1. Actress

Fritzi Crown flung her bike on the grass and ran down to the water's edge. She skipped across wet boulders strewn along the shore until she stood where the waves broke and showered her with bracing spray. It was first light, the dawn of a chill morning in early December 1906. Along the horizon the sky was orange as the maw of a steel furnace, metal gray above.

Remembering a recurring dream that had held her in the moments before she woke—a dream in which she stood on a Broadway stage while thunderous applause rolled over her—Fritzi threw her arms out, threw her head back like some pagan worshiper of the dawn. The wind streamed off Lake Michigan, out of the east, where lay the mysterious and alluring place that occupied her thoughts in most of her waking moments.

The waves crashed. The wind sang in her ears, a repeating litany that had grown more and more insistent in past weeks. Time to go. Time to go!

Red faced, windblown but exhilarated, she stepped down from the rocks and turned toward the bike lying on the grass shriveled and browned by the autumn frost. The bike was a beautiful Fleetwing with a carmine enamel frame, gleaming silver rims and spokes. It was a "safety"—wheels of equal size—now the standard after years of high-wheel models, the kind on which she'd learned.

Fritzi was a long-legged young woman with an oval face, a nose she considered too big, legs she considered too skinny, a bosom she considered flat. She was dressed for cold weather. On top of a suit of misses' long underwear she wore her bathing costume of heavy alpaca cloth—a separate skirt, a top with attached bloomers, both navy blue. Her cycling shoes were tan covert-cloth oxfords with corrugated rubber soles. For added warmth she'd put on wool mittens and her younger brother's football sweater, a black cardigan with an orange letter P. He had bequeathed it to her after he was thrown out of Princeton. Aknitted tam barely contained her long, unruly blond hair. Altogether it was the kind of costume that her father, General Joseph Crown, the millionaire brewer, disapproved of—vocally, and often.

"Ta-ta, Papa, you must remember I'm a grown girl and can pick out my own clothes," she would say in an effort to tease him out of it.

He disapproved of that, too.

The spectacular sunrise burst over the lake and burnished a row of trees near the footpath. Wind tore the last withered leaves off the branches and flung them into fanciful whirlwinds. The leaf clouds spiraled up and up, like her buoyant spirits. There were great risks in the decision she must make. They started right here in Chicago, in her own family.

Returning to her bike, Fritzi stopped abruptly. In thick evergreens planted behind the trees, a pair of eyes gleamed like a rodent's. But they didn't belong to a rodent, they belonged to a man—a filthy, ragged tramp who'd been spying on her. He lurched out of the shrubbery, coming toward her. Fritzi was sharply aware of how early it was, how isolated she was here.

The tramp planted his feet a yard in front of her. The sleeves of his coat shone like a greasy skillet. "Hello, girlie." Fritzi swallowed, thinking desperately. Even upwind of the man she caught his stupefying stench—mostly liquor and dirt. He was burly, obviously much stronger.

He winked at her.

"Girls out wanderin' by theyselves this time of morning, they're either runaways or little Levee whores." His baritone voice was thickened by hoarseness and phlegm. He stuck out his arms, wiggled his fingers with an oafish leer. His nails were broken and black with dirt.

"Come give us a kiss." He dropped his left hand to his pants. "Anywhere you please."

For want of her usual weapon of defense, a long hat pin, Fritzi called on her primary talent. She replied in a loud and almost perfect imitation of his wheezy baritone: "Don't let this long hair fool you, bub. You've got the wrong fellow."

The tramp's eyes bugged. He was confounded by the male bellow issuing from Fritzi's chapped lips. She'd always been a keen mimic, sometimes getting into a pickle because of her rash choice of subject, especially schoolteachers. The tramp's confusion gave her the extra seconds she needed. She sprang to her bike, wheeled it onto the path, ran and threw a long leg over the saddle. She took off in a flying start, pedaling madly.

Flashing a look back, she saw the tramp thumb his nose, heard him shout something nasty. She sped around a curve, snatched her tam off and let her curly blond hair stream out. She laughed with relief, pumping harder.

At least her talent proved to be worth something this morning. It could be worth a lot more in New York City.

Time to go…

Of that she was certain. And never mind the trouble it was likely to cause.

As Fritzi pedaled away from the lake shore, she reflected on all the things that had driven her to the emotional epiphany this morning.

Shapeless things, like the growing malaise of living day after day under the roof where she'd been raised but definitely no longer belonged.

Copyright © John Jakes, 1998.