THE LIVING STATUE

Ida’s first impression of the nation’s capital was renewed next morning when she began a pilgrimage to the city’s theaters, following the directions of Mrs. Broad. Blocks of marble cluttered the grounds of the Capitol, there were coal and lumber yards along the Mall and a muddy canal ran through the heart of the city. Often she saw cattle being driven along the grandest streets, and Mrs. Broad complained that there were more pigs than cats.

The four theaters were not far apart. Ida was a tall young woman with strong bones. Even carrying a robust infant eager to be born, she could walk for miles, pausing only once in a while to lean against a picket fence or rest on a marble stairway.

One afternoon she was glad to board a car of the Washington Horse Railroad Company on Seventh Street, although she wasn’t sure where it was going. The only sign on the car was not helpful:

COLORED PERSONS
MAY RIDE IN THIS CAR

But the horse was plodding in the right direction. On the Avenue, Ida descended and walked over to Tenth Street to try the last of the theaters on Mrs. Broad’s list. At the first three, Grover’s National and the two music halls, the Varieties and the Canterbury, no one had heard of Lily LeBeau.

In front of the fourth theater, there was a crowd on the street. They were all staring up at a man stepping carefully along a tightrope stretched between two buildings. Ida watched too, holding her breath until he reached the other side. Then she turned to the gaping man beside her and asked her question about Lily LeBeau.

At once he turned with a theatrical gesture, swept off his feathered hat and said, “Dear madam, come with me.”

Ida followed him gratefully through the darkened theater into a maze of dark passages. At the end of a narrow corridor he nodded at a closed door and said, “In there, dear lady,” and vanished.

Ida knocked. A woman’s voice called out, “Un momento.” Then the door was flung open by a white marble statue.

Ida gasped, but the statue laughed and pulled her inside. “Oh, dearie, it’s just The Marble Heart. You must have heard of it? Well, here I am in person, a marble goddess come to life.” She struck a statuesque pose, dropped into a chair, then jumped up again and pulled out another chair for Ida. “Here, dearie, sit down. What can I do for a sweet mother-to-be?”

Ida opened her mouth to ask for Lily LeBeau, but the loquacious living statue kept right on talking, crossing her white legs and lighting a cigar. “Oh Jesus, you can’t imagine what it’s like. I have to stand on that pedestal without moving a muscle for twenty blessed minutes before I come to life at last, and then I’m stiff all over. But fortunately, my dear, guess what? The new writer, he’s changed the lines, so when I wake up, I get to stretch and yawn and say, ‘Three long years of marble servitude!’” The living statue jumped up, stretched, yawned, then plumped herself down again. “And then I’ve got another line that really brings down the house.” The actress raised a limp white arm to her white forehead and closed her eyes in anguish, “‘I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.’”

Ida smiled and the actress laughed and slapped her knee, but at once she stopped laughing and said, “Well, I don’t know how long the big boss will let us go on being silly like that. When he gets back from Boston, we’ll be all la-di-da again. ‘Gold cannot buy genius!’ What twaddle.”

There was a rustle of skirts in the doorway and a squeal. “Ida! Oh my God, it’s not Ida?” Ida stood up awkwardly and smiled at Lily, who held out her hands and cried, “Oh, Ida, what on this earth are you doing here?”

Ida didn’t know how to soften the truth. “Oh, Lily, I followed you. I saw you board the train in Baltimore and I figured you must be coming after Seth.”

“Oh mother of God.” Lily was wrapped in filmy layers of lavender gauze. Her face was heavily made up, but her dismay showed through the pink powder and the patches of sweat. She dropped Ida’s hands and said faintly, “But my dear, it’s not so.”

“You’ve got to tell me, Lily,” said Ida, determined to have the truth at last. “Is Seth here?”

Lily looked around desperately for an excuse to get away. “Wait, dear, wait for me, because it’s just not so, what you said. Dearest girl, wait.” With a flutter of gauzy veils, she was gone.

