The Troupe (13 page)

George was not sure what was going on, but he stayed silent. Yet eventually he saw that the men behaved differently around Colette.
It was in how they looked her up and down when she made a shot, or how they placed a hand on her back when explaining her errors, their fingers lingering below her shoulder blades just a little too long. George became so agitated by this behavior that he almost didn’t notice that they’d begun playing for money, and Colette had accumulated quite the payload.

At the end of the evening Colette sang the men a song in French, and sent them out the door with a royal hand-wave, blowing kisses in response to inebriated cries of, “Goodbye, Princess!” When they were gone she smiled after them for a bit, and turned to George and delicately said (in an American accent), “I will be right back,” and walked out the back door.

George waited for several minutes before going out to check on her. He found her leaning up against the wall with one hand, a small puddle of vomit on the ground before her feet. She spat repeatedly and wiped at her mouth, then stuck her finger down her throat and gagged. Nothing came up. “Fucking hicks,” she said.

“Goodness!” said George. “Are you ill?”

“No,” she said. “I did this to myself. Those bastards put a lot of booze in me, and I didn’t want it screwing me up any more than it already had. It was stupid of me to accept. I’d already had plenty to drink.”

“Well, why did you say yes, then?”

“I don’t know. I guess out of spite.” She stood up and wobbled a bit. As she regained her legs, thunder muttered somewhere up in the sky and a few fat drops of rain splashed against the hotel. “Oh, great,” she said. She sat down on the back step and put her head down on the tops of her knees. “I guess it’s my own fault. Thank you for pretending you know French.”

George sat down next to her. “Pretending? What makes you think I don’t know French? Maybe I understood everything you said.”

Though she did not lift her head, he could discern a bright, hard look in the corner of her visible eye. “People who know French,” she
said, “generally do not look so dumbfounded when it is spoken to them.”

“Oh,” he said. “Was it so obvious?”

“Your mouth could have caught flies, it was so open. You were lucky they were fools.”

“Are you really from Persia?” he asked.

She was still for a very long time. For a moment he wondered if she’d really heard him. But then, in a very small voice, she said, “Yes,” but he thought he heard a note of fear somewhere in that word, and he thought it strange; while the girl in white and diamonds and the fearsome pool player seemed like very different people, he could not imagine either of them afraid of anything.

George wondered how best to relieve her depression. “Do you ever miss it?” he asked.

She rolled her head to the side and looked at him. “Do I what?”

“Miss Persia. Your home?”

“Oh.” She thought about it. “Yes. All the time.” And then, after more thinking: “No. Actually, I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Do you ever miss wherever the hell it is you came from, George?”

He considered it. He had not thought of Rinton in some time. It felt like years since he’d left his grandmother’s house in the dead of night to catch a train. Sometimes he missed her embrace, and her cooking, and the whisper of her rocker on the porch; but then he remembered the furious boom of her voice, and the way she’d go into hysterics whenever he thought of disobeying her, and especially how she’d refused to ever discuss the subject of his father. He would still be there, he thought, if she had not let her anger overwhelm herself the day after the Silenus Troupe left Rinton, and spat after their departing train. And that had been the one act George had been waiting for, the gesture that would give him a clue to who his father really was, and once he had it he’d seized upon it and dogged her
with questions from morning till night, until finally she could stand it no more. She’d led him down into the basement, where she’d produced the piece of newspaper with a smudged photo of Silenus on it, and she’d pointed at it in the dark and said, “There. There.”

How that face had haunted his dreams for so many nights… And how he’d clung to the theater bill he’d stolen from that gutter back home… And now he had found him, the man who he’d once thought would fill all the empty places in his heart. But now George was no longer so sure.

“Yes,” he said. “And no.” He nodded, seeing her point.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I miss my home. But then I remember I’m not really remembering it right. I’m better off here, with Harry.”

“You don’t ever want to go back?” he asked.

“There’s never any going back.” She picked her head up and stared out at the rain. “God, I hate the sticks. And the sticks is all we ever seem to work. We never hit the big time, never try and get in close to the cities. Not unless we have to. You’ve heard of the Palace, haven’t you, George?”

