The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  Of course, this was 1947, pre–Las Vegas showgirl, before the Copa girls and the Lido girls, before the Moro-Landis dancers and the Rangerettes, before the sky-high headdresses and the sequins and beads. But I could see it all before it arrived—because I had already seen it in my mother’s Busby Berkeley films. That was what Las Vegas needed. Goddesses. Long rows of girls descending staircases, curving staircases like the one my mother stood on playing the violin in Gold Diggers, girls flying on trapezes, girls turning on spinning pedestals like the ballerinas in music boxes. I didn’t know that girls like that were already performing in Parisian nightclubs or in some of the clubs Meyer Lansky was opening in Havana, girls ornamented in every way with the exception of clothing. But I could sense that what we were doing was not going to fly here for long.

  And standing there in my short pink dress and red high heels, I looked to Benny. His face was blank, obedient. Whatever Meyer wanted to see on that stage was what Ben was going to put on that stage, no matter how he felt privately. He would watch the cheerful Andrews Sisters retreads. He would cut the paychecks for the twelve of us girls dancing chastely in pink. If Meyer wanted the clean American West, friendly, welcoming, bring us your money, we would present cheerful Americana as we scooped up the tokens and chips. I wrinkled up my face as I watched those Andrews Sisters dancing and singing.

  There’s just one place for me, near you

  It’s like heaven to be near you

  Times when we’re apart

  I can’t face my heart

  They swayed their arms as if they had no idea their days were numbered and pretty soon they’d be a nostalgia act. I could feel my lips purse as if I were tasting something sour. This act would not interest Buzz and I had cut my teeth on Buzz, on Hollywood, and on the Sunset Strip. Not on a desert backwater. So over to the side of the floor where we girls were corralled waiting for our turn to flip and flap, I quietly defied Mr. Lansky. To “Apple Blossom Time,” I did something else. I stretched, threw my leg up, arched my back. I did a slow swirl that started in a crouch and then spiraled upward and ended with a head circle. I did the mincing steps of the high-heeled strip-tease artist, my arms thrown up to the heavens, hands wagging. By the window drapes where nobody could see me, I had my own private ball. And then, slowly, I became aware someone was watching me.

  It wasn’t the crestfallen Benny or Lansky, the man who’d deflated him with a long silver pin. It was the man beside Lansky. Nate Stein. He wasn’t looking at the Andrews Sisters anymore at all, just at me, only at me, and there was no censure in his face. Quite the opposite. He was smoking and watching. I looked back at him for a moment and once I figured out that what I saw in his face was not disapproval, I continued dancing. I pretended I didn’t know he was watching, but I knew that he was, and what I felt was entirely different from what I felt while doing my “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” dance for Ben two years ago. From Ben had seeped a gray disappointment, and what emanated from this man was, I understood, the opposite of that. I felt myself tugging on a long fluid string to make his hands and legs and lips move and if I wanted to, I knew I could pull him toward me, though I was too naïve, of course, to have any idea what to do with him once I’d gotten him there.

  When the Andrews Sisters finished their number with,

  Spend the rest of my days

  All those happy, happy days,

  So near you!

  I stopped, my back to the club floor, and I listened to the men clap. When I turned my head for a peek, I saw Benny and Lansky were applauding the Andrews Sisters, but not the third man. He was looking right at me, all approbation, and when I inclined my head in a small bow to acknowledge his pleasure in me, he smiled, eyes crinkling, all the former harsh severity in his face banished, and suddenly, I liked him. All the men I knew used on occasion what I thought of as the bad face, the tough, unflinching stare meant to intimidate. The man had been wearing that face not ten minutes ago, but now his bad face was gone and he was looking at me as if he were delighted with me, this little girl he didn’t even know. And he was the one who tugged at that string between us, not me, tugged me to him with that smile. And then he leaned over to Benny and said something to him and then Benny looked to me and I knew he had asked Ben who I was. And I saw Benny hesitate just a moment before he brought Nate over to meet me.

