A/N: A series of pre-canon chapters focusing on Nadine and her relationships with the others in her canon. Anyone you recognize belongs to Joseph Moncure March and Michael John LaChiusa; any cameo-OC's, (i.e. Harper Greene-angel) belong to me. Kindly review.
She met a few of them over time, the fellow performers, fallen stars, rising stars, flatlines, ghosts. A number of them had been lovers, some currently, others many years ago. Yet they were a family, and it was a long time before she understood what that meant to them. The man at the door, dressed soberly, with a long, studious, quiet face, was Oscar Caligheri, by birth, and Oscar D'Armano, by choice.
"He's gotta man uptown," Mae explained, indifferent as she shook a bottle of red polish. "He took his name," Eddie explained.
"Why?"
Eddie and Mae exchanged a grim, knowing look. Phil D'Armano was a force to be considered. Avoided, if at all possible, rather than reckoned with. He was Harlem-bred, with a smattering of art in his blood, and he used professionalism as a substitute for passion. Awhile back, he had been obsessively in love with a woman they called Queenie. It was a long story; Eddie brushed off the girl's questions.
There were others: Isaac Greene-angel, a two-bit funnyman and accordionist, and his wife, a dark Armenian dancer named Harper, with a cruel face and a vivid imagination. Their daughter was a thin, sharp-shouldered blonde just older than Nadine, named Suzanne. Couples were popular Vaudeville attractions, and many crossed paths with each other. Harper, an old comrade of Mae's, merged with them once on tour, and Nadine was introduced to her daughter.
Suzanne, for her part, was frail and unremarkable, with a talent born of a transitory stage life of speaking out under the lights. But in person she never seemed to have much to say. With a feeble constitution and a habit of closing in on herself when spoken to, she was not suited for the life she led. Harper was rumored to beat her when she fell ill.
Suzanne was nervous when she spoke with Nadine and Eddie, bowing her shoulders, lowering her head, shrugging, putting all her weight to the side, clasping one wrist behind her back with the opposite hand.
It was accepted by the women, chattering ferociously about old friends and stale gossip, that the men and the girls would suspend their own worlds. Isaac had spoken in blunt, broken English about a car dealership that had just been robbed, and his daughter, set apart from her parents, crouched into the dust and drew five circles, each intertwined with the next. Nadine squatted beside her, took a twig that lay in one of the circles, and traced a line. Suzanne tensed up.
"Don't!" she told her, horrified, "They won't be able to get back through!" Hurriedly, she turned her back on the rest of them, slid down onto her knees, and rubbed out the line Nadine had drawn.
"Almost curtain, Mae." The reminder came after a long, lone while, and Nadine stood up gratefully. Eddie pulled her in close, "I'll find someone to watch Dine." This shouted over his shoulder to his wife, who waved, and took Harper's arm.
Nadine smiled at Eddie, "You couldn't wait to get away."
"Walk faster," was all he said.
***
The theater was huge, but not in the way she'd been expecting. It was not cavernous, but labyrinthine. Many passages seemed to lead down to the principals' dressing rooms but in the end they met up in the same narrow course, after which the performers could part company and find their signature ways to the stage. Nadine was crushed tight to her brother's side with her nimble steps just barely in his way. She hurried to keep up and rode his stride like a small wave. She barely reached his chest. The posse was on tour for three weeks in Detroit; flamboyant and immoveable transitory tent cities had sprung up around the theaters and Eddie was steering his wife's kid sister through the leering, cavernous mouth of the theater, dodging infiltrating vendors and late performers. The passages smoothed by the trails of people, Eddie pulled Nadine through the crowds. His wife was busy onstage, by profession a drunken Jewish wife and a drunken center-stage chorus girl of the dressed-up brothels. And he had a curtain to make.
He'd intended to leave the child with his wife's friend Kate, but she hadn't made the tour; though the crowds back in New York were screaming her name, the lowly circle of friends that had flocked to her had yet to find out about the newest Vaudeville triple-threat. "The fastest legs in lights", proclaimed the newspapers, recycling the old headline of the tabloid press. So a star was made.
Now was a time to call in a favor. So, instead, now he hurried to steep stop outside the dressing room and pounded the door. Inside the door a boisterous voice broke into a colorful string of swearing, and there was the sound of something sizable being thrown against it. The door wrenched open and Eddie, nudging his sister forward alongside him, turned up his dashing smile a few degrees between charming and mocking and held out his arms.
"C'mon, Venus, don't be talkin' to your old friend like that. Put the shoe down before you put out someone's eye, it ain't becoming of a lady."
