The Mercury Waltz (7 page)

Card palmed, with one elbow she draws the pack safely against her side and “No,” she says, “fish,” flipping with her other hand the sardine tin into his face, greasy sauce and salt and bones and “Little bitch!” his cry, but already she is off the bench and halfway through the crowd, down the lane and back to Die Welt, met at the door by the news that the theatre man around the corner came looking for a servant, a live-in to cook and do the dailies and “I’ll have it,” says a scrawny boy with a certain pride. “I already know ’im, that fella, he gets the chocolate every time—”

—as without a word Tilde pushes past him, drops her untied apron on the counter and “Pay me,” she says to the owner. “Pay me for today, and I’ll be gone.”

“For today? You’ve done nothing today but wash the slop pots and shell walnuts, I’ll not give you—”

“Pay me,” she says, without a change in volume, noted not at all by the few customers dozing over the obituaries or the scourings in their pipes, but the owner sees the little blade in her fist, one of his own paring knives, though he will not notice that special perfidy until later. For now, angry and dismayed, “Take your pennies, then, witch,” tossing into her face less than half a half-day’s wages, but it is enough to buy a fresh flannel and a drop of scent, to make herself more presentable before she presents herself at the door of the theatre, knocking for the writer with the glasses who favors the
Šálek cokolády,
the dark man who needs a daily girl to cook and care for him.

There are cards and there are cards, and not all decks play out the same: surely her father taught her so, or the man who called himself her father, thick fingers laying out yet another spread between the cracks on the crooked table, while the rain drips tick-tick-tock like a drunken clock and the unfed baby cries:
The Four Houses and the Eight Rooms, that’s what this spread is named. Pay attention, Mathilde!
as her gaze is caught again by the pretty pictures, the beautiful Queen on Horseback, the blooming Ace of Flowers, the arrowed Jack with his gleaming quiver and bow.
What card is this, now? Tell me.

The Priest.

And what’s his job?

If he’s next to a Lord, he tells what will be. If he’s next to a Queen, he tells what might be.

And if he’s next to a Knave or Jack?

He don’t tell anything. Hush,
in competent annoyance to the red-faced baby, slipping between the screaming rosebud lips a nursling’s tit, a knot of cheesecloth soaked in goat’s milk and dashed with gin; in a few moments the baby is sucking peacefully.
Tell it again about the world that lives in the cards,
a story she loves, for the whole world is contained in this deck, not only past and future for the customers who pay, but the colors of the seasons in the four colors of the suits, Hares, Doves, Flowers, Crowns, thirteen trumps for the months and the moon, each Lord his Queen and loyal Jack and scoundrel Knave. It makes a comforting tale for a girl whose daily world turns like a top in the gutter, whose mother, still half a girl herself, dances for tips at the gurdy house in-between the midwife’s visits; the last one died, a little bluish boy who barely drew two breaths, but this new baby is like to live, and so she is Tilde’s charge, Tilde’s half-sister Tanti disliked by Tilde’s father who is not Tanti’s father, who comes each week to see the dancing mother who does not like to see him—

Go away, Vasily, how many times must I say it! This is not the village!

But I love you, Annochka!

—as privately Tilde considers them the Queen of Hares, swift and always running, and the Knave of Flowers, forever offering the nosegay no one wants.

While he waits in vain for the mother, he teaches the daughter the cards: for this dodge a girl is preferable to a boy, a boy they might suspect, they do suspect, those superstitious burghers’ wives and platter-eyed servants, but a girl—made as tidy as she can be in borrowed cap and apron, wild hair brushed flat, face scrubbed nearly clean—a girl will make her way where a boy or man could never enter, make pennies there and more than pennies if she is skillful to understand that
They never really want to know what’s coming,
says the father, setting down another card, the Knave of Hares with his empty snare and furtive net.
So you tell them what they do want to hear, in place.

But how do I know what that is?

