Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Where she was roving the main floor, Susan heard Monty’s words like a firebell and sped for the doorway that led to backstage.

  “Seems like it’d be fitting,” Monty offered around generally, as if the frozen onstage group had asked for his opinion and here it was, “what with all she’s done to bring in the Harlem side of things for tonight.”

  The stage manager straightened up as if bracing to be struck by lightning next. Seeing that Monty appeared serious, he said in a carefully juggled voice: “I’m afraid that’s not on. Miss Duff may be a perfectly capable musician in her own right, I’m sure. But tonight has been advertised as you and Cecil—”

  “—and of course that’s the understanding with the radio hookup,” Vandiver inserted swiftly.

  “—that’s the way we’re set up,” the stage manager said with a conclusive shrug, “that’s the point of this rehearsal.”

  “No, the music part of the rehearsal hasn’t really got under way yet, has it,” Monty pointed out, all reasonableness. “That’s why I figured this is the time I better let you know she’s the one I want at those keys.” He called over consolingly, “Just tonight, Cece.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t see how—” The stage manager searched out the house manager with a despairing look.

  The house manager, crisp as the point of his Vandyke beard, knew how to handle a tiff of this sort: “Speak up here, Phil, you’re the producer.”

  “Monty, as long as Cecil is in good health, we’re obligated to do the program as advertised,” Phil called out. “If we haven’t given notification of a substitution three days before the performance, the management has the right to—”

  Monty cut him off. “Rights are sure cropping up here all of a sudden. Where’ve they been hiding before now? The way I savvy it, Harlem didn’t get invited down here much, before tonight. Before this lady pitched in.” He looked around as if marveling. “And you know what, I thought the acoustics would be better in a place like this. Everybody? One more time: I would like for Miss Duff to be at that piana.”

  From where he was watching in the wings, Wes in spite of himself had to grade Monty right up there in tactics. Maybe he did learn something in those Clore Street scuffles. If you’re going to run a bluff, why not run a big one.

  Abruptly Susan flew past him, giving him a look that forgave nothing of last night but shared an understanding of how things avalanched, and charged onward to the group moiling at centerstage like a troupe having trouble remembering its lines. She caught her breath and pierced the circle of disputing men.

  “Van, Phil, let me—Mister Rathbun, that’s wildly generous of you, but we haven’t even practiced for this.”

  Monty let that sail in one end of his smile and out the other. “A musician of your experience can catch on to these songs in no time, I’m sure.”

  “Gentlemen and all,” J.J. spoke up. “Give me a minute with my client. Montgomery?” Not quite plucking Monty’s sleeve but plainly wanting to, he indicated with his head toward the nearest stage door.

  “Excuse me, everybody, I have to smooth some feathers,” Monty said to the assemblage as though J.J. had come down with a raging disorder. “Miss Duff,” he called over, his eyes saying to her Susan, Susan, “don’t let them talk you out of this, none. It’s going to work out.”

  * * *

  As quickly as Monty and J.J. disappeared through the stage door, Phil set about talking her out of it. “A performer sometimes gets this kind of bee in his bonnet,” he said as if confiding a truth learned the hard way on Broadway. “Nerves, I’m sure.”

  “Maybe the singular of that in this case, Phil,” she retorted.

  “Whichever. It would help like anything if you were to go over to Monty and say you’re honored, but you’re just not up to playing to a packed house”—he feathered that in as though it would be rude to outright say a Carnegie Hall packed house—“on such short notice.”

  Beside Phil, Vandiver nodded with vigor to encourage her in that direction. The Carnegie Hall staff one after another looked at their watches discreetly. She stood there as if the stage had taken hold of her. Not one of these glorified supernumeraries counted any more than the ushers when it came to the making of the music, as Monty wanted of her. All at once the words arrived to her, cool and clear:

  “I am honored. And I don’t know that I’m not up to it.”

  She knew wondering looks were being passed behind her. She swung her own gaze to Wes. He looked away.

  * * *

  Backstage, J.J. cut loose on Monty: “Are you that far out of your mind? The Carnies are never going to go for that woman, and even if they did the Over Theres won’t—you see the look on Vandiver and Philip, and even your buddy the Major? They don’t know whether to crap in their hats or go blind.”

