Looking for a Love Story

by Louise Shaffer

  And with that time-worn phrase, the boys began running through their material.

  The basis of the act—which had been conceived and written by Joe—was that Benny was a bad piano player. And the truth was, he really wasn’t very good, because Benny had never had the patience to practice. So the act opened with Benny, the pianist, accompanying Joe, the singer, and butchering the song. As Joe became more and more frustrated—with lots of mugging and comic takes—Benny hit more and more clinkers. Finally, he stopped playing and the zingers started to fly. The verbal fight turned physical—this was the knockabout comedy section of the act, carefully staged and timed to the second so neither performer got hurt. Mid-battle, the script called for them to realize they were fighting in front of the audience. More double takes and mugging followed and finally, in perfect harmony, they finished the song Benny had been destroying at the beginning of the act. They were practicing the harmonies when they heard a voice behind them.

  “So,” it said. The boys turned to see Mrs. Gerhardt standing in the doorway. She was wearing her second-best dress, a drab garment with a high collar and long sleeves that covered her arms down to the wrists. She only wore it for special events, and that—added to the fact that her face was red and her bright blue eyes were shooting angry sparks—made it clear that something was up. But when she spoke her voice was low and calm. Too calm.

  “So,” she repeated quietly. “All my son’s teachers tell me he’s a smart boy. He could go to college, they tell me. He could be a doctor or a lawyer, he could do anything. That’s what they tell me.” Her face was getting redder. “But does my son listen to them? Does he stay in school and make something of himself?”

  “Ma—” Benny began, but his mother rolled over him.

  “No, my son the genius quits. He gets into a fight—like a hooligan. Like a bum. And when they tell him he’s wrong he quits.”

  Joe watched Benny’s face close down. “I didn’t start it,” he said stonily. The truth was, with his snooty way of talking, his fancy manners, and his weight, Benny was often the target of would-be bullies. These boys were surprised to find that Benny was not the easy victim they’d expected. In spite of his rarefied ways, he fought back. And Benny fought mean. “I was the only one the teacher put in detention,” he told his mother. “It wasn’t fair.”

  “It was your punishment! A man takes his punishment!”

  “School is a waste of time. Joe has to work, so I’m the only one who can make the rounds of the booking agents’ offices for the act. I was going to quit anyway.”

  “Without telling me? I have to find out from your principal? My son the genius makes a decision like this and doesn’t even talk to me?”

  “How could—?” Benny started to say, but once again she barreled over him.

  “Sixteen years old!” she said. She stalked across the room and, as Joe watched, she grabbed the sheet music off the piano. “Sixteen and you’re ruining your life. For this?”

  “Don’t!” Benny yelled, but she was already tearing up their sheet music.

  “For this we came from Germany?” she demanded, as the confetti she’d just made fell to the floor at her feet. “For this your father worked himself to death? So you could quit school and be a bum?”

  “I’m not going to be a bum. I’m going to—” But before Benny could finish, she had picked up the pile of papers on which Joe had written the final version of their act.

  This time both boys yelled, “Don’t!”

  She ignored them, and the fragments of paper she was tearing floated to the floor. “You will go back to the school tomorrow,” she told Benny calmly. “You will beg them to take you back.”

  “No!”

  “You are going back to your classes—”

  “No! And you can go to hell!”

  The curse word stopped her. She slapped him hard across the mouth. Her fingers left red marks on Benny’s big round cheeks, and his eyes filled with tears of pain. “Mr. Big Star!” she exploded in fury. “Mr. Al Jolson! I know why you want to do this stupid thing. You think you’re going to start singing and dancing and all the girls are going to fall at your feet.” She laughed. “They will fall down laughing! Like I am right now. They will laugh at the fat boy who thinks he’s going to be Al Jolson.” She leaned into her son’s face and yelled, “All you have is what is up here!” She pointed to her own head. “Don’t you understand? Look at yourself in a mirror.”

