by Juliette Fay
He shook his head, face hard with self-loathing. “She’s dead, and you were as good as dead. I failed the two people I loved most. That’s all that matters.”
“No, you’re wrong. You did your best under horrifying circumstances. That’s what matters. The fire was not your fault, and neither was the outcome. Lucy wouldn’t have blamed you. I certainly don’t.”
He blinked at me, taking in my words. “I’ve imagined talking to you so many times, begging your forgiveness.”
“If you need my forgiveness, then it’s yours. I only wish you would’ve written, and we could have talked about it sooner.”
“I think of you every single day, Winnie. But I was certain that even if you were alive, you would despise me.”
“I don’t.” To the contrary, in the face of his profound suffering and remorse, the last vestiges of my anger dissipated. It was all I could do to keep from putting my arms around him and kissing him. Love flooded through me like water over a broken dam. It was time to leave before I started crying, too. “I wish you all the best, Joe. Sincerely, I do.” I put my hand out for him to shake. He only stared at it.
“You’re leaving?”
“Well, I . . . I’m supposed to meet Nell. She and Fred are playing Keith’s.”
“You’ll come back tomorrow, then?”
I blinked at him; my lips parted but no words came out. What was I supposed to say? Were we to be friends now? Would I soon be congratulating him on his marriage to some other, unscarred woman? I could live my life alone, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t play the kindly, slightly misshapen maiden aunt to his children.
Before I could answer, he said, “Don’t go. We’ll send word to the hotel that you’re staying with me. Mama’s asleep by now, but she’ll want to meet you in the morning.” He took my hand, and it was the best I’d felt in almost a year, since the last time he’d held it in Seattle.
His apartment was only a few blocks away, and we were soon climbing the stairs and entering a small hallway. He led me into a parlor crowded with dark-legged furniture: a settee with faded green velvet fabric, a rocking chair with wide arms and a padded leather seat, a high buffet and mirror carved with scrolling woodwork. It smelled faintly of cooked meat and furniture wax, and there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. “She cleans,” he said. “It helps.” He gestured for me to join him on the settee, but I chose the rocking chair instead.
“Did you ever pay off the land?” I asked. “Where was it—not far from here, right?”
“Yes, it’s all mine. It’s about twenty miles west, in a little town called Belham. I take the train every Sunday to work in the garden and check on the building. I bought a house from Sears. The kit came a couple of weeks ago, and some carpenters are putting it together for me.”
“A house! Will you live there? What about your mother?”
“She’s sick of it here. “The memories exhaust me,’ she says. And what about you?” He seemed to be treading lightly. “What have you been doing?”
I told him about going back to school, working hard to graduate. He smiled broadly and said, “I’m so proud of you, Winnie.” It nearly broke my heart, that smile, and I tried to steel myself against it, to keep the avalanche of feelings from burying me. I’ll go to Nell’s hotel tomorrow and have a good hard cry, I told myself.
We sat in silence for a moment, and he said quietly, “Your dress, it’s very . . .”
Dowdy, I thought. Like someone’s mother.
“. . . warm for July,” he said.
“It hides my scars.”
“I want to see them.”
I almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. No one wanted to see my scars. My own family could barely stand the sight of them. “Trust me, you don’t,” I said.
He rolled up his long sleeves and raised his arms as if he were cradling someone in front of him. In fact, he had been cradling someone in front of him, but he hadn’t known at the time that she was already past saving. His forearms were mottled with a patchwork of melted skin.
“Oh, Joe,” I whispered.
“Now you.”
I tugged at the left side of my high collar and pulled back my hair, which I grew to my shoulders now, no longer cutely bobbed as when he’d last seen me. The scars ran from the hairline behind my ear into the secrecy of my dress, down my shoulder to my elbow.
“Come sit beside me,” he said.
If he touches me, my heart will break into a thousand pieces, I thought, but I went anyway, like Anne Boleyn to the guillotine.
“I want to see them all.”
“No,” I said.
“Winnie, tesoro, I need to see what happened to you.” Slowly, he undid the buttons and pulled the dress down until it was around my waist with only my thin camisole to cover me.
“Oh,” he breathed as he studied my shoulder and back. “Oh, Winnie, the pain must have been terrible!” He traced a finger down my arm. “Can you feel this?”
“A little, but not very well.”
He cupped my cheeks in his hands. “I wish I had been there to comfort you.”
“I missed you so much,” I whispered, and my tears leaked down over his thumbs.
“I missed you, my beautiful Winnie.”
“Not so beautiful anymore.”
He leaned forward and kissed my cheeks and lips, and then gently, tenderly, he kissed my scarred shoulder. He raised his gaze to mine, firm and serious. “To me, even more beautiful.”
He went briefly to a neighbor’s house to use their phone and leave word at Nell’s hotel that I would meet her in the morning. We stayed up all night talking, shedding tears when the wrenching pain of the past year reared up through our words. We understood each other’s devastation like no one else could, and the very fact of releasing it from the dark and broken corners of our hearts provided a relief neither of us had thought possible. As we nestled on the settee with the faded green velvet cushions, I felt myself healing.
