This all seemed like the largest possible company to me, but I was quickly informed that the company had been much larger six months earlier, when Madame’s husband Alexander had been in charge. He was a very well-known magician, a proven draw, performing a two-and-a-half-hour program booked into theaters as a solo act. But his health had begun to decline, and he’d decided—possibly on the advice of Adelaide, who was not only his wife but his assistant—to book into a vaudeville tour. The money was good, the demands less onerous, and the tickets practically sold themselves. In October, he booked into a six-month circuit. In December, he died. And it was that circuit we were now completing, his wife having picked up where he left off as best she could. Her employees might not love her, but she provided a good living and had a good hand at keeping the wolf from the door.
Jeannie was the one who told me Alexander’s story. She was an excellent source of information and the closest thing I had to a friend. After more than a year spent in either Biltmore uniform or Broadway chorus garb, there was something I found irresistible about the variety of fabrics and embellishments at our disposal, and I couldn’t resist stealing a few moments in the costume closet here and there. We fell to chatting, and she invited me back whenever I liked. Jeannie was a short woman, and her voice was low and raspy like a man’s, but her body swelled as generously above and below as the native fertility figures on the shelves of Mr. Vanderbilt’s smoking room, the ones we’d only given the most perfunctory dusting. She’d been sewing her own clothing since she was a child in Abilene and had taken in whatever fancy work was needed there, of which there wasn’t much. But her talents were in great demand at the local theater, where Madame, on tour, discovered and claimed her. Jeannie worked her own sort of magic on torn skirts and sleeves, making things good as new or even better. Her needle absolutely danced. There wasn’t a gown she couldn’t improve, expertly spangling a bodice or whip-stitching rows of lace to a skirt even as she kept up a steady stream of patter. I loved to listen.
Adelaide’s costumes commanded attention without being immodest. Her Oriental robes showed her shape at the waist but were otherwise wide and flowing. On a typical night, she might change her gown three times, and each was a marvel. A soft underrobe of thin cambric was overlaid with a heavily embroidered satin piece that extended all the way to the floor in front and back, meticulously worked with Kelly-green birds and beaded gold branches. For an illusion where she was to play the lady at home, Madame wore a tea gown with frills at the collar and cuffs and pronounced leg o’ mutton sleeves, the height of fashion for such a character. Her most elaborate gown was for her Cleopatra. This had a bodice so laden with stones and beads that it easily weighed twenty pounds atop a gauzy skirt and train, with long swinging chains of beads that dangled from the waist and bounced merrily whenever she moved. Jeannie was responsible for keeping all of these neat and tidy, as well as sewing new costumes whenever Madame thought it necessary and extending the same attention to the dancers’ and assistants’ costumes. It was also Jeannie’s responsibility to secure the fresh flowers Madame wore in her hair every night, a circlet of gold with a small cluster of white blossoms on each temple. We had fake flowers for contingencies, but Adelaide hated them, and on nights Jeannie couldn’t find fresh flowers, we all held our breath just a little bit through the whole performance.
As for the rest of us, the dancers and assistants, our skirts only reached our knees. Our arms were bare from the elbow. The costumes were modest by the standards of the Broadway theaters, but they would have shocked the stuffing out of Mrs. Severson. I had a sudden urge to write her a picture postcard and show her where I’d gone but instantly thought better of it. Let the past be the past, I told myself. Magic was where I had a future.
But the thought stirred something else within me, and I needed to settle it finally. I wrote a plain note on plain paper and posted it from Chicago. I didn’t sign it. It said simply, I am well. Whether my mother saw it or not I couldn’t say, but it helped, knowing I had made the attempt.
