“Where do you even get these ideas?”
“I’ve read about them in books, of course.”
“Of course you have. You shouldn’t read so many ridiculous books. It isn’t healthy.”
“You were a poor kid and you went and built a fortune. You spent your whole life figuring out how to become something you were not.”
McMahon squinted his eyes at her for a moment, then shrugged her off. It was beneath him to compare their life stories.
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THE DEPRESSION WAS AFFECTING EVERYONE. Rose went to speak to Antoine, the booking agent of the club, one afternoon. He often went down to New York City to find the best acts. He was known for it. He was a middle-aged man with a jet-black toupee and enormous teeth that were always forcing him to grin, and he was known for having an agreeable disposition. Rose met him in the dining hall of the Crescent Dance Hall. It was empty because it was the middle of the day. All the golden chairs were upside down on the tables. He took two chairs off a small table in the center of the room and sat down with Rose. “What can I do for you, darling?”
Rose thought they should try to save money by booking local, undiscovered acts. “I can help you find some. It would be my pleasure.”
Antoine thought it was worth a laugh at least. They went down to Little Burgundy to see some acts in jazz clubs. Rose dressed in a white fur coat with dark swirls of brown, like a chocolate sundae.
They went to a small club that had a balcony that was being rented out as a storage space, and which was stacked with used furniture. There was a scared, skinny singer wearing an ugly dress, who didn’t know what to do with her hair. She warbled so much when she sang that it sounded absurd. Her voice was shaky, like a fawn standing on brand-new legs. Rose thought they should give her a chance.
“When she gets a little bit of confidence, she’ll be wonderful. When she stops singing as though she’s standing in the rain, it will be something.”
Antoine didn’t see it, but he hired her and she turned out to be a favorite at the club. She even wrapped a silver turban around her crazy hair and it became her signature look. She joined a touring American jazz troupe and ended up making cameos in the biographies of several famous men.
Rose told Antoine about a magician who performed at children’s parties. They met him while he was buying doves at the Atwater Market. His hands were all scarred from having been burned in an act gone wrong years before. He said he performed for young children because they couldn’t write reviews. He was down on his luck. He used to make a silver dollar float in the air. The other night he had used a copper penny, which just somehow wasn’t the same and depressed everyone in the room.
At the Roxy the magician had a dove fly out of a wallet. He couldn’t afford an assistant, so he had Rose stand on a small chair as if she were a ferocious lion, and then she disappeared. Rose was really good at coaxing paranoid geniuses out of exile. She had her ear to the ground about new acts too.
There was a teenage boy who was able to do all sorts of tricks on his couch. They sat on the coffee table eating cucumber sandwiches with weak tea that his mother served them as they watched the boy. It was as though the couch were a trampoline—he bounded up off it and did a backflip on one of the armrests.
“He’s been doing that since he was little. It’s annoyed me for years, but I haven’t been able to make him stop. Beating doesn’t work on children anymore. If he’s able to make some money from it, all those years of aggravation would be worth it.”
He leaped off one armrest, did two flips and landed on the other armrest.
Since she seemed to have remarkable intuition, Antoine had Rose oversee the audition for showgirls for a club that was opening in Montreal North. She saw at least two hundred girls that weekend.
Antoine had trouble looking at the chorus line. All the showgirls looked the same. They were so perfectly in sync that, when they performed, it gave the impression that it was just one girl in a hall of mirrors. They came out onstage with their arms around one another like linked paper dolls. He couldn’t believe it. A chorus was giving him a sense of the sublime. And it was made up of working-class girls from Pointe-Saint-Charles!
Antoine suffered a heart attack and died, not because of the chorus line but because of all the smoked meat he had eaten in his life. Rose decided to ask McMahon if she could replace him.
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