by Vanda
Chapter 46
THE TIME TO move on came. I decided to take Max up on his offer to live on the top floor of the duplex he’d rented at 53rd and Park at an obscene cost.
Saying good-bye to my old neighborhood was hard. I walked up Eighth Street toward my apartment, passing the Whitney Museum, Nedicks, and Miss Elizabeth Lolly’s Tea Shop. Sam’s Deli had closed long ago. I missed Sam’s cheap salami and cheese heroes, often my lunch during the war. The whole area was crowded now with cars beeping and people shopping; tourists, wide-eyed with the energy that pulsed through the center of that magnificent street. Eighth Street, the heart of the Village, seemed to shout, “I’m alive!”
I pushed through the Milligan Place gate and went up the three flights to my tiny apartment. I kicked away the crushed cigarette butts that lay in front of my door and thought, “That’s the last time I’ll have to do that.”
My living room was as barren as when Aggie and I first arrived in ’41. Anything worth saving, which wasn’t much, I’d transported to the new apartment myself. The rest went to The Salvation Army.
Standing in the center of the empty room, I listened for the voices and strained to see the shadows of younger selves that had passed by. I stood there listening to the walls breathe, trying to hear our voices. Aggie, Dickie, Danny, and me. There was a time when they meant everything. My whole life was wrapped in and around theirs so tightly that once I thought I would cease to breathe without them. But I didn’t.
Still, their sounds must be somewhere in this room. Perhaps deep in the floor boards or behind the painted walls, but … as hard as I listened, I couldn’t hear them, couldn’t see a thing. We’d all gone on to something else. Certainly, we’d left a trace in each other’s lives somewhere, a smoky memory or two, but now, we didn’t even know each other. Forever they’d be the kids I used to know from the block.
I stepped over to the window, my footsteps hollow in the empty room. I needed to take one last look at the scrawny tree Aggie was going to bring back to health, but never did because she had to take care of her husband Dickie, who’d been wounded in the war.
I looked out the window at the little tree still growing through the cement. If it could do that, what more could I do? I picked up my handbag from the radiator, straightened my pencil skirt, and loosened the Dior scarf around my neck. I took my beige gloves from my handbag and pulled them on. I stopped to look in the mirror I was leaving behind and cocked my hat a little to one side. I had careers to build, my own and Juliana’s. I pulled the key from my handbag and bent down to slip it under the mat. I stood in the doorway trying to capture … some past something that … It was impossible. I stepped out the door, closing it behind me.
Chapter 47
September 1951
USUALLY WHEN I had a smidgen of time—and my time only came in smidgens—I would read one of Mercy’s lesbian pulp books in my sitting room at the back of my upstairs apartment. Max lived downstairs.
My sitting room in the Park Avenue apartment was filled with the lightness of soft-colored wallpaper in pale green and yellow circles. Max and I were so busy we rarely saw each other. I had my own phone line, and sometimes I called Max to make an appointment to meet him in the living room. Occasionally, Scott would stay over and cook us dinner, and we’d spend the evening drinking wine—Scott would have a coke—and we’d talk. Then Scott and Max would disappear into Max’s part of the house, and I wouldn’t see them for days. Other times, Scott didn’t come around at all. During these “droughts,” as Max called them, he would sneak in some good-looking boy for “recreation.”
The articles continued. They warned decent, ordinary American citizens to watch out for homosexuals because they were dangerous to American society and must be rooted out of government, teaching, and civil service jobs. Since we were so dangerous, articles and books appeared about how to detect and cure us. Some doctors thought marriage could fix us if we only gave it a chance. But the worst for me was the article that came out in Coronet Magazine.
I’d been subscribing to Coronet for years. My mother and father had subscribed to it, so I always saw it lying around the house. It had short, fluffy articles on current events, movie stars, stretching your budget, and making your marriage work.
The day was warm, September still clinging on to summer, perfect for an inconsequential read. I relaxed on the balcony in one of the chairs with my feet up on the hassock. Chopin played on the Victrola in the living room, and I kept the French doors ajar to hear it.
I picked up Coronet, and the title “The New Moral Menace to Our Youth” shouted at me. It said homosexuality was rapidly increasing and was imposing a threat to the youth of America. “Some male degenerates … descend through perversions to other forms of depravity such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.”
This gentle, innocuous magazine was slitting my throat. All the freedom and silly chances Juliana and I had taken in the forties during the war were gone. Shirl and Mercy knew women who’d completely stopped looking for female partners. They were too scared they’d lose their careers, their friends, and their families. Some women they knew had dashed into marriage with men in an attempt to hide or be cured. Others joined convents. I wondered how that was working out.
The tension of the times even showed on Max’s face as Scott drew close to him and then retreated. I never dared wear trousers, except behind the walls of my own home.
“What’s the matter?” Max asked, leaning on the back of my chair.
“This.”
He pulled up a chair next to mine.
“It says,” I began. “We’re as bad as syphilis.”
“Don’t take these silly people seriously.”
“When did you know you were different?”
