Escape Artist

to keep from falling. My temples throbbed. Yes, we’d always fought, we two hardheaded sisters, coming at the world from different camps. Fannie, the easily bruised child, temperamental, a tongue-lasher; me, the tomboy, the battler, the bull in the novelty shop. But something had changed this past year. Since I’d started working at the Crescent, a note of real resentment, even anger-sometimes I even used the word poison-had entered our exchanges. My sister would never want the life on the Appleton streets, but she resented that I owned it. The night my first by-line appeared, she’d whispered, “It should say Edward Ferber. They wanted a boy.” So our battles became volcanic. Frowning on my new role, my mother at first had screamed her disapproval, but now she was slowly drifting into a silence that was, peculiarly, more frightening. Under the sway of an imperious mother, Fannie often felt trapped at home. I always felt trapped at home, but I left in the morning, enjoying the illusion of freedom.

Kathe stifled a giggle.

“You can leave now, Kathe. Thank you,” my mother said, annoyed.

“I’m not finished, Mrs. Ferber.”

“I say you are. Good night.”

Kathe smirked at me.

“Kathe,” I began.

“No,” my mother said. “Edna, no.”

Chapter Four

Upstairs on the edge of my bed, hands folded into my lap, I swallowed a sob. I flashed to my moment in the street with Houdini-it seemed ages ago and unreal, the sense of new possibilities an illusion like his escapes.

We fought over nothing because that was all we had to fight about. The bloody wars of headstrong sisters. Fannie the Pre-Raphaelite flower girl; Edna the Hogarth crone by the woodstove. Once again Kathe Schmidt would gossip to everyone that the Ferber household was filled with screaming women. The witches out of Macbeth, she’d whispered to Esther. My snide remark when the story got back to me, “I’m surprised she’s heard of the play.”

I hurriedly dressed for the theater in a Persian silk dress with an Arab burnoose hood lined with red velvet. I dabbed powder on my blotchy face.

I had to rush or I’d be late. One of the pleasures of the job was my blue-coated cardboard pass to the Appleton Theater and Bertsehy’s Hall, the opera house on Appleton and College. But my favorite theater was the old Lyceum on College near the university. Appleton saw a wealth of touring drama and musicals and circuses-like Negro glee clubs, Swiss bell ringers, P. T. Barnum’s circus, and Wild Bill’s western extravaganza. I loved theater most of all. I saw Rosa Coughlin in Forget-Me-Not. Blanche Walsh in Tolstoi’s Resurrection. Mary Allibone in The Spendthrift. Alex Warden in The Fire Brigade.

Tonight I was meeting Esther to see Hazel Wilde in A Taste of Winter, straight from Broadway, via Kalamazoo and Peoria. I scurried out, whispering a quick good night to my father who was slumped in his chair, dozing, and walked briskly to the Lyceum. Once again, Esther was late. I fumed in front of the theater with its magnificent white columns and its ivied red brick facade. I refused to walk in after a play began.

On edge, craning my neck, I thought I saw Esther crossing College near the Masonic Hall, but realized, to my surprise, that it was Kathe Schmidt rushing past, turning onto Drew Street, her arms linked with her strapping hulk of a boyfriend. Hadn’t Kathe said she had to rush home? No, what she’d said was: I have to be somewhere. Somewhere was obviously the arm of the brawny Jake Smuddie, a boy happily placed into the freshman class at nearby Lawrence University. His enrollment, rumor had it, was the result of an intervention by his powerful professor father and not Jake’s scholarship. Jake pointed in my direction, but an uncharacteristically bashful Kathe grabbed his arm as they slipped out of sight down Drew Street.

Curious.

Esther touched me on the shoulder, and I jumped. “Father kept me. One of his lectures on female deportment in the new century.” She giggled. “Rabbi Leitner on the Gibson Girl on the tennis court.”

I mentioned seeing Kathe and Jake.

Esther shook her head. “Kathe thinks the world is trying to steal Jake from her clutches.”

