Chapter Twenty-Seven
1904–1905
The Ring in Danger
He gave me a ring, of course. Maybe he thought that’s what I really wanted. It wasn’t. I wasn’t holding out for a bauble, some kind of material proof of his commitment. It shocked me that he thought that might be what I required. Then it shocked me again that I assumed I knew his reasons. It’s amazing how well you can know someone, how much you can love them, and still not really know what it is they’re thinking.
The ring was lovely and simple. A gold band with a gemstone channel-set into it, very thoughtful, since it wouldn’t catch on my clothes while I was performing. It was a light blue stone, but when I looked at it carefully, it seemed to me to have a kernel of brown inside it, almost like my half-brown eye. If he’d searched to find something unique that reflected my own uniqueness, it was a touching and wonderful gesture. But I didn’t ask him about it. I couldn’t. If I asked about the ring, he would take it as an invitation to talk about the proposal, about whether or not I might accept. I wasn’t done thinking yet. I was afraid to talk at all to him until I knew what it was I was going to say.
I didn’t know what to do with the ring, so I stuck it to my chest with a bit of spirit gum to keep it close to my heart. When I put on my first dress for the evening’s performance, in a spangled blue gown I knew flickered gorgeously in the gas spotlights, I dressed right over it. Between the spirit gum and the tight fabric of the undergarment, I thought it would be safe.
My emotions were affecting me more than I wanted to admit. It was too much at once. My brush with death at the Iroquois. The horror of Ray immediately afterward. Regrets and uncertainties I couldn’t silence. Worst of all, the volatile situation with Clyde, who I needed as my rock. Everything was coming unmoored.
I could almost hold myself together. I knew every moment and every action so well, I only needed to let my body find the memory to carry me forward. We got through Light and Heavy Chest, Woman on Fire, the Magic Milliner, one bit of business after the next. But three-quarters of the way through the act, at a crucial moment of stage patter where I stood alone on the stage, things began to fall apart. I found myself reaching for a coin that, for the first time, wasn’t there.
Had anyone else been on the stage, I could have motioned to them for help. We had a set of prearranged signals for exactly this type of situation. But I was alone, with no one there to assist and a mind as blank as an unpainted canvas.
My choices were to invent a way out or to walk off. I invented a way out. It was all I had been thinking of for days, this ring, and while I didn’t usually do any ring illusions, I remembered the name of one I’d seen in Adelaide’s old notes. It was all I had to help me. I used it.
I reached into the front of my dress, freed the ring, and held it high to catch the light.
“The Ring in Danger!” I cried.
First I made it vanish inside a dainty flowered handkerchief, a simple palming with a misdirect, and it reappeared in the spot over my heart again. I strung it on a flowing crimson scarf, then cut the scarf in tiny pieces and brought it whole from my pocket, with the ring still threaded over the fabric. I used the spare charge up my sleeve from Woman on Fire to make it appear to melt in a burst of flame then pretended to find it intact in the most unlikely place, in the sock of a man in the fifteenth row, nowhere near the aisle.
The illusion was a success, but I felt no pride, only a flat and hazy relief.
After the act, I went to Clyde. I took off my sparkling gown and stockings and corset and underdress and hung them neatly so they didn’t wrinkle. I removed every layer, down to the bare skin. I still felt the wound on my thigh, but I knew what I felt was invisible—while I hadn’t healed, my body had. I scratched away the patch of spirit gum on my chest and left an angry red streak in its place. I tugged the ring off the finger where I’d kept it after the illusion and held it in the palm of my hand. I lay down next to him on the bed, raised myself up on my elbow, and gazed into his face.
He looked at me and said, “You have an answer for me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not going to be the answer I want, is it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Go ahead and say it.”
“Beloved, I’m not going to marry you now,” I said.
He lay back with his eyes closed, his head against the pillow, and said, “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“I love you more than anything else in the world.”
“I know.” He reached out and stroked the side of my face. The feeling of his fingers against my cheek shook my resolve. He was offering me a kind of certainty. The chance to know that no matter where we were or what we did, that I had a person who loved me that much, who always wanted to reach out for me. Proof, or as close to it as one could ever have, that we believed this love would last. Linking just the two of us, forever.
But I couldn’t. It was a trap. He might not mean it as one, but that’s what it would be. I had no second sight, no magical power to see what life would bring, but all the same, I could clearly see our future. We were too strong-willed to be locked together in marriage, a permanent institution. If we tried to hold each other too close, it could destroy us. On some level, we would never trust each other. I was no longer trustworthy, and neither could I believe it of him. Even with the best of intentions, one of us would do the other wrong. It was only a matter of time and chance which one of us it would be. And if we married, my property would be his. My money would build his theater, whether or not I wanted it to. I hated to think that entered into his decision to propose, but I couldn’t be certain it didn’t.
And I couldn’t say any of that out loud.
Tentatively, I told him, “The timing just isn’t right. Maybe we can talk about it after this tour’s over. It’s only a few more months.”
His jaw tightened, tensed. “Fine. I suppose. I just wish we didn’t have to do everything your way.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Yes, we do,” he said. “I have suggestions, I make recommendations, but we always end up squarely where you want to be.”
“And is it so bad?”
“No, darling. I’m happy,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it, or was trying to. “But I think sometimes we could be happy if I got my way too. It would just be different.”
“I’m not ready for different.”
“All right.”
“Can’t we just keep things the way they are? For now?”
“Including your new trick, I suppose.”
I said, “Yes. I’m not going to back down on that, I think you know.”
“I was afraid you’d say that too.”
“And it’s not a trick.”
“Let’s go to sleep.”
***
The fame of the Halved Man grew. Some audience members were still shocked by the boldness of it, but more and more of them bought tickets because of, not in spite of, the illusion. We got more coverage in the papers, higher billing on the posters, more attention in every regard. Even the people who hated it couldn’t stop talking about it. They might even have been talking the loudest. And for every minister or temperance crusader who complained that the Halved Man was a travesty and a sacrilege, there were two or three more citizens who wanted a front-row seat for the hubbub.
To stoke the flames, I decided to make the illusion even more shocking. I did so with the help of our prop assistant who had staged dozens of battles at a Shakespearean theater in Philadelphia and knew all there was to know about fake blood. Eagerly we worked out the best position and the best moment. At the next performance, the blade of the saw pierced a thin membrane, and bright red blood seemed to pour from the severed body, completing the illusion that a man was dying right onstage in front of the audience’s wide, hungry eyes.
And as dark and disturbing as the Halved Man seemed to the world, it made me happy. It made me regain my joy in performing. The fear that had crept back into my life was banished. I could enjoy the applause again, revel in the audience’s amazement. When I bowed low and heaved the blade of the saw through the cabinet, I was fully the Amazing Arden, without even a trace of the Ada I had been. Afterward, once I had shown them I had full dominion over life and death, I raised my arms and drank in their admiration. I’ll admit I enjoyed the power. I think anyone would. Suddenly I was an overnight success, half a dozen years in the making.
I even got a card from Adelaide. She didn’t sign it. She didn’t need to. She only wrote, “Well done. —A.” and I knew I had finally brought myself up to her standard. She was, at last, truly proud of me. That gave me a warm thrill of satisfaction I sorely needed while the other person I most cherished was deserting me inch by inch. Seething. Pulling away.