The Mercury Waltz (31 page)

“The Mercury Roulette”

Contributed by Seraphim

Writing for the
Muses’ Journal
is somewhat like spinning a gambler’s wheel, such as one finds in the Park, or at certain gaming establishments—the ones not already closed by the Morals Commission, that is. We have become so completely moral here that one wonders if the gods of chance have, in dudgeon, quite deserted our poor city, which would in turn perhaps explain the many, nearly daily municipal crises: the Prefecture’s self-anointing as a kind of imperial body; the constabulary’s growing violence; and the flurry of consumption taxes, the latest levied on milk and cheeses, that had the dairymen fairly rioting in the streets. Madame Tyche, whom the Romans called Fortuna—how may we again implore her favors? For every city, every town, every man, needs the blessing of luck and good fortune to navigate a way through the dangers and vicissitudes of life.

Fortunately, we still have the Mercury Theatre.

Though it has been quiet, since the—call it fanfare—of
The Snow Youth
affair, it has in no way been idle. And between those walls has come to life a new show to salute and invoke the deity of chance, the
ange ou démon
to whom a man offers real oblation when the chips, as the saying goes, are down. Fortune’s wheel spins once a day for all of us, from dawn until dark, but the slower revolutions that make up the life of a man, or of Man, that turn and crown and topple kings and governments: who spins that starry wheel, whose unseen hand, like a skillful puppeteer’s, puts into motion the motion that tells the story of us all?

And if theatre is truth, who better to ask such questions than a puppet? I am very privileged to have met backstage with those two actors Mr. Pollux and Mr. Castor, but to all my importunings they would answer only “See the show, and you will know.” Does one argue with such favorites of the Lady of Chance? for it is her sign that you must follow, readers, when this production shall be mounted.

Thus I invite you to keep your eyes open, you citizens for whom the current moral climate is a stifling one, who have watched things change and never for the better, who have perhaps seen the insides of rooms they never dreamed existed. Watch for the signs, dear friends and fellow citizens, follow the signs when they appear!

And cry the Mercury!

The breeze shifts, the river smell rises, piscine and faintly sour; it shifts again. The afternoon light draws lines across Rottermond Square, as if in division for a battle: this side the silent drunks of the Heads or Tails, that side the urgencies of the broadsheet printer and the shoemaker, one of whom is busier than ever these days, as if unsettling news compels the purchase of new shoes; perhaps it does. The news vendors no longer call the
Muses’ Journal,
as it has suspended publication; those in the know know that its jolly editor paid a visit not so jolly to the rooms of inquiry, where he was ordered to change either his profession or his views, an order he stoutly resisted; since then, no one has seen him, in the barrooms, on the streets, or on the page.

Vater the knife man has also disappeared; he has, or said that he has, a sister in a village somewhere to the east, not far from the Black Sea, where everyone, even the parson, carries a knife:
Good trade for me, sah!
as Istvan offered him a farewell drink, there between the buildings clinking bottle to bottle, as a colder wind, autumn’s exhalation, whispered to itself behind their backs.
And a good time to move on—my dog is old, the streets are too much for him,
bringing an irritable growl from the dozing form beside the grinder-box.
The streets are too much for us all, now, excepting the reverends and the constables. You watch yourself, sah. Bad times are coming.

Bad times are here. But I won’t linger longer than I need to, I never do…. The Black Sea, you said? I may well have some family there myself.

If you come through, you and your friend, I’ll have my sister heat up the pot. And you can play us a puppet show.

The boy who jigs with the bells has gone as well, though if to a sister’s or some other, lesser lodging, no one cares enough to inquire. A new musician has taken his spot, a pocked Irishman with a pennywhistle; every tune he plays sounds melancholy as it floats through the Mercury’s windows, that third-floor roost where Rupert busies himself at the businessman’s desk with various expenses and disbursements, the disposition of correspondence from absent friends, old letters from the dead, before shining his spectacles and taking up a battered leather folder, to ride the omnibus uptown to a noon appointment requested, with some urgency, by Herr Robb.

Below, backstage, Istvan in vest and soft-heeled slippers brings today’s rehearsal to a temporary close, hooking the angel and the devil puppets to their perches beside their older brothers, shrugging to Frédéric that “You might call one ‘Alexis’ and one ‘Corydon,’ the evening and the morning star,” the one’s watchful yellow eyes, the other’s silver-foiled sword, “though I’ll defer the final naming rights to you, my young Marquis, and your knowledge of the classics,” with a little, avuncular smile. He has been smiling much, Istvan, these last days, his humor as bright as the tip of a knife, the white knife always loose now in his pocket, the pearl like a winking eye in the hair hung long and unbound as a boy’s. It is with a boy’s humor that he teases them: Frédéric the seraph become, for his own private amusement, the Marquis, lately of Carabas; Tilde once Mab and now Milady, more ferocious than ever as her belly grows, and more silent, saying little if looking much: she gazes often out the doorway, as if expecting a visitor or an onslaught, then in the evenings at Rupert, tie off and head bent over the newspapers; at times, those times, she looks very sad.

