Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris, Mayor for a Day - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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There were dark rumors about the Liventi brothers. How these rumors started it would be impossible to say, but they have been traced back as far as little Irene McCormack who told Willie Corway that the parents of the Liventi brothers “acted in shows.”

On the strength of this information, Willie Corway took particular note of the Liventi boys when next he saw them on their way to school. Seeing nothing unusual about them, he reported to Irene that she “was lyin’.”

However, the rumor persisted, and the two boys who were newcomers in town were subjected to a kind of awesome surveillance in their immediate neighborhood.

Finally, little Irene precipitated a climax by saying (and crossing her heart to verify it) that her big brother who traveled on the road had himself seen Signor and Signora Liventi in refined vaudeville in Cincinnati. Signora, he said, played a gorgeous concertina, while her husband elicited music from strings of bells which he shook. Irene’s brother said that they “were all dressed up in gold and stuff.” With such authentic reports perhaps Irene may be pardoned for sticking out her tongue at Willie Corway.

At all events this report was enough for Pee-wee Harris. In the darkness of the night he walked past the unpretentious Liventi residence several times, casting fascinated glances at it. Seeing nothing more spectacular than the little, narrow porch with lighted windows opening upon it, he was finally emboldened to ascend the steps with dramatic stealth and take a fearful peep at the interior.

There was nothing to be seen in the little, ill-furnished parlor but a few shabby pieces of furniture and a discordantly ornate drop light on the center table. Sitting there was the only suggestion which the room contained of anything romantic or unusual. This was an old woman in a shawl of such a variety of vivid colors that in itself it suggested to the beholder something out of the ordinary in its wearer’s vocation and nationality. It was fringed and tinseled, and altogether bizarre.

For the lack of anything else to bespeak the enticing glamor and mystery of “acting in shows,” Pee-wee accepted this gaudy article of apparel as proof positive that the parents of the Liventi boys were actually theatrical celebrities.

And they were living on his own block, in one of the poor, little, old-fashioned houses up near the corner! The old woman in the multi-colored shawl was sewing, and it detracted somewhat from the vision which Pee-wee had conjured up that she was darning a stocking, presumably the property of a real son of a real actor in real shows.

Pee-wee assumed (and here he was right) that the old woman in the tinseled shawl was the grandmother of Tasca and Bruno, and that she took care of them during the prolonged absences of Signor and Signora on the road. To see the grandmother of two boys whose parents acted in real shows was not much, but it was something. To see upon the shoulders of such a very old woman a shawl which would make a rainbow look like widows’ mourning by contrast, would seem to clinch the fugitive rumors about the neighborhood that Bruno and Tasca Liventi were connected with the stage. That shawl removed them from everything ordinary and cast a sort of glamor over them.

Pee-wee walked reverently where the stage was concerned, for he was himself a manager on an exceedingly humble scale. If he was not the greatest producer in town, he was certainly the greatest producer of the block on which he lived, a block containing nine houses and four boys. It was he who first thought of using the sprinkler of a shower-bath connected with an elevated wash-boiler full of water to give a realistic demonstration at a church affair of how boy scouts can kindle a fire in a pelting rain. This difficult operation was performed with twigs in a refrigerator pan while the sprinkler kept up a torrential downpour accompanied by thunder elicited from a sheet of tin roofing off stage.