Which he did not. Somehow he plucked the scimitars out, set each one down, and then the knives, and never let any of them clatter to the boards.
He had worked up a sheen. He bowed, and listened to polite applause. Mrs. McGivers had never heard wild applause or huzzahs or bravos following this act. It was the applause of respect and relief, and maybe thanksgiving. For that is what she always felt when the juggler was done. There he was, whole, not dripping blood or writhing on the boards, killed by accident.
It was not just the audience. The whole company breathed relief when the juggler walked safely into the wings, while a stagehand picked up all his sinister hardware in the limelight. The audience had turned somber, and she spotted a few customers abandoning their seats. It was not, she thought, an act for children.
Mary Mabel Markey would be next. But Mrs. McGivers didn’t see her. She was usually stationed in the wing, ahead of her act, ready to bloom onstage, somehow flowering sweetly as she paced into the brightness.
August Beausoleil was looking for her, too. He was ready, but where was the star of the Follies?
Where indeed? The best quick sub would be the Wildroot girls, but they were lounging in the Green Room. Beausoleil nodded to Mrs. McGivers, the unspoken gesture meaning to go look for the leading lady. So she abandoned her comfortable seat and lumbered toward the stairs, and only then did she encounter Madame Markey, panting, heaving her way forward, her face white and distraught.
She pushed right past Mrs. McGivers, and nodded to the master of ceremonies, who studied her briefly, nodded, and stepped into the light to welcome the top-billed singer and star of the Follies, who looked strangely chalky and afraid.
7
MARY MABEL Markey hurried to escape, feeling out of sorts. She slipped on a plain street dress, found her shawl, and headed through the Green Room hoping no one would waylay her.
But there was August, and she was trapped.
“Want to take a walk, Mary Mabel?”
“No, I’m tired, I’m going to bed.”
“I think we’d better talk.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, heading for the stage door and the velvet cold of Helena at about eleven at night.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I like to escort a lady to safety.”
“I’m not going to talk about it, so forget the gallantry.”
She was alluding to the evening’s performance, which she had struggled through, barely completing three songs, out of breath, off key, her stage presence lost, and that ineffable quality that had made her the queen of the vaudeville palaces utterly gone. The audience had welcomed her, then grown restless, then silent, and when it was over, the applause was tepid. She had smiled, stormed offstage, and neglected the final bow.
But as she stormed into the night, momentarily disoriented, not sure where the hotel was, he stuck with her. The last of the theatergoers were drifting away. Some of the cast had switched to street clothes and were heading for the nearest saloon. There were several lining Last Chance Gulch.
August Beausoleil would not be put off, and he caught her elbow and navigated down the steep grade.
“The air is thin here, and a singer can’t get enough of it,” he said.
“I told you I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“I was thinking some rest might help. We all wear ourselves to shreds on tour.”
“I will not leave the show, and the show needs me, and you’d fall flat on your face if it wasn’t for me.”
“You are quite right, Mary Mabel. Absolutely. You’re the draw.”
He helped her down a long stair that took them into the gulch, where there was a little light spilling from windows. The quiet air bit at her cheeks and ears. Helena was cold and hard.
“But,” he added, “I’m thinking you need a few days’ rest, and we’ll manage. Some time with your head on a warm pillow should give you more air.”
“I don’t need air. And I have no intention of letting LaVerne Wildroot substitute for me. She’d drive the crowd right out the door. You’d be paying refunds.”
“I haven’t heard her. She has some songs worked up, Ethel says.”
“Ethel has a tin ear.”
“The mothers of entertainers tend to have tin ears, yes. Mary Mabel, your slot is yours. I’m simply hoping that a little bed rest will put you back where you belong.”
“You won’t get rid of me that easily, August Beausoleil.”
“It’s my object to keep you.”
“Then we won’t talk about this again.”
“We may have to if your act continues to weaken your hold upon your admirers.”
She relented a little. “I won’t be toyed with,” she said.
