City of Flickering Light

by Juliette Fay

  4

  The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

  Cecil B. DeMille, director, producer, writer, editor

  “Sweet Jesus, where’ve you two been?”

  “What’s with the getup?” asked Henry. He’d never known Irene to be particularly fussy about what she wore, but the netted hat and the blanket encasing her from the neck down were an odd combination, even for her.

  “Just get in here,” she hissed. “Barney’s in town.”

  A prickle of fear ran up his neck, a memory of the beatings he’d taken before he’d grown tall enough, with shoulders wide enough, and a veneer of take-no-guff-ness that he’d practiced even more carefully than his comedy act. He’d learned to fight, kept in shape with daily push-ups and sit-ups, and could throw a good punch. But that overgrown grizzly Barney was a formidable match for any man.

  When he’d first gotten hired a couple of months before, Henry had been under the mistaken impression that Chandler’s troop was a step up from his previous jobs. It certainly was the least chaotic show he’d ever been a part of. No one drank too much or got into fistfights. The girls weren’t running loose or sleeping with the customers. He got paid on time. The last show he’d been on was like a rolling Roman bacchanal on train wheels. He’d gotten fired from the one before that because the owner told him he was too pretty. The girls were so homely and unkempt; Henry made them look bad.

  He kept trying though. He’d worked plenty of construction jobs in between gigs, mostly laying bricks like his father, but his goal had always been to make it to a real, legitimate vaudeville circuit, like his uncle Benny. The man had certainly been more of a father to him than his actual father, and Henry had wanted nothing more than to be like him, and share the noble task of inserting some happy laughter into the forced march of people’s lives.

  But he’d been starting to have some doubts about that. It had been years of trying and he’d never made it very far. And now, this Chandler . . . Henry was starting to see there might be a price to all the order. The girls were reasonably pretty, and as far as he knew they didn’t drink too much or do drugs or run around. But as time went on, Henry had begun to suspect this was less about a sense of propriety and more about hopelessness. Some of them weren’t just demur; they seemed half dead. He’d heard whispers about Barney getting rough with the girls, but Chandler had always kept him on the periphery, so he hadn’t been sure.

  Irene never said much, and she’d been there for almost a year. But unlike most of the other girls, he could see a spark in her. She was smart—she almost always beat him to the answer when they did the crossword puzzles together. And that Millie. She clearly hadn’t read the part of the instruction manual that said she was supposed to be cowed and depressed.

  Irene explained that she’d booked a hotel room for them to hide out in while they waited for the train. Then she’d cobbled together a hasty disguise using Millie’s hat and a wool blanket off the back of a sofa in the lobby so she could wait for them and bring them to safety.

  Irene tossed the wool blanket back onto the sofa and led them up to the room she’d rented. It had two full-size beds with slightly worn bedspreads patterned with oversize flowers. This combined with an abundance of pillows and the smell of rosewater that had obviously been sprinkled about to mask any lingering odors from previous guests, made the room seem aggressively romantic. Henry chuckled inwardly about the irony of being trapped in such a room with two lovely girls, knowing the promise of romance would not be kept.

  And they were certainly lovely by anyone’s standards. Millie’s looks were showy; with her thick dark curls and big blue eyes she always turned heads, though most of the time she seemed not to notice. Irene’s beauty was more subtle: her light brown hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders, hazel eyes framed in pale lashes. She was taller and less curvy than Millie, and her straight posture and lithe limbs gave her a kind of ethereal grace.

  But Henry always said he had a strict policy about the showgirls he worked with, which amounted to: absolutely not. Best to keep complications to a minimum. While he didn’t technically work with Millie and Irene anymore, that policy seemed just as wise as it always had. Maybe even more so.

  “We’ll stay in here until just before the train to Los Angeles is due,” Irene was saying, “and hope to heaven he’s not waiting at the station.”

