“Verylike a parrot, or some other jungle creature,” he said, taking Hannah by the arm and steering her aside so that he could talk to her privately, and see her in a clearer light. His own face cleared as he did.
The young woman before him was dressed in gray, and more neatly than fashionably, at that. But no garment was needed to point up her loveliness, not to his practiced eye. She was slender enough to scarcely need the stays that held in her trim waist, and yet even the pilgrim color and cut of her high-necked gown couldn’t conceal the lush contours beneath. Still, in her case, the eye was only momentarily distracted by her form. She’d clear white skin and masses of smoky dark hair that neither her strict hairstyle or hat could wholly subdue, since here and there silky wisps, like wanton shadows that mocked her efforts, escaped to tease at the margins of her face. In fact, he thought bemusedly, half her attraction lay in the fact that she seemed made for bed matters, even as the other half sternly sought to repudiate it. She’d winged dark brows and a small, serious nose, and great dark eyes that seemed surprised by her lush pink mouth; it really was the most remarkably sensuous mouth, he thought, nodding his approval at the small sharp white teeth that showed as she spoke again.
“The altercation was because I’d given Miss Lesley several lessons that she decided she need not pay for,” Hannah said worriedly in her clear, expressive voice.“But indeed, I have the records here,” she added, holding up her little leather notebook in one gloved hand.
He disregarded it. “You give acting lessons?” he asked.
“Indeed,” she said eagerly, nodding, because she thought she might yet retrieve something from this disappointing day. One never knew who might send business one’s way, and this gentleman would certainly know a great many actors, many more would-be ones. She extracted a card from her handbag and offered it to him.
“?‘HANNAH ROBERTS’?” he read. “?‘STUDIO FOR ELOCUTION, DRAMATIC READINGS, AND VOICE TRAINING. Special attention given to Speech Impediments, Debilities. Reasonable rates, patient instruction, experienced tuition for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children.’ And household pets?” he asked gently. “Come, my dear, this is all very well, but it is all nonsense. Why are you not on the stage, where you belong?”
“I have no wish to act,” she said hurriedly. “I quite enjoy my role as preceptor in the theater arts.”
“Perhaps that is because you have no experience of it—or a bad one. My dear,” he said in a softer voice, for when he wished, his whispers could be heard across the room, and now she was sure his voice went no farther than her own ear. “You have a place in my company as of now, you know. As if I would keep on that…that parrot of yours, when I can have an actress such as yourself!”
“Oh no,” she said in a matching whisper, her eyes wide. “I do have such experience—much experience of the theater, Mr. Harper, and want no more, I assure you. I come from a family of actors, but I am a teacher and a good one, I believe, and happy to be so. Or at least,” she said with a small smile that almost beguiled an answering one from him, before he caught himself at it. ‘I’d be happy if my practice of it would just pick up a little bit, and my clients,” she added, casting a significant glance to Lottie, “would pay me what they owe me.”
“What experience in the theater?” he asked, amused, ‘I’ve been in the New York Theater since the day before forever and never heard of a Roberts family. Of course, I do know several ‘Roberts,’?” he mused. “Let’s see, there’s Winthrop Roberts, but he’s old as the hills and never wed, and…ah yes, Ada Roberts, she’s your age and a professional orphan.”
“My married name is Roberts. I’m a widow. My former name,” she hesitated before she lifted her chin, looked him in the eye, and said, “was…Darling.”
She winced as he blurted explosively enough for all eyes to turn to them, “Darling? Darling? Of course! Those eyes, that hair. You’rehisdaughter. Good Lord, my child, why not say so at once then?”
She didn’t smile at the sound of a man so near her own age calling her a child. Instead, she flushed, and turning her head, said low enough so that her very tone was a reprimand for his calling attention to their conversation, “Because ‘Roberts’ is my legal name now, and because I wish to prove that I can succeed on my own, whatever my name. Can you understand that?”
“No,” he said honestly, because success was the only thing he did understand, and any road to it not taken amazed him.
“But it’s so,” she said mutinously. Then she composed herself and put out her gloved hand to him, adding, “And so I thank you for your offer, but I must go now.”
“Go penniless, and go alone, and go unpaid for all your pains?” he asked, recovering himself as quickly. “Because even if she agreed to pay you, she could not. Well, but I won’t hire her. Would you?” he asked as she stared at him.
“?‘O Fodder!’ indeed,” he said with a quirked smile at her distress. “Can you see it? Or rather, hear it? There’s nothing wrong with seeing her,” he said. “Blondes with such, ah, obvious graces can get away with a great deal on the stage. And she has a certain flair,” he conceded, “but not with that voice, and that diction. Even New Yorkers won’t buy a Desdemona who sounds like she comes from a barge in the East River and not Venice. And certainly, a western audience won’t. They won’t understand a word…unless, of course, you’re willing to continue coaching her. For pay,” he said quickly. “Handsome pay,” he added as he saw the hunger for the offer clear in her eyes.
“But she…” she began, as he cut her off to say, “is doubtless vile, and I don’t blame you for not wishing to associate with her again. But if you know the theater, you know that actresses are not valued for their own personalities but rather those that they can put on, and this time you will be working for me, not her.”
It was reasonable and it was fair, and aside from that, she didn’t know how she could go on as she was if she didn’t accept his offer. It was actually a gift from a suddenly attentive heaven, she thought on a sigh.
“Very well,” Hannah said courteously. “I’ll do it. Only give me the parts you wish her to get right, and tell me how much time I have, and I’ll do my best.”
