Escape Artist

Gustave’s older brother Homer, standing at his side, cleared his throat. “Evening.” He spoke too loudly.

Homer Timm, Gustave’s older brother by at least a decade, was the Vice-Principal at Ryan High School. I’d never liked him, though such dislike, I’d often told myself, was irrational. Homer Timm kept order, and had once admonished me for “unladylike bustling” in the hallways, a charge I spurned. Friendly enough to all, he still struck me as a man not to be trusted with that smile that always appeared too quickly, and as quickly disappeared. He’d been a fixture in town for a decade, my mother told me, coming out of the East-Baltimore, or was it Philadelphia? — with a wispy wife and three small children, each one as pale as its mother.

The genetic power that produced a good-looking Gustave had missed the dress rehearsal where Homer was concerned; the eyes too sunken in a sallow cheek, the eyebrows too bushy, the brow too narrow, the nose too sloping and pointed-he seemed, oddly, the negative to the dazzling photograph to arrive years later.

Everyone in Appleton gossiped about the brothers Timm.

Just last week the Crescent published a notice of the upcoming September nuptials of Gustave and Mildred Dunne. That got tongues wagging. People talked of nothing else: the dashing interloper now wedding the staid librarian.

People also gossiped about Homer. He lived without his family. A consumptive Sophie Timm had been sent to convalesce at an East Coast sanitarium. The children lived with grandparents. Homer Timm, living the life of a bachelor in Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house on Jackson Street, just up from the River Lock, ventured East during summer vacations but always returned ashen and morose. I knew my mother tsked about it: “A man too comfortable being apart from his family…”

As I watched, Homer Timm knocked on the door of his brother Gustave’s small office just behind the box office. Waiting a second, his ear turned to the door, he opened it and walked in, though he hesitated at the threshold. From where I stood, I could glimpse Cyrus P. Powell, the owner of the Lyceum, sitting at Gustave’s desk.

Cyrus P. Powell had fascinated me ever since the day he replied to Sam Ryan’s request for an interview. Just four words scribbled on thick creamy linen stationery. “A preposterous request, sir.” That was it. That day everyone in the Crescent office had roared, a tide of humor that kept bubbling to the surface as we went about our business. Of course, that was a day long before Matthias Boon joined the staff.

Cyrus P. Powell knew very little about Appleton, or Appleton of him, though he owned a good part of the real estate, including the storied Lyceum Theater. The son of the president of the Appleton Central Bank on Oneida, he’d been living in New York until last year, moving back to Appleton after his father died of a stroke. He lived alone in the mansion at the end of Drew.

A man always dressed in a severe black suit, a look he never varied, just as he never varied the stern expression on his face. Perhaps forty years old, tall and angular, sporting a Roman nose over a manicured moustache and a gray-white goatee, he was handsome enough to enflame a few widows. He became everyone’s excited story for a week, largely because of his refusal to acknowledge anyone. Therefore, it was assumed, he was superior to us all. After a week, he was ignored and idly catalogued as a rich albeit handsome man who had little time or inclination for democracy.

His only acquaintance was Homer Timm, whom he’d known, years back, when both were students at Boston Latin. Once a month, no more no less, both men could be found at supper at Alter’s on Main, a bizarre rite where each ate his meal quietly, seemingly without conversation, and both looked relieved when they parted company.

Appleton assumed it was Homer’s influence that got his brother Gustave the job of Lyceum manager.

As I watched, Cyrus P. Powell scowled, muttered something to Homer who looked ready to apologize for intruding. Homer’s back was rigid, his neck stiff, that eerie smile still plastered to his face. They didn’t move, statues, and nothing about them suggested they were old friends. Gustave suddenly bustled in, a little too bubbly, but he stopped short. He shifted his body, ready to flee. Gustave always got quiet in Cyrus P. Powell’s presence. It was clear to all-that is, to me-that Gustave was terrified of his boss. Now Powell dismissed him with a flick of his wrist, and Gustave, looking around at what was his own office, backed out, bumping into a wall. His brother Homer was rolling his head back and forth, disapproving. When Gustave stepped back into the lobby, he caught my inquisitive eye. The man looked ready to sob. As Esther and I shuffled past, headed to our seats, I glanced back into the office: Homer and Cyrus P. Powell were leaning into each other, their heads almost touching, both men looking as if they were sharing some dark secret.

