The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

  I could almost agree with her there: Eva Tanguay wasn’t a great beauty, and couldn’t sing or dance very well. In fact, she ran around the stage like the cops were chasing her. But unlike Mother, Eva Tanguay was the Queen of Vaudeville, the headliner and the highest paid. Variety said she was making upward of thirty-five hundred dollars a week, for goodness’ sake!

  McSorley’s overgrown eyebrows went up again. “My, my!”

  Mother sighed. “But I never made it. My career was cut short by motherhood.”

  I slid my eyes to Gert, and she caught my gaze as she took a card from the deck the magician fire breather held out to her. Career, she mouthed, and we shared a secret grin.

  Mother gave McSorley a brave, soldier-on kind of smile. “But seeing my girls up there entertaining, giving such joy to others, it makes all my sacrifices worthwhile.”

  When the diner closed, we all trudged back to the hotel, laughing and shushing one another as we climbed the creaking porch steps. McSorley took Mother’s hand. Mother tugged it away, but she gave him a quick lit-up smile as she left him on the landing.

  “Would she ever?” I whispered to Gert.

  Gert’s lip curled in disgust. “I don’t want to think about it, and neither should you.”

  But I couldn’t help thinking about it as I clung to the side of the mattress trying not to slide into Gert’s feet, which were disturbingly close to my neck. Mother was not one to navigate the middle ground between the peaks and valleys of her emotions.

  I remember once Gert had gotten in trouble for back-talking to her teacher, and had to stay after school to write “I will not give disrespectful responses to my elders” one hundred times on the blackboard. When I came home and told Mother, she was furious that Gert would not be available to do her chores. She marched right down to the school, and Gert said Mother gave that teacher a rather large and loud piece of her mind. She would be the one to punish a misbehaving child, not some twenty-three-year-old stranger! Then she laced into Gert all the way home for causing trouble. By the time they arrived, they were chortling over the teacher’s quivering lip as Mother had lambasted her.

  Mother indulged her happier emotions just as impulsively, and I wondered what repercussions might result, now that she was finally among performers, basking in the refracted limelight, if not the stage itself.

  To distract myself I turned my mind to the diner, and the easy camaraderie of the vaudevillians. They’d never met before rehearsal that morning, and yet they’d quickly banded together to trade tips and information, to laugh and make friends they’d likely never see again. This seemed most important if you were a solo act, but I imagined that even a twosome or a small troupe might welcome new faces after so much time with the same few people.

  As if to punctuate that thought, I heard Fred and April Delorme in the next room, his voice a low, aggravated rumble, hers loose and high-pitched, a word or phrase drifting through the horsehair plaster: “. . . if I feel like it . . . slave driver . . . gimme that back!”

  Fred’s voice rose to the level of comprehension only once. “. . . ruin our chances!”

  It went quiet then, except for a squeak or two I assumed to be bedsprings.

  Distracted, I’d missed the moment when Gert had slid into our bed’s craterous middle. I took my pillow, tugged off one of the blankets and rolled myself into a little nest on the floor. Angled into a sliver of moonlight, I opened Homer’s Odyssey to the section that my English teacher, Miss Cartery, had assigned. Even if I were out of school, even if I were in the throes of a hallucinatory fever, she knew me well enough to know I would read.

  Earlville was a lovely little town in the daylight, what little of the town and the daylight we were privy to. Exhausted, we slept until ten, crawled bleary-eyed from lumpy beds, splashed our faces, and sponged our shadowed parts. Dressed in our costumes, we scurried downstairs for a breakfast of scrambled eggs cooked to tire rubber. Baby Harry was handed from lap to lap so Nell could pick at her food, while the proprietress eyed our short satin dresses and thick makeup with distaste. We hustled through the snowdrifts to the theatre, eager to take up our spot as openers.

  Unfortunately, the audiences were not nearly so excited.

  “What are we doing wrong?” Kit asked after our third performance where the applause was so weak we could practically hear individual pairs of hands. After each show, we adjusted the timing, added a roll or cut a jump. But the few bits that seemed to work with one group fell flat with the next.

