Sal’s men had gotten impatient, and at last she’d blurted out her fantasy: “I want to go to Hollywood!” She had only blurry notions about what she might do there. Dancing, acting . . . That must be an impossible dream. But she could do something, learn shorthand and be a secretary, or perhaps serve lunch in the canteen.
“If I was you, I’d take the cash,” one of them said. She shook her head, and Sal’s two goons stepped away from her and conferred a moment in grunting, very audible whispers.
“Why’s he going to all this trouble?” one asked. “He could have offed her for free.”
The other shot Lucille a leer. “Why you think? He’s got plans for this one.”
That only confirmed Lucille’s desire to get as far away from the mobster as possible. She remembered clearly the chill that had trickled down her spine when he’d threatened her family. If she was across the country, though, maybe Sal would forget about her . . . and her family.
Sal’s men said they’d have to discuss matters with their boss, but after that, things seemed to happen very quickly. A few days later they caught her on the street corner and told her to pack and be at the train station by six. All throughout the day she’d tried to tell her mother, but there was no way it would make sense without admitting the terrible thing she’d done. And once her mother started worrying about her, Lucille feared she wouldn’t have the strength to go.
So in the end she’d hidden a pillowcase full of her small possessions under a laundry delivery and left a note. Then the men had given her some cash to tide her over and ushered her onto a train, where she’d spent three days watching the countryside pass. She’d craned her neck to see the vista ahead, so she could look forward to all the things waiting for her. But the only scenery she could see was the part that had already passed. She’d cried until she thought she had no tears left, missing her mother, her brothers and sisters. But she told herself she’d bought a great chance. Something was waiting for her out West. She just didn’t know quite what.
At the station in Los Angeles, someone picked her up so quickly she thought she was being kidnapped. The man must have been given an accurate description of her, for he took her by the arm and helped her into the front seat of a roadster, giving her pillowcase full of clothes a contemptuous sneer as he tossed it in the rumble seat. “Where are we going,” she’d asked him, but he just drove her to an unmarked office where a man told her to talk, walk, sing, and dance while another man filmed her. She performed everything in a daze, but they seemed satisfied.
It was only then that she really let herself believe that she might have a future in the movies. But she still didn’t know what to expect. They told her nothing, gave her no reason to hope . . . beyond the fact that she was still in California.
And so for several days, she waited in her hotel room.
Why didn’t I just ask them for cash? Lucille asked herself early on the third almost sleepless morning. What am I doing here, thousands of miles from home?
She was jolted from bed by a knock on the door. Was it the police, armed with the truth, come to arrest her? Was it the hotel manager, kicking her out and handing her an impossible bill that no one was going to pay for after all?
Was it Sal? He’s got plans for this one.
With her face shiny and her waist-long, fair hair hanging in an unkempt braid over her shoulder, she opened the door a crack. The slim, well-dressed young man behind it pushed it all the way open, almost knocking her over.
“Sorry,” he said, hardly looking at her. “Where are your suitcases? You were supposed to be downstairs ten minutes ago, and if you don’t leave now, we’ll never make it in time. Swell way to start your first day.” He paused abruptly. “Unless you plan to be a difficult diva? That could work as your shtick. I’ll mention it to Veronica. But before she can go to work on you, we have to get to the studio and sign, sign, sign! Oh, you don’t have your makeup on. Maybe that’s a good idea, so the makeup artist has a fresh slate to work with. But gosh, slap some water on yourself. You look half asleep.”
“Who are you?” Lucille managed to ask weakly.
“Your agent. Well, Mr. Herschel is technically your agent, but he likes to delegate the unknowns. Come on, get a move on! Why weren’t you downstairs like I told you?”
“We . . . we’ve never met. You never told me.”
“Sure I did. I sent four messages to the hotel. First one telling you that your audition reel was being shopped, second that Lux Studios decided they’d take a chance on you, third the proposed terms, and fourth, to be ready at seven sharp to get the paperwork out of the way so we can have you on set for your first part.”
“My first part?” she asked, barely comprehending him.
“That’s right. Someone big must be pushing for you to be moving so fast.”
