Part 3

The family council prudently allowed Mark to adopt his brother’s orphan, Margaret. He sometimes borrowed Gurdy Bernamer to keep the dark child company in his New York flat. By 1905 the borrowing settled into a habit. Gurdy provided activity for a French nurse and then for an English governess despatched by Olive Ilden. He was a silent, restless creature. He disliked motorcars for his own unrevealed reason that they resembled the hearses of his uncle’s funeral. He had a prejudice against small Margaret because she looked like her dead mother, an objectionable person smelling of orange water, and because Mark made a fuss over the child. He learned to read newspapers, copying Mark’s breakfast occupation, and in September, 1907, noted that Carlson and Walling would tonight inaugurate their partnership by the presentation of “Red Winter” at their new 45th Street Theatre. “Inaugurate” charmed Gurdy. It conveyed an image of Mark and the bony Mr. Carlson doing something with a monstrous auger. Mark had for ever stopped acting in May, would henceforth “manage.” Curiosity pulled Gurdy from the window seat of his playroom in Mark’s new house on 55th Street. He waited for a moment when the governess, Miss Converse, was scolding young Margaret and wouldn’t see him slide down the hall stairs. He scuttled west, then south and navigated Broadway until he reached the mad corner of 45th Street where a gentleman took him by the collar of his blouse and halted him.

“Where are you going?”

Gurdy recognized a quiet character who came to luncheons now and then. He said, “H’lo, Mr. Frohman,” dutifully and looked about for the theatre. The stooping man detained him gravely.

“I thought you weren’t old enough for shows.”

“I’m looking for Mark.”

Mr. Frohman chuckled, leaning on a stick. He said, “He’s in his office.”

“Where’s that?”

Gurdy stared past the pointing stick and saw a cream face of columns and windows. He saw the stone above a ring of heads. People were gaping at his calm acquaintance as if this plump, tired man was a kicking horse. He remembered civility and asked, “How’s your rheumatism?”

“Better,” said Mr. Frohman and limped away.

Gurdy pushed scornfully through the gapers and trotted into the white vestibule of the theatre where men were arranging flowers--horseshoes of orchids, ugly and damp, roses in all tints, lumps of unknown bloom on standards wrapped in silver foil. A redhaired, hatless youth listed the cards dangling from these treasures and told Gurdy to go to hell when Gurdy asked for his uncle but another man nodded to stairs of yellow, slick marble. On the landing Gurdy found a door stencilled in gold, “Carlson & Walling.” The door opened into a room hung with photographs where Gurdy saw Mark sitting on a table, surrounded by men. Mr. Carlson, already sheathed in winter furs, bullied a carpenter who corrected the lower shelf of a bookcase. Gurdy stood wondering at the furious shades of neckties and the grey hard hats which Miss Converse thought vulgar.

“My God,” said Carlson, “Mark, look at that comin’ in!”

Mark groaned. He had a compact with Mrs. Bernamer that the borrowed boy shouldn’t enter a theatre until he was twelve. He was tall enough for twelve but he was only nine. He stayed in the doorway, studying the red walls of the room, his white socks far apart and his hands thrust into the pockets of his short, loose breeches. The callers stared at the tough legs brown from summer on the farm. The boy’s one patent beauty, his soft, pale hair, was hidden by his English sailor cap and his white blouse was spotted with ink stains. But the men grinned and chuckled, admiringly. Gurdy made no sound when Carlson set him on the top of the bookcase but gazed contemptuously at the crowding men and let himself be petted.

“When d’you inaugurate, Mark?”

“Eight fifteen, when you’ll be in bed, sonny.”

Gurdy drawled, “I don’t get to bed till quarter of nine and you ought to know that by this time.” He frowned, partly closing his dark blue eyes, as the men laughed. “What are all those flowers for?”

A man in a corner lifted his white face from a book and whispered, “Those are gifts the Greeks brought.” This caused stillness, then unpleasing chuckles. Gurdy climbed down from the bookcase and went to talk to Mr. Fitch. They talked of French lessons and the vagaries of governesses. The other callers complimented Mark on the boy’s good looks. The flattery was soothing after the strain of the last rehearsal. Mark knew it for flattery. Gurdy’s face was too long, his sober mouth too wide and his jaw prematurely square. But the compliments were the due of a successful actor turned manager. He sat for a little watching Mr. Fitch lazily chat with the boy as though he were a grown man. On the playwright’s warning he had lately published a careful interview announcing Gurdy and Margot as adopted children and his relationship to them. But people still probably reported Gurdy an illegitimate son and Margot his daughter by Cora Boyle. Mark sighed and took Gurdy down through the flowers to see the cream and gold play house where men were squirting perfume from syringes along the red aisles, killing the smell of paint. He let Gurdy have a syringe and went into the vestibule. The redhaired clerk listing the gifts of other managers handed him the card wet from its journey in a ball of pink roses.

