The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

“What an offer! Thanks for turning him down.”

  Joe grinned. “Who says I turned him down? That was a beautiful piece of fish he had!”

  I fell in love with that city. Not only with the buildings and the views and the variation of people, but with the pioneer spirit Seattleites seemed to have in their very marrow. The city was the jumping-off spot for gold prospectors headed for the Klondike, purchasing tools and supplies before chancing everything in the wilds of Alaska. They were risk takers, willing to adjust the boundaries of tradition in order to reach for something more, something bigger. The University of Washington admitted women, and I daydreamed about taking classes there someday.

  “Could you ever see yourself living here?” We were eating grilled Alaskan halibut and Dungeness crab legs at the Athenian luncheonette in Pike Place Market, with its grand view of the sound and the boats twinkling like pearls on the dark water.

  “I could live here in a minute,” he said. “But I’d have to convince Mama and Lucy to come. They’re my responsibility—I could never move so far away without them.”

  “Would they agree to it?”

  He considered this as he gazed out over the water. “I think they might. Mama writes that Boston stinks of molasses, even after ten months, and it gives her nightmares of drowning.”

  A prickle ran up my spine, as it often did when I thought of such a gruesome death, the tarry substance clogging the poor man’s nose and mouth, the terror he must have felt. I wondered if there could be any worse way to die.

  We played the Moore Theatre, which was relatively plain on the outside, but filled with marble, onyx, gleaming wood, and stained glass inside. We had the coveted last-before-intermission spot, right after Lucy and Joe, and audiences were very enthusiastic. The headliner was a buxom woman named Trixie Friganza, who sang and told jokes about her ample size.

  “The way for a fat woman to do the shimmy,” she told the audience on the first night, “is to walk fast and stop short.” They loved her.

  Unfortunately for her—and wildly fortunate for us—by Thursday, she’d caught a terrible cold and could barely be heard from three feet away, much less from up in the gallery. The theatre manager, Mr. Cort, didn’t waste a moment fretting about his lost headliner. “Trinket Sisters!” he yelled. (That name didn’t always work out quite as Mother had planned.) “Trinkets, you’re headlining!”

  Headlining—at a big-time vaudeville house!

  And as if that weren’t enough, Birnbaum called the next day to say that Keith-Albee wanted us back on the East Coast, “in the city.” There was only one city to vaudevillians, and that was New York. “You’ve got a shot at The Palace,” he said. “You’re laying them out in Seattle. If you can do as well in other theatres in the city, they’ll get you in. Maybe you’ll open, or even close. But once you can say you played The Palace, you can play anywhere, ladies. Anywhere. It’s the keys to the kingdom.”

  That Thursday night we tumbled like we were invincible.

  In the middle of the night, a city clothes itself in secrecy. The daytime people in their beds never know about the lovers, the criminals, the homeless, or the hopeless who move through the streets or crouch in doorways or under bridges. The daytime buzz of industry and industriousness downshifts to a wandering, desultory hum, and you can imagine things you might not have considered in the noise of the day.

  “So it’s settled, then. When we make all the money we need, we’ll move to Seattle.” Joe and I walked along Alaskan Way, listening to the waves slap against the wharf pilings. I was still enjoying the intoxicating bliss of having headlined my first show.

  “Absolutely.” His big, warm hand clasped mine a little tighter, a squeeze that meant he knew it was a fantasy, but one that might someday come true. “You say the word, and Seattle’s our home.”

  I squeezed back. “Don’t make fun. It could happen.”

  He stopped and pulled me into a loose embrace, head tipped down to look at me. “Winnie, tesoro, if you make up your mind for it to happen, I have no doubt that it will.” Tesoro. I was his treasure.

  Suddenly a siren sounded, a low groan that quickly accelerated to a worrisome wail.

  “Hope it’s nothing serious,” said Joe.

  “Maybe one of the canneries,” I said. “Fish oil is pretty flammable.”

  We listened as another siren started up. “It’s not down here on the waterfront,” he said. “It’s coming from up the hill.”

