Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “I want to see the manager,” said Herma.

  The clerk sighed and motioned to the bellboy. “Go get the Sheeny.”

  Mr. Dickran Khatchanigherian was one of the features of life in San Francisco and had been for as long as anyone could remember. He had been an employee of Mr. Larkin since the days when the hotel was built. In person he was imposing: over six feet tall, bulky in the middle, with small hands and feet, but a head too large for his body. His nose was one of the wonders of creation. It was too large to fit between his mouth and his eyes, even in the oversized head, so it began somewhat above the eyebrows in the middle of his forehead, descended at a diagonal for three inches or so, came to a bump like an elbow, and continued on a distance farther to end in a bulb like a cab man’s horn. Among the employees of the hotel he was invariably known as the Sheeny, although he was of impeccable Armenian lineage.

  There he stood with many gold rings on his fingers, pointing his nose at Herma and working the muscles around his mouth, which was rather small. After a while he opened the mouth and said, “I am Khatchanigherian.”

  “I am Herma, and I require two rooms with separate entrances and a connecting bath.”

  The Sheeny took the reservation card out of the clerk’s hands and looked at it.

  “We have reserved number 602 for you, my dear young lady. It’s a very nice room and has a bay window overlooking Market Street.”

  “It’s not what I require.”

  “It has a private bath.”

  “I require two rooms, with separate entrances and a connecting bath.”

  “But I don’t understand, my dear young lady, why you, being only one person, require two rooms, and in such an unusual arrangement.”

  “The other room is for Mr. Hite.”

  “Who is Mr. Hite?”

  The clerk silently pointed to something on the card he was holding.

  “Ah yes. Mr. Hite. And when will Mr. Hite be arriving, if you please?”

  “Shortly.”

  “Mr. Hite will arrive shortly,” pondered the Sheeny in a silken and slightly viscous voice. “And you require two rooms with separate entrances and a connecting bath.” He worked the muscles of his mouth some more. “Is Mr. Hite a relative of yours?”

  “That’s none of your business. Do you have such rooms or not?”

  “Oh my yes, my dear young lady, we do have rooms like that, we just don’t have one reserved for you, that’s the trouble. And besides,” he went on in his syrupy voice, “I’m not sure Mr. Larkin would approve of this arrangement. It seems exceptional. It seems unusual. It seems … an arrangement at which one might lift an eyebrow.”

  “I’m a very good friend of Mr. Larkin.”

  This was not entirely truthful, but Herma said it and persisted, standing there between her two bags with her mouth firmly set.

  “Well, the old fellow is getting on in years. He doesn’t remember what he’s done from one day to the next. If I were to telegraph him now, he might very well not remember you.”

  “My manager, Mr. Hite, is a very good friend of Madame Ernestine. Do you know who Madame Ernestine is?”

  “Oh yes I do, my dear young lady.” The Sheeny seemed impressed by this arrangement of friendships. If Herma was a good friend of Mr. Larkin, and Mr. Hite was a good friend of Madame Ernestine, then perhaps their sharing a suite wasn’t so much a matter to lift an eyebrow at. “Yes indeed I do.” Clearly Herma was a formidable opponent. She was well armed, and deft with her weapons. “Well, dear dear. Let me see what I can do. There’s 401 and 403—no, that won’t do. The Greek bishop is in there. 301 and 303. I was saving them for an important banker from the East who is arriving next week with his secretary, but I’ll put him off in some way. 301 and 303.” He motioned to the clerk, who got out the keys and slid them across the desk. “They are both on Market Street, my dear young lady, and both with bay windows. There is a connecting bath with the latest French arrangements. 301 has a fireplace, and 303 does not. Which would you prefer for yourself, and which for Mr. Hite?”

  “I’ll take the fireplace.”

  “Very well. The rate is thirty-seven dollars for both rooms, or two hundred dollars if taken by the week.”

  “The rooms are to be free.”

  “Oh dear dear dear. What are you saying, my dear young lady? The rooms to be free?”

  The clerk called his attention to something on the card. In the lower corner, in small letters, was the word “Gratis.”

