Anything Goes

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “I see,” he said. “You are?”

  “Ginger.”

  “Ah…”

  “First and last, Ginger.”

  “A stage name, then. Well, come along, and let’s talk.”

  He led her to a small office, lit the overhead lamp, and motioned toward a chair.

  “Mr. Beausoleil suggested that we do what we could, by way of a service. We’ve asked Monsignor Murphy to officiate, and there immediately arose some questions. Is the deceased a Catholic, and in good standing? A theater person, you know. That’s how it is. We’ve been unable to find out, so Monsignor has reluctantly concluded that the proper course is for him to assist in a simple prayer service. He’ll open, Mr. Beausoleil will eulogize the late departed, and the monsignor will offer a prayer for her salvation. And of course, yes, your song would be fitting and sacred. We’ll fit it in. You’re talking about Franz Schubert, of course?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, fitting. How kind of him to send you along. Now, we’ve scheduled it for tomorrow at eleven. It must not interfere with the matinee. They’re scheduling matinees each day, in the hope of recovering what they lost yesterday. One today, of course. But you must know that. How shall I list you in the program?”

  “Ginger.”

  He smiled suddenly. “Ginger it is, then. Please be here ahead of eleven, so we can seat you in the first row. Now, will you need accompaniment? We will have a pianist.”

  “I will sing a capella.”

  “I take my hat off to you theater people. I would want to hide behind a pipe organ.”

  “Where will Miss Markey be buried?”

  “Mountain View. Immediately following the ceremony.”

  “How will I get there?”

  “It’s a long way. The cast won’t be there; they have a matinee. But I believe Mr. Pomerantz will represent the troupe. Maybe he’ll take you.”

  She worried it all the way back to her hotel, where she had engaged the room for another night. Couldn’t they respect Mary Mabel Markey enough to set aside the matinee? Was that show business, or just the Beausoleil Brothers Follies at work? Bury their top act on the run? Well, she knew what she would do. She would sing the beloved Mary-song in a way that honored the woman they had come to bury; sing it in a way that it had never been sung.

  Was it the right song? Would a song honoring the Virgin be the thing for a vaudeville singer? Maybe she should choose something else, something more suited to Mary Mabel Markey. She had mastered it in Pocatello but had never sung it at a recital. It wouldn’t have been suitable there.

  Much to her surprise, the service was at the Maguire Opera House. Long before eleven the next morning, every seat had been taken. The cast, Miss Markey’s only relatives, filled the first rows. And Ginger, dressed in white, was among them, at an aisle seat. The crowd waited expectantly, in deep silence, not so much as a cough disturbing the quiet. An upright piano stood at one side, downstage. The curtains were open. At eleven, the stage lights came up, shining down on Miss Markey’s simple coffin, which rested on a pedestal draped with gilded cloth.

  The monsignor appeared, wearing a black suit with red piping, and addressed the silent throng. “We are here to celebrate the life of our beloved Mary Mabel Markey, and to hasten her ascent to an eternal life with the angels,” he said. “Now let us pray.”

  Next was August Beausoleil, this time in an immaculate black suit, entirely at home on that stage, before that quiet crowd.

  “I will talk a bit about our dear departed. Every member of our company is grieving this hour for a remarkable woman who was the backbone of our show.

  “She was intensely private, but once in a while shared bits of her past. Mary Mabel was not her name; I don’t know what it once was. I know that she was Irish, that she grew up in New York, and from earliest childhood found a way to survive by singing the songs her mother had taught her. Songs she remembered after her mother had died. Singing as a girl on street corners for a bit of loose change. Singing for passersby. Singing for her supper, for those songs would give her the only food she had, and the corners of the city offered her the only shelter she had.

  “But out of it came a miracle. Her very life depended on pleasing people, and that was her salvation and her secret road to success. When someone liked her song and gave her a generous tip, that was a clue. When someone listened to a song, walked away, and never looked back, that was a clue. So she was in the hardest school of all, and failure was not a grade, but death or starvation. But gradually, being a woman of courage and intelligence, as well as a woman who learned without help how to employ her voice, gradually she turned herself into an instrument of beauty and joy for countless admirers. Mary Mabel Markey wrought the raw material into the most successful female singer of our times, and not one step along the way was easy.”

  Beausoleil talked of the way Miss Markey had become the single thing she wished to be, a singer, and how that had shaped all her life, to her last hour, when she sang because she had to, sang against the wishes of the show’s managers, sang because she was there, in Butte, among her people.

  “Mary Mabel Markey gave the world songs that linger in our hearts. Tomorrow, a year from now, and when you are old and gray, you will be hearing her songs in the concert hall of your memory,” he concluded.

  It was amazing how that crowd devoured August Beausoleil’s eulogy. They were starved for Miss Markey; they wanted every intimate detail, and he gave them whatever he knew of a woman who was largely private and distant from them all.

  After he sat down, the monsignor invited Ginger forward.

  “And now, a sacred song in honor of all womanhood,” he said, judiciously.

  Ginger had never faced a crowd like this. She made her way to the stage and peered out upon the sea of quietness, brushed her white dress, folded her hands together, and began.

