Prima Donna

by Megan Chance

“I was used to this,” I said—even I heard the wistfulness in my voice.

  Then Charlotte pushed her way up to the bar.

  I heard her voice first. “Let me through! Let me through, you bastard,” and then I saw her slender arm, oddly disembodied, clad in cheap bronze satin, the edge of her scar showing beneath a dirty ruffle of lace, and she followed. She came up against the bar breathlessly and then looked up to call out her order. When she saw me, she froze.

  “There you are,” I said, trying to smile, failing. “I was looking for you.”

  She glanced away. “I need four whiskeys and three beers.”

  I got out the glasses. “Johnny said he would send you up to see me.”

  “He told me,” she said stiffly. “I been too busy.”

  I turned to pour the whiskey, one after another, and then the beers. I felt ill when I remembered what I’d done to her, what she no doubt would never forgive—just one more thing to add to my tally, another reason for guilt, another regret I could never atone for.

  “Sa-bi-na, sing me a song!”

  “SA-BI-NA, SA-BI-NA—”

  I turned to put the glasses on Charlotte’s tray.

  “They sure love you,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “They can’t know you very well.”

  That hurt; I didn’t pretend it didn’t. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. I shouldn’t have said those things, but … but I was angry—”

  “Why the hell should you be angry?” she demanded. She leaned over the bar, bent low over her drinks so I could hear her voice through the noise. “I ain’t the one who kept secrets. And they weren’t small ones either, Marg—whoever the hell you are.”

  “What would you have said?” I snapped at her. “What would you have done if I’d told you—” I stopped short, looking around at the curious eyes, the men huddled about the bar, listening avidly, not even pretending otherwise. “I can’t talk to you about it here. Will you at least hear me out? Can I explain?”

  “It don’t matter,” she said. She picked up her tray and turned away, shoving back through the crowd, disappearing within it.

  “SA-BI-NA, SA-BI-NA, SA-BI-NA!” The chorus was growing louder. I could no longer hear Sally singing onstage.

  “Get out of my way, you sons of bitches!” Johnny’s voice carried forward; like Charlotte, he burst through the crowd as if it had birthed him, one minute not there, the next before me. He was annoyed, more than that, angry. “What the fuck are you doing down here? You got ‘em all riled up. That reporter hasn’t shown yet either.”

  “I couldn’t stay in that room another minute.”

  “I swear you don’t got the sense God gave a rock,” he said. “No wonder Price left.”

  “We were a matched pair,” I said acidly. “He gave as good as he got, I promise you.”

  Johnny gave me an odd look, one I couldn’t interpret, and opened his mouth as if he meant to say something before he snapped it shut again. Behind him, the crowd’s chanting grew even louder. I glanced up to see Sally had quit trying. She was just standing on the stage, staring at the crowd as if she couldn’t understand what was going on. The saloon was growing dangerous; I could feel the discontent. I knew it was focused on me.

  Johnny put his hands to his ears. “Christ! Has it always been like this?”

  “Since I sang Marguerite at the Academy,” I said.

  “How’d you live with it?”

  “Gideon knew how to appease them.” It was getting hard to hear and be heard; I shouted the last words.

  “How’d he do that?”

  “He let them see me, but he kept me apart.”

  The crowd surged; Johnny was shoved hard against the bar.

  “Sing for us, Miss Conrad!”

  “Sing!”

  “We want to hear you sing!”

  It was growing out of control. Duncan looked panicked, which he rarely had in the four years I’d known him. I leaned forward and yelled into Johnny’s ear, “Let me sing for them.”

  He shook his head. “They can buy tickets.”

  “One song,” I told him. “Let me sing one song. They’ll quiet down, I promise you. Then I’ll go back upstairs.”

  He looked back over his shoulder, calculating. Then he looked back at me and shook his head. “I want them hungry.”

  “I can keep them hungry,” I said; already I felt my confidence welling. “Let me try.”

