The Ladies of Garrison Gardens

by Louise Shaffer

  Iva Claire felt herself stiffen. “How did you know . . . ?” she stammered, too embarrassed to finish the sentence.

  “It's okay,” the other girl soothed. “I know what you do before the show each time we play a new house. I've seen you erase what those jerks write.”

  The jerks were house musicians. Each vaudeville theater had its own orchestra, and sometimes if an act was really bad, like the Sunshine Sisters, the men in the pit would amuse themselves by writing notes in the margins of the music. This act is a bomb, the clarinetist in one town would scrawl on the clarinet part. A real Thanksgiving dinner, his counterpart in the next town would add. Each guy would try to be wittier and meaner than the last one. It would have hurt Mama to read what they wrote, so as soon as they hit a new town, Iva Claire would sneak into the orchestra pit to clean up their sheet music.

  “Don't feel bad. I'd do it, too, if I was you,” Tassie said.

  Iva Claire tried to smile, but she was too embarrassed. She might not want to be in show business, but since she was, she hated being the worst act on the bill. Going out in front of an audience five times a day and dying was bad enough. Getting caught erasing comments from her sheet music was downright humiliating.

  But Tassie was trying to make friends, that was clear. Iva Claire had never had a friend her own age. There had been people in the boardinghouse back in New York that she'd loved. But that was before she and Mama had had to run from New York and the boardinghouse, because of what Iva Claire had done. Now she'd never see any of her old friends again.

  Don't think about that. “Thanks,” she said to Tassie.

  Tassie climbed up on the stage and they divided up the music. Each of them took an eraser and went to work.

  “How long have you and your ma been doing a sister act?” Tassie asked, as she flipped through the pages.

  “About a year. When I got taller than Mama, we switched from mother and daughter.”

  “Benny says you're the glue that keeps your act together.”

  “Really?” It sounded like a compliment, but Iva Claire knew she was no performer.

  Tassie nodded eagerly. “Benny and Irene like to keep an eye on the show, so they watch all the acts. Benny says you and your ma get away with playing sisters because you're such a good mimic.”

  That was another secret of hers. Iva Claire had learned if she could copy Mama's gestures and poses, the audiences seemed willing to believe their age difference was closer to ten years than twenty. Makeup and distance from the stage helped, of course, but it was the imitating that did it. It wasn't just that she could copy Mama's movements either; she could also get inside Mama's head and think like her. For some reason that made it work. Iva Claire wasn't much of an entertainer, but she had trained herself to be good at getting inside other people's heads.

  “What gets me is, you and your ma don't even look alike,” Tassie went on.

  It was true. At twelve, Iva Claire was already two inches taller than her mother, and her dark hair was stick-straight. Mama's hair was dark too, but it was so curly it wouldn't lie flat even after she'd just had it bobbed. Iva Claire's eyes were blue, her perfectly proportioned nose was straight, and her face was square with a jaw that Mama said made her look determined. Although she wasn't heavy, she looked solid. Mama was tiny and looked like you could blow her away just by breathing hard. Her eyes were dark brown, her delicate little face was heart shaped, and her button nose turned up at the end. The only feature mother and daughter shared was a full curvy mouth. Yet they passed as sisters. It was proof—if Iva Claire had ever needed it—that you could make people see what you wanted them to.

  Tassie echoed her thoughts. “People will believe anything if you do it right. We toured with a two-headed boy once. He turned out to be twins who worked behind an illusion curtain. The one who played the second head told me the whole trick was in the way he held his neck—in the angle. Can you believe that?”

  Iva Claire did believe it. Completely.

  “How did you start traveling with Benny and Irene?” Iva Claire asked.

  “Benny and Irene knew my mother because she was in the business. When she died, they took me in. They got it all written up legal that they were my guardians. That was Benny's idea. It took us a couple of months to find a lawyer who would do it, since I was so young and we were trooping, but Benny wouldn't quit until he had those papers.” She said it calmly, as if being taken in by strangers was the most natural thing in the world.