“Mrs. Cosmo Rand.... Who the devil’s Mrs. Cosmo Rand, Billy?”

The clerk scratched his ear and grinned. “You’d ought to know, sir.”

“But I don’t. Cosmo Rand? Heard of him. Loeffler’s got him in something. Who’s she?”

“Miss Cora Boyle,” said the clerk and strolled off to insult a messenger bringing in more flowers.

Mark had a curious, disheartening shock. He didn’t bow to Cora Boyle on the street. What right had she to send him flowers? It must be a passing rudeness. She might remember that he disliked pink roses. Mark rested on the ledge of the box office, brooding. But she might mean to be pleasant. Her manager, Loeffler, was on bad terms with Carlson. This might be a dictated, indirect peace offering. Mark patted the florid carved stone of the ledge and thought. Cora’s new play wasn’t a success. The reviews had been tart. She might be tired of Loeffler. Mark was perplexed but the hunt for motives always wearied him. A scarlet petticoat went by outside the vestibule and led off his mind. He bade his treasurer telephone for the motor and stood joking with the man through the box office window until a flat stop in the noise behind him made Mark turn his head. The florists and clerks were motionless, regarding the street. A coupé had stopped. A footman was helping a woman and a tumult of varied flowers to the sidewalk. She came toward the doors gallantly, her face quite hidden in the enormous bouquet but the treasurer said, “By gee, I’d know her in hell, by her walk,” and chuckled. She tripped on the sill and screamed gaily to Mark, “Au s’ cours!”

Mark jumped to catch the sheaf of yellow roses. Miss Held waved her grey gloves wide and dipped her chin. “Je t’ apporte une gerbe vu que t’es toujours bon enfant, Marc Antoine! And ’ow does Beatriz get along to teach you French?”

“Pretty fair. Haven’t had much time lately. Thought you’d taken your show on the road, Anna?”

“Nex’ week.” Up the staircase some one began to whistle “La Petite Tonkinoise.” The little woman vibrated inside the grey case of her lacy gown and pursed her lips. “Oh, but I am sick of that tune! Make him stop.” The whistler heard and ceased. Miss Held swayed to and fro among the flowers, noting cards. She adopted a huge orchid for her waist and smiled down at it. A dozen grins woke in the collecting crowd. Mark was aware of upholsterers oozing from the theatre. Miss Held hummed from gift to gift, murmuring names--“Le Moyne.... ton institutrice.... Ce bon vieux David.... Nice lilies.” She moved in a succession of swift steps that seemed balanced leaps. One of the florist’s girls sighed a positive sob of envy. The curving body and the embellished eyes kept the crowd still. The soft gloves drooped on the hard lustre of the stirring arms. Mark wondered at her cool, sardonic mastery of attention. She was bored, unwell and her frock was nothing new. She was Anna Held and the people were edging in from the sidewalk to look at her.

“Like to see the house, Anna?”

“Oh, no. I very well know what that would be. All red, and gold fishes on the ceiling, eh? No. I must go away.” She strolled off toward her carriage, chattering sudden French which Mark did not understand. He heard an immense discussion surge up in the vestibule as he shut the coupé door, walked through it into the theatre where two upholsterers were quarrelling over the age of the paragon and where Mark bumped against a man in brown who seemed to inspect the gold dolphins of the vault.

“Clumsy,” said the man, briskly.

“Didn’t see you, sir.”

“I meant the decoration.” The man flicked a hand at the ceiling and the red boxes, “Like Augustin Daly’s first house but much worse. We should have passed that. Gilt. It’s the scortum ante mortum in architecture.” He jammed a cigarette between the straight lips of his flushed face and went on in a rattle of dry syllables. “Some one should write a monograph on gold paint and the theatrical temperament. Plush and passion. Stigmata.... Sous un balcon doré.... Can you give me a match?... Where’s Carlson’s office?” He bustled out of the foyer.

