by Peter Quinn
From the other side of the footlights, Mulcahey could hear the murmuring beneath the noise of the music and the dancing. Hadn’t been more than a dozen sold-out houses in the last year. Just his luck. No sooner had he climbed to the top mast of minstrelsy than the whole damn ship began to fill with water. The first week he had signed on with Brownlee’s, the troupe had been hired to play at a ball at the St. Nicholas Hotel, a costume party with the Mayor present and the ballroom packed with people stamping their feet and clapping. The troupe paraded across Broadway in the Advent twilight, a slender, hesitant light, playing their banjos as they went, the traffic coming to a halt to let them pass, a pack of prancing children trailing behind, the whole city seeming to enjoy the frolic, and out of the corner of his eye Mulcahey saw, plastered on the side of a building, a playbill for Brownlee’s, his name in, big black letters.
There had been good months after that. Until the spring almost every night had been a full house, and business had been brisk even after the war started. But it was that one night that summed up all the others, his name there on the wall in front of him, the St. Nicholas up ahead, half of Broadway stopped to see “The Ethiopian Sensation.”
A long time since Mulcahey had to work at minstrelsy: It came easy now, and even the ritual of the burnt cork seemed as natural as putting on clothes. Still got that flutter in his stomach when the curtain came up, but it left soon as he spoke his first line. For a while he drew his enthusiasm from the audience. He could sense their anticipation on the other side of the footlights, hayseeds and apple-knockers reveling in their first experience of the Rialto, workingmen anticipating some fun, journalists, politicians, pugilists, financiers, the habitués of Broadway, men in search of stories, laughter, noise, music, movement. They were still around, but now they spent their time socializing in concert saloons, or in theatres where they could see the likes of Edwin Booth, or whore-hunting in goosing slums like Jim Ryan’s, or rubbing elbows with the riffraff in Bob Butler’s Theatre (MALE ONLY) Or the Adelphi (LADIES MUST BE ESCORTED). The heart of the Rialto was moving north, to Fourteenth Street, and minstrelsy was being left behind like one of those wagons that broke down on the trek west, the occupants trying to decide whether to try to repair the thing and get it back on the trail or to hop aboard some other wagon, if they could, before night fell and the savages did them in.
A week ago, Mulcahey had visited the Adelphi at the invitation of Bill Wehman. He stopped by on his night off, was let in the stage door, and stood in the wings. The show opened with a short minstrel skit performed by two noodles in third-rate blackface, the paste erratically applied around their eyes and lips. One had a thick German accent. They shuffled their feet and bent their knees like amateurs trying to imitate what they had seen at a real minstrel show. The audience was mostly soldiers; they hooted and cheered. The minstrels were followed by a quartet of “Swedish Serenaders,” four females in blond wigs who had never been north of Central Park. They sang a medley of songs until the audience got restless, and then Bill Wehman, who rivaled Daddy Rice in his love of the grape, came on as “Paddy Murphy,” paragon of the hod-carrying race, in battered hat and threadbare coat. He stopped in the middle of the stage and gave a start, as though surprised to find himself in front of an audience.
“Faith,” he said, “sure, dere ye be! And ain’t I been searching da place fer ye! I’m comin’ from havin’ da most illigant time at da Astor House itself. Sure, dere were five gentlemen counting mesilf. Dere was me, for one; the Kelly brothers, for two; Terry Moran, three; and Jack O’Leary, four.”
He lifted his hat and scratched his head.
“By Saint Patrick, now I know dere were five, yerra dere were.” He held up his hand and counted with his fingers. “Mesilf, one, an’ Moran, two, an’ O’Leary, three, an’ the two Kellys, four.”
Wehman went on with his impersonation of Paddy for as long as he drew a response, and once he sensed the audience had had enough, he took off his coat and threw it on the ground. The minstrels reappeared and played a hornpipe, and old Wehman did some vigorous leg- and footwork, jumping so high that the audience broke into applause. When he stopped, he put one hand on his heart and stepped up to the edge of the stage. He dropped his Irish voice and spoke slowly as he struggled to catch his breath. “Gentlemen, we come … to the part … of the … show … that will take … your breath away.”
