Page 31 of The Scarlet Ball

“Why is that?”

I remembered Odile, who had trembled and pressed her hand to her lips when her wrist was cut, but she didn’t look much the worse for wear. In fact, she looked enthralled to be here, and I tried to match her delighted fascination.

“It was her cousin who fell at the de Langes’ dinner the night we met. You remember. The amethysts.”

I did. The girl who sat across from me, her body dropped like an empty sack, and those things—

I smiled, leaning forward as if I was searching for a particular friend. I hoped it would help to keep me from looking like I was about to be sick.

“Really, now. It wasn’t as if she was any friend of yours.”

She wasn’t, she was gone, and her cousin had stepped up to take her place. I felt a sudden kinship with Odile, both of us substitutes in a terrible game.

As if she could feel my gaze, she looked across the auditorium at me and her lips twitched in a nervous smile. Her gloved hand lifted from her lap, as if to play with the lariat of pearls that hung down from her neck, and her fingers wiggled just the slightest bit.

My own face smiled in response before I corrected it to something more serene. No friends, no allies, perhaps, but recognition was allowed at least. You’re here, I see you, we’re the same. Her sympathy might have been meant for Ginny Marshall and not me, but it still warmed me.

I faked fascination all the way through the first act, gasping and clapping along with everyone else. Strangely, I liked doing it. It reminded me of Paris, when there were rich men to flatter and other girls to impress. It was easy. It was play in dress-up clothes, and God, but I missed playing.

The star of the show was Aloysius Garrett as Tristan, whose high and near-perfect tenor rolled out like a copper road to some mythic place. Once or twice, I even caught the doubling in his voice that granted it an ecstatic timbre and tone. They said it came of throttling his twin brother in the womb, and stealing his voice, but that sounded like theatrical claptrap to me.

Garrett was magnificent even if he looked somewhat bored by his second month at the Academy, and it played poorly next to Isolde, Mrs. Hampton Edwards. Despite the heft of her name (she’d married young into a family of thespians), she was a little thing, her hair thrashed with a boar bristle until it fanned out around her head like a halo, her hands hooked into claws like an animal’s. There was no rest from beginning to end; her Isolde boiled over with rage and injustice, and I imagined that in real life she must be the same, all adorable looks strung on startling sharp wire.

Brangäne, Mrs. Elizabeth Renner, was another sort, following the action with a kind of bright corvid amusement. She hit her notes as if by accident, and she gave the impression that nothing she did was at all hard. I remembered that she was the one who had met her actor-manager husband when she played Cordelia to his Lear. Married just two years, she had left her husband in London to come to New York, and in a moment of delight, I recognized her for all I had never seen her before.

I’d told Mielle that I’d only been at the ballet for a few days, and that was true enough. I hadn’t told her how much fun it was, despite the predawn practices and the late nights living off of nothing but bad champagne and compliments. We weren’t the girls at the Palais Garnier, all for the art. We were looking for rich men, and they came to the ballet looking for us. I decided I hated early mornings and could do better elsewhere, but backstage, with girls who knew exactly what they were about, I had loved it. Suddenly I missed it very much.

It’s good to see you again, I thought at Mrs. Renner, and I hope your next old man is a better one. I hope you take him for the world.

“You’re in good spirits,” Mrs. Howard said at the intermission. “Have you come to a new appreciation of Tristan und Isolde?”

“Oh absolutely, nothing quite like forsaking the daylight for the realm of night and dwelling there forever,” I said flippantly. “Not that you would know anything about that.”

“Faust was more popular when I was young.”

There was a quick rap at the door, completely without deference. It was Mrs. van Vliet, a narrow stick of a woman in dark gray velvet and silver braid. She wasn’t a part of Mrs. Howard’s coven, but she did sit chairwoman for the Ladies’ Society for Comfort—they’d made a round on Mulberry Street last year, distributing blankets—and she wanted a word with Mrs. Howard about some charity event or other.

Seeing an opportunity, I excused myself, slipping by Mrs. van Vliet to descend to the lobby.

I didn’t have any great aim beyond stretching my legs. The Howards’ box, for all its luxury, was cramped and a little musty, and I was pleased to be out of it even if it took me straight into the intermission crowd.

It was a friendly mob for all the grimness of the opera itself; people, as Mrs. Howard said, out to see and to be seen. I was briefly intercepted by the older Belmonts, who wished me to give their regards to my grandmother, and I dodged Percy Charles and his mother, who had recently taken a fancy to me at a luncheon and thought me a prospect for Percy’s poor bachelorhood. I was half keeping an eye out for Odile Dryden, wondering if I could risk a lemon ice, and the next moment, all the breath left my body.

He had done quite well for himself. The horsehead on his cane looked as if it might have been real silver rather than brass, and he looked like a prosperous merchant giving himself airs rather than a smuggler who was famous for beating a man’s head in with a chain wrapped around his fist. He was not a big man, and right now, he was not an angry one, but he came upon me so quickly that my stomach lurched and my throat closed and I almost tripped into him.

He apologized to me like he would any rich white girl, giving me a charming smile as he did so.

“This crowd, I did not see you, mam’selle. Look, you are fine, you are fine.”

I knew his voice, I knew his accent, I knew him, and for one blind animal instinct, I was certain he knew me, and oh Christ, he would wire right back to Paris, and he’d tell—

A strong arm looped around my waist, and I was almost lifted off my feet as Martha removed me bodily from the situation. She never looked back at Jean-Philippe, never gave him a moment to protest. Arm in arm, we threaded our way through the crowd, Martha shortening her stride so I would not look like a duckling trying to keep up.

“You—!”

She sneaked me a sly smile, tapping the fingers of her free hand on my elbow. “I could have left you there, Ginny, but I thought you might like a smoke.”

I half laughed, because yes, I very much would, and I allowed her to take me back up the stairs to the hallways that led to the private boxes. It occurred to me that she might be leading me astray, to some public humiliation or disaster, but I also remembered her at the Gracens’ ball, her arm in mine just like we were now. It won her a few minutes, and anyway, I wanted a cigarette if she was going to share.