Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  Georgie recalled the hymn her mother liked—“O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and couldn’t keep herself from singing. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth, but still the words filled her with unexpected serenity. She took another drink from the crystal tumbler she’d carried from the house and sang the first verse again, and then again, until she could feel her mother’s nails on her back, calming her, loving her to sleep.

  She found Phillip passed out on a wooden bench in front of the church.

  “Phillip,” she said, gently rocking him with her hands. He was shirtless and his skin was warm. A single silver cross Joe had given him hung around his neck.

  “Phillip,” she said. He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. She pinched the skin above his hip bone.

  “What?” he said, opening his eyes into slits.

  “Take the boat. Just take it.”

  “I’m in no shape to drive a boat.”

  “You have to. Someone has to.”

  “I like you, Georgie,” Phillip said. “But you need to leave me the hell alone now.” He waved her off with one hand, the other tucked underneath his head.

  “But you said—”

  “I give up. You should too.” He rolled away from her, turning his face toward the back of the bench.

  She took another sip of her drink while waiting for him to roll back over. When he didn’t she walked to the place where the sand broke off into high cliffs, and began to pace the rim of the island, staring at the water below.

  Looking down at the waves from the cliffs, she remembered Florida. She remembered sipping on the air hose and drinking Coca-Cola while tourists watched her through thick glass at the aquarium show. Sometimes Georgie had to remind herself that she could not, in fact, breathe underwater.

  “Whatever you do,” the aquarium owner had said, “be pretty.”

  And so the girls always pointed their toes and ignored the charley horses in their calves, or the way their eyes began to sting in the salt water. Georgie recalled the feeling of her hands on the arch of another swimmer’s back as they performed an underwater adagio, the fatigue in her body after the back-to-back Fourth of July shows. She remembered a time when she felt good about herself.

  She thought of Joe, and her arm around Marlene’s back. She thought of the stone house, and for a minute, she wanted to leave Whale Cay and return home. But home would never be the same.

  In a few days the yacht would pull away and Joe would wake her up with coffee in bed. Hannah would make her eggs, runny and heaped on a slice of white toast with fruit on the side. She would take her morning swims and read a book underneath the shade of a palm. And would that be enough?

  They had a rock in the yard back home. Her father used to lift the copperheads out of the garden shed with his hoe and slice them open with the metal edge, their poisonous bodies writhing without heads for a moment on top of the rock. The spring ritual had horrified and intrigued Georgie, and it was what she pictured now, standing above the sea, swaying, the feeling of rocks underneath her feet.

  But she might never see that rock again, she thought.

  It was dark and she couldn’t see well. There was shouting in the distance. She felt bewildered, restless.

  She set down her glass and took off her sandals. She would feel better in the water, stronger.

  With casual elegance, she brought her hands in front of her body and over her head and dove off the cliff. As she approached the water, falling beautifully, toes pointed, she wondered if she’d gotten mixed up and picked the wrong place to dive.

  She was falling into the tank again, the brackish water in her eyes, but no one was watching.

  She was cherry pie.

  She was a ticker tape parade.

  Her hands hit the water first. The water rushed over her ears, deafening her. Her limbs went numb, adrenaline moving through her until she was upright again, gulping air.

  She treaded water, fingers moving against the dark sea, pushing it away to keep herself afloat. There were rocks jutting out from the water, a near miss. There were strange birds nesting in the tall grass, a native woman bleeding on a straw mattress in a hut on the south shore, a stone house strangled by fig trees.

  Norma Millay’s high school graduation photo.

  Camden, Maine, 1912.

  Photo reprinted with permission of the Camden Public Library.

  NORMA MILLAY’S FILM NOIR PERIOD

  ACT I

  Her earliest memory is a fever dream, her mother, Cora, retreating from her bedside, a backlit head surrounded by a pale yellow aura. Sailing, sailing over the bounding main, Cora sings, still in her nurse’s uniform with the puffed sleeves and starched collar. Where many a stormy wind shall blow. Her voice fades into silence. Diminuendo, thinks Norma, who longs to bring Cora’s voice back, to wrap herself in the familiar mezzo-soprano until she falls asleep, but now she’s left clinging to a thread of consciousness.