That’s where you’ll shine,
with much conviction, for this child’s blue eyes—he has seen it himself—miss nothing, she can read a taproom or the faces on a corner like a priest reads the Book, and never miss once. Didn’t she say alone of everyone that Bald Tommy was going to tip himself? And didn’t he tip himself, right off the roof of the church?
Put you in their kitchens for a week and you’ll know all about them, upstairs and down, you’ll be coining money, eh?
with a lopsided, hungry smile that Tilde does not return.
Now, this card, tell me who is he?

—and so on and on through the spread, the deck, the days, she is a very quick study, Tilde, and before her dancing mother forever leaves her father, fleeing in a brewer’s wagon with Tilde and Tanti beside her, Tilde has not only learned all about the cards, she has learned she must keep them for herself, stuffed into a pocket while Vasily wept at the table; a changer’s sleeve they call it, that pocket sewn inside the skirt, where one palms something good to replace with something worthless, but nothing she slips into that sleeve is ever given back.

The brewer’s wagon stinks of hops, it rains all the way to Paris, their one-room is thick with fleas and biting lice: but the dancing mother is happy and soon finds a much better place to dance, she comes home from the Gran-Royale decked in heron feathers and with money in her purse, money enough to get a two-room and real meals—hot soup and good bread, two times a day!—and a real nursemaid for Tanti, who cries less and begins to fill out, plump and chucky in the cheeks, on the streets the Parisian goodwives all say she is
très jolie
. Tilde at first is at a loss with the cards: there is more to learn, much more, she is sure of it, but Annabell—for such she is instructed to call her mother now, who here in Paris is no one’s mother, but a brave and lovely mademoiselle left with two little sisters to raise, just like “Miss Imogene of the Boulevard”—Annabell will not have her running the arcades, mixing with the mudlarks and the tinkers’ boys, for
I need you here,
severe as she regards the cameo, a queen’s ivory face on a ribbon of sky-blue tulle, a gift from one of her gentlemen just the night before, one of the gentlemen for whom Tilde tells the cards when they come calling to see Annabell, who twirls so gracefully as she pines for the protector who will one day come to save them all.

And amazingly, he does: truly it is like “Miss Imogene,” the plump man with the blond mustachios who arrives with pink roses and china dolls, piping-hot delicious chocolate from the fine cafés, who promises Annabell, as they lie together beneath silk coverlets—several stitched together, to hide the many holes—that he will care for her now, take her away from the dancehall and the two-room, move her to a fine house in
Lyon,
she says, as she packs only what fits in her fine new lady’s trunk, green leather and shiny silver locks, what fits her new life.
Pretty gardens and a stable, and a nursemaid already for Tanti—

But what about Jeanne? She loves Tanti, she calls her her little pumpkin—

Jeanne will stay here.
When Annabell turns her back, it is as if a shadow falls directly onto Tilde’s heart, as if the cards lay spread before her, the Queen of Hares face-up beside the Shadow, the card that means death, or loss, or change, or all three because
You will stay with her,
says Annabell, still not looking at Tilde, whose hands clench at her sides.
Marcel says we will raise Tanti as our own, but he can only bear to have one child about the house. And you—he says you are too grown already. But listen,
urgent, turning to knot the cameo about her daughter’s rigid neck,
I shall send money, plenty of money, my little Mathilde, you will never want! You understand me? When you are older, you will understand, Marcel has plenty of money—

—
and so he does, but after one envelope, delivered by indifferent messenger to Jeanne morose to receive it and more loath to share it, no more is received at least by Tilde, who by then understands that no more will be coming, that Annabell is gone, Tanti is gone, and what there is is the dressed china doll, the cameo, and the Taroc cards in the sack she stitched herself, of dark blue velvet as deep as the midnight sky. While Jeanne drinks
vin ordinaire
and takes in washing, Tilde takes herself down to the street, to the mudlarks in the painted wagons camped inside the park who, for certain considerations—a headdress of heron feathers, an unbroken china doll—consider it a lark to school the
gaje
girl, that skinny little blue-eyed devil, and teach her some of the many uses of that potent pack of cards.

