by John Sayles
The gossip sheets spill gallons of ink each week chronicling the mating rituals of the six uniformly winsome Florodora Girls, wreaking havoc upon the affections and bank balances of stage-door Johnnies young and old. Each time one snags her millionaire and leaves the show the Winter Garden is overflowing with sports eager to judge the charms of her replacement. Heavyweight champions and Cabinet ministers come and go with less excitement.
White points a finger at Teethadore. “The last time I saw you, you were slated between Harrigan and Hart and Professor Pembert’s dogs.”
“You have quite a memory, sir. That was at the Folly, a good number of years ago.”
“I recall a barrel-jumper being injured—”
“Amazing! One of the Deonzo Brothers, on opening night.”
“Stanny is a first-nighter,” says Barrymore, “an every-nighter, and an all-nighter.”
Teethadore sees Mansfield passing near, and wonders would he prefer to be extolled for his Dick Dudgeon in the Shaw play or for the sensation he made with the first American Cyrano.
“Mansfield!” Barrymore calls out. “What do you think of our Teddy here?”
The man is, in fact, not a hair taller than Teethadore, stopping to appraise him with raised eyebrow.
“ ‘Honest vaudevillian’ is, I believe, an oxymoron. As for Roosevelt—inviting the original to visit has always struck me as questionable, and here we have a facsimile. What will be next, bicycling chimpanzees?”
With that he makes for the exit. Teethadore declines to call out that he has in fact appeared several times with bicycling chimpanzees, an act so popular that not a performer on the bill is willing to follow them.
“He’s rather more Mr. Hyde than Dr. Jekyll, our Dickie,” Barrymore apologizes.
“Arrogant little prick,” concurs the architect. “But a marvel on the boards.”
David Warfield approaches then, Warfield who he knew as a fixture at Weber and Fields’s Music Hall, with whom he has shared many an alleged “dressing room,” moving toward him with David Belasco in tow.
“Briz!” he smiles, employing Teethadore’s erstwhile nickname. “You fooled even me!”
They clasp hands. He resists the urge to ask the comedian how he snuck in the door.
“This is David Belasco.”
“Of course. An honor, sir.”
“Wonderfully done,” enthuses the Bishop of Broadway. “You had us all going.”
“Mr. Belasco is going to make an honest man of me.”
The producer smiles. “A small enough penance, as I shall never make an honest woman of anyone.”
Teethadore allows himself a smile. Belasco’s “casting couch” is notorious.
“There’s a play called The Auctioneer and I’m to be the lead in it,” beams Warfield.
“You’ll be a smash,” beams Teethadore. They make an odd pair, the writer-director-producer, dressed always in clerical black, some sort of a Spanish Jew, and the resolutely Christian comic noted for his portrayal of East Side shylocks, sporting a false nose even larger than Cyrano’s.
“I agree wholeheartedly,” says Belasco. “There is no reason David’s talents cannot shine in the legitimate theater.”
“As they have in the illegitimate.”
Both men laugh, but Teethadore regrets saying it. He is a guest in their club and understands that though distinctions are adhered to, they must not be mentioned.
“If you ever have a role that requires someone of my—of my abilities—” he adds, feeling suddenly very small among the giants of the theater, “I do hope you will think of me.”
“I will keep you in mind,” smiles Belasco, and they drift away. So many company managers, so many directors in New York are presently keeping him in mind it is a wonder he doesn’t burst into flame from the concentrated mental energy. But if it has happened to Warfield, who is a deserving fellow after all, perhaps—
He finds himself unattended for a moment and strolls through the luminaries with drink in hand. It is still difficult to accept that he has penetrated this sanctum. The Grill Room is another long enclosure, with pewter drinking mugs, those not presently employed by the members, hanging from hooks at his eye level all around the rectangle. Old playbills decorate the walls, deer antlers hang on the chandeliers and heads with horns are mounted over the mantels of the delft-tiled fireplaces set at either end of the room. It is against one of these that he is pinned by the illustrators.
