Postage stamp
2¢
MAY 6, 1926
E left the hospital yesterday looking dazed, bewildered, halfway awake. I knew she’d probably be up half the night crying. I wanted to follow her right out that door. I wanted to hold her until she stopped.
But even if I could, would she want me to? All she wanted was to reunite with her husband and daughter. And yet I’ve spent the past weeks mooning over her, lying to her, keeping things from her. So many secrets. The hidden disease, the hidden letters, the hidden…love. And when I finally confess one, it’s that I’m dying and maybe she’s dying too. It’s a small wonder she left in shock.
Maybe she cried half the night, but she wasn’t the only one. Of course I did too. It was easier when I thought I was going away alone to California. Maybe I had only days left, weeks, months, but in that time, I could do something, I could be a writer. I’d grown up watching the sun rise over one ocean. I’d end things watching it set over the other. But now Ethel was part of it. I cried because she was sick too. I cried because she missed AL. I cried because I’d lose her in the end, one way or the other. I cried because I thought I’d said goodbye to her back on her doorstep with mashed potatoes on my shoes, and now I would have to do it all over again.
Friday
F.’s fever up again.
Supper:—
Saturday
Still high. Held her nightgown while the nurse sponged her down with alcohol. She’s so much thinner than I remember.
Supper:—
Sunday
Still high. The ward sister let me stay the night, just holding F.’s hand. Brought me strong tea and toast after the others fell asleep.
Supper: Toast.
Monday
Woke up stretched across the foot of F.’s bed. She was sitting up eating a dish of ice cream.
She’s chasing me out again, to eat, wash, change, sleep. Maybe while I’m at the campground I’ll empty out her duffel and do laundry.
Supper: Hot dog and potato salad at the next campsite over.
Camp (4 days)
$1.00
Ben Hur laundry soap, 10 bars
24¢
MAY 10, 1926
E came back fresh and scrubbed. She was wearing a gray blouse tucked into, of all things, a pair of knickers. Borrowed them from the gals next door, she said. The rest of our things are drying on the line. I asked her which things, and she said All, and I must have looked panicked, because she said, I took all your crumpled things from your duffel. I must’ve sounded like a scratched record, asking Which things again, but she touched my hand, just once, and said again, All.
She found the letters from Carl, the ones that I’d hidden. She’d read them, all alone by the campfire, without me to offer shallow excuses. As she told me all of this, I closed my eyes, waiting for a slap or a denunciation, but nothing. She sat quietly by my bed until I opened my eyes and burst out with a string of apologies. I was never very good at making apologies, but Eth, she was always the best at listening to them. It was like talking to a priest. In the end, she kissed my forehead, and I glowed with her forgiveness.
She’d brought the letters with her, tucked in a pocket. They were much creased, either from her rereading or mine. I knew they weren’t going to be love letters, she confessed. But I thought they’d hurt more than they did.
She told me he wasn’t wrong. Things have been peaceful, but maybe peacefulness wasn’t what they needed. They didn’t argue, she said. They didn’t shout and throw dishes. Not once. They didn’t even disagree. But without fighting, there was no kissing and making up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. He kisses me on the forehead before we go to bed, she said, but that’s as romantic as it gets.
Sister Benedict brought me more ice cream right then and Ethel dropped her voice. Nuns probably didn’t want to hear about kisses, on the forehead or otherwise. Carl always said that he didn’t think there’d ever be a girl wanting to marry him, but then I wrote to him when he was in France and he thought maybe I would. She shrugged and slumped in her chair. Maybe I should’ve known, when he stepped off that boat and gave me a handshake. Who brings home a handshake from France? We’re friends and maybe I shouldn’t have expected any more than that.
She’d never talked at all about their courtship. Never talked about the days leading toward their marriage. I just remember Carl came home from the war and suddenly the two of us weren’t alone any longer. It was the three of us again. She seemed happy at the return to routine, but it left a bitter taste on the back of my tongue. I’d grown used to the days with just Ethel and me. I’d have been happy with those for the rest of forever. Why wasn’t she? What did she want that I couldn’t give her?
Well, AL, for one. Maybe that was it. Maybe she married for a child. She wouldn’t be the first woman and won’t be the last. But then for Carl to take that child away. He really is the best of fathers, she said. You’d understand if you saw the two of them together. They’re thick as thieves, best friends until the end. She sits on his lap at the piano and they play “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” She’s probably having the time of her little life. I thought back to all the enthusiastic letters AL has been sending, peppered with capital letters and far too many exclamation points. She misses her mom, or she wouldn’t be writing so often, but she is happy. For E’s sake, I’m grateful for that.
She didn’t cry, but she did look pensive. I was content, you know. Married to Carl. Content. But is that the same as happiness? I don’t know.
I didn’t know either. I’d been content for all of these years alone, but now she was back in my life and my heart fluttered and I wondered the same thing.
You know what, Flor? she asked. Carl never held my hand. Not once. Can you believe it? Maybe that should have told me something.