“I have to act this morning?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. They won’t give you anything too challenging for your first role. A fainting damsel, a chorus girl, maybe someone’s kid sister. But based on the terms of your contract, it looks like they want to fast-track you. Gosh, there are girls who would kill to have what you’re getting.”
Lucille gasped and looked up at him, alarmed. Did he know?
But he didn’t seem to notice her reaction and only said, “Go wash your face and come downstairs, lickety-split.”
He exited, letting the door slam. For a moment Lucille stood stock-still in the middle of her room. It’s a dream, she told herself. I’m still in that alley, deciding what to do, and this is all a dream of what might be if I do the wrong thing. Or was it the right thing? She wasn’t even sure anymore. Not with this glittering reward hanging like one of those jeweled fruits in Aladdin’s cave, just within her reach.
She burst into motion, splashing water on her face and tugging off her nightgown, then shimmying into her cotton dress.
The young man was waiting for her downstairs, inside a big black car. A woman a little older than Lucille, with her hair in a side-parted nut-brown bob, peered curiously at her, then jumped out and half dragged her into the backseat.
“Veronica Imrie, how d’you do? And you’re Lucille O’Malley? Not for long. Hmm . . . What can we do about that? Too Irish, you know. Can’t be too anything here, unless you’re a certain type, like Dolores del Río, but you don’t always want to play Irish vixens, do you, and besides, then they’d dye your hair red for every movie even though of course no one could see its color.” Veronica talked at breakneck speed, but her movements were deliberate, reassuring. Despite her youth, she was the most competent-looking woman Lucille had ever seen.
“What shall you be, then?” Veronica continued. “Not Lucille, but Lulu. Or two capitals, capital L-u, capital L-u? Well, I’ll leave big decisions like that to my boss. Now, for your last name . . .”
“Who are you?” Lucille asked, feeling weak under that torrent of words.
“I told you, Veronica Imrie, junior publicist at Lux Studios.”
Lucille was still fuzzy from sleep, and from lack of it. “Do I really have a job?”
“Does she have a job, she asks! We might make a comedienne out of you yet. Don’t tell me you yearn for high drama. Not with that sweet little chin. Niederman liked your audition film. He’s the head honcho at Lux. Yes, honey, you have a job. A contract, anyway, or you will once this fella approves it. Herschel assigned him as your personal agent.”
The sharp young man with small spectacles perched on his nose and three hairs pretending to be a mustache on his upper lip twisted around from the front seat and held out his hand. “Didn’t I tell you my name? David Mandel.” He was instantly interrupted by Veronica.
“We call him ‘Mandelbrot,’ because he’s sweet and nutty.” She pinched his cheek, and he squirmed away.
“Quit it, Veronica. I’m a professional. What’s Lulu going to think?”
“See,” she said to Lucille, “Lulu has caught on already. So let’s get you fixed up and then we can find out what your first
part will be.”
“Not so fast,” David said. “She hasn’t signed the contract.”
“You mean you haven’t signed it. You think a green little thing like her is going to read all the clauses? No offense, sweetie,” she added in an aside to Lucille. “Besides, you have a peach of a contract here. One hundred dollars a week, a housing stipend, and guaranteed billing in the credits. I don’t know who you slept with, but you must have done a heck of a job on him.”
Lucille blushed to her ears. “I never! I . . . I wouldn’t!”
“Okay, okay, keep your pants on, sister. You’ll be a rarity in this town if you do. Almost every girl here tries to sleep her way to the top.”
“Even you?” Lucille asked.
“I only sleep with this fella,” she said, jerking her thumb toward David. “Fat lot of good it’s done me. He won’t even bring me home to meet his mother.”
“Only because—”
“I’m a shiksa temptress.”
“No. I’m just waiting for the right time.”
“Oh yeah?” Veronica asked, hands on her hips. “And when is that?”
“About a week after she dies peacefully of natural causes.”
Veronica turned to Lucille. “Because meeting me would kill her. Isn’t that nice? I’m glad my mother is a bohemian painter who doesn’t care if I bring home a Jew or a gerbil. But you. O’Malley . . . O’Malley . . . We don’t want to kill the old personality entirely. Is there something reminiscent of O’Malley, maybe a little Irish, but not too Irish? We already have Maureen O’Sullivan filling that niche. I love all those Ls though. La-la-la . . .”
