All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred fifteen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred fifteen)

“How old am I? Thirty-five.” She struck him with her feathers, turning to speak. “Oh, women forty and fifty will play the young girls. The ingénues. But I have no opening.”

“You mean you can’t audition.”

“Oh, are you helping me with my English? Of course I don’t. Have you read a play? You don’t know anything about it.”

They were interrupted by the conductor. “See up ahead, folks, opera house.”

Richard craned this side and that. He watched Mrs. Allen’s expression grow set. There was a gift here, but it would take an intimate theater to project its subtlety. Your taste is vapid, the face said, and your American grandes maisons are to be pitied. Still he’d enjoyed, in passing, the turrets; he could think the Queen City’s a rival to anything in, say, Amsterdam…

The Cookesville opera house gave world tours, via matinee magic-lantern shows; and if Mrs. Allen, who had seen Europe, imagined Richard hadn’t…well.

Half-an-hour past, they had shed Allen. He would uncrate the old lackey’s deathbed confession onstage about 2:30 p.m. “Seen the script, but I’ll be perusing while they run the first couple acts.”

In the cab Allen had perused, chuckling at The Fleeting Hours. Costs footed by Richard’s coup. (Allen, exchanging a sign with Ermentrude, had made off with the papers…and been smug-faced altogether, as though having both predicted this and bet against it.)

Their vehicle jerked to the curb.

“Got enough? You never spent all that?”

“I’ve been here the whole time. Keep better track, Allen…”

Allen was descended, his hat swept off for a passing lady, the head of his cane hiked in jaunty support of his wife’s coming down. He beckoned her ear to his lips, told her where she’d better have lunch, and to use the cars when you get round. Richard, paying the driver and joining them, was told in a voice for passersby:

“Look after Mrs. Allen, Everard. Walk her over to her uncle’s house.”

The passersby were to think him Allen’s servant.

“Where we walking to?” Eighth Street was all storefronts—but an uncle acquainted with these two might live anywhere.

“You don’t care.”

He didn’t, and thought also, since a streetcar looked heading their way, that Cincinnati would be their point of departure. Everything of Ermentrude’s left in stock was now Richard’s to circulate, takings handed direct to Mrs. Allen. His leap to the car hadn’t shed her…it was the trouble with the Allens. You didn’t catch them off guard; they had known what your move would be.

The car made a slow, elliptical progress, north at first, south if it mattered. Mrs. Allen sat close-surveying the downtown strollers…looking for the law, for old swindlees and new mugs, he thought. He wanted to find her out. Or find Allen out, by what things about him his wife would laugh at.

123

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred sixteen)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)