“Oh, jeez …”
“As soon as your Nanny put you in the playpen with the little boy down the street, you headed straight for his diapers?”
“Not that soon, and no Nanny. Just Mom.”
“Really? I pictured you with a Nanny. Like Juliana.”
“Juliana has me totally out-classed.” He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out the silver cigarette case. “I’m a bit of a phony, Al.”
“Huh?”
“My mother was a housewife who took in laundry to keep us going. Not very glamorous. Up until I was seven my name wasn’t even Maxwell P. Harlington III.”
“I knew it! I told Danny that. But what good is knowing now? I can’t gloat. What was your name?”
“Well, it was—don’t tell anyone—Bob Smith.”
“Isn’t that the name of the guy with the Howdy Doody puppet on TV?”
“Oh, God, is it?”
“I think so. Buffalo Bob Smith.”
“Oh, jeez, really? You had me pegged the moment you met me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think your name was Maxwell P. Harlington III because I didn’t think anybody’s name was that.”
“My father’s name was Maxwell P. Harlington the Second.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t say “huh,” honey. It makes a most unpleasant sound, and obscures your education. He was my stepfather. My mother used to do his laundry. Harlington the Second was a rich man. I thought of him as my father. I adored him. When he married my mother, he adopted me, and I became Maxwell P. Harlington, the Third, so that is my name. But I was always afraid someone would find out I wasn’t what that name implied, and then you came along and terrified me. I thought at any moment you were going to announce to the world that I was one big phony.”
“But you weren’t. You were a big time club owner, discoverer of new talent. When I met you you’d fallen on bad times, but you got yourself back up. None of it was a lie.”
“Wasn’t it? I always feel like I’m lying. My stepfather moved Mother and me into a very impressive house, and I went to the best schools. I don’t know that he treated Mother very well, but he was good to me. Whatever I wanted, he gave me. He was grooming me to be the head of
some big company like he was, and I would’ve done anything he wanted. I thought.
“When I was twelve, I got a job taking out the garbage for this dive, a speakeasy we had in the ‘bad’ part of town where my parents told me never to go. Illegal hooch, singing acts, jugglers, comics. I’m sure it wasn’t very good, but I loved the life right away. I didn’t need the money. There was this one act—a singer. He must’ve been fifteen or sixteen, but from my twelve-year-old view, he was a god. He’d wear these grown-up suits and sing sweetly into the microphone and look at me with these big brown eyes. I followed him around, and after a while, I started managing his career. I’d meet owners of sleazy clubs, mob connected, and I’d go right up to them and tell them about this boy—Ricky.
“Then one day, after one of his shows, he came outside where I was waiting. I couldn’t see him on stage because I was too young. That night, I watched his act standing on an upside-down garbage pail, looking through a small window. When he came out he was sweaty from giving his all. I don’t think either of us knew what was happening, but he grabbed me up in his arms, and I could smell his sweet sweat. And somehow, the grabbing turned into a kiss and then clothes got pulled out of the way, and you know how that goes.”
“How long were you with Ricky?”
“Two years. One day, we were up in my room, and my mother happened to come in and we were—you know.”
“Oh, no.”
“She screamed and ran for my father, who was downstairs reading the evening paper. Ricky was thrown out and blamed for the whole thing, and I was told never to see him again. Of course, that didn’t work. We found new places, like the back seats of other people’s parked cars.”
“Oh, no.”
“My options were limited back then. And yes, we got caught, in a beautiful Model T Touring Car, and the cops were called, and we were arrested. We only had to stay one night in jail. The judge gave us a lecture about morality, which, of course, neither of us listened to, and our parents had to come and pay a fine. Ricky’s father beat him right in front of the judge. My parents paid the fine, but when I got home, my father wasn’t speaking to me. Our relationship was completely broken, and I was devastated.”
“Well, you did exchange a couple of letters during the war. Virginia told me.”
“He asked me if I was still ‘that way’ and I told him yes and he wrote back, ‘Go to hell.’” Since then, I’ve had no contact with either of them. My mother always does what my father tells her to. She has to. Who’d want to go back to messing with other people’s dirty underwear? What about you? You didn’t have any indication before Juliana?”
“Well—that’s what I like to tell myself, but …”
“Oh, tell.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Hey, I just finished telling you the true story of Bob Smith of Portland, Oregon; you can share your war stories with me.”
“Well, when I was thirteen I made friends with this girl, Marta. She was a Jewish girl who didn’t live in our neighborhood, but she went to our school. I’d never met a Jewish person before, so I asked about her religion. Sometimes I’d go over to Marta’s house to have dinner, and then one time her mother invited me to stay overnight since we didn’t live near each other. We slept in the same bed.”
“So you did it with her. Juliana wasn’t your first.”
“No. I was only thirteen, and not at all like you. We started playing this game. I don’t know how it got started, but we kind of dared each other to do certain things. So first, she’d dare me to open a couple of buttons on my pajama top, and then I’d dare her to do the same thing. And then we showed each other our breasts. And then finally—we were excited and scared, so we counted to three and pulled down our pajama bottoms in front of each other. Then we pulled them back up right away, then we pulled them down again and left them down by our ankles a little longer than the first time; it was sort of a game of chicken to see who’d pull them back up first. I’d never experienced such excitement before. We never did anything beyond that or like that again, and we never talked about it.
