by Ed Ifkovic
Evan pursed his brow. “What nonsense are you yammering about now?”
But Annika slipped back into her puritanical mask: tight lines around her mouth, the steely eyes, the jutting chin. She folded her arms across her chest. Evan started to say something but she pointed a finger at him. “Your name is in the Doomsday Book.”
He stood and faced me. “I guess the only woman in this room who I can charm is you, Miss Ferber.”
I locked eyes with him. “I don’t find you charming, Evan.”
“Of course, you do.”
“If anything, I find you…alarming.”
“What?” A puzzled look on his face, not happy.
“You’re a fire that throws no heat, sir.”
Annika snickered. “Satan’s fire, dark and cold.”
“Well, that’s not exactly what I was thinking,” I told her. “More like a Casanova spelling out one-syllable words from an old primer.”
Though our banter confused him, Evan seemed flattered by the attention. “I’m in the room, ladies. I can hear you.”
“So can Jesus.” Said by Annika, not by me.
The door opened and Dak stood there, shadowy, framed by a wash of afternoon sunlight. His eyes darted from Evan to Annika. “What’s going on here?” His voice cracked, nervous.
“Dakota,” Annika whispered as he approached her. “You’re late.”
He was staring at Evan. “Seems to me I’m just in time.”
Evan extended his hand. “Dak, my friend, sorry about that little send-up last night. No blood spilt, right? A little misunderstanding. I don’t like scuffling with old buddies.”
Dak watched him carefully, one hand gripping the back of a chair. Of average height and with a slight build, he seemed the boy here, the ragtag neighborhood lad who trembled before the swaggering town bully. A good-looking face with glistening blue-gray eyes set off by a warm olive skin, he nervously drew his hand through his messy black hair, an unconscious gesture that was very appealing. Color rose up his neck, his eyes suddenly sad. “It’s all right,” he mumbled.
Annika fumed. “No, it isn’t, Dakota. For Lord’s sake, listen to you. This…this Hollywood degenerate appears in town and tries to…to…you know…flatter me and ask me…” She stopped, lacking the vocabulary of questionable seduction.
“Harmless,” Evan protested, though he winked.
“Let’s go.” Annika thundered, standing and looping her arm into Dakota’s. “This meeting of the Maplewood Boys’ Club is adjourned.” She nudged him along as he stumbled, sheepish, red-faced. She paused by my table, the proper Victorian girl. “Miss Ferber, this is Dakota. Dakota, Miss Ferber, the famous writer.” Dakota was nodding at me, confused by the serendipitous introduction. Annika went on. “Miss Ferber, please visit the Assembly of God.”
Dak looked into my eyes. His embarrassed smile disappeared when Annika pushed him.
Before I could answer, she opened the door of the café. A step behind her now, Dak glanced over his shoulder and I caught his eye: confusion there, true, but something else—anger. At Annika? Perhaps. Or was it dislike? Or at Evan? I had no idea what his scattered glance meant.
Evan waited a moment and then left the restaurant. But he never stared my way. Mamie Trout began clearing dishes from the tables. “That girl got her hooks into that poor boy. Nothing good’ll come of that. Mark my words. Trust me.”
“You know them?”
“His mama’s Clorinda Roberts Tyler, of course. You gotta know who that is, no? Hellfire and brimstone and salvation and redemption and Hollywood tap dance, all rolled into one hell’s-a-poppin’ spectacle. I never miss a sermon—it’s better’n amateur night at Pal’s Cabin over to West Orange. And that girl’s the daughter she never had. Joan of Arc with eyes ablazing. She comes in here and scares the bejesus outta some folks.”
“And Dak? This Dakota?”
She glanced toward the street. “Ah, that boy, the prodigal son, returned from wandering around America like a boxcar hobo. Some folks born not to know where to lay their heads down. I knew him as a boy, of course, always up to mischief in those days. Nothing mean or downright evil—just well…‘Look at me! Look at me!’ He was named for a one-reel William S. Hart movie, so I hear. Real stupid, that name. Lord, you’d think we was in Wyoming, galloping into the sunset.” She grinned. “But I’ll tell you a secret. I was always soft on that boy. A sweetheart. Harmless. You can spot a good heart, you know. You can hear it beating. He come back just in time to begin training to become tomorrow’s new Billy Sunday.”
