“Are we your first?”
“You are not, my dear, but you are certainly the most lovely. I can see why Archibald is so smitten with you.”
“You know…,” I began, I just couldn’t stand there a minute longer and listen to her speak of him as if he were some poor injured bird.
“Oh, my dear, would you excuse me for just a moment? I have to greet a guest who just walked in.…”
I stood in the middle of the room alone for a moment and felt Archie’s eyes on me. Glancing over, I couldn’t help noticing that he looked particularly modern and dapper in a double-breasted dinner jacket with those wider satin lapels that the more fashionable men were wearing these days.
Despite everything, I hoped that he’d make his way over to me. If we were going to be here at the same camp for a few days, I at least wanted to get the awkwardness over with. But just when I thought he might, the fellow from the steamboat appeared out of nowhere.
“Oli,” he said, smiling broadly. “Remember me from the boat? Andrew Stark.” He lifted my hand to kiss it.
“How could I forget?”
“You left me all alone down there,” he said. He was tight already, as if he’d been leaning into the gin martinis a little too hard all afternoon. “It wasn’t kind.” He stepped toward me. “You can’t leave me all hot and bothered like that, you know, you’ll get a man in trouble if you leave him in that state.”
“You got into that state all by yourself.” I stepped back, no longer wanting to be associated with him but also unsure of who he was and what had secured him an invitation to the Belmonts’ camp.
“Maybe, but babe, you’re the only one who can get me out of it, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not your babe—”
“Everything all right over here?” It was Archie. He stood between me and Mr. Stark.
“Fine,” I said stiffly, rolling my eyes. Archie looked from me to Andrew.
“Why don’t you get yourself some air.” He patted the guy on his back rather hard and nudged him away from me toward the back door. “You smell like panther piss, you’re lit up like a store window, and we haven’t even sat down for dinner yet,” he said in a whisper loud enough for me to hear. “If I see you bothering this young lady again, or showing disrespect in any way, I’m going to have no choice but to punch your lights out.”
He turned to Archie with a look of surprise.
“That’s right,” Archie went on. “Don’t make me show you what I mean, go on.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I hadn’t expected such a direct delivery, and neither had that drunk, but it certainly did the trick, and we watched him slink out the back door.
“Thank you,” I said.
“He can be a real brute.”
“I meant for the flowers in my cabin.”
Archie looked mildly surprised.
“What? You think I couldn’t have handled that boozehound myself?” I said.
He laughed. “That boozehound is Raymond’s business partner’s son, and he’s always in spectacular form.” He looked at me seriously. “Can we get a breath of fresh air before dinner? There’s something I need to tell you.”
I glanced around; everyone was still mingling and conversing. “I’m quite comfortable here,” I said. I didn’t see why I should have to leave this magnificent room.
“Then can we sit instead?” he asked, gesturing toward two wooden framed armchairs near the fireplace. I shrugged and led the way. Archie sat down, looking uncomfortably at the guests around us.
“I’m afraid that I owe you an apology,” he said. “You weren’t entirely wrong in your assessment of me. In fact, your instincts were right.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“At the time of our meeting and in the weeks that followed there was indeed another woman.” He glanced at me, looking concerned, as if I might once again make a scene, and he quickly continued, as if hoping he might tame the situation. “I’ve been involved with a woman in Cincinnati for almost half a year now, and in what seemed to occur as a result of a natural progression of time spent together, rather than any deep interest or desire, we became engaged to be married.”
I glared at him, not giving him the satisfaction of a response—he hadn’t shared anything that I didn’t already know.
“But upon meeting you, I had such intense feelings for you, I knew that the engagement wasn’t right. I had never felt that way about her. It was more a pairing of convenience—her family knows my family, she lives in the city where much of my work takes place, where my family resides.”
I shook my head to let him know that he was heading down the wrong path here. I didn’t want to know about her or how neatly she fit into his life back home. I wanted to know why he was telling me this. He picked up on my impatience and quickly moved on.
“Ever since I met you at the Pirate’s Den I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. I asked around to find out where you might perform and I finally discovered you were in Ziegfeld’s show. It wasn’t by chance that I caught that ribbon, it was sheer determination. Even though I knew nothing about you, I was incredibly taken. It was like electricity when we danced, and I felt compelled to know you. I also knew in that instant I couldn’t go through with the engagement, not if I was capable of having such feelings for you. It took some time for me to unravel things, and when we went to dinner that evening and kept the restaurant open into the early hours of the morning … I admit … I had not fully untangled myself of my obligation.”
I stiffened and readied myself to stand and leave. I’d wasted hours at dinner with him, indulged him. To think that I’d envisioned myself with him. I’d refrained from asking him to come up to my apartment—despite how much I’d longed for him that evening. I’d followed his “gentlemanly” lead, doing the appropriate thing. But how long I’d lain in bed that night picturing us together, something so ridiculously premature that I’d never done before.
He took my hand gently, insisting that I hear him out.
“Please, Olive. Don’t give up on me so soon. I should have told you, but I was worried you wouldn’t give me the time of day. I did know then that I would end things with Louise no matter what.”
