The Mercury Waltz (25 page)

You called me, and I’ve come….. And I’ve called no man master since we parted on that mountain,
his hand raised as if in oath, and on that hand with its scarred knuckles a ring, the signet ring that Rupert recognized with a pang, his own hand with its Greek intaglio noted then by Benjamin with a smile even sweeter, as if in confirmation of a hope the show had seeded: or may be that was fancy; it was very dark in the cab, it was all very much like a dream, that darkness, Benjamin’s murmur of gifts sent his way, what gifts?
I trust they pleased you!
Outside was all the street’s commotion, men cursing, a horse’s scream, as the servant, Emory, held the doors against intrusion, Emory who had given Rupert such a servile grin, a strange combination of unction and hazard, as if a serpent should curl and fawn upon one’s shoe.
But I have a greater gift to give. Shall I show it to you now?

And driving off together to the quiet street of the theatre, the whole building made over and made new: not at all to his taste, all that frescoing and gilt, but still it is very fine, this Garden of Eden. Look at it now, standing sturdy as a fortress in the rain…. Rupert draws on his cigar, then reaches to relight it; the matchbox is empty. He curses softly, calls the serving girl for more—

“Certainly. And did you wish another
chocolat,
sir?”

“Have you whiskey?”

With Emory discreet at the door like a virgin’s duenna, they had walked together through that theatre, across its stage—the curtain alone must have cost a fortune, an acre of sea-blue velvet—and down through its dressing rooms and properties space, almost too much space, one could put on that Cleopatra-opera and have room left over for Pollux, Castor, and the stage of the Poppy, too. The roof does not leak; there is electricity throughout, even a telephone, all is completely modern. In the backstage light, Benjamin showed the careful notes in his journal—from whom the building had been purchased, its price, the carpenters and plasterers and ironworkers used in the renovations—a thick, pearl-gray journal with an odd and sour smell, as if it had lain underground somewhere, or been shut up in some dank room:
In time you’ll read it, read everything I’ve done,
said Benjamin proudly; that same remembered pride, the boy in the tree who could not be found, the boy who took to the road and hid there while the whole world, his world, searched for him, returning at last by his own will to set his master free.
I meant for all to be ready in time for the competition—which is my doing, too, of course. Amongst all the other competitions, here and elsewhere.

You’ve done well for yourself, Benjamin. Very well.

How the praise made him glow!
I’ve worked exceedingly hard. I have a wife—Christobel, you know—and a child. A son,
brushing aside Rupert’s congratulations,
I understand my duties.
But then that spite again, that coal-black wink of bitterness:
And truly I’ve become a fine actor, my whole life is my
rôle.
I am not what I might have been,
Maître,
had you stayed.

And what to say to that past another, greater pang, yet what else had there been to do but leave him safe to his wealth and his sister, like waking him at dawn from a cherished dream…. It was then that he left that Garden, too, though clearly Benjamin meant for him to linger; they did not shake hands in parting, as if even that touch might be too much. Instead Benjamin watched from the doorway, his servant beside, as Rupert turned for the dark and the heat, to walk the rest of the night away, and leave Istvan for once with whatever clamor there was at the Mercury, let Istvan for once sweep up the breakage and deal with the brawlers and speak to the constables or authorities or whomever might have popped up, like a rogue puppet onstage, to wreak more mischief there. He himself walked the city as he has not walked it before, not in all the time he has lived here: roaming as he used to as a boy, from the theatre district, past the municipal fortress and clerks’ booths and warren of offices, past the shuttered shops and quiet churches and noisy Cemetery and through the Park, pausing, once, at Crescent Bridge to smoke, as below him tired whores urged on their customers, and one tomcat fought another to a yowled crescendo of defeat.

And walking back at last, exhausted, to find the writer Seraphim curled like a vagabond in the piled mess backstage, Tilde awake as a little owl, relieved to see him enter; and Istvan sleeping on the cot beneath the window, the first hot rays of morning’s light like a flush across his chest, his cheeks, his lips with their faint upturned lines, as if he is mirthful even in his dreams. Well might he be, with another forever to carry the weight…. This whiskey is not to his liking, it has an oily aftertaste; he rubs his forehead, he orders another, drinks it down then steps into the rain falling harder, now, swift down the block as if in actor’s exit as Istvan in bowler hat—it is, in fact, Rupert’s bowler hat—steps off the omnibus to locate and approach the Garden of Eden, and knock briskly at its silent doors.