“So you’re a follower of his mother’s religion, Mamie? The Assembly of God?”
She shook her head vigorously. “A little too damnation and hellfire for me, but, as I say, I don’t miss a sermon. A little religion is all I got—born and bred Baptist—and it’s enough to make me decent and law-abiding and God-fearing. Too much religion”—she pointed out the window at the departed Annika—“and you forget that folks got other things to worry about when they wakes in the morning.”
“Dak seems a quiet young man. But troubled…”
“As I said, I known him for years. His trouble is that he listens to other people.”
“And you don’t?”
“Most times other people got nothing you need to hear.” She paused. “Too many people talking to that boy—at that boy. He don’t know what to believe.”
Outside, hit by a blast of August heat, I deliberated walking to the nearby park, then changed my mind. A cool bath in the deep Victorian claw-foot tub, a glass of iced lemonade delivered from the kitchen, an hour with my Fanny Cavendish lines, and perhaps a welcomed nap.
As I stepped onto the sidewalk I spotted Evan Street across the way. He’d paused before a rooming house, glancing up and down the street as though looking for someone—or perhaps to avoid being seen—but he finally walked up the steps and disappeared inside. A decrepit place, this rooming house, the old clapboard Victorian with peeling yellow paint, sagging green shutters, and a faded sign hanging loose off one hook. ROOMS TO LET. MRS. SIMPSON’S. GENTLEMEN ONLY. The block lettering was fast disappearing. Respectable, certainly—the house had an aura of old musty gentility—but a painted lady down on her luck. An old man sat rocking on a chair by the front door. Dressed in a denim shirt and a railroad cap, a pipe stuck between his lips, he’d nodded at Evan, who ignored him, purposely stepping wide of the man. A residence, I considered, for itinerant workers, for drifters, fugitives from shabby Hoover villages, two bits for a night’s lodging and a lumpy mattress and mouse droppings in the shared toilet. I knew such places…and so, lamentably, did Evan Street.
***
That evening, near dark, I walked up the street to the Marlborough House, a restaurant recommended by a woman I met in the lobby of the Jefferson Village Inn. “A lovely inn, this place,” she whispered, “but if you want good food try the Marlborough House.” She glanced over her shoulder as though regretting her betrayal of the inn’s kitchen, then rushed off to her room. She looked trustworthy: a schoolmarmish woman my age in sensible shoes, a silk shawl for a chilly night, with a bit of mischief in her brown eyes, a woman carrying a black patent-leather purse big enough to secret silverware service for twelve and perhaps a gravy bowl or two.
I imagined a blessing for her as I dipped into my savory pot roast and rosemary-slathered potatoes, toothsome and perfect. In the crowded dining room—perhaps that culinary spy had alerted others?—I devoted my energy to the meal. On the hot August night I’d donned a simple polka-dot summer dress, sleeveless, with my obligatory pearls, to be sure; and the modest clutch I carried could accommodate one sterling silver soup spoon, should larceny be my inclination.
I started when a voice whispered in my ear, ”Women who dine alone are looking for vagabond heroes.”
George Kaufman slipped into a chair opposite me.
“But usually we find ne�
��er-do-well scalawags, themselves one step ahead of the law.” I breathed in. “George, you weren’t supposed to arrive for a couple days. Why are you here?”
Wide-eyed, he waved his hand around the dining room. “My spies told me I’d find the best supper in Maplewood here. Therefore, using my powers of deduction, I knew I’d find you here, food fetishist that you are.” He squinted his eyes. “And I’m not in the least.”
“I highly recommend it.” I smiled. “But that’s not an answer to my question.”