He moved off the stage, and the curtain behind him rose to reveal the first of the evening’s Living Tableaus from History and the Bible, a tree of papier-mache in the center, an apple hanging on one branch, a large snake of black cloth coiled around its trunk, and a woman in flesh-colored tights standing on one leg and reaching for the red fruit, her breasts bulging forward, her hefty thigh arching up into the fullness of her rump. Stood as still as she could until the curtain came down. The boisterous crowd settled into silence. There was a procession of tableaus: “Queen Bathsheba,” “Helen of Troy,” “The Slave Girls of Babylon,” “Esther Before Ahasuerus,” “The Abduction of the Sabines,” “Cleopatra in Her Bath,” all composed of stock-still assemblages of women in tights, straining, grasping, reclining, every posture revealing the convexities and concavities of their bodies. It was a public display less explicit than what was available on the second floor of the Trump but considerably cheaper and far more accessible.
After the show, Mulcahey and Wehman went to Tom Kings-land’s, New York’s minstrels’ bar, on Broome Street. Men in blackface threw down a refresher before returning to their roles. At the far end of the bar stood Henry Wood, the Mayor’s brother, a promoter for the Christy Minstrels. He patted backs and bought drinks, working the room in political style. Mulcahey pushed his way to a small booth in the rear. Wehman shook so badly he held his glass in both hands. “Christ,” he said, “sometimes I ain’t too sure I’m going to make it to the end of the evening, but it’s a funny thing, I been in this all my life and never once have I seen anyone die on stage—not for real, anyways—and I’ve seen the walking dead themselves go out there, men you’d figure could never take the strain, but somehow they never cashed in on stage. Seems like it’s some kind of rule of nature, and I suppose it applies to me same as to the others.”
“You had a good house,” Mulcahey said. “Full up.”
“I don’t know where it will all lead.” Wehman wiped some whiskey off his chin with the back of his hand, then licked it as a cat does its paw. “When I started in the business, you had the Broadway Circus, the Park Theatre, the Anthony Street Theatre in the Five Points, and the Chatham Garden, period. They built the Bowery Theatre the year I got my first real part. It was in Othello. Edmund Kean played the Moor. I was Cassio. Nobody wanted the part of Iago because those were the days before they’d imported Drummond’s limelight from London. They used floats, big tubs of oil with wick-holders coming out of the bottom, and the light they gave wasn’t particularly strong, at least not enough for Kean, who regularly took his anger out on Iago, every night half strangling him to death with the audience thinking it was part of the play and cheering him on. I’ve seen a lot of changes in my day.”
“But minstrelsy is here to stay,” Mulcahey said. He threw back his whiskey and waved the bartender over. “Leave the bottle,” he said. He poured Wehman a full glass.
“Nothing’s here to stay,” Wehman said. “No memory, no man, no manner of doing things, not in this town.” He lifted his glass like a chalice, hands a little steadier than before, and poured the contents down his throat.
Wehman started telling a story he had told many times before, about how in ’49 he landed the biggest role of his career as Banquo in Macbeth, starring England’s leading tragedian, William Charles Macready, at the Astor Place Opera House. Wehman was a man full of stories and reminiscences, but sooner or later he always came back to this one.
“I thought that sharing the stage with the likes of him would lift me into the pantheon of America’s illustrious actors. But Edwin Forrest used this occasion for his own ends. Claimed
to have been slighted and insulted as an American actor in London, and since he’d already planned his own production of Macbeth for the new Broadway Theatre, he said Macready was spitting square in the eye of Cousin Jonathan. He and his cronies got the city all fired up about this affront to American manhood, and the next thing you know, before Birnam wood did come to Dunsinane, a screaming, howling mob of assorted riffraff, sailors, thieves, fishmongers, and the worst sort of scum surrounded the Astor Place Opera House. They heaved paving blocks through the windows, and when the police tried to escort us out, the mob drove them off. We figured we were done. Then the militia arrived. Turned into a massacre. Twenty-one killed, twice that number wounded, scores arrested. Macready snuck out of the city dressed as a woman. And it was sworn among all true Americans that none of the traitorous dogs who appeared with Macready would ever be allowed again on an American stage. They circulated the playbills from Macbeth with skull and crossbones next to my name. And you know what? Three months later nobody remembered I’d been in the play, and six months later I was playing opposite Anna Bishop in Esmeralda at the sold-out opening of Tripler Hall. In other cities, the people would have never forgot. But this town ain’t got no taste for what was. Ain’t nothing you can count on except the fact that you can count on nothing, and that ain’t going to change ever, not in New York.”