  Sometimes Cora sets the metronome on top of the old piano, adamant the girls should learn time signatures. “You don’t have the luxury of being mediocre,” she says, leaning over them with a humorless face. “Not moderato, allegro!” In the recesses of her mind Norma can hear the tick-tick-ticking increasing in speed until it flatlines into a solid wall of sound. She nods off, wakes up, nods off again on the damp pillow.

  The Maine winter is cold enough to freeze the soft curls on her head after a bath, and the water that leaks onto the kitchen floor, but tonight she sweats like it’s a July afternoon on the bay. She keeps one leg on top of the pile of worn quilts. She thinks of eating pickled figs in early summer. Her eyes are hot and a briny taste fills her mouth.

  Vincent and Kathleen share the bed, their downy knees and sharp elbows pushing at her back and legs, which she resents and cherishes all at once. The smell of their bodies, not so frequently bathed in winter, is familiar, something like lavender soap, sweat, and pine sap, which falls into their hair when they collect kindling for the stove. She loves knowing her sisters are by her side even as Cora leaves in the dark of morning with an ugly brown coat buttoned over her uniform. “You’re a tribe,” she told them years ago, on their first day back to school after typhoid fever, when she’d cut off their hair and they looked like pale, starving page boys in white dresses. “You stick together.”

  Norma realizes there’s work you talk about and work you don’t. She pictures her mother bustling around a tubercular patient’s bed, then cutting her own copper-colored hair at night and weaving it into the scalp of a doll. She imagines the rhythm of the needle as it pulses in and out of the muslin. Piercing, popping, pulling through.

  “Teach us how,” she and her sisters used to beg, kneeling at Cora’s chair, rifling through her sewing basket and the pouches of human hair she collected from friends.

  “I’ll teach you to read and sing,” she’d say, shaking her head. “But not to work with hair.” The girls knew they were not to play with the doll; it would be sold for rent money.

  Norma knows when they wake up they’ll be alone in the dim kitchen, smearing day-old bread with measured dollops of blueberry jam, warmed on the stove. They’ll do the washing until their fingers are numb with cold, sing songs their mother taught them, tell stories in bed about imaginary lovers—what does a lover do so much as kiss?—while the modest fire becomes nothing but smoldering coals. They’re a houseful of skinny girls, dirt-poor ingenues singing arias from a cabin in the swampy part of town near the mill, a place the shipbuilders have fled. The young forest is beginning to grow again, but lately it’s bare enough to see the lean deer moving through.

  In the morning, Norma, too ill to eat, stares out of the window onto the Megunticook River, its edges frozen and tinged with crimson dye from the mills. Snow and ice form a diamond-like crust over the windowpanes, illuminated by pale rays of sunshine, so she peers out at the river through a clear spot on the window, her breath fogging up the sparkling glass.

  The rose hips outside the window are black; months before, whe
n they were plump and orange, she used to chew them. Poor girl’s candy.

  Vincent is nearby, one small foot folded underneath her body as she mends Cora’s blouse. Her lips are moving and Norma wonders if she’s reciting or composing; it’s as if she’s already gone from them. “We must save for Vincent’s sake,” Cora says. “We must try for a scholarship, subscribe to poetry magazines.”

  Though Norma and Kathleen both write poetry, sing, and act, only Vincent gets letters in the mail, letters full of praise and promise. It is, Norma thinks, as if only one of us can get out of this cold house, and it’s going to be Vincent.

  Very well and good, she thinks, trying to be just in her wants and needs. All is as it should be.

  There are things to look forward to, though, she tells herself. Boats on the bay in summer, reading on the rocks, picnics among the ferns on Mount Battie.

  She begins to shake. Her teeth chatter; in her head it’s the sound of ceramic plates falling against each other in the sink.

  “Come sit by me, Hunk,” Vincent says, beckoning Norma to her chair. “It’s cold by the window and you’re dreadfully sick.”

  Norma curls next to her sister in the chair, as she often does, wriggling one arm behind Vincent’s back and laying a cheek on her bony shoulder. When she breathes in, her sister’s claret-colored hair falls across her face, and she feels deep love tinged with resentment, like the pure ice leaching red dye from the river.

