Under the Poppy (17 page)

We are two, we need none other

Cloven not by wife or mother

Even a mistress cannot twist us

We’ll just share, like goodly brothers!

—the rest are amply titillated by its lithe, if louche, athletics, not least the giggling cousin of the marchioness, who for not a little time afterward pursues the traveling pair through various drawing rooms, until her mamma, mortified, bundles her off to a boarding-convent in Switzerland, where she relearns virtue, but never forgets her little romp with the wooden man.

This performance becomes a signature piece for Marcel, Dusan, Istvan, one he refines as circumstances suggest: sometimes the wife makes an appearance, sometimes the chastising mother, always the shared mistress; occasionally there is improvised dialogue between the “brothers”; at times the song has musical accompaniment—piano preferred, though strings will do—counterpointed by a satisfied gobble; but always it ends with Istvan kissing his fist to the audience, his gaze aimed far above its head, whether a hundred are watching or only one. There is some speculation amongst his more thoughtful patrons over what that gaze, that gesture may imply, and for whom it might be meant, but no meaningful consensus is achieved, and none seem to want to ask the young maestro directly; he smiles, always, but the smile never seems to reach his eyes, even in the most intimate of moments.

This, too, is discussed by his patrons:
There is something of the frost about that Hanzel,
opines one of the Misses van Symans, the elder one, who wears the family rings, the mantle of worldly wisdom.
Very charming he may be, but I should not like to find myself on his dark side.

He has a secret sorrow in his heart,
asserts the other, younger Miss van Symans, who considers herself a truer judge of character, at least the character of young men. Her father’s friend, visiting from London, or is it Paris? shakes his head gently and smiles:
Ah, the tender-minded ladies!
as he taps his silver ring—worn on the thumb, a curious affectation—against the sloping side of his glass of port.

If someone had known to ask the former Agatha, now Miss Decca of the Rose and Poppy, she might have been able to place the gesture’s origin, but even if asked she may not have spared the time to reply: she is very busy these days, so busy that she hardly sleeps, puts head to pillow to lie awake, wondering, worrying: Is the roof leak in the parlor turning dire? Is Pamela, that whiny drab, truly down with the ague, or merely shamming? Will the coal man deal fairly with her, a woman alone? To whom can she turn for help?—though she knows without asking this last answer: no one. There is no one to help her, advise her, protect her, no one at all now that Mattison is dying.

For some time now she has been mistress of the house in all but name, her role expanding as Mattison’s illness—consumption? no, for he does not pale or cough; it is some other strange and wasting scourge that takes his strength, that melts his flesh—advances inexorably apace. Nearly two years have passed since her coming—odd to think so, each day so like the next they could all be one round of decision and toil. But she has learned a great deal in that time, from him who was her teacher, is now her patient and charge; he has changed the course of her life, has Mr. Mattison.

Who can say why he took such a shine to her? Perhaps her first tears moved him; perhaps it was her youth, or her obvious industry; perhaps he felt his age. At any rate she has been for some time not only his favored pillow but his partner at the desk, in charge of many matters—the housekeeping, the food and slops, the dozen tasks an hour such an enterprise requires—and lieutenant to many more. Disliked from the start by the other girls, who call her “The Lady,” mock her aloofness, her frugality, her red hair, equally she disdained them, this cluster of overfed sluts used to doing solely as they pleased, stealing or shamming or scratching each other to bits, a menagerie even worse than Mrs. Segunda’s. But a few sharp slaps and a round of robust punishments tilted matters in a brighter direction, and she found that making order soothed her as surely it did the workings of the house. Mattison was delighted by the changes, naming her his lady-at-arms: “
Lady-at-arms,”
sneered the girls
. What she wants is to be Missus Poppy, the greedy cunt.

