The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  The renovation, financed by Chester Bender’s pawnbroker and loan shark connections, had taken the old parlor down to the studs, engulfed the adjacent delicatessen, knocked down walls, run electricity to a constellation of incandescent light bulbs. Flossy’s kinetoscopes and phonographs were relegated to a single row in an alcove of the lobby, and Thomas Edison’s portrait now hung in a storage closet. The American inventor had released the projecting Vitascope to compete with the Lumières, but Hal had declared his allegiance to the French brothers by purchasing the Cinématographe Model B, which projected views all during construction from one curtained-off end of the parlor. It had arrived in a wooden crate, packed in straw, accompanied by a French clerk who’d personally overseen its passage across the Atlantic. He’d presented Hal with an instruction manual, a certificate of authenticity, and a handwritten note from the brothers themselves, all in French. The first time Hal turned the projector on to run a test loop, he let himself tear up when the warming nitrates smarted his eyes. More than anything, he wished his father could have seen that cloud of granulated light.

  * * *

  Hal had written to invite Claude Ballard to exhibit his work at the grand opening of the Bender Bijoux, scheduled for December of 1900. By now, Claude’s footage had become legendary for its risqué subject matter and its ability to draw a paying crowd. He’d also designed and built a magazine for the cinématographe that housed ten reels spliced together, expanding a film’s duration from forty-five seconds to seven and a half minutes. In his letter, Hal described his epiphany in the Union Square vaudeville theater, wrote about the girl running along the beach and smelling the salt on her skin. It’s as if you projected something directly behind my eyelids, Monsieur Ballard, and for that I will always be in your debt. Then he offered Claude Ballard $500 to come opening weekend and stay for a month, to project the seven-minute reel that featured a burning boy and a naked famous actress, the reel they called The Haymaker and that everyone talks about but which the Lumières say has never existed. The letter had to be forwarded three times before it reached Claude, who was still filming and exhibiting in Australia. When he wrote back to accept the offer, Claude noted, Please understand that I am now an independent moving picture agent with no association with the Lumière brothers. I will also need board and room for my assistant.

  * * *

  When Sabine read about Claude Ballard’s exhibition at a newly remodeled theater in Brooklyn, the day before its grand opening, she was surprised by the sense of betrayal that cut through her. She was back in New York after a hiatus in Paris, rehearsing for another run of Hamlet in the spring, sharing her usual penthouse hotel suite with Pavel and Helena. The half-page advertisement that Hal Bender had taken out in The New York Times did not mention her by name, but it promised a famous personage seen like never before.

  * * *

  During Claude’s long absence, he’d sent her a series of lovelorn letters—the memory of our twin faces in the lens of the hotel mirror still intoxicates me—along with her end of ticket sales. In return, she’d mailed him friendly travel reflections written on hotel stationery and postcards of foreign monuments. She didn’t pick up the amorous tempo of his letters, but neither did she rebuff him (she remembered scenting at least one envelope with bergamot). But sometime during the past year, it occurred to her that the letters and bathtub royalties had dwindled and then stopped altogether. And why hadn’t he written to tell her of his return to America?

  * * *

  The idea that Claude Ballard’s affections for her had waned left a ragged edge to her thoughts. Young men were usually simple in their affections and in their understanding of love and art. They wanted to be understood, to transmit themselves out into the void like a telegram, and she’d always found this to be an infuriating mediocrity. Most of the time she wanted to rescue them from it, to provide an education in ambiguity and nuance, but occasionally she also wanted to warm her hands by the bonfires of their devotion. No matter how true, modern, or sophisticated doubt seemed, it still ran thin and pale next to the exhilaration of belief. Even Hamlet had grown weary of doubt and indecision.

  * * *

  She told Helena and Pavel that she’d like to spend Saturday evening—on her day off from rehearsals—going out to Brooklyn to see the theater grand opening and that they were to accompany her. They both looked at her as if she’d announced a trip to Outer Mongolia. In Brooklyn? Helena asked. Somewhat dramatically, Sabine said, Yes, and I will travel in disguise.

