On Thanksgiving, members of the Childrens Aid Society came through the front door bearing holiday bounty: turkeys, cranberries, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and pecan pies. They invaded Cook’s kitchen and bustled around heating things up and arranging food on platters. A bevy of married women with money, their confidence was impenetrable. They reeked of comfort and the conviction that while they were dishing out the food they had brought, God was praising them. They spoke to me in a cooing voice.
They believed their example was beneficial, so they brought their children. This was the day those children were to learn that it is better to give than to receive. But the children were not strangers. I knew them from school. They were dressed in satin and lace while I sat in my secondhand clothes at a long table with my hands folded in my lap, as instructed.
Elsie Cogswell was among them, looking even more beautiful than she did when the sun shone through her golden hair as she played jacks on the playground. Now she could see with her own eyes where I lived. I knew her house. Everyone did. She lived in the Cogswell estate, and once, when I was exploring Haverhill, I walked by her street and rested for a moment on a stone wall. Just then she cantered bareback across her meadow on a white pony. Did she think these ragamuffins at the table with me mirrored me? Did she imagine me grateful to her?
She was not the only reason I didn’t want to be there. This was the day that Louie was opening his new theater. A banner at the entrance read “Your Orpheum Theater! Grand Opening Thanksgiving Day! Come see The Life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension in Twenty-Seven Beautiful Scenes.” Lady Mother was horrified that I wanted to spend the day inside a motion-picture hall, especially one that had until so recently been a burlesque theater. She put her palm over her heart and said, “No. Absolutely not. Out of the question. Simply out of the question.” She said this as if I’d asked her to lift her skirt in public.
So I sat smoldering at the table in the dining room with its dark Victorian molding, as Elsie, her blue velvet sash matching the blue velvet ribbons on her braids, lowered a bowl of mashed potatoes next to me and said in an unnatural, practiced way, Won’t you have some mashed potatoes? She had been schooled, obviously, on how to behave toward the less fortunate—polite, correct and keeping a kindly distance. The hands that held that heavy stoneware bowl were trembling slightly from fatigue.
Furious, humiliated by finding myself at such a disadvantage, I punched the bowl upward, and white blobs of potato flew out. The bowl crashed and split apart. The sound made everything go dead for a second until Mrs. Cogswell called across the room in a scolding voice, Elsie! The other volunteers filled in the silence with reassuring clucking: “Thats all right. Accidents happen—no harm done.” During the flurry of mops and sponges, for the first time, though we were in the same advanced reading group in school, Elsie met my eyes and did not flick hers away. She knew it wasn’t an accident. She glared at me, waiting for me to be chivalrous, to speak up and take the blame. When I said nothing, she put more energy into her eye beam, which she imagined would wither me. We were locked in combat with our eyes. Yes, I am not grateful. Take your food and shove it. Right, I am just like you. I’m as proud as they come. She lowered her eyelids and blushed.
Lady Mother shot me the hard eye and pointed upstairs, but I did not accept banishment. I pretended to, just to avoid a scene, but when Lady Mother’s back was turned, I grabbed my winter jacket, snuck out the back door and ran into town under a cold, white November sky.
The streets of Haverhill were almost deserted because most people were home celebrating Thanksgiving. Downtown, on the sidewalk, a scratchy-sounding automatic barker blared out, "Step right up, folks. Come inside. Step right up, folks. Come inside.” The old Garlic Box had a fresh coat of white paint but no marquee over the sidewalk. The box-office was a separate little closet with Maggie inside, looking cheerful behind the window. Harry, dear, she said putting her mouth next to the open slot, come around here and look at my ledger book. I was surprised she remembered me because I had not seen her since I woke up in her house that time in the summer.
There was barely room in the box office for Maggie alone. Thinking back, I realize that she must have been about twenty-four at that time, though to me at age ten, she seemed a mature matron, soft with a slight smell of soap. When I opened the box- office door, she welcomed me by putting her arm around my waist and pulling me close to her so we could fit. She did this with no shyness, just hugged me close to her as if it was perfectly natural. She had no reserve at all, nothing in her held back from me, and she took this so much for granted that it seemed natural to me too. So I dared cuddle next to her. Each day, she said, opening a black book with the hand that wasn’t holding me close, I will enter on the debit side our expenses, such as rent, electricity, film rental, slides, advertising, salaries. And each day on the credit side,” she pointed to red margins, “I will enter our earnings. Thats called bookkeeping.” She tore a ticket off a large roll of tickets and gave it to me. “Friday night, you'll come to us. Put some meat on those bones."
