And right then Woolly knew for certain what he should have known the night before—as he stood in such high spirits among the wildflowers and the knee-high grass—that he was never going to visit the Statue of Liberty.
Emmett
When Mr. Whitney finished speaking to Woolly, he had gone upstairs to his bedroom, followed a few minutes later by his wife. Saying he wanted to check on the progress of the stars, Woolly had gone out the front door, followed a few minutes later by Duchess, who wanted to make sure that he was all right. And Sally, she had gone upstairs in order to get Billy settled. Which left Emmett alone in the kitchen with the mess.
And Emmett was glad of it.
When Mr. Whitney had come through the dining-room door, Emmett’s emotions had switched in the instant from merriment to shame. What had they been thinking, the five of them? Carousing in another man’s house, drinking his wine and staining his wife’s linens in pursuit of a childish game. Adding to the sting of embarrassment was the sudden memory of Parker and Packer in their Pullman car with their food thrown about and the half-empty bottle of gin on its side. How quickly Emmett had judged those two; condemned them for the spoiled and callous manner in which they treated their surroundings.
So Emmett did not begrudge Mr. Whitney his anger. He had every right to be angry. To be insulted. To be outraged. The surprise for Emmett had been in Mrs. Whitney’s response, in how gracious she had been, telling them in her gentle way when Woolly and Mr. Whitney had left the room, that it was all right, that it was just some napkins and a few bottles of wine, insisting—without a suggestion of resentment—that they leave everything for the housekeeper, then telling them in which rooms they could sleep and in which closets they could find extra blankets and pillows and towels. Gracious was the only word for it. A graciousness that compounded the sense of Emmett’s shame.
That’s why he was glad to find himself alone, glad to have the chance to clear the dining-room table and set about cleaning the dishes as some small act of penance.
* * *
? ? ?
Emmett had just finished washing the plates and was moving on to the glasses when Sally returned.
—He’s asleep, she said.
—Thanks.
Without saying another word, Sally took up a dish towel and began drying the plates as he washed the crystal; then she dried the crystal as he washed the pots. And it was a comfort to be doing this work, to be doing this work in Sally’s company without either of them feeling the need to speak.
Emmett could tell that Sally was as ashamed as he was, and there was comfort in that too. Not the comfort of knowing that someone else was feeling a similar sting of rebuke. Rather, the comfort of knowing one’s sense of right and wrong was shared by another, and thus was somehow more true.
TWO
Duchess
When it came to vaudeville, it was all about the setup. That was as true for the comedians as it was for the jugglers and magicians. The members of the audience entered the theater with their own preferences, their own prejudices, their own sets of expectations. So, without the audience members realizing it, the performer needed to remove those and replace them with a new set of expectations—a set of expectations that he was in a better position to anticipate, manipulate, and ultimately satisfy.
Take Mandrake the Magnificent. Manny wasn’t what you’d call a great magician. In the first half of his act, he’d produce a bouquet of flowers out of his sleeve, or colored ribbons out of his ears, or a nickel out of thin air—basically the stuff you’d see at a ten-year-old’s birthday party. But like Kazantikis, what Manny lacked in the front of his act, he made up for in the finale.
One difference between Mandrake and most of his peers was that rather than having some leggy blonde at his side, he had a large white cockatoo named Lucinda. Many years before while traveling in the Amazon—Manny would explain to the audience—he had discovered a baby bird that had fallen from her nest to the forest floor. After nursing the chick back to health, he had raised her to adulthood and they had been together ever since. Over the course of the act, Lucinda would perch on her gilded stand and assist by holding a set of keys in her claws or rapping three times on a deck of cards with her beak.
But when the act was winding up, Manny would announce that he was going to attempt a trick he had never performed before. A stagehand would wheel out a pedestal on which sat a black enamel chest illustrated with a big red dragon. On a recent trip to the Orient, Manny would say, he had discovered the object in a flea market. The moment he saw it, he recognized it for what it was: a Mandarin’s Box. Manny knew only a bit of Chinese, but the old man who was selling the curiosity not only confirmed Manny’s suspicions, he went on to teach Manny the magic words that made it work.