The Mercury Waltz (24 page)

It begins at last with sullen percussion, hours before the competition banquet: hard drops on tin roofs and Italianate shingles, on the striped awnings of the flower booths in the Park, where cut roses languish like beauties who have seen better days; the rain melts the filth at the curbs, dampens the spirits of the snatchpockets, brings a smile to the face of the owner of Die Welt, whose coffers have suffered a buffeting from that stupid riot at the theatre: why a café’s windows must be smashed to celebrate, or protest, is nothing he can understand, but his regulars, at last and dampened, have come back. The rain takes from the brow of stone Albanus a laurel crown of pigeon shit; makes a soothing counterpoint to the choir’s rehearsals at St. Mary’s, and an affirmative murmur to a droning speech at the Prefecture; laves the Athenaeum and the Cleopatra and the Palace; and slants against the windows of the trains at the station like penciled lines in an artist’s sketchbook, creating puddles to splash and sully the disembarking passengers, among them Miss Marie Mariette, perspiring in Irish poplin and a new flattop bonnet, and her stern chaperone aunt.

“Was your fiancé not to meet us?” asks the aunt as sternly; she has never been into the city before—too many people, too much noise!—but “I wired,” says Marie Mariette. “Perhaps he’s waiting at the hotel.” All these months, the two sets of parents writing furiously back and forth, Frédéric silent, and she in limbo: when she received his wire, now folded safely in her reticule, she nearly wept for sheer relief. She thinks she knows why he has not come home, she thinks—despite what her mamma fears, or what her papa says—that what Frédéric needs most is reassurance, her reassurance that marriage, their marriage, need not mean he must live his father’s life. Does he wish to stay in this city, and write those tracts? Then she will help him do so, for that is a wife’s duty; and she is a determined girl, Marie Mariette, a girl without beauty needs determination, and she believes in her heart that love will always find a way. Now she leads her aunt past the statue of Mercury to the cabstand, where the god perhaps grants his naughty favor to the sharp-eyed driver who first spots, then shepherds, then triply overcharges the innocent ladies, before stowing their traps in his leaky brougham and wheeling them away.

The roof is leaking again at the Mercury, where Istvan and Tilde are busy together backstage, he with his planing knife and a long spooling ribbon of gut, she with a mop until “Leave that, Mab,” Istvan says, “stick a bucket under it, let it drip…. Do you know how to use a knife at all?”

“I know how to cut.”

“Then cut this,” with her knife from Die Welt, her capable hands to help section the gut, then play out in equal sections a length of hard wire; again he marks how easily such work comes to her, leading him to speak as easily of Lucy Pimm, Puss his apprentice and friend as, long, long ago, another girl once stole for him bright scraps and string and muslin from a rag bag, and was almost tossed into a lock-hospital for her pains: “She was caught, you see. One ought never get caught.”

“Who was she, that girl?”

Istvan looks down, loose hair half masking his face. “My sister. Half-sister.”

“I have,” says Tilde, “a half-sister, too—her name is Tanti. Do you know where yours is?”

“I do. She doesn’t move about, much…. Tell me about those animals you saw in the park in Paris, were they puppets?” to bring from her that tale, Jean and his
zoo mécanique,
the singing wooden monkey and the beautiful Pégase and “The judgment of Paris,” Tilde says, frowning in her concentration, “Jean told me that story, too. And he gave me clothes to wear, to be a boy when I needed to,” lips tight then as she blushes, faint and pink, what memory rises behind those oracle’s eyes? as one hand drops as if unwitting to her belly, then reaches again for the knife. Istvan sees both blush and gesture, conflates one with the other, and says with a shrugging smile, “You’d make a jolly boy in the right pair of trousers and hat, like one of the runners for my shady friend St.-Mary.”

“Like your poor friend Luc,” Tilde says.

