Ever After (26 page)

She shook her head. Her eyes were heavy and haunted.

“I’ve never worked as a single. Besides, it doesn’t pay enough. I haven’t even got a costume. It’s in my dressing-room.”

“How much do they cost?”

“I made it.”

“Can you make another?”

“If I could get the stuff.”

“We’ll get the stuff. And we’ll work up a single act that will make Lottie Gilson look like a third-rate busker. Your brother Don wrote you some good music, but so can I, if it comes to that, and it won’t cost you a cent. When you’re ready we’ll get you a road job—Philadelphia—Providence—Pittsburgh—so on. Maybe you’d better use another name for a while.”

“But you don’t understand,” she said obstinately. “I can’t wait to work up a new act now, and a single at that. I have to
earn
, beginning tomorrow. I got a job at Macy’s once, when we were laid off, but it didn’t pay enough either, without what Don could put in.”

Fitz laid his hands on hers which held a fork tensely.

“Honey, it’s you that doesn’t understand,” he said gently. “Your
Pa isn’t going to get thrown out, whether you earn or not. You got friends, honey, hear what I say?”

But she regarded him distrustfully.

“Why should you do that for me? You never saw me till last night.”

“Well, I dunno, I reckon Johnny and I have adopted you. How old are you?”

“None of your business. Eighteen.”

“My Aunt Eden is willing Johnny should bunk in with me for a while, so it isn’t costin’ us anything extra for you to have his room, see? We’d take it very kindly if you’d make it a habit to have dinner with us, it adds a little something to the end of the day, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”

“B-but if you pay for Pa then I’m in debt to you, and how do you know you’ll ever get your money back?”

“Well, if you use my songs in the new act, that gets ’em sung in public and they have a chance to catch on, and that brings us out even.”

“Suppose they don’t catch on.”

“That won’t be your fault.”

Almost against her will she began to believe that Fitz was real, and the wariness left her eyes a little. She had never seen anything like him before, but she told herself perhaps that was because he was from Virginia. Friendliness for its own sake was as new to her as the nonsense he talked with Johnny. But unless all the signs she had laboriously learned were worthless Fitz was all right. His grey eyes were level and honest, his firm, sweet-tempered mouth smiled easily, and his hands—she remembered the feel of his fingers on hers—his hands were beautiful, warm and dry and well-kept around the nails. He was the kind of man they put in books, and the heroine married him and lived happily ever after. Until now, Gwen had never believed the books.

Johnny turned up in time to join them over their last cup of coffee, and he had got her a job. It wasn’t much, he assured them hastily, but it was safe. It was in the chorus of the Weber and Fields show, where she would be known as Fanny Maguire, and if she made good she could go on with the new
show when it opened in the autumn.

“So you had to go to Brooklyn,” said Fitz accusingly, and Johnny looked sheepish.

“Well, I didn’t want to get anybody’s hopes up till I was sure about this,” he admitted. “I had to think up a yarn, and then I had to get Weber to swallow it. This Fanny Maguire girl I told you about got fired from her last job because she said No to
her boss on account of being in love with a reporter friend of mine who is going
to marry her as soon as he gets a raise. But she has a sick mother to support, and they have to wait. Weber’s a good little guy, he fell for it. One of their girls is in the family way and wants to lay off. Gwen goes on next week, for the rest of the run.”

“So you won’t need my songs after all,” said Fitz rather ruefully, and this time it was Gwen who reached a quick, comforting hand.

“But I will some day,” she said in her warm voice. “I’ll sing them for you some day, and they
will
catch on, you’ll see!”

T
HE
next day was Johnny’s day off and he went along as bodyguard while Gwen used some of her seven dollars to buy the things she had had to leave behind and needed, besides a toothbrush. There was a little room on the top floor of the house where Johnny lived, and they took that for Gwen. Then they sent off Fitz’s nineteen dollars to pay up in full for Pa, and all wound up at the Imperial Theatre to see the Weber and Fields show. Johnny pretended a great weakness for Lottie Gilson, and just for the sake of argument Fitz developed a violent preference for Truly Shattuck, who was famous as the prettiest woman ever to come from the Pacific Coast. Sam Bernard, the best of the low German comedians, was in the bill, along with thirteen chorus girls, an orchestra of eight, and a very funny burlesque on
The
Geisha.
After the final curtain, they took Gwen round to meet Weber, who expressed himself as more than satisfied, and called in Fields to be satisfied too, and both asked kindly after her sick mother. The following Monday Gwen went to work in the best-paid, best-treated chorus in New York.

