by Daniel Klein
The film over, Wendell empties out the popcorn machine as he does every Sunday night. By week’s end, the popcorn remaining in the glass-walled case is more gummy than crunchy and the denture crowd starts to complain. Binx knows that it is Sunday; he waits patiently on the lobby carpet for his weekend treat. Then Esther walks in the Phoenix’s outer doors carrying a large, lavender candle, an item that recently went on remainder at the co-op.
“It’s for atmosphere,” she announces. She kisses Wendell’s cheek.
“What kind of atmosphere does it do?”
“Romantic,” Esther says. “I decided it’s time we made love.”
Wendell grins. He sets a family-size tub of popcorn in front of Binx. “We don’t want to rush into anything,” he says and laughs.
“But there are rules,” Esther says, her tone balanced between sober and giddy. “Like, only candlelight.”
“Good. I look like Spencer Tracy in candlelight.”
“And I may not take my top off,” Esther says.
“Fine. Does that mean I can keep my socks on? It keeps me from getting foot cramps.”
“I’m serious, Wendell.”
“So am I.”
“I haven’t done this since Bob left.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, either.”
Wendell laughs. “No fancy stuff, eh?”
Esther wraps her arms around Wendell, hiding her face against his chest. “This scares the shit out of me,” she whispers.
Wendell strokes her hair, kisses the top of her head. “I love you,” he whispers back.
Esther does not remove her blouse, nor Wendell his socks. In the flicker of the lavender, lilac-scented candle sitting by the bed on the dressing room floor, Wendell looks more like Steve Martin than Spencer Tracy. They make love slowly, carefully, tenderly, with their eyes and hearts perfectly open.
Later, her head resting on Wendell’s chest, Esther sweetly weeps while outside the door, Binx, sated with popcorn, snoozes in the bassinet recently deposited on the Phoenix’s stage for the upcoming production of How’s Never?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It is 1921. The war to end all wars is over and America has gone back to work with a vengeance. Production rates soar, employment is nearly full, and new homes are being built at a breathtaking tempo. Yet the industry known as show business is in free fall, at least the live end of it. Performers scramble to adapt their talents to two-dimensional, black-and-white projection on a sparkling white screen; producers close up their offices on Broadway in New York and rent retired airplane hangars in New Jersey and California to launch new careers; and in Grandville, Emile deVries spends all of his waking hours trying to figure out how he can thwart their misbegotten enterprise.
It is not just the full-dimensioned vigor of live theater that compels Emile; it is the Phoenix itself. To him, the edifice is a monument of classic proportions, an homage to European grandeur, the Temple of La Ville Grande, all of which could vanish in deathly darkness. At his dinner table, he decries motion pictures as cheap facsimiles of peerless art—tawdry postcards of timeless masterpieces. He predicts that movies are a fad that will expire in two years’ time, three at best. By then, even the dimmest audiences will find themselves hungering for voices and color and the tantalizing possibility of seeing one of the players dining on oysters and champagne at the Phoenix Café after the show. All Emile needs to do is hold out until then, to make do with the road shows still available to him.
Enter Aaron Fine, an octogenarian impresario who mentored with Florenz Ziegfeld himself. One of the last of the Broadway holdouts, Fine throws Emile a lifeline in the form of The New Ziegfeld Revue. It is Fine, himself, who takes the train to Hudson, New York, then a taxi to Grandville, carrying with him a sepia portfolio of his vaudeville extravaganza featuring operatic singers, dance artistes, magicians, prestidigitators, and a horse that can spell polysyllabic words in two languages. Fine’s price is steep—higher for three consecutive nights than an entire week of High Country Fair just five years earlier—but his competition is virtually nil and his results guaranteed. He proffers the receipt ledger for his show at the Wurlitzer Theater in Buffalo, Reynold’s Variety House in Fargo, and Proctor’s in Troy—sold-out houses every night, every one of them. Emile signs up, feeling indomitable.
Emile launches an unprecedented, two hundred-dollar publicity campaign with two-color posters that he personally affixes to utility poles, grocery windows and, when permitted, Post Office bulletin boards in towns and cities as far away as Springfield to the east, Bennington to the north, Hillsdale to the west, and Winsted to the south. He runs a full-page advertisement in the Grandville Courier under the headline, ‘The Show That Will Not Die!’—a line that his wife finds morbid and, for some reason, sacrilegious. But, indeed, Emile’s diligence pays off: he sells out advance tickets for the first two nights.
