He had finished his business and was back uptown by lunchtime, so he did a quick check of the spots he’d heard were Benny’s favorites and finally ended up standing in front of Neely’s glass door. He peered through the big front window of the restaurant and saw Benny sitting at a table with a group of friends. There was no point in going inside and making a scene, so he moved to the side of the building and leaned against it to wait until Benny came out. But Benny had seen him through the window, and he came outside right away.
“I suppose you want to see me,” Benny said.
“Yes.”
“We need to get some things straight.”
“I agree.”
“I told Ellie and I’m telling you. I’m not going to let you raise that little girl. She’s my daughter.”
“That’s not what her birth certificate says.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you know the truth!”
“But no one else does.”
“All anyone has to do is look at her to tell she’s mine. She looks like me.”
“I think my daughter looks like her mother; Ellie has blond hair and blue eyes. But I think Baby’s going to be short—like me. You’re how tall? Over six feet, aren’t you?”
“The women in my family are small.”
“What a coincidence.” Joe had been resting his back against the building, and now he leaned forward. “Here’s the way it looks to me, Benny. Ellie and I will both lie. We’ve been married for four years, and people are used to thinking of us as a couple. If you try to claim our little girl is yours, you’ll look like a fool. And you won’t like that; you know you won’t.” Joe paused. “You can’t prove you’re the father. Give it up.”
“You think I’m going to let you get away with this?”
“If you’re smart.”
“How are you going to support them? Because I promise you, if you do this to me you won’t work again.”
“We’ll be just fine.”
“Doing what?”
“None of your business.”
“You won’t be opening at the Jefferson next week, Joe.”
“I know. I went there this morning and canceled.” Joe turned and started walking back toward Pastor’s Boardinghouse.
“She’ll never stop loving me!” Benny called after him. “I know her. She’ll get tired of you, and she’ll want—” He never said what she’d want. Because that was when Joe turned back and punched him.
• • •
“YOU STARTED A fight with Benny in the middle of Broadway?” Ellie demanded. She’d grabbed a chunk of ice from Mrs. Pastor’s ice box and was chipping it into small pieces to make a pack to press on Joe’s rapidly swelling eye. “Are you crazy?”
“Been wanting to do it for four years.”
“But you canceled the Jefferson. Do you know what that means?”
Joe stood up and walked to the window. He looked out at Forty-fifth Street for what seemed to Ellie like a very long time. “We’re out of show business,” he said. He kept himself turned away from her. He didn’t want her to see his face.
“But you were just getting started,” she said. “Joe, you don’t have to quit. Benny can’t keep you from working forever.”
“No. But he can make it tough for a while—I don’t know how long. We’d be on the small small-time—maybe even on a couple of Death Trails—playing tank towns, five shows a day. Staying in dirty rooms, doing the long jumps, worrying about the next meal. You know what it’s like. If it was just you and me, we’d take it. Wait it out until something broke again. But we have a little girl.” He still hadn’t turned to look at her.
“You’re quitting for her and she’s not—” Ellie started to say, but he stopped her.
“Don’t tell me she’s not mine. I’ve already heard that today.” He finally turned. “And Benny is right. Anyone who looks at her and knows him will see the resemblance. Do you want that for her, all that gossip? Do we want Benny playing father of the year—when it’s convenient for him?”
“No.”
“If we’re in the business, we’re going to keep running into him. We need to live somewhere out of the way.”
“But you’re so good in the act—”
“I can live without it. But not being with you?” He looked into her eyes. “Ellie, I’ll never tell you I can’t live without you. I could if I had to—and you could live without me. But I just don’t want to.”
It wasn’t the kind of declaration of love you wanted to hear when you were young and foolish. But it had been a long time since Ellie had been that. Joe would never sing a corny love song for her, or buy her a silly present he couldn’t afford. But he’d always been there with whatever she needed, starting with the first time she’d met him, when her pa gave her the black eye.
Ellie picked up the bowl of ice, dumped it in the basin, kissed Joe on the back of the neck, and started out of the room. Joe turned to see her opening the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To get you a piece of raw steak. You’re going to have one hell of a shiner.”
CHAPTER 33
“What did Joe and Ellie do next?” I asked Chicky.
“What time is it?” Her voice on the phone sounded groggy.
“I’m not sure. I just finished writing the last section and there aren’t any more tapes. You said you were going to make more, but you never gave them to me.”
“It’s five in the morning, Doll Face.”
“Okay. That sounds about right.”
“I don’t do early morning anymore. In case you haven’t heard, I’m very old.”
“You didn’t tell me the end of the story. I don’t know what happened after Joe and Ellie quit show business.”
Chicky took a moment. “Do you know how to operate a car, Doll Face?”
“I can drive six to the ground, and I once took a Bentley out on the Four-oh-nine in LA during rush hour. The car had not been adapted yet for the American market, so the steering wheel was on the right. Why?”
“Because I can get us some wheels and there’s something I want you to see.”