The cathedral of St. Mary of Dolors is as old as the city, built at the heart of its crumbling, spooling streets, though some traditions call it even older, the city itself in accretion around it, the holy irritant that seeds the pearl: a thundering cataract of rose windows, incense, marble madonnas, and many cold hundredweight of gold. On this Sunday morning it casts a shadow as cold on the steps leading up to its massy doors, each step inscribed with a saint’s name, a climbing litany of the virtuous and forgotten, Josephus and Uriel and Martinus: “Like you, Martin,” says the large man in the greatcoat, a truly magnificent greatcoat of epaulets and fat black braiding, suitable for a peacetime general or a warlike municipal king. “Calvinist or not, we’ll see you etched here someday—‘Well done O good and faithful servant’—and little children shall light candles to your name.”

“That would hardly be suitable,” says Martin Eig, his own coat much more modest, with a smile equally modest to show that he understands if not shares the other’s humor. “And no servant is ‘good’ who does only his duty: ‘We are unprofitable servants, we have done only that which we ought to do.’”

“A harsh doctrine.”

“It comes to us from Christ Himself.”

“Who also said, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’” in a gorgeous
basso
rumble, complement to the white mane and thick-lidded eyes of the Morals Commissioner, Herr Guy de Vries: the Lewd Lord they once called him, famous in the boudoirs and the dancehalls, serial impregnator of actresses and governesses, other men’s mistresses, other men’s wives; there are half a dozen fathers in this city alone who regard their children with judicious and unhappy scrutiny, parsing a resemblance to the mighty de Vries nose or the drooping and sensuous lower lip. The lord’s own, much-delayed first marriage, to a disappointingly shrill van Symans daughter, ended in fierce private recriminations and a public annulment so shocking—they had been wed for almost three years—that only the long friendships with other notable families, such as the Chamsaurs and the Konstantins, kept social stigma from fully ruining the de Vries name.

It was with his second wife, the tranquil, lovely, stupid daughter of a somewhat less-storied house, that the lord at last found religion, the hand of Mother Church extended in the person of the bride’s great-uncle, an archbishop and fellow traveler who counseled strict fidelity and virtue, while pointing the way to other, less strenuous paths of penitence, paths the lord, lewd no longer, embraced with a convert’s zeal. Within a year the tranquil wife was pregnant, within three years there were twin daughters and a son, within four years the churches of the city had found a new and generous benefactor, and the Herr, “lord” no longer, was a diligent member of the Council for Public Virtue, the forerunner to the current Morals Commission, using his own lamentable past as a warning to others and signal of his worthiness to serve. If his young wife is pleased to blow kisses from her cabriolet as she departs for yet another visit to the countryside, if his children’s nursemaids are fortyish and dry, if he often finds himself in haunts unworthy of a Christian, all of these are proof to the citizens that their Commissioner is a true family man who keeps strict watch on whatever vice may fester, especially in those dens of purchased pleasure, with their gambling and sneak-thieving, cloudy liquor and black opium, pouting girls and painted boys—

—like this specimen a step or three below, a boy with checkered scarf and lacquered lips, outrageous that a creature so obviously foul should loiter so close to sanctity itself but “Suffer the little children,” says Herr de Vries, with a friendly eye. “Look at that hair, yellow as a daisy! One of your lad’s lads, do you suppose?”

Martin Eig shakes his head. “I couldn’t say. —I’ve set him to watch, St.-Mary, at that puppet theatre. ”

“Hmm? Watch what?”

“Everything there is to see,” beyond the simpler fact of the plays themselves, those fairy-tale insurrections that the writer Seraphim praises so extravagantly that others must queue up to see them, too. Of course the
Globe,
their
Globe,
has called this latest offering immoral and unworthy of any serious attention, but that does not seem to stem the tide of interest; then let the tide rise, they are fishers of men after all, and when the tide turns, they will be ready. And St.-Mary himself bears closer watching, for he is more than a smirking tough, much more, despite Costello’s view; but not what he thinks himself to be, or not yet, and that process ought be observed, for a resourceful lieutenant is no easy find. ”As it is, the place winks at sedition as well as sodomy—”

“Really. Onstage
and
backstage, you think?”

“We know.”

