From Time to Time

19

A LONG-HAIRED GIBSON GIRL handed me this program in exchange for two tickets to The Greyhound. She wore a gray uniform dress, big white Buster Brown collar with a huge bow tie, and a button that said Usher. She led us—the Jotta Girl and me—down to seats right on the aisle, and when a twelve-year-old boy in a red bellboy suit with brass buttons came along selling long thin boxes of chocolate mints, I bought one.

I glanced around: people coming down every aisle, edging into the rows. Z would be here, was maybe here right now; maybe I was looking at him. All over the theater splendid long-haired women in high-necked dresses sat removing their enormous hats—carefully, using both hands to lift them straight up, the Jotta Girl one of them. She wore a long pale dress and a pink hat not quite ten feet in diameter. The men, all over the theater: stiff collars, short hair parted in the middle, mostly, some of them wearing pincenez glasses. Would Z be wearing pincenez? I didn’t think so, but maybe.

Up ahead hung the tall and massive red curtain, the heavy gold fringe along the bottom at least a foot long, the velvet folds shadowed by the footlights. Breathes there a man with soul so dead he doesn’t find the moments before the mysterious curtain rise a thrill? Although I remembered that in years ahead theater curtains would vanish, leaving you to sit staring at the empty set until it turned stale, illusion gone.

Beside me, the Jotta girl sat studying her program, and I looked at mine, then counted, and turned to say, “Hey, a cast of twenty-six!” but she didn’t seem impressed. I counted scenes then: six! But didn’t say anything. I was impressed, though, and pleased. I get tired of the same old set all through the play. And tired of only two actors.

I talked a little about Wilson Mizner then, one of the play’s authors, and also something of a crook and confidence man. She seemed interested, which pleased me. It was nice having her along. I liked the Jotta Girl; liked people who like Wilson Mizner. He’d been up in the Yukon during the gold rush of the nineties, not out in the cold and snow but comfortably playing poker with the gold-bearing miners, and mostly winning. One day he sat playing cards in a Yukon saloon and bawdy house, when a man rushed in saying, “Someone just insulted Goldie!” And Mizner, dealing the cards, said, “In God’s name, how?”

The moment came: The houselights lowered . . . held . . . then flicked out, the theater suddenly black dark except for the gas flames standing behind the red exit signs. Then, always and ever a thrill, the swift rise of the curtain, this time, according to my program, on “A San Francisco Boarding House.” And we saw a thinly furnished bedroom: a single window, a dresser, a cast-iron bedstead. At which Ying Lee stood making the bed.

Well, what can I say about Ying Lee? Except that I sat here in a 1912 theater, and that Ying Lee was therefore not a “Chinese” but a “Chinaman.” We knew that, because his eyes were taped into a slant, his skin had been yellowed, he wore black cloth slippers, and his pigtail reached to his waist. And in the moment we saw him up there, carelessly making the bed, the audience reacted not with an actual laugh—he wasn’t doing anything funny yet—but with a murmur hinting of anticipated laughter because . . . well, this was a Chinaman.

“Ying!” a woman’s voice called from offstage, and Ying looked up, his face going stubborn, not replying. He accidentally dropped a pillow, clumsily stepping on it, and got a ripple of laughter. Then in came Mrs. Fagin, the landlady, my program told me. “Why don’t you come when I call you?”

“Me make bed.”

“You know less about making a bed than a mule.”

“Me quit!” He folded his arms.

“Now?”

Ying thought about that. “By and by”—getting his laugh.

“Well, in the meantime go and straighten my room up.” And Ying left—singing what either was or was meant to be a high-pitched Chinese song, and we laughed again.

“Claire” walked on—this was her room—and I took up my program because she was truly lovely: Alice Martin. She began telling her trouble to Mrs. Fagin, and we learned she was married to and deserted by “The Greyhound,” a confidence man who’d treated her badly, though she still loved him. But I started to lose track of the plot because I’d begun listening less to their words than to the odd sound of their voices. And realized that, without microphones, their voices carried out to us oddly, absorbed instantly by our several hundred bodies. This curious deadened sound, flat and echoless, was strangely compelling, making the actual presence of the actors up there extraordinarily real.

I also sat waiting for witty Mizner lines, but wasn’t hearing any. Claire and Mrs. Fagin exited, Ying and McSherry came on, and we learned that McSherry was a reformed card shark, now a detective, in love with Claire, and so forth. “Mrs. Fagin upstair,” Ying said. “You wait.”