Mark wearily tore Cora Boyle’s card in his tanned fingers and nodded. The stranger was right. This new theatre was stale. The gold sparkled stupidly. The shades of velvet were afflicting. But Carlson liked it. Mark sighed and thought, rather sadly, that his patron’s whole concept of the trade was vulgar and outworn like this gaudy expense. Red velvet, heavy gold, bright lamps--the trappings of his apprenticeship. Old actors told Mark that this was a variant of the first Daly theatre. The stranger was right, then. Mark wondered and went upstairs to the office but the flushed man was gone.

“That feller Huneker was in tryin’ to get me to hire some orchestra leader,” Carlson said.

“But I thought Huneker was a young man,” Mark answered.

Mr. Fitch whispered from his corner, “He hasn’t any particular age. What was that riot downstairs, Mark?”

“Anna Held dropped in and left some flowers. She ain’t lookin’ well.”

The playwright closed his magazine and lifted himself from the chair, assuming his strange furry hat. “We have just so much vitality. She’s losing hers. But if she died tomorrow it would make almost as much noise as killing a president. And that’s quite right. Presidents never make any one feel sinful. Good night.”

Carlson asked, “You’re comin’ tonight, Clyde.”

“Not feeling right, thanks.”

Mark followed the bent back down the stairs. Fitch was stopped by a lounger at the doors, loaned the old fellow ten dollars and passed, unobtrusive, along Forty Fifth Street. He went shadowlike in his vivid dress. Liking the man, Mark frowned. The exhausted courtesy, the slow voice always left him puzzled; it was as though the playwright’s prosperity kept within it a dead core of something pained, as if the ghost of an old hunger somehow lived on under the coloured superfluity.

Mark’s motor arrived outside. He went to whistle Gurdy up from an investigation of the orchestra pit. All the bulbs burned about the house. For a second Mark liked the place then the gilt and the mulberry hangings bothered him. He chased Gurdy up an aisle to the vestibule. The treasurer slipped from the box office to say, “Young Rand just called up. I said you wasn’t here.”

“Who?”

“Cora Boyle’s new husband. That English kid.”

Mark shrugged and shoved Gurdy into the dull blue limousine at the curb. The motor took him away from the theatre and away from several beckoning hands on the sidewalk. His shift to managership had changed the fashion of salutes. People now beckoned him with a posture of confidential affection and earnestness. They had friends to recommend, deep suggestions. Carlson had warned him, “Mind, you’re a kid with a pocketful of candy, now. You’ve stopped bein’ just one of the gang. Better ride in cabs if you want to get anyplace.” Well, the motor, with its adorable slippery blue crust, kept people at a distance. Mark wound an arm about Gurdy and pulled himself into a corner of the seat. The car was hampered by a dilatory van that lurched ahead of its hood. The chauffeur cursed in Canadian French and a messenger boy on the van’s tail cursed back, joyously foul, emptily shooting accusations of all sins in a sweet, sexless howl that pierced the glass about Mark and made him grin, absently amused.

“He’s mad,” said Gurdy, dispassionately.

“No. He’s just talking, son.”

“Huh,” Gurdy grunted, trying to match the words with ordinary conversation. This messenger boy was plainly an accomplished fellow. The van rolled off over Broadway in a shock of light and dust. Gurdy saw “Red Winter” on a poster and asked, “Is this Red Winter a good play, Mark?”

“Pretty fair, honey.”

“Well, can I come to it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Too dirty,” Mark said, then, “All about killin’ folks, son.”

Gurdy argued, “Well, Lohengrin’s all about killing people and Miss Converse took me to that and it was in Dutch.”

“German, sonny.”

“I like French better’n German,” Gurdy yawned, waving a leg in the air and went on, “I think Broadway’s ugly.”

“You’re right,” said Mark, enchanted by such taste.

Yet Carlson really liked to stroll on Broadway and Cora Boyle had often led Mark for dusty hours through this complexity of hesitant, garrulous people, along these sidewalks where there was nothing to be seen. He rubbed his jaw and thought of Paris, viewed last summer, of the long, swooping street at Winchester gilt in an afterglow. Oh, after dark Broadway was tolerable! Then the revolving people were shapes of no consequence and, with a little mist, these lights were aqueous, flotillas of shimmering points on a hovering, uncertain vastness. Now, the roadway was a dappled smear of bodies wheeled and bodies shod. The sidewalks writhed, unseemly. But Cora Boyle liked it. The pretty, black haired dancer just then lodged at Mark’s cost had rooms overlooking the new width above Forty Second Street. And she liked that.... And she liked the scenery of “Red Winter.” Poor stuff, he thought. He cursed scene painters. Charles Frohman had heard of a fellow who’d studied the art in Berlin and made astonishing sets. He must telephone Frohman and get the man’s name. He was tired. “Red Winter” had tired him. The leading woman had a way of saying “California” through her nose that had vexed him all week. A poor play. His head was full of jagged swift ideas, of memories; Eddie Bernamer milking a young cow against a sulphur wall and laughing when Mark tried to sketch him on the fly leaf of an algebra; Cora Boyle swaggering into Rector’s in a blue dress; Clyde Fitch telling little Margaret that her name was Margot; Stanford White shouting with laughter because Mark softened the ch of “architecture.” Why hadn’t they given White a billion dollars and let him build the whole city into charms of tranquil, columnar symmetry?... Gurdy knew that his uncle was oppressed. When Mark thought hard he stroked the scar on his jaw. Gurdy wanted to talk, now, and tossed a leg over Mark’s black, rocky knee.