And most mercilessly does Istvan tease Haden, mocking comrade and confidant, lieutenant kit to whom he gives not only a private and compact, deeply serious tutelage—

There’s much you can do, even though the space is small, and much you can make, if you stay. What we did—

I heard it from Cockrill, he said you two were quite the flashy toppers. At the Poppy, an’t it, with dancing girls and such—

Cockrill knows less than nothing. Watch, and I’ll show you.

—but also keys to both the doors, main and alley, and the run of the rooms on the second floor:
Share them out nicely with her ladyship, and you and your angel may bunk together however you like. And you do like,
with a rowdy wink,
like a pair of minks, yeah? We hear you drumming morning, noon, and night,
which brings to Haden’s cheeks a blush, a rare and flaring blush: and why not? It is love’s heat between him and his Frédéric, Frédéric who, freed now by passion, has become an even more resolute man of the boards, Frédéric who measures and hammers, builds and builds, who declaims aloud and scribbles with his silver pen, consulting both Istvan and Rupert—a more forthcoming Rupert, now, observing what is to come forth; he has even reconciled to Haden,
That slippery jack, I suppose we must have him
—before heading out in disguise of an evening, Haden his bodyguard, to watch what passes on the city’s other stages. Both of them go attended by an honor guard of boys, many of whom will have roles in the show to come: itself an honor, and a mighty lark, and as such by the boys much desired and disputed-for.

Haden’s own tasks with which he tasks those boys tilt more heavily, these days, from the pimp’s to the intelligencer’s: another influence of Istvan’s, and a legacy from Lucien; when the boys now meet the men from the great houses, they do so in pairs, one to spread and one to watch, and neither drunk nor pilled till safely afterward. Even so, they do so less and less these autumn days, when the impulse to lust has flattened, the dark comes earlier, and the rain, when it falls, is less deluge than thin mist; these days, it seems that everyone is guarded, everyone is hunkered down and on the watch.

Now Istvan smiles again upon them, this trio at the backstage table—teapot and pen and twists of tin, Haden and Frédéric together, Tilde across—and “Try it,” he invites, giving his own lazy spin to the gaudy Wheel built hollow to make it light, and decked in flashing foil and chips of fool’s gold to make it glitter all the way to the back rows, with the small blacked figure of Everyman to run as it runs and make it real. “My colleague in the Park blessed it with spit and crossed fingers, he assures me that there’s no finer specimen unless made by the travelers themselves. They asked after you,” he adds to Tilde, “that is, their women did—I told them you were well, but might welcome a visit now and again. You’ll need a woman’s hand eventually, yeah?” at which Tilde nods minutely in return; Istvan notes that she does not herself touch the wheel, nor has she had her cards out for some days…. See them spin the clacking, shining circle, the boys watched by the girl: Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, the spinner, yes, the measurer and the cutter, Istvan reaching past them for the last issue of the
Muses’ Journal
and “One might think you were a priest of Apollo,” he says to Frédéric, tapping at his column, “or some pagan deity, you know your way so neatly into and out of myth. But didn’t you use to sing in the fine saint’s cathedral? It’s the promptings of this wicked fellow,” nodding to Haden, “that drove you from it, I’ll be bound.”

“Sir, not at all!” says Frédéric hotly, blushing then when he sees that Istvan is only teasing; he has a way to go on the road of discernment, the young Marquis; the puppets will help him. “That is, I stopped attending when I started hiding,” with a sigh that brings Haden back to his side, Haden to loop an arm around his neck, where the Christopher medal now dangles sweetly on its silver chain. “I am hiding, you know, still. I’m a coward, of course—perhaps the Morals Commission doesn’t care a whit for me any longer! But I can never go back to the Cathedral, because—” with a different kind of pause, looking to Haden with such great and troubled love that Istvan sighs inwardly: another road the Marquis must learn to navigate, and such a tempest over nothing! for “Some say,” lifting Mr. Pollux as if idly from his hook, “that Rome’s spectacle is unsurpassed: the mighty music, the flowers and candles and incense, we ourselves might take a leaf from that gaudy book, yeah? But the Man they say it celebrates—why, myself I’ve never met him, but to think that that man—who had his own fellows a-follow, I understand—would frown upon a kindly friendship? What say you?” to Mr. Pollux, who makes a very rude gesture indeed; even Tilde laughs. “To me the trouble’s in the reverends who, not content to serve their Lord, instead aim to be Him, or wear His halo at any rate.” Turning directly to Frédéric: “
Can
a savior deny any man?”