  “Somebody call the undertaker,” muttered McSorley, the headlining comedian. “It’s a goddamn morgue out there.” At least it wasn’t just us.

  Mother seemed uncommonly happy, though, as she came and went from the stage door with the regularity of a train conductor, bringing in food, removing the baby when he squawked, and running errands for the other performers, getting them a cup of coffee, sodium bicarbonate for an upset stomach, or new stockings when the old pair had run itself into zebra stripes. They responded with the kind of gushing adoration that show business people are known for, though there was clear sincerity beneath the thank-yous and aren’t-you-just-the-dearest.

  “You girls are very lucky to have such a kind, generous mother,” said the soprano, whom Mother had coddled and sweet-talked from one poorly received performance to the next. Happier than I’d ever known her to be, Ethel Turner basked in the attention she’d so rarely experienced as a mere wife and mother.

  The audiences in Earlville did not improve. The few who showed up were what McSorley called “hand sitters.” On the third day, just before the show opened, I saw him peeking through the curtains. “What are you looking at?” I whispered.

  “I’m counting heads.”

  “What for?”

  “To see how many of us are gonna get paid.”

  “But we have a contract!”

  McSorley turned his world-weary eye on me and gave my head a pat. “Right,” he said.

  His words portended the future. On Wednesday night, after the final performance, we all gathered outside Mr. Castleberry’s office for our payout, as cigar smoke wafted from under the warped wooden door. McSorley, who had established himself as the leader of our temporary little band, banged on the door. “Come on, now, Castleberry. We’ve worked some long hours and we want to get paid and hit the trail.”

  Castleberry opened the door, cigar clamped in his teeth like a piece of leather to bite down on during a painful procedure. He handed out envelopes, which were snatched up and inspected. Since ours contained the fewest bills, Mother was the first to finish counting.

  “Why, there’s only thirty dollars in here—our contract was for forty!”

  Angry words erupted as each performer realized how much they’d been shorted. I noticed several of the stagehands nearby, each unaccountably holding a heavy prop, broomstick, or board.

  Mr. Castleberry raised his frying-pan-sized hands. “You didn’t bring the crowds, so I don’t have it to give you. I cut you all by twenty-five percent. I’m a fair man, see?”

  Fred Delorme’s voice rose up. “That’s not right. We worked hard and did our part. It’s your job to fill the house. You didn’t short your own salary, did you?”

  “That’s right! How much do you get paid?” others chimed in.

  Castleberry crossed his arms. “Delorme, you might work hard, but your act’s a joke. That partner of yours looks like she’s sleepwalking. You got what you earned, and if I hear one more word, I’ll smear your name to every manager from here to Buffalo.” His glare shifted from one performer to the next. “And that goes for the rest of you, too.”

  Thirty dollars. Of that, three would go to Mr. Birnbaum for his 10 percent, and another sixteen had gone to food, lodging, and train fare for the five of us. Eleven dollars was all we had to show for eighteen performances and countless bruises to our bodies and egos.

  On March 1, 1919, the rent and utilities were paid with the money we’d earned performing. But the bank account was completely
empty. Worry hung in the air like sulfur from a lit match.

  Mother tried to reach Mr. Birnbaum at his New York office, using Mrs. Califano’s phone next door, but his secretary said he was on the road and she would give him the message. A week went by and we heard nothing. Mother called a second time. On her third humiliating trip to beg the use of the phone, Mother came home muttering that it was her last call. It was too much to suffer the secretary’s apathy, Mrs. Califano’s disapproval, and the horrible spicy smell of that tomato gravy that was always bubbling on her stove.

  One night after a tin of beans and some mashed turnips for dinner, Mother suddenly shouted, “At least you’re not going to bed hungry!” as if someone had complained, which of course no one had done.

  “Not yet!” Kit yelled back, and burst into tears.

  And if some of us weren’t going to bed hungry, it was only because others of us were. Dad had taken a scant spoonful of beans, and Nell took none at all, only nibbled at the turnips.