I left Boston with promises to write and visit soon.
When I got home, a letter awaited me, but this one wasn’t from Joe.
Mother was the only one who was surprised that I was accepted into college—mainly because she was the only one who was surprised to learn that I had any interest in it to begin with. “Winnie Turner, you are no more going to college than I am going to ride in an airplane.”
It was the heart of the summer, when many big-time acts avoided the stiflingly hot theatres, so Nell and Fred had a week off between tours. He’d gone back to Buffalo to see his family, including April, who after a year of unexplained wandering had eventually made her way home. She had been right; they had taken her back.
Nell, Mother, and little Harry had come to visit us in Johnson City.
“Mother, she has to go,” Nell said, passing the plate of meat loaf across the kitchen table at dinner that night. “This is Winnie’s dream.”
“Dream, my foot! It’s the biggest waste of time and money I can think of, even if she were a boy, which she isn’t. What’s next,” she scoffed, “letting her run for mayor?”
“I got a partial scholarship,” I said. “We wouldn’t have to pay the entire tuition.”
“No, no, and no.” Mother spread a knife-load of butter over her bread. “We’ve all worked so hard to get this family back on track, and I won’t let you derail us with this little flight of fancy. Now that’s an end to it.”
With help from Nell and Gert, I had cobbled together the money for the first semester. But at nineteen years old, I had never before set out to do anything my mother had explicitly forbidden me to do. Could she stop me? Might it splinter the family if I were to disregard her wishes so completely?
“She’s going.” Dad’s voice was quiet but clear.
Mother let out a derisive snort. “Well, I like that! The person with the least means to send her says it’s just fine and dandy if she goes.”
“She’s got the money, and she’s going.”
Mother put her hands flat
on the table, eyes narrowed at Dad. “She’s not.”
The air fairly crackled with her fury, and my mind darted to devise a solution, some way I could convince her, or possibly go without her knowing . . .
Dad suddenly stood, the feet of his chair screeching in protest against the floorboards. He picked up his plate, and I thought he might take it out to the porch to finish his meal in peace. The plate hovered a moment in the air, and then he simply let it fall so that it crashed down onto the table, breaking into pieces, mashed potatoes splattering across our place settings.
“She’s going, Ethel. And neither you nor anyone else will stop her.”
44
GERT
I am not sorry. I will tell anybody that, and it is the truth.
I lived the way I wanted and never did what people said
I should do or advised me to do.
—Fanny Brice, comedian and singer
I lied about the money, but I knew Winnie would’ve turned it down flat if she knew it took three months to make enough for her tuition instead of three weeks. Leg shows don’t pay like vaudeville, even if you are the featured girl.
I didn’t start out like that. I’d asked Nils for anything but onstage, and that’s just what I did for two months, until well after Winnie went back to Johnson City last December. So I never lied to her face, only to the paper I wrote my letters on after she left.
The funny thing was, the first question Nils asked me was whether I had a high school diploma, because if I did, he’d give me a job in his secretarial pool.
Oh, this is rich, I thought. Someday I’ll tell Winnie and we’ll have a good laugh over it.
There were three of us girls in the “pool,” but we didn’t have time to talk or be friendly. It turns out running a string of burlesque houses takes an awful lot of paperwork. We never had a moment to breathe. It was my worst nightmare, showing daily. I even had to go out and buy a high-collar shirtwaist and long skirt with my first paycheck—no new fashions allowed!
On top of everything, the money was peanuts. I was never going to get out of that filthy boardinghouse if I stayed in the pool. Every night I sat in my cramped little room and lifted a dictionary over and over with my bad arm, working the muscles, gaining my strength back.
I tried to get in with a new vaudeville act, but I couldn’t find any acrobats who needed another girl, and tumbling is really all I know. I can’t sing or eat fire. I can’t do impressions or regurgitate a fish. All that time I would’ve given anything to get away from my family, and now I’d give anything to be working with them again instead of shaking for a living.
I hate burlesque. I started in February and swore to myself I’d bank up some dough and be out in six months. But then Winnie got into college, and I couldn’t let her down. I shudder to imagine what Tip would think. He wouldn’t even black up, for cripes’ sake.
With any luck it won’t be long, though. Last week the craziest thing happened.
We’d closed the show, put our clothes back on, and were all filing out into the alley as usual. I ignored the stage-door johnnies—I wasn’t interested in free drinks anymore. It was cold for October, even in Fresno, and I just wanted to go back to my shabby little hotel room and sleep. But at the far end of the alley by the street, a small man with wispy hair leaned against the brick wall. In a brown suit.
I stopped dead in my tracks, mortified at being found out.
“Hungry?” he said.
I wasn’t, but I knew he was. Birnbaum was always hungry.
“Now don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “You ain’t the first girl to get her paycheck however she can. Let’s get a bite and see what we can work out.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I know people.” He took my arm and steered me to a little diner down the street. “Besides, your mother was worried that maybe your chorus line was no Ziegfeld Follies. When that woman gets an idea in her head she’s like a dog with a bone. She gets a look, and I don’t care if you’re Geronimo himself, your knees start knocking. You know that look?”
