Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 30

Jack glanced up from the microfilm reader whenever Millie emerged from her office to confer with one of her staffers or make a photocopy or chat with reporters waiting at the counter. Sometimes she glanced his way also, but he always looked. He could not help it if he tried. His peripheral vision always picked up on her hair, which continued to astonish him no matter how closely he had been with her these past few weeks.

After having written eight stories about buildings whose facades would be part of the now-revived downtown mall project, Jack had worked low enough on the agreed-upon list to focus on the Pembroke Theatre. He already knew some of its story from his research into Albert McQueen, the larger-than-life automobile promoter of the 1920s who also owned the theater.

The Pembroke opened in 1890 as an opera house catering to sophisticated patrons of the "legitimate theater." Its success was interrupted in 1897, when the Pembroke's orchestra director was shot and killed during rehearsal by the first chair violinist in a personal dispute involving the violinist's wife. Jack remembered hearing about this as a child, but in that telling, the shooting supposedly took place during a live performance.

Whether because of that scandal or just because the city didn't have enough well-to-do residents to support high-end theater, the Pembroke closed down. Its reputation was further sullied when it reopened a few years later as a burlesque house. That iteration lasted only one season, during which it was raided by the police several times and caught fire once before closing again. In 1905, it reopened as a vaudeville house where it found its footing and remained mostly solvent until the stock market crash of 1929. McQueen entered the picture in 1919, when he bought the Pembroke while it was again in financial difficulty during the First World War.

Although vaudeville was not considered "legitimate theater," it was a lot more legitimate than burlesque. The circuit owners and local vaudeville managers had strict rules about keeping all acts family friendly. Other than keeping one's act clean, however, there seemed to be no particular rules on what the content of a vaudeville act could be – so long as audiences wanted to see it. There were singers, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, comedians, animal acts, and sometimes even famous Broadway actors doing brief scenes from their shows. All acts -- or "turns" as they were called -- were in the 10-to-20-minute range, and performers would do the same act two or three times a day because the theater was open for six hours at a time to a rotating audience.

Jack recognized some of the names of those vaudeville era performers who later became famous in the movies, including Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope, but many others were evidently well known in their day, but now forgotten. As he was working his way through the microfilmed index, Jack came across an article from 1925 with the headline "Prohibition Agents Raid Pembroke Cast Party." A story the following day was headlined "Pembroke Liquor Charges Dropped." That sounded promising, Jack thought, as he switched to the newspaper microfilm.

The two stories recounted a police raid of a house, where Pembroke performers and crew were known to gather after the show each night. The Prohibition agents claimed the house was a speakeasy, but McQueen (and his lawyers) successfully challenged the raid, arguing that the gathering met the definition of a "private party" under the Volstead Act and was thus protected from such raids. The judge agreed, and even ordered the Prohibition agents to return the liquor seized in the raid because it was not bathtub gin or moonshine, but legitimately produced alcohol that had been bottled before Prohibition.

Jack was getting a kick out of the story when he froze looking at the glowing microfilm page. The address of the house where the private party of Pembroke performers and crew took place was 103 Elm St. -- his grandmother's house.

Of course, she probably didn't live there at the time, he presumed. After all, this was the 1920s, and the period when he knew she lived there was in the 1950s and early 1960s before she got sick and went into the home. He did not know when she actually started living there. Jack went to the shelves in back that held the old city directories, but the oldest one was 1946. As he was taking it off the shelf, his watch beeped to remind him he was meeting Millie at a new restaurant called the Tea Room in 15 minutes. Normally, they walked to lunch together, but on this day she had an off-site appointment late in the morning, so they had arranged to meet. Jack quickly flipped to the address section and found 103 Elm Street again. Louisa Anschutz was still listed as the primary householder, with her occupation given as "factory worker."

Jack was a few minutes late to the restaurant, and Millie was at the booth, intently looking through some papers. As soon as he sat down, he blurted out all that he had discovered. "How do I get to the 1925 city directories?" he asked. "The Public Library?"

"Actually, we have those earlier directories also, on microfiche," Millie said. "Just ask any of the librarians and they can show you. I would, but I am hip deep in something."

"I was going to ask what all this is," Jack said, gesturing at the papers Millie had stacked in front of her. "Is this part of your presentation to the corporate guy?"

"No, I'm as prepared as I can be for that -- and he's coming Monday. This is just a regular library research project."

"I thought you had underlings to do that stuff."

"I keep my hand in," she said, "and I picked this project for a couple of reasons. One, it's a Lifestyle section feature story about redheads, so naturally they came to me. But because it's just a Lifestyle piece, it's kind of a low-stakes story, so I figured I would use it to try doing Internet research to placate Max."

