A Moment in the Sun (80 page)

Ready when you hear me call—

—he sang—

Pull that stick and let her fall!

Limbs, bodies, heads moving out of the way just in time not to be destroyed by the monstrous works—

Haul the next one when you able

Put the bacon on you table!

And the men singing back now and then, never taking their eyes off the machinery—

Won’t be liquor, won’t be sin

Cotton gone to do me in!

It was thrilling and terrifying and she felt a mixture of awe and pity for the men working there, a sadness to their labor that she thought at the time was due to their fellow worker having his leg crushed that morning, due to the danger and the deafening bursts of steam and the heat and having to breathe the cotton lint kicked up and filling the air till you were coughing, coughing without a hand free to cover your mouth, coughing blood sometimes and spitting it out onto the hot metal beast. But now she understands that it is not the work itself, so much harder and more dangerous than her own, of course, but the repetition, the repetition of the work that is nightmarish. The same process, the same motions over and over, day after day, year after year, knowing the job will not change, that it is waiting for you, impatient, demanding, insatiable, and that this is all that life will ever have to offer you. Jessie tries to become an automaton, to drive complaint from her head and to make her motions as efficient and mechanical as possible. She tries to count the pieces as they pass through her hands, hoping to mark time with the sum, but twice loses track just past thirty.

At the end her eyes are dry and smarting, the headache settled just behind them, and the brush is trembling slightly in her hand. The tall man has been down twice to check on their progress, shaking his head and muttering, and finally there are no more figurines left to paint. The skinny boy climbs the stairs, carrying a crate full of finished pieces, and promises to tell the men that they’re done.

“Are ye here all the time?” Wee Kate asks the women at the next table, who are all standing and trying to straighten their backs.

“A few of us were in yesterday,” answers the woman with the gray in her hair. “I think they set up in different places whenever they get a contract.”

“I made dolls once,” says another. “Stuck the hair in their heads. Pay was the same but at least we had a window.”

“Oh, I done worse,” says the older woman. “I done plenty worse.”

The tall man comes down with a cloth sack and begins to pay the women at the first table their two dollars, most of it in coins. When it is Jessie’s turn he gives her a pair of Columbian half dollars, the ones with the explorer’s ship on top of two globes on one side and his face on the other. Junior has a collection of them. Had.

“Don’t bother coming tomorrow,” the tall man says to her.

Jessie holds the two coins tightly in her hand, rubbing them together, as she pulls her coat back on and follows the other women up the stairs and out through the lobby into the street. It is almost dark now, big flakes of snow falling lazily between the high buildings, and cold.

“Where you live?” Alberta asks her.

“On 47th, just west of Eighth,” she says. It is the third apartment they have lived in, and if she can find steady work they won’t be there long.

Alberta nods at Clarice. “We walk you far as 39th.”

As they are leaving she sees the skinny boy and the drayman loading crates onto the wagon. Her soldiers are in there somewhere, she thinks, no telling where they’re headed.

New York is a machine with too many parts. Harry braces himself on the ice-slick sidewalk, a flood of bodies rushing past on either side of him, attempting to decipher the intermeshing rhythm of its gears, the design, if any, of its incessant motion and counter-motion. He has cranked his way through every clamshell Mutoscope in lower Manhattan, harem girls and saucy parlor maids up to their customary antics, has thrilled to the
Roosevelt Rough Riders
thundering off the screen at Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, mourned
The Burial of the
Maine
Victims
and marveled over
Mules Swimming Ashore at Daiquiri
at Koster and Bials, suffered through an interminable and decidedly unfunny comic opera at Keith’s Union Square to witness the
Cuban Ambush
on their celebrated “warscope” and eaten a hamburger sandwich at a counter with fellow lunchers’ elbows digging into him from both sides.

A tiny newsboy with yellowish skin starts across from the other side of 23rd, disappearing behind careening carriages and screeching trolley cars but sauntering yet, unconcerned, when they have passed, till he stands at Harry’s side tugging at the sleeve of his new heavy coat and raising plaintive eyes.