Wehman had a thin, worn face, the remnants of his good looks still there in his high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He had played in comedy, tragedy, minstrel shows, whatever was available, but had never come closer to glory than Banquo to Macready’s Macbeth. The whiskey relieved the tremor in his hands. He sipped it instead of gulping it.
“The war’s the problem,” Mulcahey said. “All this jawing about slavery and the draft, but once it’s over and things get back to the way they were, minstrelsy is going to be bigger than ever, I’m sure of it.”
Mulcahey drummed his fingers on the table, tat-tat, tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat-tat. He had invented the floorboard castanet. Minstrelsy was his life. The first time he appeared on stage was in 1848, with Jack Diamond. He was right off the boat, trying to figure out how not to starve to death and how to get out of Boston, a town he detested from the moment he set foot in it. The Yankee disdain and disgust for papists and Paddies was as thick as the fog that enfolded the harbor. He got a job sweeping out a saloon and was allowed to sleep in the carriage house behind it. Right across the way was the rear of a theatre, and for the first month Mulcahey was at his job, the theatre was empty. But then the bills went up announcing the appearance of “THE GENIUS OF HEEL AND TOE-JACK DIAMOND-THE NATCHEZ NIGGER BOY.”
As Mulcahey crossed the alley that first night, he could hear the banjos, loud, happy, and see the light as it spilled out the windows and doors to turn the darkest corner of this dourest of cities into a place of happy expectation. The music washed up against the redbrick walls and rose into the nocturnal emptiness. Even before he reached the stage door and was bathed in its rectangular glow, even before he caught his first glimpse of black-faced Jack Diamond gliding in front of the footlights, arms outstretched, he knew he wanted to be a part of whatever this was, a feeling that resonated from the depth of his soul to the soles of feet, a baptism by desire. He watched every night for two weeks. Made living in Boston almost tolerable, and on the afternoon of the last day of Diamond’s scheduled appearances, just as the grim realization that this light was about to go out of Mulcahey’s life, the only light he had, he overheard two stagehands as they stood by the back of the theatre and discussed what Diamond would do now that his fellow heelologist and minstrel partner, Danny Byrne, had gotten so drunk that he had fallen down the stairs in his hotel and broken his foot. Mulcahey’s hand trembled as he took axle grease and spread it across his face, an impromptu blackface, some of it getting on his tongue and leaving a foul, oily taste in his mouth. He ran to the hotel, people turning and pointing at the crazed, grease-smeared urchin tearing through the streets, another symptom of the immigrant influx that had turned Boston Harbor into an American version of Botany Bay, a polluted depository for the diseased and disorderly Irish, 37,000 of them invading the city of 115,000 in the single year of 1847.
Mulcahey flew past the desk and the startled clerks to the room where the stagehands had said he would find Jack Diamond. He made the sign of the cross and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again, harder. He could hear footsteps coming up the stairs. It had to be the desk clerk. He banged with the flat of his hand. The door opened. Diamond was scratching his head and yawning. Mulcahey started dancing, imitating what he had seen on stage, leaning forward with his hands almost touching the ground, shuffling backward, his arms starting to sway from side to side, the momentum building, the pace picking up. Diamond told the clerk to stand back. Give the boy room, that’s it, heel, toe, shuffle right, shuffle left, rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Mulcahey got the part. They left Boston the next day.
*
“Everything has its own modicum of days, a beginning, a middle, and an end,” said Wehman. “Trouble is that the days go so fast in this city that it’s over before it begins.” There was a globule running from the right corner of his mouth down to his chin, a pendulous dribble of spit and whiskey, the product of a mouth trained to project a voice into the metropolis’s auditoria. He wiped his chin once more, and again licked the back of his hand. Mulcahey poured him another glass.
