Spider Dance (37 page)

As soon as Irene had written her notes and tended them to a hotel messenger boy to deliver, along with enough funds to buy an imperial elephant’s howdah, we hied again to Brentano’s Literary Emporium, fountain of all things theatrical.

Biographies of Lotta Crabtree were a dime a dozen, and appeared to read like dime novels. Again we left laden with parcels of books, along with the script of La Lotta’s latest play.

The young male clerk, emboldened by a second visit, now displayed an absurd partiality to me.

“Alas,” Irene mock-complained on our exit, “I am wholly a matron now, a married woman, which must somehow show, for it’s you who are collecting all the tender young swains. So passeth prima donnahood.”

“Nonsense!” I retorted, though I couldn’t deny that the
cleric had displayed an unusual solicitude for my opinion and wants.

We returned to the hotel for an exercise I pretended to chafe about, but which secretly pleased me enormously. We settled down like schoolgirls again to read our heads off, nibbling on tea-table sweets until our teeth and foreheads ached.

The foreheads especially ached after Irene imported the sherry decanter to our indoor picnic table and insisted I have some “for thy stomach’s sake.”

This routine reminded me so much of that first interior “picnic” with Irene and Godfrey and Quentin and myself in London—shortly after Quentin’s and my dramatically unexpected reunion outside Notre Dame in Paris—that I could hardly resist her. So I didn’t.

We read simultaneously through the various pasteboard-covered books until I was as familiar with this precocious child called Lotta Crabtree from San Francisco of forty years ago as I now was with Irene’s own precocious and bizarre childhood from the New York City of a quarter century ago.

Lotta, I learned, was short for the more conventional Charlotte. Mignon was her middle name.

“Goodness,” said I as I read, “her mother was Englishborn, as was Madame Restell, and even Lola Montez was almost English-born—though she did her a-borning in Ireland, benighted country that we own and now deeply regret it. Is everyone in America originally from England?”

“You did own
us
for a while, you know.”

“You Americans are rebel Englishmen and women, yes, but you have been through your own bloody Civil War. I would think by now you would grow your own leading ladies.”

“Ah, Nell, we can grow apart, but we can never quite lose our British roots.”

I refrained from comment. I confess I was coming to envy the uniquely American energy and cheek I encountered all too often nowadays. I wondered, oddly enough, how Sherlock Holmes was surviving his similar encounters here.

Little Lotta Crabtree, performing at the age of six, was dubbed La Petite Lotta of the gold fields. Apparently child performers were the rage in the almost womanless mining towns. So both Lola and Lotta made their very different sort of conquests, Lotta being roughly twenty-six years younger than Lola. Being, in fact, young enough to be her daughter. Hmmm.

I read the passages about Lola’s tutoring of Lotta with the insight and interest of a former governess. As much as I wished to totally disown Lola Montez as a candidate for the role of Irene’s lost mother, I admit my eyes teared over as I read.

Never and nowhere else had the creature who had recreated herself into Lola Montez been as happy, productive, and beneficial to others as in Grass Valley, California, in the years 1853–56.

This crude town, far from the rude urban overindulgences of Gold Rush San Francisco, was a place of flora and fauna, of such constitutional opposites and yet natural allies as flowers and dogs and bears, of adventuresses and servants and children in happy, egalitarian collaboration.

Liberté, soeurité, egalité?

Little Lotta, the daughter of a doughty English mother and a self-serving American father whom the mother met in New York City (where else), was set dancing on the stage at as early an age as Irene herself.

Little Lotta, it appeared, when Irene filled me in on her history and career, had indeed studied at the literal, adorably tiny feet of Lola Montez.

Now considered New York’s leading comedienne, she was a strawberry-curled, coy, flirtatious piece who was adept, as Irene put it, at the ‘strategically inciting wiggle.’”

“Her act,” Irene said, “will not last much longer, for at past forty she outgrows both it and the boyish trouser roles that have been her bread-and-butter . . . and caviar.”

(This last proved prophetic, I add as I censor . . . er, amend these diaries: three years after we saw her, Lotta Crabtree retired from the stage to a quiet life of artistic self-improvement,
charity, and animal advocacy in New Jersey. So much for having one’s carriage pulled by adoring young men. One wonders if she would show them as much charity as she did to the hardworking street horses she went around putting hats upon in later years. I myself find hats a sufficient indignity to humans that horses should be spared them, come to think of it.)

Our early morning outing to B. Altman’s the next day produced ready-made evening gowns in pastel shades dripping with lace and flounces and diamante. This was not sufficient for Irene, who next proceeded to the Twenty-sixth Street flea market, where she scooped up great quantities of plumage and jet beading.

“Monsieur Worth’s trick,” she explained. “The brunette colors in evening dress imply richness and sophistication.”

We set about sewing the new frivolities into place. By the time Quentin called upon us in the early evening, in black tie and tails as Irene had hoped, we were ready for the Diamond Horseshoe.

Our seats were in the finest boxes overlooking the stage, courtesy of the phantom Mr. Belmont, whose praises Irene sang in ever increasing arpeggios.

Quentin looked beyond dashing in his formal garb. For some reason the starched white collar and shirtfront against his adventure-tanned face provided a stunning contrast that had women in neighboring boxes nearly jerking their heads off their necks to further appreciate.

Irene had decreed that Quentin and I must make a pair, and she led.

