While I was making coffee, the lump woke up.
It was Norman.
The car he was in had ended up at someone else’s party, and later he’d arrived at my apartment to find me passed out and Tom about to leave. Tom said I’d fainted as we entered the apartment, so he carried me to bed and undressed me down to my slip. I was intrigued.
Passed out? How Carole Lombard.
And a man undressed me? How Doris Day.
And I spent the night in bed with someone else? How deliciously theatrical!
There had been nothing sexual, so I wasn’t feeling guilty. Just awfully Noël Coward. But when Norm went back to Michigan later that day, Tom started badgering me.
“Was he the first? Confess!” Tom demanded. “It was Norman, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”
He wouldn’t let up. Frightened, I finally took a long breath and whispered, “Yes.”
I hadn’t been raised to deal with angry people, never even seen anyone in a rage like that. I was a naive small-town girl from a loving family. I was taught The Golden Rule. Be kind. Return goodness for goodness. Perhaps not the best preparation for professional theatre. Or for a frighteningly dysfunctional relationship. Up to then, Tom and I had laughed a lot, sharing our common interests and attitudes. He’d brought lunches from home that his sweet mother packed, and shared them with me. There had been many good times, and more would follow, but now an undercurrent of strain had been added to the mix.
In mid-January, I missed my period and knew at once I was pregnant.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry Tom. Or that Tom wanted to marry me. Could I give up Norman forever? But I couldn’t marry Norman…could I? Terrified and confused, I wrote a letter to Norman, but before I worked up the nerve to send it, I got one from him. Sitting at the counter in a diner, I opened it. He said he might have gotten a girl pregnant back in Ann Arbor. If she was, he was going to marry her. She would know in a few weeks. I sat frozen for a long moment, knowing my next move would have a profound effect on the lives of several people. I was deeply afraid of making a terrible mistake.
I slowly tore my letter to Norm in half, then quarters. My fate was sealed.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Entrances are wide; exits are narrow.”
—JEWISH PROVERB
In the quaint 1940s, Saturday cinema matinees included short features starring such invincible heroes as Captain Midnight and Captain Marvel. In one Agent 99 cliffhanger, our hero was fighting the Black Widow, a buxom alien beauty determined to subjugate Earth at the behest of her nefarious father, king of a distant planet. Magically conjured from the bowels of a low-budget set, he appeared on a tinseled plywood throne flanked by diapered Nubian standard-bearers. Temporarily bested by Agent 99 in one deliciously cornball episode, the king narrows his eyes and solemnly declares, “This will set my plans for world domination back a week!”
I hate it when that happens.
Tom and I were crossing a busy street in Erie when I told him, “I missed my period.”
“A friend of mine got someone pregnant,” he said. “And he left town.”
“Oh…” I digested that chilling tidbit.
Was Tom the kind of guy who would skip out on me? How would I survive if he did? Now, I suppose some will throw the Let me think it over! thing back in my face, but folks, this was 1958. I was pregnant. There was nothing to think over. I needed this man to stand by me.
“I think we should get married next weekend,” I said, and crossing that street, he agreed.
We made the mistake of telling Newell Tarrant, who told Ken, the publicity guy, who wanted a couple of weeks to set up newspaper coverage, a cute angle to promote the playhouse, and we foolishly agreed. The wedding date was set for Sunday, February 2. My grandmother Fanny’s birthday. Groundhog’s Day. A nice coincidence, I thought. A good omen.
Word to the wise: Never trust omens! Omens don’t mean bloody squat.
I wrote to my parents and Norman to tell them I was marrying Tom. No details. Why not? Because, my dears, I was monumentally stupid. Why would I ask anyone for advice? That would have been as outrageous as calling a cab for a ride to the hospital. I picked out an affordable white eyelet wedding dress with all the fixings, including fake pearl earrings and white net gloves with the fingers cut out. I still have the dress, though it’s beige now and would fit my foot. Tom and I shopped for wedding rings and settled on small gold bands with silver etchings. Things seemed to be working out. Tom was taking it all in stride and our sex life hadn’t faltered. I wanted this man. I needed him. I loved him. He commented one night that he hated blondes, which hurt my feelings, but rather than say so, I dyed my hair dark red to please him and bought a slinky black nightgown to give me courage for the honeymoon.
