The Astonishing Life of August March

by Aaron Jackson

Germany surrendered in May, and the Backstage Bistro threw its most riotous party yet wherein August, smashingly drunk, kissed a well-known actress onstage to the tumultuous cheers of the gathered military personnel. A photo of the kiss became quite famous, even appearing in Harper’s Bazaar. The actress was none other than Vivian Fair, and had the public, which devoured the picture so greedily, known that the subjects of the photograph were actually mother and son, the photo would probably have caused an even greater stir, albeit for different, more taboo, reasons.

  Summer melted into August (the month, not the boy) and eventually, two catastrophically persuasive bombs were dropped on Japan.

  “It’s over!” cried Miss Butler as she burst into August’s room, upsetting a fern in her elation.

  “What is?” August asked, not looking up from his novel.

  “The war, you insufferable child! Japan’s surrendered. Now get dressed! We’re going out!”

  For all his prepubescent ennui, the fact that the war had ended did cause August to jump on his bed and let out more than a few hoots and huzzahs. He was in the midst of a fist-pumping leap when the rest of Miss Butler’s announcement finally registered.

  Going out? As in outside? He’d left the Scarsenguard before, but aside from his disastrous first attempt, his escapades had been strictly rooftop affairs, private wanderings that belonged to no one but the city and himself. But Miss Butler slipped August into an altered suit, splashed some water on his face, and led him out the front door of the theater into a world he’d never known, as if it were nothing.

  “Stop gaping, dear, you look like a tourist,” Miss Butler chastised, gripping his hand in her gloved one, pulling him through Times Square. She was positively beaming, dressed in a festive yellow frock that made her look ten years younger.

  Didn’t she understand that he’d never been outside in daylight before? Never seen an operating storefront? Upon further consideration, August realized that Miss Butler probably wasn’t aware of these facts. Her memory had been faulty for decades, and seeing as how she had surpassed the hundred-year milestone a year or two before, it would be unfair to expect her to remember such a trivial thing as keeping a boy inside a theater for the entirety of his life.

  But August couldn’t help but gawk. Everyone was smiling, laughing, talking; there were so many people! A girl with dark curly hair right around his age ran up and hugged him. August was dumbfounded. He’d hardly ever interacted with anyone in his peer group, let alone had a girl embrace him.

  He was fishing for something to say to this wonderful person when the girl’s mother appeared and grabbed her hand. “Sorry, she’s just excited. I guess we all are!”

  He watched the pair walk away, feeling a pang of loss when the girl’s dark hair finally disappeared into the crowd.

  His melancholy hardly lasted a minute; Miss Butler led August all over that day, chattering so ceaselessly that August feared she might asphyxiate. She bought him every sort of treat: cotton candy, ice cream, roasted almonds, hot dogs; the world, it seemed, was chock-full of sugar and simmering meats. Due to the sandwiches available at the bistro, August hadn’t gone hungry for years, but he’d never lost the scavenger’s mentality bred into him during his youth. He devoured whole each culinary delight he was offered.

  When Miss Butler finally led him home at dusk, August collapsed in his bed, overstimulated, overfed, and exhausted, vowing to return to the outside world as soon as possible.

  * * *

  August was unable to fulfill his pledge as quickly as he would have liked, however, for the very day after the bombings, Mr. Barreth, the Scarsenguard’s mustachioed owner, came plowing through the building, shouting demands. Though August had intended to sneak out into New York’s streets, he felt it his duty to oversee the overseer lest the latter make a muck of things.

  The Backstage Bistro, home to a thousand glittering parties, was already being disassembled. The decadent canvas, the gossamer glass lanterns, and the perfectly intimate stage were all being unromantically and, in August’s opinion, rather disrespectfully removed or repurposed. A few years back, nothing would have delighted the boy more than the bistro’s demise, but against his will, he’d come to love it.

  “Get it all out of here,” Barreth yelled, a smile distorting his face. “Isn’t this wonderful?” he said to a nearby secretary. “The Scarsenguard can start making me money again! And no more darkies in my theater!”

  So the decision to make the bistro unsegregated, a decision that had received heaps of mostly positive press, had obviously not been Barreth’s. August was anything but surprised.

