The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

  I have a funny story to tell you. A couple of nights ago, Fred and I were in the middle of our act, and who comes toddling out onto the stage but your naughty nephew. Apparently Mother was chatting with the ventriloquist and took her eye off Harry for a moment.

  He hit the boards calling, “Mama! Mama!” And what could I do? I scooped him up, turned to Fred, and said, “I guess there’s something I should tell you.” Fred made a great show of shock, and the audience howled with laughter. Then my little scalawag reached out, saying, “Fed!” That’s what he calls Fred because he can’t say his Rs yet.

  That scoundrel took the baby into his arms, got down on one knee, and said, “Well then, I guess there’s something I should ask you. Will you marry me?” A gasp went up in the house as they waited for my answer.

  Well, I was more than a little caught off guard. But the answer I felt in my heart was yes. Yes! He’s a good, kind man, he loves my boy, and we’ve gotten so close traveling together these past eighteen months. He’s been patient enough to let our bond grow over time.

  But this is vaudeville and we were in the middle of a show. I made my eyes go wide with surprise (which was hardly an act) and then broke into a big smile. “I guess I’d better!” I said, and the roof nearly came off the place, with all the hollering and clapping and foot stomping.

  We’ve had to change the act, of course. It’s a marriage gag now, and at the right moment, Mother sends little Harry running onstage. It slays them every time.

  We’ll take our vows in the city at Christmastime, and I hope you’ll be there with Joe and his mother, if she wishes to come. New York is so beautiful all dressed up for the holidays.

  I’m glad to hear Joe was able to pay off his father’s land and build a little house there. That must be nice for him, knowing his father would be happy. And how wonderful that he’s kept up his piano playing, too—at a little speakeasy called The Palace, no less! Lucy must be smiling down from heaven, knowing her big brother finally got to “play The Palace.”

  It’s funny how much we care about what the dead might say if they could see us now. Harry would be so surprised to see me onstage. That’s not at all who I was when I was married to him. But I think he would be glad for my happiness. He was so generous that way.

  Yes, don’t worry, I voted and I wore white. I’m just sorry you weren’t old enough to join me. Two more years, and you’ll be making full use of the Nineteenth Amendment, too.

  All my love,

  Nell

  I tuck the letter back into my pocket and smile all over again, happiness for her warming me against the bitter gusts that blow through the trolley when the doors open at each stop. It certainly is a different life than she would’ve had with dear Harry, but a good one, if a bit out of the ordinary. I ponder this as the trolley makes its way through the village of Cochituate, past the churches and shops and the neat little houses. An ordinary life.

  My parents began their marriage in the usual way, living under the same roof, my father going off to work each day, my mother cleaning and cooking and wagging her finger at us girls. They never seemed to suffer from an excess of happiness. And now Dad still goes to work, but he takes more time to fuss over Kit, and he can play his Enrico Caruso records as loudly as he likes. Mother is in as near a blissful state as I’ve ever known her to be, living in the larger-than-life world of big-time vaudeville. Her letters always include boasts and complaints about one thing and another, but that’s just Mother, finally content.

  Someday soon, Joe and I will have a conversation about life and its variations on “ordinary.” I can sense that he wants to get on with things. The thought of it fills me with hope and dread in equal measure, as I try to imagine how his dreams might coexist with mine.

  Gert’s letter came the day after Nell’s, but I don’t carry it with me. I don’t want Joe to see it—he wouldn’t be able to read between the lines, to understand how much she cares for us both. Besides it’s short and I know it by heart.

  November 14, 1920

  Winnie,

  You’re really beginning to annoy me. Stop fussing about whether I can afford your tuition! Like the old guys taught us, vaudevillians help vaudevillians. No matter where we go or what we become, that will always be a part of who we are. Besides, I like thinking about you sitting in some viney old building, using three-dollar words with people who actually understand them. Or care.

  Just do me one favor. I like Joe, you know I do. But don’t let him get in the way of your future. Maybe he’ll be part of it, or maybe he won’t. Either way, don’t black up for other people’s comfort.

