by Vanda Writer
“Oh God, Al, Oh God, Oh . . .”
Our voices, our bodies melting into each other. Take me, take me, possess every inch of me. And we shot high into the air and met each other there. We slowly came down. A moment of silent gazing on the pillow turned into laughter. And more laughter. And tears. I cried and cried and she held me against her breasts.
“Al?”
“I’m fine,” I said, sliding out of bed. “We got there at the same time, didn’t we?”
“I think so.”
“It was one of those firsts, wasn’t it?”
“Uh, huh. It was beautiful.”
“I know.”
Now, how was I going to tell her about Schuyler? I stood there in the middle of the room naked, crying.
She got up and put an arm around me. “Are you still held in the thrall of our orgasm or is it something else?”
I went to my bureau and pulled on underwear. Our orgasm, she’d said. “Nothing. I mean . . .” I put on my shirt and turned to her.
“Yes?”
“Wait. I can’t do this without pants on.”
I put on a pair of pants, not a skirt this time, pants. I needed the security that pants would give me. “There’s something I have to tell you, Juliana.”
She must have detected the seriousness in my voice because after I said it, she pulled on her nightgown and sat back down on the bed ready to listen.
“I . . There’s something, uh. . .”
“Just say it, please. You’re scaring me.”
“Schuyler. Dan Schuyler.”
“Who?”
“You met him on the ship. You danced with him a few times.”
“I danced with lots of men.”
“Medium height. Dark hair, thirtyish.”
“You just described more than half the ship. Who is he? Why are we talking about him?”
“Remember I told you about a musical that I thought would be good for you?”
“Yes. And I told you no. So . . .?”
“Schuyler, he . . . he knows . . .”
“Knows?”
“About us.”
I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. She just sat there looking at me, her expression frozen, unreadable.
“That musical is his property. He wants you to play the lead and if you don’t, he’s going to the press with . . . with what he knows.” She still wasn’t saying anything. She seemed to be waiting for me to come to some punch line, something to give this horror a happy ending. “I sent a cablegram to Max with all the latest details. I had to talk in code because I didn’t want the cablegram guy to know what— I expected to hear from him by now with some great advice but—nothing. Schuyler wants your signature on the contract today or else he’ll—”
“Where’s the contract?”
“Here.” I pulled it out of the bedside drawer. “I tried to stop him, Jule. This might be my fault.” I wouldn’t let myself cry.
“I don’t understand.”
“One of the people I hired at The Haven may have helped Schuyler. I’m so sorry.”
“You had no way of knowing that any of them would do such a thing.”
“But, Jule, you’re going to be great in that part. It’s perfect for you.”
The house phone rang.
“Do you think so? Under a threat like this?”
“Well . . .?”
The house phone continued to ring. To shut it up I figured I had to answer it. “What? What do you want?”
“Max!” I screamed into the phone, breaking all those politeness rules. “We’ll be right there, Girard. Don’t let him hang up.”
“Jule, get dressed.” She’d already dashed into her room.
I thought about changing out of my pants, but I was too jumpy. So what if they stared at me. I hopped into my shoes. I don’t think Juliana ever got dressed so fast in her life or ever looked so sloppy; her dress was wrinkled, her hair a frazzled mess, no earrings, no makeup.
We didn’t bother with their pokey elevator. We flew down the three flights of stairs. I grabbed the receiver. Max! Oh, gosh, Max, I knew you’d come through.”
Monsieur Girard Fournier stood uncomfortably close to me, whispering something in my free ear. I moved away from him. “You can fix that lousy dirty rat Schuyler,” I said into the phone. “What are you gonna do, Max? Oh. She’s right here.” I held the phone out for Juliana. Monsieur Fournier was now leaning over Jule, anxiously talking to her in French. She shooed him away. “Take the phone Jule. He wants you.”
Jule hesitantly stood. Getting help from Max in this desperate circumstance had to be hard for her after all the years of not speaking to him. I hoped Max didn’t rub it in and make her feel worse.
I handed her the receiver and stood listening. She didn’t say anything. She was focused on Max’s words with every muscle in her face. Girard stood practically on top of my feet. “Madam, Madam, you cannot stay in the lobby in those clothes.”
“Shh. Please. I have to hear this,” I said.
“You cannot.” He gestured wildly. “Trousers are not . . .”
I moved closer to Juliana.
She said quietly, “I understand. If that’s what you think is best. Thank you.”
Her hand still on the phone, she stared at the back wall, past Girard who was pacing and jabbering in English and French about pants. She hung up the phone.
