Femme Fatale (54 page)

Irene was not to be stopped. We surged together through the room full of men in evening dress, four mirrors among them and perhaps twenty powder puffs for their mostly bald heads.

She finally stopped at one chair. “Maestro!”

His hair was white and waved back from high temples. He was as thin as a catgut string, yet his posture was more tightly wired.

The pale eyes that regarded her were blank.

She struck her clasped fist against her breastbone, a sort of human percussion that made him blink.

“Irene Adler,” she said. “I most urgently desire to speak with you.”

We adjourned to Delmonico’s.

The old fellow walked in like a prince, but it was clear he had not dined so well in ages. Irene ordered like a caliph, and lit cigarette after cigarette.

I kept watch.

“Irene,” the old fellow murmured between courses. “I never thought I would hear you sing again.”

“I have your violin. I wish to return it.”

“Violin? What violin? A poor second to a human voice. Say that you still sing.”

“I still sing.”

“I still saw away on my lifeline. Times have changed. Did I do you a disservice, I ask myself? More escalloped potatoes? New York can be very cold. You cannot return to the past.”

“Maestro.”

He cringed, but ceased jumbling his thoughts together.

“I must know,” she said, “why I can’t remember my own past. An artist without a past is . . . nothing. I’ve come back to remember.”

He pushed away the princely dishes. I saw an old man, hungry and ashamed. A beggar with an inferior violin. I couldn’t look.

“Maestro,” she pled.

I couldn’t look.

“I am a fraud!” he declared. “I have not played a heartfelt piece of music since you left. You were my violin. You were my masterpiece. Yet, I cheated.”

“I am a cheat?” she asked, heartbreakingly ready to accept his judgment.

“No! I! I alone.” He held up his wine glass, and a waiter filled it. “My dear child.”

I sensed that he had never spoken so intimately in his strange, lonely life. Was this her father, then?

“I was obsessed by music. I required an . . . heir. A legacy. Something better and bigger than I could ever be. In you I found it. Yes, I drove you. Yes, I was the stern taskmaster. Yes, I understood the sheer talent you and I had been blessed with, and it was my duty to evoke, enhance, encourage, drive you and let you leave me.”

“The role you took on was harsh,” she said. “You never let me be grateful, yet I understood what you did, and more so as the years passed. You had never encouraged me to acknowledge you, and I never did. Until now. Maestro.”

He cringed again. “Don’t call me that. You don’t understand the price I paid to free you. The price I made you pay. I couldn’t do it today, but I still had hope and perhaps some hubris then.”

“Price?” she asked.

He sighed, swayed from side to side. “My dear Irene. What a
wonderful name, the goddess of peace, yet your history was anything but peaceful. You came to me wounded in mind and soul. I wanted and needed a voice. I had no hope of getting it after what you’d been through. One mad hope, though. I’d studied in Europe. Music, voice, a spiritual sort of technique. I’d met a man, a Solomon of musicians. He used mesmerism to free the voice from its containment. You had lost your voice when they brought you to me. They swore you had once had it, the nightingale gift. I so desperately needed to believe in nightingales. So . . . I cheated. I mesmerized you, Irene, until your voice came free of your past, like one clear note, and then I worked with that and then another note and finally you were a whole chorus of musicality. Only because I mesmerized you.”

“I am an automaton?”

“No. You are what you could have been had not fate flattened all your potential.”

“But . . . I can hypnotize others.”

“I gave you the technique, for yourself. And for others. It was taught to me by a musical genius I met in Vienna in the fifties, before you were even born. A man called Adler. Later, known as a musical genius called Svengali, he produced the supreme soprano of the age in an unknown artist’s model named Trilby. When I told you once that he was my own maestro, you took his true last name for your own, as you had none.”

“I remember doing that now. Adler! So I am named for a fraud.”

“A genius, though misguided, for I have followed misguided genius all my life.”

Irene had drawn out her smoking apparatus again.

The maestro frowned as she drew breath through the cigarette. “That is bad for your voice.”

“Not that anyone has noticed. Besides, I don’t sing as frequently as I once did.”

“Even worse!”

Irene turned the blue enamel case in her hand, the bediamonded initial “I” twinkling like a star.

The maestro stared at that small movement, that mote of winking light. He seemed to have lost the thread of his thoughts.

“You must tell me,” she said so softly that both he and I leaned over the table to hear better, “why I had lost my voice.”

“That is far better forgotten,” he said, the words seemingly pulled from him like salt water taffy candy is drawn from a machine. I thought again of ectoplasm, and invisible spirits, and how we all draw into ourselves much that is unseen, yet that shapes us.

We all exhale invisible drafts of our pasts, and breathe in the future like smoke, hardly noticing it.

My own breath caught in my throat when I realized that Irene was hypnotizing the old man. It was true that she only turned the tables on him—again I thought of the mobile table at the séance, why could I not get those images out of my head? I had not even been there to see them, like Pink.

And then I understood that Irene was also calling on the dead, as much as any medium, invoking the past, asking the maestro to commune with his own lost past self, and hers.

“Why had I lost my voice? Literally lost it, couldn’t speak or sing?”

“Couldn’t sing,” he answered at last. “Could speak, but didn’t like to. They told me what had happened, and then I understood, or at least partly.”

Irene exhaled a perfect O of smoke that distorted as it drifted upward, reminding me of the tormented face of a ghost at some séance in the upper air.

The maestro’s weak blue eyes followed the smoke ring until it vanished. “You young women lived in a theatrical boarding house, sharing rooms and a common water closet.”

“How young were we?”

“Oh . . . you were seventeen when you began studying with me, and I had already trained you for half a year. Your voice was a wonder and you had already been acclaimed on stage for it, but in musical terms you were still a little savage, with not the slightest grasp of technique. We had much more work to do.”

