The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  Both Bill and Flora had had some hits and misses finding success on the stage in the year and a half they’d been there. Bill went to see Flora when she played the Cheshire cat in a small, out-of-the-way production of Alice in Wonderland, and she’d be in the audience watching Bill in the few dwindling vaudeville productions he snagged. He was a natural, with his easy, lanky physique and malleable face, and had been praised by some for his physical comedy. Not Madame Ososki. She loathed vaudeville. “Words, Mr. Parker!” she’d cry, raising a forearm in the air. “It’s the words that make a performance!” Bill disagreed with her, but stayed in the class anyway because Flora was there.

  She let him treat her to meals at the Actor’s Dinner Club, because they were free. The club offered free meals to those who couldn’t afford to pay, and most of the time Bill couldn’t. It wasn’t high society, but the food was hot, and since it was free Flora didn’t feel obligated to him. They’d also share lunches together and walks through Central Park, and Bill eventually admitted to Flora he wasn’t too sure he’d done the right thing in moving to New York.

  “I feel a lot more myself in a smaller town,” he said.

  “I do, too,” Flora’d said, and that was when he knew she was definitely the one for him, and he forgot all about those other three or four girls. He hadn’t been serious about them anyhow. He never took them to the Actor’s Dinner Club. And when Flora’d told him stories about her childhood upstate, and admitted that she, too, sometimes wondered if it had been a mistake to come to the big city, he’d felt something serious. Like her slender fingers wrapping themselves gently around his beating heart.

  Flora had finally let herself enjoy Bill’s attention after four months of his obvious flattery, and only after he’d stopped flattering the other five girls from their acting class. Flora didn’t miss a trick, and she’d frown until her dimples pierced her cheeks when he was winking or waggling his eyebrows at girls around the room. Mistrusting men, especially white men, had been something her mother had instilled in her from a very young age. She’d learned the lessons all black girls learned from their mothers, but her appearance made sure no one would ever know the truth about her unless she wanted them to. “Your eyes and hair,” her mother would say, shaking her head in disbelief every time she lifted the fine, straight strands that would barely hold a curl. “They’ll spare you.”

  Flora’s being “spared” caused an uncomfortable overlap of relief and guilt that stacked like flapjacks on top of each other as she observed how the world treated her versus the way it treated someone like Lila Carter, her friend from grade school, or Ernestine Brown, the woman who mopped the hallway floors of Flora’s New York apartment building. Flora would release the confusion of emotions in her acting exercises and in the characters she played onstage.

  It was the vile words of a vicious-minded white shopkeeper hurled at a young black man begging for work that had smacked and stung worse than any blows might have. Hearing them had sent Flora racing down an alley to vomit behind a trash can and collapse in a frustrated, sobbing heap. The world was a cruel place. The next morning Madame Ososki’s eyes had shone with tears, her breath held and hands clasped beneath her chin, as she watched Flora’s performance.

  “Oy! Kak krasivo!” Although the class didn’t understand the words, they knew this was Madame’s highest praise, and although she wasn’t looking directly at him, Flora knew Bill Parker’s mouth was hanging open in awed admiration. Flora’s secret identity, as she sometimes thought of it, made her acutely aware of her environment.

  Flora paid attention to everything and everyone, and one thing that stood out in her mind was that Bill Parker had been patient and open and more honest than anyone else she’d met in New York.

  She was the one who’d suggested the move. She was the one who’d said, “Couldn’t we be together and pursue our love of acting on the stage somewhere smaller? Somewhere less overwhelming, less intimidating? Somewhere easy and friendly?”

  “You mean, like Nebraska?” he’d asked.

  And she’d laughed, then said, “How about Wooster, Ohio?”

