Prima Donna

by Megan Chance

  I was very cross then and I told Barret what a fool he was to get a whore at Willa’s wedding and one who brought laudanum too, and he said, “It wasn’t her who brought it.” He told me Gideon had given it to him. I said he was talking nonsense. I know very well Gideon is as concerned about Barret’s habits as I am. Why would he do such a thing?

  Once we were at the hotel, I had the driver go up to fetch Gideon to help me get Barret inside, and when he came down and saw Barret unconscious in the cab, he gave me such a look, as if he had expected it and hadn’t he told me before? He and the driver took Barret up to the room and Gideon told me to follow at a good distance so no one would see me with them, which I did.

  Gideon asked me what had happened, and I told him, also that Barret had said Gideon had given him the laudanum, which he denied. He said Barret was too drunk to even remember his name half the time, and asked me, “Who do you believe, Bina? Me or your brother?” and I cried and said that of course I believed him. He held me, and then he brought me down on the bed to lie beside him and cradled me and stroked my hair. His voice was quiet in my ear. “Your family doesn’t believe in you. Not like I do.”

  I thought of Willa, who wanted to keep me from him, and Papa, who blamed me for Willa’s hurt and Barret’s dissolution, and Barret, who thinks so little of me now that he calls me a whore at the slightest provocation, and I know Gideon is right.

  CHAPTER 10

  Seattle, Washington Territory—March 1881

  When I woke the next morning, Charlotte’s words were sharp in my ears, and Johnny’s too and I knew what they said was true. The past had such a tight hold on me I could hardly breathe for its grip, and I knew at last the time had come to learn to live with it, and that Johnny’s suggestion to turn the Palace legitimate might be just what I needed. The idea still frightened me, but to have something back of what I loved, no matter how small, to no longer live in weariness and joylessness … it was too much a temptation to deny.

  And I told myself that this time everything would be different. I didn’t love Johnny, and that kept me safe. I could lead him where I wanted. He trusted me, and he would listen to my advice. In the same way I’d appeased his ambitions by suggesting the boxhouse, I could slow this plan to my pace. I could protect myself with half measures that satisfied us both.

  I could have some kind of a life again.

  The next morning, when I went into the Palace and Duncan warned, “Johnny ain’t in a good temper this morning,” I gave him the smile that had charmed more men than I could count, and even though he should have been used to it, he flushed and dropped the glass he was drying so it shattered on the floor.

  “Is he in his office?” I asked.

  Duncan bent to pick up the glass. He nodded, mumbling something unintelligible, and I knocked on Johnny’s door and stepped inside. Johnny sat at his desk, marking figures in a ledger. He looked up. “It’s about time.”

  I hung my cloak on a hook. “You could have sent for me if you wanted me here earlier.”

  “Would you have come?”

  I seated myself on the edge of his desk and leaned forward to brush his lips with my own. “I’m at your beck and call, as you well know.”

  He frowned. “What the hell are you in such a good mood for?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. About turning the Palace into a real theater.”

  “And?”

  “And I think we should do it.”

  His frown disappeared in surprise. “You do?”

  “I do. I’ve been thinking about the best way to go about it.”

  He hesitated, and then said, “I got a friend in San Francisco owns the Luxe Theater. Thought I’d send him a letter, see if he has any acts that might be interested in coming up here.”

  “Not yet,” I said firmly, ignoring my quick panic. “It’s too soon. You can’t ask anyone to play this stage. It’s barely a platform. We’ll need to make it at least look like a theater, and for that we need money. So unless you’ve got a pile of gold sitting in that safe under your desk …”

  “You know better than that, honey.” Johnny sat back in his chair, tapping the end of the pencil against his mouth.

  “We’ll need investors. Rich people who have nothing better to do with their money than spend it. City fathers, merchants, the mayor, people like that.”

  “Go on.”

  “We’ll get together a list—you should do that, you know everyone. More important, you know their secrets.”

  He smiled a little.

  “Figure out who will give us money. Then we can start to make changes. Then we can talk to San Francisco. We’ll get some of the smaller acts up here. Limit the whores to the floor and the boxes, so we’ve got real talent on the stage for a change and the rest is just a service we offer. That will keep our regulars around until we’re ready to lose them.”

  Johnny said, “Not a bad idea, honey. Not bad at all.”

  “But the money has to come first,” I said.

  “That could take a while.”

  “It’s not a race, Johnny. Better to do this right.”

  He nodded slowly. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t suppose it could hurt to write San Francisco anyway.”

  “We need the stage first.”

  “Building this place up will take months. Investors will need to see more than footlights,” he pointed out. “They get nervous with their money. They’ll want to know real entertainment is waiting in the wings.”

  “The last thing we want is for a troupe to come up here and discover they’re playing in a glorified brothel. We’ll never get a second chance.”

  “I’ll just advise Tom that you and me are changing things up here, and to keep an eye out.”

  “Don’t mention me,” I said quickly—too quickly; Johnny’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “Why not?”

  “I … because … because I’m a woman. He might not look kindly on your partnering with me. He might think you aren’t serious.”

