The Troupe (4 page)

And there, on the opposite page, was an illustration of a man in a top hat standing in the middle of a stage, telling a story. With trembling fingers, George pulled out his theater bill from Rinton, unfolded it, and held the two bills side by side. Though the Pantheon’s bill was by far the superior, and the Rinton bill was old and faded, the two illustrations matched exactly.

His trembling increased. He had never been this close before.
He’d dreamed of this moment so many times, yet he’d never really believed it could happen.

Then, to his surprise, the doors of the theater were pushed open, and a crowd of people came striding out. George went white, and almost fainted. “Oh, no!” he said. “I’ve missed it! How could I have missed it?” He nearly sat down in the street in shock, but stopped himself as three members of the crowd stood in the street to smoke:

“I shouldn’t have come so early,” one man said. “I mean, I only came for the Silenus bits. I’ve no interest in these Little Lord Fauntleroy plays at all. They’re just maudlin.”

“Oh, come now,” said a friend. “The kid was trying. He wasn’t that bad. One lady actually cried.”

“That was Maudie Gray,” said a woman with them. “She cries at everything, especially when little boys are involved. You should have seen her when they did
East Lynne
. She came to every show and bawled her eyes out.”

“I believe it,” said the first man. “But still, I should have come in after the halfway. I’m really only curious to see what all the talk is about.”

“Or what it isn’t about,” said the second. “Does anyone really know what Silenus is going to do?”

“Do you think it has to do with why they got started so late?” asked the woman.

“Is it late?” said the first man. “I suppose it does feel late.” He peered up into the sky as though there were something wrong with the moon, and shivered and lapsed into silence.

“It’s intermission,” George said softly. He rechecked the bill of acts. “It’s only intermission! I haven’t missed it!” Then he stuffed the bill in his pocket, picked up his suitcase, and dashed inside.

The coat-check girl wouldn’t take his suitcase, so after some negotiating with the usher George was allowed to take it in with him, provided he sat at the back. George found that the Pantheon was a much, much nicer theater than what he was used to: it had velvet
curtains of a very rich red (which he found more tasteful than the ratty green ones used at Otterman’s), footlights of crenellated gold, and a pristine white spotlight that stayed fixed on the center of the stage. George felt an irrational pang of jealousy at this; even though he’d dissolved all his bonds with Otterman’s, he still felt bitter that the Panthon had a spotlight, while his old place of employment did not.

More people filed in to sit around him, and it felt like hours went by. George found he wasn’t alone: several people began checking their watches, and one nearby lady said, “I hope he gets started soon. I thought I was late getting here.”

“Did you?” said her friend.

“Yes. When I left the house I thought for sure that it was very late.”

“How odd. You know, I think I might’ve felt something similar. I’ve never had an evening pass as slow as this one. Though once the show begins, I expect things will go faster. It shouldn’t be long.”

George hoped so. His stomach had gone numb, and he felt like he couldn’t open his eyes wide enough. He knew it was unwise to pin all his hopes on one man, yet this was almost exactly what he had done: he hoped that Silenus could take him away from these small country theaters, and school him in the finer arts of the stage; he hoped his father would greet his newfound son with open arms, and rejoice in their meeting; and George’s last, most desperate hope was that Silenus would be such an astounding and wonderful man that finding him could somehow make up for the loss of George’s mother. She had died giving birth to him, and as the identity of his father had been unknown he’d been left to be raised by his grandmother. The fallout from the ensuing scandal had dealt their family name an irreparable blow, and as a bastard child George had been exiled to a lowly, unspoken caste in Rinton. Perhaps, he hoped, Silenus would make all those unhappy years worthwhile.

It would not be long now. He kept sitting up to peer down into the
orchestra pit to see when they were going to start playing. That would be when the action would begin.

After a while the lights in the theater faded and the mutter of talk died down. Some signal came from offstage, and the pianist sat down and began arthritically tinkling out a breezy waltz. George thought the man’s playing stilted and pat, but he was far more excited about whatever was going to happen onstage than what was going on in the orchestra pit. “Here we go,” he whispered aloud.

