“And no chest of gold from the Frozen North.”
“I’m lucky to return with all my toes.”
“Hold out your hand.” Bramley digs in his coat pocket, then clinks five Morgan dollars into his palm. “With a touch of moderation, that should last you all night. Or until I win them back from you.”
“You would have made an excellent brother-in-law.”
“You’d have ruined me, Niles.”
Niles slips the coins in next to Harry’s bill and follows Bramley into the saloon. The House of All Nations stays open till dawn.
They stand and cheer for many minutes after, Harry sniffing back the waterworks, so moved that if he was of whole body he would rush out to find a recruiter and sign on for the fight. The orchestra continues to play as the curtain falls, and finally people begin to file out. Harry waits till the aisle ahead is mostly clear, then grabs his hat and hobbles quickly up to the stage. He tries not to use his cane in public, saving it for occasions that require a great deal of walking.
Peachpit is guarding the steps to backstage.
“Evenin, Mist’ Harry. Enjoy the show?”
The old man had smallpox as a boy, his cheeks and neck cratered with scars.
“I thought I might take a look at the apparatus.”
Peachpit begins to shake his head. “What they tole me, Suh, is—”
“I won’t bother the players. I’d just like to see that ship.”
“Well, if that’s all it is—” Peachpit steps aside and Harry climbs past him. Going down stairs presents more of a problem for him than going up. “I’s awful sorry to hear about your brother.”
“What did you hear?”
“Word is he was kilt by one of them polar bears in the gold rush.”
“He’s still with us, I’m afraid,” Harry calls as he steps around the curtain. “He was here tonight.”
“Praise the Lord,” says the old man, pressing his palms together in thanks. “Snatched from the jaws of perdition.”
Backstage, a gang of men slide the enormous scrim that made the ship’s hull toward the wings, its frame slotted into a groove set with bearings. Harry loses his balance trying to keep out of their way and stumbles backward into a small man who seems not to have a task among the swarming stagehands.
Teethadore steadies the fellow and leads him to a safer spot. He recognizes the type — a small-city Reuben dazzled by the footlights.
“I’m afraid that the young ladies aren’t receiving visitors,” he says. “They’ll be rushing off to get their beauty rest.”
“I was actually more interested in the device,” says the rube. There is something wrong with his legs, the sole of one shoe inches thicker than the other. “Whatever you used to make the background views.”
“Ah,” smiles Teethadore. “An aficionado of the illusory arts. Come with me.”
He wears a thicker sole himself, both sides equal, on his street shoes. Stature does not betoken character, of course, but at times the supplementary altitude is most welcome.
“Did you enjoy our little extravaganza?”
“Very much so.” The local fellow is still rubbernecking as they make their way through the maze of props and scenery. “Your turn as Roosevelt was striking.”
Teethadore beams. They all warned him not a soul in Dixie would grasp the reference. “You’re familiar with our former governor?”
“No, actually, I’ve never been to New York—”
“Never been? What a tragedy.”
“I expect I’ll be going there soon.”
“Bully!” Teethadore presents him with one of his cards. “If we’ve completed our tour of the southlands by that time, you’ll have to look me up.”
“Teethadore the Great,” reads the young man. “Actor, songster, and dialectician. Stoddard F. Brisbane—”
“My given name. Civilians call me Brizz.”
“Civilians—?”
“As opposed to thespians.” He winks. “We have our own little rituals. A bit like the Masonic Code.”
The young man offers his hand. “Harry Manigault.”
“A pleasure. And this,” he says as they come to the device, “is the font of all our magic.”
Harry Manigault bends, hands on knees, to peer at the apparatus. The beam remains fixed, pointing toward the audience, while the turret it is housed in can be cranked around in a complete circle, with a slot in which either a single diapositive can be fixed, like the flag or the cemetery scene, or the continuous vista of jungle made by gluing several views into a strip.
“The coloring was beautifully done,” says Harry, giving the crank a little turn.
“You’re a Kodak bug, no doubt?”
“I built my own stereopticon when I was twelve.”
“Impressive.”
Young Harry shrugs. “Merely an application of the principle of binocular vision.” He picks up the fan of colored celluloid the stagehands wave in front of the beam to project the fire. “I’m working on a machine now, something like a zoopraxiscope, only—”
“Reinventing the wheel, are we?”
“It’s a sound principal. And if you’ve only got access to normal cameras—”
“I know Dickson.”
Harry Manigault lays the color fan down. “Mr. Edison’s Dickson?”
Teethadore smiles. “Dickson, Brown, Paley, the whole gang of them over in Jersey. I made a comic view with them — portraying Governor Roosevelt on one of his hunting expeditions. Quite a droll scenario with a shotgun and a small bear in a tree.”
“I’ve never seen the moving ones—”
“We use them for entr’actes in our New York performances. But on the road — the equipment is difficult to maintain.”
“It’s only a kinetoscope, what could be difficult—?”
“You should speak to our stage manager, Mr. Giles.”
“I should.”
A keen fellow, not at all what he expected to find in this section. Teetha-dore adjusts the spectacles he has begun to affect, the lenses only clear glass but the resemblance uncanny when he puts them on and flashes his choppers. “I trust that the temperance biddies have held no sway in your city?”
“You’d like a drink?” asks Harry.
“Sir,” Teethadore replies, spreading his arms in his Need you ask? gesture, “I am an actor.”
Afterward, when the breeze through her window cools her mind, Jessie lies hugging her pillow in her arms. Alma has left her now, she is Jessie again and she is holding him, just holding.
“Royal,” she says out loud, as loud as she dares, and knows that in the saying of it she is forever transformed.
Crows are in the sycamore, already rasping their cries, when the Judge is awakened by banging at his door. The girl, the new one, doesn’t come till seven, and he is greatly out of sorts by the time he finds his slippers and makes it down to see what the racket is.
Maxwell stands at the door, looking red-eyed and sheepish.
“Sorry, Judge.” Maxwell is a competent clerk, but believes he can still burn the candle at both ends.
“What calamity, may I ask, can possibly merit waking me at this hour?”
“It’s your son,” he says, not quite meeting the Judge’s eyes. “There’s a — a situation brewing that I felt you should be informed of.”
He knows not to ask which one it is. Even if he hadn’t seen Harry drag in late last night with whiskey on his breath and preposterous schemes of northern travel on his mind, he would know it was Niles. Three children and only the daughter with a speck of common sense. “Where is he?”