  “I’m the one going to get up there and sing at this Observance of theirs,” Monty said dead-level. “Let me have the say, this once.”

  “Be reasonable here.” J.J. himself was frantic. “We both know Cecil is a prune, but he’s the best in the business.”

  “Not my business, he isn’t,” Monty retorted with equal force. “You forgetting that every one of those song arrangements are hers, are you? That woman, as you call her—the bones in her fingers are the same color as ours, J.J. She savvies the music, that’s what counts.”

  J.J. sucked in his breath. “Don’t be doing this, Montgomery. How many ways do I have to beg?” He cast an indicating glance through the doorway at the huddle of Carnegie officials. “They’ll snake out on us—the ‘professional standards’ clause. You and Miss Pond Cream can sort yourselves out however you damn want, but not here. You say one more time that she has to be at that piano and they’ll be on the telephone getting hold of Robeson’s manager, or Roland Hayes’s, or haul in Blind Mortimer from the streetcorner, if it comes to that. Somebody to step in while we’re thrown out. You’re asking for it, my friend.”

  “Let’s just see.”

  * * *

  The onstage bunch and the now keenly attentive front-row onlookers saw in a hurry: Monty coming back out looking serenely stubborn, J.J. saying with a shake of his head that was that.

  The house manager looked at his watch again, nothing discreet about it this time. “Phil, J.J., I’m sorry but as of now we’re giving notice—”

  “Let’s be clear here.” Wes’s voice took command of the stage. He heard himself saying: “Notice is being given, all right, but I don’t hear it noticeably being taken.”

  In the massive silence that met that, he mechanically strode out onto the apron of the stage, contriving as he came. “I don’t see what the commotion is about,” he boomed, casting a glance at the piano as if even he could play it. “I particularly asked this of Monty. He was simply trying to carry out the favor.”

  Even more so than Susan, Monty had experience of the ungodly capacities of the Williamsons, but this stretch from the Major startled him to the absolute limits of his ability to keep a straight face. He gazed at the Major—rescuer, rival, sugar daddy in all this, in-over-his-head debtor to somebody in all this—with thankful wonderment. I figured something would give if I could stay dug in hard enough here. Never thought it would be him. Who knew he’d lie for us like this?

  As Wes’s sentences added up, Susan felt the agony of last night leave her and something like prospect come in its place. Wes, you holy fool or whatever you are. Not even you can calculate the cost of this act.

  Front and center, Wes looked all around, as if to make sure everyone present was wide awake. He needn’t have bothered. Several dozen sets of the most appraising eyes in New York were taking this in. His glance passed over Susan, over Monty, a flicker of resolve in it for each of them. If each other is so damn much what you need, this is the one way I can give you that.

  Pivoting toward the group mid-stage who had thought they were in charge of tonight, he split the cloud of speculative staring, drew the lightning onto himself. “Miss Duff is—someone I’ve admired fr
om afar, during our time together on the committee. And out West, she has great standing as a musician herself. I thought this would be a way Over There could repay her for her services a bit. I don’t like to throw my weight around on this, but the rest of you are busy doing it. So I must insist. If she isn’t at the piano tonight, I cancel my backing. What I’m putting up for the Observance, what I’ve pledged for the Bonds of Peace, any annual giving ever again to the Hall—the works.”

  The house manager had no trouble reaching his decision. “Van?”

  “That does put a different light on things, Major,” Vandiver said tightly. “We appreciate your forthrightness. Naturally, now that we know the full circumstances, we can accommodate a special request of this sort. Can’t we, Phil.” Expressions, masked as they were, in the semi-circle there at centerstage spoke a good deal more in Wes’s direction than Vandiver’s words. Stage door Johnny. Overage schoolboy with a crush. Lothario with more money than sense. Phil’s face simply said, Bye-bye, old friend.

  Head and heart high, Monty stepped toward Susan and gestured her toward the piano as if it was an atoll of refuge. “If you’ll excuse us briefly, gentlemen. Miss Duff and I have our music to go over.”

