Escape Artist Read online

  “Well, well,” a voice said from behind me. I turned. “Miss Ferber.”

  Mildred Dunne stood by the ticket window, staring at me with half-closed eyes. A stern disciplinarian in her mid-thirties, slender if not bony as a starved pullet, Miss Dunne was a dreadful woman, a school librarian who despised books and cherished silence. The only daughter of Amos Dunne, one of the rich landowners of the town and the proprietor of the feed store on Drew, she was famously a spinster, to use her own redundant phrase, until the arrival of Gustave Timm, the theater manager. Suddenly the woman remembered solely for admonishing us to be quiet was seen on the arm of the dashing Gustave Timm at church socials, at dances at the Masonic Hall, on the river excursions. Miss Dunne, I supposed, was pretty enough for such a handsome man—but there was something off about the giggled confidences and whispered intimacies the two engaged in, often right on Appleton sidewalks. She seemed ill matched to the effusive Gustave. My mother once nodded to a neighbor, “Why do women always choose the wrong men?”

  Next to Miss Dunne stood the brothers Timm. In my mind, of course, they were the brothers Grimm.

  “Good evening, Mr. Timm,” Esther said to Gustave.

  I sometimes found myself fluttering foolishly in Gustave’s presence. Like his brother Homer, Gustave was tall and square-jawed, but he was dashing and Byronic, a man out of one of the melodramas he mounted on the Lyceum stage: deep violet eyes, a hero’s swagger, and a deferential manner. He was just too close to a world I dreamed of, my life as an actress. Footlights and fantasy, star billing, bouquets of roses hurled my way.

  Smiling, Esther spoke to the other brother, “And you, too, Mr. Timm.”

  Gustave’s older brother Homer, standing at his side, cleared his throat. “Evening.” He spoke too loudly.

  Homer Timm, Gustave’s older brother by at least a decade, was the Vice-Principal at Ryan High School. I’d never liked him, though such dislike, I’d often told myself, was irrational. Homer Timm kept order, and had once admonished me for “unladylike bustling” in the hallways, a charge I spurned. Friendly enough to all, he still struck me as a man not to be trusted with that smile that always appeared too quickly, and as quickly disappeared. He’d been a fixture in town for a decade, my mother told me, coming out of the East—Baltimore, or was it Philadelphia?—with a wispy wife and three small children, each one as pale as its mother.

  The genetic power that produced a good-looking Gustave had missed the dress rehearsal where Homer was concerned; the eyes too sunken in a sallow cheek, the eyebrows too bushy, the brow too narrow, the nose too sloping and pointed—he seemed, oddly, the negative to the dazzling photograph to arrive years later.

  Everyone in Appleton gossiped about the brothers Timm.

  Just last week the Crescent published a notice of the upcoming September nuptials of Gustave and Mildred Dunne. That got tongues wagging. People talked of nothing else: the dashing interloper now wedding the staid librarian.

  People also gossiped about Homer. He lived without his family. A consumptive Sophie Timm had been sent to convalesce at an East Coast sanitarium. The children lived with grandparents. Homer Timm, living the life of a bachelor in Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house on Jackson Street, just up from the River Lock, ventured East during summer vacations but always returned ashen and morose. I knew my mother tsked about it: “A man too comfortable being apart from his family…”

  As I watched, Homer Timm knocked on the door of his brother Gustave’s small office just behind the box office. Waiting a second, his ear turned to the door, he opened it and walked in, though he hesitated at the threshold. From where I stood, I could glimpse Cyrus P. Powell, the owner of the Lyceum, sitting at Gustave’s desk.

  Cyrus P. Powell had fascinated me ever since the day he replied to Sam Ryan’s request for an interview. Just four words scribbled on thick creamy linen stationery. “A preposterous request, sir.” That was it. That day everyone in the Crescent office had roared, a tide of humor that kept bubbling to the surface as we went about our business. Of course, that was a day long before Matthias Boon joined the staff.

  Cyrus P. Powell knew very little about Appleton, or Appleton of him, though he owned a good part of the real estate, including the storied Lyceum Theater. The son of the president of the Appleton Central Bank on Oneida, he’d been living in New York until last year, moving back to Appleton after his father died of a stroke. He lived alone in the mansion at the end of Drew.

