Chapter Twenty-One
1901
The Suffragette’s Trunk
After six months, everything felt stable enough to build on. The company grew and so did the act. We began a northeastern circuit, playing midsize cities, some large theaters, some small. We played to a packed house at the Leonard Block in Taunton, which seated a few hundred, and at the much larger Mechanics Hall in Worcester, more than half of the seats went begging. Even when I knew there was no difference in size between the two audiences, I hated to see empty chairs. Without applause, I couldn’t breathe. With it, I felt all-powerful. And as the tour proceeded, even the larger halls began to fill up.
Like Adelaide had done, I gave my favorite girls more responsibilities onstage, and while I was certainly the main attraction, we had a dozen wonderful players, and I wanted to show them all off. Doreen, as Contessa, had developed an impressive talent for fire dancing, so she had her own spotlight, in between the Magic Milliner and the Fair Shake. I brought the Dancing Odalisque out of storage and asked Giulia to invent her own new spin on it, and she came back with the suggestion we make the girl in the picture Botticelli’s Venus and worked with Jeannie to design a costume that cloaked everything precious while seeming to reveal all. Clyde and I discussed its potential and agreed it would be a knockout. It was a hit with the husbands whose wives had dragged them to the show, for certain. The night we performed it in Springfield, rose after rose flew through the air and landed at our makeshift goddess’s feet. A true performer, she did not bend to pick them up. But afterward, I saw the flush in her cheek and smiled that I’d played a part in making the girl so happy.
It was good that I was revising and enhancing the act, since we soon found that my success had inspired some imitators. Clyde brought me word that Arthur Burlingame, an established illusionist in the South, was performing an illusion he called the Enchanted Hat, quite similar to my own Magic Milliner. Other magicians had made key changes to their acts as well. While no one else was bold enough to give a woman billing equal to a man’s, they added to the roles of their female assistants and made their dancers more prominent, to appeal to some of what we’d awoken in the audience’s minds. I smiled to myself even as I muttered under my breath that we’d have to do more, do better, to stay ahead.
While my competitors aped the illusions I’d already done, I worked on newer and more elaborate illusions. One of my favorites was called the Suffragette’s Trunk. It was a variation on a well-known trick called the Saratoga Trunk Mystery, where a man puts a woman into a large bag, locks her in a trunk, then sits atop the trunk. Assistants raise a cloth in front of him, and when they pull it away, the woman is sitting atop the trunk with the man inside, tied in the bag. The mechanisms were simple. There was a false seam in the bottom of the bag where the woman could slip out; there was a panel in the trunk that slid open for the players to make the switch. The main issue was making sure the players moved very, very quickly, as the longer the curtain was up, the less impressive the switch was to the audience. I made it far harder. In the Suffragette’s Trunk, the man and woman took their positions in the bag and the trunk just the same as the Saratoga, but when the curtain was pulled away, the woman was not only sitting on top of the trunk, she was wearing the man’s suit. The man, when freed from the bag, was wearing the woman’s dress. Jeannie, always a genius, had made tearaway clothes for Otis and a new girl named Della, so all they had to do was pull off their first outfits to reveal the second ones underneath. Della was pert and pretty in a brown tweed three-piece suit, and Otis was perfectly lovely in a dress of emerald-green serge. In some cities, the audience laughed so hard they cried.
Also during this time, we added to the company a pair of twenty-year-old twins Clyde found for me in Ithaca who were absolutely ideal. They were like angels with their ringlets of blond hair, and they called themselves Michael and Gabriel. I would have turned them down—their pale curls reminded me of Ray’s—but they were so clearly more talented and eye-catching than all the others, I set my personal feelings aside. It had been so long since Ray. He was in the past. I had only the future. I had a long solid set of bookings yet to come, and a brand new life as the Amazing Arden.
I did many things the way Adelaide had done them, but in one area, I’d chosen to be very different. I wanted my company to feel like a family, and like the mother of any good family, I imposed rules. Every member of the company was required to eat dinner together and make conversation, telling their own stories and listening to others’. We had a very strict curfew and a ban on fraternization. The stiff punishments—a night’s suspension from performance on the first violation, a week’s suspension on the second, and dismissal from the company on the third—kept the boys and the girls out of each other’s arms and beds. There were no repeats of young Jonah’s fate. So as many young people as we added to the company, they treated each other more like brothers and sisters than anything else, which was certainly how I preferred it. My old bunkmates had all left the show when I’d taken over from Adelaide. I occasionally wondered what had become of them, but truth be told, not all that often.
