Calvary Alley
Copyright© 2024 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 17: Behind the Twinkling Lights
The gaiety, with its flamboyant entrance, round which the lights flared enticingly at night, had always seemed to Nance an earthly paradise into which the financially blessed alone were privileged to enter. At the “Star” there were acrobats and funny Jews with big noses and Irishmen who were always falling down; but the Gaiety was different. Twice Nance had passed that fiery portal, and she knew that once inside, you drifted into states of beatitude, which eternity itself was too short to enjoy. The world ceased to exist for you, until a curtain, as relentless as fate, descended, and you reached blindly for your hat and stumbled down from the gallery to the balcony, and from the balcony to the lobby, and thence out into the garish world, dazed, bewildered, unreconciled to reality, and not knowing which way to turn to go home.
But to-day as she passed the main entrance and made her way through a side-passage to the stage-door, she tingled with a keener thrill than she had ever felt before.
“Is Miss Smelts here?” she asked a man who was going in as she did.
“Smelts?” he repeated. “What does she do?”
“She dances.”
He shook his head.
“Nobody here by that name,” he said, and hurried on.
Nance stood aside and waited, with a terrible sinking of the heart. She waited a half hour, then an hour, while people came and went. Just as she was about to give up in despair, she saw a tall, handsome girl hurry up the steps and come toward her. She had to look twice before she could make sure that the imposing figure was Birdie.
“Hello, kid,” was Birdie’s casual greeting. “I forgot all about you. Just as cute looking as ever, eh! Where did you get that hat?”
“Ten-cent store,” said Nance, triumphantly.
“Can you beat that?” said Birdie. “You always did have a style about you. But your hair’s fixed wrong. Come on down to the dressing-room while I change. I’ll do it over before you see Reeser.”
Nance followed her across a barn of a place where men in shirt-sleeves were dragging scenes this way and that.
“Mind the steps; they are awful!” warned Birdie, as they descended into a gas-lit region partitioned off into long, low dressing-rooms.
“Here’s where I hang out. Sit down and let me dude you up a bit. You always did wear your hair too plain. I’ll fix it so’s it will make little Peroxide Pierson green with envy.”
Nance sat before the mirror and watched Birdie’s white fingers roll and twist her shining hair into the elaborate style approved at the moment.
“Gee! it looks like a horse-collar!” she said, laughing at her reflection. “What you going to do to me next?”
“Well, I haven’t got much to do on,” said Birdie, “but you just wait till I get you over to my room! I could fit you out perfect if you were just a couple of sizes bigger.”
She was putting on a pair of bloomers herself as she spoke, and slipping her feet into her dancing slippers, and Nance watched every movement with admiring eyes.
“Come on now,” Birdie said hurriedly. “We got to catch Reeser before rehearsal. He’s the main guy in this company. What Reeser says goes.”
At the head of the steps they encountered a gaunt, raw-boned man, with an angular, expressive face, and an apple in his long neck that would have embarrassed Adam himself.
“Well! Well!” he shouted at them, impatiently, “come on or else go back!
Don’t stand there in the way.”
“Mr. Reeser, please, just a minute,” called Birdie, “It’s a new girl wants to get in the chorus.”
The stage-manager paused and looked her over with a critical eye.
“Can she sing?”
“No,” said Nance, “but I can dance. Want to see me?”
“Well, I think I can live a few minutes without it,” said Reeser dryly.
“Ever been on before?”
“No; but everybody’s got to start some time.” Then she added with a smile, “I wish you’d give me a chance.”
“She’s a awful cute little dancer,” Birdie recommended. “She knows all the steps in the Red-Bird chorus. I taught her when I was here before. If you’d say a word to Mr. Pulatki he might try her out at rehearsal this morning.”
Nance held her breath while Reeser’s quizzical eyes continued to study her.
“All right!” he said suddenly. “She’s pretty young, but we’ll see what she can do. Now clear the way. Lower that drop a little, boys. Hurry up with the second set.”
The girls scurried away to the wings where they found a narrow space in which Nance was put through the half-forgotten steps.