“In New York? I’ve read about it, certainly.” The Palace Theater was the epicenter of all of vaudeville, owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith himself, the founder of the Keith-Albee circuit. To traveling vaudevillians, both big-and small-time, crossing those boards was the equivalent of transcending the Earth to take their place among the constellations.

“Yeah,” said Colette. “I saw it, once, you know.” She looked at him, and George could tell he was meant to be impressed.

“Did you?” he said.

“Yeah. One of the few times we got to go to New York. I went all the way downtown to do nothing more than see it. It’s a weird building. It’s tall and thin, which I didn’t expect. I didn’t get to go in, because I didn’t have the money. All I got to see was the damn outside. But I knew that was where I should be. In there, on that stage.
Not out here, in the sticks. With a bunch of rubes drinking moonshine and playing billiards.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s just a matter of hard work and knowing the right people,” George said knowledgeably.

Colette gave him a piercing look. “And are you suggesting,” she said, “that I haven’t been working hard?”

“No!” said George. “Well, I’m sure I can’t say. Sometimes these things just take time, you see.”

“And what do you know about time?” she asked. “How long have you even been in the business?”

George reddened. “I have been a very distinguished house pianist for over seven months,” he said with all the pride he could muster.

Colette stared at him. Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, God,” she said. “For a moment there I was almost offended!”

“I don’t find anything particularly funny,” said George. “How long have
you
been in the business?”

“Four years,” said Colette. “Since I was your age, I guess.”

“Well, that’s hardly any longer.” He very much wished he were wearing his tweed now. He felt sure this would have gone differently then.

Still laughing, she shook her head, but seemed to catch something out of the side of her eye. “Who’s that?”

“Who’s who?” said George. Then a bright spiderweb of lightning arched across the sky and he saw two figures making their way down the street carrying an enormous trunk between them. When they got near he saw it was Stanley and Silenus, and they were hurrying as fast as they could through the mud.

“Get that door open!” shouted Silenus as they approached.

George stood up and shoved open the back door. Silenus and Stanley charged up and fell through, gasping and heaving their steamer trunk forward. George noted its deep black wood and recognized it as the one from the office upstairs.

“Why were you carrying that out in the town?” he said.

“Because I need the exercise,” snapped Silenus. Though the two men seemed exhausted, they did not drop the box once they were inside; they lowered it gently, and Silenus kept his head tilted as if listening for the sound of anything breaking. When none came, he let out a great sigh of relief.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” said Colette.

“You don’t ask about my private matters,” said Silenus, “and I won’t ask about yours.”

“But these matters don’t seem particularly private.” She eyed their spreading puddle of water, which had grown enough to kiss the toes of her shoes.

Silenus gave her a glare and stomped up the stairs, dripping water all the way. Colette sighed and followed, making sure to step around the muddy footprints.

“Are you all right?” George asked Stanley.

He nodded and sat in a nearby chair. Rather than angry, Stanley appeared incredibly fatigued, and he sat bent in his chair as though he’d strained his back.

“What happened?” said George.

Stanley seemed to debate answering him, and shrugged and took out the blackboard and wrote:
WE FOUND SOMETHING, BUT IT WAS NOT WHAT WE WANTED TO FIND
.

George considered asking him what that meant, but knew he would not get an answer. He saw that the trunk featured nearly as many locks as Silenus’s door, and had been polished to a fine shine; he could see his own face within its wood, staring back at him uncertainly. He reached out to touch it.

But before he did, Stanley cleared his throat and wrote:
HELP ME GET THIS UPSTAIRS
? And his face was so drawn and tired that George could not say no to it.

When it came time to begin rehearsals the next day, George hardly had a chance to get his bearings. He was awoken in the morning by a pounding on his room door. He opened it to find Colette standing in the hall with three heavy bags in her hands, which she immediately tossed to him with no more than the words, “Time to get going. Get these to the theater.”

“What?” said George. “I’m supposed to
carry
these?”

“If you know a better way to get them there, be my guest,” said Colette.

