A dark look came over his eyes and he stopped walking.
“I tried. But they’re suspicious of native Germans. Afraid they might be spies. I guess I can understand that. I applied for citizenship a few years ago and Auntie Emma was all set to sponsor me like she has for so many others. But then the war broke out and there was a moratorium on granting it to Germans, Italians, and Japanese.”
So, he was foreign-born. She was glad she didn’t have to ask. One didn’t know when rudeness might take over curiosity.
“Mrs. Koehler told me that a friend of Ernestina planned to join the German army.”
His jaw tightened. “That man is a traitor to a country that has shown him nothing but generosity and Ernestine should have had better sense than to cavort with his kind.”
He turned toward her and his voice softened. The shadow of the synagogue’s red dome was cast diagonally across his face, which might have been comical were their conversation not so grave. And so timely, given the faith of the building they stood before.
“It’s an odd position to be in,” he continued. “No longer loyal to a homeland that has been taken over by a tyrant. And not fully embraced by a country I long to become a part of. No matter how hard I’ve worked to eradicate my accent, a stray word comes out now and then that sounds foreign and someone will invariably look on me with suspicion. I used to volunteer at the USO canteen on Commerce Street, but it was clear that they were uncomfortable with my presence.”
Mired as she’d been the past few months in her own series of heartbreaks, she’d never considered how the war had affected those besides the families of the ones serving. Or the families of the lost. She’d heard of internment camps and other injustices, but grief had a way of blinding one to all but the identical grief in another, rather than seeing all the shades of it. For too short a time, being engaged to Artie had lifted her from all of that, only to have his betrayal send her back to its grip.
Until the newspaper ad that Mrs. Koehler had placed. A rope in the deep well she’d sunk into.
“I’m sorry,” she said, words that felt as insignificant as the breath with which they were spoken. But it was through sharing what bruises the war had left on all of them, and was leaving every day with each new headline, that they could triumph over it. And survive.
Erik took her hand in his, glove to glove, interlacing their fingers. She turned toward him, no longer able to dismiss the pull she felt. His blue eyes met her own with a gentleness that softened every safeguard she’d built for herself. It was all she could do not to cry.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, dear Mabel,” he whispered. “You’ve given me the gift of your friendship, new as it is, without prejudice.”
He turned and continued walking toward the park, but he did not pull his hand away. Nor did she want him to. Talking like this filled her with the first traces of peace she’d felt in a long time.
Crossing San Pedro Avenue, they continued on Ashby, away from the empty pool of their first meeting. The day was cold and warm breath crystallized at its touch, so they walked the rest of the short way in silence.
They walked on toward the theater and approached by the front, where the walls were made of smooth stones. A pointed roof and two Doric columns graced the front. Nods to the theater tradition that meant so much in the Greek world. She was glad to finally see it up close.
Erik unlocked the large wooden door at the front, the metal key making a deep groaning sound as the latched turned. It was sheltered from the elements by the roof covering, surely meant to provide welcome shade from the blazing summer sun she’d heard so much about. In this winter, however, it only served to make the landing colder, and Mabel shivered.
Darkness awaited them inside and Erik stepped in first. He ran his hand along an interior wall and some lights came on, illuminating the front part of what appeared to be a hallway that extended horizontally to either side. At the far left was a concession stand where Mabel could imagine enjoying popcorn and sodas before seeing a show.
Erik reached out for her hand again and she took it, the action feeling more natural with each successive time. He led her toward another set of double doors.
“I can’t wait to show this to you,” he said.
Like before, these opened into darkness, but this time when he switched on the lights, she saw the theater itself.
Its name, San Antonio Little Theater, was appropriate. Though she’d never been to see a show in Baltimore, she knew the Hippodrome on Eutaw Street to be renowned for its magnificence. She’d walked past it many times, under a bulb-lit marquee and seen throngs of tuxedoed and sequined patrons passing their tickets to the box office attendants. In comparison, The Little Theater seemed to hold about three hundred people and had no adornments to speak of.
But Erik looked very excited to be here.
“Come this way,” he said with an enthusiastic smile.
He led her to the front row. The chairs on the end were labeled in brass. He pulled down a red velvet seat for her to sit on.
“Stay right there and close your eyes.”
Mabel could hear him leap onto the stage and listened as some kind of equipment shuffled across. She was tempted to peek, but didn’t want to spoil his surprise.
When the sounds abated, she heard the distinct click of lights turn on, which echoed through the empty space.
She felt Erik pull down the seat next to her.
“Ok. Now open.”
What had been a blank void was now a small cabin on the plains. A painted canvas spanned the back of the stage, depicting fields of corn six feet high with a blue, cloudless sky atop it. Sunlight was a mere suggestion, with the blue fading to near-white at the top.
The cabin had a front porch with a white rocking chair and red and white gingham curtains in the windows. To the left, a cutout of a horse was attached to a carriage with a fringed top. The horse was recognizable by shape only: it had no mane, no eyes, no hooves.
It was as if Mabel had been planted in another time and place entirely.