  Maybe it was because I was wearing this costume. Or maybe it was because I was finally grown up, which I’d been trying to do as fast as I could since we’d arrived in Vegas because there was nothing here for little girls and so many opportunities for young women. I didn’t know yet how these men were protective of little girls but preyed upon them when they grew up. But you couldn’t stop growing up. The transition from girlhood to womanhood turned on a pivot. One day you were a child and then, all at once, you weren’t.

  Well, that day was my pivot.

  The man had a pinkie ring on his left hand and a cigarette in his right, and he transferred the one to the other as he approached, and that’s how I knew he was going to touch me for the first time. I could see better now his Roman nose that counterbalanced all that hair. He was handsome, though not in a pretty-boy way like Benny, who once wanted nothing more than to be a pretty movie star. Still, he looked something like Ben, something like my father, some version of them. Without the intemperate rage. Without the failure. He moved with a tall, silky grace that actually reminded me of my old Hollywood dance teacher, Daddy Mack, who might have been short and fat, but when he moved all that weight on his two short legs, he wore his blubber like a mink coat. And that’s how this man moved, as if he were wearing a mink coat.

  “E,” Benny said to me, not entirely happily. “This is Nate Stein.”

  Nate offered his hand. I took it. It was large.

  “I’m Esme Wells,” I told him, giving him my stage name, which was half my name and half my mother’s stage name. Nate laughed.

  He knew exactly who I was, Esme Silver, fifteen years old, practically unschooled, a nobody, but he understood my affectation, even approved of it. All those men approved of ambition. Of reinvention.

  Naturally.

  And we stood there, my hand in his while Benny frowned, probably because Nate was married, and not for the first time, not that marriage had ever inhibited Benny himself in any way in his various extramarital adventures, but because I was Benny’s Baby E and Nate was staring at me in this certain way and Ben could see what lay ahead, and he didn’t like it. He cleared his throat. He would have liked to clear the club, or rather, clear Nate from the club. But in the current pecking order, Ben didn’t have the power to do this. So the rest of the girls clumped back to the dressing room, where they would smoke cigarettes and drink Cokes, while I stood here. I can only imagine how I looked to Mr. Stein, a piece of candy in a candy-colored costume, my face orange with Pan-Cake and my lashes an elongated black, my hair long as a child’s. I didn’t want to let go of Nate’s hand and he seemed not to want to let go of mine, either. What was happening was perfectly proper, an introduction, a handshake, but somehow it didn’t feel proper at all. And Benny, irritated, looked away.

  My costume, though actually quite modest, suddenly seemed to feel riskily low-cut and short, exposing too much of me everywhere from my neck to my flamingo-red high heels. I flushed and Nate smiled at my transparency. Embarrassed as I was by my near nakedness, I nonetheless found myself in the grip of an absurd impulse to undress further, and all the while, Nate Stein smiled at me. He’s an old man, I told myself. But the fact that he was older was exactly what I liked about him. He wasn’t striving to be something, he was already something. If I’d met him when he was twenty, I wouldn’t have liked him, wouldn’t have wanted him. But I’d met him now. And I wanted him, whatever that meant. I had a feeling about him, the kind of feeling my father had when he knew his horse was going to come in.

  But because I was as yet still underage, and because Nate was a careful man, more like Lansky the accountant than the id-driven Benny—who needn’t hav
e worried about me, at least, not yet, and by the time he should have been worried, he was dead—it was therefore too early to know what would become of us.

  And so all Nate said to me that day was, “Lovely to meet you, Miss Esme Wells.” His voice was a purr, with the slightest tinge of something foreign sounding in it, which turned out to be just his flat Midwestern accent, though I was too ignorant to know it.

  He was fifty and I wasn’t quite a third of that.