THAT WEEKEND, CHICKY and I drove an ancient Honda—courtesy of the grandson of one of the Swinging Grandmas—up the Taconic Parkway to Millertown, New York.
Millertown was established as a port on the Hudson River when New York was still a colony, long before the hey-let’s-go-dump-tea-in-Boston-Harbor movement. The town consists of two main drags running parallel to the river, and a couple of side streets that intersect with them to form the ubiquitous northeastern town square, with the requisite white clapboard churches flanking it, along with a minuscule fire station and a tiny town hall. There are other streets that intersect with the intersecting streets, so that a small residential area radiates out from the square. The train used to stop in Millertown, but it doesn’t anymore, and whatever industry kept people in the area employed has long since vanished.
Chicky had given me this history on our trip north, so when we reached Millertown I was expecting to find one of those sad little villages whose time has passed. Not so. It took us fifteen minutes to find a parking space, and once we hit the sidewalk it was clear that the place was thriving. There were cute little clothing and home goods shops, art galleries, several antiques stores, and the old railroad depot had been turned into a school that proudly bore the name MASTERS ACADEMY. I figured this was the engine behind the town’s prosperity.
“Academy of what?” I asked Chicky.
“That’s the next part of the story.”
“Which you are not going to tell me until you are good and ready.”
She patted my cheek. “You’ve come to know me so well. Look to your right.” We were standing in front of a building with a neon sign above it that read MILLERTOWN DINER. It looked like one of those boxcars you see in antique postcards; it was small and squatty, painted lime green, and loaded with immaculately maintained chrome trim. A plaque proudly displayed on the front door identified it as
one of the few remaining Silk City diners still standing in the country. According to the brief history written on the plaque, these diners, which were popular in the 1920s, were inspired by railroad dining cars, and today they are considered to be architecturally significant. This one was a historic landmark.
“Come on,” Chicky said, and led me inside.
The booths on either side of the diner were full. Every seat at the counter was taken. The three chairs in the small waiting area were taken too. “People still love this place,” Chicky said happily. She turned to a kid who was manning the ancient cash register. “Hey, Pabir,” she said, “how’s your granddad doing?”
“Omigod,” said the kid. He rushed around the counter and he and Chicky hugged and did some how-are-you-it’s-been-forever dialogue; then he turned to the kitchen and unleashed a cascade of a language I didn’t understand, which was followed by a man and two women racing out of the kitchen to hug Chicky some more.
The older of the two women was wearing a cook’s work apron over a sari, and Chicky introduced her as the wife of the man who had purchased the diner from her back in the fifties. “Samir retired a couple of years ago,” Chicky explained. “But Aditha is still coming in every day to make the pies.” As everybody beamed, I glanced at the old-fashioned dessert case, where my eye was caught by a clone of the killer lemon-meringue pie Chicky had baked when Show Biz and I had our party.
“And Grandma makes the curry too, the best you ever had,” Prabir assured me.
“I want to show Doll Face the Wall,” Chicky said. She led me to the back of the diner, where there was a glass case full of pictures hanging on a wall. The photos were arranged chronologically, starting in the late twenties, and they all featured Joe Masters on a platform in a spotlight, with a mike in his hands. Standing nearby in each picture was Ellie. As far as I could tell, this show, or whatever it was, had been a yearly event in town for quite a while. As time passed, Joe’s hair had started to recede and he had developed a bit of a paunch. But in the last picture Ellie was still a slim beauty with just a touch of gray in her reddish-blond hair.
“This town is where I grew up,” Chicky said to me. “My folks moved here after they quit vaudeville.”
“After Joe canceled the gig at the Jefferson,” I said.
“You’ve got a good memory, Doll Face.”
“I just wrote a book about them.”
“So you did.” She gave me a fond little chuckle. “When my parents came here, they didn’t have much money—just what they’d saved to get them by for a few weeks if they were laid off. But the old couple who owned this diner wanted to retire and Pop had made friends with them when he and Mom stayed in Millertown before. They let him buy it for almost nothing down and pay it off over time. It took twenty years. Mom and Pop learned to cook, and Mom turned out to be a damn good waitress. Pop made a great lemon-meringue pie. They added to their family and they were happy—as much as most people are—but they missed show business. It gets in your blood, and you never really stop loving it.”
I turned to the wall of pictures. “It looks to me like they found a way to do something theatrical.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Miss Chicky, we have a table for you.” Pabir was standing behind us.
“Good,” she said, as she hooked her arm in mine. “Because when I tell you this next part, we’re both going to need pie.”
After we were seated and we’d ordered—pecan pie with vanilla ice cream for Chicky, lemon meringue for me—Chicky turned back to look at the wall. There was a dreamy expression on her face.
“Pop never talked about performing when I was a kid, but Mom knew he still missed the business, so she started having talent shows, right here in the diner. Two or three times a year she’d put up a little platform in the back, right where the pictures are now. People would strut their stuff and Pop would be the emcee. The prize was whatever the house pie was for the day.
