The Cure for Dreaming by Cat Winters
PORTLAND, OREGON—OCTOBER 31, 1900
he Metropolitan Theater simmered with the heat of more than a thousand bodies packed together in red velvet chairs. My nose itched from the lingering scent of cigarette smoke wafting off the gentlemen’s coats—a burning odor that added to the sensation that we were all seated inside a beautiful oven, waiting to be broiled. Even the cloud of warring perfumes hanging over the audience smelled overcooked, like toast gone crisp and black.
Up in a box seat to my left sat Judge Acklen’s son, Percy, in an ebony suit and a three-inch collar that made him look far older than his seventeen years. The electric lamplight shining down on his head coaxed a rich redness to the surface of his auburn hair, which made me think of Father’s favorite saying about my mother’s strawberry curls: Red hair is a symptom of dangerous, fiery passions.
Percy shifted toward the orchestra seats, and I could have sworn, even from that distance high above me, he glanced at me and smiled.
A sharp elbow jabbed me in the arm.
“Stop gawking at him, Livie,” said Frannie—my dearest friend, despite the jabbing. “That boy is a vampire.”
“A vampire?” I snickered and rubbed my walloped bicep. “Here I thought I was the one who’d read Dracula too many times.”
“Percy Acklen would do nothing but make you feel small and meaningless.”
“You never even talk to him.”
She patted my hand. “Neither do you, my friend.”
I shut my mouth, for she was right. Percy and I had never exchanged as much as a simple Good morning or an Excuse me for stepping on your toe.
“Forget him,” said Frannie, “and enjoy your birthday treat. You’re worth a thousand Percys.”
Our friend Kate, a dimpled blonde whose married older sister was supposed to be our chaperone for the evening, plopped down beside Frannie after chatting with other girls at the back of the theater.
“Why is Livie blushing?” she asked, leaning forward.
“I’m not blushing.” I fanned myself with my program. “I’m just flushed from the heat.”
Frannie frowned up at Percy and twisted the end of her waist-length braid, but she was a good-enough friend not to betray my silly infatuation.
I folded the upper-right corner of the program’s front page until the tip of the cream-colored paper met the boldfaced words at the center:
“Maybe as a birthday present to yourself, Livie,” said Kate, flapping open her own program, “you should volunteer to join this Mr. Reverie on the stage. Maybe he’ll teach you how to hypnotize your father into being less of a grouch.”
“Maybe.” I gave a small sniff of a laugh, but I greatly doubted anything could fix Dr. Walter W. Mead.
The lights dimmed, submerging us all in the dark, save for five small candles that flickered inside a row of jack-o’-lanterns in front of the closed red curtain. A hush fell over the audience. Electric footlights rose to life in a fog of white and orange.
A full-whiskered man in a green checkered suit plodded across the apron of the stage, which set off a hearty round of applause from a thousand pairs of gloved hands. The gentleman waved his arms to quiet us down and offered a grin that turned his eyes into tiny crescents.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a booming voice that rumbled up from the barrel of his round belly. “And a Happy Halloween to all of you. I am William Gillingham, your stage manager, and I’m ecstatic to announce that we have a bewitching show for you tonight. Young Monsieur Henri Reverie, barely eighteen years old, has traveled all the way from Montreal, Canada, to exhibit his enthralling hypnotism skills.”
Additional exuberant applause echoed across the theater, and again Mr. Gillingham settled us down with a wave of his hands.
“Thank you, thank you—I’m overjoyed by your enthusiastic response. Some of you sitting out there in the audience will be invited onto the stage to fall under Monsieur Reverie’s spell. The rest of you will bear witness to his remarkable powers over the human mind. I assure you, this talented young man will cause your jaws to drop and your eyes to open wide in astonishment. For musical accompaniment, he’s brought along his sister, the highly talented Mademoiselle Genevieve. So . . . without further ado, I present to you”—Mr. Gillingham turned with an upward sweep of his right hand—“the Reveries.”
The curtain ascended and revealed two mahogany chairs, facing each other at the center of the stage, and a canvas backdrop painted to look like a star-kissed nighttime sky. On the left, a young woman with long golden ringlets sat in front of a monstrous pipe organ made of dark wood and gleaming copper. The stage lights brightened to their full brilliance, and the girl’s peacock-blue evening gown gave off an otherworldly glow that made her appear more spirit than mortal.
She reached toward the instrument’s keys and pressed a single D note twelve times in a row—the sound of a church bell chiming midnight. Chills shuddered down my spine. The pumpkins’ toothy leers seemed to burn brighter.
Silence swallowed up the theater again, but before we could all lean back into the comfort of the calm, Genevieve Reverie lunged toward the keys and played a series of eerie notes that swelled into a passionate rendition of Camille Saint-Sa?ns’s “Danse Macabre.” She hunched her shoulders and plowed her feet into the instrument’s pedals, as if she were racing through the streets of the underworld on a tandem bicycle, on which we were all unwitting passengers. I clutched the armrests. My head seemed to spin around and around and around, but I smiled and straightened my posture, for I adored a good Halloween fright.