“Like Luc,” Istvan says, no longer smiling. Luc will come no more to the Mercury, with kisses and silly bonbons and pots of scent; or run the streets for Haden, or sell his lavish beauty in the service of some foolish, boyish meld of guilt and pain: Luc was found with his blue silk scarf, in the old silk jacket too large for him, washed up quite dead and fish-nibbled beneath the Bridge. There was no money in the pockets of that jacket, so the constables marked it off as a robbery, one urchin on another; when they found him his eyes were open, a detail known and shared by Vater the knife man, who knew the boy to be a friend of the men of the Mercury, and felt that they, or at least Istvan, ought to know of his end. Istvan has not seen Haden since he heard this news, news whose hearing sent him out into the lurid sunset to buy a bottle of very fine Armagnac, half of which he drank in libation, murmuring like a prayer some lines from an old song, street song for a street boy,
Je rêve d’un garçon tout simple, Qui me parle d’amour,
while thinking of that smile, that beauty, that confiding hand slipped into his own, the taste of death when they kissed for the last time in the street; a life like a puppet’s, something carved to pass an idle afternoon, little friend, little toy not meant to last. The other half he poured into the river, dark cascade into darker waters, then smashed the bottle, glass raining down upon some swimming boys—perhaps they, too, were Haden’s boys, naked as smelt and splashing—as well as a docking oarsman who climbed to the bank to resent it with his fists, climbing back down again once he saw the look in Istvan’s eyes: Why die for a shower, when as an oarsman he has been drenched before by even worse.

Luc’s ending is not a tale that Istvan has shared with Rupert; in fact they have barely spoken past the
Snow Youth
, a fact noted by Tilde with alarm, a fact she brings up now in her typically forthright fashion: “Sir’s gone again, isn’t he. He’s angry at you, what did you do?” to bring in reply Istvan’s shadowed nod: “Sharp eyes. And none of your affair, though it’s nothing I did,” but rather apparently what he had not done: the real Snow Youth in the audience to consider his own refracted history, to reach afterwards at last in some fashion for Mouse, to say whatever he had said that put Rupert at the dressing-table the morning after the long and absent night, dry-eyed and accusing:

Once again to play your tricks, messire, without a thought for me! There at the Opera—

You’d gone home already, hadn’t you, you’d had enough of poor sweaty Cleopatra. So I took the kit instead, he was handy…. Christ, Mouse, what difference? We had a drink, we bowed to one another, that was all.

You never change, you never will. You could have said that you had seen him—

And you went off with him last night—all night—without alerting me. Shall we repair to the alley and throw mud at each other, make all even? If you hankered so much to frolic again with the quality, the young Madame herself invited us to—

What I “hanker for,”
hard with anger, up from the chair so quickly that it fell,
is an hour’s fucking peace before I die
—gone back out then as he has gone in and out for days past Istvan’s feigned indifference, gone once more this lowering afternoon, and in a mood as self-contained and dire; where the fuck does he go, now that the Mercury is dark again, the mountain dismantled, the Snow Youth boxed in a fruit-crate coffin and shoved into a corner, Misters Pollux and Castor hung silent as strangers at one another’s sides?

The angel Frédéric has said, in his diffident way, that, on his own brief forays into the streets (in a disguise of his own making, flat cap and gipsy scarf that oddly suit), he has glimpsed Mouse in a café next to the Garden of Eden:
It’s not quite opened, the sign says “soon.” But no one seems to know who owns it
—not Frédéric himself, nor Vater when queried, nor Cockrill all distracted with the competition’s apex:
I’d tell you surely if I knew, anything for a brother puppeteer! Now if you could show me, just a tick’s worth, of how you make your fellows move so nicely?
If the kit knows, he has not shared his knowledge, Haden who, now that the seraph is
in situ,
has made himself completely scarce though
It was Haden’s thought,
Frédéric’s painful blush in answer when questioned on his own presence, even more diffident at the table with notebook and black eye,
and truly, sir, I am enormously grateful for the refuge, truly I shall make myself useful to you all!
Mouse seems barely to mark him beyond a sideways glance, but Mab has found him quite useful, has put him to daily work at which, if he does not quite excel, still is diligent to learn—his tea-making has improved a great deal, now that he knows what a strainer is for, and he can paint a flat without painting the wall behind it—while he scribbles his polemics for the cheeky
Muses’ Journal,
and hides, in some torturous way, from the Morals Commission, a fact confessed in trembling, but met by Istvan with a shrug:
We’re no friends to the Commission, or any other moral fuck. You’re safe here as long as we are. Behind our
gamine—nodding approvingly to Tilde—
who bites.

