When George finally got to the theater he saw the thick folding sign out front with the words WEEKLONG PERFORMANCE—SILENUS and 5 CENTS ENTRY blaring up and down its sides, and all thoughts of the men in gray faded from his mind. He wandered up as if in a dream, took a bill of acts from the ticket box, and read:
And there, on the opposite page, was an illustration of a man in a top hat standing in the middle of a stage, telling a story. With trembling fingers, George pulled out his theater bill from Rinton, unfolded it, and held the two bills side by side. Though the Pantheon’s bill was by far the superior, and the Rinton bill was old and faded, the two illustrations matched exactly.
His trembling increased. He had never been this close before. He’d dreamed of this moment so many times, yet he’d never really believed it could happen.
Then, to his surprise, the doors of the theater were pushed open, and a crowd of people came striding out. George went white, and almost fainted. “Oh, no!” he said. “I’ve missed it! How could I have missed it?” He nearly sat down in the street in shock, but stopped himself as three members of the crowd stood in the street to smoke:
“I shouldn’t have come so early,” one man said. “I mean, I only came for the Silenus bits. I’ve no interest in these Little Lord Fauntleroy plays at all. They’re just maudlin.”
“Oh, come now,” said a friend. “The kid was trying. He wasn’t that bad. One lady actually cried.”
“That was Maudie Gray,” said a woman with them. “She cries at everything, especially when little boys are involved. You should have seen her when they did East Lynne. She came to every show and bawled her eyes out.”
“I believe it,” said the first man. “But still, I should have come in after the halfway. I’m really only curious to see what all the talk is about.”
“Or what it isn’t about,” said the second. “Does anyone really know what Silenus is going to do?”
“Do you think it has to do with why they got started so late?” asked the woman.
“Is it late?” said the first man. “I suppose it does feel late.” He peered up into the sky as though there were something wrong with the moon, and shivered and lapsed into silence.
“It’s intermission,” George said softly. He rechecked the bill of acts. “It’s only intermission! I haven’t missed it!” Then he stuffed the bill in his pocket, picked up his suitcase, and dashed inside.
The coat-check girl wouldn’t take his suitcase, so after some negotiating with the usher George was allowed to take it in with him, provided he sat at the back. George found that the Pantheon was a much, much nicer theater than what he was used to: it had velvet curtains of a very rich red (which he found more tasteful than the ratty green ones used at Otterman’s), footlights of crenellated gold, and a pristine white spotlight that stayed fixed on the center of the stage. George felt an irrational pang of jealousy at this; even though he’d dissolved all his bonds with Otterman’s, he still felt bitter that the Panthon had a spotlight, while his old place of employment did not.
More people filed in to sit around him, and it felt like hours went by. George found he wasn’t alone: several people began checking their watches, and one nearby lady said, “I hope he gets started soon. I thought I was late getting here.”
“Did you?” said her friend.
“Yes. When I left the house I thought for sure that it was very late.”
“How odd. You know, I think I might’ve felt something similar. I’ve never had an evening pass as slow as this one. Though once the show begins, I expect things will go faster. It shouldn’t be long.”
George hoped so. His stomach had gone numb, and he felt like he couldn’t open his eyes wide enough. He knew it was unwise to pin all his hopes on one man, yet this was almost exactly what he had done: he hoped that Silenus could take him away from these small country theaters, and school him in the finer arts of the stage; he hoped his father would greet his newfound son with open arms, and rejoice in their meeting; and George’s last, most desperate hope was that Silenus would be such an astounding and wonderful man that finding him could somehow make up for the loss of George’s mother. She had died giving birth to him, and as the identity of his father had been unknown he’d been left to be raised by his grandmother. The fallout from the ensuing scandal had dealt their family name an irreparable blow, and as a bastard child George had been exiled to a lowly, unspoken caste in Rinton. Perhaps, he hoped, Silenus would make all those unhappy years worthwhile.
It would not be long now. He kept sitting up to peer down into the orchestra pit to see when they were going to start playing. That would be when the action would begin.
