could not.

"I thought about you, Willa."

She drew her hands into her lap. Very quietly, she said, "I don't know what you do to me. I'm shaking like an ingenue making her first w

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entrance. I can't drink this coffee. I don't want anything more." A long pause. "Would you escort me up to my rooms?"

"Yes. Gladly."

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And so, much sooner than he'd ever anticipated, it happened to them, in the small bedroom dimly lit by gaslight from the adjoining sitting room. She moaned a little, expectant, as their hands worked, strewing clothes everywhere. While she unpinned her silver-and-gold hair and shook it out, Charles gently, carefully touched one small, firm breast, then the other. "Oh, I'm so glad there's you in this world, Charles," she said, moving beneath him, drawing him down. She ran her palm round and round on his chest, kissed his throat, sought his mouth. He felt tears of happiness on her cheeks.

"I'm not altogether a scarlet woman," she whispered. "There's been but one other man, and that only twice, from curiosity. Each time was a botch, so I'm not experienced. I hope this--"

"Hush," he said, kissing her. "Hush."

She was soft and thick and golden where he entered her. She arched high as they found the rhythm together. Her heels and calves held him, and he lost every worry about entanglements and their consequences.

He thought of nothing but the ardent, open warmth of this singular and passionate young woman who inspired him to love with all of his body and mind.

Abruptly, wakefulness returned. He didn't know where he was.

He thrashed; turned; saw the gaslit sitting room through the half-open door. His movement roused her.

"Are you all right?"

"I was caught in a dream."

Tenderly, she brought her naked warmth against his side. Kissed his shoulder. "Was it bad?"

"I think so. It's slipped away already."

After a pause she said, "You called out several times. A name."

Another pause. "Not mine."

Upset, he struggled up on his elbow. "No, no," she said.

It's all right, Charles. You need to talk about it. There's something I

°eed to talk about, too. Tomorrow," she murmured, drawing his back against her bare breasts, reaching over to close and softly stroke his eyes.

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In the early morning hours, for the sake of propriety, he dressed aid left the hotel. He walked boldly, even noisily from the staircase to

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the lobby doors. The clerk, leaning on his palm, opened one eye. Because Charles acted as though he had nothing to hide, the clerk immediately went back to dozing.

Charles took a room at a cheaper hotel and next morning called for Willa with a rented buggy. She'd packed a lunch hamper. They drove into the country upriver, settling down to picnic in a pretty grove of elms and sycamores, many with wild bittersweet twined around their trunks. The grove smelled of the mint growing there. In the sunlit field just to the north, wild asters and bloodroot and jack-in-the-pulpit grew amid stands of nettle and poison ivy.

"An embarrassing question," Charles said as he helped unpack the hamper: thick summer sausage rounds between pumpernickel fresh from one of the local German bakeries, a corked jug of foamy ginger beer. "Last night, was my beard--? That is--"

"Yes, rough as those nettles over there," she said, teasing. "Notice all this extra face powder? You left indelible evidence of our scandalous behavior."

She leaned close, kissed him lightly. "Which I thoroughly enjoyed and do not in the least regret. Now--" She spread a checked cloth in the shade. The buggy horse switched his tail to drive off flies. A stately stern wheeler appeared in the north, bound for St. Louis. "I want to tell you something, so that we have no secrets. I didn't come to Sam's theater entirely by choice, though now I'm very glad that I did. I was running away from a man named Claudius Wood."

She told the story of New York, the Macbeth dagger, Edwin Booth's kindness. It put him sufficiently at ease so that he could tell her about Augusta Barclay, that they were lovers but never married. He did hedge the ending a bit, merely saying the war separated them before she died.

He didn't reveal that he'd initiated the separation, to spare her loss and emotional pain if he were killed. Ironically, he was the one left grieving, and wary of another involvement.

And yet here he was--

While they finished their picnic the sun's angle changed. The Mississippi flowed quietly again, the stern wheeler's wake completely gone.

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The grove grew warm. Sweat ran down the neck of Charles's open shirt.

Willa invited him to put his head in her lap and rest. He asked her permission to smoke a cigar, lit it, then said, "Tell me who you really are, Willa. Tell me what you like and what you don't."