There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  The idea that Ben still had my belongings was something I rather liked. It gave me another reason to call him if calling him after his show didn’t work. Lord knows, I wanted every opportunity to contact him, and I was not averse to dropping in on him to read the electric meter or lay down a spray against termites. It was beginning to look to me that I was a lousy hold-out, that if a dumb breeze blew the smoke of one of his cigars into my nose, I’d go running into his arms, begging forgiveness and hoping he’d take me back.

  The world and all hope ended when Richie came back with all of my belongings. I asked him how come and he stalled around for an answer. So I asked him again, “Richie, how come?”

  “He called and told me to come and get them. I’m sorry, Ginnie, but the guy’s a prick. You caught him cold and he’s not even embarrassed. What I don’t understand is how you could have loved him in the first place. For Christ’s sake, couldn’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe now you can. I went up there and—damn it!”

  “What?”

  “Ginnie. There was another girl there!”

  “An airline stewardess? Because if it was, it’s all right.”

  “I don’t know who she was. Ben introduced her but the bitch was walking around half naked.”

  “Was her name Alice, or Susan, or Jessica?”

  “No. Her name was Marjorie. Marjorie something.”

  “And she wasn’t a stewardess?”

  “If she was a stewardess it could have been on her own airline. She had a ring on that’d knock your eye out. And a necklace—Ginnie, she was not a stewardess. She was too old.”

  “Maybe she was my mother.”

  “Does your mother have platinum hair and tits down to her knees?”

  “My mother has brown hair and no tits at all.”

  “Then she wasn’t your mother.”

  “Did Ben say anything? I mean, did he give you any message for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What? Richie? What’d he say?”

  “He said to tell you he was sorry about your mother and that, even though he could explain it, it was just as well that it happened because—”

  “Because what?”

  “Because—for the time being, if you don’t mind, he’d like to leave things the way they are. And that maybe, at some other time—Do you want me to go on with this shit?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Because I don’t believe it. I think he’s making it all up.”

  “He didn’t make up Marjorie. I saw her.”

  “She’s a stewardess. They drop in from everywhere.”

  “For Christ’s sake, will you wake up and face life? The guy’s a prick. He’s going big time. He doesn’t want to hang around with chorus girls anymore. As for Marjorie—here—her picture’s in yesterday’s paper. ‘Mrs. Jason Kimbrough, the former Marjorie Robertson, is in New York City for the telecasting of Sunday night’s Theatre 60 show to be aired at nine P.M. over NBC.’ Ginnie, she’s the wife of the client. Your beloved Ben was not only screwing your mother, he’s now screwing the client’s wife! And if you can’t figure out what kind of man that makes him, then you deserve everything that happens to you!”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “What you have to do is be tough. Figure you’ve learned something—and get on with your life.”

  “Some pretty lady, isn’t she?”

  “If you like that type. Who you calling?”

  “Barry.”

  “What for?”

  “To see if he knows anything about this.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I just want to see what Barry knows.”

  “Barry knows everything. He was with me.”

  “Barry went with you to carry two little bags?”

  “Ginnie. Call him.”

  I called Barry with Richie standing right alongside me and asked Barry if what Richie had told me was true. Barry took a long time in answering but finally said that it was true, that he was with Richie and had seen the Marjorie woman, that he was sorry, and that he was so disappointed in Ben as a man that he was going to drop him as a client. I firmed up and told him it wouldn’t be necessary, that his was a business relationship and that he should make his money wherever he could, and that it would be dopey to resign Ben over me. Barry said he loved me and we hung up.

  Then I apologized to Richie and he huddled me in his arms and I cried—because I hurt so bad, so blues-in-the-gutter bad that if Richie hadn’t been there to hold me, I’d have crawled down a sewer and died.

  I managed the next day—barely. Something was bothering me. All that Richie had told me and that Barry had corroborated—it just didn’t sound like Ben. And yet, neither would I have expected the Ben I knew to be in my mother’s hand in a hotel room doorway. So those two canceled each other out.

  As to Richie’s motive for lying, he had one—the preservation of his act, the survival of the Pickering Trio. If Richie thought that my reconciliation with Ben would destroy or even delay the act’s chances of getting back on the road, yes, Richie could he, probably would. He could easily have come across Marjorie Kimbrough’s photo in the paper and made up the whole story just to keep Ben and me apart, perhaps thinking that if we got together, I’d quit the act. But then how did he come by my luggage? And Barry? Would Barry Nadler be a party to a lie like that, knowing how deeply it would hurt me? I didn’t think so. Barry reminded me of Sy Fein, and Sy Fein would never do that. Never.

  Still, the doubt persisted. I knew that there was only one way for me to find out just what the truth was, and that was to call Ben. And I did. I called him I don’t know how many times over that Friday and Saturday, the weekend of his show, using the same dime from the same pay phone outside the ladies’ room at Meridian Hall. There never was an answer. He never was in. Probably was at rehearsals. I’d have to keep trying.

  And I would have kept calling forever, but Fate reared her ugly head because Saturday we found the girl-a sensational dancer named Sheila Sawyer. She was about twenty-five and had that society gloss that could augment the act so well. And she learned fast. The truth is, she was a much better dancer than me. If her dancing lacked anything, it was humor. And that made her just perfect for the way our act laid out. She’d be the square, I’d be the dip.