The creature before him shook back a sheet of deep scarlet hair and greeted Eddie with a laugh that had the deep vibrating ring of brass before grabbing him up in a hug that looked, and sounded, quite painful. The two slapped each other on the back and the stream of conversation that followed was garbled, but seemed to consist chiefly of cheery insults. The woman, though she wore only one of her dominatrix black heels, stood very nearly at eye level with the former champ. Her upper arms were just beginning to freckle with age, and Nadine saw solid muscle clenched over Eddie's back. She instinctively tried to make herself seem as small as possible. This wasn't difficult, but she wanted nothing in her stance to imply a challenge. The woman broke away from Eddie with a hearty slap on the back of the ribs, and she pushed up the man's face with scarlet-taloned fingers. Nadine had the distinct feeling that this woman, or force, or whatever she was, was the only one Eddie would have let get away with such flamboyant lack of reverence.
"Status report, Champ, how's monogamy treatin' ya? There's a line I haven't seen before," she commented, letting go of his chin and casting a double-take over his shoulder, "Who's the morsel?"
"Mad, Nadine, Mae's kid sister. Dine, the incomprehensible Madeleine True, nearly famous pseudo-intellectual stripper in Vaudeville-" Madeleine True had punched him sharply in the chiseled shoulder.
"And the there's you, Champ, world-famous meathead and loved by women, men, dykes, and himself-" Eddie, his arm around her shoulder, smacked the side of the woman's head without appearing to move. She shoved him with one generous hip and then she bent down to the girl, who took a few hasty steps back and drew one of those great, roaring laughs from the woman.
"Oh, step on up, honey, lemme get a good look." Abruptly, she seized the girl's hand and twirled her until she spun to a stop, "Mae got shortchanged on looks in this family. Kid, step on into the lights, you get the right angle and you look like an attractive midget. Champ, ain't 'cha got a curtain to make? I'll take care of the kid."
Nadine was already throwing frantic glances at her brother, who kept one broad hand in her hair as he caught Madeleine's waist and murmured thanks in her ear. Without her great, shadowed protected she felt lost as she stared up at the woman, still dressed in her threadbare but well-loved robe of royal navy blue and gold. In its former life it might have belonged to a queen. Nadine craned her neck up to the woman's face and the first cohesive thought she verbalized beyond a squeal was, "You're… very tall…"
Madeleine shrugged and bent the leg that ended in the gothic heel to stand flat-footed. Both set of wicked nails were painted that same, disquieting blood-red, "Ah, it's the shoes."
Of course, it had nothing to do with the shoes, but as the crowed thickened around the corridor, Madeleine swore and dashed back into the screens around the dressing room, grabbing a handful of makeshift curtain. Nadine, through the streaming hustle outside, followed in and crouched on the opposite side of the curtain, at eye level with a long scar that began on Madeleine's ankle. A minute passed in relative silence and the Madeleine tumbled out of the curtain, half-immersed in a swelling black bodice, and taking a green jacket from where it lay crumpled on an upturned chair.
"So, tell me, kid," said Madeleine from the hand mirror, a bobby pin between her teeth, "Can you sing?"
Nadine looked up, and shrugged, "I guess so."
"Dance?"
Again she shrugged. She'd taken ballet at her mother's side for as long as she could remember. Madeleine chuckled rather bitterly as she pinned up her scarlet hair. "Yeah, well, in Vaudeville you gotta do it all. But here's the trick; no one specializes. Long as you do it all, doesn't really matter if you're any good. Not to go on against your sister, honey, but the act she's doing now with the Jersey accent is her only real claim to fame. Ask any of the other chorus girls."
Privately, Nadine agreed, but said nothing. Madeleine took her brush and hurriedly powdered her face. "Come onstage with me after my set. I wanna show you something."
***
"What about Eddie?"
"He's got three shows tonight and until then he's left you in my capable claws. So kid, here it is, humble as it stands." She made a grandly ironic sweep of her arm across the bare wood and remaining drunk settling in for the night. "Come on out with me. Tread the tread of the Prima Donna you may yet become. How's it feel? Your first catwalk in Vaudeville?"
The girl smiled and stretched her hands up toward ragged curtain ropes. "Perfect. More than perfect."
"So, show me something."
Nadine stumbled and looked back. The woman seemed to have lessened in ferocity in a few hours. She did four shows a day on tour, and then there were always a few slobbering drunks whose hard-ons were obstructing the blood flew to their brains who failed to see the feminist gold chain on her neck or the women on her arm she had to deal with. So in truth, the lack of viciousness was mere exhaustion, but she was also starting to take a liking to the shy little ingénue that was Mae's charge.
"Show me something, honey."
"Show you-?"
Madeleine waved, before realizing the girl needed more explicit direction. "A dance step. The first steps of your solo act."
The girl stepped forward and raised her arms to shoulder height, as though embracing some invisible friend loosely, and she looked at the veteran performer for confirmation. Madeleine snapped her crimson nails, and then her long neck. Nadine heard a crack. "Not here, love. Out on center. Get out there."
