Juliana

by Vanda

  Someone had propped open the front door with a jagged piece of wood so we made our way without difficulty to the steps that led to the boys’ apartment. As we climbed toward the second floor, I lost my grip on Danny and dropped him. He laughed, crawling the rest of the way on all fours. He curled up in front of his door and started to fall asleep .

  “Danny, I need your keys.”

  He turned onto his back. “Come and get ’em.”

  “Hand them to me.”

  “They’re in one of my pants pockets. Think you can find them?”

  “Danny, it’s late. I’m tired. I gotta get home.” I looked at my watch. “Dang curfew. Hurry! Give me the keys.”

  He laughed and crossed his arms over his chest. “I only got four pants pockets. Those odds ain’t bad.”

  I was tempted to grab hold of his tie, but instead I reached into one of his front pockets. His keys were there, but before I could take them out he pressed his hand against mine and held my hand in his pocket.

  “I love you, Al. I know I haven’t been acting like it lately, but I do.”

  “I love you, too, Danny.”

  “Kiss me.”

  “Out in the hall?”

  “Yeah. Let the whole world know I love you.”

  I kissed him lightly on his lips, but somehow the kiss turned into something more. He put an arm around me and crushed me into him, and suddenly, I needed to kiss him. I needed to feel myself surrounded by him, drunk or not. There was an empty space inside me that I never knew about before, but now I needed to fill it. I kissed Danny harder and deeper.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  He popped up, unlocked the door, and took my hand, leading me into the apartment. He threw his tie and jacket on the couch. Dickie wasn’t home.

  He led me into his bedroom and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed the side of my face, my neck.

  “I love you, Al. We’ve always loved each other. We were born to love each other.” He kissed me on the lips and I kissed him back. While he was kissing me, he moved us backward toward the bed. I expected us to tumble onto it, but suddenly he let go of me “No.” He sat on the bed, his head in his hands. “I can’t do that to you.”

  “But I want you to.”

  “You don’t know all the ugly things inside me. I’m horrible, bad.”

  “No, Danny.” I sat beside him.

  “Yeah, I am. How could I have been so mean to you tonight or yesterday if I wasn’t? You’re the kindest, most wonderful person in the world.”

  “It scares me, Danny, the way you’ve been acting. It’s like you’re not you. Like you’re going away. And if you do, I don’t know what I’d … I wouldn’t have anything without you. I’d be lost and—”

  “Shsh.” He took me into his arms. “I’m not going anywhere, and you’d be just fine no matter what ’cause you’re strong. You’ve always been stronger than me. But you gotta go now.”

  “Go? But don’t ya want to … you know?”

  “More than anything. But you don’t, and I don’t wanna do that to you. ”

  “But I do want to. Honest.” I threw my arms around his neck, kissing him.

  He slid away from me. “You won’t feel that way in the morning.” His body suddenly folded up, his arms wrapped around his stomach like he was in pain.

  “Danny, what’s the matter?”

  He gurgled something from his lap that I couldn’t make out. “Are you … crying?” I’d never seen him cry before. Not even as a little kid. Not even when Uncle Charlie did that awful thing.

  “No,” he said, covering his head with his forearms.

  I took him in my arms. “Danny, what’s the matter? I’m your pal. You can tell me anything. It terrifies me to see you like this.”

  He laid his head in my lap. “You’re here, Al, aren’t you?”

  “Right here. Tell me what it is. I’m gonna love you no matter what.”

  He lifted his head and held my shoulders, looking into my eyes. “I know you think that, but …”He ran a finger over my face like a blind man. “You’re here, Al. The bad things won’t take me over if you’re here.”

  “The bad things can’t get either of us if we’re together. That’s what you told me the first time they took my mother away.”

  He pushed himself off the bed. “Nothing bad can happen.” He wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Oh, gosh, look at the time. Your curfew! You gotta go.” He pulled me toward the door. “Don’t let me be responsible for you getting kicked outta that place. I couldn’t stand that being my fault, too. Go. Go.”

