She noted the rumples of the brown leather, the texture like gilded copper. When Colin was born, Max told her that people sometimes bronzed their children’s shoes. She’d never heard of such a thing. Thought it was silly. Now part of her wished she had. She had kept a pair of his shoes in a blue chest. That was all that remained after the nursery had been packed away. Max thought it would be worse to keep more. She’d hated him for that. Even the solid blue lining of the nursery had been changed to taupe. The abandoned dominion of a tiny boy.
She pulled his jacket into her arms and held it against her. The collar smelled of the city, but it mostly smelled like him. She felt the bulk of his wallet and pulled it from an inside pocket. Privacy seemed like a worn-out notion as she opened the rough leather. She reached in the first slanted pocket and pulled out a thin card with powder-blue embossment. Daniel’s face looked mildly out to her from his tiny likeness. Gallagher, Daniel Henrik, margined the photo in crude typeset. Grade: Airman, Service No. AD84793022. Daniel had signed his name in bubbling, upright scrawl on the bottom corner. She ran her thumb over his dour face and returned the card back to his wallet. She counted the bills inside: forty-seven dollars. Pushing the money back inside, her finger glanced over the edge of something else. She stopped, running her finger over it again. It stuck at first to the lining of the wallet as she tried to pull it out. It finally broke free. Her breath caught as she saw her sixteen year-old face on the faded lobby card. She turned it over and saw Danny’s faded handwriting: Katie’s Airplane Juju. She dropped the wallet in her lap, feeling a tear run down her nose.
She didn’t ask him to stay. She was sure he already knew what she wanted. At dawn, she left the hotel while he still slept. She walked to a drugstore and picked out cursory selections of male hair tonic and shaving cream, plucking down whatever she thought would suit him. He was still sleeping when she returned, and she made quick work of putting away the toiletries. Just as she finished, she heard him stir. She rushed to the desk, pretending to look at the stack of bills there. He walked into the parlor, wearing only the pants he’d arrived him. He lazily pulled his shirt over his head, his lean muscles tight under his skin. His complexion seemed less sallow. There was something momentarily fresh and joyful about him when he smiled at her. He squinted and looked to the window. He held back for a second before walking to the window, still keeping a few inches from the glass.
“Hey, you can see the whole park from up here.” he said with admiration.
“Yes, you can.”
No script this time, Satin Doll, the sing-songy voice devastatingly reminded. But that wasn’t true either. No matter where they were, how old they got…there would always be the notion that the words had already been said, already been written. When she joined him at the window, she knew it would be snowing—that was how the scene went, wasn’t it?
“Nice,” he said softly.
“Yes,” she said, staring at the falling bits of white, “nicer than the Park Sheraton?”
He looked at her, confused.
Not this time, Satin Doll.
The melody behind the sing-songy voice became dissonant, filled with the ominous sound of a chapter play’s cliffhanger.
“What?” he asked, his expression confused.
She searched over his face for the punchline lurking around his eyes or mouth. “The Christmas special, you know—”
Daniel’s eyes went dim and dreamy, no signal of recollection. He looked back to the snow. She’d seen the look once before. The face of her father’s mother—or at least she’d thought it was because it hadn’t been Nan. The cataract, fish quality of her eyes looked right through her as her grandmother called her by her sister’s name.
“No, Mum, this is the youngest,” her father had said.
“Why, what have you done with her hair, Milton?”
“Hair? Nothing, of course. It’s the same as it ever was—yellow as a cowslip.”
“Is that so?” her old force trailed off, “sure I was it was black as a raven’s wing,” and then she’d done it, made that same face, that not knowing face.
Fear filled her eyes. She roughly turned his jaw until he was forced to look at her.
“Danny—the Sheraton—Jimmy Dorsey…your socks on the radiator, remember?”
“I don’t remember much.” He smiled.
“You taught me to play Parcheesi on the plane—to calm me down.”
“Now Parcheesi, that’s a game.”
“A boring game.” She pouted.
“You were just bugged I kept winning. I had to play with Mistlewort the rest of the flight. Not the sharpest eye, but the guy was alright. If it weren’t for him, I’d have never gotten into your room that night.”
She felt her cheeks blush and tried to restrain the girlish way her lips wanted to curve up.
“I thought you said you didn’t remember?”
“I don’t remember much.” He smiled again.
She looked to the half-hearted flutter of snowflakes in the distance. She felt him touch her hair. He held a few strands of it in his fingers.
“I saw you in a movie over there. They’d changed your hair. It was damned near white, cropped against your neck like Jean Harlow or something. I said to myself, ‘that can’t be Katie…my Katie’s hair is long and yellow.”
“They made me peroxide it,” she said sadly.
“They were always changing things that don’t need fixing. I bragged to my buddies that I knew you. They didn’t believe me.”
“Now all they want are redheads and coquettish brunettes—but back then I was never blonde enough.”
“Your voice was different too.”
“They make me do American accents now,” she said with a doleful smile.
