Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Seymour took the manuscript. Each page was yellowing along the edges and seemed to have been dipped in water many years before.

  “My libretto,” Caleb said. “The Joint. I wrote this when the place closed down. Kind of an homage.”

  Seymour grinned. “You don’t say.” He leafed through the papers, nearly every one ringed with coffee. “Does this thing have music?” he asked.

  “It does!” Caleb said.

  “Let me take a look then,” he said. “Tell me where to get ahold of you.”

  Caleb looked down at the tablecloth. “I’ll be here,” he said, now looking up sheepishly at Seymour. “You can always just find me here.”

  Seymour gave Caleb Candor fifty dollars for his script and in return received the right to do to it whatever he needed. Caleb had seemed more than pleased with the arrangement, though he did ask for a steak dinner to celebrate. He wrote it ten years ago, he told Seymour. But there was plenty more where that one came from, he said. All you need to do is ask, he told him, shoving tenderloin into his mouth. He took a huge gulp of Chianti and wiped the corners of his mouth. Seymour couldn’t tell if it was wine or blood from the rare meat that left an imprint on the white napkin when Caleb Candor so crassly set it down on the table.

  “This is going to be a show to end all shows!” Seymour said, looking away from the spectacle of the writer’s eating.

  It would be nothing like those shows he’d sat through with his wife in the beginning of their marriage, thought Seymour. Though he enjoyed musicals, he thought those from the twenties were such fluff and frosting, without virtue. Not for him. He thought of Show Boat, which broke every tradition of theater. It was an epic. He remembered watching that show and feeling both euphoria at the genius he was witnessing and the utterly deflated sensation that always comes from watching the genius of someone else. For the first time there were real themes: racism, miscegenation, a sad marriage. And the success. It seemed to be making way for a different sort of theater.

  “Caleb,” said Seymour, “in this terribly depressing time, we will not drive theatergoers away, but we will embrace them with drama, music, dance. This was what the theater was meant to be: absolutely everything.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Caleb. “But people want to have fun. I know I do,” he said, tapping his glass and gesturing for the waiter to bring more wine.

  Seymour’s first mistake was letting Nat Allen have a go at the libretto. Or maybe his first mistake was hiring Nat Allen, a former Ziegfeld Follies director, as his director. But Nat had come to Seymour via the Terrier, as so many things had. How could Seymour resist the opportunity for Broadway? He won a turn at the Majestic in a card game. You can have it starting in October, the Terrier winked. The place was just two blocks north of the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Terrier’s “office,” from where, Seymour knew, he could keep tabs on everything.

  The Terrier told him, “Don’t say I never did you any favors, Goy.” He bit his soggy cigar.

  So many favors, it was impossible to turn them all down. “Since when did I become your charity project?” Seymour asked.

  “You’re forgetting all my charitable contributions to Israel, aren’t you?” the Terrier said. “Why does everyone forget that?” The Terrier closed his eyes and breathed, in and out.

  “I haven’t forgotten that,” Seymour said. Not only had the Terrier sent money but he’d sent carloads of arms for the military as well. “You are a generous man.”

  “Well, I like a good musical too, ya know,” he said. “You’ve made my life so glamorous. You can’t blame me for feeling amorous,” he’d sing, which Seymour always took to be a warning.

  Nat Allen thought that his musical—he corrected himself, Seymour’s first musical—should be about real people, the real story of Inez, Seymour’s hardworking mama, and her rise to grand hostess, the toast of New York City.

  “It’s a hard time. People want to see something fun also,” Seymour said, recalling Caleb Candor’s simple advice.

  “Precisely,” Nat told him. “And let those immigrants go to the pictures for their fluff!” Promptly, he eliminated the dancing waiters and the overflowing glasses of champagne. “You think this is vaudeville, Seymour?” he chided. “Come on. You do what you do, let me do what I do.”

  He did have a point, Seymour thought, as he let him get rid of Inez’s gorgeous dresses and her famous clientele. He let Nat Allen strip the play of his mother’s fairy tale to the story of a girl from Western Europe who came to America with dreams that would go forever unfulfilled.