  Millie sank down onto one of the two beds and slid catlike into a lounging position with one arm propping up her head. “Well, there’s another option.” Clarence had spoken to the theater manager and brokered a deal of thirty-five dollars for one performance of a twelve-minute skit. “The show’s at eight. We’ll have just enough time to make it to the train. Think of it, Irene! Thirty-five dollars for only twelve minutes of work!”

  It certainly was tempting. If they were thrifty, thirty-five dollars would give them an extra few weeks of food and lodging while they looked for jobs in Hollywood.

  “What skit?” asked Irene.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Millie, running a finger around an enormous fabric flower. “I figured we’d come up with something.”

  “You mean Henry and I would come up with something.”

  Millie glanced up, her sapphire eyes settling on Irene with exasperated affection. “Well, yes. That’s what you’re good at.”

  Irene looked at Henry, and he nodded. “That’s what we’re good at, Irene. Just like Millie can sell sawdust to a lumberjack. Thirty-five bucks,” he reminded her. “That’s a boodle right about now.”

  He tugged his little notebook of jokes out of his rucksack, along with a pencil and a jackknife to sharpen it with, and turned to an empty page.

  “We don’t even have costumes,” Irene said, but her resignation was clear. She slumped down next to him on the bed. “I suppose we could crib a story from a magazine . . .”

  They racked their brains for stories they’d read or heard that could be captured in twelve minutes with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. Then Irene came up with an idea about a runaway bride and a fortune-telling gypsy, but she snorted in frustration. “It’ll never work!”

  “Are you kidding? It’s fantastic. It’ll lay them out in the aisles!”

  “We have no costumes, Henry. You can’t expect an audience to buy a bride wearing a cotton day dress and black pumps.” She stuck out her foot to indicate her scuffed shoes. “Or a gypsy with no crystal ball.”

  Millie sat up. “There’s a pawn shop down the street. It had fancy clothes on a rack along the wall; I saw them through the window. I’m going to go trade some things.”

  “You can’t risk running into Barney,” said Irene.

  Millie stood and put her hat on, tugging the net down over her face. “I’ll follow your lead and grab that blanket on my way out.”

  “You’ll have to trade everything you own to get a wedding dress, Millie,” said Henry. “You’ll end up wearing it on the train to Los Angeles.”

  “Won’t that get me some attention!”

  As it turned out, Pick of the Pile Pawn Shop had several wedding gowns complete with veiled headpieces for Millie to choose from. She’d also found a bulbous glass vase that looked vaguely like a crystal ball when it was turned upside down and a high-necked, long-sleeved black dress for Irene to wear. Because of course Millie would be the one in the wedding gown.

  “Widow’s weeds,” explained Millie. “The pawnbroker told me the owner married a new guy only two days after the last one passed, so the dress was barely used.” She’d also found a colorful handkerchief for Irene to wrap around her head and some cheap clip-on hoop earrings.

  The Gypsy and the Runaway Bride was mostly Irene’s creation, though Henry contributed jokes and physical humor—notably the bride getting tangled in the train of the gown and falling flat before the gypsy’s table as her entrance. The dialogue revolved around the gypsy repeatedly changing her predictions based on the woman’s ongoing tale of her calamitous courtship.

  I
rene decided that Henry would enter at the last minute as the groom who’d been left at the altar. The gypsy takes one look at his handsome face and broad shoulders and changes her prophecy one last time: “Marry him and you’ll be happy with the view for the rest of your days!”

  This made Henry distinctly uncomfortable. “What kind of a swelled head do you think I have!” he said.

  “Henry, it’s not you. It’s the character. And I’m sorry to break the bad news, but you do happen to be devastatingly handsome. Just think of that thirty-five bucks and simmer like Rudolph Valentino, okay?”

  Devastatingly handsome. Henry furrowed his brows to hide the fact that he liked the sound of it. Irene had glanced at him for an extra moment as she said it, and he wondered if her matter-of-fact-ness hid a feeling or two that she didn’t want him to know about. He only hoped things wouldn’t become complicated. In the uncertain days ahead, they would both need a friend they could count on.

