The scene approached. There’s an ensemble song and dance number before Astaire’s firecracker routine. I was watching, my eyes half closed. A line of girls comes onto the stage from one side, a line of guys from the other. They’re singing a patriotic tune about the Fourth. The guys group at the back of the stage singing the bass line. Half the girls split off into the audience; the other half, six girls, have formed three pairs, backs to the camera. The first pair faces the audience to sing, “Let’s salute our native land.” The next pair turns, “Roman candles in each hand.” Then the last pair sings, “While the Yankee doodle band.”
I don’t hear any more. I’m standing in the theater, pointing at the screen. The girl on the right is Lillian. She sings and dances through the rest of the scene. It’s Lillian. Astaire danced her right into the movie. He got her a part. Rent the video if you don’t believe me.
I never saw Fred Astaire again.
After Astaire died at eighty-eight, Mikhail Baryshnikov said, “It’s no secret we hate him. He gives us complexes because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity.”
They buried him at Oakwood Memorial Park not far from Ginger Rogers’s grave.
I wish they’d put him at Hollywood Memorial, where his real partner rests, the one who danced her way into Holiday Inn. The only one light enough on her feet to match him, step for step.
The Demon of E Staircase
by Charles Sheffield
After the thunderstorm of the previous evening the skies had cleared. The passengers on the coach were riding aloft until the interior, which despite all efforts had admitted rivulets during last night’s torrent, dried out.
The two men provided an odd contrast. The thin one huddled inside a greatcoat and shivered slightly in spite of the warm June morning. The fat man by his side, also in his middle forties, bounced in his seat like a child and leaned forward as the coach approached the crest of each hill, seeking spires amid the gentle rise and fall of the East Anglian landscape.
“Close to twenty-five years since I first came here, Jacob,” he said. “A man changes a great deal in a quarter of a century. Yet would you believe it, I still feel the nervousness of a young lad within my belly? Though the feeling is, to be sure, a good deal less.”
“While the belly, Erasmus, is to be sure a good deal more.” Jacob Pole leaned forward a little, caught by his companion’s eagerness to see the town ahead. “Is it Cambridge that excites you, or is it the prospect of the exhibition and lecture?”
Erasmus Darwin smiled, revealing the absence of front teeth. “No doubt it is b-both.” As often when he was at ease, his voice had a slight stammer. “If rumors are correct, our good captain has returned a host of novel plant and animal forms from his voyage to the Pacific, and greater marvels yet from the vast terra incognita in the far south. Who would not be excited?”
“I perhaps less than you.” Pole, satisfied that their destination still lay some distance ahead, leaned back in his seat and nestled down again inside his thick coat. “I sailed the South Seas more than once, seeking my own variety of novelties, but what I brought back was less than marvelous.”
Darwin had at breakfast caught the slight tremor in the other man’s hands and read its meaning. He patted the wooden chest sitting at his side. “I have Jesuits’ bark here, should you feel the need for it.”
Jacob Pole shook his head. “This is no more than a minor fit, brought on by the cold and damp of last night’s storm. Give me time and warmth and I will be good as new. But what of your friend who waits for us? The storm delayed us, and we are already late. Are you not uneasy, imposing so on his time and hospitality?”
Darwin was pleased at the change of subject. There was no point in voicing his own fears, that his companion’s worldwide quest for treasure had permanently damaged his health and would doom him to an untimely death. “Be we late or be we early, you need have no worries about our reception by Collie Wentworth. Twenty-three years ago, when we were both undergraduates, he became convinced that I had saved his life.”
“And had you?”
“I doubt it. He had been drinking when I pulled him from the river, but others were about. Had it not been me, it would have been someone else.”
“And his gratitude continues yet?”
“It is more than that. Collie is the kindliest and best-natured of mortals. Permit him his pipe and his glass, and he will wait if we are late a full day, and never say a word against any man.”
Jacob Pole nodded, and the two lapsed into the silence of comfortable familiarity, the only sound the steady clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and the tuneless whistling of the coach driver on his seat a few feet below. They came to and breasted a final long hill, descended until they crossed the old stone bridge over the River Cam, and turned right into St. John’s Street. The great gates of the college were closed. Darwin, nimble for a man of his bulk, swung down from the coach’s upper level and gave Pole a helping hand.
He stared up at the carved decorations above the double doors. “Ah, they carry me back. But it is odd to find the main gates closed at this time of day. Come on.”
Leaving the coachman to transport their bags to the courtyard, he led Jacob Pole through the narrow inset door and into the stone forecourt beside the Porter’s Lodge. There Darwin again stood frowning about him in perplexity.
“Wentworth’s message said that he would be waiting here to meet us at noon, which is already passed. I see no sign of him, which is not perhaps surprising if he is eating lunch. But, much stranger, there is no one in the Porter’s Lodge.” He walked forward and stared around the open rectangle of First Court, with its precise squares of close-clipped green lawn. “Or, for that matter, anywhere else. At this time of year one expects few students — but not a college deserted. In my years of study here, I never saw this court so empty of people.”
An archway at the end of First Court led to Second Court, with Third Court beyond it and then the river. Darwin again moved forward, into a passageway with the dining hall on the right and the kitchen and buttery on the left. As though confident of what he would find, he turned into the buttery. Sure enough, four men were seated at one of the rough wooden tables, full glasses in front of them and a round covered dish on the table end. They sat close, heads together and talking earnestly.
“No need to stand up.” Darwin waved a fleshy hand. “We are seeking Mr. Wentworth, a Senior Fellow of this college. He was to meet us by the front gate, but he was not there and the court seemed... unusually empty.”
Despite the invitation to remain seated, the four men shot to their feet.
“Excuse me, sirs.” The only one of the four not wearing a striped apron took a step forward. “You came to see Mr. Wentworth, you say. May I tell him your name?”
“I am Erasmus Darwin. My companion is Colonel Jacob Pole. As I said, he is expecting us.”
“Very good, sir. I will inform him.” The man headed for the door, but hesitated there. “Things at the college today are, as you might say, not usual. Begging your pardon, sirs, but would you be good enough to remain here in the buttery until I return with Mr. Wentworth? I’ll be quick as I can.” He turned as he went out. “George, hospitality for these gentlemen.”
“Yes, yes.” A man with a girth to rival Darwin’s stepped forward. “Beer, sirs, or cider?”
“Apple juice, unfermented, for me. Jacob?”
“The same will do.” Pole watched as all three men hurried away into the room beyond the buttery. “Erasmus, what the blazes is this? We come for a talk about empty places on the map and instead we find an empty college.”