Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [82]
“Martha?” This time I was the one who attempted to interrupt the proceedings. Martha …? It couldn’t be. Or could it? Had the unimaginable happened? Had people I believed I’d never encounter miraculously materialized? No. No, it was inconceivable. Fictional characters don’t leap out of the pages of books and confront their authors. I studied the actress called Martha: the narrow waist and fashionably full sleeves, the cameo eardrops and brooch, the reticule held in a gloved hand. Of course, she was a reenactor. A good one, certainly, and wearing more costly accoutrements than most, but that didn’t mean she was the genuine article, a resident of 1840s Philadelphia transferred to the modern city. Probably the name was pure happenstance. Or perhaps I’d misunderstood. And yet … And yet, what if truly it were she? What if fantasy had turned into fact? “Martha … Beale?”
She made no sign of having heard my words, but she turned and faced me. Despite the fading daylight, I knew in an instant that this was no counterfeit. It was Martha Beale in the flesh. Her aquiline nose and proud jaw, her pensive eyes, the tall, stoic frame: who else could it have been but she? Practical, resolute Martha who’d finally broken free of her dictatorial father’s troubling legacy. And there she was, gazing in my direction as though the encounter was a commonplace occurrence.
How to explain what I felt seeing her standing before me after all these years? Shock is too pallid a word; I was utterly confounded. It simply wasn’t possible that she was living and breathing, but somehow she was. I stared at the broad steps leading up to the bank; pollution had cut runnels in the marble; the columns were streaked and crumbling, so I knew the time wasn’t 1843 but the present. And then there were my fellow audience members: exposed bellies bulging over hip-huggers, facial piercings, flip-flops despite the season, the sartorial trappings of the twenty-first century. This was no figment of my imagination. Martha was alive. Now. I reached out my hand. I couldn’t help myself. “I’m—”
“Hey, no touching the actors,” a nearby participant ordered. “That’s like harassment or something.”
“But she’s my—”
“Gab all you want after the show. For now, ya shut yer yap, capisce?”
“She’s not an actr—”
“Lady. Shut the hell up.”
I examined the other supposed performers. Of course, it was Thomas Kelman and Becky Grey Taitt, two other personalities from my newest novel. How could they have been absent if Martha was present? Kelman with the scar that traced a silver line diagonally across his cheek, and the somber expression that turned to joy whenever he looked at Martha; Becky, quixotic, effusive, temperamental, and a celebrated beauty.
You’ll wonder why I hadn’t recognized them immediately. These three are the products of my brain, after all. Without my fingers and keyboard they wouldn’t exist. When I tell their stories, I don’t write them, I live them. Each of my fictitious persons has its doppelganger in me, and I in them, and in the other characters in my books too. Villain or victim, they and I share one soul, one heart, one mind. Think what you will about the consequences of multiple personality disorder; I embrace the condition.
“Oh, my friends.” Tears filled my eyes; I dispensed with all doubts. How Martha and the others had conjured themselves out of fiction and into reality was too stupendous a question to pose. Besides, I’m no scientist. I stretched out my arms.
“Shut. The. Hell. Up,” a burly guy with thick, hairy forearms snarled. His calves, visible beneath hip-hop length shorts were hairy too. Hirsute might be a better literary description. Or simian, perhaps. His legs bowed like an orangutan’s. “You made the actors clam up. My kid was really