His sound had called to her since his first musical, 1948’s Fifth Avenue. Something about his rhymes—he loved to vary a scheme, so she never knew when the ring would come, it hit her like a surprise, thrilling, every time—and his observations about humans, so fresh, often mean, made his musicals unforgettable. He incorporated his classical training, blues, jazz migrating down Manhattan, and even the new rock-and-roll licks other Broadway composers wouldn’t touch. He could write any kind of music but often preferred a pared-down sound: the singer, a piano, perhaps a muted drum kit, the lyric. He distilled everything she liked about musicals into one voice.
According to the reviews in the New York Times, which she had to drive ten miles to buy whenever he had a musical opening, his scenes were as good as the score. Mannheim was one of the few writers around who penned the music, lyrics, and all the lines. But Eleanor had only ever heard the soundtracks.
She fell in love with his works as she discovered them. First Pat introduced her to Fifth Avenue, Mannheim’s debut, with a second act not quite as good as the first but still precious, in its own way. Then there was The Birds and the Bees, which according to the Times was Don’s “attempt to rival Ziegfeld.” He didn’t venture back.
Charades was his fifth musical and her favorite. It was still running on Broadway after six years. Mannheim spun together seven characters’ stories with finesse that took her breath away and assured his genius status. The whole score sounded like the city—heavy brass instruments, tinny percussion, strings that made her think of the sun glinting off skyscrapers. It wasn’t typical material for a musical—a pregnancy, a dying woman searching for a last affair—which made her love it all the more. No one in her town talked about those things.
Don Mannheim wrote about the peculiarity of being surrounded by family and friends and feeling unknown. So often, Eleanor felt her love of musicals overflowing, bursting within her, and when she expressed it to her mother and father, they said something like, “What a fun little song.” When she saw other young people, apart from Rosie, she was sneered at or ignored; they didn’t know what to do with her. These dismissals broke her heart a thousand tiny times. She was off, but couldn’t help it. Her obsession lifted her from the group. Though she had an escape with Pat, Eleanor often felt strangled in the daily battle of suppressing herself. Don Mannheim turned the feelings in her soul into lyrics. That meant he felt them, too, and understood this particular loneliness well enough to finesse it into a useful, beautiful line. When listening to his music, she heard her own pain echoed.
She’d torn through his remaining works—Pillow Talk, The Ladies of Sheridan Road, Candy Apple—and loved everything he made, like unique children. Mannheim blended commercialism with the catharsis of classic dramas and the wit of a French salon. He wrote with the snap of Porter and Hammerstein’s sensitivity. Eleanor clipped every review and hung them on her wall. She ran her hands over his picture until the pads of her fingers were inky. He was forty-one, a hulking, virile man with shiny black hair, a self-made musician who’d composed his way out of a factory town and made it to New York on scholarship. He was a veteran who’d fought in Japan in World War II. He had a brilliant smile, and in her favorite picture, he grinned openmouthed, hands spread across the piano keys, midlaugh. Eleanor adored him.
Once Pat and Eleanor reached the song where Eliza Doolittle mastered her speech, singing in a clear soprano about rain in Spain, Pat lifted the pin on the record. His eyes were wet.
“You are the rightful owner.” Pat slid the record back into the sleeve and presented it to her with pride. “And now for your real present.” Pat reached under the desk and produced a page from a newspaper, folded over. “Look there, honey.”
She leaned over the counter and read.
MANNHEIM/FLYNN DUO TURN TO PUBLIC FOR NEW LEADING LADY
Eleanor’s face went hot before she read the rest.
“What’s this?” Her hands shook, so she hid them under the counter.
Eleanor didn’t want to read more. She knew what an open call was: a way for ordinary girls to get on Broadway. Already, she felt jealous, excited, terrified, as she read the article. The number of girls would be staggering. The back of her neck started to sweat. Hordes of girls would line up in character shoes. Gorgeous girls, girls who’d had dance lessons. Her chance, and it was a thousand miles away. She wanted to vomit.
She tried to keep her cool. “That theater will be a madhouse.”
A quote from Don followed the announcement of the audition: “We’ve had a string of wonderful young starlets in the role but Harry [Flynn, Mannheim’s creative partner and the director of Charades] and I want to take this opportunity to find someone fresh.”
Pat stared at her. Blood rushed to her ears.
“Guess they ran through everyone good.” She squared her shoulders and slipped the article across the counter.
Pat pushed it back. “You should go.”
She made herself laugh, though her heart pounded.
“Eleanor, you’re good.” His voice was energetic—he believed she could get the part. When it was too cold to practice in the barn, Pat lent her his store after closing; he’d heard her practice for years, noticed her improvement, her dedication. But that didn’t mean he was right.
“Every girl with a smidge of talent hears that,” she said. “Especially in small towns. I’ve heard enough musicals. They’re fantasies, not real.”
“It’s a cliché because it happens. Not every star is born in New York.”
“It won’t happen to me.”
“Don himself is from Indiana.”
“Don studied music at Juilliard.”
“That was his ticket out. This is yours. Eleanor, your voice is special.”
Eleanor’s love of theater was a flame inside her—she guarded it, and no matter who was cruel to her, no matter how dull her life, the music and lyrics brought joy. Only Pat knew just how deeply she loved it, and not even he would understand how humiliated she would be if her talent was ever put to the test and found lacking. She’d lose herself. An audition in New York was a gamble, risking everything she had.