The pianist played the first movement of whatever piece it was, and as he geared up to repeat it a man walked—no,
erupted
—from the side of the stage, charging for the center of the boards with a palpable confidence. He wore a red coat, checked pants, and a black top hat, and his white-gloved hands were bunched into fists. George got the impression that he would have walked through a brick wall, if one barred his way. When he came to the center of the stage he stopped short and wheeled to face the audience, swooping his hat off his head as he turned. He surveyed them for a bit, like a man inspecting a horse for sale, and people were not sure whether or not to applaud.

Time seemed to stand still for George as he stared at the man on the stage. Except for his pose, it was the theater bill’s illustration come to life. The man was short and mustachioed and had a slight potbelly, and he wore his thick, black hair combed back over his head. It shone in the light like oil. But what George was most astonished by was the man’s face. Though he wore the whiteface makeup commonly used in vaudeville, George could see that the man’s cheeks and mouth were heavily lined, and his cold blue eyes were very deep-set. It was not a lovely face; it was hard and austere, a face much used to scowls and glares. But the most astonishing thing was that it looked a little like the person George saw each time he glanced in the mirror.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” called the man in a fruity, tobacco-tinged voice. “I come to you today bearing wonders from afar. If you were to inspect my shoes, you would find on their soles the soil of a
thousand countries. My many coats have soaked up the salty air of all the seven seas. Were you to see my dustbin you would find a dozen hats, all drained of color by distant suns. These are the lengths I have gone to to procure our world’s greatest treasure, our most precious resource, our most secret and unpredictable wonder.” He paused, and smiled both cunningly and a little cruelly as the audience waited for his finish. “Entertainment,” he said, and bowed. “I am Heironomo Silenus.”

The audience smiled and clapped, but George was too thunderstruck to move, trying to drink in every moment. Silenus snapped back up and advanced on the edge of the stage. He leaned out over them, looking furious in the lights of the gas jets along the stage, and several people in the front row recoiled. “For what better gift did the Creator give us than that ability to release, and relax, and allow ourselves to be taken to lands unseen and undreamt of simply with the crude components of performance?” he said. “A dab of face paint, a tinkling of a chord, a well-crafted costume and a few choice words, and we are given a vision of things that are not, were not, nor will ever be. We are given visions of the Other. These I bring to you in the palm of my hand, eager to send them tumbling into your laps. We are constrained by one thing only: time, and yours I shall no longer waste.”

He whipped around and withdrew, gesturing toward the curtain, and said, “See now the genius I found overseas in the hallowed halls of ancient Europe! A man of mechanism and wit, of ingenuity never before seen, a professor in his own lands, but here, something even greater: a performer, waiting to serve at your whim. I give you the redoubtable Professor Kingsley Tyburn, and his companions!” Silenus then replaced his hat with a flourish, sank into the darkness, and was gone. The curtain began to rise, and George nearly moaned in disappointment; it was the first time he’d ever glimpsed his father, and he did not want him to leave. But he quieted once he saw what was behind the curtain.

On the stage was the painted backdrop of the interior of an old farmhouse, but it seemed a strange and forbidding scene. The wood of the farmhouse was gray and old-looking, and the landscape outside the window was filled with twisting trees and a sickly moon. A long, high table was set up in front of the backdrop, and a man in a black tuxedo was seated at the middle. His skin was painted white, his lips bright red, and his copper-red hair was closely cropped. His legs were crossed, and he appeared to be reading a book, completely unaware of the audience, with one hand holding the book and the other hidden below the table. Placed along the table were three boxes, each of them shut. They looked a little like tiny coffins. The man licked a finger and turned the page of his book, but otherwise did nothing.

“Have we started yet?” said a small, tinny voice. “It sure sounded like we did…” It spoke with a distinctive New York twang, and seemed to come from one of the boxes.

The man, presumably the professor, cocked an eyebrow, and glanced at the box on the far right. The audience chuckled.