  They dressed in their costumes in the hotel room, in hopes that if Barney crossed their path, he wouldn’t recognize them. Millie pinned up her hair and pulled the white veil over her face, and Henry tucked his hat down over his eyes. He would walk with her to the Orpheum Theatre, and Irene would leave a few minutes later. Barney would be looking for a man and two women, and they hoped this, too, would throw him off.

  The theater manager had assigned them the second spot on the bill, which would give them just enough time to get to the depot and catch the eight-forty-two to Los Angeles. They had practiced it over and over and knew their lines—but just barely. Henry would stand in the wings with his little notebook and prompt them if they needed a reminder. The skit took thirteen minutes—“lucky thirteen!” Millie had said. That was almost three dollars a minute, a princely sum by anyone’s standards. They knew they would need every penny of it in Hollywood.

  5

  We never make sport of religion, politics, race, or mothers. A mother never gets hit with a custard pie. Mothers-in-law, yes. But mothers, never.

  Mack Sennett, actor, writer, director, producer

  The backstage area of the Orpheum Theatre was dusty and dark like all theaters, in Irene’s experience. The lobby and front of the house where the audience sat were generally neat as your granny’s corset drawer, while the backstage was allowed to grow dust balls the size of bear cubs. But it was familiar and somehow reassuring to Irene. She’d spent a good deal of her adolescence traipsing from one small-time theater to the next, in places like Correctionville, Iowa, and Big Timber, Montana. Occasionally, if the theater was big enough to have dressing rooms (the Idle Hour in Correctionville had one, the Auditorium Theatre in Big Timber had four), and you were the headliner (or at least not opener or closer), you might get to relax and put your feet up between shows without risk of being mowed down by a busy stagehand. Irene and her sister had loved the luxury of having a room to themselves, where they could play cards or tell each other stories between performances without anyone shushing them backstage.

  Don’t get sappy, she told herself as she felt her throat tighten at the memory. Besides, the Orpheum had only two dressing rooms, and she wouldn’t be there long enough even to peek at them.

  Irene had limped hurriedly from the hotel to the theater, and now, swimming in black fabric, she sank down on an overturned crate and fanned herself with a copy of Photoplay magazine that someone had left on the floor. It had a lovely, fresh-faced Clara Bow on the cover, at whom Irene glared enviously for a moment before putting that face to service.

  Henry and Millie were standing by one of the huge rope-hung cleats, going over Millie’s lines. From all appearances it was not going well, Henry prompting every other sentence, and Irene wondered why they hadn’t come up with some sort of dance routine instead. Millie was a wonderful dancer, though she did improvise quite a bit, which had always annoyed the other girls in the burlesque show. Irene had fewer lines, so it really was Millie’s show . . .

  We are going to flop, thought Irene.

  She knew she shouldn’t care—it honestly didn’t matter if they were booed right off the stage as long as they got paid. But Irene felt a strange sense of pride in that story, and it had been a long time since she’d done anything to be proud of.

  “Two minutes,” whispered Clarence, and Irene felt her heart accelerate, just as it always had when she and her sister got the two-minute warning for their song-and-dance act. Her pulse never sped up for burlesque; in fact she often felt it might slow to the point of catatonia.

  “Oh . . .” Millie whined. “I don’t know about this . . .”

  It started well, at least. The curtain rose to reveal Irene sitting behind a table, gazing intently into the overturned vase. After a beat, she lifted her eyes to the audience and intoned in a vaguely foreign accent, “I predict a snowstorm!”

  This was Millie’s cue, and she galloped onstage in the voluminous white gown, then turned midstride to see if anyone was following her, the train wrapping around her ankles like a lasso. Arms windmilling wildly for balance, she went sprawling with a thump onto the boards.

  Irene smiled Cheshire Cat–like at the audience and said, “Right again!”

  That snowstorm bit was her idea, and when the audience let out a howl of approval, it was all she could do not to grin with pride. When the guffawing crested and broke, Irene said to Millie, “You are fleeing for your life!”