“What’re you thinkin’ about, Mark?”

“Just bosh. What’s Margot been doing all day?”

“Havin’ a bellyache.”

That terrified Mark. He sweated suddenly and called through the tube bidding the driver hurry. Spinal meningitis, he read, began with nausea. But when he ran into the panelled library of his house Margot was playing with her largest doll and the angular governess assured him, in simple French, that a pill had set things right. Margot lifted her black eyes and said, rubbing her stomach, “I was ill, papa,” in her leisurely way.

“Ate breakfast too fast,” Gurdy said, in grim displeasure, watching Mark double his lean height and begin to cuddle Margot.

Margot stared at her cousin with an aggrieved, brief pout and then wound herself into Mark’s lap. The large doll was named Aunt Sadie for Mrs. Bernamer. Margot said, “Miss Converse fixed Aunt Sadie’s drawers, papa,” and her brown face rippled as she displayed three stitches. Then she righted the doll and gazed at Mark devotedly, solemnly, preening her starched skirt of pink linen. Pink went with her black hair and her tawny skin. Mark touched a roaming mesh of her hair and her face rippled once more. Her skin had this amber haze like the water of a pool in the pine forest behind the farm. In that pool he had bathed with her father through endless afternoons, idling on until other boys lagged off and the shadows were ink on the crumbled ocher clay of the margin where pink boneset grew. And now Joe was dead and his blackhaired wife was dead ... an unskilled cook before marriage, half Irish, half Italian, a good, sleepy woman who ate with her knife and wore a chaplet blessed for her Roman mother by some Pope. Margot would never know them. He kissed her hair. She was this warm bubble enclosed in his arms.

“Love me any, sister?”

“’Course,” said Margot.

Gurdy snorted and stalked away. Mark talked to the stiff governess and patted Margot. Miss Converse sewed and chatted about Conrad’s novels, then getting fashionable. She assented, “Very interesting. Romantic, of course. I dare say the colour attracts you.”

“Of course,” said Mark, “and what if they are romantic?”

She had some vague objection. If she bored him, Mark was still grateful that she hadn’t tried to marry him. She was necessary to the training of the children but her buff, bulky face wasn’t alluring and her gowns hurt him by a prevalence of mole embroidery and rumpled lace. She was a gentlewoman, wonderfully learned and obliging about his pet airs on the piano. Mark talked and wished that he could escape, like Gurdy who went to practice handsprings in the white hall and slid downstairs at the note of the doorbell.

Gurdy slid along the handrail of black wood so admired by callers and jumped for the dining room which had doors of glass coated in blue silk. These doors opened into the drawing room which Gurdy despised for its furniture all black and silver and its hangings of cloudy tapestry, impossibly noiseless when one bounced balls against them. Yet people called it a lovely room. And now, peering through a rift of the blue silk Gurdy saw the butler turn a visitor into this space and the visitor looked about with brown eyes, seeming to admire. Gurdy speculated and decided that the slight man was an actor come to talk to Mark about a part. His hair curled, his overcoat clung to his middle neatly, his white gaiters were unspotted, his pale moustache didn’t overhang his little mouth. He was visibly an actor. Gurdy had examined many through this spyhole. And like many the fellow went to glance at a circular mirror above the cabinet with tiny doors which Miss Converse called “Siennese.” As Mark’s feet descended, the man straightened himself and began a smile. Gurdy listened to the jar of his high voice against Mark’s fuller drawl.

“Mr. Rand?”

“Yes. Don’t think we’ve ever met. Daresay you know who I am and all that?”

“Yes,” said Mark.

Gurdy noted the long pause. He held that actors were a talkative lot. Mr. Rand worked with his moustache an indefinite time before he spoke again.