He came behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. She leaned into him, feeling the stubble of his cheek as it rested against hers.
“Always after changing things that don’t need fixing,” he whispered in her ear.
They lived behind the great balustrades of her hotel for two weeks—and three days. She knew because she’d taken to counting again. The façade of sleeping apart was the first boundary to crumble. Even awake, they stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, disregarding the stream of steady phone calls to her room. They drank liqueur from cordial glasses in dark bars. They walked Central Park in circles. They did a lot of pretending. They pretended for how it might have been—if only things were different. They did a lot of ignoring—not only the telephone… but the sing-songy voice and the world at large.
Time was drawing to a close. A clock ticked down the minutes left in their fool’s paradise. Mrs. Gallagher’s grandfather clock against the wall. The clock in Danny’s haunted house. Soon the bells of Avalon would ring three times…urging them back to a world where time passed too quickly. A bit of Katie’s desperate dreamscape chipped away every time she blamed bad lighting for the sick hue of his skin. Every time she woke beside him, saw dirty room service dishes piled on the nightstands, felt his fevered skin.
She stopped pretending on the fourteenth night. The night she learned he had dreams. He had them like her now. He woke screaming and wouldn’t stop until she shook him to reality. His eyes darted over her face and, for one moment, she thought there was the memory of something very important inside. She felt the clammy sweat sheen of his brow then pulled him to her and begged him in a familiar refrain. Jesus, Danny, just tell me what’s happened. For once don’t make me beg.
I can’t, was his inexorable response. That was how the script was supposed to go. It was how the lines had to be read: I don’t want you to go, followed by a pregnant beat of time, then—I won’t. Those were the words that marked the end of the scene. The final revision that could never be undone.
Chapter Nineteen
New York City, New York
1966
The echo of a chime filled Max’s office as he slammed the phone down. He breathed a deep, aggravated sigh and leaned back in his leather chair. He s
tared at the ceiling, contemplating the thought of just showing up, bribing the doorman and muscling his way in. But that wouldn’t do either. Something didn’t feel right, but that didn’t necessarily mean something was wrong. It just meant that he wanted to see her so badly he’d invented an excuse to worry. It didn’t matter in the end if some rookie reporter got to her. She’d fielded more idiot news jockeys than he could imagine. There wasn’t much that could surprise her at this stage of the game. She didn’t need his help.
It wasn’t the first time she’d avoided his phone calls since she’d moved out of their apartment, but he’d usually gotten a hold of her eventually. Accessibility was Katie’s bit; it was what had kept her famous all those years. But for some reason these past few weeks, she’d gone completely dark on him—harder to reach than Garbo. That sent his nerves a jangle. It was too close to another day she’d been like hell to reach.
She hadn’t wanted to go back to work so soon after the baby, but she’d painted herself in a corner with the studio. Her attorney had pulled out all the stops to renegotiate the lengthy indentured servitude of a previous contract. After a standoff of several months they’d given her what she’d wanted: a bit more money, plus they’d knock two years off the seven-year contract if she committed to two more pictures (and an option for a third when the time came). After two decades of slaving through nearly every slant of showbiz, she’d gained the success to leverage for a bit of control over her life. She could finally make plans of her own, which hadn’t exactly included getting pregnant. Colin had been a surprise—but a nice one. She’d had only five months with him before she had to fly back to California to make one of the commitment pictures. There’d been no way around it without breaking her contract. That wouldn’t do with the club barely breaking even and a new baby at home.
Everything would be fine, he’d told her. They hired a nanny off a blue-blooded family uptown—come as highly recommended as Mary Poppins. What's more was that he was the kid’s own father after all. If they couldn’t handle the baby, who could? Katie was a girl raised only by her father and nannies, so maybe the notion wasn’t too far from normal. Still she’d felt strange about it. When he’d dropped her at the airport, she’d said she had a bad feeling. That things… felt different than how they should. She was always saying stuff like that. He’d never known how superstitious she was until they’d gotten married. Usually he found it adorable. But on that day at the airport, it had made him feel completely helpless. As though there was absolutely nothing he could say or do to set her at ease. He realized then that her anxiety came from a more profound place than he could ever fathom. He told her that everything would be fine. He watched her smile, not knowing if she actually believed him. Katie was a very good actress.
Colin was a quiet baby; he rarely made a fuss or holler. He was easy to feed, easy to put down. She’d once asked Albert and Lilly why he didn’t seem to cry as much as other babies. Why he didn’t seem so full of zip as their kids…but they’d simply told her to count her lucky stars for a baby who slept through the night. So they had. Easy peasy. That was why he hadn’t worried the night he came home late from the club—three in the morning to be exact. He told the nanny to take the guest bedroom if she wanted it. She said no, wanting to get home to enjoy her next day off. She checked on him before she left, at least she said she had. He was fine. Something inside had urged him to take a second look inside the nursery—but he hadn’t.
He’d barely been able to keep his eyes open as he walked by the nursery, making sure the door was creaked wide in case Colin started crying.