“The trick is, Jack, finding what people will pay to see. Garbage ain’t much different from gold as long as people are willing to pay for it. Willingness to pay! That’s the Philosophers’ Stone, the thing that can turn lead into gold. If people are willing to put their money down to see or possess or let something, then that thing has value, no matter its size, shape, condition, or smell.”
The dribble was back on Wehman’s chin. They stood up to leave. Wehman almost fell. “My leg’s asleep,” he said. He held Mulcahey’s arm and shook his leg. After a minute he sat back down. “It’ll take a little bit of time before I can walk on it. Nothing serious. Happens pretty regular.”
“I’m in no hurry,” said Mulcahey. He looked down at the top of Wehman’s head, strands of hair pulled across the freckled skin, the skull of a tuckered old man who risked a burst blood vessel every time he put himself through the paces of his tired routine. Banquo’s ghost. Here but not here. A broken-down player in a back-alley theatre with an audience that barely paid him any attention.
“You okay?” Mulcahey said.
“Sure,” Wehman said. “Just a minute more.”
Mulcahey could see the aura of death around the bowed head, a clear, pure light that seemed to emanate from inside it. Caveat histrio: the has-been’s fate, a lonely death, on stage or off, his haunted head a mirror for Mulcahey to peer into.
This afternoon, Mulcahey and Eliza had gone down to the Methodist church on John Street for Wehman’s funeral. A church without kneelers or statues, a bare place made barer by the small number of mourners sprinkled about. Wehman had been right about actors not dying on stage, but just barely. Wasn’t more than a foot or two off stage when he keeled over dead. The minister obviously hadn’t known him. In a Catholic service, with the incense and vestments and the Latin, that wouldn’t have mattered much. A funeral Mass made even the humblest jack seem important, especially when it was sung, the priest in his black chasuble intoning the Dies Irae as if the Almighty were rearranging heaven and hell over this one death.
The main part of the service consisted of the minister’s sermon. He kept referring to Wehman as a tragedian. He seemed to think the departed had never played in anything save Hamlet or Macbeth. He never mentioned the hundred-odd roles Wehman had played—singer, dancer, minstrel, comedian—or the Adelphi or the Astor Place Riot, the tragicomic olio that brought Wehman to the grave. On the way out of the church, Mulcahey rapped three times on the coffin lid. “More luck to you in the next world, old-timer,” he whispered.
Tonight, the Adelphi had opened as usual, Wehman dead, buried, and replaced, and those una
ble to get in had come to Brownlee’s. They were filled with alcohol and desire, the thought of what they were missing, every curve and motte, every mountain and crevice, the lay of the female landscape, women the likes of which you would never find in country towns. They moved in their seats. Restless. It was an itch Mulcahey couldn’t scratch. The noise and motion of the opening parade kept their attention, but you couldn’t keep that up all evening; and when the darkie dialogues began, the stories and the jokes, the noises from the seats grew louder, the shuffling of feet, an anxious, angry energy, the occasional shout, Come on, nigger boys, let’s see some leg, bring on the girls!
At the end of the strutting and dancing, the minstrels came back to their chairs, Bones and Biglips squabbling over who sat where. Mulcahey pulled a big red satin handkerchief from his pocket and dusted off his throne with a broad sweep. He put one foot up on his seat, polished his shoe with the hanky, then did the other shoe. When he was finished, he blew his nose loudly into the satin square.
“Be seated, gentlemens,” he said.
Squirt’s head was framed in the prompter’s box directly in front of Mulcahey. Mulcahey placed three fingers on his lips, and Squirt signaled back the same way to indicate he had the appropriate script. Mulcahey had never needed a prompter’s support until recently. Usually he improvised, randomly starting stories, skipping from joke to joke, presuming the end men had a full command of the repertoire, but there had been times, only a very few but they had happened, when his mind stood still like one of those old horses that the cartmen used, a horse that pulled faithfully for years till one day it stopped dead in the middle of Broadway, refusing to move despite the merciless urgings of the whip.