by Mary Miley
‘That sounds like the grape bricks we have in California. They’re dehydrated blocks of grape pulp and skins that people use to make wine at home. My friend Melva tried it last month in our kitchen.’
‘How did it come out?’
‘Not so good.’
‘Gussie Busch Jr. runs the Budweiser Syrup operation. My cousin works there and he said they made six million pounds of the stuff last year. Six million! You like beer?’
‘Sure.’
‘You should try making it some time.’
‘Maybe I will.’
The driver found the building I was looking for – a sagging, three-story tenement – in a German/Irish section of the city where the dirt streets were clogged with refuse and sewage. When I exclaimed at the poverty, he said we could thank the teetotalers for all the immigrants thrown out of work. I stepped across the matted fur of a dead cat as I got out of the taxi, shuddered, and said, ‘Please wait for me. I won’t be long.’
The address indicated an apartment on the second floor, so I climbed the stairs, passing two bedraggled urchins huddled barefoot on the landing. The place stank of urine.
No one answered my knock, so I moved to the adjacent door. No one home there either, but the third time’s the charm. An unshaven man in long johns appeared. He could have been a casting director from the look he gave me, sweeping me from head to toe with bleary eyes before demanding, ‘Wha?’
‘Good morning. My name is Sarah Stanley and I’m looking for someone who knew Mr Aleksandar Jovanovitch, the man who lived, until recently, at the apartment two down.’ I gestured with one hand and passed him a fiver with the other. He closed his fingers around the bill, leaned out to see where I pointed, then spat on the floor.
‘I been here six years, doll, and I never heard of such a fella. Two down’s Mabel and some man and a passel of kids.’
‘Have they lived there long?’
He scratched his head. ‘Not long.’
‘Before them. Do you remember a man who lived there before they did?’
‘Some fella named Al.’
I was about to shake my head when I realized Al must be Aleksandar. Immigrants often Americanized their names, and Aleksandar seems to have been cut from the same mold. ‘Yes, that would be the man. Al Jovanovitch. Do you remember him?’
‘Yeah, sure. Uh, no. Not really.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
The next woman I found had come to live with her sister just a month earlier. After that, I moved across the hall and got lucky. As soon as the door opened, odors of boiling cabbage wafted toward me. A fleshy woman with fat blond braids and a wailing baby on her hip looked me over with eyes like slits until my five-dollar bill rounded them out and jogged her memory. She remembered Al Jovanovitch.
‘He left in September. I remember because this one was newly born and I was up all hours with him,’ she said, bouncing the baby to hush him.
‘Tell me what you know about Al. I’m a relative of his and my mother’s looking for him,’ I added so she would know I was on the up and up. The money meant she didn’t care. ‘What do you mean he left? Moved away?’
‘Left. One day he was here, the next, someone else moved in. I don’t know where he went. I mind my own business.’
‘Was he living alone?’
‘So far as I know.’
‘What did he look like?’
She put the tip of her little finger in the baby’s mouth to stop his crying. ‘Big, strong. Dark hair and heavy beard that he didn’t shave but every week or so. Talked with an accent.’
‘Where was he from?’
She gave me a funny look, like I should know these things if I were really a relative, but the money meant she didn’t challenge me. ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t German. That’s the only accent I know.’
‘Do you remember anything else about him?’
She searched her memory for a moment, then said, ‘He worked at one of them automobile factories downtown. Moon, I think it was.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No, nothing else, except I didn’t like him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just didn’t like the way he looked at me. Made my skin crawl.’
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ I said, slipping her another Fairbanks fiver and praying she wouldn’t turn it over to her husband to drink up.
Thankfully, my driver was a man who understood the value of a bird in hand.
‘Thanks for waiting. Do you know of an automobile factory named Moon?’
‘Sure do, miss. It’s one of the biggest in the city. Moon Motor Cars. Makes trucks too. You wanna go there now?’
‘Do they work Saturday afternoons?’
‘Some of the production lines go all day, every day, but by now, the offices are closed.’