“You wouldn’t think she’s so good to look at her,” David told Lucille while Veronica continued to talk to herself, “but trust me, she’ll get you in every magazine from here to Honolulu to Hong Kong. Hold on. I can tell from that gleam in her eye that she’s got something. Lucille O’Malley, prepare to meet the new you.”
SIX
You see,” Ben said, “you’ve got your three classifications of forgotten men.”
Frederick sucked on the sweet end of a piece of timothy grass. It didn’t do much to assuage his gnawing hunger, but he liked watching the cattail puff at the end bob with each unsteady jarring of the locomotive. In the past month he’d eaten charity porridge and raw potatoes grubbed out of a dusty abandoned field. He’d traded his socks for beans heated in their own can over a campfire.
“Oh yeah?” he asked Ben. “And what are they?”
Ben chewed on his snipe, the stubby end of a cigar. He was in his forties, he said, but to Frederick he looked nearer sixty. They’d met an hour ago in the deep shadows on the outskirts of an eastern Pennsylvania rail yard. “First train hop?” Ben had asked in a low whisper, wary of the rail bulls. “Stick to me, then.” Frederick had thought he’d have to help the stiff, scrawny older man, but it had been the other way around. The train, just gaining speed, still moved much faster than Frederick had expected, and loomed so large, a churning metal monstrosity that threatened to grind him to a pulp. Frederick hesitated, stumbled . . . and had it not been for Ben’s surprisingly strong grip, he might have been crushed beneath the wheels.
Ben had ignored Frederick’s effusive thanks and sat deep in the corner of the half-empty freight car, staring at the passing blur of forest for the better part of an hour. But now, at last, he seemed to notice the scruffy young man and started up as though they’d left off in the middle of a conversation.
“It’s a regular classification of men of the road,” he pontificated in his slow, scratchy Southern voice, interrupted at regular intervals by a phlegmy cough. “You’ve got your bums. Can’t stand them myself, though I’ve been called one a time or three. Your bums, now, they’re scared stiff of work. They’ll walk ten miles for a free meal sooner than work an hour to buy one. Your tramp, on the other hand, he’s a step up.” Ben squinted at Frederick. “You might just be a tramp, come to look at you.”
Frederick still didn’t quite know what he was. A month on the road without a cent beyond what he earned with his own labor, without his name, had changed him, certainly, but sometimes he still felt like that spoiled, stupid, selfish rich boy, waiting for someone to hand him something. And the funny thing was, occasionally—more often than he would have ever thought—people did hand him things. Farmer’s wives would give him a glass of milk still warm from the cow. A small-town banker on his lunch break tore his sandwich in two and gave half to Frederick. People were kinder than he’d ever dreamed they would be.
But not always. He’d been chased by dogs, shot at with rock salt, and hustled away by innumerable cops. Still, those shining kindnesses glowed through the hardest days.
“What’s a tramp, then?” he asked Ben.
“Tramps are nature’s wanderers. Might call them explorers, if there was anything left to discover. They’ve got the wanderlust in them. Ain’t that a splendid word?” He said it again, dreamily. “Wanderlust. Is that you, young feller?”
“I had to get away. I didn’t much care where to.” He fought back the image of Mr. Shaw lying dead, of Duncan’s hate-filled eyes.
Ben looked at him sharply. “But you’re not a criminal. Are you? No, I don’t think you are.”
Frederick was glad Ben had answered his own question. My entire life has been built on crime, he thought.
Ben resumed his recitation. “A tramp will work if he has to, but it’s the journey that really drives him, not his next meal. Not getting from Kalamazoo to Tupelo, exactly, but getting from somewhere to somewhere else and then setting off again. Can’t see it myself. If I ever strike it big, I aim to settle down. Hell, even if I strike it small. All this traveling is hard on the bones.” He shifted uncomfortably on the metal freight car.
“You must be the third kind, then,” Frederick said.
