She was small and exotically handsome, her theatrical make-up emphasising the large eyes and full lips Nature had given. A gold-and-pearl head-piece wrapped her head like a bandeau, but with cross-pieces that connected over the crown of her sleek ebony hair and continued down on either side to make ear-pieces. Her dress was long and golden, the slippers peeping from beneath its hem were gold, her finger-nails were painted gold, even her warm coppery skin seemed to glitter; the white explosion of a lengthy feather boa around her throat only emphasised the overall colour.
When the tribute had begun to fade, she took a step forward and threw back her arms and her head, showing for the first time a pair of blazing green eyes. She opened her mouth, and the band came in precisely on the first beat.
Her signature song was, of course, ‘The Bird in the Golden Cage’, a tune that I had first heard when I was not much older than Martin Ledbetter, in those gay fin de siècle days that the Twenties already seemed determined to emulate, if not surpass. The notes emerged from the singer’s throat completely unhindered by any trace of masculinity; if one closed one’s eyes, one would hear only a saucy and self-assured woman at the height of her powers; when the song had ended, I applauded as freely as the rest.
Ledbetter leant over to speak in my ear. ‘That’s Billy Birdsong. Just returned from half a year in Europe.’
‘Ah yes, Miss Birdsong. I have heard of her.’
‘Originally William,’ he said, pouncing on the words as if he had caught me out. I suppose he still expected me to be shocked at the daring sins of his generation, sins previously unseen upon the earth.
I concealed my smile, and said merely, ‘Of course. However, good manners require that one accept at face value whichever identity a person presents. Wouldn’t you agree, “Mr Ledbetter”?’
He gave me a sharp glance, then turned back to the stage.
The chanteuse was no operatic voice, but her contralto range was true, and had clearly been trained. She was pleasing on the eyes, her jokes were clever if on the racy side, her costumes remarkable, and I could easily understand if this home-grown talent had made a successful conquest among the sophisticates of Europe.
At the end of her set of songs, she retired from the stage amidst whistles and hoots, and the dancers settled in for the more mundane talents of other singers.
It was here that Ledbetter justified his salary.
He stood up and said, ‘Be back in a minute.’
As the young man did not appear to be using his disappearances to ingest any substances more illicit than the alcohol on the table, I wondered if he had a medical condition that should be seen to. When he had not returned in a reasonable time, I further began to wonder if perhaps I had been abandoned--I will admit that I even felt at my inner pocket to reassure myself that my note-case was still with me.
However, I had neither been robbed nor abandoned; indeed, it turned out that I was being served well by my hireling, who had gone to fetch the evening’s entertainment.
I rose at the approach of Ledbetter’s companion, taking the delicate hand and bowing deeply over it as my guide made the introductions. The singer’s green eyes danced with pleasure.
‘Marty here told me I had an admirer from a far-off land. I just had to come see.’
Billy Birdsong was a fine womanly figure of a man, five feet four inches of smooth racially mixed skin over a dancer’s muscles and pleasingly languid bones. Modern dictates of fashion made re-forming the male form less of an engineering feat than it had a generation before--these days, even women were required to appear boyish. The casual drape of a sheer scarf around the singer’s neck concealed the masculinity of the throat, and she navigated with assurance on heels higher than many women dared.
I invited her to sit while Ledbetter summoned up a new bottle of champagne and another glass. Miss Birdsong fluttered her eye-lashes with only the slightest exaggeration of femininity, and said, ‘You are from England, Mr Sigerson?’
‘London, yes.’
‘I was there for most of February.’
‘Pity, the spring can be quite lovely. Alas, I was in India then, or I would surely have seen you. Where did you perform?’
She told me, acted gratified that I had heard of the place, and set about the sort of conversation that is required of professional ladies. She was, however, distracted. Before a minute had passed, her avid attention to my description of the Suez Canal slid sideways--only momentarily, and only those green eyes shifted--but clearly she was searching her surroundings for something, or someone. And not finding them.
This intrigued me in a way her professional demeanour had not. Billy Birdsong was the most prominent person in the place; why should she give the most surreptitious of glances at her surroundings? She could easily rise up and gaze imperiously about, and no one would be taken aback.
Either she did not wish to offend me, or she did not wish to be seen looking about. And although I could indeed have represented a potential source of patronage, her lack of interest made that seem unlikely.
No; she was scouring the room for someone, a face she did not want to be seen searching out, and she was not finding that person. Furthermore, that absence made her increasingly anxious: While her eyes probed the corners of the balconies, her fingers sought out the large, beautifully mounted pink pearl she wore on a silver chain, tugging at it and rolling it between finger and thumb.
When her hand rose to her mouth and her sharp little teeth began to work at the cuticles of the finger holding the pearl, I knew something was amiss.
‘Miss Birdsong,’ I began.
‘Call me Billy,’ she broke in. ‘Everybody does.’
‘Yes. Miss Birdsong, you appear to be agitated. May I be of any help?’
At that, her gaze snapped back to me, her spine went straight, and her gnawed finger dropped away. ‘Agitated? Don’t be ridiculous,’ she protested, and laughed. ‘Why should I be agitated while I’m sitting with admirers and drinking their bubbly? Silly man.’