  When it came time to cast his musical, Seymour couldn’t help but remember the lovely girl who had transformed from a pinprick of light into a full-blown image on a television screen, the one he had seen months ago, beckoning him to the future. He wanted to capture this—this feeling—of the past and the future in one glance.

  No stars. Only real people, Seymour decided right then. The Joint will mark the talent, the talent will not mark the show. The pretty, dark-haired girl should play the lead! Seymour thought. It will be brilliant.

  Then Seymour made his second mistake, which would turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his life: he thought of his wife. Sarah should read for the role, he thought. Though this thought and the subsequent and impulsive way he followed through on it could be viewed as the lovely, selfless act of a husband trying to grant his wife her dream, there were many who came to think that even giving Sarah the opportunity was more the horrid and selfish act of a husband who was trying to dash that dream for good.

  Either way, Seymour brought Sarah in the next day to audition.

  Never would he forget turning to see his wife walk into the theater in that powder blue gown. She was tall and slim, built like a rectangle, and she walked down the aisle slowly and deliberately. As he watched her walk up to the stage, her head held high, Seymour realized he had enlisted his wife to play his mother.

  And he realized in that single moment that there was no good alternative to this now inescapable situation. How could he win? His wife got the part? It was horrible. She was to play his mother. His mother. She didn’t get the part? Well, they might as well both take the gas pipe then.

  “Hello,” Sarah said in a voice as deep as Tallulah Bankhead’s. She slithered across the stage, her chin held high, her long nose reaching to the ceiling. She turned to look out into the empty theater.

  Onstage Seymour’s wife was a photograph: inaccessible and grand and one-dimensional. He looked at Nat Allen. Which disaster would it be? he wondered. Yes or no.

  “This is a fabulous canary!” Nat said. “But can the canary sing?” he screamed up to Sarah on the stage.

  “Why yes, she can,” Sarah said slowly. She walked over to the piano, thumped the lid three times, and began to sing. “Falling in love again, never wanted to…”

  Had Seymour ever heard his wife sing? He looked up at Sarah, amazed by her, and all the reasons he had chosen her to be his wife became clear to him. She was incredible! His, and yet she was a thousand miles away.

  Seymour was grateful he could give her this chance. Perhaps this would keep her out of speakeasies and out of Celia’s bloomers. He hoped it would. He hoped Nat’s answer was yes.

  “What am I to do, I can’t help it.”

  “Fabulous, little canary,” Nat screamed when she was done. “Thank you.”

  As if she had done this every day of her life, Sarah glided back across the stage and, lifting the hem of her dress so as not to fall, stepped carefully down the stairs. She nodded at Nat, smiled and winked at Seymour, and then left the theater.

  “She’s perfect,” Nat said. “The Roaring Twenties and the Depression rolled up into one.”

  “Wonderful,” Seymour said. But his goodwill had already begun to fade, and something he couldn’t name started to nag at him. Was that his conscience pulling at him, the same tug he felt when he arranged for the plates on the car to be changed, the keys left in the toilet of some candy store on South F
ifth Street in Brooklyn? It was unnameable now, as it had been then, but Seymour knew that no matter what, as bad news always does, somehow it would announce itself.

  The Terrier named at least two of Seymour’s fears when Nat called to tell him they had a lead for the production. He slammed into the theater from the Knickerbocker, red-faced and, again, with the gun.

  “What is it?” Seymour had said flatly to him. “Put down the gun, Terrier,” he said.

  “Your wife?” the Terrier screamed. “Yours? Mine’s the beauty queen,” he said. He did not put away the gun but waved it vaguely in Seymour’s direction. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

  “She is beautiful,” Seymour said carefully, remembering the first time he’d laid eyes on Pauline. For a moment, he felt that he owed everything—the mess, the fear, the violence, but also the cash, the glamour, even this here musical—to that endless pair of legs. “But she is not an actress.”

  “I know that, Seymour,” Terrier said. “Don’t you think I know an actress when I see one? But her sister sure as hell is. Frances Gold is who should play this part.”