  Chapter Twelve

  October, 1941

  I sat in the foyer of Mrs. Viola Cramden’s home. She had some rooms in the Astor Hotel in Times Square. Tommy Dorsey and that new singer, Frank Sinatra, appeared here all the time.

  A violin and some other instrument I couldn’t recognize played in the next room. Quiet, soothing music but bouncy, too. I let the music seep deep within me. I tried to see through the yellow translucent triangle of glass that was embedded in the center of the wooden door separating the two rooms. All I could make out was an occasional shadow floating by.

  The foyer and the staircase leading upstairs were covered in a thick carpet of intermingling browns and maroons. The straight-backed chair I sat on, made of a dark wood, had a maroon seat cushion with the embroidered words “Passion is at the bottom of all things.” Sunlight streamed in through the window making a crooked triangle across the carpeted floor and over my feet.

  I held my fraying copy of Mr. George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan on my lap, pushing it hard against my stomach to feel the words, to get as close to them as possible. I let the words drift through me. Sometimes I thought I wanted to devour the words and stuff them so deep inside me that I would become the words. I was going to recite the Saint Joan speech for Mrs. Viola Cramden, so she’d see I could act.

  I glanced at my watch—10:05 a.m. Already five minutes past the time for my appointment. I wondered if she’d forgotten me.

  This was my chance. Mrs. Viola Cramden would make me into a great actor, uh, actress, and I wouldn’t end up a bum on the street. Mom would be proud of me. Mom wasn’t always crazy. She went in and out of it. When I was real little, she wasn’t crazy at all and she was even nice. She started getting crazy when I was eight. After that started happening, she had to stay in the asylum, sometimes for months. They did terrible things to her in that place. One time when I was thirteen, she came home with a broken leg and broken arm. That had something to do with the electricity they put in her brain. But Dad kept sending her back. He didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes, when she came home from the asylum she wasn’t crazy for a long time, but she was hardly ever nice. It was like all that craziness had worn down her heart.

  The music stopped. I waited. A little woman, thin—no, she was thinner than thin, birdlike really—opened the door, her gray hair in a frizzy, unruly mass around her head. Her dress hung like a huge tent over her frail body. “Miss Huffman?” she asked nodding at me.

  “Yes.” I stood.

  “Come in.” She went back into the room and I followed her. She stood near a piano. A violin lay on top of it. “Close the door. Do you like Bach?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know.” Her voice suddenly became willowy high as she waved her bony hands around. “Bach is the heart and soul of all things. Your first assignment is to buy a gramophone record with a Bach composition. Did you like the piece my assistant and I just played?”

  She waved her hand at the young man in the brown suit sitting on the couch across the room, his cello leaning on his knee. He looked to be about sixteen.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. I liked that music very much.”

  “That was ‘Cello Suite #4 in E Flat’ from Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites . Buy that. Today. As soon as you leave here, go immediately to a music store and purchase it. It’s an emergency.”

  “An emergency?”

&nb
sp; “An emergency. You cannot live one minute more of your life without Bach. Bach will teach you all you need to know about acting.”

  “But there are no words.”

  “Words? Words? What do you need with words? You need no words to act. You need rhythm, passion, desire. Heat. Do you know what heat is, Miss Huffman?”

  “I think so.” I took out my notebook.

  “Put that thing away. If you ‘think’ so, you do not know. And if you do not know, there is no heat. Heat is not about thinking. It is about feeling . It happens in your body. Here!” She grabbed one of my breasts.

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, ‘oh,’ indeed, Miss Huffman. And heat is here.” She pushed her hand against my stomach. “But mostly it is here.” She thrust her hand between my legs and squeezed.

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, we’ve already established that.” She moved back to lean against her desk. “Do you have a beau?”