‘I need to see someone at the office. They’re closed Sunday, I’m sure. I’d like to hire you again on Monday, if you could be at the hotel by nine.’ I would use Sunday, the day of rest, to work out my strategy for Monday’s visit to the moon.
Meanwhile, it was fair on toward Saturday night, and the prospect of an evening moping about the hotel lounge depressed me. I needed something light, something like the witty dialogue of a Shaw or Wilde play or the antics of an animal act. Going home to vaudeville had never before failed to lift my spirits. And my spirits were in great need of lifting that night.
‘I’d like to go to the theater tonight,’ I said to the desk clerk. ‘Could you please recommend the best vaudeville in town?’
‘The American is an Orpheum theater,’ he said, pulling a copy of Billboard out from behind the desk for me to see. ‘And a beauty she is, too.’ It was the last night of the week’s run, but Saturday was also the biggest night of the week. I had already seen the week’s schedule before I’d left Los Angeles. I recognized a few of the acts, but knew none of the performers very well. It would be a perfect evening.
Shortly thereafter, I presented myself to the dining room maitre d’ dressed in a plaid wool frock, part of the wardrobe I’d bought last year when I’d impersonated the heiress in Oregon, and tucked into an early meal of lobster à la Newberg, potatoes Lyonnaise, and French peas, with Lady Baltimore Cake for dessert. I had brought nothing more suitable to wear to an elegant evening at the theater, but vaudeville was decidedly less ambitious than legit, and my ensemble, when topped by my wraparound coat with its lavish badger-fur collar and cuffs, turned heads.
The American Theater had a familiar feel. The moment I saw the stage, I recognized the unusual drape of its curtain and realized I’d performed here at some point in my murky past, probably during the early years with The Little Darlings. The soaring arches and broad aisle seemed like old friends welcoming me home. Comforted, I found my seat in the second tier, stage left, and settled in with rising anticipation.
It was the usual commotion as ushers hurried to seat people. By curtain time, the orchestra level was nearly full, the balcony and boxes less so. I nodded to the older couple on my left as they were seated and hoped the empty chair to my right would stay that way. Promptly at eight the orchestra struck up the first of four lively pieces – slow, ponderous music was never part of the opening numbers; it would dampen the excitement level. The Holman Brothers: European Comedy Bar Artists came next. Theater managers always slot a ‘dumb act’ – one without dialogue – in the first position while latecomers were being seated and the audience was settling in. The Sisters McConnell: Eccentric Grotesque Singing and Dancing Comediennes followed with fourteen minutes of talent that left me breathless just watching them. They had three curtain calls. A play came next: Her Guardian, a character comedy about a precocious flapper ward and her befuddled uncle.
I knew the fifth act, Those Deere Girls in Vocal Versatility. Marjorie and Mildred Deere had shared a billing with The Little Darlings for a few weeks in Virginia and Pennsylvania several years ago. Their choice of songs had changed, naturally, but they brought the same energy to the stage as they had back t
hen. Theirs was the act before the intermission, a spot usually given to the act ranked second best on the program, and they lived up to their billing.
At the intermission I bought a glass of apple juice and chatted with a young couple on their honeymoon to the big city from their family farm. Made me think of Carl Delaney and his own family’s farm across the river in Illinois. I wondered about Carl. He was an odd sort. Coming out of Illinois and moving to California, I understood, but Paris? No one else would I take seriously about such a thing, but Carl … Carl I took seriously.
The show resumed with Lambert’s Dogs: the Most Amazing Animal Act in the Varieties. It was, the program stated, their first time in St. Louis and, I suspected, their first gig in Big Time. They flopped. The audience sat on their hands. The dogs weren’t to blame; it was Lambert who lacked any sense of showmanship. If he didn’t liven up his routine soon, I suspected the manager would be handing him his pictures and bidding him farewell.
