Nevermore by William Hjortsberg Read Free Book Online Page A

church.” Was there no escape from those eyes? “What’re you searching for?”
    “You … ,” she said.

5
MEOW!
    S HOW PEOPLE WERE A clannish lot. The vagabond nature of their profession, together with a caste system based on talent and luck, set them apart from the daily grind. Most were further isolated by lifelong poverty and, in spite of a faddish era’s un-ending appetite for “stars,” by the general disapproval of polite society, who still smugly remembered a not-so-distant time when actors were expected to use the trade entrance.
    Entertainers remained a separate class, speaking a backstage lingo as obscure with slang as the argot of the underworld. Like criminals, they lived life on the lam, holing up in show business ghettos such as flourished in a number of rooming houses and cheap hotels along the side streets intersecting Times Square.
    For every headliner lodging at the Astor, there were a hundred second bananas, chorus-line hoofers, and small-time ventriloquists crammed into drab run-down rabbit warrens like the Hotel Stanley, at 124 West Forty-seventh Street, just off Sixth Avenue. Rooms here could be rented daily, but most tenants paid by the month. Cheaper that way, and if an act got lucky and went on the jump for ten weeks in the sticks, the management could always be counted on to credit them with time already paid.
    Located one crosstown block from the “Great White Way,” the Stanley was a short walk to the shoebox offices of third-rate booking agents and song publishers. Local coffee shops and cafeterias catered to show people, especially during the off-hours when the legitimate world toiled. In fair weather, old-timers living in the neighborhood gathered along “Panic Beach,” a strip of sidewalk fronting the Palace Theater, trading jokes and gossip, reminiscing about back when they “wowed `em in Trenton” or “brought down the house in Philly.”
    Maude and Chester Marchington had lived off and on at the Stanley since before the war. Their two-room suite wasn’t much improvement over the room they’d had on Thirty-second Street more than twenty years ago when they were newlyweds. In 1900, Herald Square was the heart of the theater district and Maude worked as a showgirl in the Floradora Company, dancing alongside fifteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, who later gained notoriety as “the girl in the red velvet swing.”
    That’s what the press called Evelyn at the trial of her millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw. He murdered Stanford White, her former lover, in the rooftop garden restaurant at Madison Square Garden. The famous architect died on top of his favorite design. Back then, Chester sported handlebar mustaches. A job as a singing waiter at Rector’s was as close to show business as he would ever get on his own. Maude always said she was happy not to have married a jealous, sadistic millionaire, to have found instead a loving man with “a set of million-dollar pipes,” who didn’t go around bumping off everybody who’d ever gotten fresh with her.
    Her appraisal of Chester’s talents proved somewhat inflated. The two-act they put together during the summer of the Thaw trial, the “Merry Musical Marchingtons,” never rated higher than fifth billing on the three-a-day. Now they took whatever bookings they could get, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs; working summers in Coney Island and the occasional split week at small-time Loew Circuit theaters in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For the most part, they hung out on the pavement outside the Palace or lingered over coffee at the Somerset with friends from the old days, out-of-work jugglers and comedians.
    “With those earphones stuck on his head, he don’t care what kind of howling goes on next door.” Maude addressed her remarks to the hotel’s daytime manager, a ginger-haired young man named Bloom, decked out in so many freckles he looked camouflaged. “It’s bad enough I got to listen to the El roaring by outside, all day