Fay Lea, meanwhile, had gone on plugging
Dusk
Until
Dawn,
not for love of Fitz, but because the customers liked it. And before a month had passed Fitz received a communication from one of the smaller and grubbier music publishers on Fourteenth Street near Second Avenue, offering him twenty-five dollars for it, outright, no royalties. This wasn’t exactly the piano-trade sales Johnny had envisioned, but Fitz rushed round to the address on the letter and collected, feeling like a millionaire. They had a party in Johnny’s room that night to celebrate, with a bottle of champagne.

Gwen was shocked about the champagne. “It’s a week’s rent,” she said. But she liked it, and it made her eyes very bright, and she laughed at their jokes now. The ones she understood. Fitz thought how cosy it was, the three of them, and Gwen laughing, and he looked anxiously for signs of love on Johnny’s part and found none,
and dratted Virginia who just kept Johnny dangling for the fun of it and treated him like dirt half the time. If Johnny’s father had not gone to Princeton with Cabot, back before the war, Johnny might never have set eyes on Virginia, and that would have been much better for everybody.

Gwen went back to Macy’s for the summer, between shows, and Fitz and Johnny made up the difference when she ran short for Pa. She kept track of what she owed them in a little book. Sometimes, shut up in the room at the top of the house where the roof sloped so sharply you were likely to crack your head getting into bed, she cried over the rising total of her debt to them. But she knew now, for sure, that they weren’t going to try to collect in any of the usual ways. And she nursed the hope that some day, when she went back to the halls as a single, she would sing Fitz’s songs so well that they would sell to the best publishing house there was, and on royalties too, and then he would be fixed for life, and all because he had bothered to be kind to her.

Meanwhile she mended Johnny’s clothes and sewed his buttons and cooked them delicious meals on the gas ring and gave them unstintedly of her motherly devotion. She was always ready to listen, always ready to laugh if she saw why, always cheerful and self-contained. They had no idea of what went on behind her little
one-sided
smile and her shining dark eyes, no idea at all that sometimes when things were gayest she was saying to herself, I must remember this, it won’t last for ever. I must keep it to think about later when he’s gone…. For even without knowing about Cabot Murray and the house on Madison Avenue, it was plain to Gwen that Fitz was not really a thirty-dollar-a-week reporter with nothing better to do than loaf around with her and Johnny. Some day Fitz would go back to where he came from, to the sort of woman his mother was, who had never, it was plain, scrubbed floors and played the cheap halls. Gwen knew that Fitz was only lent to them, by
circumstances
she could not inquire into, and the time spent in his company was doubly precious for it was bound to end. I must remember this, she would tell herself—I must never forget that line in his cheek when he smiles—the way his hair dips in front—the way he drawls his words—oh, God help me, why can’t I love the other one, I might have stood a chance….

There was something else she didn’t know about Fitz, and that was his musical comedy. He was working hard at it now—which was something new for him. He used the piano in Eden’s ballroom, which could be closed off so that he wasn’t heard in the rest of the house. After Gwen started the new Weber and Fields show in September he felt safe to take a room on his own just down the street from the house where Johnny and Gwen lived. When he had moved
in there he seemed more like them, to himself at least. But he still went back to Eden’s piano, working out his score, labouring at his lyrics.

The musical comedy was to incorporate some of his darky music, and the nostalgic setting was in Virginia before the war. He could not remember those days, of course, but it was a time whose serene beauty was in his blood and bones and in all the traditions of his childhood. He was doing a daring thing, to ask New York audiences to accept darky characters who sang and yet were not minstrel men, whose dialect did not tell smutty jokes, and whose devotion to their white folks was not on the syrupy Uncle Tom plane, but was jovial and cheeky and matter-of-fact. It was a simple enough tale he told, with music, of a Virginia girl who loved a Yankee, and an old darky coachman whose loyalty to his Confederate master conflicted with his desire for his young missy’s happiness with the man she had chosen. Fitz worked at it lovingly, and thought nothing of the fact that all his Arabella’s songs were written for a voice like Gwen’s. Long before Christmas-time he was looking forward to playing it for his Cousin Sue when she came back from England.

