by John Jakes
“Oh, yes. The dancing teacher.” With that resolved, Cooper started his horse over the plank.
It had the effect of a match thrown in dry grass. Des kicked his mule forward. Hooves rapped the plank. The mule frightened Cooper’s horse, causing it to sidestep and fall. Cooper twisted in the air to keep from being crushed, and landed in the shallows next to the horse. He thrashed and came up unhurt but covered with slimy mud.
“What the hell is wrong with you, LaMotte?”
“Dishonor, sir. Dishonor is what’s wrong. Or does your family no longer understand the meaning of honor? It may be insubstantial as the sunlight, but it’s no less important to life.”
Dripping and chilled despite the heat, Cooper wondered if he’d met someone unbalanced by the war. “I don’t know what in the name of God you mean.”
“I refer, sir, to the tragedies visited upon members of my family by members of yours.”
“I’ve done nothing to any LaMotte.”
“Others with your name have done sinful things. You all smeared the honor of the LaMotte family by allowing Colonel Main to cuckold my first cousin Justin. Before I came home, your runaway slave Cuffey slew my first cousin Francis.”
“But I tell you I had nothing to do—”
“We have held family councils, those of us who have survived,” Des broke in. “I am glad I met you now, because it saves me from seeking you out in Charleston.”
“For what?”
“To inform you that the LaMottes have agreed to settle our debt of honor.”
“You’re talking nonsense. Dueling’s against the law.”
“I am not referring to dueling. We’ll use other means—at a time and place of our choosing. But we’ll settle the debt.”
Cooper reached for his horse’s bridle. Water dripped from the animal and from Cooper’s elbows, plopping in the silence. He wanted to scoff at this deranged young man, but was deterred by what he saw in LaMotte’s eyes.
“We’ll settle it with you, Mr. Main, or we’ll settle it with your brother’s nigger widow, or we’ll settle it with both of you. Be assured of it.”
And on he rode, mule shoes loud as pistol fire on the plank. After he reached solid ground, his hunched serving man followed, never once meeting Cooper’s eye.
Cooper shivered again and led his horse from the water.
Late that night, at his house on Tradd Street, near the Battery, Cooper told his wife of the incident. Judith laughed.
That angered him. “He meant it. You didn’t see him. I did. Not every man who goes to war comes back sane.” He didn’t notice her mournful glance, or recall his own mental disarray in the weeks following their son’s drowning.
“I’m going to warn Madeline in a letter,” he said.
_____________
WINTER GARDEN
Broadway, between Bleecker and Amity sts.
THIS EVENING,
commencing at 7½ o’clock,
RICHELIEU; THE CONSPIRACY.
Characters by Edwin Booth,
Charles Barron, J. H. Taylor, John Dyott,
W. A. Donaldson, C. Kemble Mason,
Miss Rose Eytange, Mrs. Marie Wilkins,&c. …
4
WILLA WOKE SUDDENLY. SHE heard a noise and a voice, neither of which she could identify.
Memory flooded back. Claudius Wood—the Macbeth dagger. She’d fled along Chambers Street in the rain and almost been run down by the horse of a fast hansom when she slipped and fell at an intersection. Only after four blocks had she dared look back at the dim lamplit street.
No sign of Wood. No pursuit of any kind. She had turned and run on.
The noise was a fist pounding the door. The unfamiliar voice belonged to a man.
“Miss Parker, the landlady saw you come in. Open the door, or I’ll force it.”
“Ruin a good door? I won’t permit it.”
That was the voice of the harpy who ran the lodging house. Earlier, when Willa had come dashing in from the rainy street, the woman had peered at her from the dining room, where she presided over bad food and the four shabby gentlemen who occupied the other rooms.
Willa had raced away from those hostile eyes and up the stairs to her sleeping room, with its tiny alcove crowded with her books, theater mementos, and two trunks of clothing. Safe inside the room, she’d thrown the bolt over and fallen on the bed, trembling. There she had lain listening for nearly an hour. At last, exhaustion had pulled her into sleep.