  12

  Los Angeles

  1939

  The claptrap truck my father had hired after our eviction followed us all the way along Wilshire Boulevard, the words express moving phone boyle 366 shamelessly, boldly, painted on its side, the bed of the truck piled high with our furniture, which had somehow, for the most part, as my father had promised, remained intact on the lawn, a few pieces missing, my mother speculating which of our neighbors had snuck out in the night to take what. But nothing had been stolen. Whatever was missing had been quietly pawned by my father, shortly after his crushing loss at the racetrack. So most, if not all, of our belongings were now upended in the back of the moving truck, mattresses naked and pathetic-looking in their striped sheaths, a huge jailhouse embarrassment which my parents ignored, pretending that the truck behind us had nothing to do with them.

  I couldn’t help but turn around in my seat to look at the sight of the swaying mess, so irresistibly wrong, until my father finally rapped me on the head with his knuckles to make me stop. If we didn’t look at it, it wasn’t there, though we were lucky it was. And he was especially lucky it was. Yet, despite this great luck, I could tell my mother was miserable. For one, she wasn’t speaking to my father. Or two, looking at him. We were heading back to Boyle Heights, our horse tails tucked between our legs, retreating to immigrant East Los Angeles, where the rents were cheapest and the scenery most familiar.

  I know my father had once appeared to her as if he knew something about the big world, hair slicked back, cigarette jaunty in one hand, the smart Jew on the make who wasn’t selling scrap metal or neckties or painting houses or slicing meat in a delicatessen like every other man she knew in Boyle Heights. He looked like a winning ticket, blown into the city from Baltimore’s Pimlico racetrack just for her to pick up. Yet this day I’m sure he seemed not so much of a winning ticket after all, not so much a Magic Ike as an Ordinary Ike. Head down, she looked at the naked fingers of her ring hand and chipped at her nail polish, something she did when she was upset, a habit I learned from her and practiced, though not to such an exaggerated extent. I watched while the red paint was slowly nibbled and nicked away until she had nails the same color as my unvarnished child’s nails.

  We took the Sixth Street Bridge, our own personal bridge jumper, you could say, except my mother, not my father, was the one I worried might jump from it, though it wasn’t a very long fall to the Los Angeles River. The water was so shallow you could wade in it only up to your ankles, the banks sharp and sloped, once made of dirt and laced with negligible vegetation, but now newly paved over with cement. The river was being remade into a concrete channel in an effort to control future floods. I peered down now at the angular, empty cement trough as my father drove over it, and he called out, ill-advisedly, I thought, even as a six-year-old, “Hello again, Jewtown. Where Los Angeles rolls its refuse over the river. We’re back!” If he wanted to try to soothe my mother, he was taking the wrong tack.

  When you first cross the bridge into Boyle Heights, the streets are full of Mexicans and Japanese and Negroes and Chinese, the city’s refuse, as my father had put it, who lived here, labored here, and were buried here in cemeteries as segregated as their neighborhoods had been. It wasn’t until you drove along Brooklyn Avenue and past the large Breed Street shul that you might understand why the rest of Los Angeles referred to Boyle Heights as Jewtown. It was there that Hebrew lettering appeared along with the open-air markets, replete with barrels of herring and pickles, over which women in housedresses and bedroom slippers bent to take a sniff. We passed Zellman’s Men’s Wear with its checkerboard floor and Leaders Barbershop with its two long lines of chairs and mirrors where my grandfather used to get his hair trimmed and Cantor Bros. Delicatessen with Jewish stars all over the plate glass, one of them between the two words Steaks and Chops, as if meat itself could chase a religion.

  Past the cleaners, the haberdasheries, the drugstore, past the Hoffmans of Coast to Coast Neckwear Company, the Rosners of Rosner’s Bakery, the Kartzes of Kartz Appliances, the Abrahams in their dry-goods store, the Shonholtzes at their jewelry store, the Resnicks in their deli, and past Mr. Rael who stood sentry at the door of his furniture store.

  Peddlers all, my father would say. Not big boys. These ordinary Jews were the ones who populated Jewtown, and they were not the moguls or mobsters my father admired, the big boys who had sprung themselves from the pen that held all the other Jews.