  ACT II

  Norma’s thick hair is cut to her chin and she wears her secondhand fur coat with pomp, turning the collar up so it brushes against her wide but handsome jawline. While her sister’s beauty is elfin and ethereal, Norma’s is sumptuous, hardy, fervent. Vincent may be the genius, Norma thinks, but I am the femme fatale.

  Vincent calls her Old Blond Plumblossom. They’re stalking across MacDougal Street in worn heels, a block from the theater where they both work, hashing out a three-part harmony for the stage. Norma relishes the rush of mingling with so many people in the city. The way she can dance until midnight or give all her energy to rehearsals that last until daybreak, with Eugen and Jig staggering around and fighting, the women drinking and stitching costumes, legs dangling over the small stage.

  “Charlie lost his temper last night,” Norma says, interrupting Vincent’s singing. “He doesn’t like Ida being cast—”

  “Dear Charlie is always losing his temper,” Vincent says, sighing, slight affectation in her voice, picked up from her years at Vassar. “He hardly has one to keep.”

  “He thinks you’d make a better lead.”

  “He’s right, of course,” Vincent says, shrugging her shoulders. “And I appreciate his loyalty. I know he keeps it up to flatter you. But I’m plenty busy writing my Aria. Speaking of—Hold your C for me at the end of that first line.”

  Norma does as told, then Vincent hits a complementary note. They’re supposed to be Furies or, as Vincent says, the Erinyes, and her idea is to make otherworldly sounds. “We’re brutal avengers,” she reminds Norma. “The melody should be haunting and rise to a sort of onslaught. I want beautiful but frenzied.”

  “Try G,” Norma says, gently correcting her sister. “Like this.”

  “And E major for Mum,” Vincent says, unleashing a note that becomes a cloud of breath in the air.

  “Mum will have to be offstage left,” Norma says, thinking of Cora’s tendency to jockey for a role onstage. She looks up at the wan sky, then into the golden insides of a café with a green awning. She imagines a steaming hot cup of coffee and a pastry, but there’s no money for pastries, just a big lunch at Polly Holladay’s.

  Her pace, and then Vincent’s, quickens, probably because they’re talking about Cora. She’s the one topic capable of dividing them, and they both tend to get anxious when she comes up. Taking a longer stride causes the backs of Norma’s shoes to rub against her heels and she winces. Vincent had called her to New York in a letter, saying, “We’ll open our oysters together.” But Cora had come too.

  “We can’t just put Mum on the shelf,” Vincent says, dodging a lamppost. “You know that.”

  Norma nods, though she’s ready to be young and free in the city, and Vincent’s extreme loyalty to their mother baffles her.

  “We’ll all be offstage,” Vincent says. “Heard but not seen.”

  “Fine,” Norma says, not wanting to fight.

  At night, in their cramped apartment, Cora peers over her small spectacles and refuses to drift out of young conversation like most women her age. “I, too, slept around if it suited me,” she announced one evening at dinner, a candlelit meal over a rickety table that included one of Vincent’s literary suitors, a kind but unathletic man who couldn’t hide his shock. “Why shouldn’t my girls do the same?” Cora continued, nonchalant.

  Norma was embarrassed, but not surprised, while Vincent laughed heartily and poured her mother another glass of wine.

  Vincent is the sun they orbit now, not quite a mother figure but a revered one. One night, when they’d been drinking, she asked Norma to sweep the kitchen.

  “I always clean the kitchen.”

  “Oh don’t be revisionist. We all cleaned the kitchen growing up.”

  “Who do you think kept house when you went off to Vassar?”

  “Tell me,” Vincent said, pausing in the doorway, owning every inch of her five-foot frame. “What kind of ride is it, on my coattails? Is it good?”

  In the morning, Vincent groveled, but Norma waved her off. We’re all hustlers, she thought. I may have come into the theater on Vincent’s coattails, but I’ve stayed because I’m damn good at what I do.

