Under the Poppy (24 page)

One of those on whom he plans to call is out upon the darkening streets: Istvan, abroad on a private prowl. Hair blown and tangled by the carrion wind, bundled like an urchin in raveled gloves and cast-off greatcoat that he wears as carelessly as the opulent outfits discarded on the road back to Rupert, as a snake sheds its skin, to become again
the vagabond player, the one-night-only apparition that, like a dream, disappears with the dawn. The
deshabille
suits him, cloaks him in
camouflage, frees him to loiter and examine the town
in extremis
, indulge his own hunger for motion: he has been pent, spending so much time in one place—one place? One building, Jesu. No show to mount tonight, and Mouse is busy, Ag he has promised to leave be, so: hand in pocket for a brownish little apple, a pippin apple that he peels with a surgeon’s precision on the windy mercantile porch, watching with interest a caravan of limping soldiers traverse the avenue like Adam driven from Paradise, the midwife following after, her face bright red in the cold, trundling like a carter a scratched and painted two-wheeler advertising her art and services; she is the town’s sole doctor, now, Adderley and his monocle having been dispatched some weeks before by a stray explosion from the cannon that, like thunder, now call to one another from the hills. Istvan tosses the apple core aside, tugs his collar higher, heads back into the street toward the Poppy, past the hotel. He does not see the two drummers from the lobby, at the door now, step out to follow him down.

At the quiet Poppy, Decca follows Velma into the storeroom, pondering what else might be done to the everlasting potatoes and oatmeal to make them worth swallowing yet again. Her leg aches from the constant
sideways gait of her broken slipper: she has tried to mend the heel with
bits of wood, but the shoes are fit for nothing but the ash-pile now; it is amazing how long one can make do, but nothing comes from nothing’s
rind. Velma suggests adding to the oatmeal glue a handful of peas, old as stones and just as tender, and Decca shrugs. There is a finger of cornmeal left, and, sweet surprise, some still-edible molasses: that will help. Istvan used to love molasses, would fling a sticky rope of it into a snow bank, retrieve it frozen, and chew it for an hour…. Istvan, now in Rupert’s rooms: What does that portend? Something final is in motion, is already occurring, but as usual she is powerless against it. After leaving Velma, she retreats to her own rooms, turning the penny lock to sit sorting through her things, account books, sachet-tin and ribbons, lover’s eye and the deed to the Rose and Poppy, telling each through her fingers like a rosary’s beads, like the silver-paper links in the chain made for her so long ago, frail as a sigh though stronger than the time it has outlasted, the other chain between the three in fragments, now, she knows this. She knows this. What to take, what to leave? because that will be the next thing, the knock at the door—

—but the knock that comes summons her instead to Colonel Essenhigh, arriving unexpectedly, snow-coated and tired but glad to have outridden the darkness, gladder still that he need only stay one night in this place that so disgusts him, worse than the war-fields, with its queer innkeeper and unwholesome diddling dolls. There are others the General could have sent on this errand, but the General has entrusted it to him; so be it, he is a soldier above all, he does his duty as he is bidden—though privately, in his darker moments, the colonel suspects the General of having a sense of humor unbecoming in an officer. He inquires of Decca, with an automatic politesse toward women, all women, even madams, if she is well, and she swallows the sudden laugh that clogs her throat, and thanks him instead for his concern: Yes, she is quite well, thank you, and hopes that he is the same.

Making her own quiet way, Lucy, overhearing this exchange of false courtesies, stops to peep in passing—what an ass that colonel is; how ugly Decca looks these days, all stiffened up, as if she has swallowed a whole paperful of pins—then continues up the stairs, down the hall toward Mr. Rupert’s rooms; so much simpler, when Istvan was in the Cell, to visit with the mecs, just scratch on the door for admittance—but Istvan is off somewhere, and see, now, Mr. Rupert himself, deep inside himself, step inside those rooms and shut the door. She hears the key turn, turns on her heel, lets out a sigh: Very well, back
to her Blue Room, no mecs today—though she misses them sorely, it seems the more she works with them the more she longs to, though the girls mock her, and Puggy teases:
Why, hadn’t you any dollies as a child?
But there is so much she could be doing, one idea pops another till she has a fair litter to corral: the queenly costume she would like to fashion for Miss Lucinda, glitter-paste jewels and a new feathered hat—from
her own angel’s costume, the wings picked carefully apart—and she has a piece of velvet set aside that would look a treat; plus a check of the strings for the Bishop, a freshening brush for the Chevalier, himself locked away for so long,
Your horsemanship is not admired.
And every rummage through the trunks unearths some unglimpsed treasure: like that strange infant neatly wrapped in butcher’s paper, the blue-eyed baby puppet that, says Istvan, is no longer able to cry the tears it used to, its lids dried shut in the sockets; but surely it can be mended? How she would relish the chance to try, to use again the fascinating tools, the strong-smelling glues…. A baby, how would one put a baby into the shows? as her memory stirs, the long-ago player and his hook-nosed puppet, the puppet wife and, yes, baby, too! Now, what did that baby do?—

