Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Etta May likes to sit outside after a performance, even in the downpours that often follow upon the heat of the day, on a folding chair placed underneath a mighty beech some dozen yards from the tent. When Eleanor comes to her, she fetches a second chair, sets it up so they sit side by side. An audience for crickets. Storm clouds on the dark horizon; moonlight slipping through the web of branches; a fox loping past them left to right.

  For the longest time they simply sit. Etta May does not push for conversation, is patient, placid, waiting for rain; Eleanor awkward, precise, stockpiling words. At last Eleanor breaks the silence and describes it: the odd conviction that she has been accumulating followers at the end of each play; the shy obeisance paid to her by men and women twice her age.

  Etta May absorbs it matter-of-factly; shifts her big rump in her chair.

  “They come to you to be blessed, do they? Well, why not? Sometimes I feel like getting a blessing from you myself!” She pauses to retrieve a cigarette from her sleeve, lights it, then speaks through a wreath of smoke. “You take their pain away, girl, their anger. It curls out of them, all their nastiness, right into you and there it stays. What comes back out is lighter, kinder. The parts of themselves they like.”

  “You’re a Soother, Em. Isn’t that what you do?”

  Etta May snorts at the suggestion. “I am merely slow to rouse. Sluggish Smoke—it calms things down, dampens them. And the Shapers are different, too. They are actors, see; they step into an emotion and broadcast it, making sure it dominates. But you don’t act. It’s quite the opposite. I have never met anyone quite so still.”

  When Eleanor does not respond, the big woman leans closer and touches Eleanor’s shoulder as though testing her solidity.

  “Balthazar says your uncle kept you in some kind of machine. It punished you when you smoked.”

  “It didn’t. It taught me to punish myself.”

  “And now he’s looking for you. What does he want?”

  “Cruikshank said that I hurt his pride. That I was his vision for the future but I ran away instead.”

  “And what do you say?”

  Eleanor considers the answer, considers it deeply.

  “I think that he wants me back because he loves me. And once he has me, he will want to use me. Only I don’t know how.” She rushes the next words, willing them out. “I have a dream sometimes that I am pregnant by my uncle. It’s growing in me, tailed and scaly. Holding a ledger to its breast. It frightens me, Em. It frightens me like nothing else in the world.”

  “Frightens you? Well, you sure scare the daylights out of the rest of us! Balthazar most of all. He says you make him feel flimsy.” Etta May smiles, reaches over and pats Eleanor’s knee in a maternal gesture, the stub of her cigarette wedged between soft knuckles. “It must be strange, being like that. Lonely. Like being the biggest fish in the pond. Some new kind nobody’s ever seen, a catfish maybe, sitting there on the muddy floor, huge and unmoving. All the others watching it from the corner of one eye.”

  Eleanor blinks away the remark. She asks, “What’s wrong with me, Etta May? Why can’t I be normal?”

  “Wrong, hon? Nothing. You have talent, that’s all. Why do you think Balthazar is so interested in you? Oh, he is interested in your story, naturally. You met Charlie Cooper. One of The Three. You’re an eyewitness, someone who can help him write his grand history of Smoke. If that’s all there was to it, he’d ask his questions and be done with you. After all, you are a member of the audience. Not one of us. That’s how he sees the world: players and spectators, never the twain shall meet. But you have talent. Balthazar respects talent.”

  Eleanor has heard the phrases before. “Talented Smokers.” “Talented Smoke.” The theatre people seem to prize nothing more highly.

  “Talent for what?”

  “Ah, there’s the rub. Balthazar isn’t sure. It sits in his craw.” Etta May smiles but her eyes remain serious. “Whatever it is, hon, it’s too big for the theatre. It does not do make-believe. And so Balthazar ain’t sure that he can use you. You see, he’s an artist, down to his bones. He only has time for people he can use.”

  They listen to the rain for some moments before Eleanor objects.

  “He is a she, Em.”

  “And what if he is? It’s easier, running a business, if you are a man. Always travelling, negotiating; bargaining with other men.” Etta May stubs out the cigarette against her chair, fishes a fresh one from out her sleeve. “Second Smoke or not. The world has not changed that much in ten years.”

  Eleanor does not believe her. “It’s more than an act.”

  “More? Why, of course. Don’t you see what happens onstage, honey? You don the costume. And become what you play.”

  Eleanor distrusts the answer, senses denial underneath. She pictures it, putting on breeches, boots, and cap; tying her breasts down to preserve the clean lines of her buttoned coat.

  “I am not like that,” she says at last. “I’d just be a girl dressing up.”

  “That’s just it—why you don’t fit with us. You have no need to play at things. If someone scares you, you just take their Smoke and pay them back in kindness.” Etta May looks over at Eleanor, still with that same gentle smile, still serious underneath. “Where does it go, all the hate that you absorb?”

  Eleanor finds she knows the answer. “There’s a tower, inside me—that’s how I picture it. A high, narrow tower, like a grain silo or a smokestack, only it’s made of steel.”

  “A smokestack, ha! Well, if you ever decide to let off steam, hon, do let me know. Now there’s something I would pay to see.”