  The Sheeny worked his mouth around one last time. “The rooms, my dear young lady, are at your disposal,” he told her, more greasily than ever, in an effort to smile. “Show the young lady to 301 and 303,” he told the bellboy without raising his voice.

  Herma went off, following the boy carrying the two bags.

  “Dear dear dear,” said the Sheeny. “What a pain in the ass. How long are we to have this nuisance around, I wonder? And I have no doubt that her so-called manager, Mr. Hite, is even worse.”

  “She’s a looker, I’ll say that for her,” said the clerk.

  The Sheeny said nothing, only snuffed contemptuously. As was well known, he preferred boys, if possible under the age of twelve. He was a personal friend of the police chief and had never been arrested.

  The bellboy came back down. “I put her in 301, and the dude goes in 303. Miss Herma says she needs a piano in her room.”

  “A piano?”

  “For rehearsing.”

  “Rehearsing what?” said the Sheeny.

  4.

  Herma arrived ganz rechtzeitig, as Mr. Speidermann put it. Women were in short supply in the repertory company of the Larkin, as they were in every realm of San Francisco life, with a single obvious exception—there were plenty of ladies of the night. In this the city conserved an aspect of the rough frontier town it had been only a generation or two before; its population was preponderantly male, and women of any sort were a novelty. Herma was not only a woman, but a young and pretty one, and one who could sing, and she was seized upon avidly—almost with a little pounce—by the director of the theater.

  His name fitted him exactly—he was a slightly undersized, mild, rather insubstantial man, with spindly arms and legs, and a slow and deliberate way of moving (until he pounced), but a sharp beak that looked as though it might poison you if he bit you. If there was a bitterness deep in Speidermann, he had his reasons—beginning with the fact that he, a Viennese, a musician to the core, and a graduate of the Staatsoper conducting school, was treated as no more than an employee of the hotel and subordinate in all things to the Sheeny, who despised him, since he was neither a Greek bishop nor a wealthy Eastern businessman, and because the hotel had to put him up gratis as it did Herma. Going on through his list of troubles, he suffered from hemorrhoids, his salary was low, his exile from his beloved Vienna was evidently permanent, the Larkin Theater was inferior in all respects to its rivals the Grand Opera House and the Tivoli, and he as its manager was plagued by a chronic shortage of good musicians and of female singers of any sort, good or bad.

  So Speidermann, hardly believing in his luck in finding this young and gilded fly in his net, quickly incorporated her into a production that was just going into rehearsal at the Larkin Theater—Feminissima, a revue starring Liane de Pougy, “Straight from the Casino in Paris, France” as the marquee out on Market Street had it. In the immemorial tradition of provincial theaters, everything that played at the Larkin was straight from somewhere, but never from San Francisco. And it went without saying that, while the star was imported, the musicians and the rest of the cast were local—so that Speidermann, in addition to his other troubles, had to find singers who could at least pronounce the French language well enough to convince an audience of San Franciscans.

  Liane de Pougy, perhaps the best-known French music-hall star of her time, was a spectacular redhead, no longer in the first blush of her youth, it was true, but still shapely and energetic. Her voice was a kind of hoarse vibrant contralto exactly suited
to her material and its traditions. It was the voice of a woman who had lived; this was what struck every member of the audience. In fact, she herself so declared: “Moi, j’ai vécu bien,” she sang in a smoky tone in her second-act finale. In the third act, finishing her song against a background of persimmon-colored peacock feathers, she was negligent enough to let slip a corner of her costume so that a round white fruit with a pink dot in the middle of it was momentarily visible, to the enthusiastic acclamation of the audience, nine-tenths male, and the hypocritical and simpering confusion of the star. In this spectacle, based on a “poem” by Jancel with music by Gaston Lemaire, Herma sang among other things a trifle called “Si tu m’aimes comme je t’aime, tu m’aimes.” Since she didn’t drop any part of her costume, and there would have been nothing in particular to show on her chest if she had, there was no wild burst of applause when she finished. A notice in the Evening Call reported that the star “was ably assisted by Irma, a young artist newly arrived from the south.” As a junior member of the repertory, Herma was paid two hundred dollars a week. Since there were six performances a week and she had a song in each of the three acts, this worked out to eleven dollars and eleven cents a song, or slightly more than she had been paid for singing at weddings in Santa Ana. She took out a savings account at the Wells Fargo Bank, avoiding the Crocker because of the risk of meeting Mr. Riemer.