To which Decca’s reply, had she heard or cared to, might have been a shrug: Marry the master, no, or rather she has no preference, but run the house, yes, of course, so much better than working in its beds, itself a leap from kneeling in the streets; the ladder has many rungs. But her ambitions have grown wider for the business as well, to steer the nights’ proceedings more toward the monied and cultured, the theatrical, to at least
Have them
dress more stylishly
, her murmur to Mattison beneath the midnight counterpane.
Twill ribbons are cheap enough, and dyed muslin can look like silk. That Pamela can sew, if she’s pushed to it, and I can certainly—

Ah, but the gents like ’em tits-out, Dec, you know that.

For what looks finer, we can charge more.

Old dogs,
his wheezing laugh, the discussion left unresolved: too soft to say no to her outright, soft as well in the bed so that most nights are spent in conversation, he might cup her bum or stroke her hair but their shared passion is for the Rose and Poppy, named, he confides, for his first two girls, Rose a refugee from the streets of Victoria and Poppaea from
Someplace southron,
his shrug,
I never did figure out her talk. But she could work a joint like the best of them. And was almost as pretty as you.

His illness, when it comes, moves in jumps: one month a mild aversion to the table, the next a difficulty in keeping down the food; then the wasting, the nighttime sweats, the confusion with accounts—
Did we pay that knacker Tomlinson? He’s roaring in the streets I owe him coin—
so
that is her worry now, too, besides everything else. But having endured so much, more is no real hardship, she knows how to carry weight without breaking. And the pain, well. She has borne greater pains that this, bears them still, wears the scars on her heart where no one can ever see them, or know what, or of whom, she dreams at night.

Mattison knows, though, and has from the start, taking care to say it gently as she sponges him clean of yet another night’s sour sweat:
If you never felt for me that way, the heart’s way, well, why should you? But you’re a trouper always, a good girl. You’ve always been a good girl, Dec. And that dark lad was a good fellow as I recall—

My brother.

Kindly,
I know he’s no kin to you, poppet, though you love him. A good fellow, though, and much stronger than he looked. Stronger than me, now, just an old plucked rooster,
waving his feeble arm, as if he will get her to laugh but
Stop it,
she says angrily, fighting the tears that fear can bring; another one, leaving her in the end. Always, all of them leave.

But before he goes—in rigor, in delirium and sweat—he does her one last service, Mr. Mattison, giving her all that he can—safety; security—in the only way possible, as Decca sits in what was his office, among the papers, the notes and the accounts, and tries to think what next to do. Her brain is infected by echoes, it seems, the rolling wheels of the dead-wagon, the insincere tears of the whores who scattered to the four winds as soon as it was plain that there would be nothing beyond a handful of coin for each of them, those handfuls nearly beggaring what small store was left with
“The Lady,”
mocking her still as they leave,
the
Widow Mattison. High time she started working for her daily bread!

Empty-handed, empty Decca at the desk is another kind of echo: of Rupert, hunched on a fleabit cot at the dreary foreign boardinghouse that, despite its drear, is still so overcrowded that his “room” is a closet beneath the stairwell, with space enough only to sit, lie flat, or piss in a chamber pot; and drink; why not drink? What else in life is there for him to do?

He has been here nearly a month, after who knows how many months of the road, less questing than impelled, like a puppet invisibly strung; he knows exactly how a puppet feels, now. After leaving Mattison’s employ, for a brief time he was a coachman’s road-guard, then a temporary bravo for a dubious businessman, whose import business went up in midnight flames; but until his advent in this city he has called himself a courier, seeking to fund his voyage by carrying messages, bundles, documents, whatever was required, down the road he himself wished to go. The cargo has varied: Once it was a fine morocco-leather case, a jewelry case, filled with worthless old watch fobs. Once it was what no one named as opium, though he knew the thick-wrapped bricks by their dark smell. Once it was a very young woman in gypsy head-wrap, who spoke no tongue he knew, yet nonetheless made herself more than plain on the two nights they traveled: she would trade anything, anything at all, for a moment’s blindness and her freedom. Untempted, he refused, to find at road’s end she was a bailiff’s runaway, a nasty little knifer who tried to nip when he turned her over at the gaol:
I’d’ve fucked you, you know,
her snarl in perfect gutter English.
You dim bastard, you must be flat queer. Or busted-broke,
to bring his brief unsmiling amusement:
Or both, mademoiselle.