“Well?” I said. “I know he’s got a plan to get you out of this.”
She headed back up the steps to our rooms, slower this time. I followed, wondering what in the world Max had said.
“Well?” I asked once inside my room again. “What’d he say?”
She spoke with no expression. “He told me to sign the contract.”
“What?”
She sat down on my bed, her fingers dug deep into the edge of the mattress. “He said there isn’t much he can do from the States, but when we get home he’ll get Schuyler off my ass—his words, not mine—so Schuyler can’t keep me prisoner forever. He said that if you think this property is good for me, I should listen to you and pretend there is no Schuyler for now. He said you know what you’re doing.”
“Oh, gosh, Jule, I’m sorry.”
“The contract.” She held out her hand.
I handed it to her with a ballpoint pen.
“I can’t use a ballpoint for this. My fountain pen. On top of the vanity.”
I ran into her room and snatched the fountain pen, inkwell, and gold-plated blotter from the top of her vanity and dashed back into my room. I placed the ink and blotter on the bedside table close to where she sat and held the pen out for her. She dipped it into the ink.
“You know we’ll have to be even more careful when we get back,” she said. “You and me. More careful than we’ve ever been.”
“I know.”
She signed her name in a flourish.
Juliana
End of Book 3
Get a FREE full-length play,
Why’d Ya Make Me Wear This, Joe?
This play was the beginning inspiration for the Juliana Series and it was my most produced play.
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ecgczdzuw9
Some Fun Facts
Al complains that Billy (Juliana’s director) takes TWA to Paris instead of the ship with the rest of them. She has a good reason for being angry. In 1956, a first-class ticket on the SS United States cost about $365. This amount had the spending power of $2,097 in 2016. However, a TWA flight from New York to Paris cost $711, which had the spending power of $9,240.
When Al and Richard are boating in the Lac Daumesnil, Richard speaks of the phone conversation he had with Dan Schuyler. He tells Al that he and Schuyler should meet because “. . . you know, tw
o men over a beer. . .” Al thinks to herself, Oh brother now he sounded like they both belonged to the Princeton Club. No women were admitted to Princeton University until 1967; therefore, women did not have an important college club to join, one that gave men important business connections. In that moment, Al’s feeling her lack of access to resources that men easily had available to them.
The story Al relates to Juliana on the deck of the SS United States about the lesbian who bashes her husband’s head in with a hammer, and then dashes off to a bridge party comes from F.S. Caprio’s book: Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbians, 1954, p. 148. It seems important to note that Caprio was an M.D. To give a flavor to exactly what Juliana and Al are up against and why they are so afraid, I’ve listed a few quotes from Dr. Caprio’s book.
“Lesbianism is capable of influencing the stability of our social structure.” (p. viii)
“Crime is intimately associated with female sexual inversion (lesbianism). Many crimes committed by women, upon investigation, reveal that the women were either confirmed lesbians who killed because of jealousy or were latent homosexuals with a strong aggressive masculine drive.” (p.302)
“Some lesbians manifest pronounced sadistic and psychopathic trends. Kleptomaniac tendencies, for example, are not uncommon among them.” (p. 302)
Reviews
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Hey, It’s Still the 1950s
There are times when readers have contacted me and written wonderful letters about my characters and their relationship to them. This thrills me because these characters are part of my soul, so when a reader believes in them too, I’m in heaven. One such letter came from Sallie Castillo.
Sallie said: “I have a love affair with historical lesbian fiction, so when I discovered your Juliana I couldn’t wait to read it. I was not disappointed. The time period, the focus on the fear of discovery in the ’40s, all brought to life, for me, our history and the fascinating world of Gay New York in the war and postwar years. I also fell in love with your characters, the complex Juliana and the sweet young naive Al. Max, Shirl, and Virginia Sales, I loved getting to know them and learning of their lives. But it is your protagonist “Al whom I most related to.” She goes on to explain why she relates to Al so much and then she came to the “but . . .”
She said, “I became disappointed in Al. How could she not move on (from Juliana)? How could she not have other love stories and adventures!?”
I’m sure others have had some of these same thoughts, so with Sallie’s permission I’m going to reprint my response back to her.
Certainly, Juliana is no easy woman for Al to be in love with. I’ve worried about this myself. Still, I need to remind you and myself that we are still in the 1950s; it is not even the 1970s. No one’s consciousness has been raised yet.