  Feminissima lasted three weeks, and was followed by The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar (“The Latest Sensation Direct from Vienna”), which Speidermann perhaps felt he owed himself to compensate for his exile in this remote part of the world. This Teutonic confection didn’t please, and the Sheeny himself ordered it stopped after a week. For a while the theater was dark, while Speidermann pondered what to do next, glancing nervously at the door through which the Sheeny might come at any moment, ordering him perhaps to put on a vaudeville with Scotch comedians and a dog act. Finally he bethought himself of Herma, who seemed to have a supple little voice and was already on the payroll, and also of an operetta performed in New York the year before called Mlle. Modiste with music by Victor Herbert. No more imported stars, the Sheeny had said; the Pougy had cost too much, and so had the piece of Viennese pastry who had sung the Lehar. Herbert was at the peak of his popularity and the rights would be expensive. But on the other hand Herma would be free. The thing was, could she do it? Nobody had ever heard of her. She had a figure like somebody’s younger brother. There was no place in it to let her dress fall down like Pougy, the plot was trifling, and there was only one good song. But he would have to do the best he could with what he had! At least the thing pretended to take place in Paris, there was that to be said for it. He telegraphed to New York for the score, despairing, as he came back along Market, to see on a poster that Tetrazzini was singing The Magic Flute at the Tivoli.

  In the empty theater, with a single Edison bulb hanging over the stage and the rest of the place dark, Speidermann spread out the score and began explaining it to Herma and the accompanist. Three acts. Lyrics in English. The setting, Mme. Cecile’s hat shop on rue de la Paix in Paris, where Fifi was employed. Fifi had a talent for singing. An American millionaire financed her singing lessons. She married a Captain Etienne de Bouvray whose uncle had a castle. About in the middle of the thing, Fifi sang her waltz Kiss Me Again. The rest of it was a lot of whipped cream. Still, they had liked it in New York.

  The accompanist, a veteran cynic in shirt-sleeves and a derby, slapped it out onto the piano. He tried a few chords. “Dum de dum dum. Oh dear one how often I think of the past. You gonna do the verse first? The verse ain’t much. You better do the chorus first and then switch back to the verse.”

  “Pardon me, my friend,” said Speidermann in his heavy Viennese accent, swallowing the R’s. He turned the page to the chorus, pointed out the place to the pianist who began jabbing his fingers into the keys, and broke into a falsetto that bore a corpselike, thready, and catarrhal resemblance to a soprano.

  He broke off and said, “Lovely. Ve’ll start there and then svitch to the chorus,” ignoring the fact that it was the pianist who had made this suggestion.

  “But look here, Maestro, it’s too hard for the little lady. She starts way down here below the middle of the piano, then she has to go way up to G on top of the roof.”

  “It’s only an octave and a half,” said Herma scornfully.

  “Yeah, but you have to start down too low for a soprano, honey. It’s for a more experienced voice.”

  “Horsefeathers.”

  “Okay, let’s see you do it if you’re so smart.”

  He played the D seventh, held it, then struck the G chord and Herma sang. Starting powerfully, with a slight throaty tone, on the B, she mounted up in an arching legato to the F and then effortlessly lilted through the rest of the line.

  The accompanist took his hands off the keys. “You got a friend behind the piano or you doing all that by yourself?”

  “Fantastisch,” breathed Speidermann. “But meine Liebe, meine Liebchen, do the rest of it please, in case what you have just done was only some accident.”

  Herma sang the rest of it, while Speidermann clasped his hands and the accompanist watched her with a kind of cynical interest. It wasn’t the low B of the opening that caused the trouble, it was or might be the difficult legato from high G to middle F, toward the end, which might be difficult to carry off without an unseemly swoop. But it was only musical comedy, Herma told herself.