  “SA-BI-NA! SA-BI-NA! SA-BI-NA!”

  Johnny took a deep breath, and then he nodded. “All right. One song, honey, that’s all. Duncan! Help me get her to the stage!”

  “I’ll never get to the stage. Just help me onto the bar.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment, and then his expression cleared, and he nodded. He leaned back against the bar and kicked out, saying, “Get back! Get back and Miss Conrad’ll sing for you.”

  They eased back, not much. Those close to us heard what Johnny said and immediately quieted; the danger I’d felt in them tempered.

  “Duncan, come and help me up,” I called, and Duncan was there in a moment.

  “You sure about this?” he asked.

  “Get her up on the bar,” Johnny ordered. He caught sight of Sarah, coming back for drinks, and shouted, “You girl! Go on upstairs and tell the band to play”—he looked over his shoulder at me—”what the hell do you want them to play?”

  “‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,’ “I said, because I knew even Billy would have no trouble with that one.

  Johnny shouted it to Sarah, who turned again and headed for the orchestra loge. Duncan put his hands at my waist and lifted me onto the bar, and the moment I was up there, the “SA-BI-NA! SA-BI-NA! SA-BI-NA!” died. It took a little longer for the talk and the laughter to quiet, and then there was a hush.

  Someone shouted out, “Were you there when that Frenchie got killed?”

  I felt myself flush.

  “Shut up, you son of a bitch!” someone else shouted. “Let her sing!”

  “Did you help murder him?”

  The memory pushed back. I tried to ignore it, to smile. I tried to remember what Gideon had told me. To embrace the scandal, to not let them use it against me, and I called out, “Do you want me to talk, or would you rather hear me sing?”

  “Sing!” someone shouted, and then someone else, “We want to hear you sing!”

  Johnny wrapped his hand around my ankle, meaning to reassure me, I knew.

  The strains of “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” began, as tuneless and muddled as ever, and I felt the nervousness come over me as it always did, and I closed my eyes and imagined his kiss, his whisper, and it was enough. I opened my eyes again just as the introduction ended. And then I sang.

  I held them there, rapt, drawn into my hand, breathing in time with me, leaning forward as if they could somehow join their souls to mine. I enchanted them with my voice and with a song so simple this could have been Völksstadt, and I fourteen years old again, bringing hausfraus to tears with “Ständchen,” or “O Du Lieber Augustin.” I even made them forget Billy’s wretched playing.

  I searched the crowd until I found her. There, Charlotte. Standing at a table with her arms around some burly lumberman’s neck, staring at me as if I had changed into something else before her eyes, and I held her gaze and sang to her, putting all my apology into the words and my inflection, until I saw the shine of her tears.

  When I was finished, the applause was so loud it felt it might lift the roof off the building, and I smiled at them and made my bow a seduction; I invited them to come on Monday and hear the full concert, and then I jumped down from the bar and whispered hurriedly to Duncan, “Get me away.”

  He took my arm, nearly pushing me into Johnny’s office. The applause was still going. Whistles, catcalls, shouts. Duncan handed me the key, and the moment he went out I locked myself in.

  Then I stood there, listening to them, breathing hard, feeling that rush in my blood that had been like an addiction, and the wor
ds I’d read only a few hours ago in my own journal came back to me, words I’d forgotten. Barret saying that he would serve as my conscience, since no one else would. That I did not need the things I’d thought I did, not fine trappings or rich patrons, that my voice was enough.

  Now, I heard the applause beyond, and my brother’s words took on a poignancy that nearly made me cry. Because I had not been singing on any fine stage, nor had I been dressed in satins. This was no pedigreed, high-society audience. And yet they had loved me, and I had loved singing for them. For those few moments, my voice had brought us together, and I had not cared who they were or what they might have done, and they had cared nothing for the fact that I was scarred and no longer beautiful, nor that I was notorious for a murder no one knew the truth of and that I claimed not to remember.

  All that had mattered was my voice.