Then I threw myself into the future. The time that the other seven dancing girls spent figuring out how to divide up only four eligible boys between them, I spent learning. I watched the entire show, all through, every night, choosing a different angle from one night to the next. Unlike my experience on Broadway, where I was on and off the stage constantly for the whole show’s two-hour duration, I had time before and after my appearance in the Dancing Odalisque to spare. Madame Herrmann was often the headliner, but because there were plenty of other acts on the bill and an audience still in their seats, we couldn’t load up our sets and equipment and be on our way until the entire evening’s entertainment was finished. When our part of the show was over and the other dancers crowded into the wings to watch Miss Ella’s Comedy Joy or the Singing Gardini Sisters, or made themselves scarce for other, lustier purposes, I picked our show’s illusions apart one at a time.
The Dove Pan was a shallow silver dish with a lid that could be used to produce anything the size of two fists or smaller. It got its name, of course, from hiding doves. Adelaide used it to produce a sweetly singing finch. It was an easy matter for me to find the pan’s false bottom and to realize that from then on, the audience never saw what they thought they saw.
Slightly more challenging was the Light and Heavy Chest, a trunk that couldn’t be raised from the stage by any number of people in the audience but that Adelaide herself could lift one-handed with no visible strain. I examined the trunk many times from all angles, inside and out, and found only one clue: the top and sides of the chest were ornately carved, expensive wood, but its bottom was made of bare, flat steel. I shadowed the prop master for two weeks, trying to ferret out the secret. It was the night we didn’t perform the illusion that gave the game away—I asked why, and he muttered that there was no space under the stage. At the next theater, I snuck under the stage during that portion of the act, finding a large metal box with a switch on the side installed on the underside of the floorboards, with an assistant there to operate the switch at the right moment. When Adelaide cued the assistant with two sharp stomps of her foot, he flipped the switch and the box hummed with electricity. Moments after came the roar of the crowd. Of course. Activated, the electromagnet held the wooden chest directly above it in place, and no one short of God could have pried the metal bottom of the chest away.
And yet this knowledge did nothing to disrupt my enjoyment of the show. Even when I discovered the secret behind the illusion I loved most, it ruined nothing. From the beginning, I had been transfixed by the illusion Lady to Tiger. It was a simple, impossible thing, where Madame magicked a large empty cage into existence on the stage, strode purposefully into it, and then reached outside the bars to draw a set of curtains closed. When only moments later an assistant drew the curtains aside, Madame was gone—and a large, roaring tiger was there in her place. I never volunteered to be the assistant in this act. I was extremely concerned about losing a finger, or worse, to the tiger. But I wanted to know what the secret was, so I watched every night and scrutinized every aspect of the illusion until I figured it out.
By looking closely, I could tell that the back of the cage was solid when Madame walked into it and the base of the cage was a raised platform about half a foot off the stage floor. There had to be a reason for both. I guessed that there were two hidden compartments: one in the back to hide the tiger before its appearance, and one in the floor to hide Madame after hers. I was certain of it and confirmed it with the prop master one night outside Lancaster. He outwardly grumbled that I was too inquisitive for my own good, but he gave me that look like Mrs. Severson had given me when I’d done something impressive, so I paid little attention to his grumbling. And even after I figured out the secret of Lady to Tiger, I continued to watch it every night just as avidly. I knew that Madame was not the tiger, that the tiger existed separately as a real flesh-and-blood animal at all times, but I still believed somehow. In that moment
where the switch was made, I was seeing a woman transformed.
And Madame always was a tiger in her way. She retreated to her railcar every night for a brandy, and it wasn’t unusual, late after dark, to hear a glass breaking against the wall. She didn’t share confidences with us, nor we with her.
As I became more intrigued by magic, it seemed Madame became more intrigued by me. In that first circuit, she added me to five more illusions, nearly half the act. She renamed me Vivi, and my name appeared in the program alongside the other girls’. Two months in, she gave me the coveted spot of handing her the first deck of cards for the first act of the evening. For this, I wore a gauzy, elegant white dress so beautiful I was terrified I’d ruin it with makeup or lampblack or the droppings that Madame’s doves sometimes left just offstage. I made a beeline to Jeannie immediately after I stepped offstage to get it safely back into her care.
