The Mercury Waltz (36 page)

“Benefit? No one came to
Hamlet.
I told you we ought not do
Hamlet,
no one wants to watch a tragedy when—”

“It’s not the public’s task to decide what it wants to see. It is my task—more, it is my duty—to shepherd the public’s taste. Why else do you think I was specially awarded—”

“
You
were awarded nothing.
Our
theatre, named for me, I might add, was awarded—”

“It has been years,” severely, “many years, since you were Cleopatra, Madame.” Having seen the Garden of Eden, the Cleopatra itself has come to seem to Simon Cowtan less Shakespeare’s Globe than Cockrill’s Palace; he has been having similar thoughts about Mrs. Cowtan, especially when he auditions the demure young actresses, or notes the rice powder caking in the corners of Mrs. Cowtan’s downturned mouth, sore with juniper and toothache, she is always in some sort of pain. In the dark winter and the darker months to come, he will take steps to change his situation permanently on both fronts, and will succeed on both fronts, though the changes engendered will neither please nor advance him. Before a full year has passed, he will have played on the cold stage of the rooms of inquiry, to disquieting notice by the Morals Commission, who will find his pretensions presumptuous—Tibor Banek, in particular, will be much affronted:
As if the fellow was ever a friend!
—and his defense on a morals charge (the licentious production of
The Queen of Sheba
, the adulterous young actress) much less than persuasive, or even adequate to keep him from a month’s imprisonment, lasting shame, and the permanent closure of his theatre, that will much later reopen as a Freemasons’ lodge, and later still, a popular brewery. The Garden of Eden will come under the shrewd if foreshortened management of Gilbert Fairgrieve, who will produce there many nights of fully innocuous drama, until it, too, goes dark; as does Mrs. Cowtan, become wardrobe mistress under the hard thumb of Cynthia, herself at last in the rôle of Mrs. Fairgrieve. Mrs. Cowtan will wonder bitterly why she of all people must end her days in this vaudeville of sorrow; Cynthia Fairgrieve, in her wig of real Chinese hair and eyelashes fashioned of the same, will enjoy explaining why, day after toilsome day.

It is the stage of the locked Mercury that is busiest today, Istvan in his element, buoyed by the chaos of boys around him, tossed heads and lacquered lips and knobby fists and “This is bally too tight,” complains one worthy, his curly hair tangled in the strings of the black mask. “Why an’t I wear it just like so?” like a second pair of eyeless eyes slanted up above his own, looking to Haden, who looks to Istvan, who tugs it securely back into place—“Because we don’t want them to see your face, poppet”—reinforcing the lesson with a salutary box to the ear. “Do you know what sprites are, lads? No? Then think of yourselves as an army of shadows, will that suit? And no one ever sees a shadow’s face. Now you,” selecting one of the boys, a ragged near-beauty with very fair hair, “show us how you can slip from one shadow to the next—”

—from upstage to downstage past the set dressing still in progress, Frédéric harried and flurried and fully absorbed, fully in his element as well—he has learned at last how the puppets operate, has learned things he never dreamed were there for the knowing—but how many details to remember, how much still to do even though the time is rushing past, this show on the cusp of its opening for “They were out in the streets already, you know,” he reminds Tilde
sotto voce.
“Up around the Park, and some went all the way downtown—”

“It’s time,” she says. “The constable put up the sign,” the notice of final eviction nailed to the Mercury’s doors, that constable’s hammer like a knocking hand, a ticking clock, counting down the hours and the minutes although “Sir,” she says, half to Frédéric, half to no one, “says not to worry,” himself her own greatest worry since
It’s dim up there, and narrow
but
I’ve been climbing since I was younger than you are now,
as she watched him step down nimbly from the dark of the catwalk stairs. Only the two of them awake so very early, in the dawn like a red eye opening, so few mornings left to sit together at the table though
You’ll have that visiting-card you asked for,
Rupert frowning at her, teasing so she finally smiles.
But I’ve something else to give you, too,
as he took from his pocket a pretty jeweler’s pouch, pink velvet and within it, in nesting pink silk, a locket such as a fine lady might have, a very fine lady:
For your little one,
as he fastened the clasp around her neck.
You can put a picture inside if you like, or a little snip of hair.

And she said nothing, for what could she say to thank him? for this, yes, queenly gift, this locket of pure gold, real gold with scrolls and swirled etching on front and back, the worth of which would have made her father shout, her mother dance—though neither could ever have guessed its worth to her, symbol of the gift far greater given every day, this roof, its safety, his kindness from the start; she would give this locket and twenty lockets to stay just as they are, just now, at this quiet table. Instead she gave back a gaze from the very depths of her eyes, like treasure from the depths of the sea, and
Sir,
she said, just that; and they sat together in silence, their own silence, tea and chocolate bittersweet, until the others began to stir and rise and make their yawning way down the stairs.