  How had it been that in all that time, I’d never seen that Barret was right? How young I’d been. How stupid and young and selfish. How had I let my ambitions—and Gideon’s—over-whelm my joy?

  I had told myself I was running away from Gideon. He’d been part of it all; he was no innocent, but the truth was as he’d said, that I’d been running from myself, from the things I was willing to do. With shame, I remembered my meeting with Blakely Davis at the Occidental Hotel. My flirtation with Lyman Kerwin. The way I’d managed Johnny. What had Gideon said? That I’d been a bludgeon when a tap on the shoulder would do. I had been that. He was not blameless, and perhaps he had taught me things I should not have learned, but in the end, the decisions had been mine. I had been the one who wanted it all. I could have stopped it. I could have said no.

  “I don’t want to be that person any longer.”

  “Then don’t be.”

  How easily he’d said it, as if simply saying it could make it happen.

  I looked at the door; I heard the applause dying down, the music starting up again, some girl taking the stage, and I thought: What if he was right?

  CHAPTER 26

  I stayed in Johnny’s office until it was very late. I fell asleep in the chair, starting awake when he knocked and said, “Honey, open up. It’s me.”

  The saloon seemed fairly quiet; when I went to open the door, Johnny slunk in, closing it tightly again behind him. He looked me over. “You all right?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re starting to trickle out,” he said. “You were right about the singing. Too bad most of the tickets are already sold.”

  “You might want to add another show,” I said.

  He started. “Another show?”

  “I’ll do four,” I said. “That should be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To get Seattle and the Palace mentioned in every review in the country.” I smiled. “Prosch is right, you’ll have your theater before you know it.”

  He went very quiet. “You break my heart, Margie.”

  “I’m sorry for that too.” I went up on my toes to kiss him, and he put his arms around me and held me there, tightly enough that I couldn’t escape, and kissed me back hard, and when he let me go I had tears in my eyes.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  “You can read about me in the papers. I don’t doubt I’ll be in them.”

  “Not for any more murders, I hope.”

  “Not unless they’re in Faust.“

  He laughed a little. “Well, you were never boring, honey, I’ll say that for you.”

  “Perhaps … perhaps I’ll come back to see you sometime. Maybe you could even book me to sing here.”

  He shook his head. “Price will never take what I can afford to pay.”

  I looked away. “Perhaps it won’t be up to him.”

  Johnny took my chin in his hand, forcing me back to look at him. “Truthfully, honey, I think he might be the only man in creation who can keep up with you—or who wants to. He’ll get tired of being bored soon enough. He’ll be back.”

  “I don’t need him.”

  “Maybe not, but that you want him is clear enough.” He smiled. “And God help us all if you don’t get what you want.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I rose early. The reporter from Portland had not made an appearance, and Johnny said he’d be here later, along with one from San Francisco, but there was something I wanted to do before they arrived. I dressed and left the Palace, going out the back door to avoid the people already gathering at the front—only a half dozen yet, as early as it was, and some were muddy, as if they’d slept there. I drew my hood over my head and scurried down the back steps and took the roundabout way to the telegraph office, breathing a sigh of relief when I reached it without incident.

  The telegraph operator was half asleep and paid me no attention as I scrawled out the message he was to send.

  Coming home. Sorry for everything. Forgive me. Sabine

  He glanced at it when I handed it to him, and I was relieved when my name seemed to hold no interest for him. “Where to?”

  “Willa Griswold,” I told him. “First Avenue and Sixth Street. The Völksstadt, in New York City.”

  When it was done, it was as if a weight had been lifted from me—one whose heaviness I had grown so used to bearing that without it I felt almost untethered. But I’d only gone a few blocks before my next task settled itself in its place, and I made myself rush forward so I did not have time to think about it, to reconsider.

