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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




It was two o'clock when she turned off her lights, just enough glow from
the hallway pressing against her transom to reassure her. The sheets
were fragrant with cleanliness and she let her body give to the
delicious sag of the mattress. The rumble of the train was gone from
her ears. She felt washed, light, drowsy; cast aside her pillow; wound
her arm up under her head; sighed out of deliciousness; slept.

She awoke with a sense of red. A flame of fear shot through her, and a
first thought of fire, but even before she could rise she saw it was
static, this crimson gash across the blackness, and shaped like a grin.

She began to tremble, and an unreasoning fear of the depth of the
darkness to take hold of her. A sort of paralysis locked her, and,
although she wanted to scream, she lay there drenched in terror.
Finally, out of contempt for her fear, she sprang, landing both feet on
the floor.

A little window in the box of the wall telephone, one of those modern
hotel devices _de luxe_ and _de trop_, had flashed up redly, spelling
out to her dilated gaze, "MAIL IN YOUR BOX." Regarding it, her relief
shifted suddenly to terror. Mail! Not even had she herself known what
her address might be! Her mother--father--Albert? But how? The drummer
with the gold-mounted elk's tooth! The clerk and that almost
imperceptible trail of the hand. Detectives! Her window showed a streak
of dawn. Five-forty by her watch. She tried to go back to bed, but at
six she was up again, dressed fumblingly, finally sliding the linen
jacket over an unbuttoned blouse. She had some difficulty locating the
elevator, scurrying through the deserted halls only to dash herself
against repeated _cul-de-sacs_. It was almost seven when she descended
into a lobby that was littered with sawdust in the sweeping up.

She asked for her mail, a strange clerk handing it out to her without
askance, and hurried to a chair behind a pillar, holding the envelope
between the folds of her skirt without glancing at it, and trying to
hide the trembling of her arm. She sat down, forcing her hand around and
her gaze to meet it. The envelope was blank; she tore its flap and read:
"Valet Service. Suits Cleaned and Pressed in One Hour."

And then she went out into 7 A.M. Broadway, all swept clean and caroling
with the song of the car gong and the whistlings of steamboats. A
line-up of theaters, early-morning mausoleums of last night's madnesses,
first met her eye in the clean light. One of them was violently postered
with lithographs of Minnie Maddern Fiske. A three-sheet proclaimed
Melba. Broadway became an Olympus, every passer-by a probable immortal.
She half expected to pass John Drew there as the Rialto cleaned its
cuspidors, polished its brass, and swept its front. She thought she
caught a flash of Margaret Mazarin in a cab. An exultant chill raced
over her at the vertical sign, "Rector's." A musical comedy full of
frothy and naughty allusions to Rector's had once played Forest Park
Highlands, St. Louis. It was like strolling the pages of an illustrated
magazine. Some one jostled her and smiled around very closely into her
face. Suddenly her eyebrows shot up. It seemed to her that the face
under the gray derby hat was as coldly and as bonelessly fat as an
oyster. Her two hands could have met around the little neck which was
tightly incased in a soft blue collar held with a gold bar pin. She
quickened her step and, what with the lifted brows, promptly lost him.

She stopped finally at a florid lace-and-glass-fronted restaurant on
Forty-third Street, with a mimeographed breakfast menu up against the
window. Her food went down through a throat constricted against it. Her
tightness would not relax.

At half after eight she was back once more in her room, changing from
the tan linen into a pink mull, heavily inserted, too, and throwing up
quite an aura of rosiness about her. She had only the tan hat, too wide
and too floppy of brim, but it had a picturesque value, which is a
greater selling quality than _chic_. In fact, in her own eyes, as she
tilted the mirror for a full-length view, the art of Katy Stutz stood
unimpeached. Eying her reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator,
she felt as pinkly blown as a rose, and looked it. A head or two turned
after her youth. At the desk she inquired for the Pittman Building. Just
opposite! A policeman held up traffic to let her cross. She picked a
name off a third-story window, "Barnett Bureau--Musical Service," and
rode up to it.

By one of those astonishing flukes of beginner's good fortune, upon the
occasion of this very first effort Lilly obtained.

A ground-glass door opened into a room the size and bareness of a
packing case and crammed to its capacity with a roller-top desk, a
stenographer at a white-pine table, a cuspidor, a pair of shirt sleeves,
a black mustache, and a blacker cigar.