  Richie negotiated with her in no time. Then he called ahead to St. Louis, to the Bryant Hotel, and told them that we were on our way and could open on Wednesday as originally scheduled. We were on a plane at ten A.M. Sunday morning.

  We were in our hotel by three thirty in the afternoon. I hardly knew Sheila and asked Richie if it would be all right, at least in St. Louis, if I had my own room—staying with neither him nor Sheila. Richie said it would be fine but that, if I wanted to do that throughout the remainder of the tour, it would have to come out of my own pocket. He was being tough with me, and I knew why and respected him for it.

  I took a walk around St. Louis and then tried phoning Ben again, knowing full well that he’d be at rehearsals. I phoned Florrie in Pittsburgh to see how she was, telling her that we had a passable replacement for her for the time being and not telling her about Ben and me, just reminding her to watch Ben’s show, which she said she would. During our talk I discovered that Monty had had to return to New York and that Richie had yet to call her. That was a bad mark for Richie. He was beginning to get me nervous.

  At seven P.M. I was in my hotel room in front of this terribly small television set, so small that it looked as though it should only carry fifteen-minute shows. Television was not yet a very big thing in St. Louis, and I was lucky to have had a set, however small, at all.

  The picture wasn’t the best—sudsy with periodic waves—but the sound was fine. And I fussed with the controls from seven until nine, New York time, at which time the announcer said that “Tony” was on, written by Benjamin Webber, and I went numb.

  Ben’s play was on and I was watching it in St. Lo
uis. It was all wrong and I felt unreal and immobilized. It was good. Very good. At first I had trouble with some of the casting because many of the players were not as Ben had initially sketched them. But the lines came out right, just as I had typed them after first having interpreted Ben’s paleolithic scrawl. I found that I knew every line of dialogue of every character. And when an actor floundered or groped, I fed him his line—from St. Louis. And it worked.

  It was all there. The whole play. The whole idea of “Tony”—the tragedy of it and the questions it raised of guilt and doubt, comedy and despair. Ben could write drama and in the middle of it have the funniest things going on. I didn’t know of many writers who could do that without subverting their whole statement. All of it poured through the tube and spilled out into my little room in St. Louis. We had done it together, Ben and me, the pair of us. We had sweated it out and sent it in, and there it was, for all the world to see. A fine play, taut and comic, yet making you very nervous because death was always hanging about.

  When it had concluded, I switched off the TV set and sat staring at the grey-empty tube. For one hour Ben Webber had commanded the air waves. My Ben. No matter that we no longer were together. We were together then, in the fashioning of the play. If we were never to be together again then that one hour out of the world’s history forever belonged to us. Nine P. M. to ten P.M., June 11, 1952—Ben and Ginnie Time. Our time.

  It was so quiet in my room that I didn’t know what to do with it. So I stood up and applauded, the tears coming down my face as if Caruso had sung Pagliacci for me and me alone. I applauded Ben’s talent and the short time we had spent together. And I applauded my decision to stop the crap and call him, and have it out, and see if we couldn’t get together again.

  Sometime after eleven, New York time, I phoned his apartment, knowing damned well that he couldn’t be home yet. But I wanted to establish in my brain that I was capable of calling that number. No answer. I phoned again at around one in the morning. A woman answered and I hung up. To make sure I hadn’t dialed a wrong number, I waited fifteen minutes and called again. The woman answered again. Marjorie Kimbrough, no doubt, screwing her young playwright on his home field. And that was the end after the end that should have been the end. C’est fini, cheri. Vive la France and fuck you.

  And in my head I heard the rumble of moving vans, carting off all the pretty scenery of my short-lived love affair, packing it away in a warehouse for which there was no key and to which no road led. All the laughter of our short ran was stuffed into trunks and stifled, all the happy hopes and passionate speeches torn from the script so that nothing remained but the characters’ names and some brief passages describing where the ancient action had taken place.

  And any doubts I may have had as to our love affair’s being over, they vanished with the arrival of the next morning’s New York newspapers. No reviews of Ben’s play in those papers. They had reviewed the Antoinette Perry Awards instead. But there was a picture in the Daily News—“Mrs. Marjorie Kimbrough and playwright Benjamin Webber”—a swell kick in the head and a fine launch into my nineteenth year, which, I vowed, would not find me as trusting as I had been a million years ago, when I was eighteen and the world was my oyster.

  There’s always a next morning. It does always come. Even though the night is endless and the clock doesn’t move and the pills have no effect, the next morning always does arrive. It doesn’t necessarily sweep clean but it does, in its own way, shuffle the cards for another go at a new ante.

  I am not a strong person, never was. I might bluff people into thinking that about me, especially with my shocking language, I might even bluff myself, but my underpinning is all wobbly despite my superstructure’s seeming solid. That’s the way I have always seen my ship. From the water line up—a dreadnaught, and you’d better give it room when it sails past your dinghy. But below the water line the timbers are weak, the bolts slipshod, the ballast sliding, and the bilge continually slapping at my hammocked ass.

