At our next meeting, I pronounced the lines of the script he handed me with all the histrionics I’d been practicing for years: “My … my name is Rachel Hoffman. My mother? I don’t know where she is. They took her away. I haven’t seen her in a long time.” When I was eight years old, I’d overheard some woman in a store say about me, “Doesn’t that child look like a little refugee?” Sid must have thought so too. Halfway through the monologue, I was to push up my sleeve and display to my invisible, kind interlocutors the concentration camp number branded on my arm. “What? She’s in the other room? Waiting for me?” I was to exclaim at the end of my four-minute performance before I ran off, joyfully shouting, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” I had no trouble imagining devastating separation from my mother. I had no trouble imagining emotional wounds inflicted on me by the Nazis.
For weeks we went over the piece, only he and I in the entire place, the office room dark. “Very fine!” Sid Sandman said solemnly, or “Take it from ‘the number on my arm?’”
Always I listened for a noise in the outer room or hoped that the door would open. But I saw the luminous Irene only in my dreams.
One day, though, the light was on in the office when I arrived, and there at last, sitting at the desk and holding a receipt book, was Irene Sandman. I felt myself turn paler than dead grass.
“I’ll just pay you now for the whole month,” a woman said.
“One month for Sissy Simpson … and that’s for the Wee Ones Dance Movement Class,” the lovely voice said.
I watched her elegant white hand with its well-shaped red fingernails writing out the receipt. The woman took it and left, brushing by me.
“Lillian, hello,” Irene Sandman said.
She remembered my name!
“Sid says you’re making terrific progress.”
I barely squeaked out an “Oh, thanks,” though I could have wept for joy.
“I’ll sit in on your session today,” she said, smiling brilliantly at me. Neon spots swirled before my eyes. How would I be able to speak if those radiant violet eyes were upon me?
But I did. I was Rachel Hoffman in every inch of me, with only the tiniest fraction of my mind aware that Irene was poised elegantly on the bench next to her husband. When I ran out of the room shouting, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” in my eyes there were real tears that sprang miraculously from nowhere.
“Wow!” Irene let out as I came back to stand before them.
Could I believe what I was seeing? There were tears in her eyes too. I’d moved Irene Sandman to tears! In Mary Marvel’s cape I floated just under the ceiling.
“Lillian.” The mellow tones arrested me a half-hour later as I floated still, now out the door. “I’d like you to bring your mother with you next week.”
I landed with a thump. Dear God, my mother! Whatever for? My mother never wore lipstick anymore. The shadows under her eyes had become even darker, and there was so much gray in her hair now. And her accent! I loved her more than my own life, but how could I bring her to stand in the presence of this glorious personage?
“I’ve had our lawyers draw up a personal management contract, which Theatre Arts Studio will sign with our most gifted students.” Irene’s exquisitely lipsticked lips smiled. “And you’re one of them.”
I have no idea how I maneuvered the streets that day again, but I know I must have galloped because I was panting as I bolted up the porch steps on Dundas Street. I had just enough breath left to shout toward the bedroom, where my mother was lying down, “I’ve been discovered! I made it!”
“We’re from Chicago,” Irene said to my mother, but my mother was staring at the tutued ballerinas on the wall and her mouth was ajar. I was mortified. Why didn’t she know how to behave in such a momentous situation? What would Irene think? Fanny’s furnished room showed on us, I was sure. I’d selected my mother’s dress from out of her now-unused New York collection. I’d made her wear lipstick and go to the beauty parlor to get her hair done, but still she looked shabby and dim next to Irene Sandman. Who wouldn’t?
“Both of us were very involved in Chicago’s theater arts, but we decided to come to Los Angeles because that’s where the theater world has moved.”
My mother looked at her now and made little “Dat’s nice” sounds. We must seem like dolts to Irene Sandman. Though she didn’t address me, I nodded my head vigorously at whatever she said to make up for my mother’s virtual silence. I arranged my face into what I hoped was an intelligent expression, and I kept it plastered there.