  “Ten-der-ly pressed …” she dropped to the F as easily as a bird alighting, “close to your breast …” By this time the accompanist had left off dallying with one-hand chords, and the full piano came in behind and under the voice. Herma swept on. There was nothing to it, it was easy! After this there was only the climax with its reiterated kiss me’s, swelling, pressing, soaring in its lyric exultation toward that final high G which she rose to and held with perfect pitch and an effortless vibrato.

  And, as the youthful voice died away, the rush of descending octave chords from the piano, as though tactfully withdrawing from the scene of so much lyricism and so much emotion—the final arpeggio—and the accompanist was left staring at the fermata marks at the end of the song, like two small eyes with eyebrows over them.

  Speidermann’s word was carefully chosen. It was not that it was so great a voice as all that, but that it was fantastisch in the way it coiled around the song and seemed to be able to do whatever it wanted, without effort, with perfect pitch and legato.

  “Meine Liebchen, have you ever sung this song before?”

  “No.”

  The accompanist: “Ever been kissed?”

  Herma had no comment on this.

  Accompanist: “Well, I think the kid will do all right.”

  “All right! But it’s fantastisch! Wunderbar! Zauberhaft!”

  “Well, I don’t speak Dutch. But the kid’s got a classy little voice there. A little more training and she could sing grand opera.”

  “I’ve already sung grand opera,” said Herma with slight hauteur, “at French’s Opera House in Santa Ana, California.”

  “Oh, pardon me.”

  After only ten days or so of rather frantic rehearsal—a dark house ate up money, as the Sheeny reiterated heavily—the Larkin opened with Mlle. Modiste, Comic Opera with Music by Victor Herbert and Book and Lyrics by Henry Blossom (“Straight from the Regency Theater in New York,” declared the marquee rather ambiguously), with Herma as Fifi, Henry Wollantz as Etienne, and a nondescript middle-aged baritone whose name nobody could remember as the American millionaire. This time both the Evening Call and the Examiner sent critics, although the Chronicle, the aristocrat of the city’s three papers, seemed never to have heard of the Larkin, or to have forgotten it in the long years during which it had slowly moldered and sunk in artistic esteem. The Call got Herma’s name right this time, and the Examiner critic, a youth of twenty on his first assignment, lost his head completely and waxed so ecstatic that he had to be restrained by the city editor. As the r
eview finally appeared, considerably toned down, it spoke of “a new star in the firmament” and “a youthful nightingale” and predicted, correctly, that in a week everybody in town would be humming Kiss Me Again.

  And in fact it was the simple little waltz that drove the show to success, even though Herma had a clever little coloratura passage in the second act and Etienne pumped the maximum of emotion into The Time, the Place, and the Girl. At the Sansome Street firehouse the off-duty firemen harmonized on “Safe in your arms, Far from alarms,” and there were numerous parodies—Kiss Me in French—Kiss My Behind. In this strongly male city with its smell of sea breeze, freshly cut lumber, and stale beer, the fad soon spread to the Mission Street saloons, whose habitués seldom went to operas, even comic ones. “I don’t get it. What’s her other name?” “She ain’t got any other name. It’s because she’s French.” “She ain’t French.” “Then how come she kisses you in French?” “She don’t kiss you in French. She kisses you a-gain. And a-gain and a-gain and a-gain.” These artistic discussions usually ended in the same way, with the musician of the place seating himself at the battered piano.

  “Kiss my behind,

  And you will find,

  Dat I will soon kiss yers too-o-o …”

  Barbarians, breathed Speidermann. But what did it matter, since the dollars continued to roll in? But if they rolled in, they also rolled out—Wallantz, who had a certain celebrity, asked for and got five hundred a week, and here came that pesky Hite, Herma’s manager, to demand more for her too.

  “I’ve been reading this review in the Examiner.”

  “Ja, prachtvoll.”

  “‘A new star has appeared in the musical comedy firmament with the local premier of Victor Herbert’s Mlle. Modiste at the Larkin. While Henry Wallantz performs capably as always, and Boris Krumpf’ “(this was the baritone’s name) “‘ is at least competent, it is Herma in the part of Fifi who makes the show. This refreshingly youthful voice … ’”