The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
THE DIVINE CARLOTTA
Of precisely the same height were Sally Fell and Rosey Cohen, but as different in habitat and appearance as a fallow deer and a gayly-striped zebra. Rosey was a daughter of the slums, a foster child of the cafés. Her first cry—even in that hour it was harsh and forceful—was heard in a close room behind a fire-escape draped with a vari-coloured bed-cling, one of a thousand such crude balconies ranging above the crowded East Side street and its jostling many-tongued thousands.
Her father usually stood with his skull-cap and wide flaring beard in the doorway of the Kosher shop, decorated with ugly dark red lumps of beef and scrawny fowl, hanging pathetically with their heads downward. In front of the store, and in and out of the interminable pushcarts, with their flaring oil-lamps at night illuminating a bewildering miscellany of merchandise,—everything from spoiled grapefruit to slimsy suspenders, Rosey played and fought and bit her way. In her life there were two bright recurring episodes,—the visits to the gallery of the Grand Street Theater where the adipose Adler, pride of the Jewish race, stalked the boards, and the wandering hurdy-gurdy, to which she danced, not with the dainty grace of the Greek and Italian children, but with a wild abandon and agility which distracted even the pushcart vendors from their wares.
As, in not any too ripe a fulness of time, eight little animated steps—a curly-haired brother and seven little sisters—followed the fat, girdleless "Momma," Rosey, to keep this human stairway from collapse, joined the chorus of "The Queens of the East," American Wheel Burlesque, even disporting for one week at Miner's (where they "liked 'em fat," she confessed) but whose glory is now a pathetic legend.
Here an equipment of animal spirits, hard and sensuous good looks—really libeling her, for her head was level enough—together with that most surprising muscular agility, even promoted her to a place in the "olio," the intermission between the two tawdry acts of the performance. But after a year or two, tiring of the road, she blossomed out at a semi-foreign café, on a street that cuts Second Avenue, the boulevard of the Ghetto, midway to the East.
The storm that was hurling the Provincetown to her doom enveloped the whole coast, and drove its slanting lances on the dripping cabs herded in the triangle outside the café. But all was warmth where she sat at a table near the piano, waiting her turn, meanwhile usurping the others'. The rouge on her cheeks was heightened by the natural scarlet of good spirits, and her bobbed black mane swished from side to side over fleshy but shapely shoulders, as she quarreled with the manager. In this fashion of headdress she was, of course, a prophetess, anticipating the present by at least a decade, but she had adopted the wild coiffure from a Salome make-up she had admired. It was, as the cashier was explaining to a startled customer, an "Elluva-fight" she was having with "the boss." She apparently liked anything of an "elluva" variety, in fact, she never was so happy as when rowing. Besides she thought it effective. So finishing the manager, she ordered the jabbering busboys, waiters, and orchestra leader about with a sovereign and well-dissembled anger, and succeeded most thoroughly in drowning out the tenor of expansive chest. And all through this performance—by no means on the bill—the black eyes gauged its publicity value, for nothing pays so well as rudeness and a nicely-calculated degree of insanity. At least the faces of commuters in yokel quest of Bohemia so attested.
MacAllister made his way through the blue wisps of smoke, and between the little tables, with their spaghetti dishes and inverted siphons of carmine wine.
"Your exit-cue, Josef, here's a gentleman to see me."
Nettled by the emphasis she placed on the seventh word, and its implication, the manager beat a hasty retreat, almost as beside himself as an impresario over some famous star's caprice.
MacAllister dropped lazily into a chair at her table, giving as always the impression of the utmost economy of word and effort. When action was not insistent, his tall figure seemed to drawl through life but—never, even when motionless, those deft, alabaster-finished fingers of his. In the dark picture he made these were ever the highlights.
"Gotta bit of news for yuh," began the girl, "that Abey Clout is one swell little press-agent."
"Yeh, he's a bright boy," vouchsafed MacAllister.
"Bright! Why, he's got the Singer Tower faded!He's booked me for a solo dance at Standish's on Broadway at a hundred and fifty per, lessn his commishun. Not that I didn't have it comin'," she added proudly.
Not being exactly of a lymphatic nature, or one to sit back and lazily luxuriate in a prospect, she sat forward blithely and both thrilled and shrilled at it. Besides the figures just mentioned there were perquisites. She had a code, which was more than some of her Madonna- faced rivals could boast, priding herself on always having "gone straight," but such a course has fine gradations, and reasonably untainted luxuries were to be had from all gauged as "easy marks," without too entangling a compromise.
"Congratulations are in order, Rosey."
"Aw, don't Rosey me any more. He's goin' ta bill me as Carlotta, 'The Divine Carlotta!' Canya beat it?"
Mr. MacAllister couldn't, and she continued.
"I'm the illigit'mate descendant of Mahomet, Abey says, some wop prophet, I guess—never heard him menshuned in the synagogue. But, dearie, 'the divine Carlotta!' Say, are you lissnen?"
"My homage, divine one."
Carlotta, for henceforth we must not incur her displeasure through addressing her by her earlier name, surveyed his cool, suavely-tailored length with some admiration.