  “Hmmm.” Johnny went quiet and thoughtful.

  “Your friend won’t want to deal with me anyway. You know that. He’ll just assume I’m involved because you’re fucking me. He won’t listen to anything I have to say, and he won’t trust you if it looks like you are.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that.”

  “I am right.” I slid off the edge of the desk and stood. “So we’re agreed? You’ll look for investors first?”

  “We’re agreed,” he said with a nod.

  “Then I’ll get back on the floor.”

  I was at the door when he said, “Margie—”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder. “Yes?”

  “What the hell made you change your mind about this?”

  “I just saw the sense in it,” I told him. “And I guess … neither of us wants to work a boxhouse forever.”

  He nodded and waved me away, but there was a thoughtfulness in his expression that sent a little frisson of discomfort into me. I told myself I was imagining it. I’d just given him what he wanted. What else mattered?

  NOW THAT I’D said yes to Johnny, things seemed strangely different, as if I were looking through a glass into another world. The Palace was ugly, I knew that, but tonight it did not seem so irredeemably so; tonight when I looked at the stage I didn’t see the splintery and warped platform or the rickety steps leading to it. Instead I saw what it was going to be. I found myself mulling over how the footlights would be placed and whether we would get the fittings to turn their colors from yellow to green or blue or red. How we would build wings to hide the steps leading to the orchestra loge. Whether the drop curtain should be blue or green or crimson.

  That night, the shadows were not so very dark as I’d thought, the men not coarse and rude but simply honest laborers looking for a little fun, ready to laugh and be teased, and the girls were more likely to break into a smile, as if they too sensed that something had changed. They mis
sed fewer notes; even Billy’s playing improved nominally.

  The place stayed full a long time that night, and it was closer to dawn than to twilight when the crowd finally lessened enough that I could take a break. I stepped out the back door and onto the stoop and breathed deep. Cool air, but not cold, and tinged with damp from the harbor but not from rain. It would be spring soon. The sun would not be unwelcome.

  The back door creaked behind me. I turned, expecting it to be Duncan coming for another keg, and was surprised when it was Charlotte instead, her hair frowsy and falling from its pins.

  “I thought I saw you come out here,” she said.

  “Is something wrong? Do I need to go back in?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” She sighed and came up beside me, crossing her arms over her breasts, shivering a little. “It’s dying down. Johnny just told me I could go home if I wanted.” She sat down on the edge of the stoop. “You seem happy tonight. The whole place feels it.”

  “I don’t think it’s just me. There’s something in the air.”

  She tilted her head at me. “Oh, it’s you, believe me. When you’re a bitch the whole place feels that too.”

  “How sweet.”

  She shrugged. “What happened today?”

  “What makes you think anything happened?”

  A heavy, impatient sigh.

  I sat down beside her. “It’s your fault, in any case.”

  “My fault?”

  “I decided to do what you suggested. I’m going to help Johnny remake the Palace into a real theater.”

  “And that’s what’s got you so happy?”

  “Yes.” I turned to look at her. “Shouldn’t it?”

  She laughed a little and shook her head. “If that’s all it took, why the hell did you wait so long?”

  “What you said made the difference,” I admitted quietly.

  “You and Johnny … you were both right. About my living in the past.”

  “So what’re you going to do? Apart from getting rid of the whores.”

  “We’re not getting rid of you. At least not yet.”

  “I don’t see much fucking going on in places like Squire’s.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” I said wryly.

  “Oh yeah?” The faint glow from the streetlamp on the corner glanced over her face, softening the sharp outlines of her cheekbones, her nose. She teased, “How do you know that, Marguerite? Let me guess … you and Johnny do it there at Faust?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “All right, so what did you mean?”

  I wasn’t surprised at the question, what was surprising was the lack of fear I felt at it. Perhaps it was only that I was in a good mood. The past seemed far away for once, too far to hurt me, and she had been honest with me about her own life. Didn’t that create an obligation to answer with mine? And I wanted to tell her something. Not the truth … or at least not the whole truth, because I knew it would change the way she felt about me and I was afraid of that. But something else. Surely there was something else I could tell her, something small, something to show how much her friendship meant to me.

  I found myself saying, carefully, anxiously, “I traveled theaters all over the country with him.”

  “With who?”

  “A musician. He was a pianist.” I let out my breath slowly, relieved when the words caused no pain, when they were as simple as they sounded. “I met him when I was very young and I fell in love with him.”

  “Was he famous?”

  “A little,” I said. “No one you’ve heard of, I’m sure. I think you’d have to have worked in the business to know of him.”

  “Ah.” She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, which was nothing but a hazy darkness above our heads. “What happened?”

  “It ended, that’s all.”

  “Bad?”

  I nodded and tried not to think of it.

  She said, baldly and irreverently, “So that explains it then. No doubt the two of you fucked your way through every theater in America.”

  I laughed and she laughed with me until Duncan stuck his head out the back door and said Johnny was looking for me, and we went back inside.