My parents flew up to Erie with Melinda, now six months pregnant. I walked down the aisle with my father and stood before the minister with my knees shaking so badly, I was sure it must show beneath the full skirt of my princess-length wedding gown. (That means calf-length, men and young-uns.) Mother filmed the festive little reception with her Super 8 and had photos made for the newspapers, so Ken was happy. I wasn’t exactly happy, but I was hopeful.
We spent our one-night honeymoon in a motel in Jamestown, New York. When I opened my suitcase, out fell tons of rice and a pair of oversized flannel pajamas. Tomato red with white polka dots. I dug around in the rice but found no black nightgown. For decades, I blamed my sister, but a few years ago, she told me, “Nope. It was Mother.” Fortunately for all concerned, I learned this after Mother had died. (I mean, really, Mother, what were you thinking?) Some honeymoon. I sat there with my sullen spouse in that dumb little double bed in that dumb little motel, watching Your Show of Shows on TV, feeling like a large red and white polka-dotted turd.
Norman wrote that his girlfriend had turned out not to be pregnant. Swell news, huh?
“I married Tom,” I wrote back, no reasons given.
Tom and I moved into a gloomy little one-bedroom apartment and continued the spring season at the playhouse. As a wedding gift, Newell upped Tom’s apprentice salary from $27.50 a week to the actor’s level of $55 a week, which really was decent of him.
Two weeks later, Tom and I walked over to a party about ten blocks from our apartment. The house was full of guests, the buffet table groaning with food, and anywhere there’s free food, you’ll find a line of actors eagerly picking up plates. (They don’t call us starving artists for nothing.) A gangly, acne-pocked apprentice stood at the end of the line, alone and awkward, and I stepped in line behind him and chatted him up, expecting Tom to fall in line behind me. I filled my plate and looked for Tom, but I didn’t see him, so the boy and I found empty chairs among a group of playhouse personnel. A few minutes later, Tom strode up.
“Hey, Tom, where’ve you been?” I smiled up at him. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“It was plain you already had your dinner companion,” he said—and stalked off.
“Tom?” I ran after him. “Hey, that kid’s just one of the apprentices. C’mon and join us.”
“Forget it! Obviously, you don’t want to be with me.”
He disappeared into the crowd, and for the rest of the evening, I dogged his tracks, trying to get him to talk to me, but he wouldn’t acknowledge my presence. Good grief, I thought, if I’d latched on to some handsome guy our age, he’d have a case, but that pimply-faced, tongue-tied kid? Tom got thoroughly drunk, and we left early to walk home in the bitter cold. Walking thirty paces ahead of me, he stopped to bang his head against a tree.
“Tom! What on earth?” I cried, alarmed (to say the least!) by this bizarre behavior.
He trudged a few paces down the block, stopping at the next tree. Bang.
“Tom! Stop that! You’re going to injure yourself!”
“Ooooh,” he moaned in anguish, and trudged a few more paces. Bang.
“Tom! Please!”
“Oooooh.” Bang. All the way back to the apartment, where he fell asle
ep, dead drunk.
All I got out of him the next day was that I had betrayed him, and he remained distant. Except in bed. Sadly, I soon had morning sickness that would kill Sabu. And it wasn’t just in the morning, it was all the damned time. Tom was unsympathetic. He kept trying to make love, but the slightest movement of the bed and—whooooa, Nelly—I was running for the john. It felt like the “car sickness” I’d had as a child. By mid-April, my dark red hair had faded to the color of a Florida orange and I was still throwing up, three months pregnant, big as a house. I came down with a serious respiratory infection, and the high fever left me too weak to get out of bed. I looked and felt about as sexy as a tree sloth. With orange hair.
“My wife is pregnant,” I heard Tom tell Newell one day. “She’s too sick to continue here. I’m taking her to Oklahoma.”