  As Joe knew very well, girls did laugh at Benny. In school he made himself into a clown for them and they screamed with laughter at his antics, but none of them had ever said yes when he asked them to walk in the park or to go have a soda pop. Not that Benny had had the courage to ask very often. As for Benny looking at himself in a mirror, Joe knew Benny draped a towel over the one above the bathroom sink when he washed his face so he wouldn’t have to see his double chin.

  Mrs. Gerhardt seemed to think she’d made her point. “Tomorrow,” she said briskly, “you will go back to school—”

  “Never!”

  “Then you can leave my house. Right now.”

  There was a silence in the room as mother and son faced each other. Joe knew the prospect of being on his own would be terrifying for Benny and waited for him to back down. Instead, Benny fought back his panic. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get my things.” He started for the stairway to the bedrooms, but his mother blocked his way.

  “No,” she said. “Everything you have is mine. You will not take anything with you.” Joe watched Benny fight back his fear again. Then he nodded and walked to the door. “Don’t come home until you are going to school again,” his mother called after him.

  Benny slept on the floor of Joe’s room at the boardinghouse that night. “But we can’t do it again, because my landlady will kick us both out if she knows,” Joe warned. He needn’t have worried. The next morning, Benny was gone before he woke up. When he walked into the parlor where the boarders’ breakfast was served, he saw Benny in the doorway counting out a week’s rent into his landlady’s hand.

  “What did you do?” he muttered under his breath, as they sat down to their coffee, toast, and fried eggs. “Where did you get the money?”

  “I still have the key to the bakery. I delivered Ma’s doughnuts for her this morning”—Benny’s grin creased his face—“and I kept the money.”

  “You stole from your own mother?” Joe choked on his toast.

  “She won’t report it. I left her a note. She won’t let the police take her little Benny to jail. She’s too proud.”

  “But … she’s your mother.”

  “She should be glad to help me. After all, she wants me to make something of myself.” Benny slathered butter on his own slice of toast. “I’m going to see that stage manager who can get us into the talent contest today. Ma’s doughnut money will grease his palm.” He looked toward the landlady and smiled. “I had some money left over to give Mrs. O’Hara, so we can rehearse our act in the parlor every afternoon.” He took a big bite of the toast. “Relax, Joey, everything’s under control. All we have to do is win the contest.” He swallowed and lifted the toast to his mouth again, but then he suddenly put it down and pushed his chair away from the table.

  Still slightly dazed by everything that had happened, Joe asked, “Is something wrong with your food?”

  “I think it’s time I stopped being the fat boy,” Benny said.

  CHAPTER 15

  I held my breath as I read through the scenes I’d just finished writing. Then I let the breath out in a long relieved sigh. It was still early to be sending up balloons, but …

  “I think the kid is back,” I whispered to Annie. “For someone who hasn’t written a cogent sentence in three years, these pages are okay.”

  What happened next really pissed me off: I was so happy, tears started stinging my eyes.

  “I hate this!” I yelled. “I don’t want to be a work-obsessed, self-absorbed freak. I don’t want my whole life to be about me and wh
atever I’m writing this week.”

  Well, get over it, said a voice inside my head. This is who you are.

  I’d thrown out all my size fours, but I think that was the moment I really kissed the pink ruffles good-bye.

  Life lesson: Sometimes getting to know yourself really sucks.

  Still, you’ve got to get on with it. I’d upset Annie with my outburst, and she was eyeing the Evil Laptop anxiously. I tossed her a cookie. “Everything’s cool,” I said, and went back to work.

  “POP AND BENNY won the contest,” Chicky’s voice told me when I turned on the tape recorder again. “And to give him his due, Benny tried to bury the hatchet with his mother. He paid her back most of what he’d stolen out of his part of the prize money, and when the act went on tour he sent her copies of all their reviews—which were pretty good, although they were in small local newspapers no one had ever heard of. Benny wrote little notes to his mother, like Someday we’ll be in Variety and the New York Sun, to go with the clippings. But when their two-week tour was over, and he and Pop walked into their boardinghouse, all the envelopes were waiting for him, unopened. His mother had refused to accept his mail.