He nodded. They both knew he wasn’t toying with her. He was a discreet and sensitive impresario, with a knack for placating unhappy talent. She would give him that. He said no more, but she knew it was far from over. She felt out of breath; the mountain air didn’t seem to satisfy the craving of her body for more oxygen. Her pulse raced, and she ached. She wondered sometimes why she was a performer. No one in the business lived quietly, safe and rested in a nest somewhere.
If Helena did this to her, how would she survive Butte, which was much higher? She felt dizzy again, and felt his firm grip on her elbow, steadying her. They headed up the Gulch, found the dim-lit door to the hotel, and entered. It wasn’t much warmer inside the tiny lobby, but somehow it was welcoming.
“I will see you to your room.”
He never did that. It alarmed her. She ran through the reasons, and concluded that he was escorting her to her door for the worst of them: he feared she would collapse before she got to her room. He had read her well. She was wobbly on her pins, rasping for air, and she hurt. Her vocal cords hurt. They often hurt a bit, but not like this. Her voice had thickened. During her act, the sweetness that had won ardent admirers had vanished, and what emerged this night was thick and nasal and without the maidenly quality that had made her a celebrated singer with a silvery high range.
He paused at the door, while she dug for a key.
“You’ve given your all to the Follies, Mary Mabel. I know you’ll continue.”
“If that’s a warning, lay off.”
“I need to do some accounting,” he said. “We had a full house.”
He tipped his hat and vanished. She was angry with him for no good reason. She’d had a miserable night, sometimes so faint onstage that she wondered if she should sit down and sing from a chair. All those Mary Mabel Markey admirers had been disappointed. It wasn’t blatant. She had pushed air through her throat, forced her lungs, delivered every ounce she could, even as she grew horrified and desperate at her own performance up there in the limelight.
She’d had a few bad nights, sick nights, nights when the stage was so cold, or so hot, it made her dizzy to sing. But nothing like this night, which is what terrified her. She slipped the skeleton key into the door, and swung it open. It wasn’t the fanciest place in Helena—show people didn’t live like that—but it had a soft bed, a taut red blanket drawn over it, and a good white pillow in a slip that wasn’t yellowed. Tonight any bed would be paradise.
She slipped down the hall to the water closet that served six rooms, found it empty, and prepared herself for the night to come. She washed her face in cold water, studying it. She was still young, or at least not seamed and gray. She had a dozen more years at the top of the heap if she wanted that. But she didn’t like this dizziness, or the aching arms and chest and neck, so she hastened to her room, slipped into her white flannel bedclothes, and tumbled into the bed.
But the weariness wouldn’t release. Her racing pulse wouldn’t slow. She lay angrily, not wanting to know what was troubling her, and not wanting to learn about it from stupid doctors who didn’t know, either.
In the morning she sought out Marcus Aurelius Flannigan, MD, who practiced in the front parlor of his home on the other side of Last Chance Gulch. It had to be a morning appointment; she
had a matinee that afternoon, and an evening performance. There were two doctors in Helena, so she chose the one with the most imposing name, on the theory that he knew more.
He welcomed her and led her to his parlor, fitted up as an examination room, with square bottles lining the walls and instruments of torture lying about.
He wore a gray swallowtail coat, and had a closely cropped beard, and hair in his nostrils.
“I am Mary Mabel Markey,” she said, but that elicited no response. “If you are overly familiar with me, and talk about it, I will consider it an offense against me.”
“I practice medicine,” he said, and nothing more.
“I may have the vapors. Find it out at once, and give me some powders. I have a matinee this afternoon.”
He pursed his lips, registering that. “What powders do you have in mind?” he asked.
“You’re the doctor. Take twenty years off me.”
“Well, if you’ll take twenty off me, I’ll take twenty off you,” he said. “Sit right there and tell me what’s ailing you.”