  “I’ve got plans for this place,” Barreth mumbled to himself, the grotesque smile growing ever wider.

  Despite the sting of mourning he felt at seeing the bistro being so coarsely dismantled, August couldn’t help but feel excited. Continuing to eavesdrop on Barreth, he overheard that a play, already rehearsing, was scheduled to start previews at the Scarsenguard in September. What bliss!

  It turned out that the new play was a light, silly thing called Flirty Bertie. Seemingly after their sons and daughters had been killed overseas, people didn’t have the stomach for tragedy. Still, Flirty Bertie was less loathsome than the offerings of the other theaters on the block, and August, in his reclaimed cubby above the spotlight, had watched every rehearsal and preview performance to date.

  The young actor who played Bertie was named Avery Guy. Mr. Guy was currently locked in a terrible struggle with reality: he believed his waist to be a few inches smaller and his chest a few inches larger, while facts kept insisting otherwise. Miss Butler, back in the saddle as the Scarsenguard’s stalwart laundress, was forced to listen to Avery’s every complaint, and though she would wave a tape measure in the actor’s face, indicating exactly what his measurements were, the young man was nothing if not persistent.

  “Be a pal,” he’d say, flashing his smile, flicking his eyes over her shoulder to see if he could beam his gorgeous teeth at anyone else.

  And so she sewed, getting her revenge by taking in the pants several inches more than Avery Guy had requested.

  “Let’s see him squeeze his way into these,” she murmured to herself.

  It was a stupid thing to do. Eugenia knew she’d just have to let them out again the next day, but it was these quiet mutinies that kept a person sane, and so she threaded the needle, in and out, each new stitch an act of revolution.

  Pulling the needle, Eugenia carelessly pricked her finger, a hazard of her profession, but a mistake she generally avoided. Worse yet, a tiny globule of blood fell from her finger and landed on the pants, which were of course white. The splatter was too noticeable to be left alone. Normally a little spit would take a blood stain right out, but her mouth was too dry to muster even a tendril of saliva, so she’d need to run the pants under cold water before she could continue her war against the waistline.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  Last words are a funny thing. They can’t be planned or rehearsed and are more often than not unintelligible babble. But a person’s final thoughts are even stranger. What should one think about at the end of their life? Miss Butler, who’d lived more than a century, had witnessed many world-changing events that might constitute one last moment of reflection. The Civil War. Prohibition. The crash. The Chrysler Building, and then the Empire State. She’d been buying stockings when a teller told her that the Titanic had sunk.

  But none of these affairs were personal. True, they’d shaped the country, but they hadn’t necessarily shaped Eugenia. So as her life neared its final moments, should she consider contemplating one of the smaller incidents of her existence, something uniquely hers, that still stuck out after all the years, red as a wagon after a rain? Perhaps the time her teacher, Mrs. Wilson, had called her foolish in front of the rest of her class, a flashback that could still bring a blush to her face, was a memory of merit. Or there was the terrier mutt she’d grown up with, so bored by fetch. What about Alan Conrad, who die
d in Virginia? Eugenia still wondered if he’d gotten that last letter she’d written.

  And then of course, there was the night she found a baby in a basket of dirty blouses. Surely August, the greatest joy of her long life, deserved one final fleeting recollection, a misty reminiscence before death claimed her.

  Alas, life is cruel, and Eugenia Butler’s final thought was not of her beloved August, but of cold water and spit. She fell to the ground, dead at the overripe age of one hundred and three.

  August, already squatting in his secret cubby, never saw the body. At intermission, he decided to stretch his legs and skip the second act, having seen it many times already. Careful to avoid contact with anyone, a habit he was having trouble readjusting to, August only accidentally discovered that his surrogate mother was dead through the hushed, excitable whispers of two cast members hurrying up a stairwell.

  At first, he wouldn’t believe it. After all, every death he’d ever witnessed had been played by an actor. The grief ended at curtain call when the performers came back and took their bows. And hadn’t Miss Butler yelled at him earlier that day for being a precocious smart aleck? That woman, so full of punch and vigor, couldn’t be gone. This was just her brief exit. Soon he’d hear her throaty laugh again, or she’d come rushing round a corner to demand he help her find a pincushion. She wasn’t gone, though. She wasn’t dead.