One thing I am not is silly, and I believe she saw that, despite the setting and my proximity to the pick-pocketing ne’er-do-well at the other side of the table. She laughed again, a well-trained noise, finished her champagne, and rose to make a wide and easy circuit of the balcony before retreating down the stairs.
But la donna è mobile, even when la donna is an artifice, and thus I was not in the least surprised when a note arrived, on scented paper and in an elaborately calligraphed script:
If you would like to buy a girl some dinner after her second show, come to the dressing rooms at twelve-thirty.
--BB
Ledbetter was, I believe, rather taken aback.
EIGHT
What on earth are you chuckling at?” said a foam-clotted voice.
Kate looked up from the photocopied typescript to see her partner looking around the doorway from the hall, a toothbrush jutting from her lips at a jaunty angle. “You better not let Nora see you doing that,” she warned. “Granny Martinelli will rise up from her grave in horror if her great-granddaughter starts running around the house with a stick in her mouth.”
Lee went back into the bathroom and came out a minute later sans brush. She moved with deliberation around the foot of the bed, hands out to balance herself, her cane left leaning against the dressing table.
“I take it that story’s entertaining?” she asked as she lowered herself onto the bed. “You’re giggling like a schoolgirl.”
“It’s a hoot. Can you picture Sherlock Holmes in earnest conversation with a drag queen?”
That startled a laugh out of Lee. “Oh, come on now. Is this one of those porn stories that have Holmes and Watson in bed together?”
“Are there such things? The mind boggles. No, so far it’s all very decorous, although reading between the lines you begin to suspect a fair amount of leg-pulling is going on. And actually, so far there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the main character even is Sherlock Holmes, although he’s every bit as
pompous as the original. Far as I can see, the main reason for interest would be if it was actually written by Conan Doyle, which I wouldn’t know, although it sounds like it’s set in the early Twenties.”
“Early soft-core gay porn. Sure, I’d kill someone for that. In fact,” she said, rolling languorously over until she was taking up a large portion of Kate’s side of the bed, “I’d kill for some of the later kind.”
“Murder is not necessary,” Kate replied. She dropped the sheaf of papers to the floor, turned off the reading light, and before long had her partner giggling, like a schoolgirl.
KATE never failed to step back and wonder at the morning ritual. Even on those days when Nora was in a temper, when Lee was snappish with aches, when Kate herself was rushed out the door, there would be a moment when she would pause and savor the precious fact of the day. This Wednesday morning it came while she stood in the door of the sun-filled kitchen and bit into a cold, leathery, half-burned English muffin, Nora’s latest culinary venture. Lee, still in the thigh-length T-shirt she used as a nightie and hair awry, was holding the glass carafe of the coffeemaker up to the window to see if what it held was still drinkable. Nora, in her school clothes and hair brushed but nonetheless nearly as awry as her mother’s, was scowling with concentration at the complexities of spreading jam on muffin.
“Strawberry jam’s harder to get even than other kinds,” the child complained.
“That’s because they leave the strawberries whole instead of grinding them up,” Lee explained.
“Why don’t they grind them up?”
“I guess they want to give you the surprise of biting into a berry here and just jam there.” Lee had decided the coffee passed muster, poured it, and slid into the built-in table across from Nora. Her T-shirt rode up on the vinyl seating, and without thinking she tugged it down, disappointing Kate.
“Maybe I should just put more on and make it even,” Nora said.
“That might be too much jam even for me,” Kate told her. “Next time we’ll buy cheaper jam and it’ll go on even.”
“Okay.”
And that was the moment she held with her for the day: solemn child, sleepy partner, and a bubble of laughter rising in her chest. She kissed one sticky face and one coffee-flavored mouth, and let herself out of the house.
With one foot in the car, Kate heard someone call her name, and looked up to see the next-door neighbor coming up the block. Hadassah Levitson was one of the few people Kate had ever met who made her feel tall: She couldn’t have been more than five two. She also reminded Kate of a Jack Russell terrier, her nose in everything and absolutely fearless.
“Kate, glad to catch you.”
“How are you, Hadassah?”
Typically, the woman didn’t bother with an answer but went straight to business. “You know old Mrs. Kirchbaum in the next block?”
“Er.”
“Nice lady, no grandchildren, works at the children’s center?”
“Poppy seed rolls?” Kate remembered.
“You got her. Anyway, I hadn’t seen her in a couple days so I went around, and she’s hurt her leg, finding it hard to get around. I’m organizing people to drop in with dinners, but I know she has a son down in LA or something and I want to talk to him without her knowing. You have any idea how to get in touch with him?”
“I could probably hunt him down,” Kate told her, figuring she was being asked because cops can do anything. “But it would be faster to ask Lee. I think she’s got a list of emergency contact numbers for everyone at the center.”
“Great, I’ll see if she’s got it.”
“She’s home now,” Kate told her neighbor, but she was already talking to Hadassah’s back.
She finished getting into the car, a smile on her face. Small-town life.