  We looked at each other for a beat and, without another word, we began walking and then running up Madison, the screeching sirens growing louder and more insistent as we crossed First Avenue, then Second, terror rising as we saw the smoke billowing up just a few blocks farther where the Lincoln Hotel stood.

  The sidewalks were filling with dazed lodgers in nightgowns and nightshirts, and Joe and I scanned them desperately. “Lucy!” Joe began to bellow, and I called my mother’s and sisters’ names, too, but no one responded to allay our worst fears.

  Firefighters were trying to keep the crowd away from the building, but in the confusion we were able to make our way to one of the side doors of the hotel. We saw no flames, only smoke. “I’m going in,” said Joe.

  “They won’t let you!”

  “No one’s here to stop me,” he said. “Stay right here, I’ll get them all.” He ran up the short steps and into the building.

  How could he get them all? But what if they needed help? I saw their faces in my mind: Lucy, Gert, Kit, Nell, Harry, Mother . . . What if they couldn’t make it out on their own? He couldn’t carry them all.

  Panic will make a person do any number of instinctive things: scream, faint, run away.

  I ran into the building.

  People rushed toward me through the smoke, almost knocking me back down the stairs several times, and it felt like it took forever to reach the third floor. I had to feel for the room doors and could barely make out the numbers as I made my way down the hallway against the tide of the terrified running for their lives.

  “Lucy!”

  I followed Joe’s voice into the next open doorway. He was crouched over the first bed, screaming her name. Kit was sitting on the floor next to her, blinking against the smoke filling the room.

  “Kit! Get up!” I yelled, tugging at her. She was dazed, and I slapped her cheek to get her to look at me.

  “I tried to carry her,” she mumbled as I got her to her feet. “I didn’t want to leave her.”

  “Where’s Gert?” I pushed Kit toward the hallway. I hadn’t been able to see far enough into the room to know if Gert was in the bed by the window. “Did she come back to the room?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Follow the people out,” I told her. “Don’t stop until you get outside! Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.” I guided her into the exodus and then she was gone.

  The pounding of running steps and cries of distress were joined by another sound, a sort of rumble, as if the building itself were quaking in fear.

  I turned back into the room. Joe had Lucy in his arms. “She won’t wake up!” he wailed.

  “Get her out! I’m going to check for Gert, and then Nell and Mother. Go—I’ll be right behind you!”

  “Come with me!”

  “No, I have to make sure about the others!”

  The smoke grew thicker as I felt my way across the room. “Gert!” I screamed. “Gert!” But no one answered. My knees hit the bed and I leaned over to sweep my arms across it.

  Empty, thank God.

  I turned to make my way back to the door, and the rumbling sound suddenly burst into an angry roar. Flames shot through the doorway, and a blast of heat hit my face. I stumbled back toward the window, tugged the heavy drapes apart, and struggled as the sash resisted my efforts to open it. I was about to break the glass, desperate for fresh air, when the wood relented and the window went up with a bang.

  The scene below was mayhem, people scattering, calling for one another, the fire brigade in their heav
y coats and helmets running here and there, a swarm of them holding out a round net below someone else’s window.

  “Winnie!”

  I heard her thundering scream, and it was like cool water on my baking nerves.

  Another boom of destruction behind me and I could feel the heat crawl closer. I looked back to see Kit’s and Lucy’s bed erupt in flames.

  “Winnie, jump!”

  It was three tall floors. My addled brain began to calculate . . . if I lived . . . if I lived I would break my legs . . . there would be internal injuries . . . hemorrhaging . . .

  “Winnie, I’ll catch you!”

  The fire was closing in, crawling toward me, voraciously swallowing everything in its path: the plush carpet, the upholstered chairs, the wardrobe trunks where we’d hurriedly tossed our satin costumes after the show, my first aid book on the bedside table . . .

  She screamed my name again, a banshee’s wail slicing through the cacophony of sounds.