  “Still, he kept on trying to reach her. When Masters and George landed a nice booking in Westchester, Benny saved all his money for three weeks and mailed her a train ticket so she could come and see them. He wrote her a letter saying he would take her out for a lobster and champagne supper after the show; she’d always told him they would go to Delmonico’s for lobster and champagne when he graduated from college. Mrs. Gerhardt sent the train ticket back, along with the letter, which she hadn’t opened.

  “‘She thinks I’m going to be a nothing,’ Benny said angrily. ‘She wants me to fail. I’m going to have all the things she wanted and didn’t get. Well, I’m going to have a big fancy house, like she was always nagging my dad for. And a car. I’ll have a family, and she’ll never see her grandchildren!’

  “But then word came that his mother had died. It had been two years since Benny had seen her, and she’d been sick for at least a year, but she hadn’t let Benny know. Maybe she was trying to protect him or maybe she was still mad; Benny never knew. Mrs. Gerhardt didn’t have any money at the end; she’d closed the bakery when she got sick and had been living off her savings. There was just enough left to bury her. Benny was on the road touring when it happened, and by the time her neighbors found him, he’d missed the funeral they’d had for her.

  “After that, Pop said, he saw something harden in Benny. It was like he decided no one was ever going to hurt him again. Especially not a woman. And all of a sudden there were plenty of women in Benny’s life. He’d lost a lot of weight by then, and he was a looker! Well, you can see for yourself, Doll Face. Look at the picture.”

  I pulled out a shot of Benny and Joe taken after Benny’s weight loss. The two young men were standing next to each other and smiling broadly. Benny’s fat-kid expression was gone. He was downright cocky now. And he was a looker—even in a picture taken a hundred years ago, when men decorated their upper lips with little mustaches, parted their hair in the middle, and loaded it with pomade. Benny’s newly streamlined face was matinee-idol handsome, and his thick blond hair framed it to perfection. I couldn’t help remembering my own days of peacocking around as the newly skinny wife of Jake. And if there was something a little shallow and surfacey about Benny’s wide smile—well, I knew all about being shallow too.

  Benny and Joe were wearing white straw hats—boaters, I think they were called—and white suits with vests, pleated pants, and jackets that were worn open. It was a good look for Benny’s new physique, which featured broad shoulders and a tapering waist, but not so good for short, skinny Joe. But there was something about Joe, a sweetness and an intelligence in his eyes. For all of Benny’s glitz, Joe was the one who got to me.

  “Both Benny and Pop were smart.” Chicky’s voice brought me back to the task at hand. “But Pop was the artist. He’d work for hours to get a line or a piece of stage business right. Benny got bored easily; he liked to walk onstage not knowing what he was going to do and ad lib. But offstage, like I said before, Benny was the go-getter for the act. He was a first-class schmoozer, and in the early days, Masters and George got most of their jobs because Benny played up to the managers and the bookers. Don’t get me wrong, Pop was as ambitious as Benny, but he didn’t have Benny’s gift of gab.

  “So they had a good act—not great, but it was enough to get them work on the small-time. I bet you don’t know what that means—the small-time.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Hang on.” I turned Chicky off, sharpened my pencil, and ate a chocolate bar. One of the advantages of working with a machine is that you can stop for snacks. I turned the tape recorder on again.

  “Vaudeville theaters were organized into circuits, some of them covering whole areas of the country,” Chicky’s voice instructed me. “Performers were booked to go from theater to theater. The circuits were split into two classes: the big-time and the small-time. Some people said the small-time was actually split into small and small-small, but that’s getting picky. Getting booked into the big-time meant a performer had made it. These theaters had marble lobbies, chandeliers, and velvet stage curtains. There’d be a first-rate orchestra in the pit, the dressing rooms were clean, the audiences sat in reserved seats, and they knew a good act when they saw it. Big-time theaters were usually in large cities with nice hotels and restaurants where performers could go after the show. And the work was easier. Big-time acts only had to do one or two shows a day, and they usually booked for a week or longer so they had a chance to settle in a town.