“The theater used to be very alive in Chicago. Mel Tormé was my best friend in high school,” Irene said, laughing. So charmingly. My toes curled. My mother was looking at the picture on the wall again. Was she even listening to Irene? “Steve Allen was our buddy too. He was always very funny, but he didn’t know how to play the piano. I’m the one who taught him. Though he was very quick to catch on,” Irene added demurely. “He didn’t need much teaching.”
My mother recognized the name Steve Allen. “Iz dat soll,” she said, and I shrank as I heard her mispronounce the American idiom. It was better when she said nothing. We were lost here, in the presence of this heavenly being who had a direct pipeline to Hollywood.
“Do you have any questions?” Irene asked. My mother shook her head.
“What if one of us has to end the contract?” I said in a wavery voice. I couldn’t imagine such an eventuality on my part, but I hoped that if I asked an adult-sounding question Irene would think I was thoughtful and worldly and wouldn’t notice my mother’s incompetence.
Irene looked at me without expression. I wanted to evaporate. “You don’t get married thinking about divorce,” she finally said. “We’ll need a stage name for her,” she said in my mother’s direction. “Lillian Faderman doesn’t sound much like an actress.”
“How about Lilly the Kid?” It had been my fantasy name for so long, the words just blurted out of me.
To my mortal shame, those beautiful lips now spread and seemed to begin a guffaw, but she arrested it. “I was thinking of something more along the lines of Lillian Foster.”
My contract stated that our arrangement would last for seven years, renewable in perpetuity. I knew what perpetuity meant, and I prayed for it in association with Irene Sandman. It also said that Irene would be my sole representative and would receive ten percent of my earnings. That sounded wonderful—there would be earnings!
To celebrate, my mother and I went downtown on Saturday and—at $3.50 for her, $1.50 for me—we took a Tanner Grey Line Bus Tour of movie star homes, Robert Mitchum, Greer Garson, Spencer Tracy, Anne Baxter, each more fantastic than the last. So there really were palaces right here in Beverly Hills, California, just as in the movies, with great expanses of blue-green lawn and tall iron gates and uncountable gables and turrets. My mother and I devoured it all.
“When you become an actress,” she said to me dreamily as our bus lumbered up and down the glittering streets of Beverly Hills and spewed exhaust fumes into the rarefied air, “which house do you want us to buy? We have to find a tutor for you, you know, because if you’re making movies you can’t go to school regular. Then we’ll both have a maid, and we’ll have a chauffeur,” she said, recalling movies she’d seen about the rich, who always had a whole staff of servants, “and a man butler to answer the door and the telephone—and what else?”
“And I’ll buy you the most beautiful winter coat in the world,” I promised, remembering the shabby, thin jacket she’d worn every winter since we’d come to California.
“Why just one? I’ll need a long white ermine, and a brown mink stole, and maybe a Persian lamb jacket,” she enumerated with a sweet smile.
Did Irene have an ermine coat? I wondered. How splendid ermine would look beneath her spun-gold hair.
“I’d like you to sing for me before your acting lesson,” Irene announced when I arrived for my next session with Sid. I chose “Again,” and I wasn’t nervous because I’d been singing all my life. She played
a little introduction on the piano and then nodded for me to begin. For a few seconds she scrambled around the keyboard, trying to find my key. Then she realized there wasn’t any. She shook her head, and I cut off my caterwaul, puzzled. “Lillian, you need to listen to how the music sounds and match your voice to it.”
It was a revelation to me. I felt my skin prickle and beads of sweat form above my lip.
“We’d better start you on singing lessons.” Singing lessons? My dreams were crumbling like a dried mudpie! My mother gave me the $1.50 a week gladly for my acting lessons, but she couldn’t afford singing lessons.
“How about working in the office on Saturday mornings?” Irene said, as though she’d read my despair, “and you can pay for all your lessons that way.”
I would have worked in the morning and the evening and on Sunday—and the rest of the week too—just to be around her. “Oh, yes, that would be wonderful,” I managed to gulp in a torrent of gratitude. “Oh, yes.”