“Well, maybe you can tell me something,” McSherry said, and brought out a big sheet of red paper in such a way that we could see it was written in Chinese characters.

Ying glanced at it. “No sabby.”

“That’s too bad,” said McSherry. Then, suddenly and loudly, “Sim yup tong!”

Instantly Ying reacted, because it turned out that this was a command from his tong, never to be disobeyed. Immediately servile, terrified, Ying shouted “Ni ha limya!” or something like that, snatching the paper, turning to face us as he read it silently, head moving up and down the vertical columns.

“You sabby now?”

“Mebbee.”

McSherry pulled up his left sleeve to show a scar on his wrist. Ying Lee looked at it, consulted the red paper, looked back at the wrist, apparently checking the scar against a description of it. “This Chink’s from Missouri,” McSherry said, to the audience.

Wilson Mizner? The celebrated wit? I refused to think so. Looking at the red paper, McSherry said, “Looks like a bill for tearing up a shirt.” When McSherry asked where Claire’s husband was, Ying said, “He come by and by,” and McSherry said, “To a Chink ‘by and by’ means two minutes or forty years. Which do you mean?”

“He come yesterday. One o’clock.”

“What time the day before?”

“Seven weeks.”

Well, the audience liked it. And I was part of the audience, so I laughed with them. But . . . ?

Mrs. Fagin and McSherry advanced the plot: he was here to help Claire because he was in love with her himself. Then along came a line I’d read sarcastically referred to in the Times review. McSherry, speaking angrily to Claire’s husband, The Greyhound, said, “Any man that can’t go straight on his own, don’t do it for a woman after he’s got her!”

“Ain’t it the truth!” Mrs. Fagin exclaimed up there on the stage, and I sneaked a glance at the Jotta Girl, and then at the audience immediately around me. They sat smiling, enjoying the play, but not taking lines like that any more seriously than I did.

A couple of times in the same scene, when McSherry was affected by the powerful emotion of his love for Claire, he did something that surprised me. He’d turn away, and stand with his back to the audience, shoulders bowed—something I’d never before seen an actor do. An acting convention of the time, I suppose, to show emotion so strong the face must be averted. I’ve heard that a ballet dancer, working hard and sweating, will seize an instant when her back is momentarily to the audience to wipe sweat from her face with a lovely wrist movement, then fling her arm gracefully out to flick the sweat away. Maybe McSherry, I thought now, was up there, back to the audience, making funny faces.

As he and Mrs. Fagin finished, Ying came in with a broom. “Me make sweep?”

Mrs. F. stepped back in astonishment. “First time in his life he ever asked to work!” When McSherry and Mrs. Fagin left, Ying’s sweeping slowed till the broom was barely moving, no longer quite touching the floor, a Chinese Stepin Fetchit.

Act One pretty well laid out the plot: A group of con men and a woman were sailing to Europe in order to fleece a rich family aboard the ship. And I was wondering if maybe Wilson Mizner had personal knowledge of how that was done. I liked the gang’s names: The Greyhound, Whispering Alex, Deep Sea Kitty, and The Pale Face Kid, so called, I understood when he first walked out onto the stage, because his face was so red. “You’ll be in the way on this trip, Kid,” said Deep Sea Kitty.

“Why?”

“On a first-class ship people wear garments, eat with their forks, and change their clothes to sleep!”

“I could learn all that in a week!” said the Kid, and I laughed, and nodded—I thought that had the raffish Mizner touch. But mostly this play seemed to me as if it might have been laid out of an afternoon. Over drinks.

I’d been careful not to read the scene description in my program. I wanted the little surprise I got when the curtain rose, this time on Act Two, the deck of a ship, and it was fine.

There it all was: people reading in deck chairs; others leaning on the rail to stare off at the sea and painted backdrop of sky and clouds; a very real-looking lifeboat; a radio shack; even a couple playing that shipboard game where you toss rings. And when I glanced down at my program I saw that this was “The Hurricane Deck of H.M.S. Mauretania.” I’m one of those people who are fascinated by the great old ocean liners; who like to read about them, and stare at their pictures wondering what it had been like to sail on them. And of course the Mauretania was possibly the most loved of all the splendid old liners—was this really what the Mauretania looked like? I sat forward, studying the set, and—well, who could say? But this looked real, even the deck seemed like genuine ship’s planking.