After a while the lights in the theater faded and the mutter of talk died down. Some signal came from offstage, and the pianist sat down and began arthritically tinkling out a breezy waltz. George thought the man’s playing stilted and pat, but he was far more excited about whatever was going to happen onstage than what was going on in the orchestra pit. “Here we go,” he whispered aloud.
The pianist played the first movement of whatever piece it was, and as he geared up to repeat it a man walked—no, erupted—from the side of the stage, charging for the center of the boards with a palpable confidence. He wore a red coat, checked pants, and a black top hat, and his white-gloved hands were bunched into fists. George got the impression that he would have walked through a brick wall, if one barred his way. When he came to the center of the stage he stopped short and wheeled to face the audience, swooping his hat off his head as he turned. He surveyed them for a bit, like a man inspecting a horse for sale, and people were not sure whether or not to applaud.
Time seemed to stand still for George as he stared at the man on the stage. Except for his pose, it was the theater bill’s illustration come to life. The man was short and mustachioed and had a slight potbelly, and he wore his thick, black hair combed back over his head. It shone in the light like oil. But what George was most astonished by was the man’s face. Though he wore the whiteface makeup commonly used in vaudeville, George could see that the man’s cheeks and mouth were heavily lined, and his cold blue eyes were very deep-set. It was not a lovely face; it was hard and austere, a face much used to scowls and glares. But the most astonishing thing was that it looked a little like the person George saw each time he glanced in the mirror.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” called the man in a fruity, tobacco-tinged voice. “I come to you today bearing wonders from afar. If you were to inspect my shoes, you would find on their soles the soil of a thousand countries. My many coats have soaked up the salty air of all the seven seas. Were you to see my dustbin you would find a dozen hats, all drained of color by distant suns. These are the lengths I have gone to to procure our world’s greatest treasure, our most precious resource, our most secret and unpredictable wonder.” He paused, and smiled both cunningly and a little cruelly as the audience waited for his finish. “Entertainment,” he said, and bowed. “I am Heironomo Silenus.”
The audience smiled and clapped, but George was too thunderstruck to move, trying to drink in every moment. Silenus snapped back up and advanced on the edge of the stage. He leaned out over them, looking furious in the lights of the gas jets along the stage, and several people in the front row recoiled. “For what better gift did the Creator give us than that ability to release, and relax, and allow ourselves to be taken to lands unseen and undreamt of simply with the crude components of performance?” he said. “A dab of face paint, a tinkling of a chord, a well-crafted costume and a few choice words, and we are given a vision of things that are not, were not, nor will ever be. We are given visions of the Other. These I bring to you in the palm of my hand, eager to send them tumbling into your laps. We are constrained by one thing only: time, and yours I shall no longer waste.”
He whipped around and withdrew, gesturing toward the curtain, and said, “See now the genius I found overseas in the hallowed halls of ancient Europe! A man of mechanism and wit, of ingenuity never before seen, a professor in his own lands, but here, something even greater: a performer, waiting to serve at your whim. I give you the redoubtable Professor Kingsley Tyburn, and his companions!” Silenus then replaced his hat with a flourish, sank into the darkness, and was gone. The curtain began to rise, and George nearly moaned in disappointment; it was the first time he’d ever glimpsed his father, and he did not want him to leave. But he quieted once he saw what was behind the curtain.
On the stage was the painted backdrop of the interior of an old farmhouse, but it seemed a strange and forbidding scene. The wood of the farmhouse was gray and old-looking, and the landscape outside the window was filled with twisting trees and a sickly moon. A long, high table was set up in front of the backdrop, and a man in a black tuxedo was seated at the middle. His skin was painted white, his lips bright red, and his copper-red hair was closely cropped. His legs were crossed, and he appeared to be reading a book, completely unaware of the audience, with one hand holding the book and the other hidden below the table. Placed along the table were three boxes, each of them shut. They looked a little like tiny coffins. The man licked a finger and turned the page of his book, but otherwise did nothing.
“Have we started yet?” said a small, tinny voice. “It sure sounded like we did…” It spoke with a distinctive New York twang, and seemed to come from one of the boxes.
The man, presumably the professor, cocked an eyebrow, and glanced at the box on the far right. The audience chuckled.