—as footsteps ascend, Omar leading the colonel bearing news from the General, news he will deliver to Mr. Bok with a certain sour satisfaction. Another sort of pleasure lights his eyes as he watches Vera scuttle by in chemise, hair down, from one room—hers?—to the next, arms piled with dress and petticoat and ribbon-trailing hat, graceless yellow and bedizened blue, nothing matching, most of it the property of others, which explains her stealthy haste—though not too hasty not to mark the colonel’s regard, to toss him a wink over her shoulder, and flash him half a tit: a working girl needs all the friends she can muster, no matter where she is or where she goes.

In the room beyond the hall-locked door, past Rupert at his desk—gaze fixed on the coins before him, sight a turmoil inside—the silent puppets bide: the tall Chevalier with his wasted prick, the lugubrious Bishop, lovely Miss Lucinda whose feet are fashioned for the dance: if one were to solicit their opinions, what might they say? seeing as they see so little, there in the quiet room, hostage to inaction, awaiting their master’s voice? Or, as the General once suspected (himself a would-be player in his faraway youth, a mellifluous declaimer of poetry not his own), are they privy in some deeper way to that master’s secret intentions, via art’s telepathy, the shared mind of shared purpose played out through the months and years? Are they in some half-formed, faulty manner not living, yet alive?

And thus perhaps most of all the silked and coffined Pan Loudermilk, seeded with lost Marco’s parts, themselves so potent with love and betrayal; as Istvan himself once mused, how different is a man from a mec? A rhetorical observation, but one at which Pan, were he capable, might smile, perhaps does smile there in the dark, manipulation after all his métier; how different is a mec from a man?

Hector Georges

Courtesy is vital, especially when ill tidings must be given—and Mr. Bok and his situation surely merit that courteous attention—but one cannot bilocate, no matter the need or desire. It is a bit of a pity, making Essenhigh the messenger, but he is the most expendable of my officers, and at any rate a local man, my future representative there, if he lives. If not, it will be Lieutenant Rodgers, or that large, bowlegged fellow whose name always escapes me, the one Javier calls Pantagruel. Any one of them can sift through the town’s ashes, and gather up any clinkers as they fall. And blame the wreckage on the foreigners’ advent, an idea already so widely credited it verges on the truth. “Huns,” they call them now, and it’s a short step from a “foreigner” to the neighbor one dislikes…. War is always a hazy business. And loss tends to foster a grudge.

For now, we are in endgame, in this landscape at least. The men must be out of the Poppy summarily and sent to Gottsburgh; Essenhigh will speed them up the road. The greater withdrawal is proceeding steadily, without undue delay, or so Jack Pepper tells us, though Raws-thorne is impatient to begin his shipments. Well. My young yokel aide is impatient, too: some of the lieutenants have told him that the cunts of Paris smell of roses and dispense champagne, and I thought he would mount up and begone that very evening, blizzard or no blizzard. It is so heady to be young.

Although one need not be a stripling to act as one—witness Vidor’s capers, shaming in a man his age. Yet his tantrums do open certain avenues. Vidor and I have skirmished before and elsewhere, not always on the same side; he makes an ugly foe. In London, he blocked my progress, and set me back not a little; in Prussia, he almost cost me my commission. Fortunately Javier was there to intervene…. We’d thought him dead, Vidor, left him for such at any rate. Though here he was a useful ally, for a time. Is that shocking? That is commerce. Why else make war?… Yes, there is the glory, too.

But Mr. Bok—I would prefer not to leave his establishment un-
defended, retreats are notably chaotic, and his resources are at ebb-tide. And he was a good innkeeper to us, though the men were a trial, I’m a-crawl myself with their merry herds of lice. His sister—no, she’s Hanzel’s sister; strange, that—at any rate, Miss Decca has an instinct for parsimony rarely met outside a gaol, grudging every mouthful we swallowed though we more than paid our way. She shan’t weep to see us go—vinegar tears, and pull her armor-plates tight, that young lady will outlast Armageddon. Women can be so ruthless, it’s a pity one can’t put them in the lists. I’d send Essenhigh to her without a moment’s regret. For either of them.

