Under the Poppy (31 page)

“Good evening, M. de Mercy. Where is your lady?”

She has a curious voice, deeper than a woman’s should be, a curious glance for Istvan and Rupert, who stand silent as Denis de Mercy babbles how his Caroline has
la grippe
, is desolate to have missed the ball “as well as yourself, of course, Madame, and Master de Metz,” making a bow that the boy does not return, so thoroughly indifferent—to him, them, the table, the room, everything that is not himself—that he gives no notice, reaching instead to pluck a flower from the centerpiece, a fat red rose and “For you, Belle,” he says to the woman; he sounds half-drunk. “Your favorite.”

She does not speak, no one speaks. He drops the flower, takes up Lucy’s half glass of punch, drinks it down, reaches for another almost full but “Pardon,” says Rupert, putting his hand to the glass; his signet ring gleams black and gold; their fingers nearly touch. “Ask the waiter, there is plenty. This one is mine.”

Still no one speaks, everyone watches, those at the table and those surrounding watching Rupert and the boy, Benjamin, who seems in that moment to have grown younger; cheeks flushed, his eyes have lashes as lush as a girl’s.

“It tastes like watered piss,” he says.

“That it does,” says Rupert, with a very brief smile. “I prefer whiskey.”

“So do I,” says Benjamin, his own smile sudden and suddenly sweet, withdrawing his hand and everyone smiles, then, everyone but Istvan as “Very well met, Monsieur,” says Isobel de Metz, extending her hand, gloved past the elbow, not the current style. “You are—?”

“Rupert Bok,” while Istvan beside him bows in turn—“Your servant”—and “Dieudonne,” muses Madame de Metz. “Have you a brother, M. Dieudonne, or some relative in the city? I seem to know your face, if not your name.”

“Not in this city, Madame,” with a charming shrug and “You must come and dine one evening,” she says, to him, to Rupert, Denis de Mercy not to be of the party, Denis de Mercy bowing again as she leads her brother away, the young man’s gaze lingering on Rupert and “You should have been a schoolmaster,” Istvan says, “you have such a way with les bébés.”

“Unpleasant boy,” says Rupert dryly.

Madame and Master de Metz now mount a narrow staircase concealed by a sweep of bog-green drapery, rising to one of the petite private balconies, a tempting array of refreshments and “Have that dinner, Belle,” says Benjamin. “Before I go to Paris.” He takes a little glass of whiskey, dark as amber, drinks it down. “I swear I’ll be good.”

She reaches for her Fabergé cigarette case: silver roses, pink pavé diamonds; he lights her cigarette. “You said you would be ‘good’ with Mr. Petkov,” exhaling a long, voluptuous stream. “And see what happened.”

“Oh, horseshit. Is it my fault that I am loved?”

“It is your fault that you are naughty,” but he has gone, back down to his friends, Achille and the others, the piss-watered punch and a series of young ladies serially wooed and then ignored, but by then Rupert, Istvan, and Lucy are back in the barouche, headed home: Lucy’s fine slipper has cracked its heel, Rupert is silent, Istvan too, unusually so. Upstairs, Lucy. yawning, bids them goodnight, Rupert unspools his tie and “From where does she know you?” he asks Istvan on the bed. “That woman, that Isobel de Metz? Not the shows at the Calf—?”

“Perhaps I fucked her once.” Rupert gives him a look. “Or perhaps I rode her to the races, she’s ugly as a horse at any rate…. Come here,” without a smile, mouth to mouth, strong, clever, agile hands until “The lamp,” Rupert’s murmur, Istvan stilled and waiting: why must it always be dark, now, when in the days before anyplace would do, dark, day, only let them be together? But afterward, when Rupert sleeps, Istvan’s hand rises to his shoulder, his own landscape of scarred flesh, a different sort of keepsake than Lucy’s box of ribbons but a souvenir of the Poppy all the same. In the darkness he kneads the skin, the scars; he thinks of the boy at the ball. When he sleeps, they are children again in his dreams, he and Rupert and the toybox of familiars, the puppets and stage on which they staged their days and their lives.