  Tell Nell I’m sorry I can’t make it to the wedding. She’ll understand. She knows the business.

  Gert

  PS: Miss you, too.

  Joe waits for me at the trolley stop on Old Connecticut Path, as he does every Saturday morning. I notice that his coat is getting a little tight around the shoulders, now that he spends his days working the land instead of sitting around dim backstage areas, waiting to tickle the ivories for twelve minutes.

  He pulls me into a snug embrace, kisses me, and says, “Mama says to tell you she made biscotti with the pistachios, the way you like it.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “That’s very sweet of her.”

  “Just as you deserve. Now, how did you do on that biology test?”

  I smile coyly.

  “You aced it!” He grins. “I knew you would.”

  As we walk down the road, the treetops sway in a little soft shoe, and the weak morning sun illuminates a velvet curtain of clouds like a footlight.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Vaudeville is dead, but it’s always had a mighty lively corpse.

  —Unknown

  One of the criteria I used for where the Turner Sisters would perform was that the vaudeville houses had to remain in existence today. This proved quite a challenge, since the vast majority of theatres, no matter how opulent, fell into disuse and were demolished. Of those mentioned in this novel, some have been turned into movie theatres, but many have been restored to their original grandeur, and now host music, plays, and comedy acts. Please visit them! If not currently known by the name used in 1919, I’ve listed them below to make them easier to find:

  • Cuba, New York—The Keller Opera House is now known by its original name, the Palmer Opera House. The original owner, Mr. Palmer, lost it in a poker game to Mr. H. E. Keller sometime in the early 1900s.

  • Hamilton, New York—The Sheldon Opera House is now the Hamilton Movie Theatre.

  • Sackets Harbor, New York—The International Order of Odd Fellows Hall is now the Lake Ontario Playhouse.

  • Walton, New York—The Walton Opera House is now the Walton Theatre.

  Opera houses only occasionally hosted actual operas. It was just another word for theatre. The cities listed on the Tumbling Turners’ big-time tours also have vaudeville houses that exist today. The hotels and restaurants all existed, as well, though most are now long gone.

  The Cahn-Leighton Official Theatrical Guide of 1913–14 was my bible of details about each theatre. Unfortunately no edition was published for 1919, so I operated under the assumption that information regarding stage dimensions, number of seats, dressing rooms, etc., was likely to remain stable. They have often changed dramatically since then, however. For instance, the Ohmann Theatre in Lyons, New York, was listed as having four dressing rooms, but they’ve somehow disappeared. The current manager suspects they were along the back of the house and later removed. For each location, I used the actual name of the theatre manager listed in the guide, and invented personal traits.

  In the spirit of theft that permeated vaudeville, all of the comedy sketches in the novel are based on those of real vaudeville acts. Yes, they were that corny!

  The quotes at the beginning of each chapter are from vaudeville performers, though readers today may know them from subsequent work in radio, TV, and movies. The one exception is Lillian Gish, who was a stage and film actr
ess. Helen Keller, along with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, began her vaudeville career at The Palace in New York City in 1920. Her act, “The Star of Happiness,” displayed her ability to understand spoken language by putting her hand on her teacher’s lips, and respond to questions from the audience, showcasing her extraordinary intelligence and wit. Her act was instrumental in changing the prevailing sentiment that blind and deaf children should be institutionalized rather than taught.

  The three-hour silent film The Birth of a Nation was hugely successful and horrifyingly racist (it was hard to sit through), and did in fact spark a major resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Harvard’s chapter of the KKK began in 1921, not 1919 as stated in the story, but I thought the fact was so interesting and appalling that I moved up the date so I could include it. The film’s writer/director/producer, D. W. Griffith, was the son of a Confederate Army general, and believed deeply in the story. It’s said that leading lady Lillian Gish denied the film’s racism to her death in 1993 at the age of ninety-nine.

