Railroad Page 6

  Collis blew smoke. ‘This is what they call a marriage of convenience, although it seems to be for everyone’s convenience except my own. The girl he wants me to marry is Delphine Spooner, who is the daughter of George Spooner, of Ohio Life and Mutual. And guess which Wall Street finance company is interested in joint speculative investments with Ohio Life and Mutual? No prizes for the right solution.’

  ‘Delphine Spooner,’ said Jack thoughtfully. ‘I met her once at a birthday party, out at Astoria, Long Island. Quite pretty, if I remember, but very, er, petite.’

  ‘I’ve only seen her a couple of times,’ said Collis, ‘but I remember her arms were unbecoming. Plump, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Well, that settles it,’ said Jack. ‘You can’t marry a girl with plump arms.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Henry. ‘And supposing you don’t even like the young lady when you meet her? What then? I really think you’re going to have to make a stand here, young Collis. Is a man’s destiny his own, or not? You hold our collective fate in your hands.’

  ‘I’ve already agreed to meet her,’ said Collis. ‘I’m not entirely sure why, although I guess it has a lot to do with money. I know my father would cut down my allowance if I annoyed him. He might even cut it off altogether. But that isn’t the whole reason. Maybe that business with Kathleen Mary this morning made me think twice. Maybe it’s time I was respectable.’

  ‘Hallelujah,’ said Jack. ‘The scales have fallen from his eyes. He has been converted to the one true faith, which is to honour thy father and thy mother, marry a virgin, and if at all possible, live no further north than Fourteenth Street.’

  ‘I really don’t know what’s the matter with you, Collis,’ said Lewis. ‘I always thought you were a man of the world. A dashing figure. And here you are, considering wedlock with a very drab young lady. It’s inadmissible!’

  Henry raised a hand to Jimmy, to indicate that they were all ready for another round of drinks. It was growing noisy and bright and hot in the saloon now, as pre-theatre crowds pressed in for a quick beer or whisky before the shows started. Just as Jimmy slid over fresh glasses for them, a tall, sallow young man in a showy silk vest and hyacinthine whiskers came pushing his way through the throng of black top hats and starched white shirt fronts and shook them all by the hand as if he hadn’t seen them for seven years.

  ‘I’m so pleased I bumped into you,’ he said, blinking his brown, bulging eyes. ‘I was thinking of a couple of hours’ faro this evening, if you were in the mood.’

  ‘Have a drink, Nathan,’ said Henry. ‘At the moment we’re deciding whether we’re in the mood for a wedding or a funeral, or maybe both.’

  Nathan Hackett looked from Henry to Collis, and then to Jack and Lewis, and his smile slowly faded. He was the son of Colonel Walter Hackett, who was president of innumerable banks and funds and trusts, but was probably better known for his love of polo and cards and women. Colonel Hackett’s only legitimate offspring, Nathan had inherited all of his madcap enjoyment of wagering and gambling; and although Collis considered himself a sharp faro player and a risky kind of a betting man, he knew that Nathan unquestionably had the edge on him. It was Nathan who the previous night had bet on the matter of the bald heads.

  ‘You’re welcome to join us,’ said Collis. ‘I’m afraid I was just starting the evening with some reflective thoughts, and I’ve made us all miserable. I’ve had one of those days when you don’t know whether to do away with yourself by drowning, which might take the press out of your clothes, or by taking poison, which might disagree with your luncheon.’

  ‘We’re going to Delmonico’s,’ put in Henry. ‘And then we’re off to Leonard Street to enjoy a slightly exotic entertainment.’

  Nathan took his pocket watch out of his vest and peered at it. ‘I have to meet the Rodgerses at White’s Restaurant,’ he said. ‘But once that chore’s over, I’ll come down to Delmonico’s and join you. You know the way the Rodgerses eat. Like lions at the zoo. It should all be devoured in a half-hour.’

  ‘I bet you five dollars they’ll take longer,’ Collis said.

  Nathan grasped his hand. ‘Done! Now, I must be off. I’m late already.’

  ‘No force-feeding, mind,’ said Jack. ‘We don’t want you to win this wager by propping open poor old Dorothy Rodgers’s mouth with a salt cellar and pouring the soup straight down her gullet.’