  Seymour tried to negotiate what to do with his face. After all, he too had thought first of Frances. But now, it simply could not be. Now his wife would be playing his mother, and, unless he wanted to end his marriage once and for all, this was what he had to do. Besides, this was his musical. His. “This is mine, Terrier,” he said.

  “Pardonnez-moi?” the Terrier said, bracing.

  “Look, this wasn’t just my decision. You wanted Nat to direct, Nat is directing. You wanted it at the Majestic, and what do you know, here we are at the Majestic, conveniently located two blocks from your office. Anyway, Nat agrees. It was he who cast Sarah, not I.” Luciano on the dock, his face shredded. Seymour remembered the craps game the night Sarah’s folly with the gangster liquor had been discovered. The energy it had taken to appear calm while inside his heart was racing, that had cost him more than anything, he realized now. The acute knowledge of being one thing on the outside, a whole other entity to himself and himself alone on the inside, had never left him. He carried this duality with him now in all his dealings, both in and out of his house.

  “Not I?” the Terrier quipped.

  “Yes, ‘Not I.’”

  “Moi?” the Terrier asked.

  “Pas moi,” said Seymour, smiling, his heart filled with rage.

  Humming his way out of the theater, the Terrier seemed somewhat appeased. But, as Seymour knew well, one could never tell. Though he had stood up for his wife, just as he had when she’d watered down the liquor and nearly gotten them killed, Seymour couldn’t be sure. Could he have thought of the means to get Sarah out of the production without destroying her completely, he would have. And were there a way to have taken back his first kind thought of pleasing his wife and making her whole again, he would have done that in a heartbeat.

  “Great news!” Seymour told his wife that evening, pushing aside his growing dread to place both hands on her cold cheeks. “You got the part!” He did not mention, were she to take it, their lives could be in jeopardy.

  “That’s wonderful, dear,” she replied, as calmly as one who had been headlining Broadway shows all her life.

  That was all? That was it? He had thought he would be rewarded at least a little for what he had given her. As far as he was concerned, it beat the fur coat she had to have last winter, and she could show a little excitement, for Christ’s sake. She could throw her arms around him and be happy for one goddamn minute.

  He thought of Sarah holding her gloves in her right hand and leaning in to Celia, heading upstairs. For once she had seemed so easy in her skin. What did they do up there? Seymour wondered, both repulsed and aroused by the thought of Sarah unclipping Celia’s stockings and reaching out to touch her.

  When Seymour had broken out a bottle of the 1928 Salon champagne and was pouring Sarah her second glass, however, she began to let her happiness show.

  “I’m a tiny bubble, rising to the surface of the world,” she told her husband, raising her glass. “Pop!” she said ebulliently. “How I love you, Seymour,” she said, leaning in and kissing him sloppily on the lips.

  Well, that’s a bit better, he thought, pouring himself another glass. Worth being killed over, I can’t say.

  How long had it been since they had made love with true abandon? Seymour could not remember. Had they ever? He couldn’t recall, but tonight Sarah mounted her husband in the marble foyer.

  “Broadway,” she said, unbuttoning her dress.

  Seymour had always had a weakness for her small, perky breasts. “You will be a star,” he told her, reaching for them with both hands. In that moment he wanted nothing more than for his wife to be what she had always wanted to be. And if she were a star, and he the producer, what a fine couple they would make.

  It was as if, Seymour realized, each was allowing the other’s dreams to come true at the exact same time, and this rare and beautiful moment was reflected in their lovemaking. By the time they had reached the bedroom, the stairs too had been a platform for their mutual appreciation. When Seymour finally fell into bed, exhausted, he felt that he had his wife back, which was exactly what he had wanted when he’d called Sarah up two days before and told her, “Put on your dancing shoes, my dear, and come down here for the biggest audition of your life!”

  If Sarah had not gotten the good news about winning—or having been won—the lead, perhaps she would not have drunk so much champagne, which always made her wild and reckless. And without the champagne, she would not have made love to her husband so many times and in so many ghastly ways. Most likely, she would not have made love to her husband at all. And if she had not had sex with him three times, once upright against the banister, wood as smooth as bone, perhaps she would have spent the next nine months looking forward to her name in lights and in all the papers.