“Then there was this other time. When I was around fourteen, I went to a park that had an art museum I liked to go to. Heckscher Park. It was closed because with the depression, the town couldn’t afford to keep it open, but there was a place at the bottom of the fence that had a section cut out. I wore trousers, so I could crawl under the fence. I read a lot when I was a kid, so I’d go to the park where no one would bother me.
“There was a pond there where I could watch the ducks swim while I read. One day, I was sitting under a tree and these boys came over and made a circle around me; they pointed at me and said things like: ‘Is that a girl or a boy?’ I became a ‘thing,’ not a person.
“I didn’t know what to say, because I wasn’t a boy—I knew that—but ‘girl’ didn’t feel right either. Then one of them pointed at my chest and laughed. ‘Oh, look, it’s got those things. It must be a girl. Are you a girl?’ he asked me.
“I kept quiet, pretending they weren’t there until they went away. That’s when I realized I didn’t know for sure if I was a girl or a boy. I’ve never told anybody about this before. Even so many years later, it makes me feel—ashamed.”
Max put his arm around me. “It’s obvious that you’re a girl.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that even now.” He squeezed my shoulder and kissed the side of my face.
Chapter 48
“AL,” MARTY SAID, as he slid his meatloaf out through the little doors. “I can’t believe it,” he carried his tray toward a table. “They hired me.”
“Who hired you? For what?”
He put his tray down and pulled out a chair for himself, not me. I sat opposite him with my tray. “TV! Aren’t you eating?”
“Luncheon engagement with Juliana at Sardi’s. I wanted to come and hear your good news. I thought you were already working in TV.”
“Small potatoes. This gig is big. The lead. My career is set. My whole damn life is set, and I haven’t even graduated yet.”
“A whole career can’t be determined by one job,” I said.
“In TV, it can. I’m going to be seen all the way in California. Thousands of people.”
“I thought you wanted to do musical theater.”
“I did. Until TV. You’ve been seeing me in those fifteen-minute dramas?”
“I’m at the club evenings.”
“I’ve been stacking up those little shows, one or two a week, but when I can, I sneak in to watch the sixty and the ninety-minute shows. I’ve never seen this kind of acting in my life. Total commitment. I’ve stood in the presence of absolute genius. You’ve got to make time to see it. Of course, not everything’s great, but when it is, it’s even better than theater. You’re so close to it, you can see every wrinkle of pain, question, doubt in that actor’s face. You know what kind of concentration that takes?
“I’ve been getting to know some terrific actors,” Marty continued, “and a lot of them come from the Actors Studio. You know, Marlon Brando came out of there.”
“Yes, Marty. I’m in the business too.”
“I forgot. I’ve got an appointment to audition for the Actors Studio next week.”
“Good luck. That’s prestigious.”
“I’m a wreck. I rehearse with this girl from the school every day. It’s almost impossible to even get an audition, but these guys I met through TV introduced me to the right people.”
“Tell me about your part on TV.”
“My show is for General Food Playhouse on CBS.”
“Big. I’ve got Juliana signed to—”
“Have you seen their anthology series?”
“Working.”
“Every week they do an adaptation of a novel or a play.” He cut off a piece of meatloaf with his fork and ran it through his mashed potatoes. “The one I’m cast in is called “Train to Nowhere” by—by … I forget. A new writer.” He put the meatloaf and mashed potato into his mo
uth. “The producer, Sal Vincent, said he’s gonna get a writer from Modern Radio and Television to do a piece on me so I get known. Once you’re in with these guys, they keep calling you for other things. My day has come. My mother’s over the moon. Oh, no, look at the time! I forgot! Equity. Important union meeting.” He ran out, leaving his tray for me to empty.
* * *
Juliana was booked into the best clubs in Chicago, Florida, and LA. Sometimes she worked in two states at the same time. She’d do an early show in New York and then board a 10 p.m. flight and arrive on time for a 2 a.m. show in Chicago, which always had a sold-out crowd. There were some clubs still booking a three-show night, so sometimes she did a 4 a.m. gig.
A Broadway producer called, wanting to cast her in the lead of a new musical he was considering, but that fell through. She cut an album that did well on the charts, but didn’t get to the very top. I knew that was because she hadn’t made a film yet. Richard was always being sent scripts from Hollywood that he passed along to me to discuss with Ben, her agent. Ultimately Juliana went with my opinion—the script isn’t right. It was so important we not make any mistakes at this point.
Practically my whole life was Juliana, but I rarely saw her. We communicated by phone, Western Union, or Richard. One of the rare times we met in person was for lunch at Sardi’s in April. My idea. We were celebrating the contract she was about to sign to do two cooking shows as a guest of Poppy Cannon, the Can Opener Queen. Juliana didn’t even own a can opener; she would never serve her guests canned vegetables, canned tomato sauce, or a cake made from a mix.