  Nathan raised his hands as if to protest his innocent intentions and then pushed his way back through the crowd. Henry turned to Collis and remarked, ‘Well, that seems to have cheered you up. There’s nothing like a wager, I always say. It’s almost as exhilarating as getting drunk. How about another stone fence before we go to the restaurant?’

  They gathered in the colonnaded porch of the grey Federal house on Leonard Street, under a twinkling red lamp. Nathan Hackett had joined them in time for the coffee and brandy at Delmonico’s, and had silently tucked a five-dollar bill into Collis’s pocket. Apparently, Mr Rodgers had been to his dentist on Bond Street that morning and his usual gobbling had been slowed to a painful, measured mastication of every bite.

  Red lights shone on almost every other house on Leonard Street, and the sidewalks were busy with opera-hatted, bewhiskered gentlemen, many of whom, like Collis and his friends, had walked over from Broadway to complete their evening’s entertainment at ‘ladies’ boardinghouses’. There were shouts and guffaws and drunken laughter, and down at the Broadway end of the street, a street musician was playing the banjo while a scraggly monkey hopped and danced on the end of a chain at his feet.

  Henry Browne knocked at the ‘boardinghouse’ door, and after a while it was opened. The five friends trooped quietly inside, into a red-draped hallway decorated with plush wallpapers and furnished with rococo hallstands in a style that Collis called ‘early gin palace’. The door was closed and secured behind them, and their doorman, a tall Negro in a powdered wig and the uniform of an eighteenth-century flunky, offered to take their hats and their canes. From a doorway at the far end of the hall, also draped with tasselled curtains, they could hear flute and cello music, and a sudden spattering of applause.

  ‘I’m told this show is splendid,’ said Henry, taking out a pair of small spectacles from a blue velvet case and propping them on the bridge of his nose. ‘Just the thing after rosemaryed mutton and raspberry ices. Just the thing to put you in the mood.’

  ‘Who’s paying?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘My treat,’ said Collis. ‘For the performance, at least. Your lady is your own choice, and for her you can stump up for yourself.’

  ‘That’s only because you invariably choose the cheapest,’ Jack ribbed him.

  Collis pulled a face. ‘I pay in other ways, I assure you. I had one devil of a hangover this morning, apart from all the other tribulations.’

  Nathan said, ‘I bet you my five dollars back that I can pick an uglier girl than you.’

  ‘Done,’ said Collis, ‘although I’m damned if I know why.’

  At that moment, the drapes over the far door parted and a young girl emerged, very pretty and delicate, with dark ringlets and made-up eyes, and wearing nothing more than a pale-blue Empire-style dress of sheerest lawn, through which it was possible to see a host of alluring curves and shadows. ‘My name is Gemima,’ she said, beckoning. ‘Would you come this way, gentlemen, and be seated?’

  Henry winked. ‘What did I tell you? It looks all very toothsome indeed.’

  Collis gave him a wry grin.

  Gemima led them through the drapes and then along a shadowy passage to an oak door. The music was louder now, and they could hear the gruff voices of men calling out ribald encouragement. Gemima opened the door and ushered them into a small partitioned-off room, like a private box at the theatre. It was furnished with club armchairs upholstered in purple velvet, and there was a small marble-topped table on which a magnum of French champagne was chilling in an ice bucket.

  The front of the box was hung with heavy, dark drapes, so t
hat the occupants were shadowed from the view of other boxes. There must have been five or six boxes altogether around the main room, and each gave its guests an unobstructed view of a scarlet-covered daybed, brightly illuminated by a gas bracket, and of three young lady musicians, all scantily dressed in Grecian-style tunics, who sat on upright chairs beside the daybed with a cello and a flute and a violin.

  ‘An exhibition has just finished,’ said Gemima in a soft whisper. ‘Please sit down, and another will start directly.’

  Collis sat at the front, by the polished mahogany rail, and Nathan Hackett sat beside him. While the others drew up their chairs, Gemima poured the champagne for them in tall cold glasses, and they toasted her, with quiet appreciation, before she bowed and left them, closing the door. The girl musicians started to scrape out an uneven version of ‘Nymphs and Shepherds, Come Away’, but the audience, who were already turning the air grey with cigar smoke, were not overly critical, particularly of the young black-haired cellist, who had to sit with her legs wide apart.

  ‘I must say I like that violinist,’ said Collis. ‘Now, she’s quite fair.’

