Loving Liberty Levine

by Colin Falconer

  He shook his head, like he was not hearing right. “You see the line of girls out the front? Any one of them would give their right arm to have Flo pick them for the Follies, lady.”

  “I need my right arm to sew with.”

  He took back the contract. “Well, if there’s somewhere else you can earn seventy-five a week, you better hurry over there.”

  “Wait,” Sarah said. “Seventy-five? Dollars?”

  “Sure, seventy-five dollars. What else you want to get paid in, ice pops?”

  “Wait with the contract. Give me a minute.”

  “I don’t have a minute.”

  “But, mister, I can’t dance to save my life.”

  “You won’t be in the chorus line. All you have to do is walk. You can walk, can’t you?”

  “I can, but I’m not expert.” She pulled the contract back across the desk. “Mister whatever your name is—”

  “Brown. Fred Brown.”

  “Mr. Brown. You want I should take off my clothes in front of everyone in New York?”

  “No, not everyone in New York. Not everyone in New York can afford a ticket. And we don’t ask any of our girls to take all their clothes off. That would be distasteful to Mr. Ziegfeld.” He jabbed a finger on a page in the contract. “That only happened at the Frolics, and Mr. Ziegfeld has dropped the midnight show this year.”

  “Seventy-five dollars. Every week?”

  “That’s standard.”

  “For walking.”

  “Miss . . .” He looked at the contract to remind himself. “Levin.”

  “Levine.”

  “Levine. You’re not getting paid for walking. You’re getting seventy-five mazumas a week for looking like the perfect woman.”

  “According to who?”

  “According to Mr. Ziegfeld. He’s the world’s leading authority.”

  Sarah stared at Fred Brown and then back at the contract. She thought about what she and Libby could do with seventy-five dollars every week.

  “Lady, you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and there’s something about you, I don’t know what it is he wants, but you must have it.” He put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “You don’t have to sing, you don’t have to dance, you’re not Fanny Brice or Lilly Lorraine. You’re a stage prop, that’s it.” He held up the contract. “You want me to tear this up?”

  She snatched it out of his hand, unscrewed the pen, and scribbled her signature at the bottom before Mr. Ziegfeld or Mr. Brown could change their minds.

  He blew on the ink and put the contract in the drawer. “One thing. Don’t go spending the whole seventy-five on champagne and diamonds. The contract stipulates you gotta look like a Ziegfeld girl twenty-four hours a day. That means you don’t take the trolley to work, you don’t go into restaurants or even walk down the street without gloves and a hat and heels. A Ziegfeld girl is never ever off stage. You understand?”

  “I’m a Ziegfeld girl now?”

  He checked his fob. “Anything else? I have to get back to work. Mr. Ziegfeld has to hire a chorus line today.”

  “And now a girl to help out in the costumes,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah, looks like it.”

  When she left, there was still a mob of girls outside the theater. She walked away in a daze. What’s a good Jewish girl doing taking a job in just her birthday suit and maybe a hat? What would her vati say if he ever found out?

  She should be ashamed. But she didn’t feel ashamed. What she felt for the first time in her life was rich.

  Seventy-five dollars a week!

  Sarah made the long slow climb up the tenement stairs. Most days she got to the top with her lungs on fire and her legs shaking like they were made of Jell-O, but not today. Today she was laughing when she reached the top landing. She had seventy-five dollars a week. She could have run to the top of the Liberty statue.

  She stopped laughing when she saw Libby slumped against the door to the apartment, her head on her knees. “Libby,” she said and bent down to see what was wrong. “Lib, what is it, bubeleh, are you hurt?”

  “It’s nothing,” Libby said, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “If this is nothing, what is something? You having a bad time at the shul? Is it your teacher?”

  “I like my teacher.”

  “The kids, then. What they saying to you?”

  Libby, her little green-eyed, flame-haired little Liberty, looked up at her and said: “Why don’t I look Jewish?”