I do hope he’s sense enough not to revel in his rôle, Essenhigh, nor try to take advantage, or Mr. Bok might lose patience, there’s no love lost between those two. Though it takes a great deal to provoke Mr. Bok, as we have noted. Marvelous fortitude. Yet a certain obscurity of vision—
par exemple
, surely he knows that he is Vidor’s Achilles’ heel? Every man has one. Hanzel, for instance, is Mr. Bok’s.

“Leave off,” says Lucy sharply, arrested in her swift pass through the lobby by a grubby knot of soldiers, headed by this boy barely shaving but old enough to have slept for months in a trench in the hills, to reek like shit and gunpowder, this boy who grabs at her sex through her skirt, then fastens on her arm as “Come on, judy,” with a lopsided grin; he looks half mad. “Kiss me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Leave off, I say—”

“Look, I’ll give you this,” reaching into his uniform jacket to draw forth a peculiar souvenir, something shining, something dark, she bends in suspicious curiosity—then cries out at the sight of a severed, brownish finger still wearing its braided gold ring, the boy laughing at her revulsion: “Stuck on a knuckle, judy, so I took finger ’n all! Don’t you like it?” but “Leave
off
!” Lucy stamping her slippered foot on his, hard at the instep, not pain so much as sharp surprise that drops his grip, “Fucking whore!”

—but she is at the lobby door, inside the theatre where Jonathan, onstage, fingers the piano keys, making no sound, as if his silence now extends to his music as well. Beside him sits pallid Pearl, bundled in a shabby pink wrapper, head on his shoulder like a weary child’s. Laddie hunches knees-up on the chaise, in a brown study, lines between his eyes that echo Rupert’s. Puggy, mending a prop basket, weaving colored paper through cracked willow, looks up at Lucy’s advent, makes a game smile: “Good evening, mademoiselle,” but “An empty lobby,” she growls, “
that
would make for a good evening, and those stinking riffraff kicked back to the gutter where they came from. I swear to the Holy Virgin, never will I fuck a soldier again.” Crossing to the piano, to Puggy, to the prop box, spangles and feathers, tarnished and limp, she makes a mighty sigh and “Vera’s packed her traps,” she says, to everyone and no one. “She’s on her way up the road tonight.”

Their startled murmurs, Jonathan’s wide eyes and “The last train,” Lucy says. “Bought her ticket with that money she squirrels away, you note she’d never the price of a ribbon or a cigarette, always promising to pay you back later. Well, she’s paying us back all right. Off she goes, to Victoria she says, and thence to Paris. Paris! She might as well fly up to the moon.”

Puggy frowns deeply. With hair again he looks younger, and, younger, more uncertain, as if his role as impresario has been stripped from him, and no other offered to fill the widening void. “And Velma, too?”

“Velma? Who knows?” Lucy picks at the velvet of the chaise, its blue worn through in spots to the stuffing beneath, like a sky plagued with soiled clouds. Spinning Jennie’s old swing dangles empty, its shadow in faintest revolution, weighted by the ghost of a ghost. “Who ever knows, with her?”

Silence then on the stage, as if a performance has dwindled to no conclusion, the actors caught without business or lines and “It’s over here for us,” says Puggy glumly. “Soldiers and refugees, there’s no one left to play to. Unless we relocate to the cemetery. What does Omar say, of Vera?”

“I’ve not seen Omar. May be he’s on the train, too,” but Jonathan shakes his head and points thumb-upward, an emphatic gesture and “He’s gone upstairs,” Pearl translates. “With Mr. Rupert, and that army man.”

“The General? He’s returned?” but Jonathan shakes his head again, folds his face into a scowl, fingers fanned at his cheeks and “The colonel, you mean,” and Lucy, troubled as she is, has to laugh: “You do him perfect, Jonnie. Good for you. May be you ought to hop the train and go to Paris, too.”

“Bad advice,” a voice from backstage, Istvan approaching hands-in-pockets, his steps uncertain, his face oddly pale. “Roost in a storm, that’s what a wise bird does. Lucy-Belle, a moment?” to lead her back into the darkness, open his coat, old brown greatcoat that makes her gasp for its collar is soaked crimson, blood in his hair, blood everywhere but “Hush,” in her ear, a hand gripping her own; his is so cold, though he stands upright, in animal instinct to show no hurt. “Not one word. Can you sew?” Her parted lips go narrow, her shoulders firm; she nods. “Good girl. Take me to your room,” down the sideway from the stage to the stairs, she his support to the hall above where quiet voices come from Rupert’s rooms, Omar outside in the hall with his face to the jamb, listening with all his might so he barely marks their passage, Lucy quick to close the Blue Room door, muffling its click as she muffles her shock to see the wound exposed, neck and shoulder and “They were aiming for my throat, yeah?” Istvan says; he sits heavily on the bed. “Fucking drummers, if that’s what they were, fucking thieves. If that’s what they were.”