Since that moment she has not taken off the chain, has put away forever the cold white cameo. Now she touches the locket again, a talisman through her blouse, while Rupert, coat on and leather folder in hand, pauses to speak to Frédéric, some last subterfuge of detail: “—when that lot,” nodding to the commotion of boys, “is all settled, then it’s to you and your fellow, remember,” nodding to Haden, the knave of diamonds surely in his new and sparkling vest, all sewn up with mirrors by Tilde, little broken flashing bits of glass, Haden who looks, again, to Istvan—

—who himself notes the way Milady regards her lord, that dark and dolorous forehead, nudging Rupert as he passes—“Your daughter’s got the wind up—” as Haden stares from one to the other in surprise, the stare seen by Rupert, who looks reprovingly to Istvan, then says quietly to Haden with a headshake, “He’ll have his joke always. She’s not my get.”

Haden looks between them again, gauging the resemblance. “Have you ever, with a woman?”

“No,” says Rupert drily. “Never.”

“Nor I, nor missed it either. I’m no one’s father,” and “Give thanks for that,” calls Tilde, which instead of needling Haden makes him laugh, makes him reach to his checked trousers in cradling clasp and “No woman born,” he says, he declaims, “can coax this prick to stand, and what of it? We all know who we are,” as the boys laugh with him, as Frédéric blushes, as Istvan—fey, fierce, smiling—calls out that “The tongue is sacred, too, to our trickster master,” leaning low to reach Frédéric’s warm lips with his own, a soft, surprising, lingering kiss, before turning for his own mask, his plague mask, to don that beaked and secret face and show the boys—the sons of Mercury, toy soldiers in this sortie against the armies of the proper and the dead, the guardians of moral purpose, the strangling moralists of heaven’s hell—a most memorable demonstration, with the help of Mr. Pollux, of the surprising uses to which such a mask may be put, whistling all the while through his teeth that naughty tune of how a lad makes his way,
A lad with wits and nasty bits/A lad who knows what he knows!

It is to Haden only that Istvan shows his truest face, and only when Haden comes to him, late that afternoon, up the stairs and into the bedchamber quiet and still, Rupert having gone again, to pay one last visit to the workingman’s bank, a building that a great financial officer, like Morris Robb, say, might not even recognize as an institution of worth. Reclining on the rosewood satin, letter in hand, Istvan salutes with his flask Haden in the doorway, the mirrored vest shed, carrying the angel puppet: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter…. Don’t just stand there, kit, come in,” to set down on the carven bed the puppet—Istvan assuming it at once, like a familiar, like family—and prowl the room in the way of, yes, a curious cat, blinking those yellow eyes at the accoutrements of purple, the draperies and ferns and old silver mirror, the ancient crocodile-toed boots beside a little trunk half-packed and a wardrobe mostly emptied, a pile of books bound with a schoolboy’s leather strap—some plays, some poetry, a
Sadler’s History of the World
—and the businessman’s desk clean and nearly bare, now, of its papers and its pens, a fat black cuff link lying solo to one side, as if discarded. With half a smile, testingly, he takes from a coat tree an opera cape, sable brown, golden frogs and golden fringe, wraps it around himself with a costumer’s flourish and “Gilding the lily,” says Istvan. “But go on, have it if you like. We’re to travel very sparse.”

Haden shrugs off the cloak, hangs it back on the tree, glancing to and then out the window, into the day’s last light, the scurriers and horses and buses below, the wheeling pigeons flashing soot-gray and soiled white. Over his shoulder: “Will it work, uncle?”

“Do you doubt me?” making the angel puppet to bow, courtly, sweetly, mockingly. “‘If you’re going to drown, do it in deep water’—it’s a saying one has. It means—”

“I know what it means.” Haden seats himself at the foot of the bed, one foot up on the coverlet. “I’ve been in deep water before.”

“Not so deep this time, as long as your lads do as they’re directed, and all falls as it should.” Istvan drinks, then passes the flask as he tilts his head in observation that “You’ve quite bloomed, you know, since your
coup de coeur
—” wiggling the puppet; both of them smile. “And he writes like an angel, you’ll do great things together…. We could have used the Marquis at the Poppy, really, it was catch-as-catch-can there with the shows. Though our bawdy girls and pretty boy, they cut some didoes,” telling tales as if rambling, both knowing that he is not, knowing that he seeks to give what he has, share what he knows though the time is short, the brandy runs out, the sun streaks and flares in the square below, on the roof above, and “In myth,” says Istvan, “Castor was in a tree when he was killed—he fell out, didn’t he, right on his mortal noggin. It was Pollux who flew up to Zeus and begged to share out his immortality, for what good is it to live forever if one must live forever alone?”