“Who is ‘we’…? Regrettable, naturally, Sodom and all that, but at least that act produces no bastards. —Ah, dear ladies, a very good morning,” lifting his hat, as does Martin Eig, to the pair now ascending, mother and daughter in matching silks and petite ivory walking sticks; the daughter’s smile is especially vivacious. “Fraulein Vaubins, how charming…. Such a pity all girls become their mothers, isn’t it? Though you ought to marry, Martin, it improves the digestion.”

Martin Eig makes a thin smile. “I fully intend to, one day. But one needs a certain income to support a family.” He watches the girl enter the larger group of churchgoing mademoiselles, girls of greater families whose connections, both of blood and of interest, could vastly aid a man who would rise high and use all of his God-given gifts to the fullest. But would the fathers of those girls consider a man who, though ambitious, industrious, and recognized by all as virtuous, lacks title as well as wealth? Not even the prayers of the angels can improve the suit of a man like that.

And even if such a mating were possible, a wife, his wife, must be a woman of a certain elevated sensibility; the pedigree of Frau de Vries makes her not one whit the less grating or foolish, and the same can be said of so many of them, ornaments born to breed, not to think. Naturally he expects there shall be children, as many as Providence shall send, but his wife must be his helpmeet, too, and capable of the depth and subtle feelings of which the greatest unions consist, as if she had truly been taken straight from his side, fashioned like Eve from Adam’s breathing bone. For such a woman he can diligently work, and patiently wait, in his rooms with their printed curtains and inferior smallware, their nightly silence in which his own silence flickers and broods:
It is not good for man to be alone,
Scripture is correct on that point as on all else, but the diversions available to the flesh are ones he will not reach for, repugnant both to the morals minister and the man: bought caresses, the risk of it, the lie of it, some strange woman smiling wetly in the dark…. No, better that he mortify and wait a year, two years, seven years like Jacob, for he shall have her in the end, the woman he longs for, he is certain of that. He shall have all he desires, in the end.

Now Herr de Vries continues on about the Mercury, some show of a wolf, or fox, “Really quite amusing! Vaubins told me all about it, he attended with his boy. A pity one can’t be seen there any longer—the plays at the Cleopatra are so dreary, it’s enough to drive a man to the ballet…. The fellow sounds familiar, that puppeteer, in fact they both do. In Brussels, once, I saw a drawing-room play that—Ah,” as the bell summons to worship, its deep voice even more sonorous than his own. “Pity you’ll miss the sermon—Iffy’s to give it, and he says it’s quite a good one, his curate has toiled on it all week. And afterward he and I will take the air,” with a smile, shaking the other’s hand as he turns for the sanctuary, adding past his shoulder, “Let me know what your lad makes of it all, hmm?” as Martin Eig executes a dry half-bow, turning down the stairs past the yellow-haired boy in the scarf, their eyes meet and “Suck?” offers the boy softly. “Just a fiver, sah, there’s still some time before the music starts.”

“I’d see you in the stocks,” says Martin Eig, “face down.” His face does not change. “Take yourself away from here before I call an officer.”

“Be corked, Mr. Pinch!” but rapidly the boy retreats, a scurry so swift that he almost collides head-on with another hurrying churchgoer, an upright young man who grasps him by the elbows to keep him from a dire backwards fall and “Suck?” the boy asks hopefully—he has not eaten since yesterday and has a very long night ahead—looking as hopefully into that young man’s face, Frédéric who feels the hungry urgency of the look, the boy is so awfully thin, but “No,” he says at once, “certainly not—” yet why do they always call to him, these boys with their sweet winks and shameless little smiles, is it his eyes, his gait, how do they always
know?
—as he ducks past and up the stairs as if in flight, he is in flight—

—but swiveling back then with his hand out, a hasty handful of coins and “Hurry,” the boy’s smile, “the music’s started,” already the great swelling strains of the organ—

—but the young man has escaped up the stairs again and through the heavy doors, the boy turning away confused and delighted, all this money for “No diddling at all,” he boasts to his mates at the milk-and-tea shop down the corner, shoving the coins across the cloudy zinc counter. “He just give it to me and then off he go. —
Two
raisin buns, you twister,
and
a kaffee!” enjoying every bite of the lunch the money buys as well as the gipsy smokes bought afterward—

