The Dancing Doran Sisters had just run onstage. Joe made his way to the left side of the stage, where the stage manager’s box was, and, after nodding to the man, stood in the wings to watch. After a second he frowned. The girls were starting out with a little patter, after which, presumably, they would dance. There was nothing wrong with that setup—it was standard for an act of this kind—but the patter was all wrong. They were doing what was essentially a kid’s act, and they weren’t that young. The strawberry blonde—according to the program her name was Ellie—had to be sixteen if she was a day. At the train station she’d been a dreamboat in a stylish traveling suit. Now she looked overgrown and ridiculous in a kiddie costume, with her lovely hair scraped into pigtails. Someone had told her to deliver her lines with a lisp.
When the girls had started their act, the audience snickered a few times, waiting for a punch line that would explain why they were pretending to be children. But the punch line hadn’t come so the audience was confused. That was bad, as Joe knew too well from his own past mistakes. You lost the audience fast if they didn’t understand what you were doing. The beauty—Ellie—seemed to know it, because she was racing through the dialogue as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, her sisters weren’t keeping up with her, so it only made things worse. The audience had started coughing—a fatal sign that its patience was at an end—but then, mercifully, Ellie gave the conductor the sign to strike up the orchestra and, as Joe heaved a sigh of relief, the girls went into their dance. The house could understand that.
The sisters weren’t bad dancers, and Ellie Doran had a nice little air about her, so you could almost forget the silly costumes. But just as Joe was thinking she might even get a small hand when it was over, she took a pratfall, a hokey pratfall that came out of nowhere. It had to be a part of the act, because her sisters clustered around her and they all went back to doing baby talk again. The audience was completely turned off by now, and there was no way to get them back. Joe could tell that Ellie Doran knew they were dying; the flop sweat had started to come out on her. He almost couldn’t watch. Suddenly, as if to back up what he’d been thinking, the girl looked offstage and he saw rage in her eyes.
A whiff of something familiar hit his nostrils, the sour-breath smell of someone who’d been at the whiskey bottle. It was early, but morning drinking wasn’t uncommon in Joe’s world. He turned to see who the boozer was. Standing next to him, weaving dangerously, was the man who had gotten on the train with the Doran Sisters. Joe remembered that one of the girls had referred to him as Pa. So this was Ellie’s father. And when she’d thrown that look of fury offstage, she’d meant it for him.
The girls finished and bowed to a house that was sitting on its hands in disgust. The Doran Sisters had laid a big fat egg. If they hadn’t been young and pretty they’d have been booed. They made their way offstage, with Ellie shooting fire out of her beautiful blue eyes. Joe backed up to see what would happen, and sure enough, she strode over to her inebriated parent as he swayed back and forth and fixed him with a blazing stare. “Are you happy, Pa?” she demanded in a whisper. “We flopped again. Are you happy now?”
What happened next was as quick as it was stunning. The drunk balanced himself and before Joe or the nearby stage manager could stop him, he hit the girl hard in the face with his open hand. “Bitch,” he hissed. “I’ll teach you to talk that way to your old man.”
The fire went out of her eyes, and she put up her hands as her sisters tried to get between her and their father, who was winding up to swing again. Joe’s fists clenched and without thinking he moved toward the man, but he felt himself being pulled back.
“No, you don’t,” the stage manager said in his ear. “You’re not gonna start a fight back here while I got a show to run. Besides, you and your partner ain’t gone on yet, and you got no time to be a hero.” He signaled to a stagehand, who grabbed the drunk and threw him into the alley next to the theater. Meanwhile, Ellie had caught Joe’s eye. Realizing that he must have seen her humiliation, she pushed her sisters away and ran to the back of the stage, where there was a staircase leading to the dressing rooms above. Her sisters huddled together for a few more seconds and then followed. Neither of them seemed shocked or even terribly upset by the fact that their father had just hit their sister broadside. That was bad.
The stage manager was motioning to the next act to get ready to make their entrance, and Joe backed off to the side to give them room. He was still thinking about what he’d just seen.
“It’s just as well you kept your suit clean,” the stage manager whispered as he gave the cue for the curtain to go up. “The owner here doesn’t put up with bum acts. Those girls will be getting their pictures back by the end of the night.”
All vaudevillians traveled with glossy photos of their act, which were hung in the lobby of the theater they were playing. When a management wanted to cancel you, they gave you your pictures back. Ellie and her sisters were going to be canned that night. Joe sighed; he couldn’t blame the management, the girls’ act was bad, but as he stood backstage watching the show and waiting to make his own entrance with Benny, he couldn’t help thinking about the look in Ellie Doran’s eyes.
MASTERS AND GEORGE did their turn and got their usual solid response from the house. After the curtain came down, Joe made his way to the dressing room he and Benny shared. Benny was off somewhere, probably flirting with the chorus girls who danced in the big flash act that opened the second half of the bill. In the five years since he’d left home, Benny had changed. The cynical fat boy with a chip on his shoulder was now a handsome man who seemed to need to make every girl he met fall in love with him. And the girls usually did. Benny had learned to hide his cynicism behind a façade of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm that females found very appealing. Also, they sensed a sadness in him—a sadness Joe knew to be real. The girls were convinced that there was some mystery behind Benny’s sorrow and they all wanted to be the one who took it away. But, as Joe knew, they were all doomed to fail. Benny’s pain came from the death of a mother who had never forgiven him or said good-bye. None of the girls who fell so hard for Benny had ever mattered enough to him to make that hurt go away. He just needed them to prove to himself that he was no longer fat Benny Gerhardt.