“Ah,” he said, taking her hand in his firm clasp. “But you’ve all the time in the world, my dear, or at least three months of it, which is as you know, almost the same to an actor. Because you’ll be coming with us, of course. Well, we are a repertory company,” he said to her blank stare, “and if I decide it’s time for a change of scene, I can’t have an ingenue who murdersMacbethas she performs in it, simply because her instructor is miles away from the scene of the crime, can I?”
And though it was the last thing she wished to do, she knew it was the very thing she must, because there was no hope for it, she thought dazedly as he shook her hand, he was absolutely right. But that hardly made it better.
Still, Hannah thought when she got back to her rooms, took off her hat, and stood surveying the work she had to do, it could be a great deal worse. At least she’d be able to pay the rent on her rooms and so have them when she returned, and if she didn’t go, it might well be that she’d lose them even before the new year. And then she’d have to go creeping back to her father and mother, begging houseroom…with Father being so extravagantly noble about forgiving her for striking out on her own, and Mother being triumphantly so…No, she thought immediately, stooping to collect her playbooks, beginning the sad business of packing at once instead of after dinner as she’d thought to do—traveling with a dozen Lottie Lesleys would be preferable to that. Anything would. Almost anything, she thought, sinking into a dispirited little heap in the center of the room, all her playbooks in her lap. Because she reminded herself how she’d gotten herself into this very predicament.
Some girls married young in order to run away from home. She’d married early so as to try to have one. An only child of two magnificently self-involved parents, on the move with every new booking they secured, she’d always longed for what she’d seen her parents able to enact on stage, but never experienced in reality: astable life in a real home. One that would be far from the theater, a place like the ones she read about inLittle Womenand other of Miss Alcott’s books, or like those she’d seen portrayed behind the footlights since she’d been old enough to dream of a better life. It didn’t have to be an elegant place, such as the kind she’d seen created forSchool For ScandalorThe Mighty Dollar, for example. No, it might even have a humble parlor like the one she remembered the Beacon Theater set up forEast Lynne—something filled with samplers and rag rugs and glowing firelight, a home that was so warm and welcoming, the audience could understand, after one look, why a girl would truly weep to be exiled from it. And a kitchen, a real one, only very like the one she’d seen at the Savoy forThe Old Homestead: a place fit for unimaginably domestic wonders to be done in; a room in which miraculous things, like the actual baking of pies, could be performed. And a front yard filled with real, not cardboard flowers. But most of all, whether elegant or homely, it would be a home like none she’d ever known: one that wasn’t rented or temporary. With someone in it like no one she’d ever known: someone who’d love her for herself, and not for her reaction to themselves.
John Roberts had come backstage one afternoon when she’d been seventeen. He’d come to deliver a parcel from his mercantile store, only that. He hadn’t even tried to scrape up an acquaintance with any actress there, he’d only ogled them as if they’d been creatures from another world, which of course, they’d been to him. But so she’d found him to be to her. Because they’d started talking. And then walking out together. He was no more than average-looking, and she could not, even now, remember even the cleverest things he’d said. But he’d listened and looked at her as she’d never been attended to before, and he’d said he never cared for any other girl as he did for her. She’d no reason to disbelieve him, because for all he was and was not, he was certainly no actor.
They hadn’t known each other very long, nothing like the year she’d heard girls from the outside world required for a proper courtship, when she decided to marry him, as he had asked. And at once. As he had not. Because when Father had finally noticed their courtship, he’d laughed at the very idea of her making a life with a man from outside the theater, and one with such meager prospects, at that. It had done what John’s courtship had not had a chance to do. It decided her. And so by the timeJulius Caesarwas done with its run, and it was time to move on, she’d moved out and into holy wedlock with John.
Father had come to the hasty wedding and wept at being made to feel so old, as Mother had grieved at losing an able pair of hands backstage. To give them their due, they’d said it was because they’d expected so much more from her. John only wanted a wife. At least she knew she could be that.
But she was wrong. Because not two months after their wedding day, John had finally raged up from out of their bed, telling her the truth, at last, about her deficiency as he’d packed. And then, still avoiding her eye, had left her and the city forever. She could hate, but scarcely blame him for it. It couldn’t have been easy for him, he was not that much older than she was, although vastly more experienced of the world—and women. How should she blame him for refusing to live half a life with her? And all because of something so profoundly intimate and embarrassing that she still could not so much as think of it without blushing. A thing neither of them could have suspected or helped or even discussed before they were wed, much less at any length after—a thing she’d been born with—or was—she’d never got the terminology straight. It hardly mattered. It was certainly enough to know she was imperfectly made, and so for all her charms, useless as a wife or a prospective mother, as well as unable to grant him what he most wanted from her.
She understood that part of it absolutely. There’d been enough difficulty to establish that fact even before he’d spoken. Isolated as her life had been, she’d no other female to confide in—certainly not her mother—and had been unsure of whether she had to go to a doctor, and then afraid to, and then it was unnecessary. He’d been to see one, he said. She was not, she was given to understand, a complete woman, and certainly, even after all that embarrassment and pain, all too obviously not his wife. It was because of a mistake of nature, imperceptible to her eye even if she’d the courage and the means to look, or the knowledge to know what she’d see if she did. An error of nature’s that she’d not known about, but one of great magnitude for him—and her. Still, she understood his decision even as she wept for it. After all, hadn’t she run from a life, however attractive on the surface, that offered her nothing she really wanted?
It was ironic that it turned out she was so like everything she’d tried to escape from. Because it seemed to her that she was like that magnificent cake she’d coveted when she’d been a child, the one she’d seen her mother carry on stage onenight…only to discover after the show that it was literally only for the show, being nothing but a perfect fraud with wooden layers and painted icing.