  * * *

  And so the next day, courtesy of a Broadway theater’s wardrobe department, she dressed as a ragged gypsy immigrant—a headscarf, a frayed workaday blouse, a bodice with a Bohemian print, a pair of scuffed boots buckled to the mid-calf. She had always adored the transformative power of costumes and disguises, had found her way to the theater through her grandmother’s cherrywood wardrobe. Wrapped in another woman’s clothes, she felt invisible and reckless. They hired a driver for the day and set off in a hansom toward Brooklyn, the three of them squeezed onto the covered bench seat.

  * * *

  Along Flatbush Avenue, there was little danger of Sabine Montrose being recognized, even without her elaborate disguise. In this stretch of Brooklyn, people were more likely to go see an acrobat, a magician, or a little blackface comedy at the local vaudeville house than cross the river for Hamlet or Othello. A few might have glimpsed her face on a Manhattan theater poster, but she was invisible to the rest. By the next day, though, every husband, bachelor, and grocery clerk would know about her. At construction sites and in lunchrooms, the rooftop nude would become shorthand for everything that was new and titillating in the world.

  * * *

  It was mild for December, and a big crowd had turned out for the five o’clock show. As the hansom pulled up in front of the theater, Sabine was surprised to see that those waiting were all men—local businessmen and clerks and storekeepers in derby hats and dun-colored coats, jostling and smoking in the twilight, eager to kill off an hour. A line began in front of the nickel-and-chrome ticket booth and stretched around onto Fulton Street. The marquee read:

  THE BENDER BIJOUX

  A VAUDEVILLE THEATER FEATURING THE LUMIÈRE CINÉMATOGRAPHE!

  MIXED COMPANY SHOWS EVERY HOUR & GENTLEMEN ONLY EXHIBITIONS AFTER 5

  Pavel confirmed with both of his fob watches that the local time was ten minutes before five. From her window, Sabine took in the overblown facade, the tessellations of blue tile under the awning, the image of Saturn wielding an imitation stone sickle above the street. After a moment, she sent Pavel into the throng to find Claude Ballard because, at the very least, she wanted an explanation for his silence. And if, in fact, he was preparing to show her unlicensed breasts, glimpsed among fernery and orchids in a rooftop conservatory, to the paying male public, then she was certainly going to seek retribution. Pavel stepped down from the carriage in his waistcoat and wool cloak, parting the crowd with his Baltic gravitas and heft.

  * * *

  Hal Bender was at the ticket booth because he didn’t trust his mother or two younger brothers to handle this volume of cash. He’d have to make a drop payment to Alroy Healy, his largest creditor, before the night was out. Above and beyond the principal and interest, Alroy was in for a percentage of the door take. When Hal saw the burly, cloaked man bustling toward him, he lifted his eyes to take in the hansom cab and saw the woman in a headscarf peering directly at him. The man arrived at the front of the line, his accent lavishly foreign.

  —I am Pavel Rachenko, sent by the noted thespian Sabine Montrose. She would like to speak with Claude Ballard, the French projectionist. Is he within?

  A few delivery clerks in line snickered at the Russian dandy, but Hal kept a straight face.

  —Is she here? Hal asked.

  * * *

  Pavel glanced back toward the hansom, faintly keeping up the pretense of Sabine’s disguise. When Hal looked over, he caught Sabine’s dark eyes
flinting above the rim of her shawl, and a flash of her waving naked from the bathtub hit him square in the chest. Three days earlier, Claude Ballard and his assistant had arrived and projected the Haymaker reel while Hal and his brothers stood in the empty theater. Angus, Hal’s twelve-year-old brother who played piano and turned pages for the church organist, sat at the Kimball pump organ, ready to accompany whatever scenes might hover onto the screen. But as soon as Sabine Montrose came into view, singing and soaping herself up in all that glassy light, Angus went slack-jawed and the organ sputtered into a reedy, pneumatic stupor. Thinking of it now, Hal had to swallow before speaking again.