“No fucking good at all.” When Haden looks to Istvan then his gaze is as open as it can ever be, the way a son might look to a father, an apprentice to his master, one avatar to another past those thickets of myth. “Too bad there’s no Zeus really. And it’s a long way down, an’t it.”

“Then you fly, yeah?” as Istvan nudges with his knee, past his most oblique, indomitable smile: to Haden he seems, in the dimness of the room, a kind of demigod himself, some half-mortal striver awarded finally with a crown, or a clown sporting so; either way it signifies. “Or did you think to be a fledgling forever?”

“It’s not just me alone.”

“Is that the worry? Why,” leaning close to take Haden’s hands, and put into his grasp the angel puppet, strings and cloth-of-gold, the wise little repainted gaze, “you’ll find that the more you operate, the easier it gets,” leaning closer still, the puppet between them, until they breathe each other’s breath, brandy and heat, a singular pair staring straight into each other’s eyes: as if they might kiss; they do not kiss. “And there’s pleasure in the tale-telling, too—truth or lie, it’s all the same. It’s a
play,
yeah?”

A silence, the sounds of the boys, of the street, then: “You want this. You planned it all, an’t you.”

“I’d not call it so starkly, but if you must, yes. Not all from the start, and not the fucking beatings, but,” looking around the room as if he has found himself in some stranger’s lodgings, some stranger place, “it’s the way of things—I can be nowhere for very long, and with no one but him; you may find it so someday, with your own cherub. Then a note came from a friend, and the angel and the devil landed on our doorstep…. You, now,” Istvan leaning back as if the spell is breaking, as if he himself brings it to an end, “if you can operate that motley bunch,” thumb aimed to the stairs, “all the rest will be easy. We’ll point to this and give them that, we’ll show them past and future, all gorgeous like Milady’s dreadful cards…. Her job’s the hardest, and will stay so. Be decent to her, if you possibly can.”

“I can’t promise,” Haden’s one-shoulder shrug, rising from the bed with the puppet in hand, careful with the golden-wire halo until “Oh,” turning back from the door, “I almost forgot.” Hand into his trouser pocket for something small and wrapped in paper, newspaper, and “Why,” says Istvan, both pleased and touched, as the pearl earring reveals itself from the newsprint, pale at the heart of a crumpled grayish bloom. “However did you winkle this, messire?”

Haden shrugs again, concealing his own pleasure: “By play. As you say,” past the eyeless stare of red Minerva, in a dingy tavern called the Bruderman, where the bravos like to go, Costello there among them and
What do you want?
with the same glower, the same stink of snuff, a new defeated slump to his shoulders that Haden did not mention, a new willingness to drink with a former enemy now that greater enemies were afoot, uniformed constables and snobbish lieutenants to
Put me mainly out of business,
Costello’s gruff admission after the second lager is drained.
You got out sooner, and smarter, thanks to your nancy friends.

I’m your nancy friend, you ass,
as he then deployed one of the oldest ploys of street play, the half-told tale that sounds like all the truth: a sad yet greatly valuable tale of a bracelet made of heart-shaped sapphires, of the faithless wife of a highly placed man though
No names, yet,
Haden’s wink in the murk.
If I told half of half I know, I’d be dead-o. But a crumb now and then makes a meal for a friend,
feeding one such crumb to send Costello back to his master’s door, a pearl wrested with force and no little enjoyment from some thieving constable’s back pocket, a new weapon, may be, to use: for Eig means to cast a long shadow, and it will be Haden’s job—funny to think so, himself with a job! A whole slew of them now, apparently—to keep that shadow’s chill as far as he may from these doors, to spend out the hard currency he holds, all those lies, all that intelligence, as they depend on him to do so, his Frédéric, and that half-gypsy bitch, his gathered boys, while they make their play between these walls; why not? Christopher travels, Christopher fords the stream, Christopher bears the weight of the world until he need bear it alone no longer; another kind of half-told tale, but the medal looks fine around Frédéric’s neck, that part is sure…. Now “A drink before the war,” says Haden, reaching for his own flask, a street boy’s robust Calvados, a salute bestowed, a toast of equals offered and accepted—