“
REBELS ATTACK MANILA
, Mister. Read all about it.”

“No thank you.” The boy is peddling Hearst’s sensational
Journal
.

“Two cents, fer cryin out loud. How can you go wrong?”

The boy looks unwell, malnourished at the least, possibly contagious. Harry tightens his grip on his cane, takes a sidestep away. “You aren’t allowed to read this scandal sheet, are you?”

The boy makes a disagreeable face. “I look at the pitchers. You got a problem widdat?”

Harry gives him a weak smile, steps off the curb.

“On Sunday they got em in colors.”

He makes his cautious dash then, using the cane to push off on his shortleg side, narrowly evading the wheels of a rattling landau, and finally gaining the broad, recently shoveled front steps of the Eden Musee.

The building is steep-roofed and ornate in the French Renaissance style, statuary perched on decorative stone ledges, stairs leading to three high-arched entryways. Harry pays his dime to the young lady in the kiosk and waits for his heart to stop thumping before venturing on to the exhibits.

“The
Passion
has already started,” she informs him. “They’re probly up to Palm Sunday.”

The clientele in the Musee are more genteel than in Proctor’s or Keith’s or the Huber Museum, well-dressed ladies perusing the tableaux with their young ones, gentlemen in bowlers and ties, no crush of workmen and street urchins popping in here for a quick and prurient thrill.

“There will be a display of sleight-of-hand in the Egyptian Room at four o’clock,” adds the kiosk girl.

The first grouping of figures depicts President Lincoln at his famous Gettysburg Address. The tall wax figure, bearded and hatless with the suggestion of a stiff wind in his hair, gestures nobly with one hand, the handwritten speech clutched in the other, flanked by a pair of Union soldiers with rifles at port-arms while a half-dozen onlookers stand at the foot of the platform in attitudes of reverent attention. The eyes are dark and deep-set as in the Brady photographs, but there is no light of life in them.

“—
that from these honored dead
—” drones a hound-eyed older man dressed in a ’60s mourning cloak who stands beside the tableau with hand over heart, “—
we take increased devotion to that cause which they here have thus far so nobly carried on
—”

Harry moves on, the unalloyed yankeeness of it giving him a guilty twinge. “
A freak of Nature
,” the Judge was wont to say of the North’s martyred saint. “
Malformed and malignant
.”

He wonders how many times a day the man must repeat the speech. Perhaps a phonograph recording of it would be more effective, not placed so it seems to be coming from the motionless figure, but amplified from above, like a voice from the Great Beyond. Harry has already worked out a mechanism whereby a spectator’s foot triggers the phonograph and is pondering the nature of sound waves when he wanders into the execution of Marie Antoinette.

“—
this moment, when my troubles are about to end, is not when I need courage, Father
,” recites an acne-scarred youth in peasant garb. “And with that the lethal drumroll began—”

A tumbrel filled with filthy straw and doomed nobles, a long-faced
curée
intoning from his open Bible, the buxom Marie with her hair shorn, hands tied behind her back, kneeling with neck stretched out over the block, the
sans culottes
, faces distorted as they jeer from every side—there is a sudden skreek of metal and the heavy blade falls in its slot—
CHOK!
neatly separating the Queen from her head! There are screams and cries from the flesh-and-blood spectators and one young lady in lavender quite close to Harry swoons and is caught in the arms of a man who might be either her husband or her father.

“French degenerates,” mutters the man, legs bowing under the weight of his charge as he fans her with an orchestra program.

Harry hurries past the other gatherings—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Moses parting the Red Sea, a rather grisly evocation of one of Jack the Ripper’s attacks—waxen, three-dimensional versions of a Kodak snap and in that way inferior, no matter what their subject, to the moving actualities he’s just seen in the variety halls. Harry is about to climb the stairs to the Concert Hall when he hears a familiar voice boom out through the open door of a workroom.

“If you don’t hurry with this I’m going to suffocate!”

Looking in, Harry sees a man seated on a workbench, his face completely obscured by plaster bandages, while another man painstakingly pries the cast away from the skin with a metal instrument coated with petroleum jelly.