“What do you think?”
She turned toward Erik, awed by what she was seeing.
“Did you do all of this?”
He smiled. “Not all of it. I designed it. And oversaw it. And I’m particularly proud of acquiring the carriage, which was not as easy to find as one might think. But there are several people who bring it all to life.”
He shifted on the chair, tucking one leg under the other. “You see. It’s not the biggest theater. It’s not the most impressive one. But when you bring people together with a similar vision, something beautiful comes from it.”
It was a sentiment aimed at the humble space, but one that could be spoken in a number of settings. Mabel wished she’d adopted that philosophy sooner. She could have been volunteering all this time with the USO, sharing that similar vision of support for the troops; but instead, she’d survived tragedy the only way she knew how: working many hours in a job untouched by war so as not to be reminded of all she’d lost. Meanwhile, Ginger and other friends worked in munitions factories and other endeavors that aided the war effort, putting its reality in front of them every day.
But faced with Erik’s enthusiasm, and the very wonderfulness of him, she saw a different path. One that promised that even if she was late to arrive at it, she could still find a way to do some good.
“Erik, there are no words. This is marvelous work.”
He smiled even wider and his eyes shone. Maybe it was the effect of the stage lights, but she thought not. “I’m so glad you like it. It’s not finished. You can see that the horse still needs to be painted. In fact, that’s why I brought you here today. I thought you might like to help with it.”
“I would love to!” Buck always had an artistic heart. He’d painted a watercolor once of Oriole Park and they’d hung it over the fireplace of their bungalow. It was one of the items that Mabel had left in storage, too afraid that it could get damaged in her move to Texas. But where
ver she settled someday, she would go back for it and for the other items stored underneath Mrs. Molling’s staircase. She wanted to keep sentimental things that conjured the sweetness of their memories, not their sorrows.
Erik stood and bounded up the stairs to the left, looking back to see if she’d followed. She was right behind him, buoyed by the idea of the project ahead of them.
Up close, the set had less luster than it did when it could be viewed in its entirety from the velvet seats. But this view held its own kind of magic: looking back to the empty theater, she could imagine the people who would sit in those seats, setting aside their own worries for a couple of hours to lose themselves in the story being played out.
“Where do we start?” Mabel asked.
“I’m going to take this guy off the hinges of the carriage and we’ll lay him on the tarp.”
Mabel took off her coat and laid it on the edge of the stage. She rolled the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows. When she turned around, Erik had already detached the horse. He pulled a dark wooden box from the carriage and set it on the floor.
“Do you want an apron?” he asked.
“Are you going to wear one?”
He looked down. “Nah, I’m not wearing anything I can’t spill on a bit. But you—you’re a vision. I wouldn’t want you to spoil your clothes.”
It was a considerate offer. She couldn’t afford to ruin a perfectly functional outfit when she had so few as it was.
“Thank you. I’ll do that.”
“Good idea.” He rummaged through the boxes and pulled some out. “You can have your pick. There’s this beauty. ” He held up a green and blue plaid one with red paint splatters that would look like blood if you didn’t know it was paint. “And you can’t go wrong with this.” The second was a pale pink with layers and layers of lace around the edges, as if someone had used it for sewing practice.
“Oh, goodness,” Mabel laughed. “They almost make me want to take my chances without them.”
“Mabel, Mabel,” he said, clutching his heart. “You wound me. I lay these gifts at your feet and you reject them.”
She took them from his hands and held them up. “Well, I’m going to let you pick, then, since you’re the one who will have to look at me in it. I can either look like a the victim of a murder or an old woman’s tablecloth.”
He scratched his chin and considered it. Looking back and forth, he said, “I’m going to go with the plaid one. If you wear the pink, I think I’m going to laugh the whole time and we’ll never get any work done.”
“Plaid it is.” She reached behind to tie it at her neck. Erik leaned over and wrapped his hands around her hair, holding it up to make her task easier. She finished it in a double knot, but he didn’t let go.
He looked into her eyes as she moved her arms down to tie the other strings behind her waist. Only then did he release her hair, running his hands slowly down the long, straight strands that she hadn’t bothered to put in pin curlers last night. Mabel held her breath and tried to still her jitters. Erik’s closeness, the way he looked at her, the aloneness of being in this enchanted place with him, overwhelmed her.
“We should get to work,” he said in a whisper that was barely audible. But he didn’t make a move to step back.
“We should.” She could see small flecks of brown in his ocean blue eyes, giving them a sense of depth.
A light bulb flickered overhead and they both looked up. It was better, at least, than an interruption from Ernestina would have been. But it reminded them of their surroundings and the task they were there for.
“Work,” he said again. This time, he pulled back. He sat down on the tarp and gestured for her to join him.
She sat down, arranging her skirt over her knees, her heart racing at how near he’d been. They danced around their feelings, each with their wounds at the hands of their fathers and of their former loves. Hesitant to love again, yet aching for one who would understand the other’s soul.