“So when are you due, sweetie?” said the marble statue, leaning back in her chair and getting down to business.

“Oh, not for ages yet,” lied Ida, sitting down again in confusion.

“Well, I must say, you look ready to pop. My sister, you should’ve seen her. We thought she must surely have three on the inside, but it turned out to be only one, and, unfortunately it died. Then she died too.”

“I’m sorry,” murmured Ida, but the statue was off on another fascinating discourse, this time on the subject of disastrous labors she had herself personally witnessed, accompanied by advice on the care of the newborn. Ida was instructed to give her infant lots of titty.

“Oh, Ida, I’m sorry.” Lily bustled in again. “Now, my dear, let me tell you what actually happened.”

At once the living statue jumped up, said, “Ta-ta,” bounded into the corridor and slammed the door behind her.

“Ida, dear,” said Lily, “I wasn’t following Seth. We had already broken up. The whole company was coming to Washington for this engagement, so of course I came too.”

“Then Seth isn’t sick?” Ida leaned forward, her heart in her mouth. “He was never sick in the country?”

“He was never what?” Lily had forgotten her earlier story. “Oh, sick in the country. Yes, dear, he was, but then he got better. I heard he was here, but it’s not true that I followed him, no indeed. And then I heard that his old wound was troubling him.”

“Oh, Lily.” Ida reached out and caught at her hands. “What wound? Tell me. Please tell me.”

Lily had forgotten that Ida’s precious husband was supposed to have been wounded in the neck. Impulsively, she gave him a new affliction. “Jaundice,” she said wildly. Whatever that might be.

“Jaundice!”

Well, no, on second thought, perhaps jaundice was not just the thing. Lily changed her mind. “I think that’s what they said.” She dithered around the room, snatching up a heap of tumbled curls and adding them to the torrent pouring down her back. “Maybe it was pneumonia.”

“Oh, Lily, Lily, where is he?”

It was another impossible question. Lily caught up a mirror and twirled to see the toss of her curls and the sway of her gossamer gown. “Oh, in some hospital or other. There are so many in this horrid city.” Then Lily put down the mirror and stopped lying. Looking Ida in the face, she said, “My dear, how can you bear to be away from home when your time is so near? Honestly, Ida, you look ready to burst.”

Fiercely Ida said, “I’m all right,” and then the thought of her suffering husband was so compelling and terrible that she could no longer sit still. Heaving herself to her feet, she said passionately, “Oh, Lily, don’t you see? I’ve got to find him.”

“Oh, my dear girl.” Lily lifted protesting hands, but Ida turned and lumbered into the corridor, striding away from the frightening distortions and artful half-truths of poor foolish Lily LeBeau.

Poor foolish Lily dropped her hands and watched Seth’s unhappy wife fade clumsily down the hall. The poor child was almost running.

Lily felt put-upon. What else could she have said? She had been as good as gold, she had done everything a mortal soul could do on this earth to guard the safety of that skedaddling scamp Seth Morgan. His poor little wife would soon give birth, come hell or high water, whether she was still adrift in the city of Washington or at home way up north where she ought to be. Either way, a screaming baby might put some sense into her head, and then at last she’d forget about her heartbreaking struggle to find a husband who had no intention whatever of being found. A husband for whom she, poor bullied and self-sacrificing Lily LeBeau, had been forced to humiliate herself time and again.

Lily felt more and more aggrieved. This hateful pretense had been forced on her entirely against her will. In order to prevent the entire force of the law from pouncing on Seth and hanging him from a sour-apple tree, she’d been forced to tell terrible fibs to his wife, poor sweet little Ida, because Seth kept saying that somebody had it in for him, the snooping bloodhounds of the War Department and somebody else who was even worse. So it had been entirely on his behalf that Lily had been forced to tell all these awful lies. It had been extremely painful and difficult, and she was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

So when Otis looked in the door and raised questioning eyebrows and said, “How did it go?” she screamed at him and threw the mirror at his head.