2) The Return of Mary Garden

Chicago, in late March, glittered cool and crisp with it's modern buildings and skyscrapers as crisp as the gales off Lake Michigan where I found myself seated at an outdoor cafe.
I had been to Chicago several times as a schoolboy dutifully marching through museums but that was oh twelve years ago. It had been nearly half that since I had last seen Xavier Penbrook. He too had been herded through echoing art bedecked halls in Chicago on our school field trips before being bussed back to rural Michigan.
Recently I had recieved an e-mail from him suggesting if I ever was in the Chicago area to look him up. By chance I was going to the Windy City to give a poetry reading and so arranged to meet him.
   Monsieur Penbrook--half French, half English--remained in my memory as a pretty thin lipped dark haired lad with merry black eyes and a quick jovial smile.
Drawing from this image it is little wonder I did not immediently make the connection to the spectacle parading towards my table.

"My dear, you look exactly the same as I remember you!"
It took a full moment to collect myself.
"You seem to have changed. Must be the mustache" I quipped, shaking a bejeweled hand. Xavier laughed easily, flinging himself down beside me and ordering a coffee from the waiter.
As the waiter left I studied him. He wore a sort of old fashioned hat, full make-up and a black faded garment that looked at once chic and out of date. There was of course no mustache above his painted scarlet lips.
The waiter reappeared with our coffees and we lit cigarettes.
"How has life been...a cabaret?"
I smiled, unfazed.
Xavier laughed again.
"Naturally and please call me Mary, no one calls me Xavier anymore."
"Isn't Mary a bit...obvious?"
I grinned.
"I could say the same Mary."
"Touche" I laugh! ed, "but why Mary?"
Xavier, Mary rather, exhaled cigarette smoke and jangled his numerous bracelets and bangles.
"Are you aware of Mary Garden?"
"The opera singer?"
I haphazared.
My guess was rewarded with a beaming smile and the following story.
   After grammar school Xavier had come out to his parents (quite religious I recalled) who in the spirit of Christianty had promptly disowned him.
Xavier then became another teenage runaway in Chicago, hustling and clubbing.
"I was nearly twenty when a john changed my life. Of course I had never heard of Mary Garden."

The john in question had been a lover of Chicago's diva-in-residence, frequently playing her recordings in an antique filled mansion full of fresh flowers and her photographs. Xavier so reminded him of her that "the poor dear...quite elderly you understand" was convinced that Xavier was Mary Garden reincarnated.
   "I dressed as her to please him, acted out bits of! Salome and so on."
"Rather romantic" I smiled.
"Perhaps...he was a very generous lover but in poor health."

"Ah!...And today?" I asked.
"Today" Xavier, now Mary smiled, "I own a mansion not far from here, a wardrobe of her clothes and an extremely healthy bank account which allows me to travel (in style) around Europe and perform cabaret shows as Mary Garden.
"In fact I am perhaps the only man in America with the legal name of...Mary Garden."
Mary Garden sat back smiling.
"And I", I announced in the rather dramatic silence "chose to become a poet."
Mary laughed, his black eyes as jubilent as the schoolboy I remembered.
"I don't look a bit like her you know, but my kind benefactor was a bit farsighted among other things."
"Like dotty" I inquired, arching an eyebrow.
"Perhaps but life takes us down strange paths." Mary lit another cigarette.

"So it does" I mused, gazing not at Mary Garden but at the blue lake, choppy from! the wind.
"Sometimes I feel, this may sound strange but I feel that I am her."
I smiled politely at the blue.
"Oh I know, I know, but explain this: her clothes fit me like a glove, I knew her songs before I knew them.
"Something echoed in me. Little things. He kept an old bottle of her perfume and this was before I even knew her name.
"Anyways I sprayed a bit on and had the biggest shock of deja vu that I staggered and damn near broke the bottle."

"Perhaps your mother wore it when you were a baby" I suggested, sipping my cooling coffee.
"My mother" he nearly snarled "wore dollar store perfume."
"How are your parents?" I asked.
Xavier laughed.
"After I inherited my fortune I flaunted it. I donated a large sum to their saintly church.
" So large, in fact, that it caused a bit of publicity. They died of shame."
Mary Garden Reincarnate laughed.
"There was a ceremony and I presented the check in all my splendour!"
"Death by drag"! I laughed.
"You're quite right Miss Garden, life can be very strange."

~THE END~