The Troupe (22 page)

Your dressing room was only desirable in terms of solitude; the actual conditions were often nothing short of deplorable. The first thing you did upon arriving was search the walls and corners for any peepholes (they would be there regardless of your sex), and fill them in with shoe polish (and yet how many times had you seen narrow, soiled fingers worming through the blocked-up holes, pushing past this obstruction to make way for a desperate eye?). Then came the rituals: you avoided looking at all the windows, for to spy a bird on one’s sill was sure to bring bad luck. If you found a peacock feather accidentally jettisoned from some chorus girl’s gown, you made sure not to touch it; to touch a peacock feather was to invoke the worst of all misfortunes. You made
sure
not to whistle, that was a death knell if ever there was one. You just pulled on your oldest performance shoes and turned your shirt inside out while mumbling your lines, perhaps shuffling widdershins two or three times as you did. Then you would be sanctified, consecrated, protected against all ills. Unless, of course, you were following an animal act; no luck could aid you in competing with dumb, trained creatures who somehow always managed to charm the hearts of the audience while leaving shit all over the stage.

Then came your moment, the little splinter of time you’d been waiting for since you awoke that morning: they called your name and you took a breath and walked across the stiff cardboard floor (riddled with holes from previous props), the dark back of the theater full of gleaming, watchful eyes like a cavern full of roosting owls, and
then you sang or bleated your little song, or made your little speech, or did your funny little dance. And it was easy, because after all you’d done it just the day before, and the day before that, and the dozens of hundreds of days before that. Had you always been doing this, you wondered, as you listened to the applause (sometimes a dribble, other times a roar)? Had you always been playing for these darkened people, rendered bodiless and invisible by the blazing footlights?

And then after the performance you returned to your barren flophouse room, frosted with moonlight from the many holes in the walls, the bed and sheets alive with dozens of creepy-crawlies who roved the folds looking for bare flesh to bite. You’d sleep shivering in a ball and awake with red and pink perforations lining your neck, your crotch, your armpits. But you did not want to slap yourself down with kerosene to keep them away, like some people advised, as the reeking fumes almost choked you in the night, so you suffered through their tiny bites. And when morning came you’d sit on the edge of the bed aching and stiff, your breath smoking and pluming, and you’d fear to touch your soles to the chilly floorboards… yet just before you did, you’d wonder what day it was. Surely it could not still be February? Could it really? Had it not been winter for many, many months?

George finally asked Silenus about the time once. It seemed to move slowly now that he was touring.

“We are traveling the thin parts of the world, George, the hollow parts,” he answered. “We seek out the fringes, the edges, the festering, open sores. Existence is breaking down here. Time doesn’t work right. It’s grown distorted. That’s why we come here to play the song. Then things will be right for these places, in time.”

“But it’s been winter for so long,” said George. “It feels like it’s been winter for years. Can the people who live here really never notice that something’s wrong?”

Silenus grinned and said, “To them, everything’s dandy. They never notice that the world is dying below their feet.”

“But why?”

“Because they don’t want to. The human aptitude for self-deception is unfathomable, kid. If it wasn’t, we’d be out of a job.”

George felt as though he was breaking down along with the world. His back began to stoop, his skin grew thin and sallow, and his knuckles clicked and cracked after every performance. When Colette found him sleeping in a pile of dusty curtains backstage, she slapped him awake and held him upright with one arm, murmuring, “Told you. I told you so.”

Her initial resentment changed to pity when she saw how hard George was taking their travels. If she was confident enough in his collaboration with the orchestra, she’d let him sleep backstage in one of the dressing rooms, and cover for him if Silenus asked. For some reason she was happy to have something to fight with Harry over: the two of them often seemed to be in the middle of some managerial argument or another, always retreating down an empty hallway to harangue each other in hushed tones, or bickering all the way back to his office. But though George was glad of her help and friendship, his increasing affections for her went unrequited. Whenever she woke him from his naps, or tended to him when he was weary, there was always a distance there, and she was reluctant to touch him. Each moment with her was fleeting and frustrated, and soon her very presence caused a dull ache in the root of his being.