  Tassie wasn't really pretty—her round blue eyes were too big for her face, and her front teeth stuck out a little—but even though she was small, she already had the kind of curves Iva Claire was learning were to be envied. At first Iva Claire thought she was tough. Tassie smoked cigarettes and played craps with the stagehands, but she was actually very sweet. The big dream of her life was to be in show business, and her idols were Gracie Allen and Irene DeLoura. She stood backstage in the wings at every performance, watching all the acts, laughing at jokes she'd heard dozens of times, sometimes clapping louder than the audience.

  Now she looked over at Iva Claire. “So why are you doing this tour? Your ma hates playing this part of the country. She says so all the time.”

  For a brief crazy moment, Iva Claire played with the idea of telling her the truth. But she could never tell anyone what she'd done back in New York.

  “You've seen our act.” She shrugged. “We have to take whatever we can get.”

  “You're not that bad.”

  “Then why are we sitting here cleaning up my sheet music?”

  “Are you going to let a bunch of hillbillies calling themselves musicians get you down? The hick playing base in Wynward was the town barber, for Christ's sake. It's not like we're playing houses with real orchestras.”

  “Our act is a bomb,” she said flatly.

  That stopped Tassie. Iva Claire put down her eraser. “Your songs are real pretty,” she said carefully. “I still like listening to them, and I've heard them every night for two months. Hell, I can sing along with you by now.”

  “But the act is a bomb.”

  “Well, it could be a little more . . . loose. The way your ma has every hand gesture worked out. . . .” She smiled apologetically.

  “I know.” Iva Claire picked up her eraser and started working again, but she could feel Tassie watching her. Finally, she looked up. “Thanks for helping me,” she said, with a smile. “It would hurt Mama if she saw this.”

  Tassie smiled back. “I like your ma. I like the way she loves the business, you know?”

  “Oh, yes,” Iva Claire said. Her voice had slipped into what Mama called her snide tone. “One thing you can say about my mama, she loves the business.”

  Tassie was fidgeting with the piece of paper in front of her; there was something on her mind. “Benny and Irene, they're quitting,” she finally said. “This is their last tour. Irene says they're too old. They bought a little piece of land in New Jersey, and they want to try to grow vegetables. If you can believe that.”

  “It'll be nice for all of you, living out in the country.”

  “The hell it will!” The big blue eyes were filling up with tears. “I don't know how I'm gonna stand it, Iva Claire, living out in the middle of nowhere. And they're so happy, I don't know how to tell them—” The tears were starting to overflow; she blinked them back. “I was thinking maybe you and your ma . . . well, maybe you might need someone to go around with you. She has trouble helping you carry the trunks sometimes, and I'm very strong. And I could keep up the costumes, I can sew.”

  It was the first time in Iva Claire's life that she'd had something to give someone. She was always on the other end, begging for a job or a paycheck. But now Tassie was doing the begging. The new role of Lady Bountiful was too heady to resist. “I'll talk to Mama,” she said recklessly.

  The response was instantaneous and gratifying. Tassie threw her arms around Iva Claire, then started dancing around the stage. “Thank you, thank you, thank y
ou!” she said.

  “I can't promise anything.”

  “Your ma will do it, if you ask,” Tassie said confidently. Which only went to show how little she knew about Mama. Tassie sat back down and started piling up the sheet music. Mercifully for Iva Claire's pride, they'd both finished erasing. Suddenly Tassie looked up. Two shrewd blue eyes were studying Iva Claire. “Now that we're going to be traveling together, you want to tell me why you and your ma really took this gig?”

  Once again, for a moment, Iva Claire was tempted. It would be so easy to just spill it all. And it might feel better if someone else knew. But what if Tassie didn't understand?

  “Like I said, we take what we can get.”

  She could see from the look on Tassie's face that Tassie didn't believe her, and she held her breath. If Tassie pushed her, Iva Claire would have to cut off what her instincts told her could be the best friend she ever had. Suddenly she realized she'd hate that. Tassie seemed to realize the same thing, because she backed off. She got to her feet and picked up the sheet music. “I'll put this down in the pit. You better get up to the rehearsal room. Your ma will be waiting for you.” She started for the wings, but she turned. “Maybe someday you'll tell me,” she said, before she left.