He recognizes some by sight—Remington, of course, wider now than any three of his leathery cow-punchers, Gibson of the haughty, long-necked beauties and square-chinned swains, young Howard Christy, Gibson’s rival in defining feminine allure, whose rendering of TR at Siboney and the San Juan Hill were surely a factor in the feisty politician’s present success—and once introduced to the others, knows and admires their work. There is Reginald Birch, whose drawings for Little Lord Fauntleroy condemn small boys to velveteen torture, Howard Pyle, King of the Pirate Illustrators, and the cartoonists A. B. Frost and Fred Opper, all of them studying his face as if it is a first effort in a sculpture class.
“You must be rather pleased with the election results,” ventures Gibson, a gin-soaked pearl onion floating in his glass.
“Yes and no.” It is damned hard to keep still with them all peering at his physiognomy. “Though I would have been chagrined had my lookalike lost by a single vote.”
“You didn’t go for him?”
The irony of it did strike him in the booth, his career, so to speak, at a crossroad. But, son of a fervent Populist, he pulled the bar for the straight Democratic ticket and stepped out through the curtain feeling absolved of sin.
“Some men vote from their pocketbook,” he answers, “others from their heart.”
“A Bryan man,” laughs Gibson. “Astounding.”
“At this distance it’s still disturbing,” frowns Christy, angling his head to look behind Teethadore’s prop spectacles. “I mean I’ve drawn the man from life!”
“A good, solid likeness,” observes Fred Opper with the tiniest hint of a German accent. “But not obvious enough to be funny.”
“They flashed a good deal of your work up on the Journal building last night,” says Teethadore, feeling as if even the stuffed buck on the wall is staring at his face. “The crowd loved Teddy as an eager beaver.”
“The man is a walking caricature,” says Frost. “He’s more fun to draw than a mule kicking an aristocrat.”
“A shame to have him buried in the second spot,” muses Remington, who immortalized TR back in his Montana ranching days. “I imagine they’ll be keeping our boy on a very short leash.”
The illustrators restrain themselves from actually taking his flesh in hand and eventually the crowd in the Grill Room starts to thin. The event began at five, actors’ dinner hour, and no doubt many here have shows to perform or attend. Teethadore will not, he knows, be invited to become a member. Their class, despised by polite society though it may be, is nevertheless several stations above his own. This is but a fleeting glimpse, a visit to a mountaintop he shall never dwell upon. He is planning his exit when he takes note of the lanky older gentleman ensconced in a chair in the far corner.
It is Joseph Jefferson, no other. Jefferson who trod the boards with Junius Brutus Booth, whose adopted daughter was the great Edwin’s first beloved wife, who breathed life into Our American Cousin, associated more now with the Lincoln murder than with its phenomenal success, veteran of hundreds, perhaps thousands of performances of Rip van Winkle, a breathing reliquary of American theater history—
Teethadore gathers his nerve and sits beside the legend.
“Sir—”
“That was very entertaining, young fellow. You kept your head.”
“Why thank you, sir.”
“An interesting character. Rather exhausting to portray him for any length of time, I should imagine.”
“He keeps me on my toes.”
“If you weren’t on your toes,” says
the old man, “the patrons in the rear would not be able to see you.”
Teethadore smiles his own, less dentally revealing smile. Jefferson’s admo-nition that “there are no small roles, only small actors” has been applied often to him, appended with further comments regarding his lack of altitude.
“My father took me to see you play the Dutchman when I was ten years old,” he says, attempting not to gush forth. “I thought that they’d hired a young actor and his grandfather to handle the transition.”
“You were a very suspicious young man.”
“Raised in a steamer trunk. My father toured with Mrs. Stowe’s melodrama.”
“Such a modest little lady,” muses Jefferson, “to cause such a big war.”
“I saw you do it again in my twenties. I was transfixed.”
“At the beginning they marveled at my ability to play the ancient Rip,” says Jefferson. “Now they are amazed that I can portray the young one.”
“Does it ever trouble you? Being so—so identified with one role?”