  Nathan touched his knee. ‘Just remember our wager. The uglier you pick ’em tonight, the more likely you are to win. So you can forget the fair ones.’

  Collis sipped his champagne and sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right. If I don’t marry Delphine, and Father cuts off my money, I’m going to need every dollar I can win.’

  ‘You could always work,’ Henry pointed out. ‘There are some professions that a young fellow like you could go into without disgrace. I hear that being a speculator in railroad bonds is an amusing way to pass the time.’

  ‘Father believes I should exploit the resources of the earth and the ocean. He made his first hundred thousand from lobsters, and I suppose he believes that what was good enough for him is easily good enough for me.’

  ‘How the devil do you make a hundred thousand from lobsters?’ asked Jack. ‘Do you send them begging letters, or what?’

  Collis coughed. ‘You have to bring them up from the bed of the sea, and boil them. That’s all. But it all sounds like too much hard work to me. Father said they often caught thirty-pounders, which took two men to hold down, and five hours to boil.’

  Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘The nearest I’ve ever seen to a thirty-pound lobster is Isaac Singer, that sewing-machine fellow.’

  Nathan Hackett frowned. ‘And I’ve never seen a thirty-pound lobster at all. My dear fellow, a thirty-pound lobster would be the size of a small boy. If you ask me, your dear father’s been pulling your leg.’

  ‘He said it was true,’ retorted Collis. ‘And if he said it was true, then it was.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nathan, leaning back in his armchair, ‘I hate to dispute his word. But if you can find me a thirty-pound lobster, and set it on a plate in front of me, then I will pay you a hundred dollars.’

  ‘Two hundred,’ said Collis intently.

  Nathan glanced at Henry. ‘Young Collis is getting riled up, don’t you think, Henry? I didn’t think he was on speaking terms with his dear father, let alone ready to fight on his behalf.’

  He turned to Collis, smiled, and said, ‘Three hundred.’

  Collis put out his hand, and they settled the wager with a firm shake.

  ‘I’ll have one of those monsters snapping its claws at you within the next six weeks,’ he promised. ‘Then you can eat your words, and your wager besides.’

  Nathan smiled and shrugged. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. That’s all I can say.’

  ‘Quiet, you two,’ said Henry. ‘I believe the exhibition’s starting.’

  ‘About time too,’ grumbled Lewis. ‘A fellow can grow weary of “Nymphs and Shepherds”, even when it’s played in the altogether.’

  The three girl musicians faltered into silence, and then an imposing-looking woman, fiftyish and grey-haired, in a sparkling turban and a peacock-blue gown, came out from behind the drapes and stood by the daybed, smiling and nodding in the gaslight.

  ‘Gentlemen, we’re so pleased that you’re here tonight. I am Mrs Netta de La Paige, and these talented young ladies are my orchestra, the Nightingales. In a moment, I wish to present to you one of the most artistic and instructive of exhibitions, which will feature my Nubian artiste Cornelia and my Aryan artiste Henrietta, together with one of the most magnificent of male physical specimens, the Mighty Marmaduke.’

  The Nightingales raised their instruments and began assiduously to scrape and tootle at ‘In a Monastery Garden’, which caused Jack to guffaw loudly. Then the drapes parted again and out into the circle of light danced a statuesque blonde girl, wound with flowing translucent scarves. By her height and the breadth of her shoulders, Collis guessed she was probably Swedish or Finnish. Her hair was cropped into close curls, and she had the kind of clear-eyed, straight-nosed face that he remembered from illustrations to stories of the Norse gods.

  She danced and twirled around the room, pirouetting from box to box, and curtsying coquettishly in front of each. Collis raised his hands and applauded her as she came past his box, and she lowered her shiny green-painted eyelids and ran the tip of her tongue across her bared teeth.

  ‘She likes you, damn it!’ Nathan Hackett laughed. ‘I swear to God she likes you!’

  The blonde girl, having completed her provocative tour of the boxes, arranged herself on the red daybed. Now the three-piece orchestra clumsily changed its tune, this time to some pastiche of an oriental melody, complete with tinkling finger cymbals from the flautist. Out of the drapes, to rough shouts of pleasure and amazement, emerged a Negro girl, as tall as the blonde, wearing nothing but a triangular loincloth of gold coins linked together. Her skin was densely black, as blue-black as writing ink, and her hair had been wound into curling snakes and wrapped with gold leaf. She was slant-eyed and big-lipped and mesmerisingly sensual, and Collis found it was impossible to take his eyes away from her. She swayed past them, snarling at them with her wide white teeth and leaving behind her a musky, arousing perfume.