  “Ave Maria,

  gratia plena,

  Maria, gratia plena,

  Maria, gratia plena,

  Ave, Ave, Dominus…”

  Ave Maria, full of thanksgiving, Maria, full of thanksgiving, Maria, full of thanksgiving, Ave, Ave, God …

  And so began her solo. There alone on the stage, she let her voice soar far out into the great opera house, soar to every corner, soar to every heart.

  Then a strange thing happened. Joseph, Mrs. McGivers’ accordionist, quietly stepped away from his seat in the first row, made his way to the stage, and settled at the piano, and soon was adding its notes to her voice. She was momentarily flustered, but he was perfect, and the piano only amplified the moment, and the words, and sent them sailing on the wings of white keys and black.

  “Benedicta tu in mulieribus,

  et benedictus, et benedictus,

  et benedictus fructus ventris…”

  And then it was done, and the last sound from the last key faded into the hall, and there was only the deepest silence. She waited for a moment, and then retreated to her seat, and the pianist quietly returned to his. There were gazes upon her. She settled in the safety of her seat, and waited.

  “Let us pray for the departed,” said the monsignor.

  And they did. And then the priest blessed the crowd and sent them on their way.

  She watched, suddenly alone, not part of the company, unknown to them all. The Butte crowd collected quietly outside, where an ebony hearse, drawn by four jet horses with black plumes, stood waiting. By prearrangement six of the troupe gathered about the coffin and carried it outside to the hearse and slid it inside the glass-paneled chamber. And then, with a stately clop of hooves, its driver, in a black silk stovepipe hat, steered the ebony hearse toward the cemetery, far away.

  She watched. Her part was done. She felt oddly lost.

  Then Charles Pomerantz approached her.

  “I will give you a ride, if you wish,” he said.

  An enclosed hack, armor against the Butte wind, awaited, its bundled-up driver eager to move.

  The crowd was watching him and
her. The company gathered on the street was watching. They would not be going. They would be snatching a bite if they cared to before the show, and preparing for the matinee that was looming just ahead. Charles Pomerantz and the girl in white, the girl unknown to them, would represent the company at the graveside service.

  He held her hand, to help her up, and soon she was seated, with a buffalo carriage robe about her, while he settled beside her. The carriage rocked gently down a rough road.

  “Ginger, that was magnificent.”

  “Well, thank you, but most sacred songs are like that.”

  “Your voice. Never have I heard such a voice, and such an offering, in any opera house. Or any concert hall. Or anywhere else.”

  She glanced at him, suddenly shy. He was gazing intently.

  15

  A BITING wind hastened the monsignor through the burial rite. Two employees of the funeral home were on hand, no one else from Butte. Ginger shivered in her summery white dress, with only a shawl to turn the cold. Charles Pomerantz stood patiently, the representative of the touring company.

  He was the only person present who knew Miss Markey. Ginger had not met her. The priest wasn’t sure Mary Mabel was in good standing, but he was offering her the benefit of the doubt, and gently laboring through the burial, though he was blue with cold. He was doing as best as he could, because death was the greatest mystery.

  It was an odd end for a nationally known and acclaimed performer, Charles thought. Burial in utter obscurity, no friends gathered at the grave. The company would pay for all this, and a headstone, too, and it would carve a hole deep into the working funds that supported the tour. He lacked even a flower to lay upon her plain pine coffin. She would be buried as anonymously as she had started, a girl struggling to survive on the streets of the city, not unlike August Beausoleil. She deserved more.

  Then it was over. “Ginger, go wait in the hack,” he said. “I’ll thank the priest.”

  The monsignor was climbing into a black topcoat.

  “Those of us who were Miss Markey’s only family thank you, Father. She is lost to us, and found above.”

  “We may all trust in it,” the priest said, and hastened toward the mortuary hack, which would hurry him back to his rectory.

  Ginger fled to the thin protection of the hack, where the driver huddled against the cold, and moments later Charles climbed in and pulled the lap robe over both of them. A great quiet settled upon them as the driver steered the reluctant dray straight into the wind. Pomerantz had a sense that things were unfinished, that Mary Mabel was waiting for more. Maybe what was needed was a wire to someone back east, announcing her death. But who? She had lacked a family, and found one in her admirers. Maybe that was the thing: let the press know, and the world would know.

  The hack rolled up the gentle slope toward the opera house. The chastening cold had vanquished traffic, and Butte seemed almost deserted. There were more dogs than people on the sidewalks. Smoke scraped the streets.

  “Where to, Ginger?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “You’re at the Butte Hotel. I’ll drop you there.”

  She peered out of the breath-silvered isinglass window. She was no longer shivering, the carriage robe warming her.

  “I want to thank you for singing. I’ve never heard a finer voice. And not just a voice, either. I’ve never heard a more accomplished voice, a voice that was tutored by someone, wherever you came from.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re at the end of your tether. You don’t know what to do.”

  “I will make my way.”

  “You came to join the show.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never saw anything so compelling. You, dressed in white, with your wavy hair, mahogany colored, like my mother’s, all alone, without so much as a pianist, standing there poised, your hands folded together at first, wholly absorbed in the gift you would give us.”

