The Cure for Dreaming(22)
Our neighbor Mrs. Stanton exited the front door of her narrow green house on the corner of Main, followed by her three little ducklings: a pair of twin girls in white bonnets and a toddler boy in a navy-blue sailor suit. She sold preserves to grocers in the city, and she and her children often emerged from their house with a wooden pull wagon stocked with jars of brightly colored jams and vegetables swimming in pickling vinegar.
Obviously, all of this wasn’t the peculiar part.
No, here was the strange thing that caused me to stop walking and gawk at the woman with my arms hanging by my sides: On this particular morning, Mrs. Stanton was a ghost.
The trees she passed, the white picket fence bordering her house—they were all visible through her skin and clothing and her tea-stain-colored hair, which looked as translucent as the layers of an onion. She was a cobweb woman. Barely there. Almost gone.
A nothing person.
“I FOUND THIS LYING ON THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE THE building,” I said to the statuesque receptionist manning the front desk of the Oregonian’s nine-story headquarters on Sixth and Alder.
The female employee, sporting half-lens spectacles and a thick black tie, sat with her posture so impeccably straight, I felt the need to stretch my neck a little higher. Rows of lady workers in tailored dress suits typed behind her in a commotion of clicking keys and high-pitched dings that signified the ends of typewritten lines.
I inhaled a long breath of inky air and handed the woman an unstamped envelope, addressed Letters to the Editor Department. “Someone must have dropped it,” I said. “I thought I should bring it in.” My fingers pulsed with nervous energy.
The woman took my envelope and studied the address through her half-moon lenses. Her hair was puffed so high and her sharp chin held with such confidence that I could have sworn I shrank six inches just from standing in front of her.
She lifted her face and offered a thin smile. “I’ll deliver it to the correct department. Thank you for bringing it in.”
A gleam in her eye told me she knew the handwriting on the envelope belonged to a seventeen-year-old girl with shaking hands, so I turned and left the building.
NOT ONCE IN MY LIFE HAD I PLAYED HOOKY FROM SCHOOL before that frosty-cold autumn morning. Not once. The temptation to be truant had never even occurred to me.
Yet instead of hurrying off to school, I found myself standing in front of the arched brick entrance of the Metropolitan Theater. A haunted sort of feeling squirmed around in my gut, but still I walked inside, my feet motivated by a will of their own.
The empty lobby felt like a hollowed-out husk compared to the hot and buzzing scene from Halloween night. My footsteps clapped across the black-and-white tiles, and the echoing, gilded ceiling above seemed a thousand feet high. I stopped and caught my breath, worried I’d get caught trespassing. I probably shouldn’t have even liked theaters so much—not after their allure had spirited my mother away one snowy December night when I was just four years old. When she told us she couldn’t breathe in our house anymore.
The pipe organ started up in the auditorium, and my heart leapt into my throat. Beyond the open doorway, someone played “Evening Prayer” from Hansel and Gretel, the spellbinding melody Genevieve Reverie had performed when Henri invited me to float up to the theater’s catwalks and bask in the warm electric lights. Whoever was attempting to play the song lacked Genevieve’s passion and talent, but even the school-recital stiffness of the performance allowed the notes to melt inside my bones and ease my troubled soul.
With silent footfalls, I stole into the auditorium.
The music proved to be the work of a bottom-heavy lady organist with pumpkin-orange hair. She sat in front of the dark wood-and-copper pipe organ, all alone on the stage, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her as if she were just learning the song that very moment. I hunkered down in a red velvet chair in the back row and listened to that mesmerizing melody that reminded me so of Halloween night. My eyelids drooped with each passing refrain. I remembered all the rows of lights hanging above the stage, beckoning me to them, and my cheeks and neck warmed.
Henri Reverie’s pacifying voice rose to my ears: “And that’s when I leap off the young lady’s torso.”
I opened my eyes with a start. There he was, on the stage, strolling over to the organist with three pages of notes in his hands, dressed in his midnight-black trousers and vest, without the coat.
Henri Reverie.
He pointed to one of his papers. “If you finish the song early, I recommend transitioning into ‘Sleep, Little Rosebud.’”
The pumpkin-haired organist, who for some reason wasn’t Henri’s sister, withdrew her fingers from the keys and rotated toward the hypnotist. “Do you really stand on top of these ladies, young man?”
“Oui,” said Henri, nodding. “But I believe in equality, and I stand on gentlemen, too, depending on what I feel the audience would prefer to see. Haven’t you ever heard of the great Herbert L. Flint?”
“No.”
Henri stepped back. “You haven’t?”
“Do you honestly think I’ve heard of every two-bit stage performer?” asked the organist.
“But he is not ‘a two-bit performer.’ He’s a well-known and respected mesmerist. We adapted his use of the human plank for our show, and I always open with it. It is my most popular feat.”