  Chapter 28

  Vivian’s new fur-lined ankle boots crunched over the graying-brown snowpack as she walked to work. All the foot traffic, automobile exhaust, and soot covered every inch of what was once beautiful new-fallen snow. Charlotte sure had the right idea staying home “sick” today. If there was anything bleaker than Wooster in February, Vivian wanted to know what it was. Oh, wait one moment. There was something bleaker. Her marriage. If she’d known the meaning of the word “metaphor” she might’ve compared Wooster’s late winter landscape to her marriage. The once-romantic, charming, and sparkling had sunk and crusted into something bleak, stale, and dirty.

  Metaphor:

  1: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them

  The new boots were Edward’s version of a metaphor. He hoped they could start fresh, following their renewed vows, and was going out of his way to prove to Vivian that she was important to him and that all that “other stuff” was in the past. The boots were the most expensive that Amster’s carried, and they’d gone on sale, as it was the end of the winter season. Edward had bought them for Vivian on Saturday. The afternoon of their wedding day. Their second one. She was only sorry he hadn’t had to pay full price.

  Vivian hugged the sidewalk on the building side in order to pass Clyde Walsh walking arm in arm with Ginny Frazier, who must have finally agreed to go to the A&W with him, and now they were out morning-walking. Well, weren’t they just a couple of lovebirds. Vivian sure hoped Clyde wasn’t already secretly married. It wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but she’d be the first to tell you, it did happen.

  If she’d learned anything after the scandal began to leak, it was how quickly the scolding eye of judgment could turn on you. She’d had the awe and respect of the other girls at Bell when they’d figured out how good she was at figuring other people. How she knew them. But now?

  The rumor’d started to trickle through the phone lines at Bell in the two weeks following Betty Miller’s tea party. No one was cruel or outright scornful, but a chilly aloof blanket had dropped over the switchboard room. The smiles had been replaced by uneasy grimaces and awkward coughs, and now that the newspaper article had confirmed it, Vivian was sure work was only going to get more uncomfortable. She wondered if the other girls thought her situation was contagious. Like, if they got too close to her it’d happen to them as well. Don’t get too close, she’s got the bigamy!

  She also wondered how long this would go on. Dorothy, Ruth, Laura, Pearl, and the others, they were all acting like Vivian had caught a venereal disease, for chrissakes. Like syphilis. The operators at Bell loved a good scandal, they just didn’t want it so close to them. Vivian thought if they could find a cure for something like syphilis, some clever scientist needed to work on a vaccine for the bigamy.

  “Well, wouldn’t that be a fine how-do-you-do?” Vivian overheard Ruth Craven saying to Dorothy as she entered the room. She might’ve been talking about Vivian, but she might not.

  “I don’t know why she’s staying with him,” Vivian later overheard Dorothy whispering to Rose Troyer, one of the new girls. Dorothy was most definitely talking about her.

  “Her poor daughter!” Vivian overheard Laura cooing to Ruth, in her gooey baby voice, as they came back from their cigarette break.

  You know who wasn’t acting like Vivian was about to wipe her headset all over their skin with her full-blown case of the marital plague? Maria Tomasetti. Now, how do you like that?

  “Vivian, how are you doing?” Maria asked during a late afternoon lull at the switchboard.

  “Oh, fine, thanks.” Vivian kept her tone breezy and forced a Fire & Ice smile.

  “Really? Because, if you need to talk about anything, I’m here.”

  Vivian kept her eyes on the switchboard, hoping f
or a blinking light.

  “Well, thank you.”

  “Men are stupid, Vivian.”

  Vivian felt a tiny spasm of release in her chest cavity, and her forced smile relaxed into a genuine one. She sighed a little before a light blinked in front of her. She nodded gratefully to Maria, and noted to herself that Maria’s English was really improving. Vivian plugged the rear key cord into the board.

  “Number, please.”

  On her way home from work Vivian thought about the calls she’d listened to. The only one she’d recognized had been the mayor calling Don McAfee, Vivian’s private investigator. That’s how she thought of him now, as her own private investigator. She’d had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, “Hello, there!” over the line she wasn’t supposed to be listening to. The call hadn’t been terribly interesting, just the mayor telling Don to “keep working on our project,” like he’d been doing. Vivian assumed the “project” was looking for Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker. She wondered if they were even still alive, and if they were, what they’d been up to since they’d absconded, and how much of that money they had left. Then her thoughts flashed briefly to the hatbox in her closet.