Lucy

The first rooms we had together were nicer, though they were that small, Istvan and I seemed ever in each other’s pathway. Still, there was a pretty view down into Goldsmith Street, and the chocolate shop around the corner, where Mr. Rupert—Rupert, that is—liked to go…. Funny how easy it is to call him so, slip back into the old days, though it’s my troupe now, my puppets, mainly—though Istvan lets me burrow in his toolbox—and my helpers, when I was once the helper, wasn’t I? And barely knowing a chisel from a planing knife, or cotton wool from gut! but sometimes you just must throw yourself in the water and swim. It’s what I tell Mickey and the rest: before anything else, a player needs dash.

Well, we’ve plenty of that, here, at the Blackbird. I’ve always loved the blackbird’s song, so cheeky and brave, I never thought twice about what to call the place. Rupert’s name is on the papers until
You marry, or they change the law here,
nodding to the broker, who had a round little head, fringed like a winter cabbage, I remember that.
Name or no, the place is yours,
putting the keys into my hand: I remember that, too, their weight in my fingers, as if they were struck from solid gold. All that night I never slept, just kept opening my eyes to look at the keys on my night table, reach and touch them, I was that thrilled.

Even still, sometimes of a night when the children have gone, I walk from door to stage and back again, relishing it all: even the cracks in the plastering, that bare spot in the drapes where the candle burned, knowing that the thing is mine, cracks and spots and all. What a fine feeling it is! I never dreamed the world could turn this way—from where I started, to have a place like this, my own theatre, my own shows—I wish Katy could see it all, somehow. May be she can, as an angel in heaven; and our Puggy, too, smiling down…. Like that funny boy at the ball, in his horrid coat, how like he was! It made you smile just to see him.

That’s how Mickey is, a friendly mug on him, and he’s got the gift of turning eyes, he makes you want to watch what he’s up to onstage. He needs watching offstage, too—I caught him once smoking in the prop room, hard by the paints and glues, and didn’t I give him a hiding! Boxing his froggy little ears and Burn it down, I said, and you’ll eat your fill of the cinders, and he looking up with his swimming eyes and Then you’ll be Cinder-Ella for real, Miss, which made me laugh. And he said sorry and sorry, and promised to do his smoking elsewhere, a promise he’s kept, or at least I’ve not caught him again.

Istvan teases me about them, my “children’s crusade” he calls it—Mickey and the others, and I’ve got several girls now, my Snow White and Rose Red—to hear them sing, la!
Such
voices, and purely natural harmony, they are sisters after all. At first their papa was reluctant, but once he’d seen the plays, and how I kept the children—no ballet-girls’ whoring as they do in Paris, selling them after shows for the highest bidder, none of that with my girls! Or my boys, either.—When he saw, he said that since the good God had given them their voices, they ought to put them to some proper use. And since he is a freethinker, and the girls were unchurched, the Blackbird was the next best thing.

So the girls are my chorus and orchestra—though I’m training Didier on the penny flute, and Mickey can do anything I ask him, or sham it well enough to make it go—and the boys are my puppeteers, and stage runners, and prop makers, and scene painters, even ticket-takers, though they are slow to learn to cipher, so are a bit too easy to cheat. But we
are
making lucre, enough to pay for fuel and food, pay our way so I need not go to Rupert for money—though never has he grudged it, no, he offers more than ever I’d ask—and Istvan, too:
Buy your moppets some toys,
he’ll say, and drop a purse in my lap, Lord Bountiful; it pleases him to give, to scatter joy here and there as the mood strikes.

His own joy is still the stage, like mine, but where he chooses to play, well. Help me he does, with a rôle here and there—he was Mister Quivershanks in our pirate-play, and Holy Doomsday in the Christmastide show, didn’t he make the toffs shiver! One lady even sent us a subscription, she said his dire performance brought her back to Mother Church. And of course the children love him, Mickey especially thinks he hangs the moon.

But these other fancies, like the café shows, that Golden Calf where the “artists” go—artists, bah, half of them never made more than trouble in their lives. Daub a picture, or gin up some larky poem—it’s all larks, there, for most of them, and home in the evenings to Missus and the
pot au feu.
Istvan never could belong there, he deserves a proper stage.