“Don’t think so,” said another, this one deeper and with a Cockney accent. “He’d have opened us up, wouldn’t he?” This one came from the box in the middle. George squinted to see if the professor’s lips were moving at all. He was far away, but they didn’t seem to even twitch.

“Unless he was still angry with us,” said a third voice from the box on the left. This one was Southern and was meant to be a woman’s, though it had a bass resonance that suggested a man behind it. “Do you think he is?”

“Yes!” said the professor, and slammed down his book. “I am, in fact.”

There was a gasp from one of the far boxes, and it shook a little as though someone inside had recoiled. The audience laughed again.

“What are you still mad at us for, Doc?” said the first voice.

“You know very well what I’m mad about, Denny,” said the professor.

“Aw,” said the voice. “Is this about the party?” The top of the box on the far right opened, and a wooden face with large, blank eyes, a pug nose, and a moth-eaten old hat rose out and leaned against the top. The audience laughed and clapped at the puppet’s appearance.

“Yes, Denny, this is about the party,” said the professor. “You embarrassed me greatly. You walked right up to the hostess and said… You said…”

The box on the far left opened and another puppet emerged, this one with the blond hair, hoop-skirted dress, and sultry blue eyes of a Southern belle. “He asked if she believed in love at first sight,” she said, her wooden mouth matching the words. The audience clapped appreciatively.

“Yes!” said the professor, flustered.

The middle box opened, and a third puppet emerged, this one fat, bald, and with one large eyebrow. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that,” he said in a thick Cockney accent.

“There’s nothing bad about that,” said the professor. “Well, nothing
that
bad about that. It’s what he said after that gets my goat. She replied no, she didn’t, and then he said—”

“I said, in that case I’d have to keep coming back here,” said Denny, and though his face was unmistakably wooden George got the impression that it had smirked at them.

The drummer in the orchestra rattled off a syncopated beat after the punch line, and the audience laughed as the professor sputtered to respond to his puppet. They were all crude-looking things, like they had each been carved out of a single log, but somehow their crudeness lent them a believable air of expression.

“You all get more and more out of control every day!” said the professor. “Berry, you even insulted my actor friend!” he told the fat puppet.

“What? I said he was great in his death scene in the play,” said Berry.

“Yes, but you said it should have come several acts earlier!”

Another beat from the drummer (this one a little late, George noted), and the audience roared laughter. Berry mugged for the crowd, even though his face did not seem to move.

“I guess we did sort of ruin things,” said Denny. “They all got a little down when I told them about my friend Frank.”

“Frank?” said Berry. “Why, what happened to him?”

“Well, he passed on.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Denny!” said the professor.

“Yeah,” said Denny. “He fell through some scaffolding.”

“How horrible!” said the Professor. “Was he fixing his roof?”

“No, he was being hung,” said the puppet, and again there was the snarl of a snare drum.

“Oh, Denny!” said the professor. The crowd clapped and cawed laughter.

“He’s rigging them up underneath the table,” whispered a woman in the row before George.

“Hush,” said her friend, but George had thought the same thing. Yet even so, how was the professor manipulating three puppets at once?

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, Doc?” said the Southern belle puppet.

“No,” said the professor to her kindly. “No, you didn’t, Mary-Ann.”

“Good,” she said. “Though I did meet the most delightful man at the party.”

“Did you?” said the professor.

“Oh, yes. He’s very well respected, a Southern planter.”

“Ah, very good.”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s an undertaker from New Orleans, you see.”

“Oh!” cried the professor, anguished at having been made a fool of again. The bass drum belched down in the orchestra pit, and the audience hooted and clapped. “What can I do to get you all to behave!”

“Well, why don’t you let us out, Doc?” said Denny.

“Let you out?” said the professor.

“Yes! Let us stretch our legs.” He wiggled in his box as though straining to move his limbs. “Let us out of the boxes, Doc, and set us loose!”

“Oh, Denny,” said the professor, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“Why not?” said Berry. “We could be real people for you!”