  Norma has held a gun, silhouetted onstage, lights dark. She’s been a mermaid, then a barmaid, in Djuna Barnes’s Kurzy of the Sea, taken direction from Eugene O’Neill, when he’s sober enough to give it. She’s delivered a monologue in a subterranean city of the future in a costume shaped like a pyramid, a halo over her head dangling from a well-bent wire. She’s been the highlight of a bad production, a critic writing, “Even Norma Millay’s superb acting couldn’t save this show . . .”

  And Charlie—Charlie has seen her talent. Dear, grumpy Charlie, who acts but just wants to paint, even though in her heart of hearts she believes he isn’t as talented as he thinks; are any of them? But that’s part of his charm, the vulnerability packed alongside the swagger and hot temper.

  If Charlie is busy tonight, or in a foul mood, or painting, she thinks, I’ll go home and share a bed with Vince and Mum.

  When she’s standing on the stage it’s easy to believe that she’s nearly famous, that she has achieved something, but there are times, like during a half-empty matinee, when the gig feels insignificant. Groundbreaking or not, they are, after all, a troupe that began in a neglected fishing shack that smelled of rotted wood and dead cod.

  Later that night, snow hurls itself against their barred window in the Village, while Norma covers her head with a pillow to drown out Cora’s snoring and the sound of Vincent making love to a poet in the kitchen. “Renounce me,” she can hear Vincent saying. “Renounce me.”

  ACT III

  “Plumblossom, I need you to be brave,” Vincent slurs. “Hurry the hell up!”

  They’re on the screened-in porch at Steepletop, and Vincent is agitated and starting to loosen the waistband of her trousers. The flies hurl themselves at the lanterns; Vincent’s farm doesn’t have electricity and is surrounded by impenetrable darkness on nights when the moon is small. The sisters have eaten what feels like their weight in blueberries, swum naked in the pool made out of the stone barn foundation, and downed two bottles of wine. Vincent’s husband, Eugen, is passed out on the couch inside, and she’s thumping a syringe of morphine with expert hands.

  “I don’t want to,” Norma says, crushing her eyes shut. “This isn’t good for you.”

  “You’ll do it,” Vincent says, exposing the white flesh of her backside. “Hunk, I need you to do it. Who cares how we raise the devil?”

  Vin
cent has burned through more than one advance, clutches her stomach constantly, complains of her guts aching, and washes her meals down with gin, wine, anything. She still packs auditoriums for her readings, but if they could only see the track marks on her legs, Norma thinks.

  “How can you turn your back on me?” Vincent says. “After everything I’ve done for you?”

  “Just tell me how much,” Norma says, sighing, throwing up her hands. “Though I feel like you’re asking me to kill you.”

  “I’ll die if you don’t do it,” Vincent says, “and that’s the truth. I won’t use caution. I’ll plunge a syringe into both thighs.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Are you daring me?”

  “Just use the damn syringe, Hunk.”

  “Write down the dose in the notebook,” Vincent says, nodding to one on a glass table nearby.

  Norma can see the lucidity in her eyes slipping away, but the imperial quality is still there. When Norma looks at the notebook she’s horrified by the entries, morphine on the hour some nights. Vincent’s cheeks already look flaccid, the whites of her eyes yellowed.

  Perhaps Cora knows how bad things have gotten, but Cora is in Camden now, feeble and focused on her own writing, children’s books and verses. And Kathleen is paranoid, and not to be trusted. No, this is my secret to keep with Eugen, she thinks, though anyone seeing Vincent now would know the truth.

  “Don’t look at me with compassion,” Vincent mumbles in a harsh, dry voice as she reclines on the divan she keeps out on the porch. “I don’t want it.”

  Norma sits on the cool, hard floor and leans against the wicker base of the divan. Vincent reaches for her hand, and she gives it, and when she wakes in the early morning, her shoulder socket aches from reaching up for so long. In the early hours, when the sun is coming up and before the birds have started singing, Norma walks to the guest cottage and climbs in the single bed with Charlie, keeping the windows open. Startled by the roar of an engine, she wakes in time to see Eugen and Vincent speeding down the dirt road, top down, raccoon coats on to take the chill off the morning, her sister’s hair raised by the wind.