But Joe did have to admit that Benny was a cut above the other vaudevillians. He had never bothered to try to cover his boundless ambition, and with his refined air and the classy way of speaking his mother had insisted on, Benny always seemed like a man destined for great things, even when he didn’t have two dimes to rub together.
There were several hooks on the dressing room wall where performers could hang their costumes. Joe took a piece of white linen out of his traveling trunk, stretched it between the hooks, took off his white suit, and hung it up so the linen protected it from the dirty wall. He put on his street clothes, checked his face in the mirror, and saw that the greasepaint was holding. If he didn’t go out to eat between shows he probably wouldn’t have to redo it. Finally, after all his backstage rituals were completed, he sat down and began to run through the performance he and Benny had just finished. He wasn’t very happy about it.
The applause they’d gotten was respectable—nothing like the stony silence that had greeted the Doran Sisters—but it wasn’t the kind of response he and Benny had dreamed of when they won the contest in Coney Island that launched them in the business. It certainly wasn’t the roaring approval that elevated an act to the big-time and to an eventual shot at that vaudevillian holiest of holies, the Palace Theater in New York City. Masters and George were stuck in the small-time.
The problem was their material. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good enough. They should start over, but it was hard breaking in a new act, and Joe was afraid Benny wouldn’t want to put in the work. However, Benny also knew they weren’t getting ahead and he was frustrated about it. That was a big worry. Benny had never been one to put up with something that wasn’t going his way. If he were to walk, Joe w
ould be without a partner, and Joe wasn’t sure he could do a single. Not that he hadn’t thought about it. When Benny skipped a rehearsal or dried while they were onstage—the performer’s term for forgetting your lines in front of an audience—being on his own would seem real good to Joe.
If he were to try going solo, it would be as a monologuist—a man who stood on an empty stage all alone and held the audience by telling stories and jokes. A good monologuist needed an ear for comic voices and an ability to slip in and out of a variety of characters, as well as having the ability to come up with one-liners. These were all talents Joe knew he had. But the move would be risky.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. This was a debate he’d been having with himself more and more lately. Benny was exasperating, it was true, but he knew how to make friends in the right places. When they were between jobs, back in New York, Benny was the one who hung around the joints where the booking agents had lunch and sold Masters and George to them over a hot pastrami or a corned beef on rye. It was Benny’s charm that got them many of their gigs, and Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what would happen to him without it. Besides, they had an act that worked—even if it wasn’t great enough to play the Palace. The history of vaudeville was littered with tales of partners who broke up a decent act and went out on their own, only to bomb horribly.
Joe opened his eyes. He wasn’t going to rock the boat, no matter how tempting the idea. The real question was, what was Benny going to do? Because Joe knew his partner would leave him high and dry in an instant if he thought it was in his own best interest.
Joe sat up and shook his head to clear it. There was no need to think about any of this now. For the next twenty weeks he and Benny were committed to the tour, and Benny wasn’t the kind to welsh on a contract. Their act had gone well enough today, and the management had to be pleased with them, No one was talking about handing them their pictures.
That thought brought up a vision of the lovely Ellie Doran and the way she’d looked at Joe when she realized he’d seen her father hit her. She’d been angry and humiliated and she’d run upstairs to hide. Joe looked up at the ceiling. He’d already checked, and he knew her dressing room was on the floor above his. Ellie Doran was probably up there right now. Her father’s hand had caught her near the eye, so it was probably turning black and blue—her whole face had to be hurting. Joe looked at his watch. There was a restaurant across the street from the theater and he didn’t have to be onstage again until the final curtain call, which was at least an hour from now. He picked up his hat and hurried out of the dressing room.
WHEN HE CAME back from the restaurant, Joe raced up the stairs to the Dorans’ dressing room. He started to knock on the door, and then he stopped. What if Ellie wasn’t there? What if her sisters were in the room with her? Somehow he’d just assumed that she’d be alone, but if she wasn’t … He looked down at the parcel in his hand. He didn’t want to embarrass her more than he already had. He’d seen how proud she was. He stood outside the door, not sure what to do. The chorus girls who had been onstage were coming back up the stairs, laughing and chatting, which meant the second half of the show was under way. He didn’t have time to waste; it was now or never. He knocked.
His luck was in. She opened the door. He stole a quick look over her shoulder and saw she was alone. And she definitely wasn’t pleased to see him.
“Can I come in?” he asked fast, before she had a chance to close the door in his face. She studied him for a second, shrugged, and walked back inside the room. He decided that meant yes. Being careful to leave the door open so she wouldn’t think he’d gotten any ideas, he followed her. The little room was furnished with one rickety chair, a mirror that was in need of resilvering, and a makeup table that would have been small for one person, let alone the three girls using it. It was the kind of bad dressing room that managements assigned to the lesser acts on the bill.