  —Please wait here and I will go find him. We’re about to start a new show any minute.

  * * *

  Hal took off at a trot through the lobby, past Flossy’s glass-fronted cake emporium, where she’d been selling baked goods and cider and kettle corn at a scandalous markup all day, and into the theater. The auditorium was still being cleaned because, apparently, Brooklynites were content to throw peanut shells, ticket stubs, and cake doilies onto the floorboards. They’d shown half a dozen screenings, interspersed with comedy sketches and vaudeville acts, since ten in the morning. Now that the evening was upon them, Hal had convinced Flossy to take the night off, to go put her feet up before the reels were switched over for the men-only performances. He’d kept the Haymaker reel from her and she was probably doing some needlepoint under the sewing lamp in the upstairs apartment, oblivious, while every manner of scandal was about to play out below—a buxom nude, a bloody fight, a burning boy, a consumptive’s final breath. Not ten feet below his mother’s scuffed carpet slippers, while she stitched the edges of a millpond, life’s appetites and sorrows would spangle and warp against a bolt of silk.

  * * *

  Claude and Chip were up on the projector stand that resembled a gun turret, bent over the cinématographe, its hatch open, making small calibrations with a screwdriver. The Model B looped Edison-format reels, no longer doubling as a camera, and they’d been discovering the projector’s quirks ever since their arrival. Hal, a little breathless, gestured out toward the lobby and the street.

  —The actress, Sabine Montrose, is outside and asking to speak with you, Claude.

  * * *

  Claude straightened slowly behind the projector, removed a small cloth from his breast pocket, and cleaned his eyeglasses. After three years of filming and exhibiting in Australia, capturing everything from the Melbourne Cup to Aborigines at Ayers Rock to deep-sea divers emerging from the Coral Sea, Claude’s face and hands had weathered and bronzed. His lips were chapped and there were creases in his neck and forehead and sun streaks in his thick brown hair. When he put his glasses back on and blinked, letting the news settle over him, Hal thought that there was something dazed and windblown in his bearing, as if he’d been walking through a blizzard or dust storm for a very long time. Claude nodded, scratched the side of his face, looked at Chip, and launched a big existential shrug.

  * * *

  By the time he’d buttoned his blazer and stepped down off the gun-turret projector stand, Sabine Montrose was already parting the crowd of ticketholders in the lobby, Pavel in her wake. The men stepped aside to let in this beautiful, wayward gypsy, perhaps a fortune-teller brought in special for the evening’s vaudeville performance, and now her Baltic valet in his embroidered waistcoat and wool cloak made sense, because the pair clearly came from distant lands where people spoke inscrutable languages, wore outlandish clothes, and ate strange foods, and where oracles wore headscarves and lived in forests. Claude saw her walk under the houselights and squint in the direction of the stage. When she completed the visual line to see him standing in front of the projector turret, he realized he was shaking and that his hands were over his head, waving like a signalman lost at sea, a man with a semaphore in a fog. In three years he’d been involved with a few women, secretaries and governesses awed by his display of exotic views, but he’d also kept vigil to Sabine in his letters and daydreams and now the sight of her, drawing nearer, made his blood jump.

  * * *

  Chip Spalding, crouching beside the projector, whispered up at Claude, Is that who I think it is? but then retreated for the stage on the pretext of some errand. In his mind, the rooftop scene had transformed Sabine Montrose into a solar eclipse. He’d go blind or turn into an imbecile if he stared at her for any length of time. Hal found himself standing between Sabine and Claude, anchored in place by their silence.

  —Would you consider being our guest of honor tomorrow, Miss Montrose? Hal asked. We’re about to start the first of two men-only shows right now, but tomorrow I can set up a private viewing area during the mixed-company screenings, for you and your associates.