My ice cream was melting; I’d forgotten about it during this hushed conversation, these confessions about a complicated marriage. I divided the ice cream in half and took up another spoon from my medicine tray. Eth, I said, if I were Carl, I would’ve held your hand the moment I stepped off the boat. I don’t know that I ever would’ve let it go.
I said it in a rush, because I didn’t know what else to say. I’d been listening without anything to offer in return. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Ethel flushed and I bit my tongue. But she took the bowl from me and spooned up a bite of ice cream.
Remember when Carl mentioned the note I passed him in class, the one with a row of Xs across the bottom? She licked her spoon and didn’t meet my eyes. It was the day after we went to Coney Island, the three of us, and you two dragged me onto Shoot the Chutes in Luna Park. Remember how scared I was?
Of course I remembered. Somehow poor Ethel ended up alone on the very front seat with Carl and me behind her. As the car tipped over the top, she reached behind and caught up both of our hands, squeezing them all the way until we hit the water at the bottom.
The note said, “Holding your hand, I suddenly wasn’t as scared. Almost didn’t let go at the bottom.” She finally looked up from her ice cream. Carl opened the note, but, Flor, I wrote it for you.
BERYL
Conversation is so easy with you.
FRANCIE
It’s because you already know all of my best punch lines.
BERYL
“Best”?
FRANCIE
(after sticking her tongue out)
It’s because we’ve known each other for so long.
BERYL
I’ve known Cal just as long and it’s not this easy.
FRANCIE
Well, of course not. He’s a man.
BERYL
What does that have to do with anything?
FRANCIE
Women are different. We understand the way men never could. We hold on to friendships with our fingernails. We love fiercely and absolutely, but we know just how to wound. When we talk to one another, it’s with our hearts.
BERYL
You’re right. You do have
the best punch lines.
—Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King
Chapter Twelve
1952
When Louise first met Arnie, it was through a folded note passed across a library table.
“Didn’t know a girl could look so pretty reading The Grapes of Wrath.”
She’d just started filming High Noon Hootenanny. It was her first real role, the singing Western she’d climbed on a horse for. After leaving the studio lot, she wanted nothing more than to sit in the quiet of the Wilshire library. She didn’t need winks or ill-placed sentiments.
She took a pencil stub from her little handbag and flipped his note over.
“Didn’t know a guy could look so pretty reading Tarzan the Magnificent.”
Without looking up, she pushed it across the table and went back to her book.
When the note came back, it said, “Well, at least you think I’m pretty.”
She’d looked up then. He wasn’t, really. Not in a Hollywood sort of way. Too skinny, with thick glasses and a crooked bow tie. But behind the lenses of the glasses, his eyes were blue like oceans. He smiled, showing a single dimple. “Hiya. I’m Arnie,” he whispered.
This earned him a stern look from the librarian. He tore another sheet from his notebook.
“I’m Arnie. I’m a writer.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
The next day, he was back. This time, when he pushed the folded note across the table, it was with a purple tulip. She ignored it and kept to her reading.
The next day, it was with a See’s chocolate sitting on top of the paper. She ate the chocolate and kept reading.
The next, the note was folded on top of a green-bound screenplay. Finally, then, she looked up. Over the top of his bow tie, Arnie was looking somewhat smug. She opened the note.
“It’s not Grapes of Wrath, but it’s a movie. If you read it and show up at the studio at ten tomorrow, you have yourself a screen test.”
She lifted the note to look at the typewritten title on the front. “MGM presents Betsey Barnes, Screenplay by Richard Rachmann, Sidney Weller, and Arnold Bates.”
“P.S. Told you I was a writer.”
Writer or not, she had no idea how he’d arranged for a screen test.
But she didn’t care. She took that screenplay home, no questions asked, and read it up and down, forward and back. Before ten o’clock, she knew Betsey, as silly as she was. And she got the part. Maybe because the studio had already seen the rushes for High Noon Hootenanny. Maybe because she’d had a chance to study the script, the story, the character. Maybe because, in this whole city, a stranger had given her a helping hand.
When she found him in the library the next time, he was the one reading The Grapes of Wrath. She’d brought her own notepaper this time.
“How did you know I was an actress?”
“Isn’t every girl in Hollywood?”
“My roommate is a hatcheck girl…”
“…who wants to be an actress.”
She looked up from the notepaper with a glare.
He licked his pencil.
“It was the way you were reading The Grapes of Wrath. You weren’t just enjoying it; you were trying to know it.”
And who wouldn’t? The biggest book of the year. Winning awards left and right. The Pulitzer, for Pete’s sake. That movie would make whoever was cast.
“It’s already in production, you know,” he wrote. “They’re out filming in the desert. You’re too late.”
Her disappointment must’ve been obvious, because he reached across the table. Not quite touching her, but right there.
“You know,” she scribbled furiously, “I won’t go out with you for getting me that screen test. Even if you ask.”
“I know.”
“The ladder to the stars isn’t runged by men with good intentions.”
“I know.”
“I climb on my own merits. Good actresses do.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to go to dinner sometime?”
“Yes.”