“And we did it. I didn’t leave New York until I was past twenty.”

“Past twenty,” he repeated dully.

Irene quietly laid the cigarette case on the snowy white linen.

All around us echoed the clatter and conversation of a wildly successful restaurant. Our table seemed encased in a bell jar of extraordinary quiet, almost as if time had stopped and begun to run backward.

A waiter hovered with the wine bottle, but Irene’s swift head shake sent him skating away.

“What happened,” she asked again, “when I was seventeen and living at the theatrical boarding house?”

“A tragedy. Not an unheard-of one, but a tragedy. And so close to home. Mesdames Sophie and Salamandra brought me the news when you refused to come to your daily lesson. First one, then the next. They explained that you could not sing.”

“Why, why couldn’t I?”

“I never understood that. Oh, I understood the shock that brought on your strange, self-imposed strangling of your greatest gift, yet I never knew why it had taken that form. It was as if you had become a nun under a vow of silence. You had always been a vibrant child, so self-possessed, so attuned to others. You had even then the air and the empathy of a great performer of the stage, who can make each audience member believe you speak and sing to him or her alone. A Patti or a Bernhardt.”

“Did I?” Irene asked, truly doubting.

“And you didn’t know it, which made you all the more remarkable. You didn’t even see the small jealousies among the other young performers, the precocious young ladies who were
prone to putting on airs about abilities that were the mere shadow of your own.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“That’s because I didn’t want you to. I wanted you unspoiled. And once the solution to your musical muteness came to me, I realized that I could . . . repair so much more than your broken voice.”

I saw alarm flash through Irene’s eyes, although they never left the old man’s face. She was not one to submit to “repair.” Even I saw the presumption in his statement, the arrogance of the teacher, or parent, who believes his word and perceptions are law to the pupil, or child.

Irene’s fingers tightened on the talisman of her cigarette case. I could visibly see her fight to avoid reacting to this last shock, to first ask the most central questions before facing any other unpleasant surprises.

“What happened to silence me? You must explain this now. A lie of omission becomes one of commission if too much time is allowed to lapse.”

He then uttered the words that chill my soul, because I used to employ them myself before I knew better. “It was for your own good, every bit of it. You had been brutally confronted with the saddest fate a young girl may meet, and had to see that only by promising to serve your voice and your music and paying attention to nothing else could you avoid a similar useless, brutal end.”

“Tell me!”

“It was young Winifred, though it could have been her sister. They were inseparable, as twins often are, and their mind-reading routine was truly remarkable. Lovely girls, with a mother who had retired as a wire-walker to mistress a man of business on Wall Street. Later they performed as Pansy and Petunia, and once they turned sixteen she often presented them at her parties, like dolls
to be petted and admired. I believe they enhanced her hold on her gentleman friend. She was not as young as she had been.”

Irene visibly winced, but he didn’t notice. His eyes remained on the wreaths of blue-white smoke she sent ceilingward like some elegant Indian princess sending smoke signals.

“Why were their names changed?” she asked.

“They were called something else as children, but when they became girls they performed under Pansy and Petunia. Petunia had grown so sophisticated after her debut at her mother’s affairs that she was demanding to be known simply as ‘Pet.’ ”

Irene glanced at me, her lips tightening. “Yet we all roomed together, and performed together . . . and bathed apart. That common water closet plays a part in your story, doesn’t it, Maestro?”

“How would you know? Would guess . . . remember?”

“I would deduce, my dear Maestro,” she explained, quieting his wild queries. “I worked for the Pinkertons even as I concentrated on my vocal exercises for you. I became astute on two quite different fronts. ‘Mystery and music,’ my husband says, are my forte.”

“You have a husband? He is a good man?”

“He is a great man, and a superlative barrister, and a quite charming Englishman.”

“Ah.” His sigh expressed relief. “You are a married lady. Then perhaps I can tell you—”

I was
not
a married lady, and perhaps he should not tell Irene anything so apparently shocking in my presence, but I was not about to miss this confession for the world! Especially after waiting so long to hear it teased out of the maestro that I’d been forced to actually sip the after-dinner wine, which was quite sweet and rather better than most wines, actually. Why had no one ever told me that wines could be other than the sour French variety?

“Tell me,” Irene urged, moving her hand from the cigarette
case to his veined and arthritic-swollen hand across the table. The look she gave that sadly ruined hand before her straight, young fingers folded over it would have brought tears to a stone. “Maestro, please!”

He took a deep breath, much like an actor about to deliver an enormously long speech. Shakespeare, say, or one of the French classicists.

“My dear girl, I fear that reviving that memory will revive your awful bout of muteness. That would kill me.”

“I am too recovered to relapse, Maestro. I have the libretto and music for a specially commissioned one-woman piece in which I portray the six wives of Henry the Eighth. It is a . . . series of roles any soprano would kill for. I will not lose my voice again. I am past thirty now, after all, and an expertly trained singer.”

Her bow to his tutelage pushed the old man over the brink of hesitancy. “What a fine piece you speak of! I must hear it.”

“You will, as soon as I have memorized it. So you see, I must have my entire memory returned to me, now that I know some of it is missing. That realization is more damaging now than anything the past might hide could ever be.”

He nodded, and began speaking as if he too had been held mute, and now reveled in releasing the censored words.

“It was quite accidental. Your entering that water closet, robed and towel in hand, for what we used to call the ritual of ‘the Saturday night bath.’ Despite your theatrical background, you had been pampered and protected and were a sweet, innocent girl, as much as we all could see to, and we old theatrical folk knew we were your only kin and parents and took that responsibility to heart.