  I heard some of the boarders gathering in the kitchen for breakfast as I went in the door of McGraw’s; the smell of some breadlike thing, pancakes or something, greeted my nose, and my stomach rumbled with hunger, but I ignored it. Quickly I went up the stairs. Duncan had only retrieved my things, not told Mrs. McGraw I was moving out, and I meant to check to make certain he’d got everything, but it was not really the reason I’d come, and I was nervous enough without delaying. Instead I went to Charlotte’s door and rapped upon it, waiting anxiously for her reply.

  It seemed an interminable time before I heard her sleepy “Come in,” and I eased the door open and stepped into the darkness. The curtains were drawn; there was only the faintest thin edge of light coming from around them.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  I heard her jerk fully awake. “You?”

  I went to the window and pushed aside the curtains, flooding the tiny room with the gray overcast light. She rose to one elbow, blinking, rubbing her eyes. I sat down on the bed, pushing my hood back.

  “Why the fuck are you here?” Charlotte asked bluntly.

  “I told you I wanted to explain.”

  “I don’t need your explanation. I already know why you did it.”

  “Do you?”

  “You were angry. You wanted to hurt someone, and I was there.”

  I looked down at my hands. “That’s about right.”

  “I don’t understand you, Marguer—” She broke off with a muttered curse. “What the hell should I call you?”

  “My name is Sabine,” I said quietly. “Sabine Luise Conrad. I grew up in New York City, in what they call Kleindeutschland. My papa owned a beer hall.”

  “So that part was true.”

  “Yes, that was true.”

  “Did you really sing there?”

  “Yes. From the time I was eight. When I was fourteen I began taking singing lessons from the choirmaster at the Lutheran Church.”

  “But the rest was a lie, wasn’t it? The part about the pianist.”

  I sighed. “Not … wholly. I met Gideon Price when I was fourteen. He sang in the church choir with my brother. When I was sixteen he arranged for me to go on tour. He became … my accompanist. My teacher. More than that.”

  Charlotte made a sound of derision. “I can’t believe you’re Sabine Conrad. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

  “You’d heard of me then?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Who the fuck hasn’t? And the murder was in all the papers.”

  I swallowed hard, twining my hands together in my lap. “The m
urder.”

  “I don’t remember much about that either. Something about a trial, and your manager—your Mr. Price, I guess—going off to prison. And you disappearing.”

  The way it sounded coming from her mouth was terrible. I wondered how I could say it, how I could tell her the truth; already I heard in her voice condemnation. But I had come here to make amends, and I was tired of secrets. If she chose to denounce me there was nothing I could do about it; at least I would know I had tried.

  “I was the one who killed him,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Alain DeRosier. The man who died. I was running away from Gideon and I wanted Alain to take me to Paris. When he refused, I killed him. I didn’t mean to—or maybe I did. I know I meant to hurt him. Then I ran. When I heard they’d arrested Gideon, I … I didn’t say anything. I let him take the blame.” I made myself look at her; I made myself see the horror in her expression even as I flinched from it.

  “I don’t believe you,” she whispered.

  “It’s true. Believe me, it’s true. I wish it wasn’t. I wish … well, it doesn’t matter. It’s what happened. And … I came here to apologize for being such a poor friend to you. I wanted … I wanted to tell you I was sorry. For everything.” I got it all out in a rush and rose from the bed. “I don’t expect you to forgive me—”

  “Why the hell not?”

  I was halfway to the door. Her words made me stop and look back over my shoulder. Now it was my turn to be confused. “What?”

  “Why don’t you expect me to forgive you?”

  I turned fully to face her. “I don’t understand.”

  “It ain’t my place to forgive you for murdering that man. It’s got nothing to do with me. And Gideon Price is the only one who can forgive you for what you did to him. But what you did to me … I can forgive you for that. And I do.”

  I felt this little explosion of something like joy in my chest, but it spread slowly, as if it were afraid.

  Charlotte pushed back the blankets and came out of bed. “It wasn’t going to last with Robert anyway. I knew that. Sooner or later … well, it ain’t like I was expecting to have a life with him or anything—”