Franny was one of the few troupe members not infected by the pervasive weariness of February. Instead, she’d become oddly invigorated by the revelation of George’s parentage. Yet it took some time for George to realize she was not happy, but angry, and specifically angry at Silenus. For some reason she could not forgive him his ignorance of his only child. She was so angry that after one rehearsal she did not pay attention and allowed a splinter of an iron band to tear
open her bandaged sleeve. When the tear flapped open George saw the black writing on her skin again, yet now he saw it was not writing, but a
drawing
, an amazingly intricate design that covered her entire arm, full of loops and twirls and spidery angles.

Before he could examine it further, Silenus stepped forward. George had almost never seen him show any tenderness to anyone, especially Franny, yet he gently took her hand and pulled her sleeve down and said, “You almost hurt yourself, my dear.” But Franny snatched her hand away and covered up the tear and walked away. Silenus appeared genuinely hurt by this reaction. “What does she think I ever did to her?” he asked. But George only watched the strongwoman depart, and wondered what was below all those bandages and scarves.

And if George was doing poorly, his issues were slight compared to Kingsley’s, which got worse every day. Somehow Kingsley still managed to perform each night: he would shuffle out from behind the curtain, limping and bent sideways, and take his seat; yet when he heard Silenus announce his name he’d straighten up and smooth himself out, and perform as though he were hardly hurt at all. But when the curtain dropped he’d crumple again like a snail dashed with salt, sometimes even whimpering, and would need several deep breaths before being able to stand.

Everyone took this grimly. Kingsley denied any medical treatment, saying he preferred his own remedies, though he never explained what these were.

George was not sure how the troupe had lasted as long as it had, and could not imagine its continuing for much longer. It seemed as if it might fall apart at any moment. And how much farther would they go, even if they could? His father had never mentioned a specific endpoint for their precious mission. When would they ever be done?

George’s only distraction from all of their troubles was the piece of the First Song he carried with him. Now that he knew it was there he began to feel it reacting to things around him, trembling at the whisper of rain or resonating with a strong wind. It wanted something, he felt. He began to suspect that it wanted to be whole.

After many weeks of traveling, he still did not know exactly how Silenus and Stanley acquired their shreds of the song. Every week or so they slipped out with the steamer trunk and returned tired and worn, as if they’d been through a tremendous trial, but what they were doing out in the wilderness was a mystery to everyone, even Colette. George did not even know how the song was performed: no matter how carefully he watched each performance of the fourth act, he saw nothing more than Silenus conducting and Stanley and Colette singing and playing. Yet still the First Song was somehow invoked. He was sure Silenus had something to do with it. Why would he be onstage at all, otherwise? He played no instrument, and did not sing.

He wanted to ask his father about it, but the opportunity never seemed to come. Though Silenus now allowed his son into his life more, he was always busy and distant, and George did not understand him or what he did any more than before.

At first things seemed positive, as Silenus’s door began appearing to him more often. “I’ve changed your privileges,” said Silenus when George asked about this. “It’ll appear more frequently to you, and it’ll always allow you in. And if there’s an emergency, it’ll show up.” George usually found his father reading inside. His reading material would vary from thick books the size of tombstones, to thin little books with silvery pages that would seem to sing when you turned the pages, to long, brown parchments that were very old and brittle. “I’m trying to alleviate your condition,” his father explained when George once asked him about it.

“My condition?”

“Removing the song. I’m hoping something here can give us a
hint.” But his expression was so black and impatient George could only assume it was not going well.