“My wife sent me along--I’m a sort of ambassador, you know?... Matter of business, entirely.”

Mark said, “I see,” wondering how old the man was. The moustache had an appearance of soft youth. He smiled, wanting Cora’s third husband to be at ease, and nodded to a chair.

“Oh, thanks no. Mrs. Rand wants to know if you’d mind meeting her. At her hotel, for instance?”

“I don’t mind at all,” Mark lied, “Glad to. Any time.”

“Then she may let you know? Thanks ever so. Good luck to your play tonight,” said the young man and walked out gracefully.

Gurdy came through the glass doors and asked, “Who’s he?” Mark lifted the pliant, hard body in the air. He fancied that Gurdy must feel something odd, here.

“How old would you say he was, darling?”

“Dunno. Who’s Mrs. Rand?”

“An actress.”

“Put me down,” said Gurdy, “My pants are comin’ off.”

Mark breathed comfortably, helped the boy on his knee tighten the white trousers and passed into dotage. Eddie Bernamer and Joe Walling had begotten these bodies. The fact mattered nothing. Mark was a father. He had possession. When things went wrong he could come home to gloat over Margot and Gurdy. He promised, “I shan’t be busy now for a week. We’ll ride in the Park and feed the squirrels, sonny.”

“All right. Say, Mark, you’re all thin.--There’s the doorbell, again.--Oh, say, a lady telephoned s’noon. Her name was Miss Monroe and she wanted you to call her up.”

“I like her nerve!”

Gurdy jumped at this loud snort of his uncle.

“Who’s she?”

“She’s an actress,” Mark stammered, hoping the boy wouldn’t go on, and Carlson came in, his yellow face splotched as though he’d been walking fast.

“That Rand squirt been here?” he yelled at Mark.

“Yes. Why?”

“I passed him. What’s he want?”

“Me to meet her.”

“You goin’ to?”

“Guess I better, Mr. Carlson.”

Carlson jabbed Gurdy’s stomach with his cane and panted, “I can tell you what she wants and don’t you listen to it, neither. She’s had a fight with Billy Loeffler. He won’t put this whelp she married in her comp’ny. I bet she quits Loeffler. Her show’s no good, anyhow. Well, I won’t take her on. She’s a second rater. She’s an onion. I won’t have her for nothin’. Don’t you get sentymental about Cora Boyle any more, son!”

“You needn’t worry,” said Mark, patting Gurdy’s ear.

Gurdy sat up and inquired, “Is that the Cora Boyle grandpapa says was a loose footed heifer?” So Carlson broke into screaming mirth. Mark flushed and mumbled, sent the boy away and scowled respectfully at his partner. Sometimes Carlson’s crude amusement stung him.

“For God’s sake don’t talk of her in front of the kids, sir!”

“All right, son. Goin’ to let Gurdy come to the show tonight?”

“Not much!”

The old man lounged into a chair and jeered at his fosterling. Mark’s horror diverted him. He yapped, “Still think it’s a dirty show, do you?”

“Yes.... Oh, dunno! If there was anything to the slop but that second act, I wouldn’t care. Nothing but Sappho over again. Old as the hills.”

“What’s new in the show business, son?”

“The Merry Widow is,” Mark laughed, “and you wouldn’t buy it. Savage is bringing it in week after next. They were playing the music at Rector’s last night.--Look here, the set for the last act’s all wrong, still. Those green curtains--”

“You and your sets! God,” said Carlson, “you’d ought to’ve been a scene painter!”

“I wish I could be, for about one week!” Mark let a grievance loose, slapping his leg. “These people make me sick! You tell them you want something new and they trot out some sketch of a room that every one’s seen for twenty years. They never think of--”

“You ain’t ever satisfied! You act like scenery made a show--”

Mark sighed, “Well, we’re not giving the public its moneysworth with this piece. The scenery’s--mediocre.--Come up and see Margot.”

The old man poked Margot’s doll with a shaking thumb and called her Maggie to see her scowl, like Mark. The little girl’s solemn vanity delighted him. He was also delighted by Gurdy who became an embodied sneer when Mark fondled Margot. The boy watched Mark kiss this female nuisance then walked haughtily out of the library and set to work banging the piano in the upper playroom.

“All you need’s a wife and a mother-in-law and you’d have a happy home,” Carlson said when Mark let him out of the front door.

“Think I haven’t?”

“I suppose you have. Ain’t any truth in this that you’re goin’ to marry that Monroe gal?”

“No. I gave her a ring, last week. I suppose she’s been airing it.”