answered. “But supposed to ain’t the same as is.”
“You’ve got a point there, Ma. If you don’t put your money where your mouth is, you can make all the promises you want, and it still don’t add up to a mound of squash.”
She pulled out more photos after that, and then she started inon the theater programs, poster bills, and newspaper clippings. Mother Sioux had been just about everywhere, not just in America and Canada, but on the other side of the ocean as well. She had performed in front of the king and queen of England, she had signed her autograph for the tsar of Russia, she had drunk champagne with Sarah Bernhardt. After five or six years of touring with Buffalo Bill, she married an Irishman named Ted, a little jockey who rode steeplechase up and down the British Isles. They had a daughter named Daffodil, a stone cottage with blue morning glories and pink climbing roses in the garden, and for seven years her happiness knew no bounds. Then disaster struck. Ted and Daffodil were killed in a train wreck, and Mother Sioux returned to America with a broken heart. She married a pipe fitter whose name was also Ted, but unlike Ted One, Ted Two was a sot and a roughneck, and by and by Mother Sioux took to drink herself, so great was her sorrow whenever she compared her new life to her old. They wound up living together in a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, and if not for the sudden, wholly chance appearance of Master Yehudi on their road one morning in the summer of 1912, Mother Sioux would have been a corpse before her time. He was walking along with the young Aesop in his arms (just two days after he’d rescued him in the cotton field) when he heard shrieks and howls rising from the broken-down hut that Mother Sioux called her home. Ted Two had just commenced pummeling her with his hairy fists, knocking out six or seven teeth with the first blows, and Master Yehudi, who was never one to walk away from trouble, entered the shack, gently placed his crippled child on the floor, and put an end to the donnybrook by sneaking up behind Ted Two, clamping his thumb and middle finger onto the crumbum’s neck, and applying enough pressure to dispatch him to the land of dreams. The master then washed the blood fromMother Sioux’ gums and lips, helped her to her feet, and glanced about at the squalor of the room. He didn’t need more than twelve seconds to come to a decision. “I have a proposal to make,” he said to the battered woman. “Leave this louse on the floor and come with me. I have a rickets-plagued boy in want of a mother, and if you agree to take care of him, I’ll agree to take care of you. I don’t stay anywhere for very long, so you’ll have to acquire a taste for travel, but I promise on my father’s soul that I’ll never let you and the child go hungry.”
The master was twenty-nine years old then, a radiant specimen of manhood sporting a waxed handlebar mustache and an impeccably knotted tie. Mother Sioux joined forces with him that morning, and for the next fifteen years she stuck with him through every twist and turn of his career, raising Aesop as if he were her own. I can’t remember all the places she talked about, but the best stories always seemed to be centered around Chicago, a town they visited often. That was where Mrs. Witherspoon hailed from, and once Mother Sioux got onto that subject, my head started to spin. She gave me only the sketchiest outline, but the bare facts were so curious, so weirdly theatrical, that it wasn’t long before I had embroidered them into a full-blown drama. Marion Witherspoon had married her late husband when she was twenty or twenty-one. He himself had been raised in Kansas, the son of a wealthy family from Wichita who had run off to the big city the moment he came into his inheritance. Mother Sioux described him as a handsome, fun-loving rake, one of those mealy-mouthed charmers who could talk his way into a woman’s skirt in
“You’ve got a point there, Ma. If you don’t put your money where your mouth is, you can make all the promises you want, and it still don’t add up to a mound of squash.”
She pulled out more photos after that, and then she started inon the theater programs, poster bills, and newspaper clippings. Mother Sioux had been just about everywhere, not just in America and Canada, but on the other side of the ocean as well. She had performed in front of the king and queen of England, she had signed her autograph for the tsar of Russia, she had drunk champagne with Sarah Bernhardt. After five or six years of touring with Buffalo Bill, she married an Irishman named Ted, a little jockey who rode steeplechase up and down the British Isles. They had a daughter named Daffodil, a stone cottage with blue morning glories and pink climbing roses in the garden, and for seven years her happiness knew no bounds. Then disaster struck. Ted and Daffodil were killed in a train wreck, and Mother Sioux returned to America with a broken heart. She married a pipe fitter whose name was also Ted, but unlike Ted One, Ted Two was a sot and a roughneck, and by and by Mother Sioux took to drink herself, so great was her sorrow whenever she compared her new life to her old. They wound up living together in a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, and if not for the sudden, wholly chance appearance of Master Yehudi on their road one morning in the summer of 1912, Mother Sioux would have been a corpse before her time. He was walking along with the young Aesop in his arms (just two days after he’d rescued him in the cotton field) when he heard shrieks and howls rising from the broken-down hut that Mother Sioux called her home. Ted Two had just commenced pummeling her with his hairy fists, knocking out six or seven teeth with the first blows, and Master Yehudi, who was never one to walk away from trouble, entered the shack, gently placed his crippled child on the floor, and put an end to the donnybrook by sneaking up behind Ted Two, clamping his thumb and middle finger onto the crumbum’s neck, and applying enough pressure to dispatch him to the land of dreams. The master then washed the blood fromMother Sioux’ gums and lips, helped her to her feet, and glanced about at the squalor of the room. He didn’t need more than twelve seconds to come to a decision. “I have a proposal to make,” he said to the battered woman. “Leave this louse on the floor and come with me. I have a rickets-plagued boy in want of a mother, and if you agree to take care of him, I’ll agree to take care of you. I don’t stay anywhere for very long, so you’ll have to acquire a taste for travel, but I promise on my father’s soul that I’ll never let you and the child go hungry.”
The master was twenty-nine years old then, a radiant specimen of manhood sporting a waxed handlebar mustache and an impeccably knotted tie. Mother Sioux joined forces with him that morning, and for the next fifteen years she stuck with him through every twist and turn of his career, raising Aesop as if he were her own. I can’t remember all the places she talked about, but the best stories always seemed to be centered around Chicago, a town they visited often. That was where Mrs. Witherspoon hailed from, and once Mother Sioux got onto that subject, my head started to spin. She gave me only the sketchiest outline, but the bare facts were so curious, so weirdly theatrical, that it wasn’t long before I had embroidered them into a full-blown drama. Marion Witherspoon had married her late husband when she was twenty or twenty-one. He himself had been raised in Kansas, the son of a wealthy family from Wichita who had run off to the big city the moment he came into his inheritance. Mother Sioux described him as a handsome, fun-loving rake, one of those mealy-mouthed charmers who could talk his way into a woman’s skirt in
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