She obeyed, though at every shaking step she looked back over her shoulder at the woman leaning against the drapery. She raised her arms to half with shaking unconsciousness and pointed her toes, sweeping her leg behind her in a turn. She quivered to a balanced stop and Madeleine bid her on. Legs aching, she sat on the floorboards and then sprawled back to watch the girl's eager-to-please steps and shy rhythms.
After a few minutes she rolled over onto her knees and stood. "We'll be back, I'm sure. But I don't spend more time under those lights than necessary. Come on, kid, I gotta freshen up."
Back in the familiar curtains, she swept up her handful of cosmetics. "Against my hardened will, honey, I'm impressed. Your sister know you can dance?"
"Not really."
"You ever show her?"
She hesitated. Mae had made her put-upon state blindingly clear from her first glance at the child through dark glasses and smoke. Nadine had thought she'd looked like a cigarette model. When she'd confided her stage dreams to Mae, a conversation where neither involved had any experience in being a sister, Mae took the dish she was drying with shaking hands and tight ashen lips. She set it on the stack with unnecessary force and went to sleep early, leaving her to her husband's care. If she knew her sister could dance, all the more reason to keep away.
"No," Nadine admitted, "No, never."
Again Madeleine swept her arm impressively, inviting the girl to seize all the poorly lit stages in the world. She finished powdering and shifted back, swinging her leg over the chair back so she sat backwards, facing the girl on an angle.
"Doesn't sound like you show her much of anything to me, hon."
"I guess not," the girl murmured. Madeleine crossed her ankle over her thigh, rested one forearm on the splintered wood and turned back to that forgotten powder puff and the mirror.
"Meaning this with all love and appreciation for both a fellow member of the trade and the wife of a dear friend, but Mae's an ignorant slut."
She said this with succinct and definite wit. That was the deeply masculine force in her that spoke with contempt against the underhanded, the passive-aggressive, that felt an angry regret for the victims and spurred them to action at a head. It was a blunt force that the little girl was not supposed to agree with but sought protection behind nonetheless. Madeleine sat very still and she seemed to sense the girl's awkward catch between truth and imagined loyalty, because she stood up and patted Nadine's shoulder as she slid into black flats, street shoes. She made one casual attempt to heal the deep sting left by her words.
"I'm getting a filter. Don't listen to me. And this is the shit that comes out when I'm sober. We got time before Eddie comes back for you," Her eyes rested on a motley collection of playing cards on her dressing table. Amidst the bottles and jars of the others there might have been one full deck. "Know any 7-card?"
***
The set-up was a strange one indeed; Madeleine still poised on the brink of performance in swelling black and flowing green, full stage makeup touched and passable under the mess of scarlet hair that had been taken up and down to the point of surrender. Her top-hat she had disposed of, now it lay upon the frizzed curls of the girls beside her, resting on the blue robe and dealing out onto the upended chair. One card was bent roughly and many scratched patterns; obscene and benign, graced the backs.
"Gin," Madeleine announced, "heya, Champ."
She threw her arm around his shoulder and cards scattered from her lap onto the rumpled street clothes underneath.
"What are you doing?"
"Teaching little sis here a poker face and a lion's roar. Let's get outta here. C'mon, Dine."
She snapped her fingers as if calling some faithful stray. Obligation or command, she jumped to her feet and went to her brother's side. Madeleine, thus entwined, lingered in her brief farewell.
"The kid's got talent, Champ," her voice was deceptively breezy in undertone, "Keep Mae's hands off, I'll take her on, there's a height call downtown with this real sweet director I know…"
"Mad, do us a favor, keep your crotch outta the Onyx staff's faces for a few months, yeah? The kid's barely fourteen."
"Yeah, and then she'll be fifteen, and then sixteen and what's your excuse then, Champ? Just your own damn pride. I'd say it came with the territory, but Mae's got it too. Fuck monogamy, Ed. No sense in throwing in your will with your wife along with your lot and life. Mae's not gonna do shit to help that kid break in because she can't stand to get upstaged when she's front and center. So let me start the kid out in the wings. That's where the talent scouting starts, anyway. And I hate to break it to you, but it'd be nice to have a third performer's salary in that flat."
Her rare moment of tact and feminine wisdom earned a reprieve and indeed a contemplation from this, her close friend and fellow graceful has-been who shared her healthy contempt for everything Vaudeville.
"Y'know, when we were onstage before she started talking about Mae. Said Mae's theater was her home away from home."
"What d'you think?"
"I think, Champ, that New York, New York and its spawn are all goin' to Hell. And we're driving the bus."
"Amen to that."
Ahead of them by a few paces, oblivious to these, her good-natured messengers of doom, Nadine danced on.