Frédéric is abroad as well, in his concealing gipsy weeds, satchel hung at his side like a beggar’s; for a mad moment he even considers begging, to see if the disguise is that complete—! Instead he heads to the office of the
Muses’ Journal,
in actuality the backroom of a nondescript four-seat tavern, the sharp young editor like a jolly pirate chief with his cigarette and braces and hearty crew of bounders, flash-paper photographers and reporters who, when there is little to report, make something up that “Turns out anyhow to be true,” boasts the editor to this Seraphim, who does indeed write like an angel, and if his clothing is a little odd, what of it? He can dress up as the Queen Mother for all it signifies. “What have you got for us this time, Mr. Angel? Is it about the theatre prize?”

“I suppose you could say so. It’s a kind of philippic,” says Frédéric, though that word is unknown to the jolly editor, a fact that matters to him as little as Frédéric’s eccentric dress: to have snagged him from the
Solon
is a coup, whatever the fellow writes they will print with a border of ten-point stars, and everyone who matters in the city will read it—including the Morals Commission and old Tortoise Banek, all of whom, the editor fervently hopes, will raise a mighty old stink when they do.

Once philippic and payment have changed hands, Frédéric hurries away, passing without glance or detour the street of his old rooming house. He has told the landlord he is “traveling,” past one furtive visit the day after the
Snow Youth,
to pay off his rent and collect all he could carry in this satchel and a carpetbag: Ovid and his other books, several clean shirts, the bundle of letters from home; it seemed a stranger’s room already, so tidy and empty after the disorder and fierce excitements of the Mercury. How odd that he should live now in a theatre, and yet in another, truer way not odd at all. Let them search that old room if they will, as they will, those constables or agents, they will find nothing of him there, not even his half-used Pinaud’s.

He steers clear as well of the publishers’ row: though Voltaire might approve him, Herrs Hebert and Konrad most surely do not. Herr Konrad is also traveling, a long, perhaps permanent visit to Vienna and his ailing mother, leaving Herr Hebert as
de facto
publisher, Herr Hebert who, it is rumored, is as angry at the loss of his columnist as the fleeing Konrad was relieved to see him go. Frédéric has promised himself that one day he will make it right with them, those men who, no matter how the matter was concluded, made it possible for “Seraphim” to write anything at all—

—as then, at his postbox, a different and more unhappy promise is recalled: a wire is waiting for him, his fiancée is waiting for him, arrived already at the old Baltic Hotel:
I am here with Aunt Maria, please come and advise. Yours, Marie.
Miss Mariette, she came so swiftly…. He pockets the wire, he turns toward the Baltic—then pauses at a milk-and-tea shop, wading through the doorway crowd of boys, some of them Haden’s, all of them hooting and begging, none of them bothering to notice this man who might be one of them grown into a kind of ragged manhood some of them will not live long enough to attain. How sad they are, these boys, who do not know that they are sad; yet comic, too, and resilient, like the lilies of the field who neither sow nor spin. He buys a baker’s dozen sugared currant buns, eating one—gone in three bites, when has he eaten last?—then turning to a boy whose face he knows, the boy he saw, once, at St. Mary’s, angling money from the archbishop (St. Mary’s, another place he now avoids; still God is everywhere), and “Here,” Frédéric says, passing him the rough paper sack. “Share them out, will you? One for each.”

“Well that’s fucking bona,” says the boy, pleased, taking the largest bun for himself, ankling and kicking the other boys in a friendly fashion; one of them shouts after “Suck, sah, for half-price, how’s about?” an offer to which Frédéric does not reply, but smiles a little under his cloaking red gipsy scarf.

When he reaches the hotel, he removes the scarf quickly and tucks it away before passing the doormen, one of whom notes that this fellow has a stain on his shirtfront, a smear of currant jelly that in the lobby lights could pass for blood. The stain goes unnoticed by the bored clerk at the marble front desk, who nods at Frédéric’s request, Frédéric who wishes fervently for a brandy, several brandies, before he tells Marie what he must now tell her—that he is a man under a cloud, a very black cloud, that for her own sake they can never be married—as the desk clerk reaches for the speaking tube.