  Fire climbed the heavy curtain to my right, leapt to my shoulder, and sunk its teeth in.

  I focused on her face, and jumped.

  40

  GERT

  If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly . . . very slowly.

  —Gypsy Rose Lee, dancer, actress, novelist, and stripper

  The night I met Nils Magnusson, I was utterly exhausted and completely happy for the first time in months.

  Headlining!

  For one glittering night, the Tumbling Turner Sisters (it’s how I’ll always think of us) were the stars of the show. I can still feel the Moore Theatre’s dusty boards beneath my hands as I sprang out onto the stage that night, can still see my sisters’ jittery brightness as we did our joke sketches, lines firing back and forth like a game of tag, you’re it.

  We were “it,” all right. The most “it” we’d ever been.

  Applause roared toward us like an oncoming locomotive.

  Afterward I could barely stand up, I was so wrung out from effort and nerves and happiness. I never knew how exhausting happiness could be. Come to think of it, at the time I didn’t know just how exhausting unhappiness could be, either.

  After the show, Nell took Harry and the younger girls back to the Lincoln, and Joe and Winnie wandered away without a word, as usual. Mother said she was taking “soup” to Trixie Friganza at her hotel, but where she might have found soup at midnight, I won’t even bother to guess. Mother was always tagging after the headliner, even one who wasn’t actually headlining at the moment.

  After changing my clothes, washing the heavy greasepaint from my face, and applying a light coat of evening makeup, I headed down the block to the Virginia Inn, a little tavern where I could get someone to buy me a drink without much effort in return. The men there were regular fellows, not the types to press for too much attention.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t pay for my own drinks. I could have bought a round for everyone in the place if I’d wanted. But where was the fun in that, if I could get them for free?

  “What’ll you have, miss?” The bartender was so skinny he looked as if a stiff breeze through his handlebar mustache might knock him over.

  “I haven’t quite decided yet,” I said. Sometimes it took a couple of minutes for one of the fellows to get up the gumption to offer. I bided my time, gazing at the shiny oak bar, replaying our star turn in my head.

  We’re on the rise, I thought, smiling secretly to myself. We can go anywhere! Visions of headlining bigger and better theatres, meeting fascinating people, and traveling to high-flying places like New York City or maybe even London twirled in my brain.

  Suddenly a flute of champagne slid in front of me. “Compliments of Mr. Magnusson,” said the bartender, tipping his handlebars toward a group of men seated at a small table across the room. I raised the flute in their direction and aimed a smile of surprised and innocent gratitude, happy that I wouldn’t even have to talk to them.

  When I ordered for myself, I generally had a Manhattan. I liked the clash of muscular whiskey and girlish maraschino cherry, which also served as a terribly wicked prop. Holding it high by the stem and lowering it to your lips put a burst of color in even the soberest man’s cheeks. The champagne was delicious, though, strangely smooth, yet pulsing with bubbles, and I felt my eyes brighten and weariness fade.

  “Like that, do you?” said the bartender. “You oughta. It’s a Bollinger. Most expensive bottle in the house.”

  Before I took the last sip, another flute appeared, and shortly after that, so did Nils. The bartender glared at the man seated next to me. Without a word, he slid off the bar stool and disappeared to some other corner of the tavern. Then Nils was there, his smooth gray pinstriped sleeve an inch away from my bare arm.

  “Actress?” he said, voice as smooth as his sleeve.

  “Acrobat,” I said.

  “Vaudeville?”

  I smiled. “Headliner.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “I might have guessed.”

  We flirted and drank. His eyes lit with interest. I thought of Nat and Benny saying Swedes were so quiet and hardworking they were like shovels. Nils was no shovel.

  He was a businessman, he said. Later it came out that he owned the Gaiety Theatre a few blocks from my hotel. “It’s burlesque,” he said simply, with neither pride nor shame.

  “I’ve never seen burlesque.”

  He took a pocket watch the size of a beer coaster from his vest pocket. “We’re just in time for the last show.” He laid crisp bills from his money clip onto the bar, stepped to the tile floor, and held out his elbow to me.