Slotted seventh was Lester, the World’s Foremost Ventriloquist. No sooner had the curtains parted than the dream that had plagued me on the train that first night burst into my head again like a Roman candle. I’d forgotten the dream until Lester began his conversation with not one but two dummies on his knees. The act disturbed me in some way I couldn’t explain. Something was wrong. Not with Lester – he impressed the audience with his back-and-forth patter, somehow managing to give each puppet a different voice. Mesmerized, I watched and listened as he manipulated the setup to distract the spectators from his lips, riveting their attention on the dummies and their antics. I hardly noticed the next act – and it was the headliner, Ralph Campbell, a stuck-up tenor who had shared a billing with me many years ago. He had a great set of pipes, but that night, I couldn’t have told you a single thing about his performance. The finale was, as usual, another dumb act, the Novelle Brothers: Melodious Tumbling Clowns Introducing their Famous Two Loving Nightingales. In a daze, I made my way to the entrance where a line of taxis was lined up bumper to bumper waiting for fares.
Back at the hotel, I asked one of the desk clerks if I could order a bottle of beer.
‘Certainly, miss. Would you like it here in the lounge or in your room?’
‘My room, please.’
‘I’ll send it right up.’
‘Make it two.’
The beer – genuine Budweiser so they must have come from the hotel’s pre-Prohibition stash – and a hot bath soothed my spirits and let me fall asleep without thinking about David, Carl, or ventriloquists. It occurred to me that the list of things I was trying not to think about at night kept getting longer and longer.
I jolted awake in the wee hours, my head throbbing with images of lips moving without sound, then still lips spewing forth words. I pictured Kit staring at Allenby and me that night on the porch while she drew his ugly portrait. The one where she put black horns on his head. After he had said to me, ‘She’s staring at me like horns were growing out of my head.’ That was it. That was what had been bothering me. How had she, a deaf girl, come up with that precise detail? Was she really deaf? Had her mother lied about that? Or could she read lips? And why the charade?
FIFTEEN
Sunday wasn’t a good day to investigate the Jovanovitch death, since St. Louis was a church-going city and most everything was closed tighter than a fist. A thick canopy of pewter clouds smothered the treetops, and the wind blew down the wide Mississippi River like it was a funnel, kicking up little whitecaps and filling my nostrils with the moist scent of decay. I spent the day at the river anyway, taking a boat ride and wandering the docks where several barges had tied up and one enormous riverboat was taking on passengers. The powerful current swept along branches, limbs, and whole trees ripped from river banks far upstream, its dirty brown water concealing the submerged danger much like the dark ocean hid the iceberg from the Titanic. That evening I took the recommendation of a waiter at the hotel and found my way to a basement speakeasy where a trio of Negro musicians off one of the riverboats were playing jazz, a new sound that I’d heard only a few times. I liked it, sometimes. It was different. Sensual. Unpredictable in a good way. As far as I could tell, it had not caught on in vaudeville, but maybe the colored musicians who moved up from TOBA, the black circuit, to Big Time circuits would bring it along with them.
By Monday, I was ready to perform my role as next of kin to the late Mr Jovanovitch.
To play up my maturity, I wore my below-the-knee wool suit the color of the muddy Mississippi, and the cunning cloche hat and gloves that matched it. My Bevo-hating driver was waiting for me as promised, leaning on his taxi and smoking a Camel when I walked out of the Chase Hotel at nine o’clock.
‘Where to today, miss? Moon Motors?’ he asked, giving the car door handle a yank.
‘The Post-Dispatch offices first, please.’
We chatted like old friends about the weather, and he pointed out certain sights as we passed by. St. Louis had once been a fur trading post owned by France, he told me; then it was Spanish, then French when Napoleon took over Spain, until he sold the city and all the Louisiana Territory to the United States.
‘That was more than a hundred years ago,’ he said, pulling up to the curb. We’d reached a boxy building on Olive Street that was topped by a sign proclaiming it to be St. Louis’s newspaper office. ‘Now, you take your time, miss. I’ll wait right here.’
A young woman greeted me from behind a desk as I entered the lobby.
‘I’d like to visit your archives, if you please. Do you call it a morgue?’ I asked, remembering Adele Astaire’s experience in New York.