  “Who’s saying to you, you don’t look Jewish?”

  “You want the name of every single kid in my school?”

  “You don’t take any mind to such stupid talk. Of course you are Jewish.”

  “But I don’t look Jewish, Mama, do I? I don’t look like you!”

  “You got your father’s Jewishness.”

  “Do I?”

  Libby glared at her. Sarah knew that look, that prove-it-to-me look. Well, what did you think, Sarah? Did you think she was never going to ask? “Come inside,” she said. “Good little Jewish girls don’t talk back to their mamas out on the landing, where everyone can hear their business. Even good little Jewish girls with not much Jewishness.”

  Sulky, Liberty got to her feet and followed Sarah into the apartment. She slumped into a chair in the tiny kitchen, hugged herself with her arms, her eyes on the cracked linoleum floor.

  “Why are there no pictures of Papa around?” she said.

  “I don’t like to be reminded.”

  “You mad at him?”

  “I’m not mad,” Sarah said. “All right, maybe still a little bit mad. Why did he have to go away to the stupid war? You think it is easy, bringing up a kid all by myself? This isn’t even my country. Russia is my country.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t have a picture on the wall, on the mantel, somewhere.”

  Sarah went to the big dresser in her bedroom, sorted through the carved wooden box where she kept all her private things, and took out a tiny black-and-white photograph: Micha, sitting down, in his soldier’s uniform, her beside him, scowling at the photographer, Liberty in a smock on her knee, one hand stretched out, like she was reaching for the camera.

  She gave it to Libby, who stared at it for a long time. Years since she had last seen it. “He doesn’t look like me.”

  “Sure, he looks like you.”

  “Why doesn’t he have red hair?”

  “What do you know from red hair when the photograph is black-and-white? Sure, your vati had red hair. He was Ashkenazi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a kind of Jewish person that has red hair. He had green eyes too, just like you. I put you in a uniform and soldier hat, no one will ever tell the difference.”

  “Was he nice?”

  Sarah felt as if she had swallowed a stone. How to explain Micha to her? Half the things her husband had done, she didn’t know that he had, or why he had done them. Was he nice? Good question. “He loved you like nobody’s business,” Sarah said.

  “Can I keep this?”

  Sarah was about to say, but it’s the only picture I have of all of us, but she stopped herself. “Sure, you can have the picture,” she said. “Put it wherever. Now, enough of this crying. You want some good news? I got a new job today. So how about you get your friend Frankie, and we’ll all go to Katz’s to celebrate.”

  “You can have anything you want,” she told them. They stood on the corner, looking at the fat salamis hanging in the window. Frankie looked up at the “Katz’s That’s All!” sign painted on the bricks and asked Sarah what it meant, and she told her she didn’t know.

  “What’s that she’s eating?” Frankie said, pointing to a woman sitting at one of the tables near the window.

  “Bagel and lox,” Libby said.

  “What’s a lox?”

  “It’s fish,” Sarah said. “Fish in a sandwich.”

  “Have they got any normal food?”

  They went inside.
It was full of people on their way to the theaters on Second Avenue. Libby thought she saw Ludwig Satz.

  “What do you know from Ludwig Satz?” Sarah asked her.

  “He’s a famous actor.”

  “I never heard of him,” Frankie said.

  “He’s Jewish,” Libby said.

  The waiter came. Libby stared at her menu. “You can have anything you want,” Sarah said.

  “Really anything?”

  Libby and Frankie looked at each other with suspicion.

  “Can we have a chocolate soda?”

  “What else you want?”

  “Mama, you said you lost your job.”

  “Well, I got another one.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “It’s in the theater.”

  “Will you be on stage with Molly Picon?”

  “Not the theater here. On Broadway.”

  “Are you going to be an actress?”

  “No, not an actress. I’m just helping with the play.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry what I mean. Means I will be out at night, but at the end of the week, there will be more money for us. We don’t struggle anymore.”