  IT IS in gatherings such as this that the man of war—man in his armor, in his uniform of whatever color—must change his stripes and be created anew, in the magnificent pinto skin we form when all our human hues are displayed together.” As Wes stepped away to a thunder of handclaps, he had to concede that even the applause sounded better in Carnegie Hall.

  He stayed just offstage now that his part in the evening was over. He ached like fury from standing so long on the hard flooring but he kept to his carefully planted stance there and watched Susan radiantly deliver her lines about the Harlem letters collection to perfection, endured Tammany next, then the mid-show comedy and its counter-face of tragedy in the letters and diaries, and as Vandiver began making his pitch for Bonds of Peace, he knew he could delay no longer and moved off to the hallway and stairwell that would take him to his seat up in the box circle.

  He stepped with care into the darkened box. Nodded a series of apologies for his lateness as he squeezed behind the retinue his wife and Mrs. Smith had assembled in the seats there. Automatically shook hands with Governor Smith in passing. Merrinell, in whispered conversation with the governor’s wife, gave a little acknowledging whisk to where he would sit. His bolster chair was installed at the angle needed to favor his knee, and he settled into it facing a bit away from Merrinell, which he figured he may as well grow used to. From her flutter of gesture, word had not yet reached her about his rehearsal declamation. But it would be told as many ways as there were tellers. When she heard, whatever version she heard, Merrinell with her active history of suspicion would do her best to make his life a ceaseless purgatory. Not that it much resembled anything else to him from here on anyway.

  Straightening up, forcing his mind to the moment, Wes looked out over a Carnegie Hall such as he had never seen before, a marbled crowd, rows of colored faces and immediate other rows of pale ones and mixes in between. Below, in the front row and the space between there and the stage and out into the side aisles, were the veterans clutching crutches or armrests of wheelchairs or in the case of the blinded ones, an arm of the person next to them. Their array reminded him of a field hospital, the one place he had seen troops of both colors quartered together in either of his wars.

  Up on the stage Vandiver finished as he had begun, with a flourish. Now out they came, one from each wing, Susan to the grand piano and Monty to the music stand near it. A ripple of programs, and more, met her entrance. In what applause of welcome there was, though, Monty walked toward her and extended an arm of introduction. They did not quite touch. Wes fully knew that if they hadn’t already done so in private, they soon would.

  With one finger, then two, then the fan of his hand as if in pledge, Wes pressed lightly on the breast pocket of his suit where Susan’s diary rested. “You’ll know the proper cubbyhole for this,” she had whispered as she slid it into his hand, backstage, before she went out to speak. In the half-light of the stage manager’s nook he had done what anyone would do, gone to the pages of the last few days. Lord, should earthly existence cause a person to laugh or gasp? He wondered how long it might take—into the next century?—before some delving scholar burrowed into the papers of the Double W and the Williamson family, flipped open this stray item as far as the flyleaf and Susan’s elongated handwriting there, and be drawn into the diary to its final inkdrops of sentence: I hope never to be forced into harder deciding than that brought on by Wes’s visit tonight, but life being life, who knows. The cavalry hat, and the knot of harm carried in our family lines, are turning to ash in the fireplace as I write this. Needless to say—no, perhaps this is precisely what does need to be set into permanence here—Monty will know from me only the same silence Wes has vowed over this. Some truths stand taller than others, and the one that I am betting the rest of my life on is my love for Monty.

  * * *

  Monty stepped to the microphone.

  “It’s my pleasure to bring back onstage Miss Susan Duff, who has kindly agreed to accompany me tonight. She is an A-1 musician in her own right—as we say uptown, she knows how to negotiate the numbers.” Laughter spread, dark to white, at that. “The particular number of hers,” he played off the line while the audience was still in chuckles, “that we’re going to perform for you is the finale of a fine piece she has written. The tune has something of a nocturne to it, and seeing as how we’re all nocturnal enough to come out this evening to this particular hall, I thought it might fit the occasion.” He paused for a moment to gaze out at them all. “Any of you who have been caught in range of my voice before will know that I’ve been in the habit of starting things off with an old song of the prairie, where I am from—and would you believe it, Miss Duff too. Who knows, this one may kick that one aside.” Turning his head toward Susan, he nodded just the fraction needed, and the music came.