Esther and I settled in our seats. Esther whispered, “Did you see how menacingly Homer Timm glowered at us?”

But I was not thinking of the elder Timm. I was bothered by the scene I’d witnessed in Gustave’s office. What had just happened there? Secrets, I told myself. Appleton was filled with secrets. Everyone had secrets.

The curtain rose, nosily. Hazel Wilde appeared from the wings. Applause. My heart jumped, thrilled. A night of theater, magical.

We were the last to leave the theater because I lingered long after the final curtain call. I loved the stillness of the vast room, the usher sweeping the aisles, the stage crew bustling behind the dropped curtain. One by one the gaslights darkened. I savored it all-and the romantic image of myself backstage in a dressing room, aglow in makeup and accolades, smelling the red roses I’d accepted from fawning and handsome swains.

There was no one in the lobby by the time we left and we strolled out the front doors, up College Avenue, nearly empty of carriages and walkers. Gaslight gave the wide street a fairy-tale feel, with its vaguely Italianate buildings, the sagging store awnings, and the line of telephone poles strung up and down the avenue. The night was cool, the leafy sugar maples and white oaks rustled with a slight balmy breeze from the Fox River. In the distance church spires posed against a painter’s blue sky, hazy white at the horizon; and a crescent moon appeared and disappeared behind wispy, stringy clouds. I rarely left the theater in anything but a rapturous mood: heart pounding, head spinning, fingers trembling.

Esther was rattling on about her father entertaining a family of prosperous Jews from Kaukauna who had a marriageable son Esther had purposely ignored, though the vapid boy never took his eyes off her. A wave of loneliness came over me. A beautiful night, and I was there with Esther, admittedly my best friend, yet something was missing. I’d been seeing Clarence Maxon last summer, a fellow lover of Thackeray, but he’d gone off to Notre Dame; we’d had a silly spat, and during his holiday visit back home, he’d failed to stop in to see me. Soon he’d return for the summer and I’d bump into him on College Avenue. Oddly, thoughts of Clarence led me to think of Jake Smuddie, that striking footballer who earlier had run off into the shadows with Kathe. I tried not to dwell on him, though I often did. I couldn’t help it.

We wandered into City Park under the cool maples. At that moment I heard rustling on the dirt path that led back to the street. Both of us started, and some feet away a tall, barrel-chested man strode into view and as quickly disappeared behind a bank of arborvitae. He didn’t notice us sheltered under a shady willow, but I recognized him. It was Mac, the printer from the Appleton Crescent offices. Just Mac-a man whose surname I’d never learned. Mac, a dark, mysterious wanderer, a printing wizard, a dervish with linotype and ink; a man who spent long days and nights in the press room just beyond the room where the others and I pecked away at our typewriters. Mac, the itinerant tramp who’d wandered in one day, took the job, and lost himself in that back room.

“Someday,” Sam Ryan told me, “I’ll turn around and he’ll be gone. It’s the nature of the beast.”

Laconic, moody, Max had not said one word to me in over a year, though often I’d spotted him staring at me, a look I had trouble understanding. He rented a room at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house. Strange, how the single men of town gravitated to Mrs. Zeller’s huge home: Mac, Homer Timm, and even new city editor Matthias Boon. You rarely saw Mac in town. A man with a flat pancake face, unlovely, pocked and dented, he had a cruel scar that led from his left eye down into the tremendous drooping walrus moustache that he lacquered so thoroughly it shone like polished wood. In the morning when I arrived at the city room, he was already in back, clamoring away at the presses, hauling trays of type, banging and knocking, and sometimes cursing so profanely I blushed. At night when I left, he’d still be there.

Now, seeing him disappear into the midnight woods, I trembled. I wasn’t afraid. I walked the night streets of Appleton alone all the time. It was the way he looked at me in the city room, a look so hard and steely that I always wanted to confess. But to what? I hardly knew.

City Park closed in around me now.