  Iva Claire sat alone on the stage. She closed her eyes and tried to make her mind a blank. But the memories of New York and the awful thing she'd done came flooding back. It had all started when she and Mama were rehearsing the Stephen Foster act.

  Chapter Nineteen

  BEAUTIFUL DREAMER, queen of my song,” Mama sang a cappella, her light soprano filling the small room she and Iva Claire rented in Big Hannah O'Brien's boardinghouse. They were going through the blocking—the moves and gestures—of their new act. Mama held her left hand up in the air near her head as if she was listening. Without knowing she was doing it, she tilted her head slightly to the left too. Iva Claire watched the little gesture and filed it away to be used when they did the performance.

  “Iva Claire, sing!” Mama said. “We're opening in a week.”

  Iva Claire felt something twist in her stomach. She didn't want to open in a week. The new act was going to be awful. Of course, that was nothing new.

  There had been a time when she'd hoped that Mama would realize they didn't have what it took to make it and let them quit. They'd stop going on the road, stop renting rooms, get out of Hell's Kitchen, and settle down in a little town somewhere. Iva Claire would go to school full time, not just for a few months whenever they were laid off. She knew she'd be good at school, much better than she was at performing, because—and this was something she could never tell Mama—she was too smart to be an actor.

  She was already surprisingly well educated. After spending so much dead time on trains and backstage, she'd already read more than most adults, and geography was a natural for her. Languages came easily too. Since many of the vaudeville performers they knew came from other countries, she'd already picked up a smattering of Italian and Yiddish and an Irish brogue that Big Hannah said sounded like she'd been born in the Old Country.

  “Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea, Mermaids are chaunting the wild Lorelei;” Mama sang, her eyes glowing happily. Iva Claire felt her stomach twist again. Somehow Mama had wangled a booking out in Brooklyn. It was the closest the Sunshine Sisters had ever gotten to playing Manhattan, where audiences prided themselves on being tough. She and Mama were going to be killed. And Mama had no idea.

  “All the booking agents for the Big Time circuits go out to Brooklyn to see the talent at the Chevalier,” Mama had said when she announced the news. Ziegfeld sends his scouts there to find new acts for the Follies. “The manager of the Chevalier—his name is Lenny—swore to me.”

  Iva Claire knew important booking agents went to demonstration theaters like the Jefferson in Manhattan, where they could catch up-and-comers like Bob Hope, but she wasn't sure they schlepped all the way out to Brooklyn. However, Mama had been giving this Lenny an awful lot of what she called “special attention”—which probably explained how they got the gig—and Mama was no fool when it came to men.

  “Beautiful dreamer awake unto me!” Mama finished the song, and her face was radiant. When Iva Claire was little she used to try to win that look for herself. Now that she was older, she knew only Mama's dream could bring it on.

  “Oh, Lordy!” Mama said, holding her hand to her chest and plopping down on the sofa. “That's enough rehearsing for now. Let me catch my breath!” Mama always had to catch her breath when she got excited. Iva Claire waited until she'd calmed down. There was something she and Mama had to talk about, and Mama wasn't going to like it.

  Finally, her mother looked at her. “Such a serious face! What's wrong with my little Claire de Lune?”

  Iva Claire braced herself. “Mama, I saw the roses for the costumes when they came yesterday,” she began.

  For a second, Mama looked nervous, but then she spotted the window across the room. “Did you close that?” she demanded.

  “Those roses were made of silk.”

  “What are you trying to do, Iva Claire, asphyxiate us?” Mama leaped to the window, opened it, and said, “That's better!” She turned and smiled, but the nervousness was still there.

  “I guess it was a mistake—the roses being silk—because we can't afford them.”

  Her mother didn't answer.

  “If you want me to, I'll take them back to the shop.”

  “Silk really isn't that much more expensive.”

  “Mama, those roses cost three times what you said you were going to pay.”

  “You have to spend money to make it.”

  “You promised you'd be careful!”