  Still, if the captain stands firm and steers well, he can navigate the Good Ship Lollipop and make it through the storm. I was that kind of captain—still am. And it isn’t all self-deception. A lot of it’s a pragmatic awareness that, if the ship flounders, the crew skips and the captain’s left alone on the bridge, saluting like hell as down goes Lollipop, into the briny. And that stuff in your lungs ain’t rum and nectar, swabby, it’s salt and shit. And the song they’re playing ain’t “Over The Bounding Main,” it’s “Nearer My God To Thee.”

  So, okay, I firmed up for the rest of the voyage. If Ben Webber was a disappointment, I would not allow him to sink my ship. How he and my mother came to be in that room, with me at the door, was no longer the issue. Nor was Marjorie Kimbrough or all his women before and after me. The issue was me. And the question, and only question, was how much fresh canvas could I unfurl to get my ass out of those stagnant waters?

  And stagnant they were, starting from the moment I realized that Sheila did not have her own room as I had but that she was shacking up with Richie. I discovered that by picking up the phone and asking for Sheila Sawyer because I felt we should get to know each other and what better time than breakfast. The hotel operator said they had no Sheila Sawyer registered but that perhaps she was Mrs. Pickering. I was surprised but by no means shocked, for that seemed to be the way Richie worked. He had made love to me once to keep me whole and the act together. He would make love to Sheila for similar reasons and save room money in the process.

  Interesting man, Richie Pickering, a shark to be sure but not without talent—and the nautical opposite of me. When he swam, only his dorsal fin protruded the surface, slicing the water passively, in no apparent hurry. His course was happily circular, docile, and meandering. But below the surface he was all teeth, an insatiable killer without conscience and harboring no remorse, driving steadfastly through schools of itty bitty fitties, his theme song, “Dinner For One, Please, James,” his warning, “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  It was okay, I understood. He was not unlike Ben except that maybe he was a little more out in the open and, no doubt, more rapacious. I didn’t think that Ben ever intended to hurt, whereas Richie couldn’t have cared less. As to which was the more dangerous to Sally the Salmon, Ben got the nod because, though you always saw Richie coming, you never saw Ben until after he’d gone.

  I was determined to be mature about things. After all, Richie had all the rights of a free man and Sheila was 100 percent cunt. I wasn’t even jealous. The one time that Richie and I had made love was little more than therapy for me. He had a beautiful body and it did everything a girl could want done, but it was all too thought out, like his predictable choreography, whereas my forte was spontaneity and passion.

  Sheila, I just couldn’t warm up to, especially since it turned out she was married. Her husband, an actor, flew in from New York for our St. Louis opening, for which—one night only—she had her own room.

  The act went very well. And if Sheila didn’t dance with the honesty of Florrie, she did dance with a regal haughtiness that worked beautifully when I, the clown, came on to mess up the act.

  Men came at me continually. I needed it but did nothing about it. I knew I should, and there were times I wanted to; but somehow I knew that that would be the beginning of slutdom, and I wasn’t ready to sally into that territory. St. Louis was therefore dreary. As were Cincinnati and Minneapolis and Dayton and Louisville. Florrie had by then gone back to New York, where a specialist told her to take up basket-weaving. It never came to that as she and Monty got married. And if she limped down the aisle, I didn’t see because I couldn’t get to the wedding.

  They loved each other, Florrie and Monty. The both of them thorough crazies but they did love each other. And it was good for me to know that it could happen as it gave me a nickel’s worth of hope in a world I’d begun to think was totally filled with slugs.

  In Louisville, on a rainy Sunday, Richie kind of asked me if I’d like to join him and
Sheila in an afternoon menage à trois. He said it would be fun and that Sheila, though not a dyke, did have eyes for me. I thanked him for his kind invitation but said that I’d sewn up my box for the duration. Richie laughed, and it rained like hell.

  The summer went. Draggingly, but it went. The only news I had concerning Ben’s career was a syndicated column in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which it was mentioned that NBC had signed him to write three new original dramas. So he was on his way.

  Each day that passed made it a touch easier for me to be away from him. Still, he was never completely out of my thoughts. I knew it would all take time and that it would be better if I could take another lover. But somehow I couldn’t. All the men I met on tour did not want intellect or companionship or even a fun evening, they just wanted to get laid and how come I didn’t understand them? That’s what comes of wearing scanty costumes and a yellow pony-tail. Such riggings evidently do not speak well of a girl’s character.

  My belligerent attitude was not lessened by the fact that, when I got back to New York, I went straight to Barry Nadler, as he was holding the money, and there learned the following: one, Sheila had gotten more money than I had gotten. And two, deductions were taken from my salary to pay for my room, whereas Sheila, who had been shacking up with Richie, had no room deductions at all.

  I screamed at Barry, my voice rising like a fishwife’s. I told him what they all could do with the Pickering Trio. He said that it was a definite and flagrant inequity and that he’d take the matter up with Richie. He also pointed out, as nicely as he could, that we had more bookings coming up—good ones—and that rather than quit, I’d be better advised to start looking for an apartment. And that’s when it hit me.