Escape Artist

plagued the visiting artists till they ran from her or complained to me. She’d ask for an autograph, then beg to be in the show.” He shrugged. “Over and over, the same pleading, yet grandly, like she was already on the stage.” His smile was wistful. “It was sad.”

“Why?”

“She thought prettiness made you an actress.”

Sharply, from me, “It certainly helps.”

Gustave disagreed. “Only in vaudeville revues. One time I asked her what she knew about being an actress, and she had nothing to say. It was the idea of fame and money, the allure of Broadway, that propelled her. She wanted to hear stories about Broadway. I told her I’d never been there. She found that strange. Like, how can you manage a theater and not have been to New York? Lord, when she went on and on, her friend rolled her eyes and grimaced. She thought it was funny.”

“What did you tell her?” my father asked.

Gustave considered. “She wanted to act at the Lyceum. I told her that we mount shows with traveling companies of professional players who bring their shows to us. We don’t put on local shows. I’m not a director-I’m a theater manager. I know the business, not the plays. We get Joseph Jefferson and Lillian Russell and the Weber Brothers, popular acts that people want to see.”

“How did she take that?”

“Not well. The last time she was there, just before a dress rehearsal-the two of them, that is-I told her to stop pestering us. Quit loitering outside, approaching the actors, bothering them. She followed William McCreary, and he was not happy. He told me she trailed him to the Sherman House, went on about joining his company when they went to New York. He wanted to call the police on her, and he expressed his concern to Cyrus P. Powell, who spoke to me about it. Harshly, I might add, warning me to shoo such pests away. I gather Powell wrote a letter to Frana’s father, but I heard that from Homer. What good did it do? She drove Mary Allibone crazy, and I was ready to call the police. But in the lobby I put my foot down. She got angry. What did I know about theater, she yelled. I was a mediocre backwater manager. She’d leave and come back to Appleton a star, she said. It was a little tiresome, but she was young, naive and, well…”

“Pretty?” I suggested.

He looked at me, squinted his eyes. “I was going to say…sad.”

“That, too.” My father turned toward me. Disapproving.

“But then I said the wrong thing. I said she could be hired, summers, as an usherette. We use three or four young people each summer. Ryan High school girls. Most like it, but…”

“The wrong thing?”

“She burst into tears. It was a little scary, frankly, and her friend had to take her by the arm. ‘I’m not an usherette,’ she yelled. ‘I’m an actress. Look at me. I’m beautiful.’”

In the quiet, my father said, “Was she beautiful?”

Both Gustave and I looked at the blind man. A rasp thickened Gustave’s voice. “Yes, she was pretty. There are thousands like her. But she didn’t have that…well, spark. A Lillian Russell steps on stage, beautiful, but there’s something else. A Mary Allibone. A Sophie Toomer. An electric charge that shoots over the orchestra and audience.”

My father spoke. “She was a little girl. Maybe she’d acquire it.”

Gustave weighed his words carefully. “I think no. You need to be born with it. The sad little girl was pretty. That’s all. That’s not enough.” His eyes darkened. “Her friend kept saying ‘Let’s leave’ in a snippy voice. Frana babbled about a friend who had a place in New York, across the street from a theater-but that made no sense. Luckily, Mildred stopped in with her mother, and the two women calmed her down, even drove the girls home in their carriage. Mildred has little patience with such nonsense. An iron will, Mildred has. Comes from being in charge of so many books, I guess.” He beamed.

“Miss Dunne knew Frana from the high school.”

“She never liked her, she told me. I guess she talked in the library.” He flashed that winning smile. “A crime against nature. Mildred complained that Frana would step into the library, her laughter already covering the room. Frana needed to be…seen. Admired. Mildred thought her desperately lonely but, well, Mildred has little patience with lost souls.” He smiled. ”She believes you set your sights on a future and that’s where you’ll end up.”

I interrupted. “Well, so did Frana. She had a dream of a future.”

Gustave clicked his tongue. “The difference is that Mildred is a disciplined woman-strong-and Frana seemed to me an idle dreamer. Let me just say that I was happy that Mildred and her mother were at the theater that day. Mary Allibone looked at me as if to say-what kind of place do you have here?”

I rolled my tongue into my cheek. “Did you tell this to Chief Stone?”

“Of course. For what it’s worth.”

“A place in New York, across from the theater,” I echoed.

Gustave Timm shrugged and made ready to leave, saying he had to meet his brother Homer for supper at the Sherman House. “It’s an obligation I have a couple times a week.” He made it sound onerous. “Mildred thinks Homer demands too much of my time. She thinks he controls me-that I’m too passive.”

I was curious. “You know, Mr. Timm, when you arrived a couple years back, no one thought you were brothers. You don’t look alike…”

“Of course we do. He’s older by a decade, yes. And a tad heavier, and darker complexioned, but we both take after our mother-prominent chin, big eyes, and”-he laughed-“the floppy ears we cover up with wild hair.”

My father said what I was thinking. “Perhaps it’s the personality. Your brother is very serious, while you…”

“It’s the nature of the profession. He deals with schoolchildren, day in, day out, and over the years he’s developed a severe exterior. Sometimes I think he’s forgotten how to laugh at things. When you run a theater where half of your shows are rollicking, roustabout comedy revues, and when actors miss performances, or when snowy nights keep Appleton home in front of the fireplace, well, you learn to laugh a lot.”

I remembered my conclusion that the brothers disliked each other. “You don’t live together?”

I sensed my father’s disapproval again. Edna, the inquisitor.

Gustave kept his smile but it thinned considerably. “It’s the same old story. Proximity breeds contempt. As boys, with a ten-year age difference, we fought tooth and nail. You know, we do love each other-he’s the one who recommended the job at the theater two years back-but we know better than to spend too much time together.”

Like Fannie and me, I thought: blood-curdling battles royal. Over the hem of a dress. Over the dropping of a saucepan. Over an innocent sarcastic barb from one sister to another.

“I keep expecting your brother to leave for the East to join his wife or for her and the children to return here.” I stopped, sensing a violation. My father was frowning.

A long silence. “Sophie may not be returning to Appleton. Homer begs her to, as she’s no longer in a sanitarium, of course, and he misses his boys. But she delays. She seems to enjoy a marriage of…distance. Each year Homer plans to tender his resignation, head East, and reunite. But each year Sophie…suggests he’d best stay here…” He stood. “I’m airing family laundry on the Ferber porch. Mildred says I talk too much.” His ready smile. “She says silence is a virtue. Spoken like a true librarian.” And he was off, tipping his hat and walking away.

After a while my father said, “They don’t like each other.”

“I know that.”

“But you have a way of intruding into people’s lives, Pete.”

“I’m curious, Bill.”

“You can’t stop asking questions.”

“I know.”

“Family business is private. There are secrets in every home.” A sloppy grin. “Remember that, Edna, when you write your books someday.”

A smile of my own. “I have to get back to the office.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

When I returned home that evening, Kathe Schmidt was in the backyard walloping the stairwell runner with a beater. From the kitchen I could hear her creaky, off-key voice: