She’d no course but to conceal the fault as she did the hurt of having it, which wasn’t difficult since it required only that she never again permit anyone mental or physical intimacies with her. And since she’d never had the one and couldn’t achieve the other, she was safe enough after she went back to the backstage of her parents’ lives.
John Roberts had done better, though his life had been briefer. Because he’d taken up with some woman in Philadelphia, and produced a son with her before his hot temper had gotten him into a saloon brawl that took his life and widowed her. He’d left Hannah nothing but a hard lesson, and alone, even though she’d returned to her parents when he’d first left. What else was she to do? Now the very idea of marriage was absurd. Even if she were the sort of woman who had no morals, which she was not, the thought of a lesser and more profitable affiliation with a man—such as many girls in the theater had with their admirers—was equally ridiculous.
Once, a few years later, when a particularly charming young Tristan had seemed uncommonly taken with her, she’d stolen out to buy a medical book, which had told her nothing she didn’t know, and more she couldn’t understand. He’d been diverted by a more accommodating ingenue by the time she’d finished reading it, but by then she’d begun to accumulate more medical books expressly written for the common man and woman. There were dozens available; people didn’t trust doctors, even if there’d been enough of them around to trust. There were fewer doctors that one could even think of speaking to about that secret, shameful subject usually covered in chapters titled: “The Generative Organs” or “Women’s Difficulties” or “Words of Advice on Marital Matters.” Soon Hannah estimated she knew more about the evil consequences of self-pollution, the various diseases of womankind, and the way to birth healthy babes, than any female of her age in New York City. But nothing more about her problem. And as all the diagrams of intimate anatomy were done in cross section, it was even impossible to recognize anything she possessed. She gave it up.
Some time later, when a truly kind as well as determined older gentleman fromShe Stoops To Conquersought her company, she found a new book by a doctor whose offices happened to be not two blocks from the theater they were at. Therewere dozens of testimonials to him from satisfied patients in the book; he wrote in a kind, agreeable manner. Best of all, at the conclusion of his book, after the usual chapters on diseases, the evils of unfortunate habits, and the rigors of childbirth, he’d written a personal note. For a fee of five dollars, he stated that he would diagnose and prescribe for any woman’s ailment that she described to him by letter, because he realized so many lived too far from his New York City offices for any other kind of consultation to be possible. And because, as he wrote with exquisite discretion:
“I have found that the mail offers facilities for a confidence between the patient and physician by which they may inform him of delicate matters that they would never divulge at an interview: matters that they have long worried over, and yet dared not consult their family physician about.”
Since Hannah’s family physician changed with each theater they played, and she was sure whichever one she consulted wouldn’t hesitate to share her confidences with her Father—and that, she could not bear to think about—Dr. Smith’s offer was a godsend. She passed the better part of three nights revising her letter until it was a model of delicacy of feeling and euphemism. Dr. Smith’s eventual reply was no less a masterpiece.
He reviewed the several things that could be her problem in language that only her reading of several dozen medical books enabled her to understand. He then wrote with genuine sorrow, that in her case he believed her particular problem would need a personal examination in order to diagnose. Then he wrote:
“But, of course, as you are now a widow, the problem need never concern you again. Should you remarry, your husband might wish a finer diagnosis, and in that case, I would urge you to overcome your understandable and laudable scruples and fine sense of modesty, and come to my offices immediately for a thorough examination, Sincerely.”
Men continued to find her attractive; it had to do, she believed, with things she’d little to do with—her eyes, the way they seemed fascinated by her mouth…She learned to disregard them. If she felt so much as the stirrings of temptation, she knew enough not to. She acquired a reputation for virtue. She knew it for wisdom.
She acquired more. She plotted and planned another escape. It wasn’t that her parents were cruel or unfeeling, only that she’d learned by hard experience from an early age onward that they were quintessential actors, and so thought only of themselves and simulated every other feeling. It suited them, but she was weary of that. Nor was it that she didn’t love them, but only that she knew they scarcely noted or needed her mite of adoration. She wished for more, even if it was only to eventually deserve her own love for herself.
Times were changing, these days a woman might try to support herself, if she must. Of course, it was scandalous, but she was, after all, from a theatrical family. She might have inherited some of her parents’ selfishness, if not their brilliance, she thought, because if she were only to be a helpmeet of theirs, she saw little reason to continue to be, at all. She reasoned they must have passed on some of their courage to her, too, since an actor must have that or be nothing. Because after six years she’d stored up enough money and confidence to strike out on her own.
Which was, she conceded sadly, looking about her small studio now, certainly what she’d have done literally this time if it weren’t for Kyle Harper’s offer. It turned out that few people in New York City needed or wanted elocution lessons, at least not from her. There were too many well-known actors and actresses reduced to giving lessons in this city of theaters. And since there would never be any given by the woman who might be able to make a success at it—the one named Hannah Darling, a lady with a famous name that fairly shouted her experience and talent—she’d never have a real chance at it. But just imagining the look on Father’s face if she’d taken his name and not his advice had been enough to keep her up nights. That—and the thought of her growing debts.