  He wandered without knowing where his feet took him. Where should he go now? Who should he tell? What was he going to do? August felt tight and hot, like the walls were pressing in. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t think about this.

  In a snap, August decided he would watch the rest of the play after all and rushed back to his cubby, determined to forget the whole thing. But as Avery Guy struggled through the play in his not-quite-finished, too-tight trousers, the weight of what he’d heard pressed down on August heavy as a curtain.

  A memory came unbidden. August was younger, five perhaps, and sat curled under the crook of Miss Butler’s arm, his little torso resting against her thigh and hip. She was reading aloud to him—what exactly, he couldn’t remember, but that didn’t matter. Something about Miss Butler’s voice soothed him. It was rich and thick with sweet flavor, like taffy left too long in a pocket.

  August hadn’t been fully listening to the story, enjoying the comfort of the ritual more than the intricacies of the plot. Instead, his mind wandering, he was pinching at the couch they sat on. It was brown with a tiny white pattern printed across the fabric. The shapeless white designs that speckled the couch had always looked to August like little peanuts, and he loved to pretend to pluck them off the cushions and eat them.

  Lost in his game, it took him a moment to realize that Miss Butler had fallen asleep, her mouth wide open and her neck bent painfully backward. August jabbed his bony child’s elbow into her side.

  “What? What is it?” Eugenia asked as she came awake.

  “You fell asleep.”

  “Did I? Oh, I’m so sorry, dear. Now where were we?”

  She picked up reading, and August went back to picking his peanuts.

  A perfect memory.

  Grief assaulted him. Still hidden in his cubby, August wept, and his unrestrained, naked agony was heard throughout the theater.

  Mythology surrounding the Scarsenguard Spirit had all but died, what with the bustle of war. The legend was reborn that night, however. Attending the play that evening had been joyless theatre critic Margaret Clarke. Her scathing reviews were not known for their sentimentality, but the next day, an abnormally atypical article appeared in the Times.

  I know not what to say. Never in my life have I been so affected by a play as I have by “Flirty Bertie.” Act 1 was an unintentional tragedy, brimming with farcical tropes that would make even a troglodyte check his watch. However, as the curtain lifted on the second act, something . . . otherworldly occurred. Even as I write it I feel foolish, but know this, dear reader: I was chilled to my very core.

  Needless to say, Clarke’s review was the talk of the town, and Flirty Bertie was an overnight smash. August, who usually followed the ups and downs of the Scarsenguard’s productions with the solemnity of a priest at last rites, took no notice. Instead, he wandered the Scarsenguard, listless and empty, embodying the ghost he’d portrayed for so long without the aid of costume, flour, or chains.

  Miss Butler was dead, and he was a boy, lost.

  * * *

  “My dear boy,” said Sir Reginald, shoving a pastrami sandwich in his mouth, “you cannot live in the Scarsenguard forever.”

  August and Percyfoot were in a pragmatic deli on Ninth Avenue, autumnal sunlight streaking in through the large glass windows, casting shadows of backward letters on the deli’s linoleum floor.

  It was October 9, August’s adopted birthday, and Percyfoot had come in from Los Angeles for the occasion, though the train cross-country hadn’t been cheap. A month had passed since Miss Butler’s death. When Percyfoot asked how the funeral was, he received the heartbreaking reply that August didn’t know; he hadn’t been invited, because no one knew he existed.

  August surprised Percyfoot yet again by agreeing that he should leave the Scarsenguard. “But where am I to go?” he asked.

  Truthfully, Sir Reginald could think of no better location for the boy. To send him into the care of the government would be criminal. There was no doubt that August’s upbringing had been unconventional, but it had been genteel and pampered in its way. Throw him into a state-owned orphanage with boys who’d been shuttled in and out of foster care for the entirety of their lives, and the poor lad would get eaten alive.

  August mumbled something.

  “What was that, child? Speak up. We didn’t spend hours on your vocal exercises to have you stammering like a simpleton.”