"Say, Mac, yuh oughtta get some sportier suit than that cremation cloth you're always wearin'."
"In what, my queen, does it offend you?"
"They're black, but they gimme the blues." She looked around proudly as she emitted this sparkle. "You look like a continuous wake."
"I wear them from sentiment."
"Sentiment—the Hell you say! 'Sleft outta your system."
"There you're in error, my dear, there's a vein, deep in my nature, which your more obtuse one hasn't touched,—a vein, tender and pure and unalloyed. You see," he grew rarely communicative, "it's for my parents. The dear old people booked me for the Amen corner, and later the big-time pulpit"
"Yuh look the part!"
"And occasionally it can be useful. I can splice a man and an untoward girl without even a license—for a night—and a consideration."
"Oh, mister, ain't yuh got no respect for my innocence!" She surveyed him critically, "yes, yuh look it, with them bits of cracked ice. Yuh oughtn't ta wear 'em—they give you away."
"My lucky stones, ever since a happy night up in Nome."
He shed exquisite reminiscence. Much red blood had been spilled that night, much yellow gold exchanged.
"They were Cal Fresno's. And he cashed in when he forgot to wear them one evening. Same thing happened to Forty-nine Halliday when he grew careless, just as Lucky Lucille foretold. On my hands they bring luck, but off, good-night!"
"Sounds like an intrestin' movie in a nickelette," said Carlotta, then issued a raucous order.
"Gustaf, a bottle o' Bud for the gentleman, or will you have a highball, Mac?"
"Neither, thanks."
"Oh, I forgot, yuh always was a high-principled man, Mac."
But it was her turn, and she flounced from the table out into the little clear space, in an ensemble of raucous voice, twitching head, hips, and shoulders, all at a ludicrous but most engaging tempo—her pace was always accellerando.
She joined him again, to find a fourteen-year old youngster with ferret eyes and a Semitic nose whose hawk-curve was a grotesque caricature of his sister's well-shaped one. After a whispered colloquy, a modulation which she achieved with difficulty, Carlotta groped in her well-developed bosom, and the requested greenback rustled in the boy's hand.
"Now, run along, Izzy, and don't shoot any craps on the way home—see. And give love to the Momma.
"But where yuh been, Mac?"
"Week-ending with a friend of yours."
"Bar Harbour or Newport?" she jeered.
"Neither—Salthaven, Mass."
She concealed a sudden look of apprehension, leaning towards the gambler with an assumed tenderness that had absolutely no effect.
"What were yuh pullin on the kid?"
"Just foraging."
Anger smouldered in her eyes, only to be diplomatically quenched.
"Did he fall?"
"Did your long-haired ancestor fall for Delilah?"
Now, strange as it may seem, Carlotta had been very careful with Master Phil and his pocket-book, choosing most inexpensive places for dining whenever he flitted down from New Haven. It really would have cut her tough little heart pretty deep, had he classed her as a "grafter" or "gold-digger," indifferent as she might be to the odium of these appellatives where fair game was concerned. When one had a "sweetheart"—why there was all the difference in the world.
"You oughtta lay off him, Mac." She sprang with some maternal quickening to the defense. "I've stood by you at cards an a lot of your phony schemes, but blackmailin' a girl's friends is diff'rent."
"Friends!" he retorted, "a girl hasn't any, they're always something else, more or less. So, easy on the love-stuff, Little One, or it might wreck the fair structure of our partnership."
The voice was raised not a half-note, but it held a master's reproof for Carlotta. Those cold, unflickering eyes could read the faintest lines on the plaid backs of cards across a wide table, and even her easy impudence faltered before them. She was subdued, or through discretion appeared so. She was also a little uneasy over something else.
"Say, Mac," she assuaged him, "you was tellin' about Lucky Lucille—did she read palms an tell your future and all that?"
"That's what her sign said."
"And did you believe her, did it come out the way she said?"
"A lot of it—why?"
"Oh, I went to a medyum, over on Pell Street, a spooky joint, three flights up, dark an back of a chopsooey hangout. She was half-coon and half chink herself."
"A happy medium," MacAllister gibed.
"Gawd no! There was nothin' happy about her. She was the saddest lookin' dame I ever saw. An', well, she says,—'Dearie, you're goin on a real long journey'"
"You prefer roses?" murmured her tormentor.
Carlotta started, looking furtively over her shoulder. "Oh, Gawd, she couldn't ameant that—but a long journey, over some water"
"Perchance, to 'the Island.'" (He referred to the city prison.)
"Stop your kiddin', Mac, this was serious—she made a big impreshun on me. It was all dark, with two spooky-lookin' guys with turbans, an' a crystal, an' incense burnin'. But she meant the ocean in a ship, an' she said"
Here Carlotta closed her eyes dramatically, and in a somnambulist's voice intoned,—
"I see gold, dearie, showers of gold, an' you in the midst of it"
"Well, Carlotta, if you're good, maybe you'll have your wish," said the gambler enigmatically.
"The gold lissens well—" she nodded, "but that long journey—I don't like it."
And she shivered as she reached for her cloak.