The smile disappeared. He said, “I had trouble finding the place.”
“Funny how no one else did. You’re fired,” I said. “Get out.”
He scowled and started toward me. I thought for a moment he might even hit me, but I didn’t let myself cower.
Clyde clapped a hand on his shoulder and stopped him still. “We’re done here.”
Deliberately, silently, I turned my back.
My heart was hammering as I readied myself to go back onstage, but I wasn’t sorry. Boundaries had to be set. If I didn’t establish my authority now, I would never get it back. The first time had to be the only time for any misbehavior, or we’d be sunk.
That unpleasantness out of the way, I found the audience more responsive as we presented our second half hour. They applauded in the right places and laughed as they should. When I asked for volunteers, a smattering of hands went up, both male and female, which I was heartened to see.
At the end, as we made our bows and curtsies, the audience cheered us. It hadn’t been the success of Adelaide’s farewell show—not even an echo of it—but neither was it a failure. It would do to start with, and to build on.
With the next twelve shows set up and the logistics of the train already arranged to get us from one to the next—the gift of Adelaide’s railcars, including her sumptuous home on wheels, being one of her most valuable—I knew we were only at the beginning of everything. I was ready to look forward, and go forward, an optimist.
***
The first month, at Clyde’s suggestion, I didn’t emphasize my womanhood. I wore a man’s evening suit of tailcoat and trousers, carefully tailored to my slightly curved shape, complete with a matched waistcoat, white bow tie, and black top hat. It was his belief that this would make me seem even more of a novelty, a woman with the spirit of a man and yet not one. The audiences liked it fine, but I liked it less and less each night. I didn’t feel like myself. As we began the second month of shows, I appeared onstage one night in one of Adelaide’s old costumes altered to fit my smaller shape, a frothy confection of white organza that made me look like an elegant ghost, and after that, the tails hung unused on one of Jeannie’s costume racks. Clyde said nothing. I felt like I’d won an important victory, even though we hadn’t been in battle. It was harder to hide away props and charges in the sleeves of a gown than of a tailcoat, but I assumed the challenge as part and parcel of the female magician’s lot and adapted quickly.
And as the second and third months went by, every part of the act become second nature. My gestures became more confident. My patter between illusions got smoother. I developed a better sense of what played best with a particular crowd and learned how to adjust my presentation on the fly. The longer we were on the road, too, the more confident and relaxed the other performers became, and we could all feel the difference, both onstage and off. We’d started out as survivors of Adelaide’s company, but now we were our own company, and I was glad.
Once things were solid enough, we hired two more performers, a round-cheeked Pennsylvania farm girl named Doreen and a dusky-skinned young woman named Giulia who could pass for Hindoo, Italian, Spanish, or any other exotic nature called for. Giulia kept her name, but Doreen I renamed Contessa. She protested that she felt odd not using her real name, and I felt a bit of Adelaide’s spirit in me as I informed her, “They are all real.”
And instead of hiding my gender and trying to do a man’s work onstage, I redesigned the whole act to celebrate womanhood. I dreamed the name Woman on Fire and devised an illusion to match it: a young woman dances alone on a stage in a soft white light then dances with a handsome young man as the light begins to glow red like embers, and as he spins her faster and faster, she seems to explode, leaving his arms empty, and the lights give way to darkness. It could be done in nearly any theater, since the lighting did most of the work, and a nimble girl could do the rest. The implication was a bit risqué, but not too shocking for the audience if the rest of the evening were properly reserved. To balance it, I invented the Magic Milliner, a version of the Dove Pan that produced a beautiful hat out of nothingness, which one woman a night from the audience was allowed to keep. Clyde found a place below Canal to buy them by the dozens. I dropped the card tricks entirely, feeling like they didn’t make sense for the new act. Instead, I taught them to the newly christened Contessa so I could call on her to fill time between illusions in an emergency and gave her several of Adelaide’s treasured decks.