The old man looks at Teethadore, thinks for a moment. He points across the room to William Gillette.
“He may not know it yet, but that fellow will grow old playing his Sherlock Holmes. And the man he is speaking with—”
It is James O’Neill, waving his arms to tell a story—
“You mean the Count of Monte Cristo?”
“My point precisely. Mansfield has managed to transcend his Jekyll and Hyde, poor Edwin was a man of many faces, but for most of us, if we are fortunate, there is one defining role, a character the public cannot get enough of, who not only pays the rent but becomes something of an extension to our own less vibrant personalities. Mine, fortunately,” the old man winks, “affords me the opportunity to do some napping on stage.”
“But Rip van Winkle is fictional,” says Teethadore, hoping to get at the root of his misgiving. “He is finite, trapped within the strictures of the play. My fellow is still breathing, and, I must say, extremely unpredictable.”
The aged player’s face lights up. He places a hand on Teethadore’s shoulder.
“Then Fortune has provided you a spirited mount. Ride him, my good friend! Ride him to glory!”
GARRISON
It must be noon by now but they’ve taken all the clappers out of the church bells. The bells in the little baryos ring out every time a patrol is sighted nearby and the ones fighting have time to hide themselves, so the colonel always says “Cut their tongues out!” even here in Las Ciegas when they came back to garrison. Most of the day the googoo mamas are out hulling rice, pounding down with their clubs on the couple handfuls they’ve tossed into the hollow on top of the belly-high wood stumps that stand in front of each hut, hooking into a rhythm that Kid Mabley will sometimes try to play his horn to. But it must be noon now because even they are out of sight, unhusked rice waiting, spread out to dry on wide bedrolls of woven bamboo and the dogs lying flat on the dirt of the plaza, still as death, baked by the sun. There is only the woman, Nilda, hanging the soldiers’ wet clothing on a bamboo rack to dry and Coop at her elbow with a can of goldfish and a fistful of hardtack, pestering.
Nothing else moves.
“This here is good to eat, see?” he says. “Yum-yum. All you got to do is pop inside for a little bit, give Uncle Coop some jiggy-jiggy.”
It is none of Royal’s business, really, that is the unspoken agreement between all of them, but the sun is boiling the blood in the angry part of his brain and it vexes him. He slowly crosses the plaza, weaving around the prostrated dogs.
“This is hardtack—like crackers, see?” Coop has a tough time breaking off a piece. “See? Won’t go soft, even in the jungle. Like me.”
The woman, moving as if she can’t hear, lifts clothes from the huge woven-reed basket, shakes them out, and goes up on her toes to hang them so the ends don’t drag in the dirt.
“And inside this here is goldfish—”
“That stuff is poison,” says Royal, stepping over as casual-looking as he can manage. “Even the coolies won’t eat it.” There is a Chinese who sneaks up once a week to sell the men beeno, and canned salmon is the one thing he won’t take in trade.
“She get a taste of me, she won’t worry about no food.”
“She’s not interested in you.”
“Get your own damn squaw, Roy.” Coop, a bit taller, harder, turns back to the woman and wiggles the can inches from her face as if she needs to smell it. “You aint never had nothin like this, darlin.”
“If she needs food just give it to her.”
Coop turns to step back close to Royal. They are both in their undershirts, pouring sweat from the heat. When the clothes are washed and dried they feel good on your skin for a few minutes and then you are soaked through again.
“You triflin with me?”
“There’s plenty of jiggy-jiggy girls in Manila.”
“We aint in fuckin Manila.”
“Then you’re gonna have to try someone else.”
Coop smiles. “You know I can whup your ass.”
“Most likely.”
Coop half turns as if to say something to the woman, who still hasn’t looked at him, then pivots to smash Royal on the side of the head with the can, knocking him off his feet.
The woman freezes, bent over the clothes basket.
The nearest of the dogs gets up with some effort, watching the men warily as it slinks several feet farther away, then pancakes itself to the ground again. A few of the men peek groggily out of the huts they are billeted in. A few natives look out too, but see it might be a fight and duck back inside.