  [ 5 ]

  For a full two weeks then, Eleanor Renfrew walks Manhattan every day and surrenders to the stage at night. And finds that she is happy. More than that: she’s in love. It’s the magic of the theatre. Etta May tells her they break hearts wherever they go.

  Then something changes.

  It is the start of the third week of the players’ residence; the sixteenth show that Eleanor has seen. There is someone in the audience: a tremble in the Smoke. He’s a large man, fleshy, not fat; his face bluff and big-featured, his skin fair and ruddy; the head bald, the cheeks framed by two thick wedges of whisker, a sun-drenched yellow, corn in a summer field. A man close to forty; in the prime of his life. Cheerful, sanguine, well contented in his vigour and his health. He dives into the audience’s Smoke with the relish of a swimmer; adds his own appetites without hesitation or shame.

  And then he cuts out.

  They are less than a third through the evening’s performance, not long before the first intermission. The players are staging a comic scene in which a maidservant and mistress undergo a series of inversions as, for the first time in their lives, they breathe each other’s sins and see themselves reflected in the other. Two women; a chair; a sheepskin rug; a hairbrush; and a sumptuous pair of pink culottes—these are the only things upon the stage. The audience lurches from Schadenfreude to the gentler need for reconciliation: between haughty missus and saucy maid; between masters and men. There is a moment before the stranger’s withdrawal, when—for a heartbeat; the length of a wanton thought—something new crawls out of him, coarser, deeper than what he has thus far shown. A few of his neighbours take it up, corrode it into lust, vainglory, vanity: emotions unbecoming to the moment. Etta May notices. She sidles closer to the group, her body straining anger from the air; plump cheeks shiny with dark Soot. The next moment the man has shut off his Smoke. He makes a movement—digs in his pocket, manipulating something there. Then he is gone. His face, his bearing, does not change: the same toothy smile, eyes focussed on the stage. But his body has withdrawn from all communion, stands singular, the Smoke surrounding him now dead against his skin.

  For those who surround him, the change is subtle, a pebble thrown into the sea. All the same, Eleanor
feels it at once. She sees Ada and Greta Silvana notice it, too, and hesitate upon the stage; sees Balthazar peek around his screen, one eye and a sliver of black forehead, eloquent in their scowl.

  Then the room catches itself: torn threads of Smoke are reconnected, between players and audience, front row and back, all now bypassing the man. The play carries on. It has incorporated the disruption, woven the unease into the fabric of emotion that it spins. Soon the auditorium is once again immersed, laughs in voice and Smoke as mistress and maid each thrust a leg into voluminous pink knickers and stand conjoined, grown together hip to hip.

  Not so Eleanor. Though she continues to feel the play in her body, trading Smoke with her neighbours mechanically, the way one can eat without tasting the food, her attention is focussed on the hulking figure of the man. He remains where he was, immersed in the crowd but separate now, as though he were watching from the confines of a glass box. What strikes her most of all is that his focus and demeanour are unaltered: the same self-congratulatory cheerfulness he has displayed all along. Then the man catches her eyes on him, across the mass of bodies and the haze. A pale gaze, his; the blink of eyelids thickly framed in yellow lashes; the purse of wet lips. There is no hint of recognition.

  It does not matter. Eleanor knows why he is here.

  The Smoke that escapes her stirs a note of trepidation into the scene’s finale, souring its cheer.

  [ 6 ]

  She hears Balthazar and Etta May argue about the man during the intermission. They are standing huddled in the shelter of his screen; heads thrown together like conspirators.

  “Don’t let him back in the tent,” she hears him say.

  “He’s paid for a ticket, Balthazar.”

  “I don’t care. Return his money. Tell Geoffrey not to let him through the doors.”

  “You want to risk a fistfight, just to keep him out? I had a good look at him. He’s not the type to go without a fuss.”

  “Sweets!” Balthazar rages. “In my theatre! He stands in the audience sucking sweets!”

  “It was impressive, though, wasn’t it? The way he just turned himself off. Must have stuffed his cheeks with a good dozen. A rich man! At least we are costing him dear.” Then: “Why do it? Why come and then not let yourself feel? What is he—some uptown Puritan curious about our shop?”

  “Curious, no. His type, they always come with a plan.”

  [ 7 ]

  Eleanor does not return to the show after the intermission. Her instinct is to run, far away, be lost in the city and its crowd. But the idea of the man haunts her and bids her linger outside the tent trying to catch a glimpse of him. She sees him but once, in the bustle that follows a riotous retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which, under the influence of Smoke, granny, wolf, and girl gradually change positions until predator turns to pup and infirm victim into hunter: sees the stranger shouting, finger-whistling, and applauding, in tune with his neighbours’ noise yet deaf to their bodies’ song drifting idle past his numb and deadened skin.

  After the show, Balthazar finds Eleanor wandering listlessly along the threshold of light thrown by the big tent’s lamps. He pauses, studies her, invites her out to dinner.

  “Something decent for a change. Just us two; tête-à-tête.”

  She suspects at once he means to say good-bye.