He sat back, his familiar slouch, and waved the waiter away. “It was Bea’s idea, Edna love. ‘You need to be there for Edna in her acting debut,’ she said, or some words to that effect. Or maybe she said, ‘Her hour of need.’ Or maybe: ‘She went there early. You leave her alone in that dull village that isn’t Manhattan. You know she’ll be at a loss for company, and she’ll probably have stage fright when she’s onstage.’” He paused. “All right, I made up that last part. Some of the first part, too. But I thought, why not come early? What else is there for me to do? How many laps can a soul do in his lovely pond? After all, we did write the infernal play together and…”
“And you got tired of puttering around your summer garden.”
“So here I am.”
“Tell the truth, George. This directing job—it’s not like you. Summers you stare into space, slack-jawed. You spend August imaging new illnesses that will kill you by September. Tell the truth—you want to see me make a fool of myself.”
“I’ve already seen that, Edna. Over me.”
“George!” I said through clenched teeth. “Enough of that!”
“I figure it will all be an adventure. Whenever we’ve traveled together, you and I, at some tryout or other misadventure…well, things happen.”
“Nothing will happen, George. It’s New Jersey.”
“So when it does, we’ll be surprised.”
I sat back, and smiled. George’s sudden appearance pleased me. Feeling a tad lonesome by myself, I knew George would, despite his sardonic commentary and occasional cruel jibe, be the loudest cheerleader for my adventure on the stage. There were times I rued his being nearby—times I suggested that he was wrong about something that I actually knew he was right about. Or those times he viciously dressed down an inept waiter or bellhop. Unpleasant, skin-crawling times. And George could be dreadfully nosy, the pesky snoop, and the hypochondriac who insisted I diagnose a low-grade fever or a heart murmur—all preparatory to a deathbed scene. He hated that I often interrupted him—which I had to. Most people, I’d discovered, are in need of being interrupted. I consider it an act of mercy. But I knew I got on his nerves, and he on mine. But…I was glad he’d come. With his carnival nose and gigantic hair, he sat there in his red bow tie and a white-linen summer sports jacket, and looked like a character from a Marx Brothers review.
“Frank Resnick is here.” He pointed across the room. “Didn’t you spot him here?”
I shook my head. “I only remember meeting him once, George. He didn’t make an impression on me.”
“No one ever remembers poor Frank.”
“I do remember that he’s Cheryl’s stage manager for the summer. For reasons that bewildered her.” A pause. “And he’s your old buddy.”
“No, I know him slightly, but I do like him. A strange bird, that one. Efficient as all get out, but distant, moody. Not one to blather like lots of show folks, present company included.”
“George, most folks can’t get a word in when you’re in the room. You enter a room talking.”
“I’m a sly fellow, Edna, as you know, but I always figure I’d better forestall the dullards waiting to share their dullness with me.”
“Tell me about Frank. He’s sitting with a very pretty girl.”
Frank spotted the two of us looking at him, and nodded. He leaned in to say something to the young woman, but she looked tense, one hand nervously touching her hair.
A man probably in his early fifties, Frank reminded me of a silent movie actor—John Garfield maybe, a pencil-thin man, wiry, with a pencil-thin whisper of a Continental moustache, smartly clipped. A dapper Dan haircut, oily black and slicked back from his forehead, the part so painfully executed it seemed etched in the scalp. Dark-complected—or was it a summer tan? He sported a slightly out-of-style suit with a checkered pattern that, while not a zoot suit, was at least a distant cousin.
As he looked at us, his eyes got cloudy and wary—confused, as though our presence was something of an intrusion. Again, the quick aside to his companion. Perhaps it was an intrusion, at least his friend George’s presence, as George cast his own covetous eyes on the slight but sultry girl at the table. She wore too much makeup for New Jersey, I thought, a crimson lipstick and accented eyes that made her seem an Erté figurine. Both were smoking cigarettes, both with arms extended as though in a scene from a Lubitsch German film, both mannered and a little preposterous. I was enjoying every bit of it.
“Our stage manager seems to be managing just fine,” George commented.
“George,” I seethed, “you have a leering gleam in your eye. A little unseemly, no?”