  Archie Leach was fifteen years old in 1919, and was a member of the Bob Pender Troupe, as indicated in the novel. However, the troupe didn’t come to America until 1920. In 1932, he changed his name to Cary Grant, and though he often used his acrobatic skills and performed many of his own stunts in movies, he was better known for his charm and sophistication than for his ability to do a pratfall. As he later became one of the most successful actors of all time, Gert’s estimation that he would never amount to much certainly proved incorrect.

  Women’s suffrage, the right of all women to vote in federal elections, was ratified by three quarters of the state legislatures, and was thus encoded in federal law on August 26, 1920. It almost didn’t happen. After a summer of intense debate, Tennessee, the last state needed to ratify, took its vote on August 18, and passed by only a one-vote margin. The surprise aye vote was twenty-four-year-old Harry Burn, who had been squarely in the antisuffrage camp. That morning he’d received a note from his mother imploring him to “be a good boy” and vote in favor. He enraged his antisuffrage colleagues by changing his vote—and history. He later defended himself by stating, “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow.”

  Margaret Sanger was a nurse who worked with the teeming immigrant population in New York City’s Lower East Side. After watching her own mother die from the strain of eighteen pregnancies, she dedicated her life to the legalization of birth control, a term she coined in 1914. She opened the country’s first pregnancy prevention clinic in 1916, for which she was promptly arrested.

  On January 15, 1919, a five-story, 2.3-million-gallon metal tank on the shore of Boston’s North End split open. A wave of molasses reported to be 15 feet high and 160 feet wide came crashing down Commercial Street, destroying everything in its path, killing 21 people and injuring about 150 others. At first it was thought to be an act of sabotage by anarchists, but it was eventually determined that shoddy construction was the cause, and years later the owners were made to pay compensation to the victims’ families.

  Why was there such an enormous tank of molasses on the Boston waterfront, you may ask? Molasses can be fermented to create ethanol, or drinking alcohol—most commonly in the form of rum—and in the last days before Prohibition, companies were anxious to make and sell as much alcohol as possible. It can also be used to make industrial alcohol, a necessary ingredient for certain kinds of explosives, which was particularly important during the recently concluded Great War.

  The fire that broke out at the luxurious Lincoln Hotel in Seattle, Washington, actually happened on April 7, 1920, six months later than in the novel. It began in the basement a little after midnight and spread rapidly up through the building. The elevators stopped working, and over three hundred guests fled by means of stairs, external fire escapes, and fire engine ladders, and some were even lowered by ropes. Four people—a father and daughter, a young woman, and a firefighter—lost their lives in the blaze. The man and his daughter jumped to their deaths from the sixth floor. Afterward, the fire marshal said his department had considered the place a firetrap since its construction in 1899, “a lumber yard with four brick walls around it.” This inspired closer scrutiny of the city’s hotels to make sure they complied with the fire code.

  Ethel Turner’s fear of fire is spurred by the Binghamton Clothing Factory conflagration that occurred on July 22, 1913, killing thirty-one people, mostly young women. Because of the July heat, all the windows were open in the four-story building, and a stiff breeze fanned the flames, destroying the building in less than twenty minutes. Later, Ethel refers to the 1903 fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, in which approximately six hundred people died, due to the fact that twenty-seven of the thirty-nine exits were locked. Touted as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois remains the deadliest single-building fire in U.S. history.

  I own three primary sources that were invaluable to me as I wrote this novel. The first is the Montgomery Ward Catalogue & Buyers Guide from 1919. At over a thousand pages, it gave me pictures of everything from what the Turners might have worn, to products they might have used, to the toys that little Harry might have played with. Though the fashions were likely above their means at the beginning of the story, it offered helpful ideas of what they might have aspired to.

  My copy of Johnson’s First Aid Manual, Eighth Edition, was distributed in 1918 as a giveaway mainly to industrial businesses, such as mining companies, whose employees would be most at risk for accidents. It contains all manner of instruction about handling injuries, such as: “Assume command of the situation. There can be only one chief.”