Royal gets halfway up, decides, and bullrushes Coop, catching him around the hips and driving him into the bamboo clothestree which collapses into the dust with them.
He has a chunk of Coop’s cheek in his fingers, trying to rip it off while Coop thumps him on the back and neck and ribs with the fist that isn’t pinned down. He wants some distance so he can really hit but Royal is strong and won’t let loose, their boots scraping the dirt for purchase, the two writhing crookedly across the plaza like a half-stomped cinch bug that just won’t die and the men come out now, the ones not on outpost or patrol, most just in their underclothes and barefoot forming a shifting ring around the pummeling men on the ground.
“What they scufflin about?”
“Don’t matter much, do it?”
“Got that woman’s wash all dirtied up again.”
“Too damn hot to fight.”
“Yeah—ought to just shoot each other and be done with it.”
Royal is underneath, his forearm wedged under Coop’s throat, trying to feel out a way to break his neck but if he moves anything Coop will be able to pound him again in the ribs where they feel broken. The thumb in his eye might be his own. There is a little bit of shade from the men closed in around them and then it is gone and a bucketful of warm water smacks down on them and it is Lieutenant Drum’s voice.
“You men get on your feet.”
The lieutenant has dressed himself in a hurry, the buttons on his tunic out of line with their holes. The bridge of his nose has been blistered by the sun. He seems more weary than furious.
“Since you obviously don’t appreciate your rest time,” says the white man, “we’ll have to find a way to make use of it.”
Royal can’t tell if he’s bleeding or not. The water cooking away on his skin and hair feels good, and he is glad that Sergeant Jacks is out on patrol. It has been all marching and guard duty and aimless patrols—Las Ciegas to Bamban, Bamban to Iba, Iba down to Subig to San Pedro and Botolan and Angeles and Castillejos and the place they never learned the name of and now stuck back here in Las Ciegas, their lives dragged out between bugle calls, sunup and sundown the same every day. Junior says it’s because they’re on the Equator. Royal stands at attention, eyes forward, as the lieutenant announces their punishment. Behind, the woman stoops to lift wet, dirt-dragged uniforms from the ground.
It is
the outpost they hate the most, no shade, no cover, just perched on an outcropping of limestone rocks with a long view in three directions. Hardaway and Gamble and Corporal Pickney are out of sight but within shouting distance. There is a finger-sized lizard in a shaded crevice of rock a few yards from him, and except for the little orange bubble working in and out on the side of its neck it hasn’t twitched for hours. How many hours Royal doesn’t know because he doesn’t have a watch and they’ve taken all the clappers out of the bells, even in Las Ciegas, and today there will be no relief, not after two, not after four, just Sergeant Jacks coming by to be sure he is still awake and remind him whose ass he has also put in the sling and Coop is out on the other side of the village doing the same thing. The side of his head is swollen, pounding, and his ribs hurt with every breath. He saw the can of salmon lying on the ground as he left, a huge dent in it.
The lizard doesn’t move.
The lizard understands how to be in this country. Royal’s stomach isn’t right and he can’t sleep, troops of monkeys screaming all night in the forest just west of town and something, rats or maybe a snake, rustling around in the thatch of the hut. Royal tries to touch only the wooden parts of his rifle as he shifts it from shoulder to shoulder. If Jacks or any of the other officers catch him sitting or just not at attention like a damn tin soldier it will be more punishment under the sun.
She comes from behind over the rocks, so silent that if she was a rebel his throat would be cut. She offers him water in a stoppered length of bamboo and something folded in a banana leaf. When he pulls the leaf open there is a yellow-orange rice ball with bits of chicken and onion and peppers in it. It smells of cocoanut and is still warm from the pot. She sits on a rock near the lizard, which does not move, and watches him eat.
Royal points at her. “Nilda.”
She nods. She is short, sturdier than Jessie, her face maybe a little flat but with that good long hair and her eyes—
“Bringhe,” she says, pointing to the rice ball, then to herself. “Nilda.”
CORRESPONDENCE