"Good plan."

"But so far it just reinforces what I've already told him. We are a professional library, and as such we have access to fabulous, rich, deep sources through Nexis, Dialog and the other online information services -- that we pay for out of my department's budget. So I've got a big stack of great articles that have been published in professional, authoritative publications— newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals. However, when I try to research the topic on the Internet, I find unnamed sources that clearly ripped off these articles without credit, and I find links to porn sites about redheads."

"Oh, boy," Jack said.

"Which I will not be sharing with you. I also found an erotic literature site about a sexy redhead having sexy adventures. It's called 'Molly and the Roommates,' so one can just imagine where that plot is going."

Jack managed to hide his panic as he took a sip of his iced tea, but the people in his head were fainting and jumping out of windows. "How did you find that stuff?" he asked casually. "I thought it was hard to search across the Internet."

"That's another problem. On the professional services like Nexis, I can write a very specific search statement and be confident that if I don't find something, then it's not there. On the internet, there could be something great out there -- not that I think there is, but theoretically there could be -- and I might not find it because of the search limitations."

"But you found some things."

"I'm not telling you how to find redhead porn."

Jack laughed. "I'll bet I could find that myself, but I don't need to because I already have a sexy redhead in real life. I meant, how did you find these other things if the search engines are crap?"

"There's a new one in beta called Alta Vista that is a lot better than Veronica, but it's still really crude compared to how precisely we can search services like Nexis."

The conversation moved on to other subjects, and they walked back to the paper together, going straight up to the library. As they walked through, Millie flagged down one of her staffers, and said, "Barb, please show Jack the old city directories on microfiche," and then she disappeared into her office, barely looking back.

As Barb took him to another reader that was set up for microfiche and showed him where to find the directories, Jack tried to pay attention but was preoccupied by Millie having found Molly's stories. He told himself, first, that it was unlikely Millie would bother to look at that site closely since it was of no use to her, and secondly, even if she did, there was nothing that would obviously connect it to her.

His fretfulness on that topic, however, was interrupted when he located his grandmother's address in the 1925 directory. Not only was Louisa Anschutz still listed as the householder, but it gave her occupation and employer as "dancer, Pembroke Theatre."

Jack stared at it for a long time, puzzled, because his only image of his grandmother was of a haggard, old woman with bifocals and false teeth. But in 1925, she would've only been 24 years old and might, theoretically, have been pretty. Could she actually have been a dancer at a vaudeville theater? He was eager to dig further, but had other obligations that afternoon and had to go back to his desk for a telephone interview, followed by a team staff meeting.

As soon as he could, Jack went back to the library and looked up his grandmother's name in the 1920s newspaper index. He found two articles listed, the abstracts for which had to do with the hubbub over the liquor raid and its resolution. Her name was mentioned briefly as having been the hostess of the party, and she was described as a vaudeville performer who "goes by the stage name Louise Mayfair."

Mayfair was, of course, her married name, though he was surprised she was already married in 1925. Jack had always been told that his grandmother wed a businessman named Walter Mayfair in 1928, and then his mother was born in 1929 -- just before the stock market crash. He remembered his mother telling him that her parents moved to New York -- where she was born -- but then Walter Mayfair died in a train derailment. Louisa Anschutz Mayfair returned to Brayton with her infant daughter at the beginning of the Great Depression.

Jack looked up the name Louise Mayfair in the index and found two more articles. Neither was primarily about her, but she was mentioned, along with other performers who had regular acts at the Pembroke. One article described her as touring with the vaudeville circuits as part of an all-female dance group, but added "when at the Pembroke, she also performs as one half of the 'Bertie & Louise' act with Bertie Blaine."

Bertie and Louise?? There was a real Bertie? A human, non-parakeet Bertie?

Jack was so absorbed he did not realize how much time had passed, and then Millie was standing next to him carrying her purse. "Are you ready to go?" she asked.

On the walk over to his apartment, Jack excitedly told her all that he had found – along with the "Bertie" references he remembered from his childhood. "My mother never said anything about Grandma working in vaudeville, " Jack said, "so I don't think she knew."

A few minutes later, in his apartment, they were making dinner together, and Millie took his vodka out of the cabinet and made them each a drink. Jack had recently gotten into the habit of keeping two bottles of vodka in the apartment. One of them was easily found, and the other wasn't. When Millie was there, he made drinks from the first bottle, and when she wasn't there, he used the second one. That way, he didn't have to worry about her noticing any drastic changes in the level of liquid in the bottle.