He’d managed to remove his shoes and undo his tie before falling straight onto the bed. The next morning he woke slowly to the sound of the telephone ringing. Still groggy, he glanced at the clock on the bedside table. When he saw the time, his heart jumped out of his chest. It had been the only time in his life he’d known something for certain. He rushed down the hallway toward the nursery, the door still open halfway to hear the cries that had never happened. He couldn’t bring himself to look into the crib. Instead he looked at the simple blue wallpaper his wife had chosen in lieu of dancing teddy bears. He touched the cold, hard bundle of his child’s body then opened his mouth to scream—though no sound came.
He was still dressed in a suit smelling of stale cigarettes and broiled steak when help came—but there wasn’t anything to be done. He watched a broad-shouldered paramedic in a teal shirt carry the baby away in a blanket. It was another six hours until she returned his call. Her uninformed voice had been so bright and sweet over Ma Bell’s telephone line. Easy Peasy.
Cot death sounded like something that happened in Victorian novels. It had no place in mid-century Manhattan. But somehow it had found them and grossly violated the natural order of their lives. It didn’t matter how many times the doctors told her it couldn’t have been prevented. A few months later, he came home from work to find she’d locked herself in Colin’s room. He called out her name but she didn’t answer. When he held his ear to the door, he heard her whispering something he couldn’t quite make out. He pressed his ear hard to the door and finally heard that she was counting, obsessively counting in a low voice. When he busted down the door, the room was ice-cold. She’d opened the windows and pulled down the blue edge of Colin’s wallpaper. Still wearing her thin nightgown, she’d torn the wallpaper to tiny pieces. She was counting the shreds of paper, pushing them about to get perfect symmetry between each piece. Colin’s clothes and shoes had been pulled from their drawers and piled perfectly in each corner of the room.
Like a kid, he panicked and called his big brother. Albert arrived twenty minutes later, covered her in a blanket and carried her to a taxi waiting below. She was treated for dehydration at the hospital but was otherwise fine. She spent the afternoon with a psych nurse. He and Albert spent an hour explaining that the scars on her wrist were from a car accident seven years ago—and not something else. The hospital agreed to release her early before press got wind of what was going on. Katie was damn near phobic about her private life. She’d have died if this made it to the gossip rags. Most of the press didn’t even know she’d gotten married. She broke down and told her manager only when she had to cop to being pregnant.
A few weeks later they found a private shrink who recommended Thorazine and Nembutal. She went on the cocktail for a year, getting better when it all came down to it. By the time she went back to work, they were little better than two strangers sharing an apartment. They had only been married a few months when Katie found out she was pregnant. After Colin, he thought maybe there wasn’t much left for them. That maybe he’d been kidding himself that she’d actually wanted him in the first place. There was always a piece that she held back. Maybe, it was that piece of her that’d never been too keen on the marriage. He tried not to think about that in the early days—but as things got worse between them, he couldn’t help but wonder.
She packed a bag and went to Albert and Lilly’s one day while he was at work.
“When are you coming back?” he’d asked. There was a silence on the other end of the phone line.
“I don’t know. I just need some time. Please understand.”
“Understand what? That my wife can’t stand to be in the same room with me?”
“That’s not fair, Max,” she sighed.
He heard the sound of his sister-in-law talking to one of his nieces in the background. Katie mumbled something to her about dinner then spoke to him again.
“Look, Max—I’ve got to go.”
“Katie wait—” he’d grumbled into the phone, but she was gone.
He didn’t hear from her for another two months. She dodged his calls until he finally persuaded her to meet him for coffee. She showed up in a fuzzy blue sweater, her cheeks blushed from the cold. She ordered espresso. After the waitress brought it out—he asked her if she still loved him. She said nothing for awhile, looking down at her coffee.
“Yes,” she’d finally replied.
“Max, I can’t—not yet,” she’d said. She finished her coffee and said she’d call him the next week. She did. After that she started taking his calls in return. Eventually he tried to nuzzle her back towards reconciliation. When he did that, she cut the conversation short. Lately he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop—the divorce shoe. Every flannel suit lurking around the club seemed a likely chap to serve him with papers.
Max looked again at the phone on his desk. He reached out for the receiver. He paused just before picking it up then sighed and dropped his hand to his lap. He sunk back into his chair just as he heard the door creak open. He smelled Effie’s perfume before he saw her—and turned in his chair. Her strawberry-blonde hair was in waves against her face. She wore a thin, navy dress that clung to the curves of her figure.
“Don’t worry about those invoices for tonight. I can go through the payables in the morning, if you want,” she said.
“I don’t mind. I’m almost finished,” he lied, looking over the piles of itemized statements for Kennebec salmon, hearts of lettuce, and Roquefort dressing. He hadn’t even got to the coffee and liquor.
“C’mon, Max. Give up the ghost. I won’t tell Albert if you won’t? What do you say we sneak out the back, with no one the wiser?” she proposed, siren-like.
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