  * * *

  Hal wondered about the word associates. Hadn’t his father’s associates put him in the ground? Sabine smiled and folded her arms, relishing the skittish look on Claude’s face. His nose and ears looked sunburnt, she thought, even in December, then she remembered the inverted summers in the antipodes. They were upside down over there, a nation of January sunbathers. From his sheepishness, she understood that her nudity had traveled far and wide, had unspooled in distant clubs and backrooms, mesmerizing factory owners and delivery boys and coal miners, the same ragtag crowd that was now waiting to enter the theater. She knew in that instant that her end of the profits was much larger than he’d sent her.

  —Thank you, she said to Hal, but I’m not a guest here. Since I am owed a commission for every screening of my rooftop scene, I believe we are all business partners.

  —Thirty percent for each rooftop scintillation, said Pavel, arriving at the projector stand.

  Claude cleared his throat.

  —It is very nice to see you again, madame. However, the rooftop scene is now spliced with many other images into a single, seven-minute reel. So, you see, everything is run together now and there is no separate accounting.

  Sabine shrugged, thinned her lips.

  —Again, said Hal, this will be a men-only exhibition, Miss Montrose. My apologies.

  Sabine turned to look at the young proprietor for the first time and put her hands on her hips.

  —If I am not entitled to see my own breasts in a starring role then the world will never make sense to me again.

  Hal flushed under the houselights, put his hands into his pockets.

  —There are other actualities in the reel, he said. Things that might unsettle you …

  Sabine loosened the knot on her headscarf and pushed some strands of hair behind her ears.

  —Unless there is brain surgery or cannibalism, I am not the least bit queasy. Now, I believe those gentlemen out there have paid to see a famous personage like never before. Were those the words in the newspaper advertisement?

  Hal said nothing but he stared out into the lobby, where Angus, dressed in his organist’s tails and bow tie, was holding back the rabble behind a velvet rope.

  —All right, Angus, Hal called out, let’s start seating them. Miss Montrose and Mr. Rachenko, if you will follow me.

  * * *

  Sabine gave Claude a curt nod and fell in behind Hal. There was no private viewing area, per se, but Hal cordoned off the space right in front of the projector turret—a bower for the famous actress, tucked right beneath the limelight. Against his mother’s protests, he brought down the wing-backed lounge chair from the upstairs apartment for her to sit in. It had been his father’s chair, a basecamp for evening declarations and whiskeyed rants. The maid, he was told, had decided to stay in the hansom cab and the Russian could make do with a wooden chair from the kitchen.

  * * *

  Once the men were seated, the houselights went down and a few vaudeville acts took to the stage, one after the other. A rope trickster, a pair of wrestling midgets, a contortionist, a juggler, a terrifyingly dull mime, a comic in green socks who did impressions. Angus pumped out marches and circus themes from the organ, accompanied pratfalls and the juggling of knives
. An usher in a red cummerbund brought Sabine an endless supply of cider and teacakes on a silver tray. It was half an hour before the projector started up, and Sabine thought she was going to faint from the migraine of tedium settling behind her eyes.

  * * *

  The Haymaker began with a clown on roller skates, wearing a baggy suit jacket and a top hat. He smoked a cigar, spun around, coattails flapping, dropped his hat. When he bent over to pick it up, a white handprint appeared on the seat of his pants and the circle of men watching in some Melbourne municipal park, wearing straw boaters in November, laughed and cheered. Their distant Brooklyn cousins did the same now and Sabine wished she’d stayed back in her hotel suite. Then came the falling cat, which she’d already seen, so she closed her eyes to make it all vanish. She listened to Claude Ballard hand-cranking the machine up on the turret behind her. He did it with a steady, pneumatic clip that made her think of trains clacking through the countryside, of yachts coming about and spinnakers being raised on the open ocean. She wanted to escape her life, to sail away with somebody whose love for her was a terrible demon.