  ‘Now for the Mighty Marmaduke,’ said Nathan. ‘I bet you he can’t manage both ladies in the next fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Five dollars?’ asked Collis.

  They shook hands.

  The cellist drew her bow across her instrument in a deafening discord. Then the curtains were thrown aside and out stalked a muscular, curly-headed man, six feet two at least, in a leopard-skin costume and black leather knee boots. His face was rugged as a cliff, with a huge shaggy moustache, but it was the prominent bulge in his costume that drew most attention. He could have been an out-of-work actor, or an Irish road-digger, or anything at all, but he walked around the room with an air of arrogance and brutish superiority, because he knew that not one of the gentlemen who were watching him had anything to match, no matter how wealthy they were.

  Collis couldn’t take his eyes away from the bright-lit circle in the centre of the room as the two girls slunk from the daybed and curled themselves around the shins of the Mighty Marmaduke. Then the blonde girl shed her scarves, one by one.

  At that moment, the room was quite hushed, and even the lady instrumentalists put down flute and cello and violin. The Mighty Marmaduke disdainfully released the cords which stayed his costume, and it peeled downward from his broad, coarse-haired chest, until the black girl seized it and tugged it right to his knees. There was another cello chord, and the Mighty Marmaduke stood magnificently revealed.

  Henry and Nathan clapped loudly, and Henry even whistled between his teeth, but Collis found himself strangely disinclined to applaud. He was stimulated by what was happening before him, he admitted that much. But somehow the stimulation seemed unconvincing, as if he was becoming awkwardly aware that everything he was seeing, and therefore everything he was feeling, was an erotic charade.

  Collis sat for a moment staring at the sexual tableau in front of him, biting his thumbnail. Then, almost as if he had been urgently paged, he drained his champagne glass and stood
up.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it’s been a remarkable evening, in more ways than one, but now I must leave you.’

  Henry caught at his sleeve. ‘You can’t go, my dear boy. You haven’t seen the best part yet! Look – look at what they’re doing now!’

  Collis wouldn’t look, and shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough, Henry. Perhaps just for this evening, maybe for good. It’s beginning to strike me, all this pornographic gimcrackery, as pretty stale stuff.’

  ‘Oh, come on, now,’ said Jack. ‘Just because you’re jealous of the Mighty Marmaduke, there’s no need to rush out in a huff.’

  Collis turned to him. ‘I don’t think I need to be jealous. I expect he’s jealous of me, being able to leave whenever I like. Don’t you think he gets bored, doing that?’

  ‘What a let-down!’ said Lewis. ‘Where’s the Collis we know and admire?’

  ‘He’s still here,’ said Collis quietly. ‘Now, don’t let me spoil the exhibition for you. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe, if anybody fancies a drink and some dinner.’

  Henry paused, nodded, and then let go of Collis’s sleeve. He was beginning to understand what was disturbing his friend. It wasn’t so much his father, and his self-centred mother, nor even the plunge that Kathleen Mary had taken off the parapet. Henry knew that Collis had been made to think about himself and his future by what had happened in the past twelve hours; and that, having thought, he was slowly lifting his head from the nightly slough of drinking and gambling and whoring, and scenting the clear, cold wind of something else.

  It was something that stimulated more than erotic circus shows, and something that intoxicated quicker than drink. It was ambition.

  ‘Take care, Collis. Let’s talk tomorrow,’ was all Henry said, but that was all that was needed.

  Chapter 2

  The ‘chance’ meeting with Delphine Spooner was carefully orchestrated, the following Thursday lunchtime, at Taylor’s. Ida had visited Mrs Spooner at her substantial brownstone house on Second Avenue, and over boudoir biscuits and Lapsangsouchong, the two of them had arranged that Delphine and her mother should go shopping and promenading on Broadway, and should arrive on the corner of Franklin Street, where Taylor’s Restaurant stood, at the stroke of midday, and that Mrs Spooner should suggest they go inside for an ice. Coincidentally, of course, Collis would already be there with Ida, and over their light lunchtime refreshment, the two could be introduced.