“Don’t think so,” said another, this one deeper and with a Cockney accent. “He’d have opened us up, wouldn’t he?” This one came from the box in the middle. George squinted to see if the professor’s lips were moving at all. He was far away, but they didn’t seem to even twitch.
“Unless he was still angry with us,” said a third voice from the box on the left. This one was Southern and was meant to be a woman’s, though it had a bass resonance that suggested a man behind it. “Do you think he is?”
“Yes!” said the professor, and slammed down his book. “I am, in fact.”
There was a gasp from one of the far boxes, and it shook a little as though someone inside had recoiled. The audience laughed again.
“What are you still mad at us for, Doc?” said the first voice.
“You know very well what I’m mad about, Denny,” said the professor.
“Aw,” said the voice. “Is this about the party?” The top of the box on the far right opened, and a wooden face with large, blank eyes, a pug nose, and a moth-eaten old hat rose out and leaned against the top. The audience laughed and clapped at the puppet’s appearance.
“Yes, Denny, this is about the party,” said the professor. “You embarrassed me greatly. You walked right up to the hostess and said… You said…”
The box on the far left opened and another puppet emerged, this one with the blond hair, hoop-skirted dress, and sultry blue eyes of a Southern belle. “He asked if she believed in love at first sight,” she said, her wooden mouth matching the words. The audience clapped appreciatively.
“Yes!” said the professor, flustered.
The middle box opened, and a third puppet emerged, this one fat, bald, and with one large eyebrow. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that,” he said in a thick Cockney accent.
“There’s nothing bad about that,” said the professor. “Well, nothing that bad about that. It’s what he said after that gets my goat. She replied no, she didn’t, and then he said—”
“I said, in that case I’d have to keep coming back here,” said Denny, and though his face was unmistakably wooden George got the impression that it had smirked at them.
The drummer in the orchestra rattled off a syncopated beat after the punch line, and the audience laughed as the professor sputtered to respond to his puppet. They were all crude-looking things, like they had each been carved out of a single log, but somehow their crudeness lent them a believable air of expression.
“You all get more and more out of control every day!” said the professor. “Berry, you even insulted my actor friend!” he told the fat puppet.
“What? I said he was great in his death scene in the play,” said Berry.
“Yes, but you said it should have come several acts earlier!”
Another beat from the drummer (this one a little late, George noted), and the audience roared laughter. Berry mugged for the crowd, even though his face did not seem to move.
“I guess we did sort of ruin things,” said Denny. “They all got a little down when I told them about my friend Frank.”
“Frank?” said Berry. “Why, what happened to him?”
“Well, he passed on.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Denny!” said the professor.
“Yeah,” said Denny. “He fell through some scaffolding.”
“How horrible!” said the Professor. “Was he fixing his roof?”
“No, he was being hung,” said the puppet, and again there was the snarl of a snare drum.
“Oh, Denny!” said the professor. The crowd clapped and cawed laughter.
“He’s rigging them up underneath the table,” whispered a woman in the row before George.
“Hush,” said her friend, but George had thought the same thing. Yet even so, how was the professor manipulating three puppets at once?
“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, Doc?” said the Southern belle puppet.
“No,” said the professor to her kindly. “No, you didn’t, Mary-Ann.”
“Good,” she said. “Though I did meet the most delightful man at the party.”
“Did you?” said the professor.
“Oh, yes. He’s very well respected, a Southern planter.”
“Ah, very good.”
“Yes,” she said, “he’s an undertaker from New Orleans, you see.”
“Oh!” cried the professor, anguished at having been made a fool of again. The bass drum belched down in the orchestra pit, and the audience hooted and clapped. “What can I do to get you all to behave!”
“Well, why don’t you let us out, Doc?” said Denny.
“Let you out?” said the professor.
“Yes! Let us stretch our legs.” He wiggled in his box as though straining to move his limbs. “Let us out of the boxes, Doc, and set us loose!”
“Oh, Denny,” said the professor, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
“Why not?” said Berry. “We could be real people for you!”
“Real?”
“Yes!” said Mary-Ann. “Real people, for you, for everyone! For this one last performance here!” She turned to beam out at the audience.