Entering, Lilly was surprised at the measured tempo of her voice and the
manner in which she permitted her eyebrows to arch ever so
superciliously.

"I'm looking for an engagement," she said, speaking through the ticking
of the typewriter.

The jaw ate in half an inch more of cigar and swung around in the
swivel.

"Voice?"

"Yes. High soprano."

He ran a swift cocked eye over her points and turned to the white-pine
table.

"Send her down to Visigoth," he said to the stenographer, who took up
where he left off.

She was as blond and as bland as a summer's day. A Pompadour dipped down
over one eye and her jaws moved as rhythmically as rigorously to gum
with a pull to it. She was herself caricatured. She and Lilly exchanged
that quickest of inventories, woman's for woman.

"Sign here."

Lilly signed.

"Ten dollars."

"Why?"

"Our rules. Ten dollars a year bureau membership, and fifty per cent of
first two weeks' salary."

"But what if--"

"We always place sooner or later."

"But in case--"

"Take this card down to the Union Family Theater, Union Square, and ask
for Robert Visigoth. It's a two-a-day. If you don't do business with
him, come back to-morrow morning."

A quick dozen of questions rushed to Lilly's lips, but instead she laid
down a new ten-dollar bill, crammed the slip into her palm through the
hole in her glove, and went out, the snapping torrent of typewriting
already resumed.

The Union Family Theater was the first of a succession of variety houses
that was to spread, first to Harlem, then Philadelphia, and later gird
the country like a close-link chain. Vaudeville prefaced with
stereopticon views, designed to appeal to the strict respectability of
the most strictly respectable audiences in the world.

The high-class Rialto houses might pander to low-class comedy and
Broadway take its entertainment broad, but Robert Visigoth laid the
corner stone of subsequent fortunes when he decided that a
ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville audience that smells sour of perspiration
and strong foods demands entertainment as pink and as sweet as a baby's
heel, and that a gunman in the gallery will catcall his prototype on
the stage.

Let the Noras and all the pyschanalyzed Magdas go their problematic and
not always prophylactic ways, the Visigoth Family Theaters wanted 'em
sweet, high-necked and low-browed.

Robert Visigoth, attorney-at-law, whose practice had suddenly, by one of
those arbitrary twists as difficult to account for as the changed course
of a river, assumed a theatrical twist, had taken over, on cleverly
obtained backing, the Union Family Theater from an insolvent client.
Within a year it had made a disappearing island of the law office,
flowing over and finally submerging that enterprise in the swifter
waters of the new.

At the end of two years, Bruce Visigoth, a younger brother by ten years
and snatched from the law the very day he graduated into it, was already
in Chicago, launching under the auspices of The Enterprise Amusement
Company, the People's Family Theater, Popular Prices, the sixth link of
the chain already in the soldering.

When Lilly found out the older of these brothers, he was standing in the
black auditorium of the theater, holding an electric bulb made portable
by a coil of cord, and directing the reverberating hammering down of an
additional brace of three orchestra chairs for which room had been found
by shifting the position of the bass drum.

A hairy old watchdog, tilted back against the brick side of the building
and smoking a pipe so foul that its tang clung to her hair that night as
she brushed it out, inspected her slip of paper and led her through a
black labyrinth of wings and properties.

An aroma lay on that blackness that in some indefinable way quickened
her, set her nostrils quivering, and ran along her entire being like a
line of fire. It smelled of Elizabethans in buckskin. Bottom rollicked
through it, thumb to nose. Ophelia leaned out of it. Bernhardt,
Coquelin, Melba, intoned into it. Its cold, pink paintiness lay damply
to her face. She had never smelled simmering mascara, but her lashes
were hot with it. Suddenly to herself she was herself, running ahead of
the wind, her aching senses bathed in an odor which somehow intoxicated
them. She was on a stage for the first time in her life, a bunch light
only half revealing it to her. Through the megaphone of cupped hands and
the dimness of the auditorium a voice came at her.

"Come down here, around through the left box."

She groped her way to a steel door, stumbling down two unsuspected
steps, and was suddenly in the carpeted silence of an aisle. Robert
Visigoth came toward her, the electric bulb held high and dragging the
yards of cord behind him.