“I can pay for my ticket. I saved a nickel from my job at the Bijou.”
“The Bijou? Don’t mention the Bijou. We don’t want to know from the Bijou.” She opened the box-office door and gently shifted her body so I was forced on the other side of it. She pulled the door closed behind me, blew me a kiss and looked down at her ledger book.
Dressed in a three-piece suit and stiff white collar, Louie was at the theater door. "Welcome to the Orpheum Theater, the little theater ’round the corner,” he said, as he accepted tickets from four lumberjacks in plaid jackets who towered over him. When I gave him my ticket, he said, “Welcome to the Orpheum Theater, the little theater ’round the corner,” but then he recognized me. “Don’t be such a stranger,” he said, as I went inside. The theater was still lopsided, with a warped floor. Tobacco stains on the walls showed through coats of whitewash. Three women in large hats were already sitting in the front row. The three women opened their compacts and sneaked backward peeks at the lumberjacks. When some sailors entered, the women opened their compacts again. The town drunk wobbled in, pressed his ticket into Louies palm and walked tipped backward to a seat on the aisle.
To start the show, Louie pulled a switch on the wall. The automatic barker stopped abruptly: Step right... The house lights dimmed, and a player piano, keys bouncing up and down by themselves, played Bicycle Built for Two, as Louie projected the lyrics onto the screen. He sang the loudest of everyone: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do! I’m half crazy, all for the love of you…”
When he projected the slide Ladies, We Like Your Hats, but Please Remove Them, the sailors called out, That means you, girls! One of the women turned around and said, Excuse me, sir, where are your manners? Louie projected another slide: We Aim to Present the Pinnacle of Motion Picture Perfection. One of the lumberjacks took a swig from his flask. Louie threaded the projector but didn’t do it correctly, and the image jumped in a frenzy of misaligned sprocket holes.
Projector threaded, the screen lit up with a Biograph newsreel of the San Francisco earthquake. We saw parched earth, a mosaic of cracks with wide fissures where the earth had pulled apart. Office buildings and houses in the background went up in flames, and the flames spread to the next building, which exploded in fire. Soon all the buildings were in a roaring blaze. There were no people in the picture, no police barriers holding back frantic crowds pushing forward for news of their mothers or fathers, no placid people just watching the sight, no horses, no trolleys on tracks, no automobiles. There were no fire wagons shooting water through hoses. Luckily, the reel lasted only three minutes because I was about to shout, “Louie! Turn that off!” I couldn’t have stayed in my seat for another second, and it took all my self-control not to start crying. Sometimes, as I was falling asleep at night, I saw those girls at the windows leaping out. Once, much to my chagrin, I woke up to find Lady Mother shaking me, and I came out of a nightmare into her rigid arms that pulled me close to her scratchy bathrobe while she murmured, “There, there. There, there.”
Louie projected his main feature, a series of tableaux about the life of Jesus, who seemed to be wearing a diaper. He lugged a cross as people in togas, their eyes heavenward, followed after him. The audience was hushed when the lights went on, as if they had seen Jesus in person. I was a bit confused myself. Was Jesus still alive?
Thank you all for coming, Louie said above Oh! Susanna, racing away on the player piano. Remember! When it comes to entertainment you can trust, you can trust the little theater ’round the corner.
The sailors eyed the women, the lumberjacks eyed the women, and they all walked out to the renewed sounds of the mechanical barker outside: Step right up, folks. Come inside…” Louie rewound the film, but he did it incorrectly, and the reel slipped off the projector, film blossoming all over the floor. I ran to help gather the loops of film. I disentangled it while Louie wound it back on the reel by hand. A rash the color of a baboons bottom flared across his cheeks. Maggie entered holding the cash box. Her husband was now sitting on a theater seat pressing his fingertips into his temples. Theres too much light, he said in a weak voice, eyes closed. Maggie, get rid of the light.
She whispered to me, Youll come, too. Take the girls out. He cant take any noise when he gets like this.
