The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 36
Mountain lions were more reliable for snarling and baring teeth, Ursula said. But she still missed Boryenka. “I understand he is quite a star in the circus.” Her eyes drifted to the window. “The last I heard, he had learned to play the banjo while riding a bicycle. He is quite a talent.”
Those first few days in Reno, First Ursula showed me the basic staging and blocking: come out, sing my first number, and dance three laps around the cage. Then open the door and go inside for the next song. She showed me how to sew raw steak strategically into the corset to enhance my profile, and how the cat would growl and wait while I ripped off the corset, and that a quick throw was the real trick, for if I hesitated and held the meaty corset in my hand—
Then, with my back to the audience, singing in full voice, I was to grab the robe hanging from the stand at the back of the cage. Depending on which city we were in and its variety-theater laws, I could either show my tits or not. She had not shown hers in a year, “but this is more for gravity’s sake than for decency’s.”
One other thing to remember: The robe stand could be used to fend off the cat should things go badly. This was the way she described being attacked by a cougar in front of a screaming throng—“should things go badly”—the loveliest bit of theater decorum I’d ever heard.
We had a fine time in Reno, First Ursula and me. I’d watch her perform and then we’d stay up late in her hotel room, sharing stories while we drank a strange plum wine that she had acquired a taste for in Spokane’s Chinatown.
In the mornings, she would go to the front desk of the hotel to see if Lem Brand had answered her telegram about the Phoenix. When, after three days, no answer came, she sent a second telegram, and then a third, but these also went unanswered, and as the week wore on, I felt an aching sympathy for her.
On the fourth night, we stood backstage together. There was no announcement that the actress playing Ursula was changing; the barker simply said, “Ursula the Great!” and I went out instead.
There was a whistle, some light applause. We’d spent most of our rehearsal time on the bits with the cougar, for obvious reasons, and while the show itself was simple, I found myself overtaken with a surprising and savage bout of stage terror.
The heat of the lights, the growl of the cat, the smell of workingmen in the front rows: It all combined to make me nauseous. I hit my notes and the cougar was professional enough, but I left the stage thinking I might not be cut out for this. There were only three things these yokels wanted to see: Two of them were my breasts and the third was a cougar attack; the singing and dancing to which I had devoted my life were very much beside the point.
I came off after that first performance feeling bereft, what she called having “fallen so far in the theater” weighing on my soul, and that is when I saw First Ursula, standing backstage, her hand over her mouth.
“Dear God,” she said. “Your voice.”
Since the rehearsals had focused on staging and safety, I hadn’t really invested in the songs and had almost forgotten the effect my voice could have at full release, its unlikely power and register, which at one time had secured parts and performances for me at the best theaters in San Francisco.
“Thank you,” I said, and she said, “No. Thank you,” and began to cry. She enveloped me in a shuddering embrace.
We separated and she looked out at the dingy Reno theater. “These dusty heathens have no idea. You could be singing in Paris for monarchs.”
“Well, I am at the Palace,” I said, and waved a hand at the bar of the Palace Theater and Gambling Club of Reno, Nevada. This, too, was rewarded with an embrace. The show was now mine. I was now Ursula.
On our last day together in Reno, First Ursula and I had breakfast at the hotel, and she checked once more for a telegram from Lem Brand; there wasn’t one.
“Why don’t you have the operator ring him?” I asked.
She said the telephone was a “brutish form of communication,” and that Lem Brand not answering her telegrams was, of course, answer enough, and the one she had secretly been expecting all along. “I suspected the Phoenix was a fantasy the moment he mentioned it,” she said. “A man will say anything on the windward side of a bed. But I chose to believe it. And I don’t mind indulging in the fantasy that a wealthy lover might reward a woman with whom he has shared such intimacy. Perhaps I could have been a wife somewhere with a loyal husband and nine perfect children—but I would have to indulge that fantasy. Compared with that business, this was a harmless bit of theater.”
We stayed up all night drinking plum wine.
“What will you do now?” I asked. “Do you have family?”
She said she was from a Philadelphia stage family—her father an acrobat, mother a singer. She was the youngest of six performing siblings—tumblers and musicians. But she was a late bloomer in looks and in talent. As each of her siblings ventured off into show