—while once the Mass has ended, and the choir director has made his farewells, Frédéric lingers, fingering in his pocket—beside a fiery new broadsheet from the Literary Leopards, and several unread letters from his mother and his fiancée—a ticket to the Mercury, not as Seraphim this time but only Frédéric, to see the show again, hear the music, watch the two men leave together for the hills. He kneels at the side altar in the throaty scent of lilies, the candles’ gleam and waver, waiting for the boys outside to go away, praying for guidance and the grace to know himself; and remembering despite himself the verses quoted by M. Hilaire, so bawdy and delightful, he ought not think of them now, how did it go again?
The ne’er-do-wells and paltry gods are we/Of rural worship and ’spite modesty/Aye under Jove with balls a-bare we stand
—

—while in a well-appointed townhouse library, books of law, books of faith, books of commerce, most unopened, Martin Eig sits over lukewarm tea beside his host, grizzled Tibor Banek of the
Globe,
and Simon Cowtan called Shakespeare. The latter is an aspirant to this room and this company, men much higher up the ladder than he—Mrs. Cowtan was thrilled by the invitation, herself ironing his handkerchief and specially buffing his shoes—and proud to address with them the issue of the growing crowds at the Mercury Theatre: “It is an odd venue,” Cowtan offers, tugging his mustache discreetly dyed with chestnut stain. “I had a girl of mine over there, as one does, you know,” at Mrs. Cowtan’s urging,
Here it is again in the papers. Send Cynthia to have a peep, may be she can get cozy there, and give us eyes!
“Just to see.”

“And what did you see?” asks Eig.

“Well—it is odd, as I said. They seem not to care who attends or who doesn’t, they list only the puppets’ names in the playbill—”

Banek narrows his gaze behind black pince-nez, clears his leathery throat. “Something to hide, it would seem.”

“Or a way to drum up interest,” says Cowtan. “People love a mystery.” Privately he considers the fuss just that, a nine-days’ wonder, for in the end what use or worry can it ever be, puppets onstage? They cannot be true actors, they will never replace true actors, especially not in some dingy theatre on dodgy Rottermond Square. And as for their handlers, they are very clearly men from nowhere, with whom no one need reckon at all; only Cockrill has ever marked them, another scrambler at the edge. Much more important is the great question of safety and patronage, he and Fairgrieve had talked it out only the day before:
We’ll all need a lord in the pocket, if this new law is passed, what is it, the Standard Morals or something like? They mean to give the ballet dancers breeches, to cover up their thighs —!

The Morals and Standards Act, it’s called, for lewdness in the arts. I’ve no worries, the Bard is above reproach
—which is not entirely true, both he and his Mrs. are worried, she most adamant in urging him to
Ask them, Simon, it’s God’s own angels give you the chance!
so “This new act, now,” cautiously, “concerning morals, can you gentlemen give me some guidance?” to bring Banek’s basilisk frown, “What guidance does a man need beyond a clean conscience?” as “The city supports its theatres,” says Eig, “when they are good citizens. But if they sow the seeds of corruption, it must discipline them accordingly, ” leading them back to the discussion of the Mercury, Banek favoring a sterner editorial condemnation, Cowtan offering a counter-production meant to draw the customers elsewhere, to the Cleopatra perhaps? It is a fruitful meeting, that continues for some hours—

—as by this blue hour, Herr de Vries has shed both the archbishop’s company and his own trousers, and is happily encouched with the daisy-haired boy from the church steps, now tarted up in gussy like a lass, this more energetic meeting brokered by Haden in a nonesuch hotel just around the corner from his own digs: Le Chapel Vert, the name currently underscored by the almost prayerful groans issuing from the inner bedchamber. While he waits in the alcove with its flaking green paint, Haden drinks from the Commissioner’s overcoat flask—some sort of licorice liquor, one he has not had before; it tastes like medicine—and examines a letter extracted from the Commissioner’s breast pocket, a sealed letter, sadly, and here he has neither the time nor the tools to defeat that. All he can do is note the name and crest on the envelope, and weigh its weight on the scale of his palm; whoever he is, this de Metz toff seems to have a great deal to say.