“Edna.” A voice startled me out of my gloom.
“Hello, Mollie.” I nodded to the salesgirl at Pettibone-Peabody’s Department Store in charge of the woolens and long johns aisle-and one of my “informers,” as I termed them, gatherers of gossipy bits and pieces that I typed into my reports. Mr. and Mrs. Boris Leyendecker are in Little Chute for the weekend, visiting Mr. Leyendecker’s sister, who has returned from Rome. Mollie Seagrum, buxom and matronly, a spinster with a light-hearted wit.
Joshua Hutt has returned from a term at the University in Madison to attend to his late father’s estate…
Mrs. John Boyesen will be making her annual pilgrimage to…
Yet I’d relished my job, thrived on it, actually. A year back, fresh from Ryan High School, class of 1903, I’d battled my family over my desire to attend the Northwestern School of Elocution in Evanston, Illinois. In my heart I knew it was my circuitous road to ending up on the New York stage and becoming the next Sarah Bernhardt. But my family had vociferously fought me, what with spending money in short supply, my father ailing, my mother imperious, my older sister Fannie spiteful-this excuse, that one, hundreds of them. Innocent girls leaving home, lost in big cities, horribly tempted, gaslight encounters, strangers in the dark rainy alleys, a drain on the pennies needed back home, on and on, wearying me.
So I’d stormed down into Sam Ryan’s Crescent office and pleaded for a job. “I can write.” Said simply, declarative. Sam recalled my high-school essay about Passover at the Appleton synagogue, which he’d printed. He hired me on the spot. Three dollars a week.
It had been a wonderful year, bizarre and at times freakish. I was a novelty: a girl reporter on the streets of little Appleton, population 12,000, give or take a dozen wandering souls on the outskirts, including the shabby, dispirited Oneidas who knocked on back doors selling baskets of huckleberries.
I cared little that the stalwart citizens viewed me as strange, unseemly, perhaps a little maddened. A progressive town, Appleton was, with Lawrence University and an opera house. But still and all…a girl asking untoward questions? And of men? A girl in a sensible straight-boned bodice worn over a black miroir velvet skirt that sometimes got caught in the pinewood planks of the sidewalks as I trudged up and down bustling College Avenue, storming in here or there, dropping in at Kamp’s and Sacksteder’s Department Store, at the Wae Kee Laundry on Oneida, at the Ladies Aid Society on Superior Street.
What have you heard?
Do you know if…?
Why? Really? Tell me.
Tell me. I’m here to listen. Really. I…
My mother was horrified when I got the job, though she ran the family novelty store on College and was also subject to disapproving glances. Nice little Jewish girls, with spectacles and a high-school class pin, in decent Midwestern towns, acting like brazen New York City reporters; unsettling, truly. Whispered about. I cared not a whit. I was tackling life head on, albeit a small-time version as bland as thin broth. To me it was the pulse of life. My beat was the nondescript, routine social register, largely women’s doings, society musings, endless teas and church socials. Professor Meyers of Lawrence University will speak on horticulture in the Bible Tuesday at the Masonic Hall. The public is…
I loved it.
I felt important…I, the plumpish, plain girl.
The only time I didn’t feel insecure, homely, awkward-invisible, frankly-was when I marched on College Avenue with my pad and pencil, headed to the courthouse. Heads turned, eyes narrowed.
The old city editor John Meyer had trumpeted my writing, had praised my embellished, adjective-laden prose, my quirky insertion of local-color dialogue into a prosaic piece about the Knights of Pythias spring flower show. Each morning when he handed me the daily assignment, he nudged me to be…creative.
“Flower it up,” he advised. “Go for the bedraggled orphans and the weepy widows.”
A student of Dickens melodrama and the bathetic effusions in the romances of the Duchess, I need not have been so encouraged. I’d learned the power of sentimental thrusts, purple prose, the beautiful sweep of sentences that rose like spring flooding on the Fox River.
Sam Ryan, the septuagenarian-or was it octogenarian? — owner, the little old bald man with the jaunty walk, just winked. He knew a good thing when he saw it. For three dollars a week.
When I’d started out I was a chubby, round-faced cherub of a young girl, eyeglasses resting precariously on my high-bridged nose, showing up that first day in a homemade walking dress of dark green broadcloth and wearing an outlandish hat fashioned by sister Fannie-round as a saucer, with papier-mache red cherries cascading off it, accented with purple-dyed ostrich plumes, and a nun’s veil netting that looked like ocean mist.
Sam Ryan’s eyes had widened with alarm. “The hat has to go. You look like some scary grande dame in a Puccini opera. You look like you’ve been exploded.” The hat came off. “And wear your hair up.”
My hair was unmanageable, a wild thicket of deepest black, wiry impossibility, tumbleweed untrainable with ribbons and stays and seashell clasps and mother-of-pearl barrettes. So the next day I wore my hair up, decorous, with a sensible hat. I was learning. People didn’t take you seriously if you looked like an act in a vaudeville revue. Fannie, told of the slight to her creation, fumed.
My beat included the courthouse at the other end of College Avenue, a mile and a half away, at the Chute. It was hardly an exciting place. All the meaty news happened closer to downtown at the Elks Club, Moriarity’s Pool Hall, the Sherman House, Little’s Drug Store, the jail, the fire station-places where Matthias Boon and Byron Beveridge did their snooping around. But I prowled the marble, echoey hallways, gleaning this tidbit and that. Transfers of property, liens, writs. The rickety streetcar up College cost five cents, too big a dent in my meager budget, so I walked and walked and walked. At the end of the year I’d lost that plumpness, that young girl baby fat; and now, in blissful June, I was slender and tough. Nobody’s fool. The Appleton girl reporter, sleek as a greyhound, and as wily, with smart-aleck vinegar in the blood.
But magnificently unhappy.
Matthias “Matt” Boon, the new man recently arrived from Milwaukee-just why had he left that cosmopolitan city for our little town? — was a tiny rubicund man built like a tree stump, with that beet red face and those bushy Chester Arthur muttonchops.
My nemesis.
Chapter Two
I paused in front of Pfaff’s Mortuary, adjusting a sleeve and checking my reflection in the window. My eye caught something. Across the street, Harry Houdini was standing outside Volker’s Drug Store, arms folded, immobile. A cigar-store Indian without the cigar. I’d seen photographs of him flexing his muscles, wrapped in chains; he was clothed now like a drummer, yet the face was unmistakable. I scurried across the street, allowing a horse-drawn carriage to pass-Miss Fotherwell, headed with her Negro servant to examine fabrics at Myron’s Clothiers, something she did daily-and stood dumbly in front of Houdini.
“Mr. Houdini,” I began, breathless, then stopped. I’d interrupted him in some trance because he was staring, unblinking, into space. “Mr. Houdini,” I began again, but again the small intense face didn’t register my presence. I felt foolish-and intrusive. I took a step backward, looked toward the Crescent office and the small-canopied window of the law offices that were above the city room, and waited, deliberate. An image of the insolent Matthias Boon, that Napoleon who came up to the world’s hip, came to me. “Mr. Houdini.”
The head turned, the eyes nearly shut. “What?”
I didn’t like his voice: small, hoarse, oddly bell-like. Even that one word-so blunt: What? — carried a hint of a foreign accent, a guttural Hungarian inflection. His father’s son, the rabbi’s boy, carried from some Budapest shtetl.