A Free State Read Online Free PDF Page B

once our house was packed every night, with almost no effort, now it required a stream of novelties to keep us between two-thirds and three-quarters filled on the weekends. I don’t know that any other troupe was doing appreciably better, but the competition was spurring everyone to greater lengths. The first element I added beyond our core ensemble performance was a pastoral scene in which Powell and Burke portrayed Little Eva and Uncle Tom, in a tableau which I adapted from Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Dramatized performances of passages from this book were almost a necessity at that time, and I worked up a scene in which pathos was ascendant. It ended with Burke on one knee singing “Ave Maria.” Really, the effect was uncanny.
    The new set pieces and routines demanded sufficient attention that we hired a costumer half-time, named Rose, to help us keep up with the various changes. I suppose this is the place to introduce her, but I hardly know how to begin.
    She appeared at Barton’s around the time I speak of and offered her services as a seamstress. She was tall, even in the flat shoes she wore, and her brown hair was cut short, so that it nearly resembled a boy’s. Her eyes were large and brown. Her stated experience seemed in order with our needs, although I would have hired her if her experience had consisted of sweeping out coal dust in a bordello. I installed her in a large storage room that I cleared out immediately, and she was at work within a week.
    I conferred with her on every detail of costuming. Every day she herself looked different, and yet every day her appearance bore the unmistakable impress of who she was. No one else dressed like her, walked like her. One day she wore men’s trousers and a man’s shirt, and she never looked lovelier. She called me “Mister James,” with a little glint in her eye, for the first week, until I insisted upon her dropping the “mister.” Her voice had a teasing lilt to it, but never cruel, and her natural state was an unhurried grace, as if she were the exiled queen of some unknown country.
    At the sewing table she was as serious as a surgeon, and a wizard at finding ways to use unanticipated materials. I might stop in to find that she had managed to incorporate thin strips of foil into a set of pantaloons (for a Shakespearean parody) so as to catch glints of light; another time she created a pharaoh’s headdress out of a frame of baling wire, covered with dyed muslin. She seemed utterly self-contained when she practiced her craft. I have always been susceptible to this quality in people, as I lack it myself. Part of me is always standing outside, weighing the costs.
    We flirted good-naturedly—she flirted good-naturedly with everyone. On the days when her hours at the worktable overlapped with the troupe’s rehearsals, she joined easily in the give-and-take with the fellows. Dan Powell might say, “Here is our beautiful flower! Remove your weeds so that we can enjoy your beauty!”
    â€œYou’d cut your fingers on my thorns, Dan,” she might reply, with a smile.
    Fitting Burke into an evening gown for some forgotten mock-opera sequence, she might smile to herself at a few words of praise from his middle-aged lips, respond, “I’m very flattered,” without looking up, and thereby draw her boundaries in the gentlest manner. Only Eagan refrained from joining in the general teasing, and this should have told me what I needed to know.
    One afternoon, a month or so after she arrived, I asked if she might join me for a walk and lunch at McKenna’s place on Third Street. It was one of the few public houses that allowed women to come and go, catering, as it did, to travelers from the packet boats. She put some things in order at her worktable, and we walked the few blocks to the tavern. I was a bit on edge, as if I were about to submit to an important audition. I had to remind myself that I was the