She directed me to a Miss Grimsley and pointed to an elevator. ‘Basement, please,’ I told the boy. With arms that looked too skinny to operate the accordion gate, he wrenched it closed with a fierce clang and turned the crank. The car eased down in a smooth descent.
‘Third door on your left,’ he said as we touched bottom.
I exited into a narrow hallway where the scuffed walls looked like they hadn’t seen a paintbrush since the Great War. The third door was open, and I could hear sharp tension in a conversation as I approached. Two men, one young, one older, were ahead of me at the counter, both of them glaring down at a tiny woman whose face had more wrinkles than those ancient Indian medicine men they always cast in the westerns. Her hair was pulled up in a bird’s-nest bun, probably to give her an extra couple inches, and four yellow pencils protruded from it like knitting needles. An old newspaper lay on the counter between them.
Miss Grimsley could have been sixty or eighty or a hundred; it was impossible to judge, and I suspected no one at the newspaper dared ask. The men towered over her, but she didn’t so much as blink at their attempts to bully her. Wearing a severe, steel-gray dress the same color as her hair, she put me in mind of a she-wolf guarding her lair.
‘But it’s for Mr Pulitzer himself,’ protested the younger man, pounding the countertop with his fist to accent the boss’s name. ‘He ordered me to bring it up!’
‘I don’t care if it’s for the King of Siam,’ she snapped, ‘you aren’t leaving this room with this newspaper.’ Pulling a sharp pencil out of her bun, she poked it in his direction as if it were a weapon. ‘Sit,’ she commanded, nodding toward the wooden library table pushed up against one wall. She turned her attention to the older man, effectively dismissing the other who accepted the pencil with a meek sigh and shuffled to the table to begin copying the necessary portions by hand.
‘Article on Mayor Kiel and the North Market Street Dock, please, Miss Grimsley.’ She disappeared without comment, returning minutes later with three newspapers. Retrieving another pencil from her bun, she motioned him to the library table, then turned on me with a fierce scowl.
‘How do you do, Miss Grimsley. I am Jane Darling from Toronto. I’ve come to St. Louis to learn as much as I can about my uncle’s death this past September and hope you can supply me with his obituary, if indeed there is one. His name was Aleksandar Jovanovitch, but he
went by Al.’
She gave me a measured stare that suggested she entertained some doubts about my story, but evidently she concluded there was no danger to the newspaper in handling my request. Turning to the J drawer in a filing cabinet, she flipped through some cards, then disappeared into the labyrinth of shelves before reappearing seconds later.
‘There are two relevant papers: this about the death in the local news section and this one the next day with the obituary.’ She placed them on the counter without removing her hands and looked me straight in the eye. ‘It says he had no family.’
I’d been up against far worse than Miss Grimsley. ‘No known family, I suppose they meant,’ I replied evenly, putting my hands on the papers and easing them out from under hers. ‘He had a sister, my mother, in Toronto. We only just learned of his death last week, I’m sad to say.’
She let me slide the newspapers off the counter and pulled a pencil out of her bun. Following the example of the two men, I accepted the proffered pencil and parked myself at the table.
It was as Carl Delaney and I had suspected: Al Jovanovitch did not die in some machinery accident or from a heart attack. He’d been murdered.
The obituary said Jovanovitch would be buried after a service at Holy Trinity Church, so my driver and I motored over there to see if I could learn anything from its priest. It was a small church and Father Jokovic hadn’t actually known Al Jovanovitch, but he’d been willing to conduct services and bury the man. And he was willing to talk to me in my guise as Jovanovitch’s niece from Toronto.
‘I didn’t know him either,’ I confessed in my most touchingly sincere manner, ‘and I regret that he and my mother fell out some years ago, but she cared about him and was sorry to hear through a friend that he had died. She’s unwell, so she sent me south to learn what I could.’
The priest was not old enough to have such a white beard and mustache, I thought. The beard grew all the way down to the middle of his chest, with only a small opening for his mouth. I was glad to see his broad, toothy smile. ‘I fear I can tell you little,’ he said in English that bore more than a trace of his Old World origins. ‘I perform service, pray with mourners, bury the dead. You like to see grave?’