“There is someone Josie wants you to meet.”
The room was so crowded that the pair had to work their way around the cluster at the piano and through several conversational knots. At last they reached the small group of people her hostess had been looking for. A tall man was standing with his back toward them. Maud suddenly regretted that she had agreed to this introduction. What had she been thinking? She started to pull her arm loose of Josie’s mother’s grasp, but Mrs. Baum held tight. With her other hand, she reached out and tapped the gentleman on his arm, and he spun around. Maud found herself face-to-face with a slender brown-haired man with bright gray eyes and a thick, dark moustache. She felt a streak of something dark and hot plunge from her throat down through her belly.
Mrs. Baum gently pushed Maud toward him.
“This is my nephew Frank. Frank, I want you to meet Miss Maud Gage. I’m sure you will love her.”
The young man tipped his head toward Maud, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Consider yourself loved, Miss Gage.”
She could see a twinkle of merriment in the gentleman’s eye. Was he making fun of her? He looked at her as if expecting a response.
“I consider that a promise,” Maud answered tartly. “Please see that you live up to it.”
She whirled away quickly, without giving him any chance to answer, only to see Josie hurrying toward her, her eyes dancing.
“So? What did you think?” Josie whispered. “Good-looking, isn’t he?”
Maud clasped her hands in front of her stomach, attempting to compose herself.
“Well?” Josie said, looking at her friend with great interest.
Before Maud could decide what to say, she was interrupted by Josie’s mother, who gestured them over to the piano to join the carolers.
Maud linked arms with Josie as they sang “The Holly and the Ivy.” Over her shoulder, she heard one of the voices, a silvery, floating tenor, separate itself from the group, chiming in a melodic descant, but she did not turn around to see whose it was. The pianist flipped through a book of popular carols, and Maud and Josie sang joyfully, calling out the names of their favorites, still arm in arm. Maud was so caught up in the singing that she didn’t think of Josie’s cousin at all. By the time they had finished caroling, the young man had disappeared from sight.
* * *
—
SHE WAS SEATED IN another room, chatting with a small group of girls, when she looked up to see that Frank Baum had come in to join her.
“Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing to a nearby chair.
“Please,” Maud said.
“I’m afraid I may have offended you,” he said.
“Not at all,” Maud replied. “If you offend me, you will know it immediately.”
“And how will I know?” he asked, evidently amused.
“Because I’ll tell you.”
“My cousin Josie thinks the world of you. She has told me so much about you.”
“And what kind of things did she tell you?” Maud blushed at the implication. He clearly did not know that Maud heard far too often that people were talking about her.
“Let me see if I can remember….Ah, no need to remember,” he said. “I have it right here!”
He fished into his breast pocket and pulled out a letter, which he began to read aloud.
“?‘We had a most agreeable time on Hallowe’en,’?” he read, in a warm, musical voice. “?‘We girls decided to conduct a séance—’?”
“She didn’t!” Maud exclaimed.
Frank smiled, his expression amiable but not entirely free of mischief.
“?‘All of us got clues about our future husbands—’?”
Maud stood up and tried to snatch the paper from his hand, at which point he smiled and handed it to her.
“?‘Except for Maud. The knocks and raps entirely ceased when we asked about her future husband.’?” He was now reciting from memory. “?‘I should think that the spirits were more terrified of her than she was of them!’?”
Maud’s temper was about to erupt. How could Josie have written to him about the séance? This was certainly not going the way she had expected it to.
“?‘And then,’?” he continued, still reciting from memory, “?‘a tree branch started rapping on the window, and it spelled out the letter F.’?”
Maud wished she could back up to the beginning of this entire meeting and start over. Every time he looked at her, she felt like a loud whirring sound started up in her ears, as though their entire conversation were taking place in a railroad car.
“So, ever since,” Frank concluded, “I’ve been dying to meet you. I wanted to meet a young woman of whom the very spirits are terrified!”
By this point Maud was certain that he was teasing her, even if she couldn’t read it in his expression.
“The spirits are not terrified of me,” Maud said. “Nor I of them. I don’t believe in spirits.”
Appearing amused by this proclamation, the gentleman just stroked his generous moustache with the tip of one slender index finger and said nothing.
Maud was growing frustrated, but she was determined to be cordial, at least for Josie’s sake, so she tried again: “So, tell me, Mr. Baum. What line of work are you in?”
“Actor,” he said. “Director, stage manager. Oh, and writer. Perhaps writer should go first. I’m the principal everything in the Baum Theatre Company. It’s a small company. We travel from town to town putting on our shows. It’s a vagabond’s life, but I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
“Oh,” Maud said. “I don’t know the first thing about theater. How does one go about becoming a theatrical man?”
“Well, I wasn’t fit for anything else,” Frank answered, his eyes crinkling up into a smile. “Not a whit of business sense, I’m afraid—unless that business is magic.”
“Magic?”
His eyes lit up. He spread his arms wide, as if, with his long, tapered fingers, he could cast spells right in front of her.
“Isn’t that what the theater is? You conjure up something out of nothing—you build a whole world from the ground up out of nothing but the images that dance around in your mind. Nothing like it. As to how I got started, my father built a theater for me—down in the oil country. I’m not ashamed to admit I was the beneficiary of his extraordinary largesse—but the plays are all mine. I do it all: the acting, the songwriting, the dancing. I even use the latest fandangos to rig up the sets. But it’s all in the service of the spellbinding, transformative, elusive, otherworldly quest for magic. That’s why I was so eager to meet you, Miss Baum.” He peered into her eyes. “So few young ladies seem interested in this kind of thing. And here is my own cousin’s friend leading a séance—you must be a most intrepid individual.”
His discourse was so odd that Maud was not sure what to make of it, and yet there was something in his manner that had captured her fancy.
“I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not afraid of spirits because I don’t believe in them—not because I’m so intrepid. Although, I daresay, I’m not easily scared.”
Frank was gazing at her with much interest. “You’re not afraid of anything?”
“Well…I didn’t say I wasn’t afraid of anything. I don’t care for scarecrows—and I can’t abide to be teased. Because I lose my temper. I guess I’m a bit afraid of my own temper.”
“Scarecrows?” Frank asked as if this was the most wondrously fantastic statement he had ever heard. “Why don’t you like scarecrows? They can hardly scare a crow—much less a person. Why, I’ve seen scarecrows who were so friendly with crows that they seemed to invite them into the cornfield for company!”
Maud tried in vain to suppress a smile before she burst out laughing. “Our neighbors had a scarecrow in their yard. I could see him from my bedroom window, and I was convinced that he was going to climb down off his perch and come after me!” she admitted.
“You must have been something as a young girl!” Frank said. “I wish I had known you then.”
“Oh, you would have despised me,” Maud blurted out. “I was a terrible tomboy—my mother let me run around in my brother’s cast-off short pants. I climbed trees and shot marbles…the boys teased me, and so did the girls!”
Frank laughed and leaned closer. “I’m certain I would never have despised you!” he said.
“I’m so glad that you two are getting to know each other.” Only now did Maud notice that Frank’s aunt Josephine Baum had been hovering nearby, seeing how the matchmaking was going.
“Miss Gage was just telling me she’s not fond of scarecrows,” Frank said genially. “While I’m rather partial to them—the straw men and I have had some pleasant conversations through the years.”