But to Sue’s dismay, in all the companionable hours they spent together after she landed, whether at the piano in the empty ballroom, or shopping for Christmas presents at Altman’s and Constable’s, or doing the sights of New York, Fitz said nothing about a girl or about being in love. Eden raised her eyebrows at this continued frustration, and in desperation they asked Bracken’s opinion on the state of Fitz’s affections. Bracken only grinned at them and advised them to mind their own business. Then, because he saw that Sue was really worried, he assured them that he saw no indications whatever that Fitz was in love unless you could call making good at his job a bad sign.

Eden was giving a ball for Virginia before they all left to spend Christmas at Williamsburg, and the question of entertainment for the guests arose one evening when Fitz was dining at the house on Madison Avenue. Victor Herbert’s orchestra had been engaged to play for the dancing, and Eden thought it would be nice if they introduced something of Fitz’s. They could get a tenor in to sing, she suggested. Mr. Herbert could doubtless provide somebody.

“What would Mr. Herbert be charging you for his tenor?” Fitz asked casually, and Eden looked surprised.

“Why, I don’t know—a hundred and fifty or two hundred, I suppose. Of course if you want de Reszke—!”

“For two hundred,” said Fitz, “I can get you one of the best singers in town.”

“Very well, we’ll try him. Who is he?”

“It’s a girl named—Fanny Maguire. Johnny knows her. She’s got just the voice tor my stuff, and I happen to know she needs the money.”

“Well, of course,” said Eden promptly, exchanging a quick,
triumphant
glance with Sue which said At Last! “Will you make the arrangements with her, or shall I see her?”

Fitz thought it over a minute, remembering that with Gwen he sailed under false colours.

“She’ll have to come here to rehearse, because there’s no piano where she lives, so you’ll see her then. She doesn’t know any of my songs, but she’ll pick ’em up in an afternoon, with me playing them for her. Would you like her to sing something else too? Something with a little more class to it?”

“I’ll leave all that to you, Fitz. You talk it over with her and when you’ve got a programme made out let me see it.”

“Mm-hm. There’s just one thing.” His grey eyes met Eden’s squarely. “I’m kind of ashamed of Uncle Cabot, here, and I haven’t mentioned him down on Twenty-ninth Street where I live now. She thinks I’m a real reporter, like Johnny.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

Fitz looked embarrassed.

“Sometimes I feel like a sure-’nough impostor,” he confessed. “Coming here like this to a dressed-up dinner with the family while she and Johnny eat at Frieda’s. Johnny doesn’t give me away, so I was wondering if I could count on you all to do the same if I bring her here.”

“You mean you want us to disown you?” said Virginia. “Oh, I think that’s sweet, Fitz, the fairy prince in disguise!”

“Nothing of the sort,” he said testily, and Bracken kicked his sister under the table, and Eden’s eyes met Sue’s again with an I-told-you look. “It’s simply that I’d like her to think I’m on the same footing here that she is, if she comes to sing,” Fitz was saying. “Otherwise I’d feel sort of embarrassed. See what I mean?”

“Well, I suppose I do, Fitz, but it’s going to be rather difficult for us,” Eden remarked. “Are you sure it’s necessary?”

“I’d feel better that way,” he insisted gently. “Otherwise she might wonder why I hadn’t said anything before and—I tell you what, though, if I play her accompaniment maybe she won’t think anything more about it.”

“If you want it that way,” said Eden, baffled and amused. “Has the girl got a suitable evening dress?”

“Well, no, I don’t suppose she has, now that you mention it. She lost a lot of things,” he improvised hastily. “In a fire, I think it was. Maybe you’d better let us have half the money in advance.”

“It might be better still if I furnished the dress,” Eden said
decidedly, for the Lord only knew what this unknown girl would turn up wearing.

“Besides the two hundred?” Fitz bargained cautiously, and Eden laughed.

“All right, Fitz, I won’t, take the dress out of her cheque! Bring her along to see me, then, when she comes to rehearse the songs.”