After my third successful performance in this trusted role, Madame summoned me to her railcar for a nightcap. Somewhat nervously, I went.
We sat ourselves on the comfortable velvet couches. Madame drank brandy. Not having much tolerance for alcohol, I asked for a cherry liqueur. If I disregarded the soft, regular thrum of the engine propelling us through the night, it wasn’t like being on a train at all. There was carpet under my feet, Impressionist artwork on the walls in gilded frames, and an arched, dark blue ceiling painted with gold-white dots to give the impression of stars. It was like sitting in the front room of a fine hotel or a wealthy woman’s parlor. It didn’t have the grandeur of even the smallest room at the Biltmore, but it was elegant and plainly expensive, proving that things didn’t need to be large to impress.
We made pleasant small talk for a while, and I waited to see if there was something she wanted to say to me. I thought she must have invited me for a reason. I was right.
“You’re a smart girl, Vivi, aren’t you?” she began.
“I can’t rightly say.”
“False modesty will get you nowhere, girl. I expect better.”
I swallowed and said, “Then yes, Madame, I am the smartest girl currently in your employ.”
“That’s better. And I know you’re observant, and I know you watch the whole show every night. So I have a question for you. What could I be doing better?”
“You do everything well.”
“Hmph. Cut to Hecuba.”
“Pardon?”
“The point. Get to it, dear.”
“Okay.” I took the gamble that she meant what she said. “When you do the Dove Pan. You tend to turn to the right at a certain point in the patter, after you say ‘sweet music.’”
She nodded.
“It obscures your face for the left side of the audience. They can’t see you, and they stop listening. You lose them.”
Nodding more and smiling, she said, “I suppose that’s right.”
“It’s still a wonderful illusion, and I wouldn’t change anything else about it, but just make sure you’re facing forward and you’ll keep them all entranced.”
“All right then, Vivi. Another question. What’s missing? What, in your opinion, should I add to the act?”
My answer sprang instantly to mind. “Why not the bullet catch?”
“Oh dear,” she said, clearly surprised.
“I mean, it would be a great addition. Bring the house down. It was amazing. You amazed me, amazed all of us.”
Madame poured half her drink down her throat, swallowed, and said, “Well, I hope you remember it well, because you won’t be seeing it again.”
Made bold by the fear that it might be my only chance, I leaned forward and asked, “So how does it work?”
“How do you think it works?”
“They can’t be firing real bullets, can they?”
“Yes and no. We have audience members come up and inspect the guns, and there are real bullets then. You remember only one man fired. He was talented enough to palm the bullet and replace it with a flash charge after the inspection.”
“But then your life was in his hands.”
“His, and the others’, and the audience’s,” she said grimly. “Because what if his flash charge was packed too solid? What if one of the other men fired? What if an audience member, suspicious and clever, slipped something solid into the barrel of that gun? People have died doing the bullet catch for all those reasons.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Before Alexander passed”—here she crossed herself—“he’d whipped some newspaperman into a frenzy, boasting that he could do the bullet catch though he never had before. The booking was made and the press set. Then he was taken from us suddenly, and what could I do? I needed to make a splash, to establish myself as a magician in my own right, and the opportunity was there in front of me. If I canceled, I’d have to claw my way up from nothing. I’d already lost what mattered most. I couldn’t lose more. I kept the date.”
I asked, “Weren’t you afraid you’d be killed?”
“Not afraid, no,” she said. “I knew it would be my answer one way or the other. If I did it successfully, I’d keep our slot on the circuit, and then I’d tour with Alexander’s illusions and make my own name from there. If it killed me, it killed me. And I wouldn’t have to worry about anything else, because I’d be dead.”
“Thank God you survived.”
“I doubt he had much of anything to do with it,” she said and drained her drink. “In any case, I won’t be adding that to the act. But you’ll tell me if you have any other ideas, won’t you?”
“I will,” I said.
She raised her empty glass to me and grinned. “To good ideas, Vivi, wherever we can get them.”