“It’s all in the team work,” Birdie explained. “You do exactly what I do, and don’t let old Spagetti rattle you. He goes crazy at every rehearsal. Keep time and grin. That’s all there is to it”
“I can do it!” cried Nance radiantly. “It’s easy as breathing!”
But it proved more difficult than she thought, when in a pair of property bloomers she found herself one of a party of girls advancing, retreating, and wheeling at the arbitrary command of an excitable little man in his shirt-sleeves, who hammered out the time on a rattling piano.
Pulatki was a nervous Italian with long black hair and a drooping black mustache, both of which suffered harsh treatment in moments of dramatic frenzy. His business in life was to make forty lively, mischievous girls move and sing as one. The sin of sins to him, in a chorus girl, was individuality.
“You! new girl!” he screamed the moment he spied Nance, “you are out of ze line. Hold your shoulders stiff, so! Ah, Dio! Can you not move wiz ze rest?”
The girls started a stately number, diagonal from down-stage left toward upper center.
“Hold ze pose!” shouted the director. Then he scrambled up on the stage and seized Nance roughly by the arm. “You are too quick!” he shouted. “You are too restless. We do not want that you do a solo! Can you not keep your person still?”
And to Nance’s untold chagrin she found that she could not. The moment the music started, it seemed to get into her tripping feet, her swinging arms, her nodding head; and every extra step and unnecessary gesture that she made evoked a storm from the director.
Just when his irritation was at his height, Reeser joined him from the wings.
“Here’s a howdy-do!” he exclaimed. “Flossy Pierson’s sprained her ankle.”
“Ze leetle bear?” shrieked Pulatki; then he clutched his hair in both hands and raved maledictions on the absent Flossy.
“See here,” said Reeser, “this is no time for fireworks. Who in the devil is to take her place?”
“Zere is none,” wailed Pulatki. “She make her own part. I cannot teach it.”
“It’s not the part that bothers me,” said Reeser. “It’s the costume. We’ve got to take whoever will fit it. Who’s the smallest girl in the chorus?”
The eyes of the two men swept the double column of girls until they rested on the one head that, despite its high coiffure, failed to achieve the average height.
“Come here!” called Reeser to Nance.
“But, no!” protested the director, throwing up his hands. “She is impossible. A cork on ze water! A leaf in ze wind! I cannot teach her. I vill not try!”
“It’s too late to get anybody else for to-night,” said Reeser, impatiently. “Let her walk through the part, and we’ll see what can be done in the morning.” Then seeing Nance’s indignant eyes on the director, he added with a comical twist of his big mouth, “Want to be a bear?”
“Sure!” said Nance, with spirit, “if the Dago can’t teach me to dance, maybe he can teach me to growl.”
The joke was lost upon the director, but it put Reeser into such a good humor that he sent her down to the dressing-room to try on the costume. Ten minutes later, a little bear, awkward but ecstatic, scrambled madly up the steps, and an excited voice called out:
“Look, Mr. Reeser, it fits! it fits!”
For the rest of the morning Nance practised her part, getting used to the clumsy suit of fur, learning to adjust her mask so that she could see through the little, round, animal eyes, and keeping the other girls in a titter of amusement over her surreptitious imitation of the irascible Pulatki.
When the rehearsal was over there was much good-natured hustling and raillery as the girls changed into their street costumes. At Birdie’s invitation Nance went with her to the rooming-house around the corner, where you had to ring a bell to get in, a convention which in itself spelt elegance, and up one flight, two flights, three flights of carpeted steps to a front-hall bedroom on the fourth floor.
“Gee, it’s a mess!” said Birdie, tossing some beribboned lingerie from a chair into an open trunk. “There’s a bag of rolls around here some place. We can make some tea over the gas.”
Nance darted from one object to another with excited cries of admiration. Everything was sweet and wonderful and perfectly grand! Suddenly she came to a halt before the dresser, in the center of which stood a large, framed photograph.
“That’s my High Particular,” said Birdie, with an uneasy laugh, “recognize him?”
“It’s Mac Clarke!” exclaimed Nance, incredulously, “how on earth did you ever get his picture?”
“He give it to me. How do you reckon? I hadn’t laid eyes on him for a couple of years ‘til I ran across him in New York about a month ago.”
“Where’d you see him?”
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