Read Online The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin - Free Book Online Page A

little trepidation. She had grown to dislike the actor, but she had trusted him. Surely he wouldn’t let her down. She had been so preoccupied with the coming battle with her order that she had spent her afternoons writing out invitations and had not set foot in the class for dramatic arts. Here was the chance to prove that what she was doing in St. Francis Xavier’s was progressive rather than conservative, liberal rather than archaic, secular rather than religious.
    The general and his entourage had arrived along with a delegation from the cathedral. So, too, had industrialists and businessmen, heiresses and minor politicians. A minute before the play was due to begin, a group of performers from the cabaret group hurried in and made a great fuss looking for seats.The general, much to his chagrin, was made to stand up and sit down three times.
    In a broom cupboard that had been transformed into a changing room, Tiny Lil looked at herself once more in the full-length mirror. She wore a long flowing white dress, a pair of the actor’s old boots painted gold, and a cardboard crown. Her face was painted white and her mouth was a deep, dark red.
    “I think it’s almost time,” said the cabaret man.
    Wernher tried his best to find something he recognized in the girl in the crown. She gazed up at him and for a moment he saw an intelligence in her eyes that he knew neither he nor her mother had ever had. Her eyes settled on his chin. Instinctively he covered it with his hand. Now he wasn’t so sure she was his after all.
    “Don’t be nervous,” she said.
    But he felt extremely uneasy.
    “In the absence of any printed matter that is the more usual means of presentation in the theatrical medium,” announced Wernher Siegfried as he took to the stage, a section of the gymnasium recently delineated by white paint, “may I present the stage highlight of 1911: The Miracle of Saint Wilgefortis .”
    The audience, who had grown a little impatient in seats too small for their adult bottoms, sighed, squirmed a few times, and then settled down. They patted their checkbooks in pockets or bags and calculated the least they could get away with without embarrassment.
    “Well, this is a surprise,” whispered the director to the nun.
    Sister August didn’t appear to hear him. The curtains were pulled aside to reveal a painted castle wall. Tiny Lil took the stage in her crown and golden boots. For a few seconds she looked out at the blur of faces in the crowd and instantly forgot her opening line.What was she doing there? Why had she let the actor persuade her to take the lead part? And then the sun came out and a beam of light fell through the cupola above. Suddenly the actor’s words came back to her: Acting is a language; speak with your eyes. And so she took a deep breath, stepped into the light, and lifted her eyes.
    “Oh, Father, don’t make me marry him!” she cried out. “He’s old, he’s ugly, and I am chaste.”
    “What d’ya mean, chaste?” roared the cabaret performer, now dressed in a long red cloak he had borrowed from a production of Henry VI . “I am the king of Portugal and you are my daughter.You’ll do as I say.”
    Siegfried, an actor of only moderate ability, hammed it up so much that Tiny Lil had to take a moment before she could continue.
    “I am a Christian, sire. And I am married to God.”
    The king laughed so long and loud that some of the younger orphans in the front row started to whimper.
    “You’ll marry him tomorrow,” he replied after an overly self-indulgent pause. “And that’s my last word on it.”
    The curtains dropped with a flump.
    From the left side, a small band of orphans dressed in huge waist-coats and doublets, so long that they reached their ankles, skipped slowly across the stage, hitting cymbals and tambourines. A train on the S-Bahn passed outside the window so close that the whole hall shook along with the instruments.
    When the curtain was pulled up again, the suitor