George was peeved. “Unseemly, Edna? A lovely girl, that one. I take an interest in young people.”
I groaned. “A lovely euphemism, that line.”
Frank now left his table and, with obvious reluctance, was maneuvering his way to us. “George,” he began, “a surprise.”
“Well, you do know that I’ve taken over as director?” Frank nodded. “And Edna needs all the help she can get. Edna, this is Frank. Edna says she met you once, but can’t remember anything you said because she fell asleep. Frank, this is…well, you’ve heard of her. You know, I wrote all of the Fanny Cavendish lines in our play and without me she’s helpless.”
I said nothing. Frank stood stiff and tense, his head bobbing. Now and then, he lifted a hand to touch his shellacked hair, and I feared his fingers might get stuck in the oily slick that passed for tonsorial splendor.
He also kept glancing back at the lovely young woman at his table who never took her eyes off us, her cigarette smoke wreathing her face.
“Miss Ferber,” Frank addressed me, making eye contact for a second. Again, the unnecessary wariness. Why? “I look forward to working with you.”
But he was already edging away.
George reached out to touch his sleeve. “Tell me, Frank, who is your dinner guest? So pretty.”
Frank’s eyes suddenly got hooded, dull black, and he actually turned, as though he had no idea someone had joined his solitary table. Flustered, he gave out a harsh phony laugh. “Oh, God, no. It’s not what you think. George, really! That’s Nadine Novack.” A pause. “An actress. She’s the understudy Cheryl hired for the summer. Beautiful, no? She’ll be understudying Julie in The Royal Family and Talullah Bankhead in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She’s already done Louise Rainer in A Kiss for Cinderella.” He paused again, then stuttered, “An actress.”
“You’ve established her profession already.” My tone was icy.
“She doesn’t know anyone in town.”
“She knows you,” George concluded. “She’s very pretty.”
Again, the fumbling words. “She’s an…” His voice trailed off.
“An actress,” I finished for him.
He was backing away. “Yes, she is.” He looked unhappy, his final words brusque. “It’s never what you think, George.”
“That’s true, it never is.”
When he was gone, I looked at George. “I really don’t understand the mating rituals of the aging American male. I followed so little of that inane conversation. The two of you are like fifteen-year-old boys reaching puberty at the soda fountain at Woolworth’s. I expected magnificent peacock plumage to appear, Hollywood-style, from somewhere beneath both your sports jackets.”
“Edna, what are you talking a
bout?”
“She’s just an actress, George. This Nadine Novack. A preposterous name stolen from a silent movie plot. Yes, gorgeous, admittedly. But an understudy.”
He was playing with me. “She’ll have a long career.”
“Yes,” I insisted, “after Maplewood…the flood.” I rose to leave.
Glancing back at them, I spotted Frank, silent now, watching us. Nadine was fixing her makeup, looking at her face in a compact mirror, mending her lipstick. Frank said something and she looked toward the door. Frowning, she shook her head. Then she looked back at her mirror and bit her lip. What she saw didn’t make her happy.
Outside, George and I walked slowly in the warm stillness of the night. Not wanting to return to our hot rooms—“I’ve booked a room down the hall from you, Edna. No one will get past me, I promise you”—we lingered on a sidewalk bench, sheltered by a grove of trees at the edge of the park. A boy and girl walked past, ice cream cones in hand, giggling, in love. Fresh scrubbed, the boy in billowing trousers and the girl in white bobby socks. They glanced at George and me, and the boy nodded, deferential, sweet. I found it charming. George, however, cleared his throat and informed the lad, “We’re not as happy as we look, young man. She’s leaving me for a circus clown.”
“Don’t believe him,” I countered. “I wouldn’t make that mistake a second time.”
The boy and girl, baffled by the nonsensical blather from the strange couple who could be their parents—and thus should be at home—scurried away, still giggling. The boy glanced back at the skinny man with the pompadour and the Barney Google eyeglasses and the beaky nose, sitting with the tiny lady with the three strands of pearls and expensive shoes from Saks.
“George, must you engage everyone in your silliness?”