  [ 8 ]

  They find a restaurant not far from the Big Scar, order veal and greens, sit poking at them with tin forks. Balthazar seems about to start into conversation several times, then gags himself by shoving a piece of meat into his mouth.

  “Ada told me you will soon be heading to England,” Eleanor says at last, and watches him swallow the “you” along with the veal.

  “Actors! Bloody gossips, the lot of them.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “If I can find a ship that will take us. Without bankrupting us, that is.”

  Why go there? she wants to ask. The one place where—surely—theatre is forbidden. Where Gales still rage. The isle of madness. Of strife.

  But whatever it is in her that ties her tongue and sifts her words until they betray no hint of inner turmoil intervenes, so that all that comes out is:

  “They won’t let you play. He won’t.”

  They: His Majesty’s government. He: Renfrew, doctor philosophiae; MP. Lately Duke of Marlborough. Prime Minister. Chairman of the Executive Committee. “The Lord Protector of the Realm.”

  “Half an arse-cheek of one island,” Balthazar scoffs, meat in his teeth. “Hardly a realm.” He swallows, chokes, coughs up grizzle. “A half-gut Cromwell! What of him, girl? He and his Parliament, they hide down in the South. We’re heading north.”

  “To Minetowns.”

  “So you know something about English politics after all. Yes, Minetowns. I have a standing invitation. We have been there before. Besides…I have some business to attend to, over there.”

  For once her words outrace that semblance of composure. “Can I come?” she pleads, Smoke on her breath.

  Balthazar smells it and puckers his lips, a connoisseur tasting wine.

  “You tell me,” he responds without rancour. “There was a man at the play today—I think he was looking for you. Just how badly does your uncle want you back?”

  [ 9 ]

  They return to the hotel. It’s Meister Lukas who waits for them in the lobby. He is a fine-featured man, dark slanting eyes hemmed in by cheekbones, the nose small and flat; is shy to the point of girlishness. When he told Eleanor that his native city of Tsingtao looks just like Prussia, he spoke from behind a shielding hand, its back and fingers dusted with a hundred birthmarks, pinprick-small. Now that he is agitated, the shyness gives way to high-pitched babble. It isn’t so much that he has lost his English but has superimposed it with tonalities imported from his mother tongue. “Thief,” he keeps on saying. “Nasty bloody thief,” the only words intelligible in this torrent, and two fine fingers become pincers tugging with delicate urgency at Balthazar’s sleeve.

  They take the stairs at a run. If the foyer retains a veneer of grandeur, the stairwell and corridors attest neglect. Soot and mould complicate the pattern of the wallpaper that is bubbling with humidity; the carpets are at one and the same time threadbare and as though bloated with grime; half the lightbulbs blown within old chandeliers long plundered of their crystal.

  The players are all housed on the same corridor. In the absence of any other hotel guests billeted here, the hallway has become a common area where actors and stagehands will mill at all hours of the day and night, often in states of considerable undress. So it is a surprise to find the place abandoned; its doors standing wide open as though it has been fled. Meister Lukas does not stop until they have arrived at a particular door, also open, its handle broken along with the lock.

  Balthazar’s door.

  One glance is enough to ascertain he has been robbed.

  [ 10 ]

  The thief remains in the hotel. This is the chief piece of intelligence Meister Lukas manages to impart. It is the only one that matters. Everything else can wait. If Meister Lukas led them this far by tugging at Balthazar’s sleeve, it is now his own shirt-tail that is taken hold of.

  “Go on, faster,” the old director keeps shouting at his back, though it is he himself who has trouble keeping up. Eleanor is hard on his heels. They chase up a stairwell, down a corridor, up another flight of stairs. The hotel changes around them as they ascend, becomes better appointed. Six floors in total. Street Smoke rarely rises this high. Whatever luxury suites this run-down establishment may retain, they will be located here, at the top.

  At last they arrive. Another bend of the corridor, a miniature foyer, partly furnished with armchairs, and there they are: the players. At first glance one might think them simply transplanted, from one hallway to another, by a windfall in their
monetary fortunes, their routines unchanged. As on any other night they are indifferent to modesty and stand around in all manners of dress, some still in costume, some in nightclothes, curlers in their hair; others stripped to their undergarments, battling the heat.

  But rather than the usual milling and gossiping, the nail-filing, mending, and ironing, the clusters of twos and threes, the arguments and the peals of laughter coming from the washroom around the corner, they stand silent, packed into a mob—an audience—in a ring outside a door. When Balthazar pushes his way through, Eleanor in tow, they part willingly enough, relieved that someone is taking charge. Etta May is there, wrapped in a bathrobe, a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth.

  “He took your travelling chest, Balthazar. Kicked down the door and placed it on one shoulder, cool as you like. And then he went up to the reception and demanded their best room.”

  “Who, goddammit?”

  “That man. The one from the audience. Gold mutton chops.”

  [ 11 ]

  There is not much more Etta May can tell him. He showed up downstairs in the hotel an hour and a half ago and asked which room was the director’s. He asked politely, mopping his forehead, complaining about the heat. Etta May told him Balthazar was out; that he could slip a note under the door if he liked. The man appeared to think on it. Next they knew, he had broken the lock.