The New Ziegfeld Revue comes to town in a single, modestly refurbished, Army troop truck. Emile stands just outside the Phoenix’s doors as performers and stagehands debark from the truck’s rear via a stepladder onto Melville Street. He draws deeply on his cigar, reflexively masking the fumes of whiskey that accompany the troupers. He ignores a paroxysm of foreboding that momentarily dizzies him, causing him to brace himself against the Phoenix’s closest marble pilaster. He rereads a poster glued to the theater’s door to reassure himself.
That night the curtains part to reveal Fine’s finest dancer, Mlle. Culottes, direct from Paris. Accompanied by a pianist and a clarinetist playing a truncated version of M. Maurice Ravel’s masterpiece, Scheherazade, the artiste Culottes performs ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils.’ Although her inspiration may be biblical, Mlle. Culottes execution is profane, especially the lascivious smirk on her crimson-painted lips as she dispatches the seventh and final veil into the first row and around the head of Mr. Ambroise Meechum, recently retired pastor of the Grandville Congregational Church and emeritus chairman of the Council of Clergy. Some cheers follow, particularly from the Phoenix’s balcony, but these are quickly subdued by the overwhelming silence in the orchestra seats. Mlle. Culottes is swiftly replaced by Rupert, the orthographically-gifted equine.
“Rupert, how do you spell ‘undergarments’?” the horse’s master of ceremonies intones with exaggerated diction. Although this man is identified in the program as Professor Abner Wigglesnorth of the Department of Animal Sciences at London University, Emile, watching from the wings, sees that he is also Sr. Rodolfo St. Ambrogio, first clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and very recently of the Phoenix’s orchestra pit, where he just performed Scheherazade. Emile’s bout of foreboding stages a comeback.
In the meantime, Rupert, a knock-kneed mare, traipses over to a colorful placard sitting on an easel. On it is the alphabet in red uppercase letters. Rupert dips his nose to the placard, then abruptly snaps back his head with a pair of women’s bloomers between his teeth. Even the boys in the balcony are unamused. One shouts down to the stage the single word, “Faker!” and is rewarded with applause.
“Rupert, we apparently have some skeptics here in Grandville,” Wigglesnorth-St. Ambrogio responds indignantly. “Unwashed, undereducated skeptics who cannot comprehend that a single bloomer is worth a thousand words.”
From the balcony, a chorus of ‘boos.’
“A rowdy bunch, aren’t they?” the clarinetist says to Rupert. “Let’s show’em, Sweetheart. Spell ‘bloomers’!”
Rupert lowers his head to the alphabet placard, taps at it with woodpecker speed, and straightens his head.
“Close,” Wigglesnorth declares, “but there are two ‘o’s in bloomers.”
Of course, no one—not even in the first row—could have possibly determined which letters Rupert tapped with his broad bridle. The animal might have just as conceivably spelled ‘anthropomorphic’ or ‘vivisection,’ and the Phoenix audience is not fooled. “Faker!” and “Cheat!” launch from the four corners of the the
ater in lieu of the tomatoes many now wish they had brought with them.
In The New Ziegfeld Revue’s defense, it must be said that according to Aaron Fine, Rupert’s act is a parody of sorts, a comic take on the German wonder horse, Clever Hans, who was subsequently proven not to be a prodigious arithmetician after all, but simply a middling-bright animal who could read his trainer’s hand cues. St. Ambrogio’s see-through flimflam gag may have charmed audiences in Buffalo, even in Fargo, but in Grandville, whose culture has been framed by Dutch colonial literalists and Puritan purists, and layered with Eastern European suspiciousness and Mediterranean short-temperedness, it is an intolerable insult. Exit Rupert and company stage left amidst rumbles of indignation.
Emile deVries’s heartbeat accelerates, his face flushes, and as he stares out from the wings, he sees whole clumps of the audience rise from their seats and head for the exits. Next to him, the stage manager, Reuben, Mr. Fine’s youngest son, shouts over to a tall man in a tuxedo and top hat who sports a pencil-thin moustache, “Maestro, you’re on! Now!”