  “Yes, ma’am. ”

  “Good. Does he make you hot?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure what—”

  “He doesn’t. Dump him.”

  “What?”

  “What good is a beau who doesn’t make you hot? If you want to be an actor, you must have heat. Mr. Cramden made me hot. Very hot indeed. In the 1920s, I was a brilliant actress. Brilliant. Ask anyone. All because of Mr. Cramden and, of course, Mr. Bach. Don’t waste too much time being good, Miss Huffman. Life is short. And if acting is to be your career, you must strive for heat not goodness. Start with Bach. Tonight. Let Bach heat you up. Will you do that for me, Miss Huffman?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I kept thinking of that boy on the couch listening to this and watching her grab me between my legs.

  “Come here.” She signaled me to approach her desk. As I walked to her, she shook her head making a “tsk tsk” sound. “Oh, dear, we have a lot of work to do. You walk like a truck driver.”

  “I know. Ya see I flunked out of Saturday afternoon charm school, so—”

  “Now, dear, tell me what you have been working on?”

  I held out my copy of Saint Joan . “In high school, I did this recitation really good. My drama teacher, well she was really my English teacher—her name was Mrs. Haggerty—she said I was terrific at it, but one time, a theater manager asked me to do it for him in his office, and I couldn’t remember one word of it. I went completely blank.”

  “Oh, yes, the dreaded stage fright. A common problem in our profession. I cured Sarah Bernhardt of that, you know.”

  “You did?” Now I was really impressed.

  “I’ll have you cured in no time. Put that book away. We must begin at a simpler level. I want you to memorize the famous soliloquy from Hamlet. The ‘to be or not to be’ thing.”

  “That’s simpler?”

  “When I teach it, it is.

  “Isn’t that for boys?”

  “Boys, girls, those words have no meaning here. You are an actor; that is all that matters. Now, I want you to think very hard. Imagine that you are an elephant.”

  “An elephant? I doubt I’ll ever get cast as—”

  “Silence!” She flung one of her hands into the air as if it were a baton. “I am the master here. You never know what you will be called upon to do in the theater. You must be ready in a moment’s notice. You must be willing to do anything for the theater. Even die.”

  “Die?”

  “If necessary.”

  I was starting to really like this woman. The whole idea of being that dedicated excited me .

  “But for now, I am not asking you to die, rather, I am merely asking you to do an exercise. Ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Be an artist. Be fanciful. Create. Begin.”

  “You want me to be an elephant now?”

  “Donald,” she called to the boy who now slouched on the couch like he was sleeping. “Please play the accompaniment?”

  “Sure, Grandma.”

  “Silence! You are never to call me that in this room. We are professionals here.”

  “Oh, sorry, Mrs. Cramden.” He began to play something that I supposed was Bach.

  I just stood there like a stick, wondering what in the world she wanted me to do.

  “Well?” Mrs. Cramden said. “Begin. Be an elephant.”

  “I … don’t know how to—”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Where is your imagination?”

  “I feel kinda foolish.”

  “Excellent! You should feel foolish. You’re going to look foolish, too. Every time you get up on that stage you’re going to look foolish, ridiculous, silly. Get used to it. You’re an actor. Follow me.” She got down on her hands and knees. She made her arms into a trunk and walked on her knees. I stood there staring. “Well come on,” she said. “Hook your trunk onto my tail.”

  “Your tail? But—”

  “Do it!”

  I jumped onto the floor and made my arms into a trunk. I grabbed on to the end of her dress, and she led the way; the two of us walked around in a circle. She made sounds that I guessed were elephant sounds. “Well, go ahead. You, too. Make sounds.” So, I did.

  “Louder. You’re an elephant. Announce that you’re here.”

  We both made loud howling sounds as we crawled around the room. Her grandson played his cello, and we moved in time to his playing.

  “How do you feel?” she called back to me.

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Splendid!”