I loved Saturdays. I arrived before 8:00 A.M. to open the studio for the little kids’ ballet class (taught by a Bulgarian woman with stringy hair and b.o.). By nine, Irene came to take my place behind the desk. “Will you go to the cleaner’s and pick up some things for me?” she’d ask, and I’d run to fetch Sid’s pants or a dress or blouse of hers (which I’d furtively kiss through the clear wrapping). “Will you go over to the Elite and bring me back a cup of coffee?” she’d ask next. Whatever she needed I carried as though it were a sacred chalice through grimy streets, and my lips moved in fervent prayer. “Irene, oh Irene, Irene,” were the only words.
She began teaching at ten o’clock, after the Bulgarian finished her Modern Dance for 12–‘15-Year-Olds. I sat again in the gray metal chair, now warm from Irene’s perfect bottom, and opened my nostrils wide to inhale Emir, her heady perfume that lingered in the purple Orlon cardigan she often left draped over the chair. Alone in the office, I ran my hands up and down the soft material. “Irene, oh Irene.” I spoke it in my head.
I listened intently, entranced by every syllable, as she instructed a pimply, bespectacled girl at the piano, then a dark and very handsome young man who was a singer, then a class of six adolescent tap dancers. With the handsome singer—Tony Martinez, his name was—she laughed a lot, though it never seemed to me that his remarks were very witty. (“Can I take that one again?” Tony would say. Ha, ha, tee hee hee, they’d carry on.) What did he do to make her so happy?
Never did I permit dreamy passion to interfere with efficiency. “Hello, this is Theatre Arts Studio. May I help you?” I answered the phone in a low voice that sounded professional, as I’d heard Irene do. I collected money with aplomb. I wrote receipts with a secretarial flourish that Fanny would have approved of. I greeted all comers with grace and verve.
For three years, there was nowhere in creation I would rather have been than behind the desk at Theatre Arts Studio, inhaling Emir and feeling soft Orlon between my fingers while I worked to pay for my lessons.
Eddy St. John (I later found out his real name was Edward Fromberg) walked through the door one Saturday morning. “I have a singing lesson with Mrs. Sandman at twelve o’clock,” he said, his voice fluttering up and down. He took the chair closest to me and flipped through the stack of sheet music he’d brought with him. I could see that the one that crowned the pile had a picture of a sequin-gowned Marlene Dietrich on the cover sheet. “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” it was called. I watched him as he studied the music. He had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on anyone, and his hair was a coppery color I’d never seen before. He moved his head in time to the music in his mind, and he waved a long, slim hand, totally without self-consciousness. His lithe shoulders swayed.
He looked up to see me watching. “I just love Dietrich songs, don’t you?” He flashed me a disarming smile.
“Let’s try something else for a change. How about ‘On Top of Old Smokey’?” Irene threw out to Eddy from time to time over the next months.
“Not my style,” he’d rebut. “Let’s do ‘The Man That Got Away.’”
“How about ‘The Tennessee Waltz’?” she’d suggest.
“How about ‘Stormy Weather’?” he’d insist. He was only three years older than I, but what self-possession! Maybe he didn’t know that Irene Sandman was a goddess.
Eventually she gathered several of us together into a troupe that performed at homes for the aged, Hadassah luncheons, mental hospitals, and other such places. Eddy was the star, dressed all in black, with a fedora tipped just above his eyes, singing dramatic, breathy torch songs. He had an expressive high tenor that he could make husky and intimate à la Dietrich or heartbreakingly plaintive like Judy Garland. There were also the Starlets, two twelve-year-old girls with matching fat brown Shirley Temple curls, who sang in harmony while they shook silver-dusted maracas. And there was a fourteen-year-old with her seven-year-old sister, both dressed in powder blue leotards, with dark blue stuffed-cloth tails attached to their pant seats. They did a monkey act, balancing acrobatically all over each other.