“They kept the shows going during the Depression and World War II, and on the side, to earn a little extra cash, they started giving singing and dancing lessons—to kids, mostly. After the war, like I told you, some genius decided that Millertown didn’t need train service anymore, which killed off the local economy. And now the town had an empty railroad station to get rid of. My folks rented it and opened a theater school there. The school turned out to be a big draw for this place. Kids from all over came to take lessons and perform in Mom’s talent shows. Some people said that school saved Millertown.
“Between running the school and the diner, my folks worked hard. But we could always tell they loved it. And of course they had us to help out.”
“Us?”
“Their kids.”
“Plural? As in, younger brothers and sisters?”
“Only one sister. And she was older than I was.”
“But Ellie was pregnant when she married Joe. How …?”
“I was born five years later and named Eleanor, after Mom. Benny’s daughter, my half sister, Joanna, had been named after Pop; he was very proud of that.” She took a beat. “When Joanna got too old to be called ‘Baby,’ her new nickname was ‘Annie.’”
“Annie? But that’s—”
“Yes, Alexandra named your pooch after her mother. Annie was your grandmother’s name. I’m your great-aunt.”
CHAPTER 34
You know the feeling when you’re walking down a flight of stairs and it’s dark so you can’t see very well, and you think there’s one more step—but there isn’t? As your foot reaches for something solid, it can feel like the whole world is in free fall. That’s how I felt when Chicky dropped her bombshell.
“My dog is named after Benny and Ellie’s daughter?” I said stupidly.
“Yes.”
“Her name was Joanna.”
“Because it was a feminine version of Joe.”
“But everybody called her Annie.”
“It seemed to fit her better. My family was big on nicknames.”
“And she married my grandfather, and she had my mother, and my mother named my dog—”
“Doll Face, enough with the dog.”
“But it’s like one of those murder mysteries where the big clue has been in plain sight all along and no one noticed it. Annie sleeps in my bedroom. She eats her cookies there. And you’re telling me—”
That was when Pabir showed up with our pie and then hung around, waiting for us to give it a try.
I wolfed down a chunk of meringue. “Fabulous,” I said, and gave him my best Now go away smile.
But Chicky loaded up her fork with pecan pie and ice cream very slowly and put it in her mouth very carefully. She closed her eyes and did a little swoon. “Ambrosia, Pabir” she said. They exchanged a few little pleasantries while I tried not to scream in frustration. He finally disappeared. Chicky reloaded her fork.
“Are you telling me Joe and Ellie were—?”
“Shh, I’m soaking.”
“If you don’t talk to me, you’ll be wearing that damn pie!”
Chicky gave me a big fake sigh. “Elder abuse is not cool, Doll Face.” But I could see she was nervous about telling me the rest. That was what she did when she was afraid someone was going to be mad at her; she deflected. And who did that remind me of? Myself, that’s who.
“Talk to me. Please.”
“Joanna was Benny’s daughter, I was Pop’s. She was called Baby when she was little, then they nicknamed her Annie. Don’t ask me why my folks were so big on nicknames; it was just something they did. I was called Tiny for a while, and then I was Cutie. They finally settled on Chicky, because—”
“Chicky,” I broke in, “enough with the nicknames.”
“Annie was your grandmother. Alexandra’s mother.”
“So the story I’ve been writing—”
“Is about your great-grandparents.”
“And the Karras side fits in how?”
“Milos Karras was a truck driver working the Hudson River valley. He met
Annie when she was waiting tables for my folks in the diner. They fell in love and got married, and Annie left Millertown. She was always the restless type. I used to put it down to Benny’s bloodline, but then I turned out to be pretty restless myself, so who knows? Anyway—”
“Wait a minute. Did Annie ever find out about Benny?”
“My mom told her about him. But not until after Annie got married. I think she waited so long because she was afraid, if Annie wanted to meet Benny, Pop might get hurt. Mom always looked out for Pop that way. But Annie didn’t want to meet Benny. She said Pop was the only father she’d ever want.” Chicky paused. “That’s one of the things I’m really grateful for. She said that to him just a couple of weeks before he and Mom died.”
“Joe and Ellie died?” I heard the dismay in my voice.
Chicky heard it too. “You wanted a happy ending, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Always.
“They had one for a while. But then there was a car wreck. It was her birthday and he was taking her out for a night on the town. They were only in their fifties. Way too young, you know?”
I remembered when my father died at fifty-six. “Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“I was pretty crazy after it happened,” Chicky said. “I think I wanted to make time stand still. I tried to keep everything exactly the way it had been when they were alive.”
I remembered how I had felt when Sheryl was dating and I was writing Love, Max. “I know,” I said.
“I wanted to keep on running the diner and the school. It was as if I were keeping Pop and Mom with me, if I could do that. I didn’t want anything to change.”
“I know.”
“But Annie had moved on. She wanted to sell. Her husband wanted to start his own business and he needed the capital. And to be fair, I was having trouble trying to be the boss of two businesses. I was in over my head, but I couldn’t face it.
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