Now she heard the man in the hall tell the landlady, “You’ve got nothing to say about it. The girl’s wanted for questioning about an assault on her employer.” He pounded again. “Miss Parker!”
Willa hugged herself, not breathing.
The man shouted: “It’s a police matter. I ask you one last time to open the door.”
She was already dressed. A swift look into the dark alcove was her brief farewell to her few possessions. She snatched her shawl and raised the window. The man heard and started to break the door with his shoulder.
Fighting for breath, fighting terror, Willa climbed over the sill, lowered herself, holding on with both hands, then let go. She plunged downward through rainy blackness. An anguished cry went unheard as the door splintered and caved in.
“God—my God—I’ve never been through anything like this in my life, Eddie.”
“There, there.” He pulled her close to his shoulder. His velvet smoking coat had a nubby, comforting feel. While her clothes dried, she wore one of his robes, golden silk and quite snug; he was a small man. A strand of pale blond hair straggled across her forehead. Her bare legs rested on a stool in front of her. He’d wrapped her left ankle in a tight bandage. She had twisted it when she dropped to the alley, and she had been in pain as she hobbled all the way to his brownstone townhouse, Number 28 East Nineteenth Street.
“The policeman nearly caught me. Wood sent him, didn’t he?”
“Undoubtedly,” Booth said. He was thirty-two, slim and handsome, and had a rich voice critics called “a glorious instrument.” His expressive eyes held a look of abiding pain.
Rain poured down on the townhouse and streaked its tall windows. It was half after one in the morning. Willa shivered in the silk robe as Booth continued. “Wood’s a foul man. A discredit to our profession. He drinks far too much—on that habit I am an expert. Combine that with his temper and the result is catastrophic. Last year, he nearly crippled a gas-table operator who didn’t light the stage precisely as he wanted it. Then there was his late wife—”
“I didn’t know he was ever married.”
“He doesn’t talk about it, with reason. On a crossing for a London engagement, in heavy weather, she slipped and fell into the sea and disappeared. Wood was the sole witness, although a cabin steward later testified that on the morning of the mishap, Helen Wood had bruises on her cheek and arm, which she’d attempted to cover with powder. In other words, he beat her.”
“He can be such a charming man …” Willa’s words trailed off into a sigh of self-recrimination. “How stupid I was to be taken in!”
“Not at all. His charm fools a great many people.” Booth patted her shoulder, then stood up. He wore black trousers and tiny slippers; his feet were smaller than hers. “You feel chilly. Let me bring you some cognac. I keep it, though I never touch it.”
Nor did he take any other spirits, she knew. When Booth’s wife, Mary, lay dying in 1863, he’d been too drunk to respond to pleas from friends that he go to her. That part of the past burdened him almost as much as the fatal night at Ford’s Theater.
Willa stared at the rain while Booth poured cognac into a snifter and warmed it in his hands. “I’ll slip out tomorrow and try to discover what Wood’s doing now that you have eluded the police.” He handed her the snifter. The cognac went down with pleasing warmth and quickly calmed her churning stomach. “Meanwhile, I wouldn’t count on his letting matters rest. Among his other wonderful traits is his talent for being vindictive. He has many friends among the loc
al managers. He’ll keep you from working in New York, at the very least.”
Willa wiggled her bare toes. Her ankle hurt less now. In the fireplace, apple-wood logs crackled and filled the sitting room with a sweet aroma. While she sipped the cognac, Booth stared in melancholy fashion at a large framed photograph standing on a marble-topped table: three men wearing Roman togas. It was from the famous performance of November 1864, when he’d played Brutus to the Cassius and Antony of his brothers, Johnny and June, for one night.
She set the snifter aside. “I can’t go back to Arch Street, Eddie. Mrs. Drew has a full company. She replaced me as soon as I gave notice.”
“Louisa should have warned you about Wood.”
“She did, indirectly. I wasn’t alert to what she was trying to say. I have a lot of faults, and one of the worst is thinking well of everyone. Like John Evelyn’s knight, I am ‘not a little given to romance.’ It’s a dangerous shortcoming.”
“No, no, a virtue. Never think otherwise.” He patted her hand. “Supposing New York is closed to you, is there somewhere else you can work?”