“Yup. I’m a hobo through and through. A hobo, he wants to work. When the work dries up, though, he turns into a vagabond. I worked hard all my life. Tobacco fields when I was a nipper in Kentucky. Lord, how I wish I had some of those fields and fields of tobacco now.” He chewed thoughtfully on his cigar stub. “After that I must have got a bit of the wanderlust myself. I headed north and worked in a chemical plant. But the company folded and, well, there just aren’t as many jobs as there used to be. We got this here Depression going on now, hear tell, and there’s a million men, all younger and stronger and smarter than me, looking for jobs. But I know somewhere there’s a job for me.” He gave another hacking cough. “And when I find it, won’t I just send half of what I make back to Nellie!”
“Who is Nellie?”
“She’s . . . well, she was my little girl. What she is today I don’t rightly know.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Must be nigh on twenty. Haven’t seen her since she was in ringlets. Pretty little thing.”
“Where is she now?” Frederick asked.
“Lord knows.”
“How can you send her money, then?”
“Well, look on the bright side—I’ll probably never find a steady job in the first place.” Ben slapped his scrawny thigh and laughed until he choked. “What say we jump this cannonball just shy of Pittsburgh and see if we can’t rustle up a can of mulligan?”
Clueless, Frederick asked, “Is mulligan edible?”
“Barely,” Ben admitted. “You any good at catching rats, youngster?”
As it turned out, Frederick was very good at catching rats. Unfortunately, he was terrible at killing them, and got bitten by the first one he cornered in an almost-empty warehouse and grabbed bare-handed. He dropped it and it ran into a hole.
“They mostly don’t have the rabies,” Ben said. “But if you start foaming at the mouth, kindly let me know so I can skedaddle.”
“Sorry,” Frederick said. “It looked at me. I . . . I just couldn’t.”
“Don’t worry about it, youngster,” Ben said. He’d never asked Frederick’s name, only called him “youngster” if he’d recently done something foolish, or “mister” i
f he looked like he was adapting to the hobo life. “You’ll harden up by and by. Though I’d sleep with one eye open tonight if I was you. Now that rat has a taste of you, he’ll likely come back for seconds.”
While broths at home would involve his father’s personal chef simmering veal bones for two days, Ben’s masterpiece began with a bucket of water from a rusty tap behind the warehouse. He heated it over a fire made from scrap wood and gradually added handfuls of seeds and weeds he’d gathered from nearby lots. Frederick recognized the dandelions, but nothing else.
“This here’s dock,” Ben said, crumbling a cluster of seeds into the brew. “And these leaves are lamb’s quarters. Lamb would be better, but lamb’s quarters will do.”
From one pocket of the patched coat he wore despite the heat, he drew half an onion, and from another, a bit of dried bacon. “It’s been in three stews so far,” Ben confessed, “but I reckon it still has a whiff of pig about it.”
The coat was a veritable cabinet of wonders. An inside pocket produced a packet of salt and a handful of dried peas; a bulging outside pocket held a handkerchief, spoon, and pocketknife. Ben even had a candle stub and a few matches in a piece of oilskin. “Makes it more romantical,” he said with a wink.
Frederick’s mouth began to water. When the soup had cooked enough, Ben used the hem of his coat as a pot holder and hauled the bucket off the fire. Then he hunkered down and commenced eating.
Frederick’s heart sank as he watched Ben shovel the steaming food into his mouth. Why had he been so foolish as to think Ben would share? Frederick hadn’t contributed a single thing to it, not even a rat.
It had been a day since his last decent meal at a breadline; a wizened apple had been his breakfast. His stomach clenched in a tight knot. After a month on the road he was still naive enough to believe that people would hand him things. Now he was torn, knowing he didn’t deserve a portion of Ben’s meal but deeply resentful that it wasn’t offered. Sure, Ben had taught him what plants to use, so maybe he could steal a pan and some matches and forage well enough to fend for himself. Maybe next time he could even harden himself enough to kill a rat that looked at him with shining, terrified eyes. Ben had already done a lot for him—he provided companionship on the road and advice about survival. He didn’t owe Frederick anything else.
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