***
From the beginning, I’d been favored by Madame—who I now thought of as Adelaide—but after that conversation, things became even clearer. I’d found my place. As we began our second circuit in the summer of 1897, Adelaide began to teach me the illusions, one by one. Not just the assistant’s part, which I already knew, but the main action and all the little subactions that made it up. Our new circuit took us through the northern states, beginning in Western New York with Shea’s Garden Theater in Buffalo, through Pennsylvania to Ohio and Indiana, then running northward through the entirety of Michigan, with a special performance to entertain the summering crowd at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
Another girl, a newer girl, took my place as the Odalisque, and Adelaide built a new showpiece around me, called the Slave Girl’s Dream. She herself had played the Slave Girl in Alexander’s act. Aerial suspension was not so unusual to see on the stage, but it was often done by lifting prone girls on tables, providing plenty of room for ropes and wires. This was a different approach. She had the proper equipment fetched from the storehouse, and I had to admit, I blanched the first time I saw it. It looked more like a torture device than a tool of magic.
I stripped down to stage undergarments—modest enough to cover me more than real undergarments would, but still clearly meant as intimate—and submitted myself to the preparations. The contraption was a large harness of steel and leather, and as I struggled to catch my breath, Adelaide strapped me in. A rigid, slightly curved bar of steel ran up the right side of my body from the armpit to the knee, with another thick bar encircling the waist. Two bands of leather strapped me to the metal, one running over my left shoulder, the other between my legs, looping back and attaching to the bar at the waist.
“This will be tight,” said Adelaide, grunting as she buckled the shoulder strap, “but take my word, you do not want it to be loose.”
Next she brought out a steel pole, painted black, that attached to the steel bar at a right angle. I was raised into the air by the pole, bearing the entire weight of my body on a cold three-inch piece of steel in my armpit, and it had never been clearer that the control I’d used in the Dancing Odalisque had been mere ch
ild’s play.
When we performed the Slave Girl’s Dream, the curtain came up on a simple pallet, where I lay as if sleeping. Adelaide, representing a goddess of sleep, danced around me, and as the music swelled, I began to hover in the air. She then whisked beautiful garments from nothingness, garbing me in several flowing costumes of glorious silk, as if I were dreaming of wearing my mistress’s rich clothes.
The effect was amazing. I couldn’t see it myself, but when I saw the faces of the audience beholding it, I knew what they were seeing. I appeared to float in air with no support whatsoever, the gauzy edges of my rich garments fluttering in the air currents, the onstage lighting carefully directed to highlight my outstretched body and not the black pole holding me up in front of a black backdrop.
I was amazed by the illusion and thrilled to take part, but I also felt it was badly misnamed. What I thought—but did not say to Adelaide for fear of insulting her husband’s memory—was that no slave girl would dream herself draped in a series of lovely garments. She wouldn’t waste her efforts on a fantasy of silk chiffon and ribbons. A slave girl, given the ability to dream without limits, would dream herself free.
Once I debuted in the Slave Girl’s Dream and my billing in the program was second only to Adelaide’s, my fellow dancers’ attitude shifted from somewhat distant to downright hostile. Not that any of them truly envied my position. They weren’t ambitious girls nor greedy ones. None of them felt the strong affinity for magic that I did, the thrill of the rare opportunity to learn from the best. They were just insulted not to be asked and annoyed that I would be somehow raised above them, in both senses of the word.
As a group, they never went too far—no pranks, no violence, no threats—but instead punished me the way they themselves would have hated to be punished: with silence. They didn’t realize I didn’t mind silence, and in many situations, preferred it. So they ignored me, and when new people were added to the company, they were quickly counseled not to associate with me. The new Odalisque smiled at me when she met me, for example, but then never again. And that was all right. Lonely, of course, but hardly upsetting, once I got used to it. I was a good ear for Madame and for Jeannie, in different ways and for different reasons. I was respected by the stagehands and prop crew, who recognized my appreciation for the machinery. I didn’t feel the lack of other company.
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