When dinner was in the oven, Millie went into the bathroom, and Jack strengthened his drink. He went over and sat at the big chair, looking out at the city, where construction had begun behind the fence. Millie came out of the bathroom nude, and as he watched her walk towards him, Jack remembered she had found Molly's story. She sat down next to him, their bodies close. He was fully dressed, still wearing his necktie, but they both liked starting things out this way.

"I sure love that outfit on you."

"It's my favorite."

He put his arm on the back of the chair behind her head and looked down to enjoy the sight of her white, freckled body with its little tuft of red pubic hair. "I'm sorry. I've been dominating the conversation," he said, putting his other hand on her knee. "How was your afternoon?"

"It was fine," she said, "but I had a little downtime so I looked at that Molly site."

"The what?" he asked, playing dumb.

"That 'Molly and the Roommates' site I told you about."

"Really? I thought you said it wasn't useful for your research."

"Oh, it's not," she laughed. "I was just a little curious. I've never actually read erotica, and I assumed it would just be all descriptions of people having sex, but it wasn't."

"What was it?"

"It was sexy, but there wasn't any actual sex — at least not in the couple of chapters that I read. It was about a red-haired girl who . . . likes to be naked."

"Hey, I know a girl like that," Jack said, trying to sound normal, his fingertips lightly caressing her thigh.

"But I only go naked in front of you."

"And the Earth goddess who seductively rains on you."

"Yes, her too. But Molly, does it in front of lots of other people. See, these roommates of hers have hard-drinking lesbian parties every night, and she goes completely naked at those parties. Isn't that sexy?"

"Yes, that does sound sexy," he said, knowing he should change the subject, but not wanting to. "So, is the, uh, writing any good?"

"Actually, it's quite good."

"Is it?"

"Yeah, it's a fun read, but there's something else about it. I just feel this odd sense of connection to this . . . other person."

"Because . . . she's a redhead who likes to go naked?" His hand continued to migrate up her thigh. She opened her legs slightly.

"Partly, yes, but it feels like more than that. Like . . . like she could be a version of me in another dimension. Because her story is . . . well, I don't think you and I have ever really talked about our sexual fantasies, but ever since I was a teenager, my number one sexy fantasy was basically what Molly is doing -- being the only one naked at a party. I hardly ever actually did that, of course, but--"

"You said 'hardly ever.' Does that mean sometimes you--"

"Try to stay focused, Johnny. I'm sure you remember how repressive our church was about impure thoughts. Not only were we supposed to not have sex -- that part I could manage -- but also not to even think about having sex. So I didn't think about actual sex. Instead, I imagined myself in the future going naked at college parties, or even at more grown-up cocktail parties. Everyone would be looking at me, and if those people had impure thoughts, well, that was their problem. Technically, I wasn't the one sinning."

"Way to work the angles," Jack laughed, kissing her neck and bringing his hand up between her legs until the side of his index finger was pressed lightly against her vagina. "Yeah, back in those days, my salvation was constantly at risk because of you. Meanwhile, you were apparently imagining yourself in the future being the naked girl in a big Victorian house full of lesbians."

She pulled her head back and looked at him dubiously. "How did you know it was a Victorian house?"

"You mentioned it earlier."

"No, I didn't. Jack, you went to this site, didn't you? Admit it, mister."

"I plead the Fifth," Jack said, grateful that in her accusation she had given him an alibi. "I will only say, through my attorney, that you did, after all, tell me what the site is called, and you did say you found it using Alta Vista. It wouldn't be hard for even a non-librarian to follow that trail. I mean, theoretically."

"Are you cheating on me with another naked redhead?"

"I don't think it counts as cheating per se," Jack said.

"It does if you . . . touched yourself."

"I didn't. Did you?"

"Hey, we weren't talking about me."

"We are now," Jack laughed, as the tip of his thumb got itself wet and slid upward to touch her clitoris. "Did you, Millie Jenkins—"

"McGuire," she sighed.

"Did you, Millie McGuire, touch yourself in an unclean manner whilst reading about Molly and her Roommates?"

"I'll have you know," she said, "I read that in my office . . . and I . . . almost never masturbate in my office."

"Wait, you said 'almost' never."

She giggled in a lower octave than normal and began to take over the movement as he matched her rhythm. "Did I say that? I meant to say . . . hardly ever."

"But that's--"

"Later on, though," she went on, ignoring him, "when I'm home alone in my bed . . . I suppose I might like to . . . imagine myself . . . in one of those scenes."

"Like, um, which one, for example?"

But Millie did not answer. Instead, she buried her face in his neck as his thumb continued busily at its work.