"I'm from the agency," she said at once, the little beating quality that
she was feeling all over her in her voice, and holding out the slip.

"Come out here," he said, "where I can see you."

Some daylight flowed in through a slightly open fire exit and she
caught at a last moment of darkness to straighten her hat.

"Sing?"

"Yes."

He shoved open the iron door so that more light flowed over her.

"Why," he said, "you're a big girl, aren't you?"

"I don't know," she said, through a little laugh of embarrassment, and
noticing that, regarding her, he wetted his lips.

"That part's all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice.
Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only
thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation down there.
Understand?"

"I see."

He spoke through a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged
for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical
manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to this soft
indictment.

Born in one of those old morose houses in lower Lexington Avenue, each
had lived there until he obtained his degree of LL.D. from a state
university. It had been a sedate, a mildly prosperous, even an historic
home. A Vice President of the United States had once owned it. Then a
Major O. Higginbothom, and finally, for fifteen years of tenancy, the
Visigoths. One of the kind whose genteel hall light had burned through
the fanlight decade after decade, and then suddenly, overnight, as it
were, disintegrated into a furnished-room house with a sign over the
door bell.

One evening Horace R. Visigoth, of the law firm of Visigoth, Visigoth &
Higginbothom, did not answer his wife's soft question to him across the
green-shaded reading lamp of their library table. His head was quite
sunk forward in a sheaf of proofs. He was dead. One month later his wife
failed to awaken to Pauline Visigoth's frenzied attempts or to even a
dexterous physician's respiratory methods. The year following Pauline
Visigoth married the dexterous physician and moved to Chicago.

The Lexington Avenue house succumbed to a quick sale, and in attempting
to divert the law business out of the clayey rut of quiet old
conservatism, the Enterprise Amusement Company was ultimately to
be born.

Robert Visigoth, twenty-nine at the time, betrayed little of the
heritage his name suggested. His Teutonic blood pretty well laid, he was
a trifle too short and a trifle too heavy, and with none of his mother's
lean patrician quality to which both his younger brother and older
sister had fallen heir.

Suggesting future rotundities and a reddishness of complexion that was
presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square
as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality,
punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of
black mustache which he tried to twirl.

Busy at the mannerism, if not the act, of twirling that hirsute
adornment of upper lip, he continued to observe Lilly.

"You understand? What I need is a real heart-to-heart voice."

"I'm quite good at ballads."

"Quite good or darn good?"

"Darn."

"Experience?"

"I'm just in from as far west as--Dallas."

"Now what I want is a turn that hasn't struck the West yet. Understand?
It originated right here in this theater. There is a firm of music
publishers in this town makes up slides of its songs, and all you have
to do is stand beside the screen and sing to the stereopticon
illustrations. Understand? You don't have to follow the pictures. The
pictures follow you. It is sure fire if it is handled right, only the
girl we had on last week must have wrapped her vocal cords in sandpaper.
The secret of the whole thing is to make them--out there--live the song.
Understand?"

"I see."

"Every woman in the audience has to be the sweetheart and every man the
lover you are singing to them about. And to do that the first one to
live that song must be you. Believe in yourself before you expect the
world to. If you come in here and tell me you sing _quite_ good, it
won't be easy to convince me of more if you begin to warble like Melba.
Now you go up there and let me hear a bar or two. Take care of the last
row gallery and the first row orchestra will take care of
itself. Shoot!"

"I--haven't my music with me--my répertoire--"

"Nonsense! Just a bar or two--'Suwanee River'--anything with heart in
it. Give us some lights up there, Bob."

Through the blackness Lilly moved as if she were sleep-walking in it.
Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly
enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle
of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil
nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a
little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O God, make him take me! O God,
make him take me!"

The bunch light had been dragged down center stage. She stood beside it,
opening her mouth as if to muster voice, then closing it. It was as if
water were swirling around and around her, the unseen presence in the
back of the house surging at her like a multitude.

"Shoot!"

She looked appealingly in the direction of the hammering down of the
seats.

"Never mind that. Sing to the top row of the gallery."

A fearful recurrence of yesterday's train-sickness rushed over her; she
could have crumpled to her knees, had even a sense of wanting to faint,
but instead she opened her lips again, her eyes fixed on the unseen last
two tows of the unseen top gallery, and by miracle finding a pitch that
left her plenty of range.