Ellie Doran sat in the chair and looked up at him warily. The fire had gone out of her; her whole body seemed to sag with weariness now, and the bruises around her eye had already started to bloom. Joe opened his mouth and realized he didn’t know what to say. This was a new and unwelcome sensation. He wasn’t in the same class as Benny when it came to smooth-talking women—few men in the world were as gifted as Benny was in that area—but Joe had always been able to hold his own with the opposite sex. He was in show business, for God’s sake! He wasn’t some tongue-tied rube from the sticks; he’d been around beautiful girls most of his adult life. But now, when it was so important to say the right thing … just call him Johnny Hayseed.
“Well?” she said.
“I saw what happened downstairs,” he blurted out idiotically.
“I know.” She turned to stare at the wall. “It was my fault. I know better than to fly at Pa when he’s been drinking.”
“No one should do that to you,” he blurted out again. There didn’t seem to be any way to stop himself.
“It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”
“You’re going to have one hell of a shiner.”
She shrugged again. “Nothing a little greasepaint won’t cover. I’ve done it before.”
She looked defeated sitting there, when she should have been smiling and happy. She was born for smiles and happiness. Joe looked again at his package, wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with a white string. He held it out to her. “Here,” he said.
She hesitated for a long moment, then she took the package and opened it. “What the …? You’re giving me a chunk of raw meat?” For a moment he thought she was angry, but then—oh, thank you, God—she grinned. “This is a gift? You couldn’t even have it cooked?”
“It’s for your eye. It’ll help.” He was grinning now too.
“Where did you get it?”
“Across the street. At the restaurant. They thought I was crazy.”
“Aren’t you?”
Maybe about you. “They understood when I told them I was in show business. You know how that is—civilians always think we’re cuckoo.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Her grin faded. “Yeah, I know civilians,” she said bitterly. She turned away from him. “Thanks for the steak.” He was being dismissed.
“Well, take care of that eye,” he said, back to being idiotic again.
He started for the door, but before he could reach it she said softly, “I know about civilians because I’m going to be one soon.” He came back. “Our act … we’re going to be canceled.”
The stage manager had said she and her sisters would get their pictures back after the second show. That was the way it was usually done; an act was canceled after they’d finished performing. It would be mean to do it when they still had to go on a second time. “Who told you?” he demanded.
“When you’ve been canned as often as we have, you don’t need anyone to say it.”
There was resignation in her voice. She’d faced the truth, and as much as he wished it wasn’t so, it would be unkind to give her false hope. “There are other tours,” he said gently. “Other managements.”
“Not for us. Not anymore.” Her eyes started to fill with tears—she wiped them away fast. “Our act is dead.”
“I wouldn’t say dead exactly. Your patter … and the movements … may be a little young for you and your sisters…. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about changing—”
“You think I don’t know what we look like onstage?” She cut him off angrily. “You think I don’t know I’m making a fool of myself when I go out there?”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I’m sure you know how bad … I mean …” He trailed off miserably.
“Yes. I know how bad we are.”
“Then why do you do it?” he heard himself ask.
“Pa.” The one syllable came out as a sigh. “He put the act together when I was six. In the beginning, we were pretty good.” She smiled at the memory. Then she frowned, and it looked like she was going to clam up again.<
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“I bet you were,” Joe said, to encourage her and keep her talking.
“That was ten years ago.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve grown up since then.”
“You mean your father hasn’t changed the act since you were children?” She shook her head. “But that’s—” He couldn’t find the word for how stupid and wasteful and … downright criminal that was. It was one thing to have an act that wasn’t working and not know why. But to go onstage the way she did, knowing what was wrong and not being able to do anything about it—that went against every instinct he had as a performer. “You have to tell him you won’t do it anymore! You can’t!”
“You saw what happened backstage. You think that’s the only time I’ve been hit? He wants us to keep on being babies. And when he’s been drinking …” She sighed again. “He didn’t drink like that when Ma was alive. Not that I remember, anyway.”
She was looking far off now. He stood very still so he wouldn’t interrupt her thoughts. Anything to keep her talking.
“Pa was in the profession,” she said. “He started in the music halls in England with a single act—a couple of songs and a buck dance—but it was the singing that put him across. Pa had a beautiful voice. He came to this country, and everyone who heard him said it was just a matter of time before he broke into the big-time.
“He met my ma and they got married and she had us kids, and Pa was doing great. He had a booking in New York City; all the important scouts and agents were coming to catch his act. The night before he went on, Ma got sick—the influenza. She got bad real fast. Pa was torn up about leaving her in the hotel room, but this was the chance he’d been waiting for.” Her eyes were sparkling with tears she was holding back. Joe had a feeling she was one of those rare girls who got prettier when they cried. “Pa went onstage and his throat closed up. He tried to sing anyway, he pushed so hard he ruptured something in there—that’s what the doctor said. His voice was gone after that. And Ma never did get better. After two months, she died. I was six, Florrie was eight, and Dot was ten.
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