Courier to himself, at last he carried, was carried here where rumor pointed, then better knowledge, then fact—
That Hanzel, of the puppet-shows; that Marcel—
here where the end of his journey lies. But truly there is no end, just the road to this room where he sits with his bottle, tangled in his strings, alone with the thoughts he fears to follow, the
denouement
of a farce so bleak it transcends any thought of tragedy to twist instead to excruciating burlesque, wringing from him a mirthless, furious grin because he has put himself into this fix, has he not? led himself, through months of steerage and toil, merrily across the water, from town to town, led by the nose, the prick, the stupid mind refusing to confront what the blind eyes have come so far to see: Istvan and his puppets, performing—yes; again; still—for the filthy bourgeoisie.

Although apparently he has moved up in the world since last they met, now it is the burghers’ masters for whom he disports himself, Christ knows how, though in the small placard drawing on the theatre door he seems as well-set-up as any margrave or marquis: the Savile cut of his coat, the haughty tilt of his chin—though no drawing, however expert, can truly render the eyes…. Another reason to mock at his own folly, lovesick idiot standing stranded in the street, dumb before that placard as if he were a yokel from the fens, the sudden shaming urge to put up fingers and touch it, as if he could thereby touch the face itself. Jesu! and Now you know, he tells himself that night, hunched in a four-table gambling den, drunk to vomit on whiskey ill-afforded. Now you know, you have seen, you can go. Go home.

But there is no “home” and it is not over, nothing is over, nothing to do but stay, fight his way back to the boardinghouse past those who foolishly conflate a drunk with a victim; to wake, wet and wretched, in time enough to take himself to the show, the tiny, well-appointed theatre glowing like a jewel as the toffs alight, stepping through the muck of the avenue, as at the door he finds—another joke! will the farce never end?—that he may not enter, the performance is by invitation only and he, judging by the provincial hat and wolflike stare, belongs either to jail or the road. That he could gain immediate, backstage entry with a note bearing his name, with the murmur of his name, with a mouse wrapped in paper, does not occur to him; those are ideas Istvan would have had. And used.

Instead he turns on his heel and leaves. And walks. And drinks, gin this time and plenty of it, hateful the juniper taste, the raw swirl in his belly but he is ready, now, to punish himself, so ready that he doubles back to the theatre, thinking to lurk outside like a brigand, clamber the roof like a burglar, use the skills that first he learned, owned, perfected beside this, this duke of an Istvan, singing inside, distantly he hears it—singing in a new voice; for a new puppet? But where is Marco? that he made with his own hands, sanded, polished, dressed and tended tenderly as a living child, that he and Rupert played beside so many times, together?

O think of it—and he does, there in the chill of the street, cannot stop himself from recalling all the shows, Marco dancing in a velvet blouse as he sang baritone, “Paddy’s Lament” with a stick in his belt to quell the boisterous or the furtive, the ones who thought that, because they were vagabond players, they could be robbed like vagabonds as well. Remember the dawns afterward, too, yawning and pissing in doorways and on roofs, climbing down into the new day, the new journey that was the same journey, the same day spent walking, Istvan toting Marco and he trundling the rest, talking, joking, planning out the shows, new actions to try, new melodies picked up along the way, arguing this point or that; and pausing, always, at the side of the road, in likely bushes, or deep-shaded ponds, to put aside the world, and be together. Alone together, with the buoyant heat of him, the wet silken lash of his hair, O Christ why think of it now? Why think at all? when nothing will bring it back, those times, those walks, those shows where, for one reason or another—space, or mood, or the possible need to flee a constable untutored in the lively arts—Istvan played alone, he prowling the crowd’s edge, usher and bravo both, private audience for whom that most private gesture at the end—Istvan’s gaze over the head of the crowd, kissing his fist—was sent, meant, offered and accepted, a way of saying always This is for you, all of this that I do is for you.