“We could own houses, ride trains, and even vote!” said Denny. “Several times, if we wanted to!” Again the puppet seemed to smile coyly.
“But why would you want that?” said the professor.
“Everyone wants that, Doc,” said Denny.
“We’d be no longer wooden,” said Mary-Ann. “No longer so stiff, so hard, so cold.”
“Yes,” said Berry. “Everyone wants to be real. You’re one or the other. You are or you aren’t. And here we are, stuck in between.”
The audience members laughed a little, but glanced at one another, unsure. Usually every exchange was a joke, but this one didn’t seem to be heading toward a specific punch line. The drummer was searching through his sheet music, confused as to where the next beat fell. Onstage the puppets all gained a hungry look to them, but it could have just been the shifting of the light. And was it George’s imagination, or was the light on the stage now coming through the window on the backdrop, as though projected by the painted moon?
“But children,” said the professor, “you’re not real. You’re not real people at all. See?” He reached out with one hand and knocked on Berry’s head, producing a comical, hollow sound. The drummer in the pit rattled out a line on the snare drum along with it.
“That hurts,” said Berry softly.
“We’re real enough,” said Mary-Ann. “Real as anyone else. Take us and chop us up and grind us to pieces, and you’ll find naught a thing alive.”
“But do that to any other folk, and you’d find the same,” said Denny slyly.
“Yes,” Berry said. “We speak and we want. We see and we hear. We’re real enough, Father, just enough.” The puppets turned to the professor eagerly, and George felt unsettled. He was reminded of piglets voraciously suckling at the teats of a hog, squirming to get a better spot. He could tell now that all the puppets were being voiced by one performer, but somehow he did not think it was the professor. And there was something wrong with the stage… The backdrop seemed noticeably less painted on. George could swear the slats in the farmhouse walls were casting shadows.
“That backdrop is very odd,” whispered the woman in the row before George.
“I know,” said her friend. “It doesn’t suit the act. Why would he be performing beside a lake?”
“What?” said the woman. “What lake? There’s only the circus.”
“A circus? What are you talking about?” asked her friend. “There’s no circus, just the field and the lake. Look at those odd, bendy shrubs, and glowy beetles, and those people playing at the shores of the lake. But the people don’t look right to me. Their arms and legs are too long and bent. Do they look right to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the woman. “There’s only the circus behind him. But there’s something wrong with the animals… some of them don’t look like any type of animal I’ve ever seen before. And I don’t like the clowns at all. Their eyes do not seem right to me…”
George was completely perplexed by what the two women were describing, and peered at the backdrop again. But he could only see the old farmhouse, with its moonlit windows and its crooked trees outside. But how could they be so mistaken?
“You see and hear and speak,” said the professor to his puppets, “and you do want. But you do not eat or sleep, or live, or dream.”
“No,” admitted Denny. “No dreams. No dreams for the dark. Just waiting, waiting.”
“Waiting for the light to crack through again,” said Mary-Ann. “For the top of the world to open up, and to find all these lovely people waiting for us!”
“Laughing!” said Berry.
“Clapping!” said Denny.
“Waiting for us, all of them!” said Mary-Ann.
“We do the same,” said Denny, “the same as them: waiting, laughing, clapping, but you say we are not real?”
The professor gathered himself. “I do say you are not real. And not-real things belong in boxes, and the dark. Where you came from, and where you shall return.”
“But Father!” cried Mary-Ann.
“Oh, no,” said Berry.
“You are not getting out of the boxes,” the professor said. “You must stay in the boxes, for me.”
“For you, Father?” said Denny.
“Yes. That is final.”
All three of the puppets seemed to droop slightly, as though depressed by his proclamation.
“I would not mind it so much,” said Mary-Ann, “if we could sleep. Or dream. But we cannot, and stay awake. We stay awake in the long dark.”
“I tire of this,” said the professor. “Now, Denny. Why don’t you tell us that delightful joke you told me just the other day?”
“Which one, Father?” said Denny, but he now sounded morose.