  “A tide of grass runs the earth,

  The green of hope there in birth,

  And where we’ve together been and how we’ll together be

  Is all in the rolling song of that prairie sea. . . .”

  Monty could feel the lift of his voice, the lilt of Susan’s song, as never before. He was going to sing his way off this earth. The America patch of it, anyway, and not alone. Susan was coming with him on the Europe tour.

  * * *

  At the piano she delicately put the melody under his voice, her every ounce of musicianship focused on Monty at his music stand. He showed no sign of needing to look down.

  Her hands knew all there was to do on the keys, and her mind flew ahead. Europe. The join of their lives, which their own country would never let be easy. In asking her if she would come with him, Monty with heartbreaking fairness also had offered her every way out, making her know that all they would be able to count on besides each other would be trouble for being together, until she put the stop to that by saying: “There’s no better trouble we could have.”

  Before coming onstage with Monty, she had peered out past the curtain to spot Wes in the audience, angled apart from the others in his box. His to bear from here on, too, the story as set down. The thought went through her again now, as she knew it every so often would. Then she lost herself into the playing as Monty’s transporting voice and her rippling keys combined into the crescendo, the music reaching out over the footlights into the great dimmed-down hall and its unmoving audience, the medaled and the jeweled, the plainspun and the Sunday-clothed, the war-stricken and the spared, the shadowlike faces and the pale, raptly in place out there in the levels of the night as if each in a seat assigned in some dark-held circle of a heaven or a hell, Wes’s own as usual custom-made.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Fiction always takes some sleight-of-hand, and in this novel I occasionally bend the corners of time to fit the makings of plot:

  —Although
the “buffalo soldiers” of the Tenth Cavalry figure here several years earlier, the regiment arrived on assignment to Fort Assinniboine in 1894. John J. Pershing’s term of service with the regiment began in October of 1895 and lasted a year; his command of Troop D in evicting Little Bear’s band of Crees into Canada occurred in the summer of 1896. The repeated rounding up of the Crees and putting them under military escort to the border, however, was under way in the 1880s as I portray it, and continued sporadically until the displaced tribe obtained land on the Rocky Boy Reservation in northern Montana in 1916.

  —The Zanzibar Club, as a sometimes rowdy center of nightlife for Helena’s small nonwhite population, had its license lifted by an indignant city council in 1906; I gave it a new lease on life for Monty’s purposes in these pages.

  —The city of Helena was indeed shaken by an earthquake on the Saturday night of June 27, 1925, but I have conflated the much more severe effects of the big Helena quake a decade later—the evening of October 3, 1935—into my rendering of the disaster.

  —The Klan-related killing at Crow Agency that my characters allude to occurred in actuality in 1926, when James Belden was shot to death and burned in his cabin after a fatal exchange of gunfire with the Big Horn County sheriff, who was said to be an official of the Klan. Similarly, the vow against Klansmen by the sheriff in Butte, to “shoot them down like wolves,” was issued in the year 1921. (The insufficiently known story of the Ku Klux Klan’s surge westward in the 1920s is provided an overview in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, edited by Shawn Lay. There also has been some state-by-state examination by historians, most prominently: Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado, by Robert Alan Goldberg; Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah, by Larry R. Gerlach; Inside the Klavern, a rare set of minutes of a Klan chapter [in LaGrande, Oregon], annotated by David A. Horowitz. In the instance of Montana, the most comprehensive studies are Dave Walter’s article “White Hoods Under the Big Sky” in Montana Magazine, Jan./Feb. 1998, and Christine K. Erickson’s M.A. thesis at the University of Montana, “The Boys in Butte: the Ku Klux Klan Confronts the Catholics, 1923–1929.” My specific description of a Klan membership card is from the records of the 1920s Klan chapter in Harlowton, Montana, archivally held by the Montana Historical Society and the Upper Musselshell Historical Society. I also wish to thank Rayette Wilder, archives librarian of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, for information from the society’s Montana Ku Klux Klan manuscript collection.)