I had been allowed to maintain what she called my “demure English charm.” However, my cheeks had been pinked, my hair padded with “rats” and crimped on hot irons, and my eyelashes darkened by various items in her traveling case of actress’s allure, including burnt cork.

I had also insisted that she lace me within an inch of my life to Nellie Bly’s strict eighteen inches.

Quentin quite adeptly played the role of swain to us both,
which made me wonder how often in real life he had mastered the same role.

The play was loud, saucy, and somewhat amusing. Lotta Crabtree, a curly-haired imp, cavorted boyishly in trousers or girlishly short skirts. I could see why critics hailed her as “the eternal child” and “the nation’s darling.”

Were such a little charmer under my charge, I should have made her march to the tune of discipline, which had obviously never entered the life of a girl who’d had gold nuggets thrown at her feet since the age of five or six.

That her own father had run off to England with a trunkful of her hard-gotten gains when she had been only six might have had something to do with her refusal to outgrow her childish onstage roles. Who would want to grow up in such a world?

At the end of the play we stood with the rest of the audience and applauded until our glove palms overheated.

Irene hastened us from the box before the rest of the throng was moving. She swiftly led us down the side aisles to the back of the theater, and then even farther down into the bowels of the backstage area by a narrow, dark stairway.

Quentin took my elbow. (I was garbed in gloves past that point, but still I felt the residual heat of his hands through the two layers of fine cotton.)

“Step carefully,” he whispered to me. “Irene knows backstage mazes the way a snake knows its burrow, but we poor mongooses could trip and break something.”

“Messalina is fine,” I said, rather sharply, aware only that we were alone in the dark and he had me very firmly in hand.

“Delighted to hear it. You are looking exceptionally charming tonight.”

“How can you see, in the dark?”

“I noted that fact much earlier.”

“Do you have any idea why we are here tonight?”

“I imagine for the usual reasons, to play supporting characters to Irene’s leading role. Do you know what she wants of Lotta Crabtree?”

“A possible connection to Irene’s own mother.”

He held me back from moving, halfway down the stair. In the dark.

“Poor Irene.”

“Few would consider her so.”

“We know our mothers, and she doesn’t.”

“Our mothers are . . . were, in my case, from vastly different classes.”

“But we are in America now, where class doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does! It always matters. It merely goes under different names in America.”

“And what name do you go under in America? Nell.”

I felt his breath on my bare neck agitating the slim satin ribbons that tied on a cameo from Irene’s jewel box. I also felt, though barely through the whalebones and thick sateen, his hands circle my triumphantly narrow waist.

Oh, dear. I hadn’t really imagined the consequences.

He had, however, and applied them. Thoroughly.

I admit I felt much vindicated, vis-à-vis Pink, also known as Nellie Bly.

A theatrical hiss from below interrupted the histrionics above. Quentin ebbed away from me, reluctantly I thought. Or perhaps hoped.

“Nell! Quentin? What’s keeping you?”

Neither of us answered, although we tripped down the stairs hand in hand.

Here, on this level, the need for darkness to safeguard the theatrical set above from too-obvious observation, was over.

Electrical lights lit our way down a wide, long hall lined on either side with racks of costumes.

This aisle gave way at last to various doors, and finally, to one marked with a star. A name was embossed within that golden shape: Lotta Crabtree.

A dapper man of medium height in the finest evening broadcloth I had ever seen, as silken as a wet otter, bowed to Irene. His dark eyes and classically cut profile gave him an elegance I’d seldom seen in an American man, though he must be near sixty years of age.

“August Belmont at your service, madam. I trust the seats were acceptable.”

“Impeccable, my dear Mr. Belmont. Baron Alphonse could not recommend you enough,” Irene added. “These are my friends, Miss Huxleigh, and Mr. Stanhope.”

“Ah, Stanhope, at last we meet.” He shook hands with Quentin with an odd air of relief. “I trust your American assignment is proving tractable. Miss Huxleigh, you are most welcome.”

In fact, I did feel so after being the recipient of his most graceful bow.

“Miss Crabtree is waiting for you.” Mr. Belmont opened the door and bowed us into the inner sanctum like a butler.

And that is when his name finally impressed itself upon me: one of the banking Belmonts of New York City. Baron Alphonse did not associate with the lower levels.

The dressing room proved similar to the many in which I had visited Irene: amazingly small, considering, equipped with a mirror flanked by gaslights. The performer herself sat front and center in that mirror on a nondescript chair.

A piquant face peeped from under fountains of red-gold hair and gazed back at me in the mirror. Here was Sarah Bernhardt at age twelve, uncorrupted. Here was meat for an English governess.

I smiled at Lotta Crabtree’s reflection as if she were my very own charge. She smiled back, a trifle less collected than before.

It was a promising start.

The face of a beautiful doll and the ways of a playful kitten
.
—
THE NEW YORK TIMES
, 1883

“My dear Madame Irene Adler Norton!”

Lotta Crabtree greeted Irene as the French do (most excessively), with barely touching kisses upon both cheeks.

(Quentin, I am happy to say, appeared not to have mastered the affectation.)

“I have heard of your European triumphs,” Lotta added, showing adorable dimples. She stood barely over five feet tall, and her curled masses of hair were light red, although glints of darker crimson caught even the dimmer lights of the dressing room.