Meanwhile the Garden of Eden stands silent: Benjamin is not there, nor Emory, nor the flower-shop man whom Emory had refused to pay—
These roses are not fresh. Look, the leaves are already browning!
—that man pausing as he left to spit on the steps of the alleyside door, that door considered now by Istvan with a street boy’s acumen, rejected in favor of better egress via the fire-ladder and the roof; but there, too, he is defeated, there are no skylights or trap doors at all. Frowning, he clambers down, trousers wet, wondering ought he wait till it is darker, though it is surely dark enough in all this rain—

—and spinning, white knife in hand as a hand lands on his shoulder, Haden palm up and warding: “Don’t stick me, uncle, for fuck’s sake! Here,” holding out a key, “this way’s easier…. You’re bally quick, an’t you, for an older fellow.”

“I learned it young. After you,” as they step into the clean dimness of the theatre, too clean, too new, owning no spirits of its own: the former ones scrubbed away, antic or tragic, this place is like a stage for a stage. Their footsteps echo, Istvan leading through the quiet, Haden bareheaded and unsmiling, pausing to look around, to sniff at “All these flowers,” bouquets of roses upon roses, set out on stiff silver stands. “Smells like a mourning parlor.”

“The man who owns this building,” says Istvan, “is a great partisan of roses; it runs in his family.” He snaps off a fat white bloom, fixes it to his lapel. “You’re quite sure of that name, now?”

“I saw the letter on Eig’s desk, I saw the name, and the bank’s name. That de Metz, you two can’t seem to stir a step without him,” meant as a kind of humor to Istvan, who shrugs without a smile: “Milord Millstone, yes, I’d thought we were shut of him some time ago. Take the lesson, kit, take care whom you pick for a patron—”

“I an’t any. Only clients.”

“—and keep love from the equation, always. It brings out the worst in certain types.”

“I know.” Haden looks away then, into the shadowed, empty seats of the house. “Luc Topps—you heard?” and at Istvan’s icy nod, “I’m quite fucking sure of that name, too,” as the sad tale is briefly told: Luc followed up to the de Vries townhouse, Luc stumbling in without a word beneath Jozsef’s liveried arm, a small army of housemen summoned by that Jozsef, who did not even bother to raise his voice:
Will it need constables, too? The young man is here of his own will, no one holds him. Or are you,
with a nasty smile to Haden,
his father?
From the hallway another man watched, a man Istvan would have recognized, Emory with avid eyes to see Haden and his army turned away, their only consolation some flung rocks and a spray of piss against the iron gates; and was it Luc they saw at the last, there by the casement window, midnight blue drapes and white wool like a ghost? “The bastard wouldn’t even pay to bury him…. He was the sweetest of my lot.”

“The
bébé
was lovely.”

In shared silence they cross the stage, Haden pocketing the key, passing together through the ratty alley and the hissing rain, down avenues of black umbrellas and skirts spattered to the shin, faces wet as if with the city’s tears, all the way to the Drooping Lily for several cups of apple brandy and a conversation more potent, that ends with Istvan noting “That banquet is tonight, you know,” pushing to one side his emptied cup, its sediment bitter and brown; his hair is loose again, the earring winks. “The competition banquet. Do you go?”

“No. Do you?”

“It’s been some time since I performed for the quality,” with a smile mostly teeth, “and his wife did ask, Madame Millstone, that is. It would be rude not to honor such an invitation, yeah?”

“What’s your play, uncle?” as they rise together, Haden tossing coins onto the table, Istvan’s arm companionable to his shoulder: “The ancients say the fox’s den has seven exits, but we won’t need so many, I shouldn’t think. Have you ever operated a puppet?” to bring in answer Haden’s laugh, a distinctly feral sound, from the chest not the throat, like some beast coughing over its prey. In leaving they are watched by an audience of admiring servant boys, all of whom have been had by both or either, and the more jaded men at the tables, none of whom can say the same, though one, green linen and soda cologne, gives a heartfelt sigh as he quotes—“‘Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?’”—to prompt his neighbor’s raised eyebrow: ”What, St.-Mary and the showman?
Fra diavolo!
Let’s light a little candle that they can’t.”