  I have a January 1929 edition of American Cookery, published by The Boston Cooking School Magazine Company, at 221 Columbus Avenue (now luxury condos). I got the recipe for Lima Bean Sausages and Beef Shank and Kidney Pie from this volume, and while it was published a decade after the time of the story, I thought these budget-conscious meals would fit the Turner family dinner table quite well.

  Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, where Winnie works in the maternity ward, did not actually open until 1925, founded by the Daughters of Charity. However, as I was born in that maternity ward, I decided to apply a bit of authorial license and use it anyway.

  A final note of interest to those who may have read my earlier novels: The Palace in the fictitious town of Belham, where Joe plays piano at the end of the story, is the same tavern—affectionately known as The Pal—from Shelter Me and The Shortest Way Home.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  My great-grandfather Fred Delorme (right) performed in many local variety and vaudeville shows in the Johnson City–Binghamton area in the early 1900s.

  PHOTO CREDIT: N. GRACE

  Great-grandpa Fred’s dancing shoes.

  For more pictures of vaudevillians who inspired characters in The Tumbling Turner Sisters and the real-life theatres where the sisters performed, please go to www.juliettefay.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My great-grandfather Fred Delorme was a vaudevillian. He never quite made it to the big time, but from the many newspaper clippings we have, he certainly claimed his share of success in small-time shows and revues. He married Nell Smith in 1908 and had six children, including my grandmother, Margaret Delorme Dacey, who sometimes danced with him in shows. To support his family, Great-grandpa Fred kept his day job at the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company in Johnson City, New York.

  I like to think that having his name used in a story about vaudeville would appeal to my great-grandfather’s love of entertainment. For the record, Great-grandma Nell was not married previously nor did she have any children before marrying Great-grandpa Fred. I’ve used their names and a few details of their lives, but generally the fiction begins very early on. I learned only after I’d written the novel that Great-grandma Nell actually did have a sister named Gert.

  I’d like to thank my father, John Dacey, for inadvertently reminding me about his grandfather’s vaudeville career while trying to convinc
e me to write a novel about Oliver Cromwell’s violent domination of Ireland. This happened to include mention of how our ancestors fled Ireland and settled in the area of Binghamton, New York, where many years later, I was born. Sorry, Dad, but I’m still glad I went with the vaudeville idea, and not Cromwell.

  The late Anne Delorme Castelli was Fred Delorme’s only living child, and she told me about his dancing with her sister, Margaret, and how he used to give clog dancing lessons at their house on Floral Avenue. My cousin, the late Jim Stein, sent along photos and newspaper clippings, and his sister, Nancy Grace, located Great-grandpa Fred’s dancing shoes for me! I’d like to thank them and all the descendants of Fred and Nell Delorme, particularly my Dacey uncles, aunts, and cousins. They are a wonderfully entertaining bunch, and it’s easy to see where they get it.

  Warmest thanks go to my writers’ group, Nichole Bernier, Kathy Crowley, EB Moore and Randy Susan Meyers; my friends, Megan Lucier and Catherine Toro-McCue; and my sister, Kristen Dacey Iwai, who provided multiple early reads and great feedback. I am also fortunate to be a part of the Fiction Writer’s Co-op, whose collective willingness to promote one another’s books, discuss industry intel, and generate hilarious comment threads is seemingly boundless.

  My agent, Stephanie Abou, was tireless in finding the right home for this book. Her efforts brought me to editor Lauren McKenna and assistant editor Elana Cohen, who offered great vision as to how to make this story richer and stronger. Heartfelt thanks to all of these wonderful, smart women for helping me get the Turner show on the road.

  Jeri Wellman and Randy Susan Meyers made sure I got all those wonderful Yiddish words right. Tom Herendeen, manager of the Ohmann Theatre in Lyons, New York, gave me the “nickel tour” of the former vaudeville house, and put me in contact with Bob Ohmann, grandson of Burt, who was the owner/manager of the theatre when the Turner sisters would have performed there. He told me that Burt Ohmann was “kind of gruff and loved his stogies.” Jessica Allen at the Smith Opera House in Geneva, New York, was also kind enough to let me wander around and gave me a brochure full of wonderful pictures and a history of the Smith.