  “The small-time was less predictable. On a bad circuit you’d do a one-night stand, and then grab a train for an overnight jump to the next town, and you could play six or seven shows a day. The theater might be a big room above a store with a platform for a stage and dressing rooms down in the basement with rats and no indoor plumbing. For an orchestra, the town barber might play the piano—if he showed up. The audience would be hicks and drunks who threw things. Performers called that kind of circuit a Death Trail.

  “Or you could be booked into legit houses that were small but clean, and you’d do maybe two or three shows a day and you’d have half a day to catch your breath between jumps.” The gruff little voice paused. “You got all that, Doll Face?”

  “Yep,” I said to the machine.

  “Pop and Benny were playing a decent small-time circuit that covered Connecticut, New York State, and Massachusetts when they ran into my mother,” Chicky went on. “She and her sisters had an act. Check out the pictures numbered three and four.”

  I paused the tape recorder and pulled out the next two pictures. The first was a formal shot of three girls in their late teens posed in a line with their right legs extended and their toes pointed. Their right hands held tambourines; their left arms were wrapped around the waist of the sister to the left. They wore matching plaid skirts, white blouses, dark tights, plaid sashes, and little tams pulled rakishly over the right eye. The outfits seemed childish for them and their pigtails tied with ribbons looked downright silly. I recognized the girl in the middle of the line as Chicky’s mother. There was a caption under the picture that read, “The Dancing Doran Sisters and Little Ellie.”

  “Little?” I said to Annie. “She looks like she’s at least five-seven.”

  The fourth picture featured Ellie alone. She was wearing a white silk dress with a short, full skirt festooned with lace. White stockings and dance slippers with large roses on them completed the ensemble, which once again looked way too young for her. And what was up with that bow, perched on top of the beautiful hair tumbling over her shoulders?

  I punched the button on the tape recorder. “Mom and Pop met in a theater in New Rochelle,” Chicky’s voice said. “Mom and her sisters had the second spot on the bill. To be honest with you, that was the slot the managers usually reserved for a weak act because the patrons would still be straggling in
, so you’ve got to think that the Dancing Doran Sisters weren’t all that good. Masters and George had a much better position; they were closing out the first half of the show, which meant the manager figured their act for a crowd-pleaser.

  “Whenever Pop and Benny played a new theater Pop liked to go down to the stage early to get a feel for the house. So he was in the wings when Mom and her sisters were getting ready to go on.”

  I listened to the rest of Chicky’s account of the scene; then I started writing again. This time there was no deep breath. I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

  CHAPTER 16

  New Rochelle, New York

  1919

  The backstage at the New Rochelle Opera House was narrow and dusty. As the orchestra out front began to play for the Dancing Doran Sisters, Joe Masters picked his way carefully through the darkness behind the backdrop, making sure he didn’t brush up against anything. He and Benny wore white costumes because white caught the lights onstage, but it also showed every speck of dirt, and they only had enough in their budget to get their suits cleaned five times during this tour. New Rochelle was their first booking, and they had twenty weeks to go.

  Joe kept on making his way to the side of the stage. Walking around during a show seemed to steady his nerves. Besides, he wanted to watch the rest of the bill he and Benny would be working with. Especially the tall strawberry blonde who was the lead in the Doran Sisters’ act. He’d seen her back in New York when all the performers in the show got on the train at Grand Central Terminal, and Lord, she was a beauty! He’d gladly look at her for the next twenty weeks if she and her sisters were going to be on the full tour. You never knew what was going to happen when you were on the road. Sometimes you worked with different acts in different theaters, and sometimes you worked with the same people for the whole time. An act could be canceled out of town if the booker heard from theater managers that it was no good, and a whole tour could be canceled somewhere out in the sticks because there weren’t enough customers to fill the theater seats, leaving the actors with no way to get home. There were no guarantees in show business. But on a good small-time circuit like this one the managements were pretty decent, and he and Benny had a solid little act, so he figured they’d be safe. The strawberry blonde and her sisters were in the weak spot on the bill, so he was a little worried about her.