  Late that night after the others had gone to bed, I sat in the living room with Dad. The old Victrola was at its lowest possible volume, and he closed his eyes to listen, probably trying to distract himself from the rumbling of his stomach. I curled close to absorb what little heat I could through his winter coat. “Dad,” I murmured, slipping my fingers gently around his damaged hand. “You need to eat. Food gives you strength to heal.”

  “A man’s job is to feed his family, Winnie. I don’t deserve even a bread crust.”

  “It’s not your fault, Dad.”

  “It is my fault. All of it.” He shook his head in self-disgust. “I’d rob the Binghamton Savings for you girls if I could get away with it. But I’d make a mighty poor bank robber—probably land in jail. Then you’d all be even more ashamed of me than you already are.”

  “No one’s ashamed of you, Dad! We just have to hold on until something works out.”

  He gazed down at me. “Darling girl. I was hoping I might somehow save up enough to send you to college—I know how much you love school.” His eyes went glassy with sorrow. “Now I can’t even feed you. In a few weeks there might not be a roof over your head.”

  Eviction. It was the unspoken sword of Damocles now dangling by the thinnest of threads over our family. I had begged extra shifts on the maternity ward from Head Nurse Farquar, a stout woman sometimes mistaken for being in imminent need of labor and delivery services herself. She had eyed me suspiciously. “Why this sudden desire to empty more bedpans?”

  Miscalculating her capacity for empathy, I said, “My father’s been injured and can’t work. We need the money.”

  “Your misfortune does not automatically create an increased need for your services.”

  Dr. Lodge stood near the nurses’ desk reviewing a patient’s chart, her unadorned fingers flipping expediently through the pages. She was known to be an intimidating presence on the ward and gave terrifyingly clipped responses when someone failed to perform to her exacting standards. The nurses loved to speculate on the reasons for her unmarried state, and wondered how she could be so good at diagnosis and delivery when she’d never suffered childbirth herself (though they never posed questions of this sort about the male doctors). Despite her terse manner, Dr. Lodge was the one most likely to notice my presence as I snuck into rounds, and the least likely to shoo me away.

  “Nurse Farquar,” she said without even glancing up. “I’ve observed a distinct decrease in the speed at which bedding is being changed.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Scowling and muttering about “ladies with big britches,” Nurse Farquar conceded to adding a shift to my schedule. It wasn’t anywhere near enough to make the rent, but it might put an extra bowl or two of soup in our bellies.

  “Dad,” I said now. “How did you know I wanted to go to college?”

  “You’re an unusual girl, Winnie,” he sighed. “You’re meant for unusual things.”

  8

  GERT

  We had a hunger for something more important than fame. Food.

  —George Burns, comedian, actor, and producer

  Dad was officially fired. He’d been friends with Al the foreman since they’d both started in the coal room, and Al had held Dad’s spot on the line as long as he could. Dad said the poor man had a tear in his eye when he said he’d had to replace Dad. It was just like Dad to feel sorrier for Al than for himself.

  I didn’t feel one bit sorry for Al. I felt sorry for our rumbling stomachs and chattering teeth in our freezing cold house!

  I stopped carrying my little pochette to J. J. Wiley’s, the one I’d filched out of the lost and found at school. I started hauling Mother’s cracked old leather handbag instead. It was bigger, and I needed room for the uneaten rolls and baked potatoes I snatched before the busboys could get them. One day I even got a whole sardine sandwich that hadn’t been touched, but I had to get off the trolley and eat it before I got home. The smell was making people cast their eyes around and wrinkle their noses. Besides, I was starving.

  A week into March, and still no word from Birnbaum.

  “Roy,” I said as we stood looking at the new bear exhibit at Ross Park, watching those poor confused animals try and figure out how they’d gotten into this mess. “If I asked for a loan, would you give it to me?”

  “Why, sure, sweetheart,” he said, grinning a little too widely for my taste. “What’ve you got your eye on? A new hat?”

  That smile. Like he was all too happy to have me in his debt.

  I smiled back. “Yes, but I’m not quite sure about the color yet. I’ll let you know when I decide for sure.”