—
The day after she leaves the El Tovar, Louise reaches Santa Rosa, New Mexico. She’d been seeing signs for Santa Rosa’s Club Cafe for miles, with the face of a smiling fat man and advertisements for sourdough biscuits or chicken-fried steak. But when she approaches the town, that’s not what she notices. There’s a rail bridge over the Pecos River, and she swears she’s seen it before.
She parks and gets out. Walks around the car. Something about it is familiar. Something that doesn’t involve a ramshackle divorce ranch down the way. It’s when she puts her thumbs and index fingers into the shape of a box, looks through them at the bridge, like a tiny, distant movie screen, that she remembers.
A few minutes later, she’s installed in the Club Cafe, awaiting her first taste of chicken-fried steak, and she asks the waitress, “The Grapes of Wrath was filmed here, wasn’t it?”
The waitress looks bored, even for Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Her name tag reads “Bette,” just like the actress. “I never saw it.” She straightens a pair of rhinestone glasses. “If it doesn’t have Tyrone Power, I’m not interested.”
“I recognized the bridge from the movie. They filmed it in ’39.”
“How old do you think I am?” Her hair is bleached platinum, her eyes behind the glasses caked with makeup. Louise has no idea.
“You would’ve noticed the crew in town. The cameras? The stars? An old overloaded jalopy?”
“Oh, that one? Yeah, maybe I remember it. They filmed by the gas station and out by the bridge, I think.” She opens Louise’s bottle of Coca-Cola. “You want a straw?”
“You know, I was almost in that movie,” Louise says. “In The Grapes of Wrath.” The truth is stretched so thin she wonders that the waitress can’t see the light shining through the other side. “Or, at least I should’ve been in it.”
“Sure, you should’ve.” Bette pops her gum. “You and Tyrone Power.”
The steak is hot and fried crisp, with a peppery coating. It’s drenched in a creamy gravy, with a mile-high biscuit perched on the side of the plate. She almost sends the plate back because of the gravy alone. But it smells divinely decadent and she didn’t bother to see if they had cottage cheese on the menu.
It is divinely decadent. She cuts the steak as fast as she can. She can count on one hand how often she’s eaten beef in the past year. And to think she’d grown up the daughter of a butcher.
They’d done pretty well during the Depression, Dad and she. She’d been in charge of cooking during the week. Other girls her age were out playing potsy or hanging around the penny candy shop while she was flubbing her way through Mom’s old cookbooks. Cottage pie. Shrimp wiggle. Decidedly odd-shaped croquettes. Rinktum tiddy. She’d learned a few things from Mr. Steve and the other dude wranglers. How to make creamed chipped beef on toast, chili con carne, slumgullion stew. How to work up an appetite for just about anything that came off the stove.
Come Sunday, Dad would make one of his mother’s German recipes. Sauerbraten or schnitzel or some other cut of meat swimming in sauce. The shop wasn’t as busy in those days during the Depression. Some of their regulars moved out of the area. Others were reduced to chopped beef and pork chops. Dad ran a neighborhood soup kitchen out of the back of the shop, using up unsold meat. Even with that, there was still plenty to bring home at the end of the week. The good cuts, the kind families in the neighborhood couldn’t afford. Others were eating stone soup and the Wilds were frying up steaks and broiling up crown roasts. The butcher shop’s leftovers kept them fed.
As she eats the steak, she thinks of the Joads, of the foreclosures, of the soup kitchens and breadlines. Of Spam sandwiches and hobo stew. And here she is eating a dollar seventy worth of beef and gravy, as though there weren’t still foreclosures and families driving to California to follow the fruit. She eats the beef and thinks of Dad. He made the best schnitzel.
After she pays
her check—leaving a dime tip on the table—she finds a phone booth and places a call to Newark. She calls the shop, but it’s Hank who answers.
“Uncle Hank,” she says, fingers tight on the phone cord. “Can I talk to Dad?”
“Ann?” he asks. “What did the operator say, you’re calling from Mexico?”
“New Mexico, that’s all. Is he there?”
“Honey, he’s not in today.” Over the line, she can hear the bell on the shop’s door ring. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know. Is it? Is the pneumonia back?”
“He’s fine as rain. Just stepped out for a bit.” He covers the phone with one hand. “Mrs. Keene! I’ll have those chops up right away. It’s Anna Louisa on the phone.”
Louise has no idea who Mrs. Keene is—one of the blue-haired fussbudgets who appreciates a shop run by two finicky old men—but the muffled exclamations coming across the line remind her that most everyone knows her.
“Uncle Hank,” she says when he comes back on the line, “I wish you wouldn’t.” Alone in the phone booth, her face is unnecessarily warm. “I’m not Anna Louisa.”
“Well, miss, you can’t tell me who to be proud of. I’ve known you since you were in pigtails. You argued with me even then.”
“Only because I was fond of you.” She smiles into the phone.
“Anyway, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but your dad is planning a surprise.”
“A surprise?”
Muffled, “Mrs. Keene, just take your time picking out the chops. Three today? I’m glad Mr. Keene has his appetite back!”
“Uncle Hank?”
“Well, young lady, he’s pleased as a Cheshire cat that you’re coming home for Christmas. Went out and cut down a tree and everything. So he’s off today getting a haircut in your honor.”
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