Louise. The name made me cringe.
“You were right to notice, of course, that I wasn’t back to the city as much as I would have liked in those early days after meeting you. I felt that I must first wrap things up in Cincinnati. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who wooed you in New York before resolving things back home. That was a risky thing to do on my end. I worried about leaving you confused, but I felt compelled to do things the right way. I wanted to do the right thing, in the right order.”
I shook my head. I was at a loss for words. And that was rare for me.
“Olive,” he said urgently, taking both my hands and turning me to face him. “Please tell me I haven’t missed my chance.”
“Where do things stand now?” I asked dryly, unsure what to think, if I should trust him. I’d felt betrayed and fooled.
“I’ve called it off, the whole thing. No matter what you decide, meeting you made me realize I was making a mistake. Everyone back home is shocked at the abrupt break and seems to feel I’ve done something terribly wrong, and now I realize how unkind it has been of me to let things go as far as they did when I never felt true love for her. But I’ve made my decision and it’s final.”
“And you and me being here, Archie, in the middle of the forest at the exact same camp, at the exact same time. Is this just a coincidence or did you have something to do with it?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I might have put in a special request with the Belmonts.” He looked back at me and again quickly continued. “Don’t get me wrong, they were thrilled, absolutely over the moon about the idea of you. They’ve heard about your voice and your performances and they love the Ziegfeld shows, and I may have put in a few good words with your boss.”
“What? Your good words cost me my role in the
Midnight Frolic,” I said. “I was the star of that show, and now they’ve replaced me during my absence.”
He looked surprised. “But I specifically spoke to Ziegfeld and he assured me that you’d be right back where you left off after the summer tour. He promised, man to man.”
He didn’t seem to understand how his interference had unsettled me. Who was he to manipulate my life without my knowing? And yet the intensity of his feelings had been responsible.
“Now they know they can plop someone else in my role at any time, and the show will go on. I’m no longer indispensable.”
I was angry with him and I wanted him to know it, but I was also strangely flattered, despite everything he was telling me, that he’d gone to so much trouble to ensure we could spend time together.
“I realize now, as I’m saying it, how this may seem. It’s just that after we talked that night, about traveling and exploring the world, I felt certain you’d love it here. I wanted you to experience it, to feel the beauty of it, and I thought how wonderful it would be to show you this, to spend time with you here away from the busy city, to get lost on a hike, to row you out to the other side of the lake and take a picnic. I may have got ahead of myself, dreaming all this up without your permission, but it was a dream and I went for it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to think. I wasn’t expecting this, that’s for certain.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Olive. If you don’t want to see me while you’re here, I will stay out of your way”—he looked up as if to gauge my reaction—“but if you will allow me, it would be my absolute honor to share it with you.”
A bell rang and everyone began to move toward the main doors and head outside for dinner.
“Let’s go out,” I said. “I don’t want to keep Anne waiting.”
Outside in the open air, two long tables had been set for dinner, all spectacularly lit up with candles and even tiny lights that hung in the trees above. The cabins and the main lodge surrounding the space were all lit from within, and the whole scene looked like something from a storybook.
The seating arrangements were such that our group was seated at one end of the table, while the rest of the guests were seated at the other end. My seat was smack in the middle, opposite Anne and Raymond, with Ruthie and my fellow performers on my right and the rest of the guests on my left. When Archie took the empty seat next to mine, I raised my eyebrow.
“I suppose you had a hand in this too?”
“Guilty as charged,” he said, flashing a bashful smile.
I hadn’t decided what to make of his news yet, so I was as gracious as I needed to be as a guest at the table, but I didn’t indulge him—instead I paid particular attention to our hosts.
Over the main course of sweetbreads, mushrooms and green lima beans, I asked Anne who else had visited the camp, fascinated by this whole world, hidden away in the mountains, that I’d known nothing about until just a few weeks ago.
“Oh, we’ve had all kinds—actors, lieutenant colonels, writers—hundreds. I can’t think of them all.”
“Who was the most interesting?” Ruthie leaned in and asked.
“Oh, it has to be the wife of the imperial emperor of China.”
“She traveled with twenty-five personal maids,” Raymond added. “Can you believe that? I thought Anne required a lot of help!”
Anne laughed. “It’s true, they just kept coming out of the carriages. I had to worry about having enough beds.”
“While we had dinner,” Raymond jumped in, “our staff had to rearrange the cabins to sleep six or seven maids where there’d usually be no more than two.”
“Three of her girls were assigned simply to watch her bedsheets, even when she was out of the room. If a breeze so much as ruffled her sheets, they had to be washed and changed immediately,” Anne continued. “We found her delightful, but the staff needed a few days’ break after she left with her entourage.”
I thought I’d experienced luxury—having my own apartment with Ruthie, receiving mink coats and jewelry backstage from admirers and perfect strangers—but all this extravagance was unlike anything I’d ever known, and here in the wilderness was the last place I’d expected to find it.
