Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  “Ring again,” Lank mouthed from the sidewalk, gesturing with his finger before heading down the block. He didn’t go far. I suspected only later that he liked to watch people struggle.

  The door opened slightly, and Butterfly put her head through the crack. She was a small woman, and we stared at each other eye to eye. I was surprised at the immediate feeling of embarrassment that washed over me. I was starstruck, nauseated. She was famous and I wasn’t. She was part of one of the South’s biggest cultural moments. She had touched Vivien Leigh.

  “What do you want, honey?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched and childlike even though she was in her eighties. She wore her white hair pulled back and smiled apprehensively. The crack of the door widened.

  “I want to talk to you about your faith,” I said, using the line I had practiced with Lank.

  Butterfly scoffed. “Again? You can tell that minister of yours that he can stop trying,” she said. “Don’t you think everyone else has already tried? My family? My friends?”

  “He cares for you,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The Lord,” I said.

  “I won’t be anyone’s trophy,” she said, pointing to her head. “I can think on my own.”

  I took a deep breath. I started to wonder if I had the guts, maybe even the faith, to see this through. I searched in my heart for some deeper commitment, some understanding about the universe that I had and Prissy didn’t, but I came up empty.

  “If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead—”

  “I don’t believe any of that,” she said, “and I got tired of pretending. Aren’t you?”

  I said nothing. All I had were canned lines, which I had memorized dutifully but could not—when it counted—feel or defend.

  “Trust me—I’m trying to do right by others and be honest at the same time,” she said.

  “Don’t you worry about what’s going to happen when you die?” I said, suddenly genuinely curious.

  “I already know what’s going to happen when I pass,” she said. “I’m giving my body to science.”

  I was dumbfounded.

  “To do some real good,” she said. “Good we can see and good we can know.”

  I forgot about the Lord. “What will they do with your body?”

  “Cut it open, learn, give my organs to someone who needs them,” she said. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard of someone not wanting to lie in a grave in their best dress, plastic lilies stuck in the ground next to a granite tombstone. It seemed to me so rational and selfless, one of the greatest gifts you could give: your whole body.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I was hoping—”

  “I know you were, but I’m going to save your time,” she said. “Go on to the next house, honey.”

  The door shut and I stood there looking at it, stunned.

  “And God bless,” Lank whispered from behind an azalea bush, whose blooms had withered and were now brown and plastered to the porch.

  “Say it,” he hissed.

  “And God bless,” I said, my voice anemic.

  “Next house up,” Lank said, wiping sweat from his brow. “Keep momentum.”

  “I want to call my mom,” I said, tugging at the hemline of my shorts.

  “You’re letting fear in,” Lank said, holding me by the elbow. He craned over me, eyes earnest, skin tanned from frequent golf games.

  But what I’d really let in was a kernel of doubt.

  Butterfly’s black cat stared at me through the window, ambivalent. “I want to go home,” I said.

  I didn’t think of Butterfly again for years, not until I was twenty-four years old and in bed with my mother, watching Gone With the Wind.

  Those days I was working a job as a marketer at a firm in Richmond, marketer meaning someone who scheduled conference calls and hounded executives for calendar time nine hours a day. I’d married the wrong guy, and too young. I ate everything put in front of me. Anytime I got into my car alone, I cried. Two decades into life and I was burnt out.

  Mom was in and out of sleep that day, exhausted from radiation treatments. I held her hand and ate two doughnuts and an entire bag of popcorn. At that time in my life, movies were salvation. I could quiet my brain, stop thinking about the things I didn’t understand: my mother’s cancer, pharmacology, why I didn’t love my perfectly nice husband. Instead I could marvel at Vivien Leigh’s waistline, her savage femininity.

  But then Scarlett, outraged with Prissy’s failure to find a doctor when Melanie was in the throes of labor, shoved her on the staircase. I froze.

  “Oh my God,” I said, sitting up. I was struck by how horrendous that scene was, how sharp. No wonder Butterfly was uncomfortable with her role.

  “That’s how it was,” Mom said, stirring. I brought her broth.

  Three weeks later she was dead. Lank spoke at her service, his blond hair now thinned out on top and swept to the side, but I was too ripped open by grief to listen. I’d tuned him out years ago.

  It turns out that Vegas had cancer, and this sobers us. One of our team members finds a chemotherapy port surrounded by puckered skin and scar tissue.

  “I can’t believe I was wrong about his heart,” Sarah says.

  “You could still be right,” I say. “We’ll know in a few weeks.”

  While we wait for the lab technician to inspect our work, Sarah tells me that she’d like to open a free clinic in Florida for the workers who get bused in for orange picking. “They have these makeshift camps,” Sarah says. “And no health care. What about you?”

  “What about me?” I ask.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “After my mother died,” I say, “I quit my marketing job and started taking biology classes at the community college.”

  “So you didn’t always want to be a doctor?” she asks, as if this is a strike against my character.

  “No,” I say. “Definitely not.”

  “What do you think Vegas did before he died?” she asks. “Landscape architect? Toll booth operator? Who are these people?”