“The one about the medicine,” said the professor, and he stood up and ripped off the drape around the table. The audience gasped when he did: there was nothing below the table at all: no mechanisms that they could see, and no strings or levers. The boxes sat on what looked like solid wood, unless there were mirrors involved, but there couldn’t have been because when the professor sat back down his legs were clearly visible, hands in his lap.
“The one about the medicine, Doc?” said Denny.
The professor’s hands did nothing. They were clearly visible above the table. People along George’s row stared at one another in astonishment.
“Yes,” said the professor, and he crossed his arms. “The one about the medicine.”
Denny sighed. “All right, then. There was once a man I knew just down the street from me who was loath to ever take his medicine,” he began. “Yet then one day he went to the doctor, and that very afternoon he was seen sprinting down the street, pouring some potion into a spoon and swallowing it as he ran.”
“He didn’t!” said Berry.
“He certainly did. Then the next afternoon the same thing happened: he bolted out of his house and tore down the street, pouring his medicine and gulping it down.”
“How very strange!” said Mary-Ann.
“And then the next day, the same thing, and everyone came out to watch him run down the street,” said Denny. “Yet on the fourth day he skipped down the street, just like a little boy, and he took no medicine at all.
“Finally a policeman stopped him. ‘What’s the big idea?’ said the cop. ‘Why, I’m just following my doctor’s orders!’ said the man. ‘Orders?’ said the cop. ‘What orders?’ ‘He said to take my medicine for three days running, and then to skip a day, which is exactly what I’ve been doing!’ ”
The drummer bashed a cymbal and the audience laughed at the joke, but it was more than a little uncertain. The puppets did not sound like they were in a humorous mood at all. And then there was the backdrop again… Were the trees in the window moving, as though brushed by the wind?
But the professor smiled, stood up, and took a bow. The puppets did likewise, saying, “Good night,” though they sounded terribly sad. Then they sank into their boxes and shut their lids with a sigh. The professor walked to each box and picked it up off the table, taking care to show the audience that there were no holes or false bottoms or any other mechanism. Several people gasped. He stacked the boxes in his arms and said over the top, “And with that, ladies and gentlemen, good night! Why don’t you say goodbye one more time, Denny?”
Denny’s head poked up from the top box once more. And then, though George swore it couldn’t have, the puppet winked at them, and said, “To sleep, to dream, and awake anew. Good night!” and sank down below again. The professor tipped an imaginary hat and walked toward the side of the stage as people applauded. The curtain dropped before he reached the edge, concealing him from view.
“That was very weird,” said the woman in front of George.
George was inclined to agree. The act had been very funny until the light on the stage changed. Then things had gone strange. It had felt like the backdrop was a window into another world, and the professor and his companions had been fabricated versions of people on the other side, staring back at them through the glass. He was about to say something when Silenus mounted the corner of the stage again, hat nestled in the crook of his elbow. George’s heart leaped at the very sight of him, and he suddenly felt torn: he wanted the show to be over so he might have a chance to meet his father, but he also wanted to see the rest of the acts; he’d heard so much about them, and the first one had been so odd, that his curiosity was almost overwhelming.
“What an odd little family they are!” Silenus said. “But so are all families, are they not? Especially the family of our next performer. Royalty they were once, ages and ages ago, in far away barbaric places of sun and sand and scimitars. Her family had been wronged, dislodged from their rightful throne, and so fell to dissolution. I found her in the deepest parts of Persia, fallen from grace, performing her eloquent arts for mere coppers and coins, and begging for a moment of charity. Yet I rescued her, and taught her to rule her new domain of the stage. And now you, my fine ladies and gentlemen, have one of the rare chances to hear the songs of none other than her majesty, Colette de Verdicere!”
The curtain stayed lowered so George figured this would be an olio act, performed at the front of the stage before the curtain while they readied for the next full-stage act. He saw someone approaching from backstage, about to enter into the light. George ignored them and squinted into the shadows, trying to see where Silenus had gone.
Then the performer finally came out on the stage, and the woman in front said, “Oh, my goodness! How pretty!”
George absently glanced back, but stopped, eyes wide, and gaped at the stage. And for the first time since that morning he forgot entirely about Silenus and his long quest to see his father’s show.
Because George Carole had seen the girl, and now could see nothing else.