My wife, I remember thinking. He called me his wife!
The feeling that swept through me was like the fever that had left me weak, like a virus that infiltrated my system and altered my biology. And my psychology. Tom was my husband. I was his wife, carrying his precious baby. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, I adored him.
Tom bought an old car with the $600 I had saved from my salary, and off we went to Oklahoma. (Oh, goody, now I could have car sickness for real!) Actually, I should say, off we went toward Oklahoma. Somewhere in mid-America, the car began barking and wheezing. Tom took it to a mechanic and came back with the news that our buggy needed a few hundred dollars’ worth of work. We didn’t have any hundred dollars. Chagrined, I called my parents, who wired the money, and Tom and I spent the night in a cheap hotel, not shaking the bed.
We stopped in Edmond to see Melinda and brand-new baby Marcia Ann. Melinda was keeping house in a tiny silver trailer while Sheridan went to college, and they were bustin’ their buttons over their new little miracle. Marcia was adorable. And in only six months, I’d have my own baby! None of my skirts would fasten anymore, so I was grateful for Melinda’s hand-me-down maternity clothes. They were ridiculously fifties—pleated and gathered tops over skirts. I looked like a…oh, name a fruit. A cantaloupe. A ruffled yellow cantaloupe. A pleated pink cantaloupe, a gathered blue cantaloupe, a beige—well, you get the idea.
Tom and I moved into Melinda’s and my old bedroom in Ardmore. Bill found some odd jobs for Tom on his construction site, though Tom wasn’t really one for physical labor. I bought a little booklet, How to Crochet (yep, I still have it) and spent my days crocheting booties and bonnets in pink, blue, and yellow, since we didn’t know which sex was coming. I had a powerful feeling the baby was a boy, though. Tom had told me he wanted only a boy. No girls! At least, I thought, I’ll have that on my side.
Mother took me to the beauty parlor and bleached the orange from my hair, so I was my old blond self again. I felt almost attractive, but Tom was indifferent. At that point, he probably wouldn’t have cared if I’d shaved my head into a Mohawk. I made lunches for him every day and dreamed up every variety of milk shake and ice cream sundae imaginable, concocting flavors nobody ever heard of, while he became more and more withdrawn.
“What’s making you so miserable? Is it being married? Being married to me?” I asked, but he wouldn’t discuss it.
Too pregnant to work as an actress, I put my nose to the grindstone, typing letters and helping Tom apply for summer stock jobs all over the country, finally striking pay dirt. He was offered the small role of a handsome swain in The Merry Widow at Casa Mañana in Fort Worth, and the Alley Theatre in Houston offered him a summer apprenticeship, which didn’t pay but opened the door at that prestigious regional theatre, which had a full-year program.
“It could lead to an offer to join the company,” I encouraged.
He drove down to Fort Worth in our old jalopy to rehearse The Merry Widow, and Mother drove me down later for the weeklong run of the show. We stayed in a very modern, very chic hotel, and the heady fragrance that lingered in the rooms and hallway haunted me for years. Even now, a trace of that scent catapults me back to that place and time. Every night I stood at the back of the darkened auditorium, my pregnant body full of longing, waiting for Tom to appear in his few scenes. He was so dashing and handsome, my love for him leapt out of me and flew to the stage. The gorgeous song “Delia, the Witch of the Wood” came just before his first entrance. It moved me to tears every night—and every time I heard it for the next thirty years.
When the show at Casa Mañana closed, we drove to Houston and checked into a tacky motel while we looked for an apartment. Houston in the summer is as hot and humid as a steer’s mouth. Every step outside is like slogging through sorghum. On the bright side, my morning sickness had finally passed, and I was ready to shake the ol’ bed again. But Tom was more withdrawn than ever. Lying next to him in that motel, aching for him, my heart in my throat, I finally found the courage to ask, “Tom, is something wrong?”
He lay silent for a few moments. Then—
“I love you,” he replied tightly, “but I’m no longer in love with you.”