“She treats him like he’s an over-stamped library book that she’s decided to keep.”

“Oh, Edna, Kathe’s all right, you know. You just don’t like Kathe because she’s…frivolous.”

No, you were going to say…because she’s pretty. A hothouse tulip, all glossy and crisp and blatant.

I steered Esther inside the lobby of the old Lyceum, flashing the blue pass at the usher. Wearing a new dress, a pale green silk with wide puffy sleeves and a high-neck lace collar ruffle, Esther looked captivating in the way that some young girls always did, girls who never thought about their beauty. Esther never considered herself beautiful. Tall and willowy, dark complexioned with riveting hazel eyes, an oval cameo-struck face surrounded by lush, black cascading hair, she was a natural beauty. In high school a year or so back, she’d ignored the gasping swains, turning away from the breathless attention of the pimply, stuttering boys who dared approach her. She was waiting, I’d concluded, for a matinee idol. Such specimens-Arrow Shirt men, all square jawed and cobalt blue eyes-were in short supply in the Fox River Valley, land of chubby Teutonic boys, rarer at Temple Zion, where the watchful eye of her severe rabbi father followed her every movement. Quite simply, Esther turned heads. I got tongues wagging. Sometimes I wondered, flummoxed, at God’s unfair treatment of my own sex. Beauty and…well, not quite the beast. Perhaps beauty and the bleak.

I breathed in the musty atmosphere of the old Lyceum Theater, a ramshackle mausoleum of nooks and crannies, vaulted ceiling, arabesques and curlicues, faded yet still gilt trimming, and a threadbare curtain. Worn red-velvet plank seats wobbled. Echoey walls, paint flecked and mildewed, whispered of legions of performers on that narrow stage. To me, this was Theater, capitalized. I thought of the old melodramas I’d seen there, widows tied to railroad tracks, maidens lured by black-clad curs under shadowy willows. The Drunkard. Tempest and Sunshine. Ten Nights in a Barroom. Father, dear Father, come home with me now, the clock in the steeple struck one- I’d seen them all. The histrionic gesture, the stentorian voice resounding to the rafters, the icy stare, the maudlin death scenes. The theater kept me alive. It kept my family alive-the Ferbers all enjoyed the stage. There was something about a curtain going up and the rush of piano crescendo. The shock of splendid scenery, a movement of bodies, the gripping plots.

“Well, well,” a voice said from behind me. I turned. “Miss Ferber.”

Mildred Dunne stood by the ticket window, staring at me with half-closed eyes. A stern disciplinarian in her mid-thirties, slender if not bony as a starved pullet, Miss Dunne was a dreadful woman, a school librarian who despised books and cherished silence. The only daughter of Amos Dunne, one of the rich landowners of the town and the proprietor of the feed store on Drew, she was famously a spinster, to use her own redundant phrase, until the arrival of Gustave Timm, the theater manager. Suddenly the woman remembered solely for admonishing us to be quiet was seen on the arm of the dashing Gustave Timm at church socials, at dances at the Masonic Hall, on the river excursions. Miss Dunne, I supposed, was pretty enough for such a handsome man-but there was something off about the giggled confidences and whispered intimacies the two engaged in, often right on Appleton sidewalks. She seemed ill matched to the effusive Gustave. My mother once nodded to a neighbor, “Why do women always choose the wrong men?”

Next to Miss Dunne stood the brothers Timm. In my mind, of course, they were the brothers Grimm.

“Good evening, Mr. Timm,” Esther said to Gustave.

I sometimes found myself fluttering foolishly in Gustave’s presence. Like his brother Homer, Gustave was tall and square-jawed, but he was dashing and Byronic, a man out of one of the melodramas he mounted on the Lyceum stage: deep violet eyes, a hero’s swagger, and a deferential manner. He was just too close to a world I dreamed of, my life as an actress. Footlights and fantasy, star billing, bouquets of roses hurled my way.

Smiling, Esther spoke to the other brother, “And you, too, Mr. Timm.”