The Times later published a layout of scenes from the play; these are a couple of them. The people aren’t overacting as much as their photographs may suggest; they’re posing for a slow camera, I think, holding an expression not too easy even for actors. Wearing caps and hats was okay for this audience; all men wore one or the other outdoors. This flag-holding bunch—a Mizner comic touch?—are superpatriot hicks from Lima, Ohio: they’re the rich family the crooks are about to meet with a forged letter of introduction.

Suddenly we all jumped: from the radio shack up there on the stage came a startling sound burst, a hissingly electric dit-dit. Dit-dit-dit! Dit-dit-dit-dit-dit! And we sat up and paid attention. Wireless messages at sea were new in this world, and this was a new and thrilling sound. The rapid, sparking dit-dit-dit stopped, all the passengers staring at the radio shack. And a moment later a man in ship’s uniform came out with a piece of paper. “Aerogram!” he called. “Aerogram for Foster Allen! Aerogram for Mr. Allen!” and off he went hunting for him.

It was a fine touch, I thought, and from time to time throughout the play, sometimes for reason of plot and sometimes not, that exciting dit-dit . . . dit-dit-dit would come sparking out to startle and please us.

I began to suspect that The Pale Face Kid was Wilson Mizner’s creation and favorite, because he seemed in on most of what I took to be Mizner lines. On deck trying to make conversation with Etta, a good-looking young passenger, he had trouble finding something to say, and finally blurted out, “Did you notice the sea?”

And later, playing shuffleboard with Etta, he did pretty well even though it was his first time. Where had he learned? Etta wondered. “Used to play it all the time,” said the Kid, “at home on the lawn.”

“On the lawn? Can you slide them on the grass?”

“Of course not,” said the Kid, thinking fast. “Ah . . . we used to roll them.”

To Deep Sea Kitty, he said, “Can you get a lawyer to do that?”

“Sure! I could get a lawyer to scuttle this ship for the court costs.” And: “When the time comes for perjury, we’ll coach you like a first-class lawyer would.” When a passenger asked the Kid, “Where do you stop in London?” the Kid said, “Westminster Abbey.”

I thought I saw another aspect of the strange and contradictory Mizner in a deck scene between McSherry and a detective who was on board to help him with the crooks. The dinner gong had rung, everyone else gone, and talking to McSherry, the detective noticed something in McSherry’s inside coat pocket. He reached forward to tap it, saying, “Looks like a green baize shuffling board in your pocket.” A what? I’d never heard of such a thing, and I don’t think the audience had. But “a green baize shuffling board” could hardly be an invention, could it? McSherry said, “I shuffle sometimes when I’m thinking, but I don’t play anymore.” And when the detective left, McSherry sat down, brought out a marvelous little foldup board, and opened it to form a green-covered surface on his lap. Then, staring thoughtfully out to sea, his hands endlessly and fluently shuffled a deck of cards. Who would carry a foldup board just for shuffling? Nobody except a man practicing undetectable crooked shuffles. Did this come out of Wilson Mizner’s own strange past? I’ll bet it did. But watching McSherry up there, I wanted a green baize shuffling board too. Dit-dit-dit-dit-dit! said the radio shack, McSherry jumped up, and the play continued.

Curtain down on Act Two, houselights up, and out to the lobby for intermission, and some kind of pink stuff to drink. Then back for a fast curtain rise on what looked like and was a poker game in a smoky cabin, portholes on the back wall.

The Times’s advance review said, “That poker game was a delight,” and it was. Because it seemed real, a poker game right out of Wilson Mizner’s life, I was sure of it. The men up there in shirtsleeves, vests hanging open, puffing real smoke from real cigars, talked like real poker players. “Great draw, wasn’t it?” said one grinning player, pulling in a pot, and a sour loser replied, “Never mind the ancient history.” A player dropped out of a pot, throwing in his losing hand and saying disgustedly, “Fight it out between you.” A man walked around his chair to change his luck. “Say, don’t you ever ante?” one player said to another. “Sure,” was the answer, “when forced.” Looking up there at the players on the stage around a hexagonal poker table in “The Card Room: Evening, Same Day” was like watching an actual game. They said and did what poker players really say and do. “You couldn’t open your mouth with these,” said a player of his cards. A loser whose turn it was to deal started gathering up discarded cards, saying irritably, “Come on with the discards. Speed! Speed! Discards!” “I can’t draw my breath,” said another disgusted loser. A man laid down a winning hand of three kings, saying, as poker players probably always will, “Three monarchs of all they survey!” The steady obligatory insults never stopped. “You deal like you’re dividing a box of soda crackers.” This fine Wilson Mizner poker game ended with McSherry using his old skill as a former card shark, refined just before the game with practice on the green baize shuffling board, to outwit the con men by dealing from the middle of the deck.