George, grumbling, heaved them into his arms. He’d been exempt from most manual labor at Otterman’s, and he’d expected the same treatment from his father’s troupe. But when he thought to complain he was met with Colette’s bright green eyes, and he instead found himself working all the harder.

From the morning on it was pure chaos. George spent most of the day running: he ran back and forth from the theater to the hotel fetching luggage and props that hadn’t been sent ahead; he ran throughout the backstage fetching music and rosin, and chalk for Franny’s hands; and when he inevitably made an error in all of these
arrangements he had to run even faster to correct it before Silenus or Colette discovered.

The only time he really got in a hot spot was when he was late getting to the stage to help them arrange Kingsley’s backdrop. “Are we interfering with your dinner plans, Your Highness?” shouted Silenus from a balcony when he finally arrived.

“I came as fast as I could!” George called back. At first he couldn’t see what he was needed for—the backdrop was simply a large roll of paper that had to be maneuvered into place above the stage—but when he took his end of the rope to haul it up he found that the thing was shockingly heavy.

After they’d gotten it hung, Silenus pulled the backdrop down to make sure it’d traveled unscathed. George was startled to see that it was completely blank. The painting of the eerie, dilapidated farmhouse had vanished. But this did not trouble Silenus, who nodded and said, “Good. We’ll rehearse with it down and roll it up later.”

“But it’s blank!” said George.

“So?”

“Isn’t there supposed to be something there?”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Silenus as he moved on to the next task. “That’ll be taken care of.”

George cast a concerned look at the backdrop as they went backstage. The curious painting of the farmhouse had made a strong impression on him, and he had wanted to see it again.

His concerns regarding the backdrop only increased later, but not in the way he expected. When he had to run out and fetch Colette some aspirin, he dashed back into the theater and headed for her dressing room, but stopped when he saw the preparations on the stage. The backdrop was still hanging up, but it was no longer blank: the painting of the blue-and-gray farmhouse had returned, and once more the stage was lit by the strange moonlight from its large window. Yet in the lower right pane of the window the painting now showed a boy’s face peeping in and smiling, and unless he was
imagining things the boy looked much like George himself, with a pug nose, a large chin, and a pronounced brow. George got the overpowering impression that the boy in the window was watching him. He was greatly unnerved by this, and fled backstage to tell Silenus.

Silenus snorted when he heard George’s story. “Cheeky fucking thing,” he said. “Don’t pay attention to it. It was just funning with you.”

But as to how a common canvas backdrop could mock someone in the audience, he did not say, and when George next saw the backdrop it was blank again.

The troupe members themselves were just as strange. For one thing, Franny was treated as though she was another prop, despite being one of the most effective performers. “Go and move Franny over there,” was a common order Silenus gave when arranging the stage. And Franny often seemed to behave like one. She was perfectly compliant with anyone’s requests, but when she had nothing to do she did literally nothing at all. She would place a small chair in the corner out of everyone’s way, sit on it, and stare into the wall. Only once, when George was speeding by her, did she do anything: she whispered, “Hello, Bill.”

“I’m George,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling. “Of course you are.”

Professor Kingsley Tyburn was far less amenable. He acted as though moving his puppets out onto the stage were a terrible last resort, and preferred to hole up with them in his dressing room, sitting beside the little coffin-like boxes and reading aloud from
Madison’s Budget
(a dependable joke source for small comedy acts) or a Bible, for he was a very religious man. George dreaded carrying any messages to him, as Kingsley would berate him to no end for the disruption, but more than that he found Kingsley’s boxes and his relationship with them disturbing. He once glanced into Kingsley’s dressing room to see the man sprawled out facedown with his arms over the boxes, and he might have been weeping. On that occasion
George said nothing, but continued on in his labors with a shiver. Yet later when he’d been sent to ask Kingsley’s opinion on a change in his act’s music George found his dressing room dark and seemingly empty. He called Kingsley’s name. There was no answer from within, but then he heard footsteps from the far back, and a door closing. Due to the darkness of the room he could not see who it was.