Because after six months at her new profession, she’d only three clients; little Harry Platt, the butcher’s boy, whose stuttering irked his father so much it had almost caused him to lose a finger; Mrs. Harrison, who cherished dreams of reciting poetry at her church group so stirringly as to make Reverend Ames weep,before he proposed to her for her fine sensitivity; and, of course, the feckless Miss Lesley. Three clients, one of whom disliked her intensely. Not very much to show for having lived almost all of twenty-four years, Hannah thought wistfully as she sighed, arose, and began to make neat piles of that which she’d take, and that which she’d leave behind.
But she’d passed most of those years in the theater, and had a knowledge of it which was equaled by few women. And so, she straightened her back as she straightened up her room, and remembered, at least, to keep that thought. Because she didn’t doubt that where she was going, she’d need everything she could take with her.
Chapter Three
Singing on a train was no different from singing in the bath, it took faith in one’s talents, even as it gave an entirely wrong idea of them. The Lord gave talent, rehearsal preserved it. One might be able to not eat for a day and live, not drink for a day and survive, but only two things were invariably fatal: not breathing for an hour, and not rehearsing for a day. An actor who didn’t know his lines was like a peacock who’d lost all his feathers—a queer bird that wasn’t good to look at, not good to hear, and not even better off dead, since he was too tough to eat and too big to bury fast. Kyle was full of adages like that, and those he didn’t know, he made up when the need arose, which was every five minutes, or so it seemed to his newfound troupe.
He made them work all the way from New York to their destination in the West as much as he’d made them work back in New York. Since they hadn’t had much time to rehearse before they’d left, they didn’t object. Nor did they mind the myriad scripts and musical scores they were handed to look over, they were professionals, after all. But when they fell to looking out the train windows and seeing the rapidly changing scenery: the sudden dearth of houses, the increasingly empty vistas, the landscapes that weren’t enlivened by human hand or eye—that was when they resented his urging them to work. Because that was when they wanted the time to fret and brood.
“I never saw so much nuttin’ in my life,” Lottie sighed as she gazed out the window at the deepening dusk.
“?‘Nothing,’?” Hannah corrected her absently, as she matched her sigh.
“Oh no! My books say there are many jackrabbits, elk, and antelope on the high plains, as well as deer, and bison, Indians, and countless new settlers,” Little Polly Jenkins, their “infant prodigy,” said brightly. She spoke with irrepressible good spirits she seemed to believe were expected of her, but which, as their resident comedian, Lester Claxton, often said when she wasn’t within earshot, more nearly insured her never surviving to adulthood.
“Wonderfulhouses that will make for us,” Nelson DeWitt said, bending to peer out the window. “Just how does one appeal to an elk—or rather,elkess?” he added quizzically, turning to grin sidewise at the ladies who were clustered by the window, causing even little Polly to blush. For though he was very handsome, in the slightly exaggerated way of all leading men, for a wonder, he seemed almost as nice as he was nice-looking, for all he was a leading man.
“?‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast,’?” their all-around villain, Frank Dupree, misquoted wryly. “A few rounds of ‘Home on the Range’ would probably do it.”
“Yes, or ‘Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door’ and ‘With All Her Faults I Love Her Still,’ if that doesn’t turn the trick,” Nelson put in merrily.
“That’s ‘breast,’?” Maybelle Ansonia, their dignified older woman, corrected them. And when they turned to look at her, she added, shaking her silver head in her best mother-of-the-clan manner, “?‘charms to soothe the savage ‘breast,’ was what you meant to say.”
“In your case, certainly,” Nelson said, grinning and making a great show of ducking should she take offense, as he added, “but Frank’s an engaged man, so he’s better off staying with ‘beast,’ I think.”
“Please! Think of the child,” Polly’s mother said reflexively, scarcely looking up from her knitting. Then Frank said gallantly, “Very true, but a man’s a man for all that,” and he bowed to Maybelle, stroking his mustache and arching an eyebrow in the grand manner.
“That’s as it may be,” Maybelle said in a lofty way, while she nonetheless smiled as she smoothed the massive bodice of her gown. She added gloomily, “But I don’t sing, nor do I wish to charm livestock.”
“It is most awfully empty out there…” Hannah agreed softly, for she’d been staring out the window as they’d been rehearsing, watching the evening creep over the barren land, sowing it with shadows. Her sad little comment quieted them. She felt, as well as heard the sudden silence that had fallen over them, and blinked, for the light in the railway car contrasted with the cool shades of purple and gray that she’d been staring at. Seeing the somber faces gazing out at what had hypnotized her, she added quickly, “But I daresay that’s because of the hour—whyit’s actually blue out there now. Twilight is such a sad time. I’ve never seen it properly before. In New York there’s no time to see the sunset and the moonrise.”
She saw the huge new moon continuing to rise, banishing the blue twilight, but flooding the landscape with an even eerier silvery light, and went on, “We hardly ever look up really, except to see if it will rain, we just see the sky brightening behind the buildings before the dark comes over everything. If we see that at all…Why, right now, the gaslights would be being lit, people would be hurrying home from work—or out to dinner, the traffic would be beginning to pick up…” She swallowed hard against the unexpected lump of homesickness that threatened to close her throat and added, too brightly, “How lovely nature is, after all.”
They remained still, each lost in thought, until they heard the omnipresent background sound of clattering wheels increase as the door to the car slid open.
