The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 37
“And you haven’t talked to your family since?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s been—” Perhaps remembering that she had shorted her own age by at least a decade, she finished, “several years.”
I said it was cruel, Joe Considine whisking Ursula away from her family as a young woman and then summarily firing her once she got old. She said Joe was too simple to be cruel, and that he had offered her severance, fifty dollars and a train ticket east. She said she was going to take him up on it.
“I’m going to tell Joe I won’t perform until he gives you a hundred-dollar severance,” I said.
“You’re a dear,” she said, patting my arm. “You make a fine Ursula.”
“But not great yet,” I said.
“You are far more talented than I ever was,” she said, and her eyes welled with tears again. I began to object, but she put a finger to my mouth. “Please. It would be unseemly for you to argue. Your voice hurts, it is so lovely.”
We were quiet a moment.
“I will send you a postcard from wherever I land,” she said.
We finished the last bottle of plum wine and talked until dawn. We became loose with our stories, and at some point she began listing old lovers’ attributes. Instead of their names, she referred to them by avocation: The bullfighter was a groveler, the sea captain equipped like a horse.
And what of the mining magnate, Mr. Brand? I asked.
I should not have brought him up, for the very mention of his name brought sadness to her eyes and she simply shook her head.
I told her about my own weakness in that area: my penchant for a certain kind of younger man I referred to as “meat,” an actor here, a stagehand there, culminating in the dashing young playwright I fell for, who turned out to be more swindler than scribe, and who went to the bathroom at a restaurant in Sparks and never returned, sticking me with the check, a week’s hotel bill, and a wrecked heart. And because he had stolen from my old theater and I’d stood by him when I had thought him wrongly accused, I could never go back to San Francisco.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she put her hand on the side of my face.
It was almost dawn when First Ursula asked if she might kiss me. Before I could answer, she leaned in and did it. Then she lay down in front of me and faced away. I held her from behind. She was frailer than I’d imagined. In a beam of streetlight through the hotel window, I could see age spots on her shoulder, little fissures around her eye, the gray seams in her clownish red hair. When she began shaking, I whispered, “It’s okay.”
I woke alone midmorning, Joe Considine rapping on my door. “Ursula?”
He did not seem alarmed or surprised that I was in her room. “Train leaves for Boise in two hours,” he said. “They’re loading the cat now.”
I asked about First Ursula.
“Gone,” he said. She had come down early to breakfast, dressed and packed, and accepted his offer of fifty dollars and a ticket out of town. Then she caught the Union Pacific headed east toward Denver. “She left two hours ago.”
We did two weeks in Boise, then two in Butte, and after that, Missoula. In each city we headlined with two or three local opening acts—musicians, comedians, the occasional freak and animal trick. We started slowly but were extended in Montana, the notices hinting at just enough scandal that we filled the seats without riling the ministers. Meanwhile, the cat and I were developing a real rapport—sometimes when I sang, she seemed to growl on key.
In each city, I checked for a postcard from First Ursula, but none arrived.
Finally, we moved to Spokane, our passenger car emerging from mountain forest into a river valley laced with bridges and railroad tracks, a lovely train station on an island in the center of a rocky channel. First Ursula was right: Spokane had a thrumming vibrancy those other cities lacked, and the Comique seemed a fine theater, URSULA THE GREAT across the whole of the marquee, in letters thrice the size of the next act, a blind accordion player named Rico Roma.
Lem Brand was waiting to greet us onstage at the Comique, hat held over his chest. He gave a bow like he was meeting royalty. I cannot say what I expected after so many weeks imagining him, only that he was less of it. He was perhaps fifty, although he was the kind of man who would have looked fifty at thirty, bald and lumpish, soft in the manner of one used to hiring other men to do his work.
“My goodness, Ursula,” Brand said, “you are more beautiful than even Mr. Considine’s rather vivid description.”
Behind me, Joe laughed and said, “Isn’t she something, Mr. Brand?”
“Welcome to the Comique,” Brand said, and he gestured to what looked like three-hundred-some-odd seats. “I hope you will consider dining with me this evening,” he said. “It’s a tradition that, as the theater’s benefactor, I show new performers a bit of good old-fashioned Spokane hospitality.”
“So the blind accordion player will be joining us, too?” I asked.
Joe cleared his throat behind me.
“No,” Brand said, taken aback.
“That’s too bad. And what about your wife?”
That limp-rump Joe Considine hissed at me: “Margaret!”
I turned and gave Joe the sharp eye. “Ursula, you mean,” I said, reminding him of his own rule that I stay in character even when not onstage. “Please, Joe, Mr. Brand and I are having a