She seated herself on an examination table, eyeing him suspiciously. She was fussy about who did what with Mary Mabel Markey.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“I am dizzy. My strength vanishes. My neck and arms hurt. My left arm. My chest hurts. I have no air. I can’t get enough. It’s the altitude. I’m cold at night. My throat bothers me, especially when I sing ‘Sweet Lover Be Mine.’ My throat’s a little better when I sing ‘Wayward Girl, Whither Goest Thou?’ But I have trouble with the high notes, and the lowest ranges seem a little coarse. Not like me at all. And I almost fainted, twice. And they were all waiting in the wings for me to keel over, but I foiled them.”
“I am going to see about your circulation,” he said.
“I don’t circulate.”
He had one of those listening tubes in hand, and pressed it on her chest, suspiciously close to her bosom, but she let it pass. He listened carefully, moving the instrument about, being all too familiar, but what could you expect of a man named after a Roman emperor?
“Breathe in and out,” he said. He was listening at her side, her back.
He took her pulse, his hand firm on her wrist, his eye on a pocket watch with a second hand. He poked around in her mouth, the fountain of her fame, with a tongue depressor, using a carbide lamp for illumination. Tongue, gums, nostrils. Neck glands. He also peered into her eyes, one by one, with some sort of lens, which annoyed her. That was all the apertures she intended for him to examine. Knee tap. He checked her ankles for swelling, his hand lingering there, probing.
He asked the usual questions. How long have you felt this? You get faint standing up? How about sitting down? What powders are you using? Have you had any other examination?
She was inclined not to answer him because he was becoming personal, and she was Mary Mabel Markey, and doctors who wore swallowtail coats were obviously suspect. Clothing could cloak incompetence. Where did he go to medical college, and what was he doing in a raw, tawdry town like Helena, full of politicians and miners and crooks?
No one in his right mind would live in Montana except to get rich quick and get out.
“Your pulse is high, ninety-five, and erratic. Your heartbeat’s erratic and not regular. Your left ventricle’s misfiring, is the way I could best put it. You have heart trouble.”
“I do not. It’s the altitude.”
He sighed. “That’ll be three dollars.”
“What do you mean? Are you done with me?”
“You just announced that my diagnosis is wrong, and it’s altitude. Three dollars, and you may head for your matinee.”
“Of course it’s wrong. So why should I pay?”
He stared out the window for a moment. “You’re in great peril of an attack. You’ve had some small ones. There’s not much to do for it but lose weight. You would profit from losing ten or fifteen pounds.”
“I am Mary Mabel Markey and I won’t listen to malicious talk.”
“You would also do better at lower altitudes. You’ll breathe better at sea level. And certainly live in less peril.”
“I knew it. My rivals have paid you off. I’ll want some powders now.”
He contemplated that. “I saw no major problems with your throat. But it would take special lighting equipment, incandescent light beamed in, to tell you more. Until Helena’s got electricity, I’m limited. But I would suggest temporarily retiring from your company, and spending a few months at a seashore.”
“I want powders.”
“Any powders I might prescribe would have no effect on your heart, nor would they improve your breathing, and they’d probably weaken your voice.”
“But they’d stop pain.”
“Dover’s Powder, opium, would stop pain, and so would any of the cough syrups with opium in them. They would all damage your voice. And the longer you use them, the higher the dose you’d need to subdue your demons.”
“I want powders.”
He eyed her gravely. “I’m sure you do. And they would be your ruin. When you sing ‘Sweet Lover Be Mine,’ you may not receive the ovation, the response, you expected.”
She saw that he was not going to budge, so she pulled out two dollars and slapped them on the examination table.
He eyed the two dollars, eyed her, and nodded. An odd amusement filled his face. But he didn’t argue.
She left in a tantrum, headed for the nearest apothecary shop, purchased a bottle of Dover’s Powder in tablet form, and some Williams’ New England Cough Syrup, opium in an alcohol solution, and headed for the matinee.