  She eyed him, her brown eyes wide.

  “Franz Schubert, was it not? Is your repertoire mostly classical—opera?”

  “It’s everything. It was the wish of my … mentors … to be able to entertain them for any occasion.”

  The hack driver pulled up at the hotel. She pulled the carriage robe off, thanked him, opened the flimsy door, and stepped down.

  She started toward the hotel.

  He threw open his door.

  “Ginger!” he said.

  She paused, orphaned, in the cold.

  “Please join me.”

  The driver looked impatient. He wanted to escape that crushing air.

  She turned back, shivering again, the blue shawl a poor defense against the bitter wind. But she clambered in.

  “The Chequamegon,” he said, and the weary horse once again lugged the hack along hard-frozen streets.

  “Ginger, will you marry me?” he asked.

  It shocked her. It shocked him even more. He had no idea why he had asked. The thing had simply erupted.

  She could make no sense of it. She stared at him, stared at the cold city, stared ahead, even as he tucked the carriage robe around her.

  She smiled. “I’m not your ward,” she said. “And I don’t know anything about you. But it was sweet of you. It was the nicest compliment.”

  He was beginning to think he didn’t know anything about himself, either. The question hung between them, like a light throwing illumination in all directions. What was it about her? Her looks, something like his mother. Her bravery. She volunteered to sing at a funeral all alone, with no help, for people she had never seen before. Or something else. Only now, as the hack climbed another grade, did he realize that she had knocked him over. Theater men were immune to all that. Especially womanizing ones like himself. He could not fathom what had made him so reckless. Now, if she began to smile, he’d have to retreat from that precipice.

  They reached the restaurant. It was midday. He hurried her in, paid the driver, and led her toward warmth. They settled into a booth in deep silence, the moment oddly choreographed with nods and smiles and courtesy. She still was cold. He settled his topcoat over her lap. The impulsive question was forbidden turf now. And yet it governed everything they said and did. He supposed it had been a lapse, a folly, something that had escaped harness.

  He ordered tea for her, a whiskey for himself, and still she sat in silence.

  “You asked. I will tell you about me,” he said. “I’m Polish. My parents brought me here at age two from Warsaw. I’m Jewish. There were troubles in the old country and promise in the new. I’m thirty-three. I’m from Brooklyn. I’ve been in this business since eighteen, when I sold tickets. I did accounting. I managed acts. I speak Polish, Yiddish, English, and some others. As you probably guessed.”

  He was referring to the slight accent that rolled up some letters and words.

  She nodded, her warm gaze registering everything about him: The combed-back hair, starting high on the crown of his head. The sallow flesh, the dark eyes, peering out from bags.

  The plainness of his features. He could never pass for dashing or handsome.

  “No one has ever proposed before. Especially not an older man.”

  He was almost twice her age. “And who is Ginger?”

  “She is what you see before you, and all else has passed and will never be seen again.”

  “So I have proposed to a new woman.”

  “I am eighteen. That is the age of consent, I believe.”

  “And, you have had male friends, boys?”

  She shook her head. That was the past. He could see the curtain sliding down.

  “How do you live? Where is home?” she asked.

  “Home is my suitcase. I live in hotel rooms ahead of the show, or sometimes with the show, and at the end of the tour, I rent a room until the next tour.”

  “And what would you do with me?”

  “The same.”

  “I would have to like the business,” she said. “That’s why
I left … where I grew up. Why have you proposed to me?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

  She colored a little. “I can imagine. You’ve had many women.”

  “Yes. A few. Ah, more than a few.”

  “And you’re an accountant!” She had turned merry.

  “A thousand women, and none of them got into the show.”

  “Would this marriage last one night, one week, or one month?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know why I asked, and I cannot see into the future. I apologize. It was an impulse. I shouldn’t make light of it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Neither can I see ahead. But never say never.”

  “I don’t audition acts,” he replied.

  “It’s the best offer on the table,” she said. “And now and then there’ll be a piano. I need a piano in my life. A piano’s more important than singing. So you’re stuck with it.”

  He sat, nursing his drink, oddly cheerful, confused, wary, curious, regretful, and even afraid, all at once, which was too complex to sort out.

  “Cheers,” he said, lifting his glass.

  They toasted it.

  “I think I like you,” she said. “But we’ll see.”

  He knew he would remember this moment as the jackpot play of his life. But what would he take off the table?

  “Where and when?” she asked. “I’m ready right now.”

  He hadn’t thought about that. Down the road, maybe. This would take some getting used to. He could live with her for a while, see how it might go.

  “Shall we find a justice of the peace?” she asked.

  “In for a dime, in for a dollar,” he said, not quite believing any of this.

  “Over the cliff,” she said, a quirky smile building.

  “The matinee’s playing? You want to wait for the company?”

  “You’re already weaseling out,” she said.

  “I am not! I just thought we might invite the acts. Witness the follies.”

  “You’ve got thirty seconds. Now or never.”

  He lifted her hand, squeezed it, and kissed it gently.

  “My white dress is fine, but I’d like my coat,” she said. “And you can buy me a bouquet.”