"Way down upon the Suwanee River-"

"Louder!"

"Far, far away,
There's where my heart is turning ever,
There's where the old folks stay.
All the world am sad and dreary,
Everywhere I roam.
Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary--"

The lay of Page Avenue was before her, swollen through tears. Her mother
sewing beside Katy Stutz. The patient back of her father's gray head.
Her parents on their knees, far back there somewhere beside her bed of
fever. Albert! Their wedding night when the door had closed behind
them! "O God, make him take me! Please!

"Far from the o-old folks--at ho--"

"That will do."

She stood with her mouth an O on the unfinished note, hand to the little
rise of her bosom.

"Meet me around in my office back stage." His voice was like a call in a
fog, retreating and retreating. She followed it. They met in a narrow
patch of broad daylight.

"I'm afraid," she began, her voice breaking on a gulp--"I'm afraid I
didn't--"

"You did very well," he said, kindly. "Little off key and your voice
won't set the world on fire, and it has a tremolo quality that may be
rotten-bad singing, but it's the right stuff for the act."

She thought, with a swoop of perception, that in this she discerned the
astuteness of a buyer too clever to praise the article he covets. She
felt lighter, as if some of her had melted in the ordeal. The machinery
of her body began to take up again, the saliva to flow, and her heart to
beat without seeming to hit its walls.

"I'll try you out for a week. Twenty dollars?"

"Yes." Trying to seem to pro and con.

"Come to-morrow at ten and I'll have a man down to go over next week's
slides with you. That gives you until Monday. Something pink on the
order of what you are wearing will do, only fluffier. Rough up your hair
a bit, too. No, leave it slick like that, but something fluffy in a hat
or a sun-bonnet with a pink bow under the chin. Right there--under that
little chin."

Her head flew up from his touch.

"I see."

"Manage it?"

"I think so."

"You what?"

"I know so."

"Good. Never let a think show through your answer. Yes or no!"

"Yes."

He tweaked her chin again.

"Watch out somebody doesn't steal you on your way home, big girl."

"To-morrow at ten," she repeated, going out into the sunshine that smote
her with the sting of hot lances. The tweak from his hand lay back
somewhere, branded none too pleasantly into her consciousness.

But just the same, when she inquired of a traffic policeman the
direction to the Hotel Hudson, even the mundane wording of her asking
clicked like happy castanets into her spirit.




CHAPTER XVII

And so it came about, through events of surprisingly simple shaping,
that her first week in the metropolis found Lilly integral to it.

She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family
Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the
continuity of a sequence of events in which she had her place.

She was already in the rush of assurance that followed her sense of
earning capacity, regarding the Union Family Theater merely as a means
to an end, and in spare time had registered at two concert bureaus, read
off the same building of plate-glass windows, and had purchased the
score of "Carmen," humming Michaela's aria, in bed of mornings. There
was a letter she had once obtained from Max Rinehardt, addressed:

"_To Whom It May Concern. Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a
period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano of fine
quality._"

Evidently it concerned no one. The clerk at the concert bureau tossed it
aside without comment. Visigoth, when he read it one day in the wings,
returned it in just that manner.

She was secretly ashamed of her professional debut in a role that would
not have survived the ridicule of even Flora Bankhead's easy standards.
Many a time, together at matinées, they had giggled and munched
chocolates over acts that hardly rivaled hers for sentimental appeal of
about one dimension. Plenty of length and no depth.

To a series of colored views thrown upon the screen, Lilly sang from a
dark stage into the warm musk and stale linen-smelling theater, a ballad
as slow and sweet as taffy in the pulling.

"Dressed up in her gingham gown,
Just to come with me to town.
How the sun was shining down!
It seemed to bless our lit-tul wedding day."

CHORUS:

"Darling Sue--e dear,
How I miss your laughing!
Seems to me I hear it in the same old way.
Darling Sue dear, don't believe I'm chaffing.
Bless your heart! I love you in the same old way."

Lights! Revealing Lilly in the pink mull and dangling sunbonnet beside
the blank white screen. They liked her, invariably demanding encore,
this time the words and score of the chorus thrown upon the screen and,
to Lilly's importunings and pretty encouragement, the house joining in.