“Somewhere I can run to? Running is always the remedy that comes easiest to me. And I’m always sorry afterward. I hate cowardice.”
“Caution is not cowardice. I remind you again, this is something more than a schoolyard quarrel. Think a moment. Where can you go?”
Forlorn, she shook her head. “There isn’t a single—well, yes. There’s St. Louis. I have a standing offer from one of Papa’s old colleagues. You know him. You and Papa trouped with him in California.”
“Sam Trump?” Finally Booth smiled. “America’s Ace of Players? I didn’t know Sam was in St. Louis.”
“Yes, he’s running his own theater, in competition with Dan DeBar. He wrote me about it last Christmas. I gather things aren’t going well.”
Booth walked to the windows. “His drinking, probably. It seems to be the curse of the profession.” He turned. “St. Louis might be an ideal sanctuary, though. It’s quite far away, but it’s a good show town. It has been ever since Ludlow and Drake set up shop there in the twenties. You have the whole Mississippi valley for touring, and no competing playhouses until you reach Salt Lake City. I liked playing St. Louis. So did my father.”
He stared out the dark window, smiling again. “Whenever he appeared there, he could always save a few pennies by hiring bit players from the Thespians, a fine amateur company. Unfortunately, he just spent the pennies for one more bottle.” He shook off the memory. “More to the point, Sam Trump’s a decent man. He’d be a successful actor if he hadn’t gone overboard for Forrest’s physical technique. Sam turned the heroic style into a religion. He doesn’t tear a passion to a tatter; he shatters it beyond repair—”
Another thoughtful pause, then a nod. “Yes, Sam’s theater would do nicely. Who knows? You might even straighten him out.”
Exhausted and unhappy, Willa said, “Must I decide right now?”
“No. Only when we find out what Wood’s up to. Come.” He extended his hand in a smooth, flowing move worthy of a performance. “I’ll show you to your room. A long sleep will help immensely.”
On the way out, he glanced at Johnny’s picture again. Poor Eddie, she thought, still hiding from the world because so many bayed for revenge, even though Johnny had been tracked down and shot to death near Bowling Green, Virginia, almost two months ago. Thinking of Booth’s plight instead of hers helped her fall asleep.
She woke at two the next afternoon to find her friend gone. The skies outside were still stormy. A light meal of fruit, floury Scotch baps, and jam was set out downstairs. She was eating hungrily when his key rattled and he walked in, looking rakish in his slouch hat and opera cloak, and carrying an ebony cane.
“Bad news, I’m afraid. Wood swore out a warrant. I’ll buy your ticket and advance you some traveling money. You don’t dare visit your bank. Or your lodgings.”
“Eddie, I can’t leave my things. My collection of Mr. Dickens. The sides from all the parts I’ve played since I first started acting—every side is signed by all the actors in the play.”
Booth flung his hat aside. “They may be precious to you, but they aren’t worth imprisonment.”
“Oh, dear God. Did he really—?”
“Yes. The charge is attempted murder.”
A day later, after dark, he spirited her out of the townhouse and into a cab, which rattled swiftly over cobbles and through mud to a Hudson River pier. He handed her a valise containing some clothing he’d bought for her, kissed her cheek long and affectionately, and murmured a wish for God to guard her. She boarded the ferry for New Jersey and on the crossing didn’t look back at him or at the city. She knew that if she did, she’d break down, cry, and take the return boat—and that could lead to disaster.
When she left the train in Chicago, she telegraphed Sam Trump. She stayed in an inexpensive hotel and waited for his reply, which came to the telegraph office the following morning. The message said he would happily provide board, lodging, and a premier place in his small permanent company. For a man in the throes of alcoholic failure, he certainly sounded confident. She was under such stress that she overlooked the obvious: He was an actor.
Like Willa’s father, Mr. Samuel Horatio Trump had been born in England, at Stoke-Newington. He’d lived in the United States since the age of ten, but he diligently maintained his native accent, believing it contributed to his considerable and fully merited fame. Self-christened America’s Ace of Players, he was also known in the profession, less kindly, as Sobbing Sam, not only because he could cry on cue, but because he inevitably did so to excess.