  She passed Freedlander’s, like she always did, and looked in the window of the toy department, as she sometimes did. They’d changed the display from the miniature kitchen set, with a stove, refrigerator, and doll wearing a red gingham apron and holding a tray of plastic cookies, to a realistic model train set, with an impressive black steam engine, passenger cars, and cargo cars, and a caboose with a tiny die-cast engineer holding a striped cap. She stopped and stared at the train set and the tiny engineer through the glass, and felt a sharp fork of pain in her stomach. Trains always made her think of Pawpy.

  Was it worse, what her father had done to her mother? Those letters to those other women? Was that worse than what Edward had done to her? Because not telling Vivian about his first wife was the same as lying to her about it. YES IT WAS!

  Humiliation began to feel like something she had inherited from her mother, like her weak teeth or sloping shoulders. One of those had been easy to fix, and the other one could be helped by shoulder pads. What was the fix for the humiliation? Now she understood why her mother stayed with Pawpy. It was funny how easy it’d been, back then, for Vivian to say, “Well, I’d sure leave any man who did that to me.” Time had a way of changing your answers for you, didn’t it? The idea of ripping the family apart was too raw. Now, there was an image for you. Ripping apart.

  Her brother Will had once ripped the arm of one of Violet’s cloth dolls clean off, and you could see the stuffing inside and the severed threads sticking out from around the shoulder socket. Maybe that was just the best way to look at Edward now. As a doll’s arm. The doll just wouldn’t look right without it. Maybe Vivian could just put that old doll arm in a little makeshift sling for a while until it healed itself.

  As she turned away from the display window to continue on her way home, she thought about the Betty Miller phone call again. Who had called Betty that night with the information about Edward? Who’d been on the other end of that line that night? Who was responsible for throwing the gigantic wrench into the cranking gears of Vivian’s life?

  She hadn’t recognized that voice, but she’d know it if she heard it again. Frankly, the voice hadn’t sounded like someone who would have kept up with Betty and her set. The way the lady talked, it wasn’t highfalutin and snooty like Betty and the rest of the four-flushers. The voice had sounded more like Ruth Craven, who’d had even less schooling than Vivian had, and talked like one of Jimmy Cagney’s gun molls. Thinking about the unknown voice just added another layer to the clouding of Vivian’s thoughts, which were starting to feel like a big vat of pea soup. Cloudy pea soup in her head, and a twisted, clenching pain in her stomach. The twisted clenching had just gotten a little tighter with that thought. Who had made that goddamned call?

  Chapter 29

  “Did he call her, or did she call him?” Jeannie Thorson was asking Margie Miller, several yards ahead of Charlotte as she walked home after school.

  Charlotte’s first day back at school after the mortifying newspaper article had been pretty normal, aside from a few raised eyebrows, hushed whispers, and sympathetic nods, which she’d had to weather while fretting about what her mother was doing with a secret envelope full of money.

  Jeannie Thorson and Margie Miller were both freshmen, and both four-flushers. Charlotte didn’t really know what “four-flusher” meant, any more than her parents did, she just knew they had money they could throw around. Charlotte guessed they’d first go for malteds at the Rexall. Since Charlotte lived south of downtown, she often found herself walking behind them, sometimes pretending she was going for a malted, too.

  Jeannie’s and Margie’s voices were carried by the wind blowing from the south, and although she hadn’t intended to listen, Charlotte could hear the conversation as clearly as if she had been having it with them. They’d been talking about Ned Buss and Patty McGrath, and Jeannie had wanted to know who called who first, but Margie had ended that topic with a shrug and a “Who cares?” before changing the subject to the new Eddie Fisher record she was going to buy.