  That night, as I scrub the embalming fluid from my hands—it had seeped into my gloves and made my fingers tingle—I remember how Butterfly McQueen died.

  Mom read the obituary to me at the kitchen table. I was in high school, fifteen or so, and constantly sulking, but the news had caught my attention. It had been a little over a year since I’d met Butterfly, and she’d lodged in my imagination. She’d been a dancer, a maid, a Harlem social worker, and attended college in her sixties. I recall something she said in an interview about how she wouldn’t let Vivien Leigh slap her, and refused to eat watermelon. I remember cringing at the sound of her roles: maid, Auntie, a “blind negress” in Huckleberry Finn.

  Butterfly died horrifically, burned from a kerosene heater she tried to light. I picture her leaning toward the small heater in the living room of her Georgia home, trying to take the chill out of the December air, then shrieking and pulling back as the flames burst up and onto her small body. Did someone find her before she died? How long did she lay there burning?

  I do my best to imagine her body, her suffering, and how I would have treated her wounds. Cooling. Pain management. Fluids—lactated Ringer’s maybe?

  But with Butterfly it wasn’t just about treating a physical ailment. Her body was more than burned flesh. Donating it to science was about taking control of the thing that was undeniably hers. Had that chance been taken from her? There were only so many ways to show the world that she was more than a petite maid cowering on the stairs underneath Vivien Leigh’s raised palm.

  Were doctors able to use her body as she wanted? The epidermis would have been too damaged for lab work. Maybe her organs, though old, were still helpful to someone.

  I find myself hoping that her wish was granted, that her body found the purposeful end she’d imagined.
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  But I know so little. I still catch myself looking away when a slide comes up of necrotic tissue or reveals the yellow tint of a swollen limb. A burned body—it’s only a matter of time before I see one.

  It is, I’m learning, weird to get close to a body in decline. The qualities we are afraid to discover in ourselves, or others, are pushed to the front.

  My mother’s was the first dead body I knew, the first one I touched. I gripped the hand that had masterfully applied Mary Kay eye shadow, lipstick, and mascara. The hand that had braided my hair, slapped my cheek, and held me to her breast when I was an infant. She wanted a wig and the mortician’s makeup for the casket. I didn’t pass along her wishes. Does it matter what we do when consciousness has passed? I was the one who had to look at her, and I wanted the real her, even if the real her was hairless and wasted.

  Years from now there will be bodies I have loved and bodies I have treated. After a few weeks with Vegas, I’m sure my compassion toward the dying will be tinged with scientific intrigue, a desire to understand and solve problems.

  What I know now: the body is a strange vessel we leave behind.

  Sarah is anxious about her cutting skills. “I think I’m too excited,” she says. “I’m going too deep.”

  We all have performance anxiety, but that’s not what keeps me up at night. Me—I’m afraid I’ll become one of those doctors who sees a patient and not a person, the body and not the spirit.

  What I hope, I guess, is that the right kind of callus will form around my heart.

  The upperclassmen tell us we will struggle most not with intestines or livers but with the cadaver’s hands, genitals, and face—the things we see as inextricably human.

  It’s my turn to make an incision on Vegas’s back as we search for the trapezius muscle. You will always remember the first cut. I look for the part of myself who can detach from her surroundings and find that she is there, all business, working for the A.

  The scalpel is sharper than I imagined and the skin gives way easily. I will know what Vegas never could, the thickness of his muscles, the color of his subcutaneous fat. I bend over, get closer. The bright light spares nothing.

  Dolly Wilde, photographed by Cecil Beaton.

  Photo reprinted with permission of Sotheby’s.

  WHO KILLED DOLLY WILDE?

  You wouldn’t have liked Dolly if you met her, that last year. She spent a lot of time screaming in her bedroom, complaining about the wallpaper. She claimed she couldn’t be left alone with bad wallpaper, because that was how her uncle Oscar had died, and she was his reincarnation, and wasn’t it dangerous to leave a narrative thread dangling that way?

  “Isn’t it just asking for trouble?” she’d ask me, rolling over in her bed, naked. She’d been athletic as a young girl, but looking at her pale legs, I realized her muscles had gone soft in middle age. Sometimes she wore silk pajamas peppered with cigarette burns, but she was often naked. She was ashamed of her negligible bank account and empty bottle of Guerlain—never her body, not even the track marks on her arms.

  I knew Dolly wanted to go back to the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, but she’d been kicked out of the hotel at least twice and it was impossible to get into Paris now with the war. She kept bad company, odd hours, and rarely paid her bills. She’d drink an expensive bottle of champagne and take the warm dregs of the bottle with her to the kitchen and smoke cigarettes with the line cooks in the back alley. Her fluidity attracted people to her as a young woman—she knew how to cultivate obsession—but now her intensity made people uncomfortable. She wanted things: conversation, money, drugs, a hot meal, sex. She wore the want on her face; I could see it in her violet eyes every time she looked at me.

  “No more bacon in bed,” she complained. “No more love letters on expensive hotel stationery.”

  “You aren’t allowed back there,” I’d say, shrugging my shoulders. “And besides you have this smart flat that’s all yours.” She lived on Chesham Street near Belgrave Square, a small place with a posh address and a crummy interior that was also close to the physicians’ offices she tore through on Sloane Street.

