The one movie theater in town was called The Chenemeke, and it was of course on Chenemeke Avenue. That week, it was playing Theda Bara in Cleopatra, which Nance and I had seen in La Crosse just before Christmas. There was another theater, called The Wisconsin, but it was strictly vaudeville. The Wisconsin was owned and managed by a Swede named Kurt Elfstrom, who was reputed to have earned four million dollars from his two theaters, the one here in Eau Fraiche and the other in Eau Claire. Personally, I couldn’t see how he’d made that much money, because whereas he charged some pretty good admission prices — a quarter for a box seat, and fifteen cents for an orchestra seat — he still had to pay his performers, didn’t he? And he booked some really good acts into the theater, too, considering the fact that this was just a dying little timber town in Wisconsin. I could remember my father taking me to see Charlie Chaplin, in person, in a thing called A Night in a London Club, even before Mr. Elfstrom renovated The Wisconsin and put in the red velvet seats. That must have been in 1912 or 1913, sometime around then, when I was still a little kid and before Chaplin got to be a famous movie star, of course. This week at The Wisconsin, Mr. Elfstrom was showing the Greater Morgan Dancers in a historical Roman ballet; Eddie Leonard & Co., who were blackface singers, dancers, and comedians; and Blossom Seeley with her “Jazz Melodical Delirium.” Nancy and I were keeping steady company, so I would probably take her there tomorrow night. Tonight, of course, was the monthly dance, and neither of us wanted to miss that. Besides, I had worked late at the camp (even though I’d never got close to starting my bucking), and it wouldn’t have paid to drive the tin Lizzie all the way down to La Crosse, not with the roads still pretty bad after the last snowfall.
There were, I guessed, about thirty Fords parked behind the Grange Hall, as well as one of the only two Pierce-Arrow touring cars in town, this one being yellow, which meant it belonged to Daniel Talbot, whose father owned the furniture company on Carey Avenue. Just to be perverse (and also so I’d be able to find the car again when I came out, all the other Fords being as black as my father’s), I parked directly alongside Mr. Talbot’s snazzy automobile, and then led Nancy carefully over the hard, rutted, frozen mud of the back lot, around to the front of the hall. There was music coming from inside the gray frame building, two bands having been hired as usual for the occasion; Red Reynolds’ local dance orchestra, and a colored jazz band from Chicago that called itself the “Original” something or other.
I still hadn’t told Nancy what I’d done that morning.
She looked about as pretty as a skyful of stars, her hair coiled at the back of her neck beneath a simple black velvet hat, glistening pale and gold above the high crushed collar of her coat. Picking her way delicately over the sidewalk, she skirted the patches of ice, one ungloved hand raising the hem of her skirt as she navigated the slippery pavement, her muffed hand resting on my bent arm. When we got inside, I checked our coats and then went into the main hall with her. Her dress was green, paler than her eyes, short, in keeping with the new fashion (Nancy got the Delineator from Chicago every month), its silk knotted fringe shimmering a good six inches above the floor.
The Grange was a fairly depressing place. Somebody had decided to paint it gray inside as well as out, so that you always had the feeling you were stepping into a smoke-filled room, even though smoking wasn’t permitted at any of the dances except in the men’s room down the hall. The window trim was supposed to be a sort of salmon color, I guess, but it looked more like a faded red which, together with the green window shades and the hanging red-and-green crepe paper decorations, gave the room the look of a discarded Christmas. There were eight windows on each long side of the room, and a tiny stage at the far end of the room, used by speakers whenever there was a meeting, but occupied now by Red Reynolds and his band. They were playing as we came in, but I recognized the tune as one of those new fox trots and I still didn’t know how to do that damn dance. I’d had enough trouble keeping up with Nancy and trying to learn all the steps that had come in with the war, as if everybody was trying frantically to dance away all the world’s troubles, a new dance every week: the bunny hug (Shall we bunny? No, let’s just sit and hug), the turkey trot (Everybody’s doin’ it), the grizzly bear, the snake, the kangaroo, the crab, and now the fox trot and the tango. What I wanted to know was what had happened to the waltz and the two-step which my older sister Kate had taught me to do before she’d run off with her Apache or whatever the hell he was? I was a very good waltzer, and a fair two-stepper, but this new stuff was all pretty much beyond me, and so I sat on my folding chair beside Nancy and took her hand in mine and began talking about the colored band which was getting ready to relieve Red’s boys on the stand. I asked Nancy if she knew where the expression “jazz” had come from, and she said she did not. So I told her it was originally a dirty expression, and she said, Bert, it was not. And I said, Really, Nancy, it was an expression used in Chicago, it was originally “jass,” spelled with a double-s instead of a double-z and she said Well what does jass mean, and I said It was an expression used in the red-light districts of Chicago, and she said What’s a red-light district? So I said It’s where, well, the prostitutes work, and Nancy said You’re making it up, and I said No, really, Nance, jass means to do it to a woman, and she said You always make up these things because you know they embarrass me.
The colored band came on about then and played something with a lot of clarinet and trumpet work intertwined, it was very difficult to keep track of the melody, I think it was “Tiger Rag” or maybe “Bugle Call Rag.” I couldn’t dance to the music they were making, either, so we sat through the next three or four tunes, and then Danny Talbot came over to say hello and to give Nancy the eye. Danny thought he was extremely handsome, which I guess he was, though I couldn’t stand the flashy way he dressed. Nancy didn’t pay him much attention, well not too much attention, though she did keep staring up at him all the while he told the latest Ford joke, which I’d only heard a thousand times already, the one about the man who was making out his will and insisting that the old Model T be buried with him when he died. “Jed,” his wife finally said, “why do you want the Ford buried with you, for land’s sake?” and the man answered, “Because I’ve never been in a hole yet but what that flivver couldn’t pull me out,” very funny, ha-ha, though Nancy did laugh more than politely, it seemed to me. Talbot finally wandered off, and I figured this was as good a time as any to tell her what I’d done that morning, but the jazz band stopped playing just then, and Red and his boys came back onto the stand, and began playing a waltz, thank God. So I asked Nancy to dance, and I led her out onto the floor and took her into my arms.