Me, I had found my calling. I loved the crowd, of course. I loved magic. I loved being onstage and making things seem to happen that didn’t really happen. I loved to be looked at and admired. I loved pretending to be a witch one minute and an artist the next, then a society lady, then a woman on fire. I even loved walking onto a stage in a room full of people I knew didn’t like me and working hard to turn them and turn them until I’d won their favor, and at the end, they stood to applaud in a thundering crowd as loud as a train.
What I loved most about the magic I did as the Amazing Arden was that it wasn’t real. I always wondered about Adelaide’s second sight, and whether she had a true power by which she divined people’s secrets. In my act, I left the audience’s secrets alone. I wanted to dazzle them, impress them, fool them in a way that helped them escape their lives. I didn’t need to know anything about them in order to do that. They could be a mystery to me the same way I was a mystery to them. My healing magic was a private secret, not something anyone needed to know or witness. I’d keep myself to myself, and all would be well.
And all was indeed well, until we played the Rialto in Poughkeepsie.
A man shouted “Charlatan!” from the audience. Not remarkable, that a man would shout, but his choice of words set me back on my heels. It was what the man in Hartford had called Adelaide, at the fateful second sight act, and I didn’t care for it. But I soldiered on. The spirit of the show swept me up, and I was deep into the Magic Milliner, with a hat in my hands that I had seemingly produced from nothingness, when I heard the shout again, louder and nearer, “Charlatan!”
I wasn’t on the stage. There was a little staircase we used for this illusion, so I could produce the hat and then walk down into the audience to hand it to an audience member to take home. I was halfway down the aisle, and what scared me about the shout was not its volume, but its direction; he was between me and the stage.
I held the hat above my head in both hands. Usually I would call out, “To whom shall I award this fetching chapeau?” but I couldn’t focus, not with the man coming at me. He was moving slowly, but he was moving toward me, unmistakably.
A fierce cold shiver ran through my whole body, one I hadn’t felt in years. I’d let down my guard. I’d been too comfortable too long. All my good luck was about to change.
Suddenly there was more light—the stagehands had turned the footlights on the audience; I’d missed my cue but they hadn’t—and my vision shifted.
And for a moment, I saw Ray, hulking and dangerous and unstoppable.
It had been years, and I was no less haunted. Suddenly my leg ached where he’d broken it, and I flexed the hand the horse had crushed when I fled from him.
But the man was not Ray. His hair was darker, and he was heavily mustachioed, fingering a lit cigarette.
“You, miss, are a charlatan,” he said, not loudly this time, walking toward me. “A phony. A fake.”
“Sir, I don’t know why you’d accuse me of such a thing.” I spoke with all the calm I could muster.
I lost that calm the moment he lunged at me with the cigarette up and out and forward, aiming to put it out in my eye.
I half fell sideways, desperate to get out of his path, partly succeeding. The burning cigarette landed on my shoulder instead of my face. The man’s weight knocked me off balance. We both tumbled to the floor. The aisles were not wide, and I banged my head on the arm of a seat, and I could see feet scurrying out of the way. Shouts of surprise broke out immediately around us, but for the most part, the audience seemed to be holding its collective breath.
The fear gave me strength, and I wrestled him with my fingers twisted tight in the sleeves of his shirt. The cigarette had slipped under the fabric of my dress, and I could feel it searing my shoulder, smell it burning both flesh and silk. Without another weapon, he was simply trying to punch me in the face, and I kept twisting, dodging, barely avoiding his jabs.
The old litheness, the flexibility I’d built doing Cecchetti exercises for years and years, was still with me. Despite my far smaller size, he was tiring rapidly. I saw an opportunity and took it. I grabbed the hat from where it had fallen and held it over his face. Disoriented, he raised his hands to grab at it, and I reacted reflexively, striking him in the face with the top of my head. My skull rang with the impact. He fell back onto the carpet and lay still for a moment, stunned. I straddled his fallen body and raised my fists and pummeled him, aiming for the center of that hat over and over. I lost track of who or what I was fighting and became pure punishment, nothing but a set of fists.
Someone grabbed me from behind and lifted me off the fallen man, who did not move.
The tension in my body was so fierce it stung. I looked out over the crowd—they were all still seated, watching, waiting, except for whoever had lifted me off my assailant. Perhaps they thought it was part of the act, that one or both of us might transform or disappear. If so, they would be disappointed.
Whoever had grabbed me turned my body around to face him and kept hold of my wrists. He was middle-aged, old enough to be my father if I’d had one. I struggled but not mightily; this one wasn’t trying to hurt me, only hold me still. Even in my desperate state, I could tell the difference.
The new man said, “You’re the stage magician known as Arden?”
“You know I am.” I spoke harshly. Only after that did I recognize that he was wearing a uniform. It was navy blue and heavy, with an insignia on the sleeve. He had a nightstick in his belt. I wished I would have noticed these things earlier.