Once he entered to find Silenus looking at an enormous map of North America, and while most of it was recognizable some parts seemed to bulge or expand outward into lands George did not know. There was a small country on the edge of Kentucky described as “Heartache’s Founding,” several stretches of forest in southern Ontario called “The Vale of Tears,” and one large peninsula off of Nova Scotia was labeled
NOVA ATLANTIS
. George asked if those places were really there, and Silenus answered that they were, provided you came at them the right way.

But business soon trumped these new intimacies. In mid-February they left the obscure fringes of the Keith-Albee circuit and signed on with the Loews circuit, which made them officially small-time. George presumed this was done so they could search a new area for the song. Silenus initially encountered some trouble negotiating their contracts, which would normally have been laid out for several months at the choosing of the booking office, but these schedules were too restrictive for the troupe. His father was forced to go down to the telegraph office and exchange message after message with the booking office until he got the destinations and times and billing he desired. Sometimes these exchanges lasted over five or six hours, but he implacably waited it out. George never got to read the cables, but he got the sense that Silenus was a ferociously canny businessman.

He sometimes accompanied Silenus to the telegraph office, hoping to impress him with his theories about Mendelssohn or Brahms, or perhaps to discuss their family, if he was lucky. But Silenus was not interested in any such conversation. Instead he’d rant about the booking office and Albee and the stage managers, and the endless frustrations one met in touring. His diatribes stopped only to allow a fresh swig of bourbon or brandy before he continued with his vitriol, and they always ended in some bitter or cruel advice that George did not wish to listen to. “Life is a difficult, nasty thing, kid, and I
wouldn’t recommend it to any friend of mine,” was one such statement he often revisited.

Each time George could only sigh. He had fought so hard to be by his father’s side, yet now that he was here it felt like they were further apart than ever.

George eventually adjusted to life on the road, or at least as much as anyone could, and as he did he began to feel increasingly frustrated with his role in the troupe. In his time at Otterman’s he’d become accustomed to admiration and respect, but no one among the Silenus Troupe held him in any such high regard. If anything, every member of the troupe seemed to feel he was their personal assistant, and they appreciated his enthusiasm only when it was engaged in getting them a cup of coffee or tea.

He had never traveled with a troupe before, but he badly wished to impress them and rise above his lowly status. The first strategy he took was to casually begin playing famously difficult pieces during rehearsal. Once they heard what he could do, he reasoned, they’d surely think differently of him. So, during one rehearsal day when Franny was having trouble figuring out how to do her bit in such a small theater, he pretended to be bored and launched into the Mendelssohn first piano concerto. He was just hitting his stride when Harry came striding up, but rather than heaping admiration on George, he said, “Will you stop that goddamn racket? We’ve got people trying to work over here!”

George, crestfallen, nodded and stuffed the sheet music into his valise.

His next tactic for increasing his standing was to offer his expert opinions on improving everyone’s act. After all, he’d seen many acts at Otterman’s, and he played with these performers for hours at a time; they would have to see how they could better their acts once he spoke to them, and they’d appreciate his help. But his first attempt went horribly: he’d hardly gotten halfway through outlining all the flaws he’d noted in Kingsley’s act before the man went into an enraged, hysterical fit, and wound up locking himself in his dressing room. Silenus and Colette had to spend an hour talking him out of it, and neither was very pleased with George.

George was deeply hurt by these reactions, but decided he’d been going about this wrong; the troupe members were performers, and if there was one thing performers listened to, it was the audience. The trick was to somehow earn the audience’s admiration, and then the admiration of the troupe would surely follow. But how to attract the audience’s attention? He was just an accompanist. Everything about his position was meant to make him invisible to them.

George thought he’d hit upon just the thing when he remembered the bright yellow Spanish coat he’d bought while at Otterman’s. He hadn’t been able to wear it yet, but he thought it’d be precisely what was needed to draw the audience’s eye to the young man in the pit who was so splendidly playing the piano. He donned it on the night of their first performance in Grand Rapids, and descended the dressing room stairs to join the rest of the troupe before they took their places.