The red velvet curtain came down on the climax of the scene, the crooks outwitted by McSherry, the sucker raking in his huge pot. And then—I counted—there were seven curtain calls just for the scene, the play not over. Each call built to growing applause, the sixth being the sucker, who walked out for his bow with his hands full of the money he’d just won—which brought down the house. And finally McSherry, and we really and truly gave him a great hand—he’d just outwitted the crooks! Then, the applause dying, we all sat grinning, the theater buzzing with talk: we were loving this.

Fourth act, curtain rise on the thrilling dit-dit-dit-dit from the radio shack—“Midnight on the Hurricane Deck”—and the play pretty quickly resolved itself. Finally—the gang outfoxed by McSherry, the reformed cardsharp—The Greyhound either jumped or fell to his death over the side of the ship in the last and best effect of the play. We saw him plunge over the side . . . then silence through a long two seconds, the others up there on the hurricane deck staring down after him, horrified . . . Then we heard the splash! Heard it, and an instant later saw the top of an actual spout of water appear at the ship’s rail! And—a brilliant touch—this splash appeared a little further down along the rail because the ship, you see, was moving. “Man overboard!” someone yelled, and with my lovely Claire in McSherry’s arms, the final curtain began descending to—don’t ask me why—the wonderfully, hissingly dramatic dit-dit-dit of the wireless. And then, for the very first time in the play, a sudden blast of sound filling the theater, shaking the walls, from the great ship’s horn blasting over and over along with that urgent dit-dit-dit as the swaying gold tassels gradually lowered. You couldn’t think for the sound, and we went wild, went crazy. For this we’d have pounded our palms if we hadn’t even seen the play.

But I didn’t forget why I was here. Got my hat from under my seat, swung my legs out to stand in the aisle, and, crouching low, hustled up the dark aisle; and the deep blast of the horn and the electric sparking dit-dit-dit of the wireless gave a wild urgency to what I was doing, a thrill of drama and excitement. Z would be out there. He really would, I knew it! Out on the walk in the next few minutes, and I’d be there waiting to see his face.

Across the tiled floor of the lobby, empty except for a pair of Gibson girls talking, and I was the very first of the audience to reach the sidewalk in front of the Knickerbocker. Somewhere, maybe a block or so away, the Dove Lady was walking toward me.

A man came out of the theater, glanced at me, carefully fitted on his derby, then walked off. Up the street the Times tower stood against the blue-white sky. Three women came out of the theater, all talking, laughing, none listening. A few more . . . Then suddenly the crowd came surging through every door, some immediately walking off, but a lot of them simply stopping dead on the walk to chatter. Now pedestrians had to wind their way through this swelling crowd, and I stood watching, excited but worried. Because I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, and when the Dove Lady came walking by, as she would . . . with Z staring after her, as he would . . . just what would I see? What if “Dove Lady” was only a name, nothing I could actually recognize?

I moved away, toward a drugstore on the corner, to get a clear view of this fast-growing throng. An empty wooden box lay at the curb, half in the gutter, and I nudged it out with my foot and stepped on it, a little island. Because what if she were there right now this very instant and I was missing her? On impulse I brought out my camera, unfolded it, and snapped these views, of the beginning crowd, figuring that if I missed the Dove Lady, I might spot her and Z later somewhere in my photos.

The crowd kept rowing, and I wound back my film.

But no more than maybe a minute or so later, the crowd became a mob. A dozen Dove Ladies could be marching toward me now as I stood staring, looking for who knew what. Nervously now, I again wound my film forward, and got this mob scene.

Was the Dove Lady somewhere in this? Well, why not? Could be a whole flock of them.

A pair of particularly fine-hatted women came walking toward me, glancing up at me on my box. And it seemed almost obligatory, only polite, to lift my camera and snap them here. But the viewfinder of my Kodak was about the size of an ordinary postage stamp, so I didn’t notice the woman just behind them—see her there?—until I lowered my camera. Then, as she passed my box, I looked down and saw the stuffed-bird ornament on her hat, saw its round vacant little glass eye. And saw the eye close, then open again—the bird was alive! And the bird was a dove—I’d snapped the Dove Lady! And somewhere back in that crowd, maybe still staring after her, was Z. As I leaned forward to search the crowd for him, a huge pink something moved before my face, filling my vision, blocking off the crowd. And in the middle of that great wheel of pinkness, the Jotta Girl’s face looking up at me to say, “What in the world are you doing!”