“Oh, my God!” I rolled out of bed, crying. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
“Jesus, Rue, don’t make such a big deal out of it,” he said.
I stood staring out the screen door, sobbing, “Oh, God, what if he looks like you?”
I was too terrified to sleep. What would become of the baby and me? How could I live without Tom? I was trapped in this huge, pregnant body; no way out, no remedy. A horribly evolved form of that old childhood panic seized hold of me and didn’t let up for the rest of my pregnancy. Tom went to bed every night around midnight, but I sat on the floor of the bathroom, the door shut to keep the light from bothering him. Drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes, writing in my diary, I waited for dawn to creep through the window.
“For Christ’s sake, Rue, come to bed!” Tom raged. “Stop acting like an idiot.”
“I’m sorry,” I wept. “I don’t mean to interfere with your schedule, but I can’t help it.”
“You stupid bitch! You fucking cunt!”
I wasn’t sure what “cunt” meant. This was the first time I’d heard the word. But it sounded worse than “bitch.”
Just to be among people, I walked over to the theatre in the evenings and watched the actors moving through their performance like a little match girl watching a grand party through someone’s parlor window. One night, a friendly young apprentice invited me into the office and taught me to play a word game, which helped keep my panic down to a dull roar until Tom was free to go home. But after the show, Tom came into the office and announced, “I’m going out with some of the cast. I’m taking the car.”
It was after eleven, and we lived ten blocks away.
“Can I give you a lift?” the apprentice offered. He didn’t ask Tom, “Aren’t you going to take your wife home?” I didn’t either. I spent a lot of nights in that office, playing word games with that kid and letting him take me home, and I doubt he’ll ever know what it meant to me to have two hours of relative peace and a sane person to talk to.
One night, Tom got home from his after-hours whatever with whomever and, to my profound relief, seemed to want to connect with me for the first time in months. God only knows whose idea it was, but we started playing strip poker, taking off one article of clothing every time we lost a hand. It was the scariest performance I could imagine giving just then—monumentally pregnant, doing a striptease for a man who didn’t want me anymore—but I made it a comedy routine, loving his laughter. As I threw off the next-to-last garment with a funny remark, Tom blurted out, “Oh, Rue, I’m starting to love you all over again.”
“Oh, my God! How wonderful!” I cried. This miraculously amazing and extremely welcome expression of interest triggered a sudden gush of tears.
“Well, hell,” he responded. “Now you’ve ruined everything!”
And he walked out of the room, leaving me on my knees on the bed, down to my scanties, with no idea what had just happened.
Back to t
he bathroom and waiting for dawn. I didn’t confide in my parents. I felt it was my problem. And I didn’t confide in Tom’s parents, because I didn’t want to betray him, but I wrote Tom’s sister, Pat, asking for advice, and she wrote back, “We always thought Tom was an alien, not like any of our family. You have to try harder, Rue. After all, it takes two to make a marriage work.”
Thanks, Pat. And this “two” would be me and who else? Captain Marvel?
During the day, I started visiting speech and exercise classes at the theatre. I was able to do stretch exercises, even with my big belly, and the speech classes gave Tom and me something we could share and laugh about. Some of the people had Texas accents too thick to drip through a slotted spoon. The teacher would say, in impeccable British, “Hah-oo nah-oo, braah-oon cah-oo?” and someone right off the ranch Texan would drawl, “Hay-ow nay-ow, bray-oon cay-ow?” which afforded Tom and me a certain deal of delight. Somebody suggested we put together a scene from A Hatful of Rain with me as Celia, the pregnant wife, Tom as the estranged husband Johnny, and another apprentice, Pete Masterson, playing Polo, who was sympathetic to Celia’s plight. Mighty close to home, I thought, but maybe it would bring Tom and me closer—if it didn’t alienate him further. We performed the scene and got raves from our audience. But it made no difference between Tom and me.
Pete was only eighteen, but he and his girlfriend, Carlin, had become good friends with me and Tom. One afternoon, at their apartment, I confided I’d been suffering back pain and blood in my urine for two or three days.
My First Five Husbands Page 6