Now “Mab,” says Istvan, himself biting at the end of a thread, a threading line of gold that, when wound on wire, will make a perfect halo, “when our young Diogenes gets back, will you sit him down and teach him to sew? I need this raiment sharpish—the cloth-of-gold, see? No, not that, the other—yes. And our other angel,” nodding to the devil sequestered on the workbench, less sad now than purely thoughtful, appended by grace, “needs his wig trimmed up. I think the mice have been at it.”

“Who made him?” Tilde asks, hoisting the devil to her lap, yellow eyes and yellow horsetail hair, his small horns planed to silver points. “Not you.”

“Sharp eyes,” says Istvan again, half-smiling; truly this chit is made for this work. “I do believe he made himself, and found his own way here. Just like his partner. And you…. I’ll be back myself directly. And when your Sir arrives, tell him to stay here, and wait for me.”

“What if he doesn’t want to?”

“Tell him till he does,” with a wink less humor than insistence, taking up his own disguise of businessman’s bowler and coat, hair tucked up, pearl earring tucked to pocket, noting as he steps out into the rain the boys loitering across the way in the shelter of the broadsheet printer’s, Haden’s boys to whom he beckons: “You two—Where’s your master, do you know?”

“Ask Master Dangle,” says one of the boys, cupping his balls to bring the other’s snigger, sucking in a strangling breath as Istvan leans close to grab him there, a punishing grip and “The next time I ask you, you’ll sing like a girl. Where is he?” as the other hurries to answer “Sir, we dunno, sir! He said for us to watch out on your own place. But he might could be at that new Garden of Even, sir—”

“All roads lead there, apparently. All right,” releasing the first boy to drop writhing at the curb, stepping over his body in a hurry for the omnibus, to board the back platform out of the rain’s gray spatter. As he rides he reads with interest, over the shoulder of a frowning Virgo girl, the
Herald of Truth
’s examination of French culture, with a special emphasis on the ladies of
Les Folies Bergère.

At that moment Rupert sits across the avenue from that very Garden, in a nearly empty café called the Bellevue, though its view is not particularly
belle
: a fat constable pushing a thin miscreant past two brown storefronts drab as stepsisters, the other theatre buildings like hostile natives, all occluded further by cigar smoke puffed over a cup of inferior
chocolat.
His own eye is turned inward again, back to the night of the
Snow Youth
, to the darkness of the cab where he sat strangely unsurprised, as if he had somehow conjured the living Benjamin by the making and playing of the Youth—

It’s been a long time. We missed each other at the Opera, didn’t we—though I saw M. Dieudonne. He looks much older, now.

Him, he hasn’t changed a minute,
though Benjamin clearly had: more handsome even than before, the boy’s slender beauty grown into the man’s allure, the shoulders broader, the cheekbones sharper, the mouth—would it be?—as yielding and as soft. But in the changeable eyes see a hard weariness, a new grain of spite, a master’s habit of unchecked command as
Here,
leaning forward to slip into Rupert’s pocket a little folded note, his own old note
poste restante
thanking Isobel for her kindness, Isobel now gone beyond the reach of any missive.
Belle kept it, all that time. She was quite fond of you, you know.

She was a very great lady. And her passing was a very great loss,
but Benjamin was not listening, Benjamin was looking at him in that new way, examining him, what did he see? A man himself grown weary, yes, and much older, a man who has tried his best to make illusion his home and
We were meant to meet again this way, weren’t we? That Snow Youth, I rather think I know him,
with a sudden smile immensely sweet, his own smile slower in answer but
Yes,
he had said at last.
You do.