  A man always dressed in a severe black suit, a look he never varied, just as he never varied the stern expression on his face. Perhaps forty years old, tall and angular, sporting a Roman nose over a manicured moustache and a gray-white goatee, he was handsome enough to enflame a few widows. He became everyone’s excited story for a week, largely because of his refusal to acknowledge anyone. Therefore, it was assumed, he was superior to us all. After a week, he was ignored and idly catalogued as a rich albeit handsome man who had little time or inclination for democracy.

  His only acquaintance was Homer Timm, whom he’d known, years back, when both were students at Boston Latin. Once a month, no more no less, both men could be found at supper at Alter’s on Main, a bizarre rite where each ate his meal quietly, seemingly without conversation, and both looked relieved when they parted company.

  Appleton assumed it was Homer’s influence that got his brother Gustave the job of Lyceum manager.

  As I watched, Cyrus P. Powell scowled, muttered something to Homer who looked ready to apologize for intruding. Homer’s back was rigid, his neck stiff, that eerie smile still plastered to his face. They didn’t move, statues, and nothing about them suggested they were old friends. Gustave suddenly bustled in, a little too bubbly, but he stopped short. He shifted his body, ready to flee. Gustave always got quiet in Cyrus P. Powell’s presence. It was clear to all—that is, to me—that Gustave was terrified of his boss. Now Powell dismissed him with a flick of his wrist, and Gustave, looking around at what was his own office, backed out, bumping into a wall. His brother Homer was rolling his head back and forth, disapproving. When Gustave stepped back into the lobby, he caught my inquisitive eye. The man looked ready to sob. As Esther and I shuffled past, headed to our seats, I glanced back into the office: Homer and Cyrus P. Powell were leaning into each other, their heads almost touching, both men looking as if they were sharing some dark secret.

  Esther and I settled in our seats. Esther whispered, “Did you see how menacingly Homer Timm glowered at us?”

  But I was not thinking of the elder Timm. I was bothered by the scene I’d witnessed in Gustave’s office. What had just happened there? Secrets, I told myself. Appleton was filled with secrets. Everyone had secrets.

  The curtain rose, nosily. Hazel Wilde appeared from the wings. Applause. My heart jumped, thrilled. A night of theater, magical.

  ***

  We were the last to leave the theater because I lingered long after the final curtain call. I loved the stillness of the vast room, the usher sweeping the aisles, the stage crew bustling behind the dropped curtain. One by one the gaslights darkened. I savored it all—and the romantic image of myself backstage in a dressing room, aglow in makeup and accolades, smelling the red roses I’d accepted from fawning and handsome swains.

  There was no one in the lobby by the time we left and we strolled out the front doors, up College Avenue, nearly empty of carriages and walkers. Gaslight gave the wide street a fairy-tale feel, with its vaguely Italianate buildings, the sagging store awnings, and the line of telephone poles strung up and down the avenue. The night was cool, the leafy sugar maples and white oaks rustled with a slight balmy breeze from the Fox River. In the distance church spires posed against a painter’s blue sky, hazy white at the horizon; and a crescent moon appeared and disappeared behind wispy, stringy clouds. I rarely left the theater in anything but a rapturous mood: heart pounding, head spinning, fingers trembling.

  Esther was rattling on about her father entertaining a family of prosperous Jews from Kaukauna
who had a marriageable son Esther had purposely ignored, though the vapid boy never took his eyes off her. A wave of loneliness came over me. A beautiful night, and I was there with Esther, admittedly my best friend, yet something was missing. I’d been seeing Clarence Maxon last summer, a fellow lover of Thackeray, but he’d gone off to Notre Dame; we’d had a silly spat, and during his holiday visit back home, he’d failed to stop in to see me. Soon he’d return for the summer and I’d bump into him on College Avenue. Oddly, thoughts of Clarence led me to think of Jake Smuddie, that striking footballer who earlier had run off into the shadows with Kathe. I tried not to dwell on him, though I often did. I couldn’t help it.