  Then, the music got jumpy and Mrs. Cramden’s rear end bucked up and down to the irregular rhythm, and I struggled to hang on. The music screeched and stopped with a bang; Donald lay on the couch laughing.

  Mrs. Cramden jumped up. “Out! Out!”

  Donald ran out the back door still laughing. Mrs. Cramden turned to me on the floor. My head was tucked under my arms, trying not to laugh too. “I hope Donald’s childish ignorance didn’t upset you, dear. You were doing so well. ”

  I was? I was doing so well? No one had ever said that to me before. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the absolutely wonderful thing I’d been looking for.

  Chapter Thirteen

  November, 1941

  “But, Danny, you promised we’d go out tonight,” I said into the hall phone. “You can’t work on that novel every night. It can’t be that bad. Well, if it is, then why don’t you drop it for a while, and maybe …. Okay, I’m sorry. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll meet you at the library and I can read …. You don’t have to shout. We’re still going to your mom’s house for Thanksgiving, aren’t we? Good. Call me tomorrow? Of course, I still love you. I just wish I could see you.” I hung up the phone and walked back to my room. I got out my new Bach record and brought it down to the parlor.

  Mrs. Minton had a brand new Magic Brain RCA Victor record player that could automatically change one record to the next without you ever having to get off the couch. None of the other boarders were around, so I fixed the arm of the player to make it keep playing the same record over again. I was trying to feel the heat that Mrs. Viola Cramden told me about, but I think I was missing something. I liked the music, but it wasn’t making me hot.

  I took out my copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet , an old crinkly hardback I’d bought used on Book Row. I turned to the soliloquy. Just as I was about to start memorizing, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Minton’s Cue magazine sitting in the magazine rack. I grabbed it and flopped on the couch thumbing through it. I’d been trying to follow Juliana’s engagements. She’d been held over at Café Society for a week, but I never went back to see her. The critics really liked her, but then her name disappeared. For weeks, I searched for her in the New York papers but nothing. Then I found her again in last week’s Cue . She was appearing at El Mexicano, a new supper club. I’d been counting on going to that show. It was what got me through all the typing and Mr. Johnson grabbing my rear end. I never told Danny about Mr. Johnson. He would’ve wanted to beat him up, but that was just something that bosses did; there was not
hing we could do about it. It was gonna happen wherever we worked so why complain? What made it bearable was knowing I’d be seeing Juliana perform, but now Danny’s dang novel was getting in the way again.

  I looked up from Cue to see Mrs. Minton glaring at me, her hands on her hips.

  “What?” I asked. “What’d I do?”

  “Are you actually trying to drive me mad? Playing that song over and over.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I jumped up and took the record off as Mrs. Minton went back into the kitchen. I watched to make sure she wasn’t looking and ran up the stairs with her Cue . I bounced on my bed belly-wise. I knew I should memorize my Hamlet, but ….

  Aggie burst into the room and stopped short. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here. Remember?”

  “But I thought you and Danny were going out tonight.”

  “What are you doing here at this hour? You’re never here before curfew. Sometimes not till afterward. How come you don’t get in trouble for that?”

  “Sometimes I sit downstairs talking to Mrs. Minton so I’m in. Just not in the room. You really should give her a chance.”

  “So what are you doing here now?”

  “Max told me to take a few hours off. But I’m going back later this evening.”

  “Isn’t your act done yet? It’s been months.”

  “Perfection! Perfection!” She pirouetted about the room, stopping in front of the mirror to adjust her silk scarf. “That’s what Max always says. Perfection.” She doused herself in perfume. I sneezed. “How do you like my new dress?” She twirled around.

  “Nice, but—”

  “But what?” Panicky, she checked the underarm seams. “Does it look cheap? You know, it’s Saks.”

  “It’s nice. I just …. Oh, it’s none of my business.” I turned back to Cue. “I’m worried about you, Aggie.”

  “Why? I’m fine.” She stooped to reapply her lipstick.