  “I said, could I come live with you?”

  Sir Reginald inhaled sharply. Here was a dilemma. Financially speaking, he could take the boy in. But then he’d need to legally adopt August, and truthfully, Percyfoot was worried about the contractual quagmire that would entail. The authorities might look into his personal life and uncover things better left private. Not to mention the fact that Percyfoot enjoyed his unencumbered lifestyle. To suddenly have full custody of a child would certainly change the way he operated. Best to leave August safely tucked into the Scarsenguard for now; as soon as his next picture wrapped, he would find a suitable home for the child.

  “My dear boy, I just don’t think it would work.”

  August finished off his egg salad sandwich, the sour bite of pumpernickel he usually savored given nothing but a perfunctory swallow. Percyfoot sighed, the last few bits of his pastrami uneaten as well. What a mess this boy was in. They walked back to the Scarsenguard, chatted joylessly for an hour or so, before Percyfoot returned to his hotel and grabbed a cab to the train station.

  “It will work itself out,” he said to himself over and over again during the long first leg to Chicago, a mantra, a prayer.

  It did indeed work itself out, though not as anyone had expected. Due to Margaret Clarke’s controversial review, everyone in the entire entertainment industry had seen Flirty Bertie. Almost everyone agreed it was nothing but pointless fluff, and because of this, almost everyone agreed it should be made into a movie. The film rights for Bertie were secured, and Avery Guy was set to star. August was relieved. Perhaps if Mr. Guy’s toothsome sorcery was absent, the play would have no legs to stand on and be forced to close, leaving room for another, more respectable offering to take its place.

  August’s predictions turned out to be only half true. After the departure of Avery Guy, the play quickly folded. What happened next, however, was a surprise.

  The dreadful owner of the Scarsenguard, Mr. Barreth, came pounding through the theater. Would it really be so difficult to, even slightly, censor his footfalls?

  Through corner ducking and a masterful usage of staircase banisters, August was able to spy out the reason for his nemesis’s visit.

 
; “We’ll clear all this out,” Barreth said in his blasphemous baritone, nearly swatting one of his underlings in the face as he waved at the Scarsenguard’s impressive prop closet. “Do some sort of auction. Some idiot’s bound to buy this shit. In any case, we won’t need any of it in the hotel.”

  Hotel? Surely August had misheard. Later, hidden inside a wooden sarcophagus left over from a production called Lust in Luxor, he was able to piece out a bit more. The worst was confirmed.

  “This will all be kitchens,” came the muffled boom of Mr. Barreth, “and staff quarters and all that rubbish. We can make those small, cut corners where we can. We’ll repurpose some of the chandeliers to save a buck. I’m going to make a mint on this place. Don’t know what the hell my father ever got into the theater racket for in the first place. Art’s for old biddies and queers. Give me a hotel! A big beautiful hotel!”

  Unbelievable. Mr. Barreth planned on turning the Scarsenguard into a hotel? A hotel, of all things! Imagine, tourists befouling the air that was the rightful property of actors and directors and stagehands and playwrights! August’s slight chest heaved in righteous indignation. Barreth, as the owner of the theater, was supposed to be a champion of the arts! Was the Scarsenguard nothing to him but a purblind cow to be milked for cash? A swollen sow slaughtered for coinage? This was profane, an atrocity. It could not be.

  “For shame, Barreth!” August cried, bursting from the sarcophagus in his anger. “Leave this place and never return!”

  “The spirit!” Mr. Barreth screamed. He sprinted to the nearest exit, his tribe of flunkies right behind.

  After his divine fury cooled, August was rather pleased with himself. He’d defended his territory, villains be damned! He went to bed that night feeling happy for the first time since Miss Butler had died.

  Dawn, however, brought grave tidings. August thought his outburst had frightened Barreth off for good, but alas, as the timid new day streaked light across August’s bedroom, the boy stretched and went to the window. What he saw astounded him. Outside, standing at the ready, was a team of wrecking balls and a crew of thirty men. It seemed Barreth was determined to build his hotel, and the faster he could bury the Scarsenguard and its spirit, the better.