  MY LIFE WAS moving on, whether I went with it or not, the things I’d agreed to put into motion. Johnny spent nearly every night speaking with men I didn’t know, men wearing suits and vests and hats, who looked nothing like the miners and lumbermen who were our usual customers. The Palace had always had its share of respectable merchants and businessmen slumming, but none of them had ever looked it over with such interest. I stayed out of their way mostly, as I stayed away from the respectable parts of town in general. Once or twice Johnny came downstairs dressed in the suit I hadn’t seen until the night of Faust, and he’d give me a wink and leave the Palace for some meeting or another, and I felt both anticipation and anxiety at how quickly he worked the plans I’d put into his head.

  And my friendship with Charlotte progressed just as quickly, as if now that I’d opened the dam, the flow could not be contained. I found myself telling her things. Some things were small enough that they could be detached, they could be said, and with each saying the tight, hard knot of my memories loosened a little more. I told her I had a nephew I hardly knew and a sister I no longer spoke to, and Charlotte said families were strange things, bound together by blood but not necessarily by affection. I told her I had a brother and my parents wanted nothing to do with me, and she said her father had been such a mean son of a bitch she’d spent every waking hour hoping he would die. And so it went on, truths and half-truths and omissions all bound together, so I could not always remember what I’d said or how I’d phrased things, but it was becoming easier to breathe, and my nightmares were easing, occurring not so often now.

  Then, one day in early April, as Charlotte and I walked back to the boardinghouse room after a breakfast at nearby Miller’s Restaurant, she asked, “How did you meet him? Your musician? In the beer hall?”

  The memory came unbidden. The door opening, a gust of air through the smoke, my brother’s bright hair shining, his laughter as he turned to the dark-haired young man who’d come inside with him. The calling of orders back to the kitchen, the beer foaming as Papa drew a glass from the keg, the music from the polka band onstage. And then Willa moving through the crowd to take his hand.

  Talking about him was not easy—I could not think of what wouldn’t be dangerous to say. But to tell her nothing would offend, and so I cast about for something and landed on The Barber of Seville. Warily at first, in the event she would recognize it, I lied. “He’d watched me from afar for some time. He said he’d admired me, but he never dared to speak to me because I was so young, and my brother was very protective of me. And his father and my father had been enemies for years.”

  The day was warm for the time of year, and bright and beautiful enough that it made it easy to forget the muddy squalor of winter. The Mountain shone so whitely it was hard to look at without squinting. We passed a lilac tree in someone’s yard, and I snagged the branch and snapped a blossom from it, holding it to my nose, closing my eyes for a moment to breathe deeply of its scent.

  “Enemies?” she asked.

  “Rival beer hall owners.”

  “So how did you meet?”

  I smiled, thinking of the scene in Barber as we’d played it onstage, a painted balcony, myself perched on a ladder behind, gasping in delight at an impromptu serenade. “He sang to me. One night, he stood below my window and sang to me. I think I loved him from that moment.”

  “It sounds like a fucking fairy tale.”

  “It was very romantic. When I called out for his name, he didn’t tell me his real one, because he knew Papa and my brother would keep him away.”

  “Such an honorable man,” Charlotte said sarcastically.

  “It wasn’t like that. He wanted to meet me and he knew they would object. What was he to do?”

  “How about walk the hell away?”


  I twirled the lilac stem between my fingers, watching it spin. “When Papa advertised for a music teacher for me, he came in disguise and pretended to be one.”

  She snorted. “And then you ran off with him.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Ain’t that how all those stories go? Hell, it’s even how mine went.”

  We climbed the ramp to the boardinghouse door, and then up the stairs to our room. The sun filtered in through the faded curtains, and the little room was hot. Charlotte pounded on the sides of the window to force it up through the swollen sill, and I laid the lilac sprig on the table before it. The sprig seemed to swell in the sun, exploding with scent. The hot metal smoke of the foundry next door came in, along with the faint blood smell of the butcher’s on the other side, but the lilac was so fragrant it held sway over the rest.

  I fell back on the bed, crossing my arms under my head.

  She stood at the window, looking out. “And it ended the way all them stories do, didn’t it? You ran off with him, and things weren’t the way you’d thought they would be.”

  “That didn’t happen for a long time. We were happy for a while.”

  Charlotte’s glance was penetrating. “Is he the one gave you that scar?”

  Would I have answered that? Could I have said anything true about it at all?

  I don’t know what would have come out of my mouth; I was hardly conscious of thinking, only that she was watching me as if I might for once give her some truth she wanted, and I wished nothing more than to keep that look upon her face, the look that told me we were friends, that she trusted me.

  But the knock on the door startled us both.

  “Miz Olson? Miz Rainey?” Mrs. McGraw’s voice was harsh as a seagull’s caw.

  “One moment!” I rose and went to the door to open it.

  Mrs. McGraw stood in the hallway, her face wreathed in an anxious smile, her browning, missing teeth hard to look away from. “Oh, I’ve got good news, Miz Olson! Mr. Clemmons is moving at the end of the week, so Miz Rainey can have his room, just as I promised.”