  For once, Charlotte already had the latest Eddie Fisher record. On Saturday afternoon (the wedding day) her dad had taken her to the record shop right after Amster’s, where he’d bought her new saddle shoes and a nice new pair of winter ankle boots for her mom.

  “How about these?” He’d held up the first pair he’d seen on the stand, looking as awkward and out-of-place in the women’s shoe section as a dairy cow on roller skates.

  Charlotte had scrunched up her nose and shaken her head at that pair, and the next one, but the third pair had been very pretty and fur-lined, and from across the store she’d given him a thumbs-up.

  She’d stood next to him at the cash register, holding the box with her saddle shoes, as he took bills from his beaten-up wallet and handed them to the saleslady.

  “I’m sorry about all this, honey,” he said quietly as he placed a hand on her shoulder. “I really screwed things up for us.”

  Charlotte had shifted from left foot to right, uncomfortable with her dad’s uncharacteristic sheepishness, and aware of the saleslady’s sideways glance at them as she punched the keys in the register.

  “It’s fine, Dad,” Charlotte mumbled, not wanting to talk about it in the middle of the shoe store, in front of the powdered, coiffed saleslady. Maybe not wanting to talk about it at all, really.

  Charlotte’s thoughts zoomed back to the present as Howie Becker roared past in his hot rod, honking the horn loudly either at Margie or Jeannie or just because Howie liked to honk his horn. Because of all the noise, she hadn’t heard what Margie said to Jeannie just then.

  “My face would be a Russian flag,” she heard Jeannie respond as the roar of the motor faded down the street. “The rumor was bad enough, but then the article in the newspaper, ugh. I would die of embarrassment.”

  Charlotte slowed her pace, suddenly wishing she had stayed at school to work on her history paper in the library. She knew they weren’t talking about Ned or Patty anymore, and a flush crept over her face.

  “I know,” Margie agreed. “If something like that happened to my family, I’d shit a brick.”

  Charlotte gasped as shit a brick hovered invisibly in the air above Jeannie’s and Margie’s heads. She glanced at the back of Margie’s beautiful fur-trimmed coat, half expecting to see a brick drop to the ground. The gasp had alerted the girls that someone was behind them, and to cover for the fact that she had been eavesdropping Charlotte quickly upended the stack of books she was carrying, spilling them out into the stiff snowbank.

  “Oh, my God, is that her?” she heard Jeannie say, the words muffled behind a mitten.

  “Shhh,” Margie hissed at Jeannie. “Just hurry up, let’s go.”

  Charlotte stood up and brushed the snow from the covers and corners of her books. Her embarrassment at being t
he subject of the gossip had been quickly replaced with shock. Margie! Charlotte just couldn’t believe something like that had come out of Margie’s mouth. Shit a brick. Gosh. Charlotte wondered if Margie’s mother knew she talked that way. She’d bet Mrs. Betty Miller might shit a brick herself if she’d heard that. Charlotte tried to imagine Margie telling her mother she’d “shit a brick” over something. But everyone knew the things you told your friends sure were different from the things you told your family.

  Chapter 30

  Vivian told Edward she had to go up to Akron to be with her sister Vera, who was sick.

  “Vera?” Edward looked at Vivian like she’d just announced she was going to spend a weekend in hell with Satan.

  “Yes,” Vivian simply said. “Vera.”

  Vivian knew Edward wouldn’t telephone Vera’s house to check on that, because he disliked her even more than Vivian did.

  “Well, what’s she got?” he pressed.

  Vivian didn’t answer and just threw him a withering look. She’d seen enough Bette Davis movies to know that sometimes a withering look was all you needed, especially if Gary Merrill had gone and done something really wrong. And she knew the only reason those looks were working was that Edward must’ve been feeling at least a little guilty. But guilty didn’t mean stupid, and now Edward wanted to know what Vera had. Vivian had spent all her time planning the details of this trip and she’d forgotten to invent a believable sickness for Vera; something that her normally workhorse-strong sister might have gotten. Syphilis, Vivian thought, and then stifled a snort.