“Oh yes,” I said with a chuckle. “I’m familiar.”
The waitress came by, slow and slack-eyed. It was 2 a.m., and I knew how tired she must be. “Reubens and coffee for both of us,” he told her. “And get yourself a cup while you’re at it.”
He turned back to me. “Now, listen. What do you want to do? You want to stay in burlesque, fine by me, it’s our little secret. You want to go back to vaudeville, I’ll see what I can find. But I gotta warn you, it’s starting to get scarce out there. Flickers are getting better all the time, and they say it won’t be long before they have sound, too. Someday soon you’ll be able to see a whole vaudeville show just by running a film projector. Radio stations are starting to play music and entertainment. Why would people go out and pay for a show when they can stay home and listen for free?” The waitress brought over the coffee, and he took a giant slurp.
“What about you?” I said. “What are you going to do if vaudeville goes belly-up?”
“It’s already in the works. I’m going to go to Hollywood and be an agent for all those flicker actors. I got the skills and contacts. Just need to get things nailed down.”
I had to smile. He and Mother had one thing in common: they always had an eye out for the next scheme.
He wagged a finger at me. “That’s where you should be.”
I’d thought of this, of course. But it was a dicey game. Burlesque was jam-packed with girls who’d tried and failed. “You think I could make it?”
He gazed at me a moment. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think I’m looking at a girl whose act stunk when I first took it on. And in less than a year, it was high class and headlining in the big time. I’m looking at a girl who’s smart enough to spot an opportunity when it comes her way and make the most of it. So yes, if I had to lay money, I’d say you could make it.”
It was the most hopeful I’d felt in a year, since the fire. I could have kissed the man. “You want to be my agent?” I said with a smile. “Again?”
“I do, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I gotta get out to Hollywood and set up shop. Can you hang in there a month or two more, till I can get some traction? Even then it’s not a sure thing, of course. There’s no guarantees in life, and in showbiz even fewer.”
I nodded and tried not to burst with gratitude. “For you, Mr. Birnbaum, I can wait.”
His pale cheeks colored, and his grin went sheepish. “Ah, call me Morty.”
EPILOGUE
WINNIE
You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
—Al Jolson, actor, singer, and minstrel
NOVEMBER 1920
Tower Court is the nicest place I’ve ever lived for more than a week. The great room is two stories high, and there are floor-to-ceiling lead glass windows that look out over the pond. I like to sit on the high-backed cushioned benches by the fireplace and do my homework. My roommate, Miss Olive Ann Greenbridge of the Huntington Bay Greenbridges, can’t study with anyone else around. She’s easily distracted, and she isn’t used to sharing a room, which she announced quite matter-of-factly when I met her on my first day here at Wellesley College.
Lucky me, I thought.
Actually, I am lucky. I can read a book in the midst of people rehearsing their songs or knockabout routines, with wild animals or drunken performers wandering by. And I definitely know how to share.
On Saturday mornings I get up early and take a trolley west to Natick and another north into Belham to see Joe and Signora Cole. She didn’t like me at first, no matter how hard I tried.
“An Italian mother never thinks any woman is good enough for her son. The fact that you’re not italiana only makes it worse,” Joe explained as he helped me move into my dorm room in September. “The way Mama sees it, if she accepts you right away, it means I’m not worth very much, which would be an insult to her motherhood.”
“So if I understand correctly,” I said, “to like me
is to insult herself.”
Joe laughed. “Exactly. But she’s a reasonable person—”
“Oh yes, that sounds entirely reasonable.”
“You can’t see it now, but you will. She’s smart and independent herself, and even though she doesn’t like you, she respects you, which bothers her, and makes her like you less. But if you don’t try so hard to make her like you, she will respect you even more, and the respect will win out, and she’ll like you despite herself.”
“I can only imagine what she thinks about my going to college.”
“Oh, she hates it! But—”
“Don’t tell me.” I put up my hand. “She hates it, but she respects me because it’s smart and independent, and because I continue to go even though she disapproves.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Ah, Winnie, tesoro! I love you so much.”
“I suppose I must love you, too,” I said. “Otherwise I’d run screaming from the premises.”
Strangely, Signora Cole’s dislike is proving be a wonderful gift. The only way I can even hope to make her like me is to stop trying to make her like me, and to go on being smart and independent. So that’s what I’m doing. It isn’t even very hard.
In fact, I enjoy it.
Today the sky hangs heavy with pewter gray clouds as the trolley car shudders along the tracks. Snow’s coming, I think, and it’s about time. In Upstate New York they’ve got half a foot already. I tug my cloche down over my ears and reach a mittened hand into the pocket of my coat. I reread Nell’s letter so I can get all the details right when I tell the story to Joe.
November 12, 1920
Winnie Dear,
I’ve been thinking of you and hoping everything’s going well at school. I’m sure you’ll make the most of your classes, and not get too distracted by Joe living only two towns away. There’s plenty of time for all of that.