  But this landscape—I can’t say it was terribly familiar to me as I was not quite five when we left it, my world at that age consisting of my grandfather’s house and yard and the immediate half block of Winter Street on which it stood—was certainly all too familiar to my mother. It wasn’t until much later, until after I had things to be ashamed of myself, that I understood how moving back to her old neighborhood was a torment for her. There everybody knew Sy Wolfkowitz’s daughter, Dina, too pretty for her own good with the stars in her eyes, always talking about being a movie star. And Sy’s son-in-law, Ike, the bum—what kind of a Jew gambled at the track?

  And they pitied me, too, though I didn’t know it, the little blond urchin dragged around the city by that pair of schemers. We had sailed out of Boyle Heights on a pile of money, but we hadn’t been gone very long, and now here we were, slinking back, as I said, tails between our legs, and it wouldn’t be but a minute before the Zellmans and the Resnicks and the Shonholtzes and the Abrahams knew it.

  My father, who always tried to tease any situation into its best light, had said Boyle Heights was going to be a great choice for us. Boyle Heights! Home! A place to regroup. But I wasn’t sure how much of a choice it actually was. It was either Boyle Heights or a boarding house in Culver City. And as most tenants of boarding houses were bachelors or single women secretaries or actresses biding their time until they made married men of those bachelors, what real choice did we have?

  We weren’t only going back there for the cheap rent. My father was going to beg for work at my grandfather’s old company, Wolfkowitz Painting, the company he had been too fancy to own and too quick to sell—as the neighbors would say, back to paint houses for a company he could have run, Wolfkowitz Painting could have been his! his for the taking!, but he had thought he was too good for all that, thought he would hit it big at the races, and now look at him, paid by the hour, Wolfkowitz paintbrush in his hand. Very, very soon my father would be enduring the humiliation of painter’s coveralls and a painter’s cap.

  There would be a couple of escapes for us. For my mother and me, the movie theater. The National Theater on Brooklyn Avenue would become our haunt that summer, even if it showed only second-run movies, some of which my mother appeared in. The theater marquee was stuck to what looked like a storefront, this movie house nothing like the ornate theme palaces of Hollywood Boulevard or South Broadway, but it would do. As we passed the National that day, my mother read the marquee.

  Closed Tonite

  Protest Nazi Horror

  Open Wednesday

  Toy Wife

  And she turned to my father and raised her eyebrows. What? My mother never knew anything going on in the larger world. Multiple countries could have blown themselves up or their populations died of famine or revolutionaries assassinated all the kings and queens of Europe, and she would be none the wiser. But she could tell you every detail of the lives of the movie stars, gleaned from lot gossip and the studio-generated stories printed in Photoplay or Screen Romances.

  As we drove past the dark interior of the Ebony Room, Louie S
chwartzman’s place, where men played poker and Louie ran numbers games, a police cruiser made a U-turn in front of us and parked by the front door, and a group of kids acting as lookouts scattered, one of them darting inside. My father raised his eyebrows and looked at me. The numbers games were run out of the back of the bar, and my father always played the numbers, had played back in Baltimore, along with the rest of his family, all of whom loved horses and numbers and cards. I knew that much about them.

  So the Ebony Room would become my father’s escape hatch, within which he would eventually meet Mickey Cohen, who always stopped by when he came to visit his mother in Boyle Heights.

  Then we turned onto Winter Street, just to pass my grandfather’s old house—two stories, brick and green clapboard, with a deep porch, red painted concrete steps, and an overgrowth of big blue hydrangeas. For a minute, in my deluded child’s mind, I thought we might pull up there and unpack and resume the lives we had lived there before, minus my grandfather, of course, who had vacated the house and was buried next to my grandmother. My mother had my father stop the car so she could gaze at her old home. So maybe it wasn’t my father’s inspiration to stop there. Maybe she had asked him to do this.