  The girls did not look convinced. They read their menus like they were studying the Torah, and finally decided on franks and beans. Some night out, Sarah thought. Living like royalty we all are. In the end it turned out what they both really wanted was an icebox cake from the baker’s on the way home.

  When Sarah tucked Libby into bed that night, she told her what a life they would have, a millionaire life with real cloth tablecloths on the table and a marble bathtub, not a sore-bottom one, and hot water already in the tap so they wouldn’t have to heat it, and they could take a bath whenever they wanted, and even new towels, fluffy white ones like they saw in the Broadway department stores, not old rags.

  There is good luck on us now, she told her. There is coming good times. Just wait and see!

  21

  If this was millionaire life, then she would rather have a pushcart in the street. Already she worked longer than she had for Mr. Schonberg in the shirtwaist shop.

  Twelve-hour days she worked, and this was only rehearsal. Mr. Ziegfeld made them rehearse a hundred times until it was perfect, and only when it was perfect, they must rehearse a hundred times more.

  But before they could even rehearse, they had to get into their costumes. And such costumes they had. Even though it was nothing much, it would not do but the nothing much they wore must be designed by big-shot designers like Lady Duff Gordon. Every new number they would have a new costume, all chiffon and pearls with a glittering headdress. Even naked was no good on its own. Mr. Ziegfeld said a woman’s leg looked more naked in a silk stocking than for-real naked. That was the way he was.

  Go figure.

  So even when they had to go out wearing just a bit of fluff, the fluff had to be right. He would fuss over every girl. Should this piece of chiffon go over the right or left shoulder, no not like that, I can see too much of your bubbies that way, you will get us all arrested! You have to make them wonder, you can’t let them see.

  This Mr. Ziegfeld, he had an eye for a beautiful girl, she thought; and such figures some of the girls had, from as young as seventeen they were. She didn’t know what they were doing with an old woman like her, but she must have something, she guessed, even if she didn’t know what it was.

  And there were all sorts of girls: the ones fresh from Kansas, she could still see the hayseeds in their ears; schoolteachers tired of screaming at brats and getting chalk under their pretty painted nails; cashiers cashing in on themselves.

  There was nothing to what they did, sitting on cardboard cutout moons or walking down stairs. But a certain way they had to walk. Mr. Ziegfeld told them over and over, you are showgirls, not chorus girls. You don’t have to touch your noses with your knees, only walk; well, some of those blonde girls from Kansas, Sarah thought, that was challenge enough.

  He made them walk with their arms out, like they were trying to fly or she didn’t know what, and it wasn’t as easy as it looked, not with feathers and pearls piled on her head like a person would need an elevator to get to the top of it.

  He taught them the Lucile Slither that he learned from Lady Gordon, and then there was the Ziegfeld Walk, a way to come down stairs and look like you were going on your wedding night at the same time.

  “Don’t smile,” he shouted at her. “Don’t laugh. Don’t even think. You must look aloof, like you won’t even give Rockefeller the time of day.”

  So she pretended to herself that she had eaten too many potato latkes and her stomach was hurting, and Mr. Ziegfeld shouted, “Yes, like that. You got it.” So that’s how she always tried to look when she was on stage, pretending she’d eaten too many latkes.

  She didn’t know how much he spent on the show, but she figured it was more than the czar spent to throw a grand ball at the palace in Saint Petersburg. He spent money to make money, he said, a big lesson in life. And he could spend like nobody’s business. Some of the old hands said he had three gold telephones on his desk and his own private railcar. His favorite dinner was liver and onions, like her Micha, only Micha’s knife and fork weren’t made of twenty-four-thousand-carat diamonds.

  The girls also said he didn’t sleep until he’d shtupped each and every one of his leading ladies, but to her and the rest of the showgirls, he behaved almost like a rabbi.