He had one back in Brussels, playing twice a week, though not like the Poppy, no piano and no girls, just himself and the puppets at the cabaret. Most of it was comic, sharp jokes and slapstick, the joke on himself most of the time, as if it pleased him to play the fool. May be it did—we’d all had a sticky time of it, getting free of the war. And him being cut that way—it took some doing to get his arm back, his reach; even now, if you knew him then, you can see a little hitch in how he moves…. I remember that awful day, sewing him up, how he never made a sound, and how Rupert looked to see him bloody on my bed. You can’t forget a thing like that.

But Brussels gave them a way to heal, or it did to Istvan; and me, why, I was like a bird popped free of a cage, I’d never seen such a town or had such fine work to do. Rupert liked it least, I think, or may be it was all the time he spent with Mr. Arrowsmith, with business and the like. He went to the bank, and the chocolate shop, and Istvan’s shows, some of them, sat clapping in the back, though he never took a part.

Istvan’s shows here, now, have shrunk decidedly—no more Chevalier, no more Bishop (who was a cardinal for a bit, Red Hat and Bloodybones Istvan called him), and no more of my own favorite, Miss Lucinda, or Lizsette as we called her for a while. When I asked him why he’d shuttered her, he shrugged and smiled:
There’s a real Miss Lucinda now, Puss. We don’t need two.

Pan Loudermilk—he doesn’t use him, either, in favor of that new puppet, Feste—Feste half the size, Feste is all smile but there’s no smile in his playing; I have to say, Feste makes me wonder what is churning up in Istvan’s mind. Though when I ask, he claims he’s purely content:
Whatever more could I want?
With his arm round my shoulders. He knows I’d go through fire for him. But only so much will he tell me, trust me with, just that much and no more.

He and Rupert, now—I don’t know that Rupert likes it here or doesn’t. He keeps so much to himself, all places seem to be the same to him, though it eased him somehow to be away from Brussels and Goldsmith Street—and wasn’t Mr. Arrowsmith sad to see us go, asking did we need more space, or a helping hand, was there some way he could be of service? But Rupert and Istvan both had it in their minds to be away, and when the two of them are set on something, there’s no balking them, the thing will be done.

Before we left he had a dinner for us, Mr. Arrowsmith and that girl Liserl, I liked her fine though she never had aught to say for herself, just oh yes and smile and see to the wine. And Mr. Arrowsmith making
toasts—to them mostly, but for me, too, he always liked me more than a
bit—as the friends of the Muse, or the Muses, who must follow the pipes of Pan wherever they led: some high-table talk like that, but it pleased Istvan to see Rupert happy as he was happy that night, saying afterward how
Your worries were gossamer, Mouse, unless the General pops out of my kit-bag, so! making that little toy hop out from the sack, that dreadful Erl-King who was never used but the once.…“Mouse,” it is a private name they have together. They are very private, and here, why, one has to be, it’s not like the days of the Poppy, where all that mattered was keeping clear of the shooting, and no care for who lay in whose bed. Here it makes a difference, from who will speak to you, deal with you, even who would want to harm you; they do that here, yes, we heard more than one story of how the men were beaten, who care for gents, or even put in jail, though the brothels are still chockablock with boys and girls; the back-door cafés, as Mister Lord Silly would have it…. What a dizzy gent he was, to be sure, and his brother even more so, I thought I’d have to lead that waltz myself.

That was a funny night, that Opera Mauve. Istvan was all for it, but dead-quiet after, something got under his saddle, I think. And Rupert gone along only to please him, for those sorts of things don’t please
him
at all. Like this dinner we’re to go to, at Milady de Metz’s, some toffy townhouse up past the court and counting-rooms, the sort of neighborhood I’d never step foot in. Not that it’s a risk, quite the opposite! There’s a constable on every corner, it’s the safest street in town. But Rupert’s got no joy to go there; it’s Istvan who wants it. Me, I’d just as soon go out to the gaiety district and watch the cancan, and the black girls who dance
le voudou
with the fans.