  “This one time I want everything to be perfect. Just this once we're going to have the best. We deserve it, Claire de Lune.”

  She said it defiantly, but she couldn't meet her daughter's eye and Iva Claire felt herself shiver. She knew money had been going out—when you were doing a new act you had to have new pictures, costumes, and musical arrangements—but every time she asked Mama what it was costing, Mama swore she was sticking to their budget. “Trust me, Claire de Lune,” she'd said. And because Mama was so happy and Iva Claire hated to fight, she had trusted her. But now her mother couldn't meet her eye.

  Before she could force Mama to say how much she had spent, there was a knock at the door. Glad for the interruption, Mama said, “I'll get it.” Big Hannah was standing outside.

  “There's someone calling for you on the telephone,” the landlady said. There was one telephone in the boardinghouse, in the downstairs hall. Iva Claire and Mama lived on the top floor. “It's probably important,” Big Hannah added needlessly. In their world, a phone call always was. Mama left quickly. Iva Claire could hear her running down the stairs. She noticed the landlady hadn't moved.

  Iva Claire admired Big Hannah almost more than anyone she knew. Unlike most show folk, Big Hannah hadn't blown the money she'd made. When she retired from her dancing act, she'd bought this boardinghouse, where she gave tenants like Iva Claire and her mother a clean place to live for the lowest rent in the city. It was known throughout the neighborhood that Big Hannah could always lend you a few bucks if you needed it, and any performer who was down on his luck could get a hot meal from her and a place to sleep on her parlor sofa.

  The big woman was giving Iva Claire a worried look as she squinted through the smoke from the cigarette tucked in the side of her mouth. Iva Claire had practiced that squint—and the way Big Hannah talked around her cigarettes—until her imitation was perfect. Mimicking people was fun as long as you didn't have to do it onstage.

  “You and your ma been rehearsing?” Big Hannah asked. Her worried look was probably because everyone in the boardinghouse had heard about the new act, and they all knew it was going to be a stinker.

  Iva Claire nodded.

  “How's it going?”

  Iva Claire smiled brightly. “Good,” she said. The performers' code said you didn't show doubt
—not even to someone as nice as Big Hannah. Big Hannah smiled back just as brightly because she knew the rules too. But Iva Claire could tell there was something on her mind.

  “Iva Claire, is your ma planning to move after you open the act?”

  At first, Iva Claire thought she was joking. Except there was nothing funny about the possibility of losing their rooms at the boardinghouse.

  “We wouldn't go anywhere. We love it here, Big Hannah. Why?”

  The big woman looked uncomfortable. “You know I'll carry my people for as long as I can, but—” She stopped short. “Never mind. It's got nothing to do with you, child.” She started for the door, but Iva Claire stopped her.

  “How long has it been since Mama paid the rent, Big Hannah?” she asked quietly.

  Big Hannah hesitated. Then she said, “Don't you worry your head about it. I'll talk to your ma,” and let herself out.

  Iva Claire and Mama had two rooms, a bedroom for Mama, and the sitting room where Iva Claire slept on the sofa. Mama kept their money in a wooden box in the top drawer of her dresser under her clothes. Normally Iva Claire wouldn't have dreamed of going into Mama's dresser, but now she ran into Mama's bedroom, got the box, and started counting. They had eleven dollars and forty-six cents. She counted again, thinking she'd made a mistake. She hadn't. Frantic, she went through the rest of the drawer, feeling in the corners for bills or change. Nothing. She pulled the other drawers open, searching through Mama's clothes. There were stockings, blouses, sweaters, and underwear all jumbled together, but no money. Mama had done the unthinkable—she'd spent all their money on the new act. And they weren't due to get another check for four months.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE CHECKS WERE what Mama and Iva Claire lived on. Mama liked to think they supported themselves, but the Sunshine Sisters didn't work enough. The checks came in the mail every spring and fall in long white envelopes; their arrival was one of the few dependable things in Iva Claire's life. If she and Mama were on the road, a check would be waiting for them at General Delivery in whatever town they were playing. If they were laid off and staying in New York, it would show up at Big Hannah's.