“Mr. Teethadore?”

“Who’s that?” The voice, even somewhat muffled behind the appendage, is deep and resonant.

“We met in Wilmington. After a performance.”

“You find me at a disadvantage.”

Harry takes a step into the room. There are white wax heads, nearly featureless, lined up on a shelf, historical costumes hanging on a pipe and torsos made of wire. “Are you all right?”

“Having my mug reproduced. It seems that General Custer shall soon be
hors de combat
from his Last Stand exhibit and donating the better portion of himself—body, hands, flashing saber—to our noted Rough Rider.”

“It seems to be stuck somewhere,” says the other man, gently pulling on the mold.

“If I lose so much as a hair from an eyebrow,” says Teethadore, raising a finger, “there shall be dire consequences.”

“You said I should come see you,” ventures Harry with what he hopes is an ironic lilt in his drawl. “If I ever came to New York.”

“And you’ve followed me here?”

The recent disturbance in Wilmington seems too complicated, too tawdry to mention. “Actually I came for the views. This is something of a Mecca—”

“Foreign subjects. Very uplifting. Celluloid novelties for the carriage trade.”

“It’s really the camera that I—”

“Of course. I remember you now—waxing poetic over the mysteries of the projection device. Drat!”

“I’m sorry,” says the wax sculptor. “I told you to shave your moustache.”

In Wilmington the actor’s moustache had been applied with spirit gum. “No use dragging the character onto the street with me,” he’d said then. “It’s enough to portray the little runt on the boards.” But that had been before the San Juan Hill.

Harry watches uncomfortably as the sculptor wiggles the plaster this way and that, trying to loosen it.

“It was very nice to see you,” he says finally.

“You shall
see
me, my friend, when this
moulage
is removed from my face and not before. I suggest you go up and watch the other fellow suffer a bit. It’s quite a presentation.”

When Harry steps away the sculptor has taken up a hammer and chisel and seems about to do something drastic.

He slips quickly into the rear of the hall, a few patrons looking back with annoyance at the intrusion of light. The seats are all full. On the screen, Christ carries a huge wooden cross past idlers and loose women, a pair of spear-carrying Roman soldiers trailing behind Him. There is bright sunlight above and a backdrop painted with the stone buildings of Jerusalem, but this cannot be what they’ve advertised out front. The Oberammergau Passion, Harry knows, is staged once every ten years, and the equipment to photograph motion did not exist at the time of the last performance. Christ falters, catching himself with one hand. The soldiers snatch Simon of Cyrene from the crowd and force him to shoulder the cross for a moment. Finally, after much prodding with spear tips and flogging, Christ exits the right side of the screen, the rough wooden post dragging behind, the mob turning to jeer his passing. The moving image fades in brightness, immediately replaced by a lantern view, a hand-tinted diapositive of El Greco’s
Christ Carrying the Cross
. It is one of Harry’s favorites, angled as if the painter were on his knees when the Nazarene passed, his eyes fixed on the hill above, dark sky brooding behind him.

“Imagine the weight of it,” intones a white-haired gentleman wearing a pince-nez, his head barely peeking over the lectern set up beside the screen. “Imagine the rough stones underfoot, the scourge of the Roman whips, the raucous contempt of those who, only days before, had waved the palms of peace and cheered your entry into the city.”

Harry is aware of a man standing next to him in the darkness at the rear, a man nodding vigorously as the lecturer continues.

“Are these the souls He has come to save, these torturers, these blood-thirsty, mocking Jews and Philistines?”

The El Greco fades into a new still image, this the circular Bosch painting with the turbaned Pilate at the left, the soldier reaching to wrench Him away, the potato-faced onlookers. These men do look like German peasants, rough and primitive.

“ ‘
Ecce homo
,’ the Roman judge pronounces,” continues the lecturer. “See the man. Not the Messiah, not their Lord and Savior, but simply a man. This, we now understand, was the greatest degradation of all. Humble as He was, this was the only Son of God brought to His knees before the dregs of humanity, beaten and reviled, driven, at last, to Calvary.”