  “It’s so bleak in here,” she said, sighing. “The lighting is bad, and the maid mumbles . . .”

  “She’s intimidated by you,” I said, but the right word would have been horrified, because the young woman had happened upon Dolly in various states of undress, wretched hangovers, and what might have been described as fits of madness, usually brought on by the sirens that wailed throughout London in the evenings. Dolly had to dope herself to sleep every night as the Luftwaffe bombed London into blocks of fire, making hollowed-out silhouettes of old buildings.

  I think she saw her life as it was: over. As the war and her cancer progressed, I watched her try to decide if she wanted to end it all or resurrect herself, rejoin the intellectual set, make things right with the people who had once loved her but now ceased to answer her desperate letters.

  Dolly was often high, out of her mind nearly half of the day. I don’t know where she got the drugs, but she always had them. Paraldehyde, heroine, morphine—she was indiscriminate. But despite the relentless ways she poisoned herself, she would obsess over what brand of deodorant or toothpaste to use, panic over small rashes and coughs, and phone me multiple times a day to discuss her ailments.

  “I’ve noticed a spot underneath my armpit and must go to the physician’s at once,” she’d say. “You’ll take me, darling, won’t you?”

  I would.

  I loved Dolly in the way that you can only love your first love, a way that is infinitely forgiving and always mindful of the early days. We’d been friends since we were children. I used to give Dolly my nice dresses because I had no place to wear them; I hated parties. I knew she’d never return them and if she did they’d be wrinkled and stained.

  I had to be patient—I couldn’t abandon her—she was a dying woman, in many ways. There was the cancer, of course, but also the sort of dying that happens when the beautiful person you once were wears off and all that’s left is someone frightened and ugly, this hard and cruel kernel of a self that’s difficult to look at.

  If you can love her through this part, I told myself, you are the love of her wild and miserable life.

  Nearly every day I walked through the smoking rubble of London, past the crippled chimneys and grieving mothers, past the men blacking out the lights along the Thames, past the people going to work, and I knocked on the door of Dolly’s flat to see if she was okay. It was part of my wartime routine. We all had them, the things you did to reassure yourself that you were still alive.

  You’re a good person, I told myself. You’re her only friend.

  Every afternoon she ate fish soup at Russo’s, and sometimes I joined her. She wore the same blue dress over and over again, because she thought she looked good in it or maybe it was the last designer dress she had. Dolly would rather be caught twice in the same well-made dress than wear something cheap.

  She rubbed her shoulders. I looked at the toile tablecloths, worn from bleaching. There were anemic flowers on the round bistro tables. A little winter sun came through the wide windows.

  “Where’s your coat?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Tell me.”

  “I pawned it,” she said, staring me right in the eyes, daring me to judge her. I sighed.

  Dolly swallowed the fish soup, wincing a little at its heat. “It makes me think of drowning in the ocean,” she said, letting her spoon rest in the bowl for a moment. “Of getting knocked down by a wave and coming up with shells pressed to your knees, the inside of your nose stinging with salt. Do you remember that feeling?”

  I nodded.

  The soup was thin, and I think eating it was an act of contrition for her. I took a few polite bites; I’d eat at home later. We still had a cook and black market food, and I knew how lucky that made me.

  “I don’t have much of an appetite,” Dolly confessed, swirling the soup. “But last
week I spent the last of my monthly allowance on a hunk of Camembert and a buttery brioche. I pulled the knob off the top of the pastry and left the rest at the boulangerie,” she said, one side of her mouth twisted into a half smile.

  “Why didn’t you wrap it in a napkin and save it for later?” I asked. She didn’t answer; I knew she resented my veiled attempts at financial advice. She was prone to spontaneous, wasteful gestures. I think they made her feel luxurious.

  I missed her better stories, the days when she might hold forth about listening to George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique in a private garden, eating figs in Algiers, a sheikh kissing her stockinged leg. There was opium shared with Cocteau behind heavy velvet curtains in a private club she could never find on her own. I needed these stories because I had none of my own. I was too wealthy to work—my mother forbade it—and too shy to have my own adventures. After finishing school—Dolly liked to ask “finished for what?”—I read books, kept my mother company at teatime, and lived vicariously through Dolly. It had always been that way; it was our currency.

  “Something sweet?” the waiter asked.

  We shook our heads, and he left with a smile that was focused on Dolly.

  “He’s Parisian,” she explained, rifling through her wallet. “He says my French is impeccable, and for that he gives me a half carafe of wine some nights.”

  She placed a few coins on the white tablecloth.

  Je suis désolée, she said to the waiter. I’ll come back with a tip. Ne vous inquiétez pas, he said, his thin face expressing something like sympathy. He poured more water into her glass and went back to the kitchen.

  “I look like someone you should be nice to now,” Dolly mumbled. “Not someone you want to sleep with.”

  I put more coins on the table and walked her back to her flat.

  “I heard on the wireless that you have a one in ten thousand chance of dying each night in a raid,” I said, thinking those chances sounded pretty favorable.