Louie tried to appear fit and buoyant in case people were looking out the windows in the houses we passed, but Maggie and I heard his intermittent groans. Once home, Maggie guided him to a bed in a tiny bedroom, and he lay flat on his back, eyes closed, as she pulled the shades down. Then she held a washcloth under cold water, wrung it out and placed it on Louie’s forehead. She closed the door softly. The mattress in the kitchen where the cousin with the beard had been sleeping was vacant, covered with children’s clothes, sewing equipment, blankets. “They’re downstairs,” Maggie whispered. “Go get them now.”
“Is he sick?” I whispered.
“It’s his sinus.”
“What’s a sinus?”
“What’s a sinus? It’s in your nose someplace.”
“Like a bugger?”
“No. Not like that. I don’t know. He gets terrible headaches. Just go, Harry. Take the girls outside.”
“Maggie?”
“What? What now?”
“Is Jesus still alive?”
“Who?”
“Jesus.”
“Harry, I can’t leave Louie alone right now. Please go downstairs, and give some relief to Mrs. Cohen. She has six of her own. Please.”
“Was that really him in the photoplay?” She was done with me and went into the bedroom to adjust the cloth on Louie’s forehead.
I collected Edie and Irene from the apartment below and pushed them in their carriage on the street outside. It was gratifying to see how they flirted with me even though they were so little. They made me share their cookies and seemed to think I was the funniest person who had ever lived. Maggie, noting how happy they were when I returned, bartered with me. I could attend every show at the Orpheum for free in exchange for babysitting at least one afternoon a week so she could go to the meetings of the Blossoms of Zion.
I became comfortable at Louies house, sitting at his table on Friday nights inhaling the cozy fragrance of roast chicken. Maggie and he did not ask me about my parents or where I lived. I understood this reticence to be tact.
Louies theater had been open a few months and still people stayed away. Maggie had a straight forward solution: Go invite them, Louie. So he did. He visited the Blossoms of Zion, the Workmens Circle, the Sons of Italy, the Ladies’ Helping Hand Society, the German, Irish and Russian clubs, speaking to some through translators. He told the various memberships that there was no better way to teach children American ways than to let them see American players doing American things on the screen. As for learning geography, a picture was worth a thousand words. He admitted that his theater had a bad reputation but promised to show only pictures he would show to his own little girls. He promised big donations to each organization.
There aint no country in the world better than the United States of America, he said one Friday night after another profitable week. “Don’t you ever forget that. What other country has such opportunity? What other country welcomes the tired and the poor? Instead of setting the drumstick on my plate, he withheld it, and I understood this was a quiz.
None.
Youre telling me. You know the name of the president?
Me? Of course. William Howard Taft. Louie put the drumstick on my plate.
Did you vote for him, Louie?
What kind of question is that? How could I vote when I aint a citizen. Through a full mouth, he said, You didnt know that, right?
Where do you come from?
St. John, Canada. Its a hilly town. Up and down, up and down. I lugged scrap metal up and down. I come to Boston where I met Maggie. I vow to her we will never live with her parents again. My mother kissed the hem of Maggies garment.
Why?
Why? Here, eat some challah. Why do you think? She was so happy I found a good wife. I talk to her every day. Shes with me all the time, right on my shoulder.
Who?
My mother, who do you think? I ask her advice. I listen when she tells me do this, do that, trust this one, dont trust that one. You can accomplish great things, son. I listen when she tells me that.
But if shes dead, how does she tell you?
I dont know. I dont know how it happens, but she talks to me from the other side of the grave.
I sighed so deeply it made a squeak. Mine doesnt, I said.
Louie and Maggie exchanged a look. Not all of them do, Louie said. Dont mean shes not watching over you. Maybe she was a quieter person than mine. Was she quiet?
Sometimes.
You ever hear her scream at anybody?
Oats.
So then, thats the answer. Screaming wore out her voice. Thats all that means. Believe me, it dont mean shes not watching out for you.
Then how come she let Kyle break my swan?
How come? What do you think, shes God? She aint God. And how do you know what shes going to do to what’s-his-name Kyle. How do you know? Do you know everything thats going to happen? Do you? Do you know everything thats going to happen?
No.
Youre damn right you dont. So dont tell me she aint going to punish what’s-his-name. That night I took the photograph of my father from my pocket and showed it to them.