  It was the most interesting thing that had happened in months, so I took it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Magnusson!” the barman called as we reached the door. “Thank you kindly!”

  The Gaiety was huge but without the luxury of big-time vaudeville. The carpets were worn, the walls had no decoration. Once we stepped inside the darkened theatre, though, it looked like any opera house, and the show seemed like just another vaudeville bill, with singers and comedians and the like.

  I’ll admit the jokes were bawdier. Apparently burlesque doesn’t have blue envelopes. “In India, when a man dies, forty girls dance nude around him for forty days. If he doesn’t get up, they know damn well he’s dead!”

  It wasn’t until the headliner that the show went for the truly risqué.

  When the curtain pulled back, ten chorus girls in long red satin skirts and high-collared red blouses stood swaying in time to the music. They had little red caps with devil horns sticking out of them, and when they turned around, there were red feather tails attached to their backsides. They swished those tails, hips popping back and forth, and the audience clapped and stomped their feet like in vaudeville. But there was another sound, too, one I’d never heard in a theatre before, a low sort of growl like a pack of dogs all wanting the same bone.

  The band struck up a familiar song: “On the Level, You’re a Little Devil, but I’ll Soon Make an Angel Out of You.” The featured singer made her entrance and swooped among the she-devils in a shimmering long white dress with gauzy white wings attached to her arms.

  Her voice was awful, but then the devils began to take off their blouses and long skirts, opening them coyly, lowering them slowly, swinging their hips and jiggling their shoulders, revealing red bras and tight shorts. The growl got louder, punctuated by hoots and wolf whistles. It was clear that the mostly male audience wasn’t there for the music.

  I’ll admit I was fascinated. I’d always heard burlesque was a dirty business, but this didn’t seem so bad, and the hunger of the men around me had a thrilling dangerousness about it.

  The singer wound around the chorus girls, gliding her wings in front of each one’s chest, and when she moved on, the girl had undone her bra and dropped it to the floor, bare breasts right there for all to see! The ripple of sound around me swelled, and from the corners of my eyes, I could see a flutter of motion. Some of the men had newspapers across their laps, but the
papers were moving, jumping up and down . . . They were . . . In public, for godsake!

  “I have to leave,” I told Nils as I got up and pushed past him to the aisle. “It’s late and my mother will have the police out after me if I don’t get back to the hotel.”

  “Gert, don’t go—”

  I practically sprinted for the theatre doors, out to the street, where the night was cool and fairly quiet, and I could try and put the sound of those rattling newspapers out of my mind.

  Suddenly the blare of a different sound made the hair go up on the back of my neck: sirens. Fire engines rattled past me, blowing street dust into my dress and face. I shielded my eyes and began to walk the few blocks to our hotel. I couldn’t wait to get back to our room and slip into bed with Winnie, hoping by morning the burlesque show would seem like just a very strange dream.

  Then I realized that the trucks clogged the street right in front of the Lincoln.

  I began to run—away from the Gaiety, toward the far more alarming sight of people streaming out of the hotel in their nightclothes and the sounds of screams above the sirens. By the time I got there, firemen had herded people away from the building. I tried to slip by them, but a thick hand caught my arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “My mother and sisters are in there!”

  “They’re probably out by now.” His helmet was low over his brow, and I couldn’t see his eyes to know if he was lying. “Besides, you can’t go in—the building’s about to go.”

  I ran through the crowd, desperate to catch sight of my family through the smoke and terror-struck faces. “Nell!” I screamed. “Winnie! Kit!”

  “Gert!” It was Nell, holding the baby inside her coat. Mother stood with her in just a shirtwaist and skirt, without a coat, hat, or even any shoes on.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” cried Nell. “The baby was croupy and I came out to walk him in the cool air—”

  “I was in Trixie’s hotel room down the block,” said Mother, looking pale and shaken. “I ran up here when I heard the sirens. Sweet Jesus, Gert, if they’re not with you . . .”