8
THE HOUSE was filling up. August Beausoleil eyed the rough crowd, wondering what brought them to the matinee on a bright autumn afternoon. They were miners. The matinee price was seventy-five cents and two bits for gallery seats. They would enjoy the show, have money to spare for a few drinks before heading for the outlying gold mines. Or so he was told. They were not gentlemen in cravats, and there were few women out there.
That was unusual. In most places, matinees were for women and children, who could see the show and reach their homes safely before dark. But not this crowd. He saw bearded men wearing bib overalls, pale men who worked far from sunlight. Men with big, rough hands. And one or two with a flask in hand. Many of them lived in remote barracks and hadn’t seen a woman in a week.
A quiet descended as curtain time neared. These were men starved for company, starved for entertainment, ready to lap up whatever was put on their plate. It would likely be the best sort of audience, generous and happy and forgiving, if one or another performer failed.
All right, then. The audience had settled. He nodded, and the curtain rolled skyward, revealing himself, center stage, in the bright white light of the lime. This would be a dandy afternoon. A faint foreboding skittered past him, and he ignored it.
“Ladies, gents, welcome to the Beausoleil Brothers Follies,” he said. “We’re here in beautiful Helena, the proudest town in Montana. Now, to welcome you, meet the Wildroot Sisters, Cookie, Marge, and LaVerne. Let’s give them all a big hand.”
Indeed, applause rose upward as the three young ladies danced out, in the order by which they had been introduced. And quickly, they broke into song, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” always a good opener that swelled up a little national fervor.
Beausoleil discreetly abandoned the stage, and waited in the wings.
The girls wore shimmery taffeta, rose and turquoise, which rippled with light and movement and added to the luster of the opening. It was all fine, fine, another opening, another matinee.
Several acts appeared, juggling, tap dancing, and the audience delighted in them, and waited for the one that had brought them. Beausoleil knew they were waiting, didn’t quite know why, but knew he’d soon find out.
Mary Mabel sat quietly, almost remote, dressed in her show costume, her corset giving her a wasp waist and pushing her bosom high. She was oddly serene. Usually, as her turn loom
ed, she was blooming with energy, some inner fires heating up for the performance. But now she watched, distant, all too quiet.
“You’re fine, Mary Mabel?” he asked.
She replied with a little wave of her hand. It was a white hand she rubbed with sheep lanolin daily to hide the wrinkles. Now it was soft and languid. She peered up at him with enormous eyes, and smiled. Her quietness disturbed him almost as much as the agitation that had given a ragged tone to her act the day before.
“The show is a king,” he said. “It commands us.”
She nodded, still strangely quiet, the shadowed light hiding her from him.
“All right, here we go,” he said.
She stood, languidly.
He adjusted his tuxedo, made sure the attached white bib was reasonably clean, and plunged out just as the applause was fading. He was always conscious of pace, and hated dead moments. So now he strode into the shocking light even as the clapping echoed through the hall, and waited for all those miners to settle into the next act, the big act, the one he knew had brought them, the one for which they had laid out seventy-five cents and slipped into a theater seat.
The light momentarily blinded him, as usual, but soon enough he could make out those rows of males before him. And he could smell them. This was not a perfumed crowd, not for this Saturday matinee.
“And now, the lady you’ve been waiting for, the one, the only Miss Mary Mabel Markey! Welcome our sweetheart!”
Some of those miners cheered; most clapped amiably, and settled into their seats. She moved languidly past the arch, into the light, and somehow instantly quieted the crowd. Some performers could do that. Her mere presence was all it took.
She smiled right and left, almost a Wayne Windsor performance, letting all those lusty men have a gander at that hourglass form.
This would be good, he thought. He guessed she’d sing three. Usually it was two, but a little adoration sometimes stirred her juices.
She would sing a capella. She usually did. That was one of the qualities that had made her a legend. She smiled, took a breath, and began. But she produced only a squawk. She smiled, nodded, touched her throat, and plunged in again, and that yielded another throaty rumble. She seemed puzzled. The whole house was watching, transfixed.
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