  We wandered into City Park under the cool maples. At that moment I heard rustling on the dirt path that led back to the street. Both of us started, and some feet away a tall, barrel-chested man strode into view and as quickly disappeared behind a bank of arborvitae. He didn’t notice us sheltered under a shady willow, but I recognized him. It was Mac, the printer from the Appleton Crescent offices. Just Mac—a man whose surname I’d never learned. Mac, a dark, mysterious wanderer, a printing wizard, a dervish with linotype and ink; a man who spent long days and nights in the press room just beyond the room where the others and I pecked away at our typewriters. Mac, the itinerant tramp who’d wandered in one day, took the job, and lost himself in that back room.

  “Someday,” Sam Ryan told me, “I’ll turn around and he’ll be gone. It’s the nature of the beast.”

  Laconic, moody, Max had not said one word to me in over a year, though often I’d spotted him staring at me, a look I had trouble understanding. He rented a room at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house. Strange, how the single men of town gravitated to Mrs. Zeller’s huge home: Mac, Homer Timm, and even new city editor Matthias Boon. You rarely saw Mac in town. A man with a flat pancake face, unlovely, pocked and dented, he had a cruel scar that led from his left eye down into the tremendous drooping walrus moustache that he lacquered so thoroughly it shone like polished wood. In the morning when I arrived at the city room, he was already in back, clamoring away at the presses, hauling trays of type, banging and knocking, and sometimes cursing so profanely I blushed. At night when I left, he’d still be there.

  Now, seeing him disappear into the midnight woods, I trembled. I wasn’t afraid. I walked the night streets of Appleton alone all the time. It was the way he looked at me in the city room, a look so hard and steely that I always wanted to confess. But to what? I hardly knew.

  City Park closed in around me now.

  “Home,” I muttered to Esther. “I want to go home.”

  Chapter Five

  At eight o’clock the next morning, a brisk shiny Thursday, I pushed open the heavy oak door of the city room, stepped down those five stairs. Matthias Boon huddled at his desk, face nearly touching the blotter, a green-tinted lamp casting an eerie glow over his block-like head. He didn’t say a word as I sat a few feet away in my chair, but he coughed—loudly and sloppily, pretending consumptive, I assumed—and squinted at me. He stood, stretched out his arms, and disappeared into the back printing room, where I could see the giant Mac, glistening moustache on that beefy face, pausing a second, staring back at me. I heard him make a smacking sound as he spat chewing tobacco into a spittoon.

  Boon thrust some copy at him, hardly civil, stepped back into the city room, and regarded me silently.

  “Miss Ferber.” He returned to his seat.

  I rifled through some news clippings, shuffled them on the wobbly pine table that served as my desk, pushed into a corner where the smell of decaying wall mice seemed never to dissipate. As correspondent to the Milwaukee Journal, I rewrote copy to send on. The cramped, cluttered room was too ghastly, early mornings, so I reached over to switch on another lamp. Five pushed-together tables or desks, and a chicken wire mesh fence surrounded Sam Ryan’s cubicle with the roll-top desk—God knew why! Chicken wire! And beyond the room Mac’s domain, where he churned out copy, handbills, flyers, notices, and ultimately the afternoon edition of the Crescent.

  I pecked at the ancient Oliver typewriter, clacking and pinging.

  The image of Harry Houdini shadowed the room, though Boon would never mention his name…or my interview. But I waited for my punishment.

  Boon stood, let loose a phlegmatic spasm so loud that the tomcat, luxuriating in the pressroom doorway, yipped and fled. He approached my table, grunted something. Purposely, I looked down, steely eyed, at the keys of the Oliver as he dropped a slip of paper onto my table: my daily assignment sheet. I scanned it rapidly and noted that my allotment of stories had been dramatically—cruelly?—diminished. This had been the pattern for weeks, almost as though I’d show up one morning to find a blank sheet facing me, a piece of unadulterated white paper that signaled my departure from the Fourth Estate. Low man on the totem pole, I already received the detritus of newsworthy runs. When Boon was hired, Sam told me the veteran editor would serve as mentor to me. What he didn’t know was Boon’s intense dislike of women in the newsroom.