I should not by choice have sat through the second arrangement of Miss Birdsong’s music, as the increasing intoxication of the audience and its dancers did nothing to make their feverish gaiety any more appealing. But I held myself in patience, observing the behaviour of this self-avowedly barbaric race of moderns and making notes on the stylistic oddities of American slang, Jazz music, and the parallel between the men/women musicians before me and their reverse equivalents (actresses in breeches) of the eighteenth century London stage. All three being topics with the potential for engrossing monographs (the number of euphemisms for drunkenness alone would fill a small note-book), the evening was not wasted.
Eventually, however, the singer waved her way merrily off the stage for the second time that night (or, by that time, morning). The crowds began to thin as those who had gainful employ the next morning took themselves home for a few hours’ rest, and Ledbetter and I made our way down the stairs and to the dressing rooms behind the stage.
One of my first questions regarding the singer was answered when I saw that the costume draped over the screen, clearly for her to don once she had shed her stage finery, was also a frock: Some performers acting the part of women make it a point to assert a strongly masculine identity off of the stage. Miss Birdsong was one of those whose act merged into everyday life.
‘Sit down, dear boys, I’ll just be a jiffy. Have a bonbon.’ We pushed aside the chocolates and orchids and sat on the stools beside the gifts while the singer swabbed the heavy pancake make-up from her face, revealing delicate features that, had the eye-brows preserved their natural thickness and the side-burns been permitted to grow, would have read as that of a boy. As it was, she looked like a somewhat boyish girl--as indeed had half the audience, to my eyes. When her face was clean, however, she did not leave it bare, but replaced the heavy theatrical mask with lighter but equally effective powder and paint, chatting gaily all the time, mostly about Paris and London.
When she had finished to her satisfaction, she rose, loosing the belt of her mauve silk dressing-gown as she walked towards the three-panelled screen. When she had stepped into hiding, the dressing-gown shot artfully up to drape itself over the top of the screen, the frock waiting there vanished a moment later, and soon she came back, adjusting the seams of her embroidered stockings coquettishly.
A most entertaining performance; I could already see that this excursion into the night-life of the city of St Francis was bound to add to my education.
She caught up my silk hat and tipped it onto my head, permitted young Ledbetter to help her into her brilliant white sealskin coat, picked up her tiny gold mesh handbag, and sashayed down the corridor to the stage door, calling farewells to various fellow musicians and staff as she went. Outside of the door, she repeated the performance with the men and a few women waiting there, signing autographs and exchanging banter. The nightclub diva seemed well liked by all.
She hooked her two hands through our arms and steered us up two streets to a small bistro that was doing a brisk business despite the hour. Clearly a regular customer, she was whisked to a table, where she shrugged out of her furs and accepted a cigarette and light from Ledbetter.
When we had ordered, however, her first words were to me. ‘Mr Sigerson, how can you possibly imagine that I am in need of your help?’
‘You were hoping to see someone back in the balcony, a person whose absence both surprised and troubled you. The person, I venture to say, who gave you that pearl you wear.’
Her fingers dropped away from the object as if it had gone suddenly hot. ‘Ridiculous!’ she said, her fists clenching in a most unladylike manner.
‘You scarcely listened to what Mr Ledbetter and I had to say, you worried that necklace to the breaking point, and you chewed your finger-nails into an early manicure. How else to explain that level of anxiety?’
She reared back her head and stared at me. ‘What are you, some kind of Sherlock Holmes?’
It was a question I had encountered before. ‘I am a gentleman who finds himself with leisure on his hands, willing to assist a lady in distress.’
The series of expressions on the face across the table from me was inimitable, and priceless
, as the singer wrestled with the improbable possibility that this grey-haired English gent might be far more of an innocent than was either likely, or desirable. In the end, the body inside the frock sat forward, subtly changing form, as the voice dropped the better part of an octave to ask, ‘You do know I’m not actually a woman?’
‘Mr Birdsong, how you choose to present yourself matters not in the least to me. And if you prefer to keep to yourself whatever troubled you on the balcony, I shall happily share a meal with you and take my leave.’
The man studied my face for a long moment, then sat back and slowly resumed the woman’s skin. Such a talent is no common thing, nor an easy one, and my curiosity about the person gave another stir.
Birdsong--patently not the singer’s birth name, although I thought the William might be original--was by feature and accent from the American south-west, Arizona or New Mexico. The thick, straight black hair and exotically tinted skin revealed a percentage of blood older to these lands than that of the European settlers, although the light green eyes were imports--in northern India one found this mixture of brown skin and green eyes, but not in America, and not with those cheek-bones. Close quarters revealed that he was older than the twenty-eight or thirty years old that he looked, perhaps by as much as a decade. As an adolescent, he would have been remarkably beautiful; the complications accompanying great beauty had, no doubt, contributed to set him on the road to his choice of profession.
Still, the singer seemed happy enough. Apart, that is, from those anxious eyes in the balcony.
‘I was looking for a friend,’ she said abruptly. ‘He said he’d be there and he wasn’t. It’s not like him.’
‘And you are unable to make enquiries?’ I suggested. She had, after all, failed to reach her dressing room’s telephone.