John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“It’s only a kinetoscope, what could be difficult—?”

“You should speak to our stage manager, Mr. Giles.”

“I should.”

A keen fellow, not at all what he expected to find in this section. Teetha-dore adjusts the spectacles he has begun to affect, the lenses only clear glass but the resemblance uncanny when he puts them on and flashes his choppers. “I trust that the temperance biddies have held no sway in your city?”

“You’d like a drink?” asks Harry.

“Sir,” Teethadore replies, spreading his arms in his Need you ask? gesture, “I am an actor .”

Afterward, when the breeze through her window cools her mind, Jessie lies hugging her pillow in her arms. Alma has left her now, she is Jessie again and she is holding him, just holding.

“Royal,” she says out loud, as loud as she dares, and knows that in the saying of it she is forever transformed.

Crows are in the sycamore, already rasping their cries, when the Judge is awakened by banging at his door. The girl, the new one, doesn’t come till seven, and he is greatly out of sorts by the time he finds his slippers and makes it down to see what the racket is.

Maxwell stands at the door, looking red-eyed and sheepish.

“Sorry, Judge.” Maxwell is a competent clerk, but believes he can still burn the candle at both ends.

“What calamity, may I ask, can possibly merit waking me at this hour?”

“It’s your son,” he says, not quite meeting the Judge’s eyes. “There’s a — a situation brewing that I felt you should be informed of.”

He knows not to ask which one it is. Even if he hadn’t seen Harry drag in late last night with whiskey on his breath and preposterous schemes of northern travel on his mind, he would know it was Niles. Three children and only the daughter with a speck of common sense. “Where is he?”

“One of the resorts on Dock Street. I just happened by on my way to—”

“He’s in one piece, I take it?” Maxwell lacks the somber cast of the bearer of truly bad tidings. This is some new embarrassment.

“Presently, yes. But imprecations have been forwarded, ultimatums delivered — it involves a sum of money.”

“He’s been playing cards.”

“Unfortunately. And imbibing, Your Honor, or else I’m sure his judgment would have—”

“Niles hasn’t any more judgment than a cat in a fish shack. How much has he lost?”

“Thirty-five dollars. Beyond what he carried to the table.”

“These card sharps don’t believe I’m good for thirty-five dollars?”

Maxwell looks down at his shoes, which seem to have had something spilled on them. “They don’t believe your son is good for his word. Apparently he’s mentioned your name in association with gaming debts in the past, and — and failed to inform you—”

“They could have come to me directly.”

“Given the nature of some of the debts, of the loci in which they were incurred, the gentlemen involved were reticent to bring — to bring an officer of the Court into the conversation.”

“There are no ‘gentlemen’ involved in this business. They are a group of ruffians, holding my son for ransom—”

“They’ve convinced Niles it would be unwise to depart before matters are settled.”

It is a cold morning. The Judge turns back into the parlor. “Thirty-five dollars.”

“Cash would be appreciated. Under the circumstances.”

He turns back to glare at Maxwell. The man looks as if he has slept in his clothing. There is a stain on his bowler and he is shaking slightly, frightened perhaps of his employer, or merely chilled without an overcoat at this hour.

“I would not have become involved,” he says apologetically, “but for the fear of scandal.”

“Everybody in Wilmington knows he’s a damned fool, Maxwell. Wait while I go up to the safe.”

In his dream Harry is sitting by Mae Dupree, holding her hand as they watch the operetta. It is a moving-view of the performance, projected on her parlor wall, the image thrown by a device that Harry operates by cranking it with his free hand. Somehow, and even in the dream he wishes he could stop the presentation to study the workings of it, the device is ganged through a bicycle sprocket and chain to a phonograph machine, the needle riding a wax cylinder to play the duet of the Ensign and the lovely Aura Lee, their words perfectly synchronized with the movement of their lips—

He understands that he has invented this device, understands it without being told, as one does in dreams, and can feel how proud Mae is of him. The show continues on the parlor wall, only now Niles is the Ensign and Mae the soubrette, embracing as they sing.

But the most amazing thing, the Harry in the dream shaking his head in wonder as he sits and cranks, is how someone has perfectly hand-colored every single one of the diapositive frames, and how they’ve captured the exact reddish-gold of Mae Dupree’s beautiful hair.

The Judge sits at breakfast trying to avoid the sight of the new girl’s deformity when Niles steps in, treading softly.

“I am so very sorry,” he says, gesturing with his hat. Beulah, for that is her name, retreats to the kitchen after a quick glance at the boy’s blackened eye and bloodstained shirt front.

“You are sorry you lost,” says the Judge, spreading quince jam on his toast, “and you are sorry you couldn’t skulk away without settling your losses. Beyond that, you are incorrigible.”

The Judge’s wife, young and beautiful, almost died giving birth to this boy. Niles was always impervious to instruction, beating him a waste of belt leather, and so far the vagaries of life in the world outside have in no way clipped his wings.

The Judge fixes Niles with a look. “You know my opinion of our governor.”

Niles ventures a tiny grin. “Something about a fat, treacherous, nigger-coddling son of a whore, I believe—”

“Then you understand what it will cost me in pride, not to mention political favor, to petition him in your behalf.”

“Petition?”

“They’re making up the regiment for Cuba. Commissions are being handed out—”

“I’m in the Light Infantry here already.”

“We’re not discussing a club membership. There is going to be a war. I doubt it will amount to much, as wars go, but there are reputations to be made, mettle to be tested. By God, if a dose of combat won’t make a man of you, I don’t know what will.”

“They’ll never leave the state,” says Niles. “You know that. It’s all a show, a bowl of plums for our corpulent governor to pass out to his cronies.”

“You won’t serve your country?”

“Half the men in that poker game are set to be in the Regiment. Is that the sort you want me associating with?”

He has an answer for everything, Niles. With a minimum of study he’d make a passable lawyer, of the type who waste the Judge’s courtroom hours with showy but ultimately pointless objections and points of order. The Judge pushes his plate away and looks his son in the eye.

“You told me you very nearly struck it rich in the Yukon.”

“I found the ore,” says Niles, making one of his aggrieved, I-am-but-a-victim faces, “but they jumped my claim.”

“Perhaps it’s time you gave it another go.”

“Prospecting?”

“Yes.”

“That field is almost used up. The word coming into San Francisco when I left—”

“Somewhere else, then.” The Judge stands, wiping his hands on a napkin. “I’m willing to stake you to the amount it would take to get started, on a modest scale, provided you’re willing to commit yourself to the endeavor for some time. Let us say three years.”

Niles smiles. His voice, when he speaks, lacks all force, as if he knows that no matter how he plays the hand, whether he passes or calls the bluff, he has lost. “But where?” he asks.