As directly, with much gravity, looking only to Istvan as he replies: “Are you then a believer, sir, yourself?”

“I believe,” as the alley door opens, “in goodness,” smiling as if in confirmation as Rupert enters, folder folded beneath his arm, cigar smoldering in hand. He nods to them all but does not stop or even pause, Istvan pausing to resilk Mr. Pollux and give the Wheel one last revolution before following up the stairs, to open wider the window in their chamber, cool sad sun on the ferns’ purple fronds as “Robb,” says Rupert, tossing down the folder on the desk, “had a hatful of explanations, and all of them, as far as I can see, the same. Call it ‘civic betterment’ or ‘expropriation,’ whichever, the fact is de Metz can do as he likes with our building, and what he likes is to turn us out into the street.” Rupert’s tone is flat, almost dispassionate, though Istvan notes the set of his lips, and sighs internally again; Mouse takes everything so hard, when this will be easy, a lark, even the kit’s boys know that that is so! Well then, they shall be boys again themselves, though never soon enough. “What does he want with the place, I kept asking, and Robb kept turning me back to the other: ‘That theatre is larger, and finer, and you can rent it
gratis,
for the cost of your signature.’ As if that means there is no price!”

“What he doesn’t know, and we do,” soothingly, as the street-corner pennywhistle begins to pipe again, rising on the smell of twice-burned
kaffee
from the café, “is that once one leaves the Garden, there’s just no going back. One wonders, does
he
wonder why milord wants so very much to expropriate us? Though such a thought costs money to think…. Did you take out all the money, then? When must we go?”

“Almost all; I left his ‘gifts.’ Not a fucking word,” though Istvan does not look at all inclined to protest. “What I want to know is why,” around the cigar clenched, now, in his teeth, “why take what’s ours? Only to sow salt, and knock it down? He can buy any building in this city, and already he’s got more houses than a man can live in in a lifetime: that fine townhouse we saw, and the great country house of his father—”

“Where they rear for the gun. When must we go?”

—as downstairs their voices go unheard as the Wheel spins to stillness, its pointer pointing ominously to
DISGRACIO
, disgrace, displacement, only Tilde considering that end as she drinks the gritty lees of the tea—Frédéric again; he still forgets the strainer—and sets it in her mind aside the many outcomes that spin might have taken; she has considered as many as she may, some of them possible, some only dreams. In one dream there is this theatre, and Sir to preside over it, and her, and the little baby, and M. Stefan to make his plays, day in and day out, in company if not in peace—there will not be peace, no matter how the Wheel spins or who spins it, that she is sure of—but in that dream they live out their lives together. Another spin sees Frédéric and the cat-eyed Haden living here alone; another is the building sitting empty; another sees them all on the road, what a circus
that
would be! In another still she moves on with the little baby, back to Paris, and in that dream finds Tanti again, what would Tanti be like, now?
Très jolie.
Singing and playing in the park, saying her letters, has anyone taught her her letters? Does she remember her sister, Tilde? Does she even know she has a sister in the world?

One hand, as if of its own volition, brushes against the freight of her body, the small sleeper who wakes, now, to flutter and roll. Sometimes, at night or when she is alone, she touches the yeasty rise of her belly with something like wonderment, and a great deal of fear; not because the birthing will be difficult, or that she will be alone when it happens—neither will be so, the cards have already promised—but because the clouds above are already so dark, and the noosed Hangs-a-man has not yet made his appearance. In what form will he come upon them? Will it be, somehow, the lurker in the alley, will he find her and the baby, will he somehow
know?
Sir had said that he would like to meet that man, and how such a meeting might end had made her smile to imagine it, a private, wolfish little smile; but Sir will not be here much longer, this she does know, has known for some weeks as a hard weight on her heart. It is one of the reasons why she has not laid out a spread nor even spun the Wheel—for M. Stefan is right, it is a true Wheel—though now at the table, as if without her own consent, slowly she reaches into her skirtsleeve—

—as “Will you post this?” Frédéric asks Haden, taking from his blued notebook a letter: another letter to his parents, he writes them weekly, he never receives a reply. It was Haden who read aloud the single missive sent from Blum the elder, fetched from Frédéric’s old postbox, while Frédéric sat stricken on their bed—no more a pair of chairs, now Haden’s garret-bed with coverlet and sheets, a book stand and wardrobe, too, the little room become a little home—and
“The terrible shame of what you have done” – Fuck him standing, I won’t read this.