‘Maestro’ is Michelangelo the Magnificent, listed in the program as Harry Houdini’s internationally acknowledged heir. Emile is relieved on two counts: first, that Michelangelo is not the pit pianist; and second, that Reuben has skipped over the next scheduled act—the Can-Can as performed by a mélange of short-skirted women and identically-costumed, hairy-legged men—to put the magician on stage. Clearly, in Reuben’s estimation The Magnificent One is just the act to quell an insurrection.
Michelangelo struts to center stage and bows, removing his hat with a flourish. Out of it flies a dove that immediately soars to the vaulted ceiling of the Phoenix, there flying from corner to corner as if gliding on the draft provided by the puffing Greek gods. Every eye follows the bird in its rounds. The audience is spellbound, as much by the magnificence of their theater as by the bird’s graceful flight, although Michelangelo’s trick itself means little to them—in fact, nothing at all to the old timers who remember Hilton Burke, a Grandville farmer who often kept a few chicken eggs under his felt cap as his patented method for accelerated incubation. The magician’s next trick is straight from the front bin at Abracadabra Supplies in New York—a multicolored silk scarf that he pulls and pulls and pulls seemingly endlessly from his sleeve, a good twenty feet in final length— yet Michelangelo performs this less-than-surprising feat with surprising grace and a look of wide-eyed astonishment worthy of a French-trained mime. The audience responds with polite applause, as they do for his next bit of business, flipping a silver dollar into the air and catching it on his upturned forehead.
Back in the pit, St. Ambrogio lets loose with a ferocious drum roll. Michelangelo the Magnificent steps out to the stage’s apron. His voice is stentorian; his accent vaguely Italian, if by way of Brooklyn.
“Let me be honest, ladies and gentlemen, what you have witnessed thus far are mere parlor tricks. Sleights of hand any dexterous teenager could execute after only a day’s tutelage from yours truly. But prestidigitation is one thing. Magic—genuine magic—is quite another. I will now demonstrate the genuine article. Not a magic trick, dear friends—but pure magic!
“I will now spread a complete deck of cards on this stage, face up. Then I will request the assistance of one of Grandville’s most trusted citizens—a man whose father and grandfather before him created this veritable cathedral, the most celebrated theater in all of New England. I am speaking, of course, of Mr. Emile deVries. Mr. deVries will blindfold me and lead me backstage where I shall remain until he selects a card, writes his name plus a word of his own choosing upon that card, rips it in half, and hands it to another of Grandville’s estimable roster of esteemed citizens, Reverend Ambroise Meechum who, I trust, will immediately deposit it, sight unseen, into one of his estimable pockets. I will further ask Mr. deVries to dispose of the remaining cards by placing them in this leather sack”—here, Michelangelo produces said sack from his waistcoat pocket— “and cast the sack into your midst as far as he is able. Then, he will guide me back to you and remove my blindfold. At that moment, dear citizens, I will, quite frankly, astound you!”
The Magnificent’s peroration is greeted with a roar of applause. All told, Grandvillians are a Christian people who appreciate nothing more than a man who can redeem himself in an act of virtue, preferably a dramatic act of virtue. Indeed, Emile feels redeemed as he paces slowly onto the stage at Michelangelo’s beckoning. He, too, receives a small round of applause when he appears on the apron beside the magic man. The audience is clearly rooting for a happy ending.
Michelangelo spreads the playing cards on the stage floor and hands Emile a blindfold. Emile inspects the blindfold closely, holding it up against the spotlight for any possible breach. None found, he binds it tightly around the magician’s eyes and leads him in halting steps to the wings. There, he guides Michelangelo to a stool where the magician slowly seats himself. As Emile starts to rise, Michelangelo grips his sleeve tightly, pulling Emile’s head down to his. “Queen of diamonds,” he whispers. “Word, ‘giraffe.’” He releases Emile and folds his arms across his chest.
Emile is already back on stage in view of the audience before the meaning of Michelangelo’s whispered instructions fully registers. He is to pick the queen of diamonds from the deck and inscribe it with the word ‘giraffe’ before signing it, tearing it in half, and handing it to Pastor Meechum. Indeed, there is art to Michelangelo’s magic: He knows how desperately Emile wants to save this show and his theater. All Emile has to do is comply with this little artifice. No one need ever know about it. Furthermore, every piece of magic is a trick of deception anyhow—only a fool would doubt that—so what harm would be done?