  “Mr. Boon, there’s a scant day’s reporting here.” I thumbed the sheet. “You’ve even removed the county courthouse from my route.”

  “Unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary?” I echoed. “I’ve been doing…”

  He cut me off. “Miss Ferber, your embellished account of real-estate transactions strike many as a little too fanciful for something so…prosaic.”

  I sputtered. “Embellishment?”

  “Is there an echo in the room?” His lips curled up.

  I stood, tired of this nonsense. “You seem, sir, to be purposely reducing me to…”

  “What? Miss Ferber? Tears? Reducing you to tears?”

  I found my voice, waved the sheet at him. “I doubt, sir, if any woman would allow you to reduce her to tears. That would give you too much…value.”

  “You don’t report news, Miss Ferber. You tell stories.” He weighed his words carefully. “You like to describe people, Miss Ferber.”

  “And you have a problem with that?”

  “Yes, when you’re writing about Samuel Gottlieb arguing a property line with his neighbor Josiah Pholner. Lord, you dealt with Harry Houdini as if he were a character in a novel.” He looked away. “Enough. Just attend to the items on that sheet and all will be happy.” He pointed to the sheet I was still waving at him and turned his back on me. I smashed my fist down on the table. He flinched, but he busied himself with some papers. At that moment I glanced toward the pressroom: Mac, giant-like, arms folded, towered in the doorway, silent, severe, watching Matthias Boon. When I caught his eye he turned and disappeared behind his linotype machine and boilerplate.

  My throat was dry.

  Within minutes, the other members of the city room drifted in. Matthias Boon left the office without a word to anyone, off for breakfast at Platz’s. He’d be back in a half hour, doubtless with a smear of clotted cream on his bushy moustache or a trace of strawberry marmalade on a sleeve cuff. Certainly with an array of poppy seeds speckling his protruding front teeth.

  Still seething, I surveyed my office mates. Sam Ryan, owner and proprietor, had arrived with his sister Ivy, and as they unbuttoned their jackets, they were mumbling about some domestic travail. A man in poor health, Sam would drift in and out of the office, often losing his temper, swearing a blue streak, then apologizing to no one in particular. Sam was really old, a wiry sparrow of a man, a rabble-rousing Democrat from pre-Civil War days, a fiercely political soul. With his wire Ben Franklin eyeglasses and his dimpled chin and his flaky bald head, he seemed genial, a soft touch, but I knew he harbored a fierce and fishwife temper. He’d thunder at any mishap in the city room, the spotting, say, of a typographical error in some trivial copy, crumpling up paper balls and hurling them willy-nilly over ducking heads. He’d fought for the Union and on the Fourth of July wore his tattered blue uniform, decorated with ribbons of the Grand Old Army, marching behind the off-key fife and drum corps.

  He was watchin
g me, doubtless puzzled by my flushed face.

  “Morning, Edna,” Miss Ivy said. Sam’s sister was a plump roly-poly spinster, older than her brother, with a duck’s ungainly waddle, pebbly-bright gray eyes lost in folds of strudel-flaky skin, salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a gigantic knot. Her head struck me as a doorknob waiting to be turned. Terribly efficient as the Crescent’s bookkeeper and solicitor of advertisements from the likes of the Woodsmen of the World and the Knights of Columbus, she occasionally proffered homespun wisdom, delivered in a twittering voice, about the happenstance irritability of men. “You know how men are,” she’d say. Now and then she advised me to find a job more suitable for a young woman in the new world. “This,” she’d point to the city room, “is no man’s land.” Then she’d laugh. “I mean no woman’s land.”

  “Miss Ivy. Morning.”

  “Loved your interview with Houdini.”

  Byron Beveridge, sitting across from me with his malodorous cigar, puffed away while reading copy. Debonair, tall, lanky, a local Company G Spanish-American War veteran, he customarily threw his legs across his desk so that I faced the patched soles of his boots. He fancied himself a man about town, some dandy or bon vivant. Arriving late, he made a big to-do about removing his fashionable three-button cutaway frock coat and bowler hat. Blond and pink cheeked, he adopted a rugged, blustery demeanor and liked to brag about female conquest.