He was sixty-four years old and admitted to fifty. Without the special boots to which a cobbler had added inserts to lift the heels an inch and a half, he stood five feet six inches. He was a round, avuncular man with warm dark eyes and a rolling gait that jiggled his paunch. His wardrobe was large but twenty years out of date. Managers who flung plagiarized adaptations of Dickens on the stage always wanted to cast him as Micawber. Trump, however, saw himself as a Charlemagne, a Tamerlane, or, truly straining the credulity of his audiences, a Romeo.
In his lifetime Trump had known many women. When sober or even slightly tipsy, he was a blithe and winning man. To anyone who would listen, he confessed to many cases of a broken heart, but the secret truth was that Trump himself had ended every romantic affair in which he’d been involved. As a young man he had decided that the responsibilities of wedlock would only impede a career that was certain to end in international acclaim. So far it hadn’t.
Although Willa and many others in the profession practiced the craft of theatrical superstition, Trump raised it to a high art. He refused to tie a rope around a trunk or hire a cross-eyed player. He never wore yellow, never rehearsed on Sunday, and ordered his doorkeeper to throw rocks at any stray dog that approached the stage door during a performance. He always rang down the curtain if he spied a red-headed spectator in the first five rows. He wore a blue-white moonstone mounted in gold for a cravat pin and kept a chrysanthemum—never yellow—in his lapel; he always had both somewhere on his person when onstage. He wouldn’t even consider producing or appearing in the Scottish play.
The one superstition he violated was that about discussing the future and thereby jinxing it. Some of his favorite words were “next week” and “tomorrow” and “the next performance,” invariably linked with phrases such as “important producer in the audience” or “telegraphed message” or “wanting a full year’s engagement.”
His theater, Trump’s St. Louis Playhouse, had been built by another manager at the northwest corner of Third and Olive Streets; Trump called the latter Rue des Granges. He thought it more elegant to use the town’s original French names. The theater held three hundred people, in individual seats rather than the more typical benches.
On the long trip to St. Louis, Willa made peace with herself over what had happened at the New Knickerbocker. Perhaps in a few years the manager would dr
op the charges, and she could go back. Meanwhile, in case Wood’s spite reached beyond New York, she would bill herself as Mrs. Parker. Perhaps that would confuse anyone searching for a single woman, and also deter undesirable men. She refused to go so far as to call herself Willa Potts.
She was in reasonably good spirits by the time the river ferry deposited her on the St. Louis levee. She found Sam Trump painting a forest backdrop at the theater. He cried while they hugged and kissed dramatically, then opened a bottle of champagne, which he proceeded to drink all by himself. Near the bottom of the bottle, he made a startling admission:
“I falsified the tone of my telegraph message, dear girl. You have chosen to inhabit a house in ruin.”
“St. Louis looks prosperous to me, Sam.”
“My theater, child, my theater. We are months in arrears to all of our creditors. Our audiences are satisfactory. There is even an occasional full house. Yet, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, I can’t keep a shilling in the till.”
Willa could see one of the reasons, made of green glass and reposing, empty, in a silver bucket from the property loft.
Sam astonished her a second time when he said, with a hangdog look, “It wants a clearer head than mine. A better head than this gray and battered one.” Only gray around the ears. He dyed the rest a hideous boot-polish brown.
He seized her hand. “Along with your acting duties, would you perchance consider managing the house? You are young, but you have a great deal of experience in the profession. I can’t pay you extra for the work, but I can offer the compensation of billing equivalent to mine.” With great solemnity, he added, “That of a star.”
She laughed as she hadn’t in days. It was the sort of work she had never done before, but, as far as she could see, it needed mostly common sense, diligence, and attention to where the pennies went.
“That’s a heady inducement, Sam. Let me think about it overnight.”
Next morning, she went to the playhouse office, a room with all the spaciousness and charm of a chicken coop. It also had the inevitable horseshoe nailed over the lintel. She found Trump disconsolately holding his head with one hand and stroking the black theater cat, Prosperity, with the other.