  All the day she spent learning to be glamorous, but by the time she was finished, there was no more glamorous left in her. She got home late at night, climbing the tenement stairs in the dark with a coat buttoned up over her silk stockings and almost-nothing dress. More and more, Libby wasn’t even there to kiss good-night—she started sleeping next door in Frankie’s bed—and she didn’t see her sometimes for days. But she told herself: For seventy-five dollars every week, I can manage.

  The show opened in June with some big-name stars; there was Will Rogers, a real gentleman, and Mary Eaton, a looker with her blonde Marcel wave. There was Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean; they were the big-hit act—two funny guys who could sing and spiel like nobody’s business. And there was that Gilda Gray, shaking her shimmy and making a sensation of herself.

  Sarah peered between the curtains before the show started, staring at all the men in their dinner suits, their women glittering with diamonds. At least no one from Delancey Street out there to see her and call her kurveh.

  And what a theater, full of rich people and all lit up. The seats were all red velvet plush. Puffy clouds were painted on the ceiling, like heaven would look while you are waiting to see God. There were peacocks made of marble and big as houses, all watching from between the balconies and the fancy pillars. Maybe the czar himself could see such a place and not think it remarkable, but for a girl from Tallinn, she could not believe life had brought her there.

  And then it started: first there was a number that made fun of all the latest revues with schvartzes, “It’s Getting Awful Dark on Old Broadway”; and then there was a girl, Evelyn, she could cross the stage on one leg while wagging a disapproving finger at the other—which she had raised above her head. You think the men didn’t like that?

  Such different theater it was. No shouting at the stage and no drinking and no eating and no babies crying like in the Jewish theaters on Second. And the music was so catchy. She always liked the songs by that Mr. Berlin.

  And then it was her turn.

  That first time was the hardest. Mr. Brown came around backstage and gave them their final instructions while they waited for the curtain to go up. They were all dressed in not much more than a few rosebuds and spangles. They would all have got arrested on Coney Island. “Lean,” he said. “Pose,” he said. “Don’t move,” he said. “If you even so much as wiggle one of your bazoomas, you’re fired.”

  As if I am going to wiggle a bazooma, Sarah thought. I’m a good Jewish girl. I shouldn’t even be anywhere near Broadway this time
of night, let alone be here with my bazoomas.

  But when it started, it wasn’t so hard. In the glare of the footlights, she couldn’t see anything, so she thought only of the bad-potato-latkes look that Mr. Ziegfeld liked, and the seventy-five dollars at the end of the week, and no one from the Lower East Side out there, just fancy people who would never even know her in the street. They would never ever be in any street she would walk down anyway.

  It was bright lights and singing and clapping and music, and that was it. The rest of the night, all she had to do was walk up and down stairs in a cardboard fruit salad with a battleship on her head made from silk and lace.

  Her first night on Broadway. She was a Follies girl.

  Sure, she worked harder than she had for Schonberg, but at least she didn’t have to squint in the bad light, and no one pinched her bottom or clipped her wages. In the mornings she made Libby her eggs for breakfast, then wrapped her lunch in brown paper and sent her off to school. She had time only to get dressed and take a taxicab to the theater.

  Rehearse, get dressed, do the show. Afterward many of the girls got presents delivered. There were so many long-stemmed roses in the dressing room, she could have opened a flower shop. Other girls got little velvet boxes with diamonds in them. Sarah knew what a girl did to get presents like that, and it wasn’t wash and iron.

  She made a friend, Evie; she had been a Follies girl for three years. She knew the ropes, kept asking her to go out with her after the show, but Sarah always said no, she had to get home. She went scurrying back to the Lower East Side, there in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, like Cinderella hurrying back to the rags and the scullery mice after the ball.

  22

  “Look,” Evie said to her. “The seventy-five a week will only last as long as the show runs. Then what you gonna do? You’re back to the grindstone, girl. If you’re smart, you want to trade in your chips for a long-term investment. You with me? You better get used to the idea that you don’t stop work when the curtain closes.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You can be tired when you’re old and fat. We’re all tired, honey. But this won’t last. You have to find yourself a more permanent position.”