  But instead, what happened was this: two months after Seymour moved against his wife, her head pounding the spiraling stairs, he sat in the doctor’s consulting room next to her and watched her gasp and cover her mouth upon hearing the news. The yet-to-be-named David Bloom, tiny as a pebble, lay in her womb, waiting for a big entrance of his own.

  The doctor couldn’t have been more pleased with his diagnosis—this was, after all, a time for rebuilding a population depleted by war. He patted Sarah, who now sat up straight in her chair, on the back and chuckled across the room at Seymour. “Congratulations!” he told them. “Let’s cross our fingers for a boy,” he said before tossing her folder into the hanging file on the back of the door and walking out of the room.

  “You’ll have to postpone the show!” Sarah said as soon as the doctor left. Her nails clicked manically against the wooden arm of the chair.

  Seymour’s whole body sighed. It was over. Every emotion, he had foolishly let himself forget, has an equal and opposite emotion. “I can’t postpone it, Sarah,” he said. “Do you know who got me this space? It’s not an indefinite time frame we’re working within here.”

  Sarah clenched her fists. “I should say so,” she said. “Who were those fat men with those horrible scarred faces hanging around the lobby anyway? Don’t most people try their productions out in St. Louis or San Diego before hitting New York City? Why don’t you do that?”

  Sarah was turning red. Seymour closed his eyes. His wife hadn’t minded who showed up for rehearsals before, that was for sure.

  “What is wrong with you anyway, Seymour! Speed up the production then. Yes! Speed it up! Let’s just do it right now!” Sarah jumped up from the chair and went toward the door. “Right now. I’m ready!”

  “Relax, Sarah.” Seymour stood up slowly. He felt old. As if he had been replaying this scene for too many years.

  “You stupid salesman,” she said and began to cry. “I don’t even know which is worse! Never to know because I never had the chance or to have had the chance and have failed.” Sarah’s body shook with grief. “Well, now I’ll never know
! Everyone always told me I had real star quality.”

  Seymour moved to embrace his wife, but she would have none of it. Her palm circled her belly lightly. “What’s in there anyway?” she asked, her hand clenching into a tight fist.

  “Our baby,” Seymour said. “It’s a miracle.” He put his large hand on her shoulder, but she pushed it away.

  Seymour shook his head. Only two months ago his wife had been filled with regret, stuffed so full of dashed dreams and cravings for all the things she would never have, he’d thought she would explode. He had known this, and he had tried to alter it. And he had changed her, changed her inside, Seymour had thought. Her very chemical makeup. He had filled her with all the lovely things that women were made of: soft, sweet-smelling stuff, good, pure things. Now what was she filled with exactly? The thought terrified him.

  Sarah took her mink from the coatrack, and Seymour helped her into it. “I could hide it, you know,” she said, straightening. “Look.” She stood, straight as a pin, her coat flapping open as if it were her own skin and she were an animal, skinned alive. She shook her head and took her alligator purse, which had been dangling beneath her coat.

  Seymour considered it for a moment. But Sarah was not a curvy woman—with Dulcy she had shown after only three months. It wouldn’t be long now. And the sickness. Sarah would never be the kind of woman who got through her pregnancy unscathed. Vomiting all morning. And Sarah was so sensitive to being nauseated, she could not brush her teeth for her entire pregnancy. Just the smell of the peppermint, the way it seemed to be covering up something terrible, made her retch.

  Seymour and Sarah Bloom left the doctor’s office, her head hung low and, for a brief moment, against Seymour’s chest, clutching the gold chain of her bag, which knocked against him. Bump, bump, he felt as he hailed the taxi home from St. Vincent’s, a heartbeat. The Blooms sat together in silence watching the city change as the taxi headed up Seventh Avenue. As if to punish them both, the cabbie went along Forty-fourth Street, past the Majestic, where the production—Seymour’s production—would open in eight months, then east, through Times Square. It was twilight, those lights just switching on, and actors milled about, smoking in alleys, readying to go onstage for the night.