Tom Piazza - A Free State

I told him a bit about the mill, and then the farm, my brothers, the sheer boredom of it all. My father, and my mother, the disappointment inside her. He listened with an intense and, I believe, unfeigned interest.

“Is that why you don’t play the violin?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Do you never see your mother?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Do you miss her?”

“Yes,” I said. “Where are your parents? You were not raised in Philadelphia.”

“No,” he said.

I waited for him to say more. He shifted restlessly on the divan, and then he started speaking. He told me he’d been raised “up north,” near Boston. His family had a small farm, but his father died when Henry was quite young. His aunt lived with him and his mother, and they fared as well as they could, but they fell on hard times. Then a new man entered his mother’s life and became his stepfather. Henry said he was used badly by this man, and was sent away to a boarding school. But it was a hard place, and when Henry returned home his stepfather, and his stepfather’s sister, who sounded like quite a harridan, were so mean to him, and had driven such a wedge between himself and his beloved mother, that he resolved to run away, which he did.

I listened to it all with some astonishment. It was the stuff of novels, really. I had not been aware that boarding schools were available for Negroes.

“But where did you learn the banjo?” I asked. “How did you acquire your repertoire?”

“I lived with my uncle,” he said. “He played with a circus, played all kinds of music. He showed me the banjo. He knew all the songs. I traveled with the circus.”

“The circus!” I said. “I was on the road with Kimball’s for years before I came here. What troupe were you with?”

He had a minor coughing fit, which alarmed me, but he recovered enough to say, “Nettles’.”

I had not heard of them, but there were so many troupes that I did not wonder at it, and I had been out of that world for several years. I was going to ask him more about the troupe, but he preempted me by asking about the farm where I’d grown up. I told him a few more things, and I mentioned that I had changed my name, and that my family wouldn’t have known how to find me if they’d wanted to. “I was born James MacDougall,” I said. “I changed my name to Douglass when I joined the circus.”

He raised himself on one elbow to look at me, and began laughing. I found this somewhat annoying, and I asked him why he found this funny. “Haven’t you ever wanted to become someone other than you are?”

“I thought about it,” he said, getting himself under control. “I was given a different name anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man my mother married,” he said.

“You took his name?”

“Only for a while,” he said.

I was not sure what he meant by that, but I didn’t follow it up. Only later, as the weeks went by and we became more familiar, did I begin to allow myself to question the truth of his account.

I was spending more time at the theater during the days. With our popularity again in the ascendant, there was always correspondence, bills, production details, conferences with Birch on this or that bit of property deployment or stage construction. About half the time Rose would be there, working, and usually I would stop in and sit for a while with her, converse about this or that. I liked being in her workshop, where there was so much evident attention to detail, her process laid out like the insides of a clock. We would talk about nothing in particular during these visits — weather, or any scrap of news from the papers, events, what have you.

Every now and then I would insert a question to see if Rose would rise to the bait and offer some detail about her own life. One day, I asked where she had learned to sew so brilliantly and with such imagination. She was sewing at that moment, and she smiled and did not look up from her work.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “I was kidnapped by a tribe of Zouaves and forced to sew saddlebags for their horses.”

“Oh, now,” I said. “There haven’t been Zouaves in these parts for at least thirty years.”

She laughed merrily, but she did not amend her story. Another time I asked her if she had always worn her hair short, and she told me she had had hair down to her ankles when she was a girl, but she had had to sell it to an upholsterer’s in order to make ends meet. “They made some lovely pillows with it,” she said.

I wondered if she joked that way with Eagan. I knew better, at least, than to ask her such a question.

One day I had spent the entire morning answering mail queries, after which I had gone out for lunch, leaving Rose there by herself. A lovely day, and not too hot. I walked all the way down to Front Street and had a meal at the Black Horse, for a change, then made my way back to Barton’s. Inside, I heard voices coming from Rose’s workroom, so I walked down to have a look.

To my surprise, I found Henry sitting on her couch. It was not an evening when Henry would be performing, and it was disorienting to see him there. My surprise must have registered on my face, because Rose laughed and said, “James, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Not really,” I said. “Is tea being served? What is the occasion?”

“I just stopped in to say hello,” Henry said.

“Really!” I said.

“I have more free time now that I don’t play on the street.” He grinned, as if he had said something witty.

“I hope you made sure not to be seen coming in.”

“I did,” he said. “I’m good at that.”

“Yes, you are,” I said.

“I just now finished the outfits for ‘Lucy Long,’” Rose said. This was a routine Powell and Burke had gotten up for the first half.

“Splendid,” I said.

“Come in and sit with us,” Rose said.

“I should not,” I said. “I have receipts to tally up.” Then, to Henry, “Be careful leaving.”

Back in the dressing room, I was assailed by the most contradictory thoughts and feelings. As foolish as it seems, I was jealous. I had never been exactly jealous of Rose’s arrangement with Eagan. Dismayed, yes, but not jealous, as I was quite sure she did not love him. There was no reason to think anything left-handed was going on with Henry, of course, and yet his presence there felt like an intrusion into the order of things. And, beyond that, there was a recklessness in it. With all the effort we expended to insulate Henry from suspicion, this seemed to show bad judgment at the least. I stewed over it as my receipts sat moldering on the dressing table.

Perhaps five minutes later, Henry appeared at the door. “You left so fast,” he said. “Why didn’t you come in?”

“Listen,” I said, motioning for him to step in and close the door behind him, “be careful spending time with Rose. Eagan is a jealous type, and we don’t want him getting the wrong idea.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No!” I said. “Of course not. Just remember that we could be fined or closed down if word got out to the public that you’re not one of us.”

He narrowed his eyes as if he were trying to discern some underlying meaning to what I had said, and I saw that I had hurt his feelings.

“I’m just saying to keep alert, is all,” I said. “For everyone’s sake.”

“I stay alert,” he said. “I’m always alert.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

We exchanged a few more awkward phrases, and then he left.

I had no basis for any odd feelings whatsoever, and I did my best to ignore them as they swarmed. But I soon had something much larger to worry about.

On Thursday afternoon I was at the theater, sifting through paperwork, when I heard a knocking from the general direction of the stage door. I ignored it at first, but as it persisted, I got up to see who it was. The box office was open, out front, so I had no idea who this might be.