By arrangement with the publishing house, this exploitation of song hits
cost the Visigoth brothers nothing. In fact the little novelty soon came
to supplement one of the eight acts on the program, thus eliminating
a number.

Each week a new song score bordered in hearts and flowers was thrown
upon that darkness, the audience eager to find a hum in it.

Lilly's second song, "Mamma, Why Are You So Sad To-night?" went even
better than the first, and it so pleased Robert Visigoth, who in those
years had his ears to the ground of the daily audience, to hear them
filing out, whistling and carrying it on little tra-la-las, that he
called Lilly into his office the first day of the second week, to
announce a five-dollar raise in salary.

She had been in the habit of oozing past him rather hurriedly in and out
the dark passages, conscious that his touch was ever ready to slide down
her length of arm, or his knee to find out hers and press it if he sat
down beside her as she waited in the wings.

It was before the realty aspect, the buying, leasing, and selling, of
theater property had engulfed him, and his presence around the theater,
often shirt-sleeved, was hardly a matter of moment.

However favorably he differed in aspect from Lilly's preconception of
the managerial genius, her inhibitions concerning him were strong. She
always sat on the edge of her chair in his presence. To accept so much
as a slip of paper from him meant that his touch would trail to the last
long-drawn second. His eyes had a habit of focusing, seeming to move in
a bit toward the tip of his nose and grill intimately into her being.
And then his wetted lips, as if his mouth were watering.

"You need to be waked up," he said once to her. "You're like a great big
sleepy cat."

She jerked away from his touch and his reference, hurrying from the
theater, as always, immediately after her act, which came first on the
afternoon and evening bill. Secretly she was thoroughly ashamed of what
she was doing, putting each performance quickly behind her.

Six hundred and twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against
her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a
saving prop against the not infrequent sag of her spirit.

She was listed at half a dozen agencies, but nothing presented itself.
Her first hotel bill, twenty-eight dollars, sent her scurrying, against
further and deeper inroads into the chamois bag, to an immediately
adjoining side street of brownstone fronts as without identity as a row
of soldiers, all of them proclaiming the furnished room to that great
sandstorm of New York transients who blow in and out of them in
nameless whirl.

Their dreariness flowed over her in cold, soupy odors, that left a
feeling of a coating of grease over the surface of her. The poor filbert
of gaslight burning into floor after floor of slits of hallway. The
climb after a whole processional of spotty landladies whose shortness of
breath contributed to the odor-laden air.

The room which she finally obtained at three dollars a week was a
third-floor front, shaped like a shoe box, with an aisle of walking
space between the cot and washstand, and as dank to her and as
shiver-inducing as a damp bathing suit donned at dawn.

But the matting on the floor smelled scrubbed, the bathroom at the head
of the stairs contained a porcelain tub instead of the usual horror in
painted tin, and except for June bugs that bumbled all night against her
ceiling, attracted by the incandescence from the theater sign across the
street, was free from those scavengers of bed slats and woodwork which,
often as she inspected from room to room, to her agonized flush, had
crawled across a landlady's very denial of them.

Robert Visigoth had a habit of appraising this ready blush of hers. It
never rushed hotly to her face but what he noted it in persiflage.

"Look at her blush!" he cried, one afternoon as they both stooped to
recover her dropped hand bag, their heads bumping so that they sprang
apart in laughter.

"The idea, Mr. Visigoth! I'm not blushing!" she cried, stinging with her
inability to control the too ready red.

He ran his hand over the smooth glaze of her hair.

"Don't!"

"Let's see if it will muss. I'll wager it's painted on."

"It grows that way," she said, levelly.

"I like it! Clean as a whistle. Interesting. In fact, you're a mighty
interesting young woman, if you want to know it, Miss Luella Parlow."

"What is the song for next week, Mr. Visigoth?"

"'My Pretty, My Pretty,'" he said, his intimate eyes watching her
wriggle, with a sense of being ridiculous, on the hook of his glance.

"I never know how to take you," she flared, infuriated, and rushed
toward the door.

"Take me--with you."

"Really now--this--this is too absurd."

"Where are you going?"

"Home, of course. I have all this time to myself between now and the
evening performance. Why waste it sitting around with the dog and
trapeze acts?"

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