I also invented a new coin trick, almost by accident. For some of the close-in magic, I liked to walk down into the audience, so close to them that my skirt would brush their arms. I was spinning a silver coin between my fingers, saying, “And this coin, I must tell you, it’s simply an ordinary coin. Would anyone like to take a closer look? Prove to us all it’s nothing remarkable?” And as I always did, I scanned the audience to find someone to offer the coin to then noticed an unusual pair a few rows up.
The man was brightly dressed in a resplendent suit. His silk tie was a brilliant crimson, the silk square in his pocket perfectly chosen to coordinate, in a repeating pattern of crimson and cream. The woman next to him, clearly his wife, was drab by comparison, in a faded dress the color of bricks. She was craning her neck to get a closer look at the coin, her hand outstretched, offering to take the coin for examination. Her husband, not even glancing her way, pushed her hand back down to her lap, not gently, and reached his own hand out instead.
I felt sorry for the woman, clearly the peahen to a peacock, and I wanted to do something for her. The idea came to me immediately. “Ah, I seem short of coins tonight. Sir, might I have the coins from your pocket?”
Clearly proud to be singled out, the man didn’t hesitate. He produced a leather wallet and poured a small river of coins into my waiting hands. I also asked for and received the square of silk from his pocket, wrapping the coins inside. I raised the bundle over my head, shaking it vehemently, repeating the words “Shake, shake, shake, shake.” On the final shake, I thrust my hands upward, and the square of silk flew up into the air, empty, and fluttered slowly back down to earth.
There was a murmur, and people looked around.
“Madam,” I said to the peahen, “if you’ll look into your purse, you might find a pleasant surprise.”
She opened the purse, and with a cry of delight, pulled out her own coin purse, now heavy with her husband’s coins.
I announced to the crowd, “You see here I’ve taken the money from a husband’s pocket and put it in his wife’s. And this is what we call the Fair Shake.”
The applause started immediately, but what truly gave me joy was seeing how the woman put the purse in her lap, coins still inside, and folded her hands over it with a satisfied smile.
***
The new act was a hit. I noticed right away, after only a few weeks, that the audiences were changing. Not only were we filling the house, but there were different people in the crowd. More women, of every stripe. Contessa remarked on it, and so did Otis. The whole company realized that we were doing something no one else had done, and it was a source of joy to us as well as them.
It was not a bad life. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. And I was becoming more of a success every show, every night. I wasn’t into the big time yet, but the whole company could feel that we were headed in that direction. Clyde had booked individual shows at first, but as my reputation began to spread, we were ready for our first three-month vaudeville circuit. We began in the South, a lovely place to spend the winter, and traveled through Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, concluding with a performance in New Orleans at the St. Charles Theatre that took my breath away. The applause got louder, and every night as I heard excitement and surprise ripple through the crowd, I felt ever more powerful. The optimism I had forced myself to adopt in the beginning was now earned, and I couldn’t imagine feeling any other way.
And the truce with Clyde held. We worked together exactly as Adelaide had intended; I was the performer, the creative one, and he had the head for business. He spent most of his time in New York while I was on the road, but I returned to the city once a month, and we went over the books and the act and our plans for the future. He occasionally bristled at my suggestions for new illusions—“Why fix what isn’t broken?” he’d ask and expect an answer—but once he saw how the attendance numbers were not just holding but rising, there were few complaints.
The more time I spent with him, the more I came to respect him. He was sharp as a tack and good with numbers. Keeping track of who owed us money and who we owed money to would have driven me to distraction; he not only embraced it, but also displayed a gift for getting reluctant debtors to cough up what was past due. He put on his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and leaned over the columns of numbers as if nothing in the world was more important than those little red and black figures. When I heard him talking to theater managers, I was always impressed with how natural the conversation sounded, as if every man running every theater was his true friend. There were still elements of his character I wasn’t sure about—his tales of what he’d done in New York City were endless and seemed like years’ worth, not months—but he was a man of his word. Other than the handshake I’d agreed to in the library, he never even tried to touch me. If from time to time I looked down at his well-kept fingernails and remembered the feeling of them years before, gritty with dirt from the rose garden, hauling my bare legs up onto his lap, I brushed it away instantly and came back to the present. We were no longer the children we’d once been.