* * *
The next morning, I woke to a racket and a rotten champagne headache. Someone, somewhere in camp, was singing their lungs out. I put my head under my pillow to drown it out, but it didn’t help, and then I realized that it wasn’t just any old fool, it was a man’s voice, and a beautiful one at that.
Why on earth would anyone be crooning so early? Surely I wasn’t the only one who didn’t appreciate being roused when the sun was barely up. I peeked into Ruthie’s room—she was sleeping soundly and snoring like an old man, so I left her to it and checked the clock in the kitchenette: a quarter to six. Absurd! If I’d really put my mind to it, perhaps I could have gone back to sleep; I could sleep anywhere through just about any noise, usually. But I was annoyed and intrigued, my head was splitting, and I had to know who would do such a thing at this god-awful hour. And the fact was, the more I listened, the more I had to know who that voice belonged to.
I threw my fur coat over my silk pajamas and robe, pulled the woolen socks that my mother had knitted for me up my calves as high as they would go and stepped into my rubber galoshes. I followed the voice all the way to the lakeshore, where it became apparent that it was coming not from our camp but from the other side of the lake or farther down the shore. I walked along the water’s edge a little, but there was no way I was getting any closer unless I took to water.
The boathouse was a green two-story structure with a sloped shingled roof directly downhill from my cabin. Canoes were stacked inside and mounted from wall racks. A small metal rowboat sat calmly in the water, tied with a simple looped rope next to the deck, its oars already fixed in place. I climbed in, wobbling as I set foot inside, then I eased the rope off the dock and quickly took a seat on the thin wooden bench, hoping to calm the rocking motion. After pushing myself away from the dock with my oar, I began to glide into the thick grey fog engulfing Osgood Pond. I couldn’t see where I was going in the early morning haze, so I closed my eyes and followed the sound.
It might’ve been August, but at that time in the morning it was colder than Greenland itself out there. I looked down at my outfit and had a giggle, quite sure that when my mother had sat by the fireplace in our family home, tiny needles clicking away, she hadn’t envisioned me wearing these socks on occasions such as this. The mink coat, a gift from some stage-door johnny during my first week on the job, hadn’t been on such an adventure either and would probably be ruined if it got sopping wet. But if I flipped this boat over, I’d have bigger problems than replacing my fur in the summer, in our remote corner of the Adirondacks. I’d probably damn near freeze to death.
As I drove the oars through the water, I realized that steering was much harder than I’d imagined. I tried to turn into the direction of the voice—deep and emotive, becoming clearer and more powerful the closer I got—but the rowboat, which had looked so inviting and romantic sitting under the eave of the boathouse, almost calling for me to get in, suddenly felt too big and cumbersome for me to manage. I had a moment of panic. I could no longer see my way back to shore, nor could I see where I was going.
I kept on rowing, scared to look down into the deep black water, realizing how impulsive I had been and wishing I could be more like Ruthie—she might seem like a free spirit at times, but she had a good head on her shoulders. I focused on the voice—Italian and familiar—and wondered if I could have made a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t someone singing after all, maybe it was someone playing a Victrola as loud as could be, because the closer I seemed to get, the more it sounded like the operatic tenor Alberto Ricci.
“Hello,” I called out. I was close now and began to make out the shape of someone through the fog. “Hello, who’s there?”
The singing stopped, and when I was about eight feet away, I could
see him clearly—Alberto Ricci, sitting in a green canoe in his white long johns. I couldn’t believe it was actually him. Quickly plunging my oars in the water and paddling backwards to slow my arrival, I narrowly avoided a collision.
“Buongiorno,” he said, smiling right at me as if he’d been expecting company.
“Hello,” I said, attempting to sound stern. I had to keep my composure. “I must say that your singing, your beautiful singing, out here in the middle of the lake, is waking up the whole of our camp and probably half of the Adirondacks. May I suggest that you save your practice for later in the day?”
“Che bella,” he said. “It’s very nice to make your acquaintance. What is your name?”
“Olive,” I said. “Olive Shine, I’m staying at the Pines Camp. We’re the entertainment for a few days, the Ziegfeld Follies.”
“Olive, the Lady of the Lake,” he said. “Ciao, bella. So lovely for you to join me. Alberto.” He rolled his Rs and I couldn’t help smiling. I was meeting Alberto Ricci in person in the middle of a lake!
“I know who you are. Actually, I saw you perform at the Fairmont Opera House when I was just a kid; my mother is a big fan. Your voice is stunning, absolutely magnificent. But the hour … it’s so early.”
“Come—” He reached out his hands as if I might just drop my oars and climb into his canoe with him. When I didn’t cooperate, he simply pulled my rowboat closer with his oar until they were parallel and we were facing each other.
“Now I see you,” he said.
“I’d rather you didn’t. You’ve most definitely cut my beauty sleep short!”
“And what do you perform in Mr. Ziegfeld’s spectacular? Do you dance on your toes?”
“Dance, yes, but singing is my specialty,” I said, suddenly feeling meek next to this idol.
The Show Girl Page 14