I stood frantically waving her away, wanting to shove her to one side, and she did move aside, but the crowd had shifted like the revolving bits of a kaleidoscope, and Z and my moment, my one chance of spotting him, were gone, used up.

When I got back my roll of film, I had this portion of the print enlarged, and here it is, this is the moment my camera’s eye saw but I didn’t. I’d stood squinting down at my gray little postage-stamp viewfinder as my camera took the Dove Lady—see the live dove on her hat? And I’d looked up from my viewfinder at nothing but the great pinkness of the Jotta Girl’s hat! Hadn’t seen the Dove Lady till she walked past me, my moment gone.

“Let’s get a cab,” I said brusquely, stepping to the curb, where I yanked open the passenger door of a big red cab. Then I ushered the Jotta Girl in, saying “Plaza Hotel” to the driver, and slammed the door, turning away as it pulled out into the Broadway traffic, before I said something I shouldn’t.

Down the walk, as I turned, I could still see the Dove Lady’s hat, saw the startled faces of pedestrians as they glimpsed the living bird. I knew where she was going. I’d seen her photograph in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, a bird perched on each shoulder. This was our Bird Lady, a vaudeville performer, now all mystery, all interest in her gone. And I turned away to walk back to the hotel, and cool off; it wasn’t really the Jotta Girl’s fault.

It’s a twenty-block walk, and I was okay when I came into the lobby—and found the Jotta Girl waiting in a straight-backed chair right beside the elevator doors. No acknowledgment of my innocent smile of happy surprise. She simply stood up, and when the elevator doors opened, stepped in with me, saying, “Tenth, please.” Then she just stood staring at the back of the elevator boy’s pillbox hat, till he opened the doors on ten.

Then, doors sliding shut, she turned to face me and, voice icy, said, “Now. I demand an explanation of your astonishing rudeness.” Down the corridor a man turned a corner to come walking toward us, room key dangling in his hand. “Wait.” She walked by me, passing two closed doors, feeling in her handbag. Brought out her key, bent forward to unlock her door, then gestured me in with an irritated jerk of her chin. Door closed, she walked past me—a big room, larger than mine—then turned to face me. “Well?”

I was ready. “I’m very sorry. And I do apologize. But I can’t really tell you much. I’m a . . . kind of detective, you might say. I’m looking for someone. I was about to get in the cab when I thought I saw him, that’s all. So I just closed the door—”

“Slammed it.”

“I suppose. But I was in a hurry, couldn’t take time to explain or I’d lose him.”

“And—was it your quarry?”

“Nope. Wrong man.”

She stepped closer to study my face. “Si, is this true?”

“Sort of. Fairly close.”

She stood looking up at me, then did this fine thing women sometimes do: put a hand on each shoulder, her forearms on my chest. This does something to your arms; you can’t let them just hang there. So it was not of my own volition, it really was not! She was so close, I could smell her perfume, and she was so good-looking, that my arms just rose up, went around her, and I was kissing her before I could take control, kissing her hard, pulling her tight against me. Then—the little man in my head running for the controls, hanging on to the levers, fighting them, I—and oh, I didn’t want to, I was so aware that I did not want to—I dropped my arms and stepped back fast. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t intend it.”

She just smiled, nodding. “I know. But I did. It’s my fault. You’re a good loyal husband, aren’t you. Well, sit down, Si; I won’t chase you.”

I couldn’t run screaming out of the room, and I walked over to a window chair. “Damn right it’s your fault. You’re too attractive. Much too.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to slowly take off my clothes—”

“Hey! Shut up, okay? Just shut up.”

“Of course I’d help! I’d unhook the—”

“Come on now.”

“Okay. But it’s too bad.”

I didn’t nod, but didn’t shake my head either, because it was too bad. Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t this be just a—just kind of separate from everything else. A sort of separate little island not connected . . . Enough, enough, and I stood up. “My goodness, just look at the time.”

“Okay, I’ll let you go.” She walked to the door, then turned to me, hand on the knob. “But you know why I’m here, Si? In New York? I’m spending a small inheritance, that’s all. Using it up, having a bit of fun. So why don’t you let me help you? I have the time, and there must be something I could do to help.”

“Sure,” I said. “Fine, okay.” She opened the door, and I made a little show of sidling past her looking scared, she made a fake little lunge, and we smiled. Then I headed for my room, only three doors down, still smiling; I liked the Jotta Girl just fine.