  Millie slowly pulled herself up onto her knees, batting comically at the veil, and said with wonder, “How ever did you know?”

  Irene widened her eyes, looked left and right, then gestured to the crystal ball, as if to say Isn’t it obvious? More gales of laughter as Irene held the pose, milking it for every last drop of applause.

  “Why, I could use your help,” said Millie, standing. “I believe I may almost have married the wrong man!”

  Irene ran her hands around the vase, then gazed into it intently and said, “You most certainly have.”

  “He’s charming and handsome and owns his own railroad.”

  “You most certainly have . . . made a mistake in running away!” Irene corrected herself.

  “But he insists that his mother live with us,” Millie pouted, “and she likes nothing better than to criticize every single thing I do all day long.”

  “You most certainly have made a mistake in running away . . . because you didn’t run far enough!”

  The bit went on like this, with Millie offering new information and Irene controverting herself at every turn. It was going so well until Millie found one of the jokes just a little too funny and couldn’t keep a straight face. She sucked in her lips and bit down hard to keep her smile from spreading. Irene repeated her line to give Millie a moment to compose herself, but it had the opposite effect, and she broke into a giggle.

  The audience began to titter, too, and this only fueled Millie’s laughter.

  “He always eats a raw onion before bed,” whispered Henry. Millie shook her head and put her hand up to cover her mouth. Henry repeated, “He always eats a raw onion before bed!”

  “He always . . .” Millie tittered. “He eats . . .”

  Small islands of chuckling from the audience now built into a continent of laughter.

  “Raw onions!” hissed Henry.

  “Raw . . . onions . . . That’s disgusting!” At this Millie completely fell apart, gasping in hilarity. The veil fell into her face, and she tugged at it till the headpiece hung limply from the back of her head. Her black hair came unpinned and tumbled out.

  Irene knew there was only one thing to do: end it.

  She beckoned desperately for Henry to join them onstage, and when he finally did, she stood up, threw her arms into the air, and yelled her line above the raucous laughter: “Marry him and you’ll be happy with the view for the rest of your days!”

  One of her hands accidentally hit the side of the handkerchief wrapped around her head, and it unraveled and fell to the ground, exposing her light brown hair.

  A large man sto
od up in the balcony and glared directly into her eyes.

  6

  It is not so difficult, your language. But your slang is impossible. Never can I understand the American humor.

  Alla Nazimova, actress, producer, writer

  “Barney!” hissed Irene, and it took a second for Millie’s brain to register the meaning of it. One minute she was laughing harder than she had in months—years maybe!—and the utter joy of it shimmied through her as if she were being tickled. The next minute, the worst possible thing was about to happen. It was confusing.

  Her senses convulsed and her vision clouded as joy and terror slammed into each other. There was noise, lots of it, though it seemed strangely far away, like a mob riot down the street.

  “Go! Go!” she heard Irene yelling very close to her ear. The curtain was falling, and Henry had her by the arm, escorting—or more precisely hauling—her offstage.

  “The money!” said Henry.

  “No time for that! Get the bags and go!”

  Henry let go of Millie, and she felt herself start to sink . . .

  “Goddammit, Millie, stand up!” Irene commanded. And then they were running, out the door beside the stage, not toward the street but to the back of the theater property. They crossed an alley and skittered between two stores out to Railroad Avenue. Millie gripped the hem of that stupid wedding dress and pulled it up around her knees, the train swinging back and forth like a serpent’s tale behind her.

  “One more block!” yelled Henry ahead of them, rucksack bobbing on his back, a suitcase in each hand, maneuvering around unsuspecting pedestrians as he careened down the boardwalk. Irene was just a few steps behind him, and her loose dress billowed out like a black sail.

  They scrambled across the street, weaving through traffic, horns honking in annoyance, or possibly just at the strange sight of them—a bride chasing after a woman in widow’s weeds, both running after a man with two suitcases. A runaway groom! thought Millie as she gulped for air and dodged a Chevy Royal Mail roadster.