Erik picked up a brush and opened a can of paint. He took a deep breath and spoke of the task at hand. “I thought I’d make this guy brown to contrast with the white carriage, but if you think that’s too boring, feel free to speak up. We’re a democracy here at the theater.”
Mabel thought back to pictures of horses she’d seen and considered what might look best when the bright lights above were shining on it. “I like the brown,” she conceded. “But I wonder if it will contrast too much with the white spotlights. When they’re focused here, for example,” she pointed to the length of its body. “I can imagine that we’d see two circles and that could be distracting.”
Erik clapped his hands slowly. “Spoken like you’ve been a set designer all your life,” he said. “What do you suggest?”
Mabel grinned. Mama had always thought her daughter had an eye for art, but Buck was older and there was only enough money for one of them to take classes after school. Her parents promised that she would get her turn when she was fourteen. But after Mama’s death, Mabel had taken on her role of looking after the men in the family. Soon she’d buried the interest so deep that she’d forgotten about it. Until now.
“I’ve seen pictures of American Quarter horses that are more of a golden-brown color. With white manes and tales. And look— your backdrop has lots of blues and greens. I think he would stand out nicely against those.”
“I wonder if they had American Quarter horses on the plains of Oklahoma in the last century,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be that breed precisely. It was just one that came to mind.”
Erik began to mix some white paint with the brown, and as he stirred, a perfect shade began to emerge.
“Do you really think someone in the audience would comment if the breed was wrong for the time and place?”
He nodded. “Oh, Mabel. You surely have enough manners that you would attend a performance and enjoy the effort and if you noticed an inaccuracy, you would keep it to yourself.”
“Has that ever happened to you?”
“A few times. The manager once passed on a letter to me from a horticulturist who’d seen us do Show Boat and claimed that the kind of grass we painted on the backdrop never grew on the shores of the Mississippi River.”
“Wow! That is splitting hairs.”
“The funny thing,” he smiled, “is that I wasn’t aiming for any particular variety of grass. I was just painting thin green strokes. If it depicted anything specific, it was purely accidental.”
Mabel hoped she’d never be like that when she was older. Though it occurred to her that if she’d continued to live in Baltimore and dwell on all that was unfortunate, it would have become a habit. Given a few more decades, she could well be one who would be so ensconced in her own bitterness that something so small could prompt her to complain.
Mrs. Koehler and her nephew had thrown life preservers to her and they didn’t even know it.
Erik handed her a small can and a large brush. “Here is the cream color. Shall we put you in charge of the tail, mane, and hooves?”
“That’s probably best. I’m new at this.” She took the pieces and began to work on the tip of the tail.
They worked in silence at first. As she covered the tail with the paint, she began to see how adding some dimension might make it seem more realistic. She rummaged through the box for a thin paintbrush and dipped it into the darker brown can. She began at the top of the tail and gently painted strokes down it, blending the streaks with the still-wet lighter color. When she was finished, she stood up to look at it with a little more distance.
To her delight, it had given the exact effect she’d wanted. She glanced over at Erik, surprised at her eagerness for his approval, but he was facing away from her, hovering over the neck of the horse. He’d mixed the colors until they were the perfect shade of golden brown, and already it looked terrific.
Erik must have felt her eyes on him. He stopped and turned toward her, causing more than a little embarrassment
that he’d caught her staring. “Will you come to one of the shows in a couple of weeks? I can’t describe the feeling you get when you watch all of your work come together.”
She’d been thinking the very thing. “I can sit in the audience and enjoy the beauty of my horse tail.”
“Oh, there is much more to do than that if you’re game. We still have enough work that you could pinpoint something in nearly every scene that would have your touch on it.”
Her evenings were quite free, if that’s when most of the work was done. Mrs. Koehler was always tired by midday and had missed several suppertimes this week, leaving Mabel to eat in the kitchen with Frieda. It would be an enjoyable diversion, especially with the outdoors so bleak. There was little else to do, save for exploration of Mrs. Koehler’s book collection. But a quick glance had shown her penchant for old tomes. Like the ones in Mabel’s bedroom, the house boasted many leather-bound volumes that looked beautiful on a shelf but held very little appeal to a reader beyond its aesthetic.
“I’d like that, “ she said. Satisfied with the tail, she scooted down the stage and began on the hooves. Erik returned to the neck, taking care with the details. He used black paint to add shadows, and even from here, Mabel could see that the result was that the horse had discernable muscles.
“What would you like to name him?” Erik asked, keeping his eyes on his work.
“The horse?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t have a name in the script. But you could name him. It would be our secret.”
The idea flushed Mabel with a sense of belonging, of having something she was connected to. Even something so silly as a wooden horse could make her feel like she was tied to this place.
But no matter how much it fulfilled her, she would never let go of what kept her tethered to the past.
“Could we name him Buck?”
.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EVER SINCE MEETING HIM at the empty pool, Mabel had imagined what it would be like to kiss Erik. She lay on her pillow imagining the feeling of his lips on hers only to recall the memory of Artie doing the same. Souring the dream of it.
The First Emma Page 14