Emile stoops over the cards, scans them. He begins to pick one up—the nine of clubs—then retrieves his hand, still studying the cards. He is acting—pretending to search for the most obscure card in the deck, whatever that possibly could be. He spots the queen of diamonds, quickly picks it up and stands straight. He pats the pockets of his blue serge suit jacket, locates his Parker pen, removes it, uncaps it, and writes his name and ‘giraffe’ onto the card. He rips the card in half. The audience silently watches his every move, studying Emile’s face.
Emile starts for the edge of the apron. Reverend Meechum rises to meet him, his hand extended. Emile gazes out into his theater. He knows virtually every face he sees. He also knows without a scintilla of doubt that he cannot willfully deceive any one of them. He stands straight and clears his throat.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Emile says. “The price of your tickets will be refunded in full at the box office on your way out. Forgive me, please. The show is over.”
As with Emile, himself, just moments ago, it takes a long moment for the audience to absorb these words. When they do, they rise from their seats, but remain in place. The applause begins in the front of the theater, but moves in a wave to the sides and back, then to the balcony. It is the loudest, most sustained ovation of the entire evening. Emile bows, tears in his eyes.
To the day, it was three weeks later when Wendell saw his father lug his newly purchased Vitascope up the balcony stairs of the re-christened Phoenix Motion Picture House.
* * *
Franny’s four complementary tickets to the Grandville Players production of How’s Never? were for center orchestra seats, but she exchanged them for balcony seats, telling Sally Rule, chairwoman of the ticket committee, that her father was a balcony man by habit. Franny is now sitting in the third-tolast row of the balcony next to her father who, in turn, is sitting next to Esther and her daughter, Kaela. For the occasion, Esther’s son, Johnny, is spending the night with the family who lives below them in the house on Board Street; Johnny has been known to talk back to live performers.
Below, the orchestra is filling up quickly, a testament to Babs’s super publicity campaign—she appeared four times on Bob Balducci’s radio show in as many weeks—and to the fact that for the first time in the Players’ history, th
eir autumn production preempted the film scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend—in this case, the mega-hit, Barbie in the Nutcracker. Barbie’s official cancellation to make way for the local theatrical came to Wendell via the London office, doubly astonishing considering that Thanksgiving weekend was one of the top grossing movie weekends of the year. Not that Wendell minded—he was spared the prospect of watching a vacuous doll with a gravity-defying bosom dance the Tchaikovsky classic. This fortuitous scheduling of How’s Never? brings in second-homers and their families and holiday guests in addition to the Grandville Players’ loyal hometown followers. It sold out its three-night run.
Franny had not wanted to come at all. She had managed to avoid the theater entirely the past few weeks, thus evading even a glimpse of the fully assembled and painted set. She had broached the idea of skipping the show to her father—casually she thought, just saying she needed to catch up on her sleep, which, God knows, was true; she has been unable to remain asleep for more than an hour at a stretch lately—but Wendell seemed unhappy with that idea. He did not come out and say so, but Franny is an expert at reading her father. Wendell was obviously worried about her lately and, God love him, he subscribed to the idea that any deviation from standard routine was bad for one’s equilibrium; they always went to the Players’ shows together. So Franny compromised with the balcony seats; at least she would have some distance on the spectacle.
It is Sunday, the final performance. The house lights fade, Sting’s “If I Ever Lose Faith In You” issues from the loudspeakers, and the one-hundred-year-old, original asbestos curtains of the Phoenix Theater draw open. Before the actors utter their first lines, the set receives a lovely round of applause. Franny shrinks in her seat. Like an anxious child, she squints at the stage, only allowing herself to take it in one section at a time. Several seconds pass before her eyes are fully open and focused on the set. How about that? Gil Crespert had barely changed her design at all! Yes, he had added some concealed floodlights under the straw so that they threw long, ominous shadows against the rear wall, a touch that was too obvious by half, even if Saturday’s review of the play in the Berkshire Eagle singled out Franny—and those shadows—as an example of the Players’ New York-worthy production values. God knows, Gil knew how to wow them in the boonies. But in the end, it is a minor tweak. Franny pulls herself upright in her seat. Let the show go on.