We in our modern world, are highly sensitive to “abusive” relationships. We don’t put up with them and we try to not let others put up with them, either; if they do, we get mad. Our culture has been through a lot to get us to this point, but this all occurred long after the 1950s, Al’s world. As a child in the fifties, I remember a woman who lived down the block, a mother with three kids. She was badly beaten regularly by her husband. Occasionally, the cops would come and take him away to cool off for the night, but they always drove him back in the squad car each morning. She, of course, did not press charges. No woman would in those days. No cop would have taken her seriously; it was only a husband-wife spat. There were no laws on the books that made any of this illegal or even terribly shocking. I was young and I liked the husband a lot. He used to give me soda to drink, which my mother would never allow. The neighbors would whisper about the wife and say things like “Isn’t it awful,” but they all knew there was nothing to be done because she was Catholic and would never leave him; even if she hadn’t been Catholic, divorce was pretty much frowned upon by every religion back then. Everyone knew what a divorced woman was truly like, wink, wink. No neighbor thought it was appropriate to speak to the woman about this situation because the norm at that time was no one had a right to interfere with another’s family, no matter what was going on. It wasn’t our business. There weren’t even any outside agencies who could guide or protect her. When the decade turned into the 1960s and ideas were changing, this woman left her husband.
We are greatly influenced by the times we live in. At this point, I don’t think Al would know how to be with another woman. She’s gotten somewhat comfortable with Juliana, I doubt she could even picture herself with someone else. She has no close gay women friends at this point (Yes, there are Shirl and Mercy, but they are mimicking a heterosexual marriage, which was common in those days; this isn’t something Al would seek.) The gay men too (Max and Scott) are struggling during this decade to figure out how to be a couple. Al hasn’t gone to the bars. Yet. She might’ve met other gay women there, but the bars were looked at as a place for low class women. Given Al’s background, she would be sensitive about being in a place for “low-class women.” Also, the fear of being arrested and exposed was very real. Al has a career she is trying to protect.
In the 1950s, many women didn’t want anyone to know they were gay. It was dangerous to reveal yourself. During this time, some women were giving up on living with another woman because they feared being fired from their job. (Faderman, 1991) Al works in a straight club. Even Bertha and Lillian can’t know that she, Max, and Marty are gay, because if it were discovered that “immoral persons” were running their nightclub, they could be closed. It’s hard to imagine, but during the forties and fifties even the lone beat cop could close down a club. Remember, Max gives the cops money to keep them away. (Book 2)
Another reason I think Al hangs on is because she knows intuitively more about Juliana than Juliana knows about herself. Juliana says she can’t leave Richard because of religion and that’s true, but I think it also serves as a convenient excuse. She’s just plain terrified of being publicly gay. With good reason. If she were found out—good-bye career.
Have you ever read about some of the female actors who were gay in the 1940s and ’50s? Women like Judith Anderson, Dorothy Arzner (feminist director), Gertrude Lawrence (married to a man), Mary Martin (married to a gay man)? Have you heard of Hildegarde, the highest paid supper club singer in the 1930s and ’40s? She was mentioned in my series a few times. She died at ninety-nine years old in 2005, denying being gay. I met a cabaret singer, KT Sullivan, who knew Hildegarde and knew a male friend of Hildegarde’s. He was in his eighties. He had had affairs with Hollywood stars like Rock Hudson. KT introduced him to me on the telephone and asked him if I could call him at another time to ask questions about Hildegarde. He eagerly said yes. However, when I called him a week later, he had forgotten I was going to call. (Well, he was old). Not remembering who I was, he became extremely upset and told me not to write a single word about Hildegarde being gay or I would be sued. I pointed out that she was dead. He said Hildegarde had hired lawyers who would sue anyone, even after her death, that mentioned she was homosexual. He was desperate t
o shoo me away. This was a man who had had affairs in Hollywood with famous actors, who had hidden in literal closets when the star got an unfriendly visitor. On the phone with me, he was terrified and he was still protecting his friend. The Seattle Times said that the glamorous Hildegarde often described herself to reporters as “an incurable romantic . . . I traveled all my life, met a lot of men, had a lot of romances, but it never worked out. It was always hello and goodbye. (Dellair, 2005) She leaves out any reference to Ana Sosenko, who managed her career, wrote some of her songs, and with whom she lived in a huge apartment in the Plaza Hotel for twenty years. (Nemy, Aug 1, 2005). When Faderman (1991) looked for lesbians to interview for her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, many insisted on anonymity and others simply refused to participate. Faderman wrote her book in the nineties, but people were still terrified of revealing themselves; they’d been that scarred by the times they grew up in. I think it would be impossible for us in our world today to fully grasp the threat these people were under.
France Was Not The Haven