  “Dinner!” Mother called. I’d smuggled two fat potatoes home, and now she served them on a platter like filet mignon. The only other dish was a small bowl of peas.

  Kit eyes gleamed like she was under a love spell. “Where’s the butter?”

  “We’re out,” Mother said coldly.

  Kit turned to me. “You couldn’t have stolen some butter, too?”

  “Why, you little brat!”

  Dad shook his head. “Now, Gert. That’s not—”

  “It’s not what?” I said. “I’ll tell you what it’s not! It’s not grateful! I risk my job to bring home something—anything—for us to eat, and the Queen of Sheba here wants butter! Well, I’m sorry, but it’s a damn sight more than anyone else here has done to feed this family!”

  Mother slapped me. Full force. Right across the face. It stung like hell, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of showing it. I couldn’t help reeling back from the blow, though. My chair tipped over and slammed to the floor like a gun going off. The baby began to wail. Kit started to cry. A few tears leaked out of Nell, too, but that was nothing new.

  With all the ruckus, we almost didn’t hear the knock at the door.

  Winnie went to answer it, and before we saw who it was we heard her gasp.

  “Mr. Birnbaum!” she said. “My goodness it’s nice to see you!” She opened the door only about a foot, her little body shielding the Turner family insane asylum from view. I picked up the chair, Kit ran a sleeve under her snotty nose, and Nell took the screeching baby upstairs.

  “Nice to see you, too,” he said. “How about inviting me in? It’s a mite cold out here.”

  Pleasantries were exchanged all around, as if everything was just the bee’s knees.

  “You all right?” he said when he shook my hand. “You’re looking a little flushed.” He eyed my reddened cheek, and then he must have noticed that the other was its usual pale color, because he didn’t wait for an answer.

  He did his didn’t-mean-to-interrupt-your-dinner routine, but of course we pulled up a chair, completely mortified at what little we had to offer. At least he didn’t take quite so long to get down to business. “So I’ve got some news.”

  In the second it took him to inhale half a breath, I thought Mother might leap across the table and grab him by those brown lapels. To be honest, I might have helped her.

  “I was able to
book you for nine weeks.”

  We looked around at one another afraid to speak for fear of shrieking. Nine weeks!

  “Now, it’s still small-time,” he warned. “It ain’t The Palace.”

  “The Palace?” Kit squealed. “We could play in England?”

  “Not Buckingham Palace,” he said. “The Palace Theatre in New York City. On a little street called Broadway—maybe you heard of it?” He shook his head. “Little girl, if you ever play there, you don’t play for the queen. You are the queen. Vaudeville royalty.

  “Now listen,” he went on. “Most of these places are more like the palace stables, so set your expectations. On the upside, I only booked Upstate New York theatres, so it’s all short jumps—you’ll never be more than a couple hours’ ride from the next place. Also, the money’ll be better.”

  “How much better?” Mother asked, almost panting.

  “I was able to negotiate a hundred a week, most places. Some a little more, some a little less.”

  It was almost ten times what Dad made stitching those stupid shoes!

  “Sounds perfectly reasonable,” I said quickly, before any of them could do something embarrassing, like hug him or cry. But even I couldn’t keep the grin from my face.

  Birnbaum smiled. “That’s my favorite part of the job, naming the number and getting a happy reaction.” His face returned to its usual scowl. “You’ll have expenses,” he warned. “Hotels, meals, train fare, freight. It all adds up, so don’t be rubes about the dough.”

  “Freight?” Winnie asked. “What are we shipping?”

  “Your trunks, of course. Costumes, props, clothes, and such—enough for nine weeks.”

  We didn’t own trunks, and only had a couple of sets of clothes each. Silence fell on the table. Dad lowered his head, face crimson with poor man’s shame. Birnbaum’s eyes cut to the dinner plates we’d all but licked clean, and then to my father.

  “Course you’ll need an advance to get started,” he said. “Only the Vanderbilts have that kind of gear lying around.” He slid his wallet from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and opened it under the table. His hand came up with a twenty-dollar bill. Mother reached for it with a hungry smile.