And there was me, Lillian Foster, Mistress of Ceremonies, introducing each act with the energetic, smiling spiel that I’d rehearsed with Irene. “And now Theatre Arts Studio is dee-lighted to present the fab-u-lous (or mag-nif-icent or a-stound-ing)…” Irene said that a Mistress of Ceremonies needed a gown, so my mother gave me ten dollars and I went to Brooklyn Avenue to buy one—pink satin, strapless and backless, with pink netting over the skirt. When it was time for my monologues, I quickly slipped into the Hadassah kitchens or rest home bathrooms and changed to adolescent-girl clothes. I acted Rachel Hoffman as well as another piece that Sid wrote for me about a French orphan who is adopted by a kindly couple (“zz-zz-zz,” he instructed me whenever I forgot and sounded a th), and I did a monologue that he pieced together from Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. I was a twelve-year-old named Mary who fabricates an accusation against two women, her teachers. “Unnatural!” I was supposed to yell in a disgusted voice.
“We have a show to do next Sunday!” I would come home with the gift of the news, and it seemed like a wonder tonic for my mother. Eight of us squeezed into the Sandmans’ green Ford, and Irene drove us to our shows. Even if it was a spell-time, my mother’s anguish was suspended for a while. Whenever I came out onstage, I could see her in the front row, her head cocked birdlike at me in rapt attention. I worried a lot that Irene might mind that my mother came with us, but she never said a word. I made sure my mother always wore lipstick and a New York dress.
Irene follows me everywhere. Into Fanny’s house. To my classes at Hollenbeck Junior High School. In the street I look for her car, and I imagine I see it constantly. She is with me when I walk arm-in-arm with my mother down Wabash Avenue. At school I tell the girls with whom I’m friendly that I’ll be entertaining at an opening of a Thrifty Drugstore in Bellflower. “Irene Sandman is our director,” I say. I just want to hear myself pronouncing her name.
Mr. Bergman and Rae come again to take us to Ocean Park Beach. I leave my mother sitting with them on a boardwalk bench, and I walk down near the green water, where I can write her name in the sand— IRENE SANDMAN IRENE SANDMAN IRENE SANDMAN. The ocean comes up to wash it away, and I write it again and leave it there. Maybe she’ll happen by before the ocean comes again. She’ll find it and wonder who is so in love with her.
How can I make her say “Wow!” again, the way she did when she first heard me do Rachel Hoffman? “Wow!” I hear her voice in the dark in my bed at night, and I kiss my pillow as though it were her skin.
Has anyone ever felt this way? What is this? Everything but Irene has gone out of my head. How bizarre I feel, as though something is wrong. I go to the Malabar Public Library for more psychology books because I’ve never heard anyone talk about such a thing. “Crush,” it’s called. I have an “adolescent crush” on a woman. “Very common,” the books say.
But one book with a brand-new cover, Attaining Womanhood: A
Doctor Talks to Girls About Sex, by Dr. George W. Corner, says something else. I don’t understand all the words, but I understand enough to be petrified. “There are a few women who develop a deep-seated and even permanent need to be sexually attracted only by members of their own sex. This condition may apparently be an inborn trait; in other circumstances it is believed to be set up as a result of unfortunate circumstances in youth.” What circumstances could be more unfortunate than mine? And then his sentences get even more alarming. “The thought of it is disagreeable to people who do not have such impulses, but the person so affected must be regarded not as sinful but as the victim of a disturbed temperament.” I am the victim of a disturbed temperament.
“A girl should avoid a woman who exhibits lavish fondness toward her,” Dr. Corner concludes, “or who insists on constant companionship, or indulges in intimate fondling.” What bliss I would feel if Irene were such a woman, I think; the irony is not lost on me, though I am in tears.
To whom could I talk about this? Who would help me understand? Not my mother. I took the buses to Rae’s apartment.
“What happened?” She paled at the sight of me.
I threw myself face down on her bed. “I’m in love with Irene Sandman,” I wept.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 6