“Please. Eleanor, how much can a train ticket be?”
A lot; she’d looked it up many times. Eleanor handled her family’s sales to the market and butcher shop. She knew what things cost, the days of work involved. A train ticket to New York was more than her family could spare, even with her parents’ support.
“Eleanor, listen.” Pat removed his glasses and set them down. She could see the lines on his face as he ran a hand over the scruff on his jaw. “It would break my heart to know that your only friend is an old man in a music shop.”
She kept her eyes on the record. “I have Rosie.”
“You are an artist,” he said. “You need that in your life. Without it, you’ll shrivel up.”
“You’re being silly.” But his words flustered her. Pat was a person who was invited to other families’ Thanksgivings. As far as Eleanor knew, he might be one of those who, as Rosie said, “preferred the company of men,” but this was something Eleanor scarcely understood. Their friendship was based on a shared love. In all the years she’d come to discuss musicals with Pat, she’d never encountered anyone else doing the same. Sometimes when Eleanor thought of him and his little house, filled with the records and reviews he couldn’t fit into the shop, she felt desolate, and then afraid. She looked at the shop, his life’s work, and for the first time saw it as a desperate grip on a part of him that he needed to survive.
Pat offered her the article and squeezed her hand. “Eleanor, you have a chance. Go.”
Her throat had gone tight. But she folded the article and put it in her pocketbook.
* * *
Thoughts of the audition tipped life on its side; suddenly everything looked temporary. What if she never had to feed pigs or chickens again? Never had to hide her practicing?
Spent Fridays with composers and singers instead of at the movies? But then she thought of the open call. All those girls wanted what she wanted. Eleanor thought of them as slender and clear-skinned, trained in ballet and acting, bred like racehorses. They would have years of coaching. How many girls in there had grown up with shit under their fingernails?
Was even one of them self-taught? Did they stay up all night with the record turned low, listening again and again to a perfectly enunciated syllable? Hold their breath and let it out as slowly as possible, keeping track of the seconds they’d added to their lung capacity? Did even one stand among the hay in her family’s barn and attempt to focus her voice until it buzzed high in the center of her face, along her nose and forehead, because she had an instinct for resonance?
Of course not. They’d been trained—while Eleanor had earned her voice, slowly, with daily practice and careful study. But no one would see that. It was such luck, those young girls who were plucked for Broadway. And they all had whatever constituted “good legs.” Eleanor’s legs were fine, but served mostly to get her from the barn to the slaughterhouse, where she held the runts while her father slit their throats.
Who would be able to see past her Midwestern blandness when there was a knockout raised overlooking the lights of Broadway, ready to step onstage? When, for God’s sake, there was a girl who had already seen a Broadway show?
It was too much. Traveling to New York only to watch her dream go to some sink-bleached blonde? Worse, to watch Don Mannheim make that decision himself? No, thank you.
* * *
Eight minutes after Rosie was due, a horn blared from the driveway. Eleanor plucked the curtain back from the window and groaned when she saw a pale blue Studebaker.
Rosie opened the door and wiggled out of the front seat, turning back to make a face at the driver. Eleanor’s stomach knotted. She heard Rosie’s enhanced laughter and pictured her: wide grin, back arched to best highlight her assets, a piece of hair between her fingers, maybe even tickling her mouth. New Yorkers weren’t the only girls who could act.
Eleanor opened the door before Rosie knocked. “You brought a boy.”
Rosie dropped her perky stance. She was, as usual, coiffed and made up, her short, curvy body dressed in a matching two-piece set she’d sewn herself. Rosie checked her hair in the mirror. She never left the house without putting on her face. “I ran into John Plutz at the drugstore. I was buying Daddy his Bromo and got embarrassed, so I gave a rambling explanation.” She shrugged. “I think he thought it was cute. Who am I to say no?”
Rosie was usually fun, but sometimes she was aggravating.
“I didn’t want a boy around on my birthday.” Boys did not like Eleanor. Most made this clear by ignoring her, but some couldn’t handle that she was more interested in something they did not understand, and punished her for it with cruel words said to her face or behind her back. She would rather have pretended they didn’t exist, but Rosie refused to accept this.
“Don’t worry.” Rosie reached in her purse and uncapped her lipstick, before handing it to Eleanor. They’d both worn Cherries in the Snow since ninth grade. “I brought two boys.”
* * *
John drove with his hand on the bottom of the wheel, the other hand on Rosie’s knee, and chomped on his words like they might run away. “Twenty-one? Wow.”
All these boys had been making noise in the background at school for sixteen years and now, after they graduated, the ones who hadn’t married or gone to college endlessly reminded you why. Eleanor’s date, Steve Macdonald, planted a wet kiss on her cheek as she slid into the back seat. The only memory she had of Steve was from three years earlier, when he’d knocked over a rack in Pat’s store accidentally-on-purpose. Eleanor made sure he noticed her wipe the saliva with her thumb.
“So, I don’t know what you ladies did all day, but Steve and I have been working at the mill and we’re starved. Mind if we swing by Hersh’s?”
“We’ll miss the movie,” Eleanor said. “Auntie Mame plays at eight. After that it’s The Fly.”
“Well, I couldn’t sit through a movie without dinner!”
Eleanor wondered why John’s appetite was her problem. “I don’t want to see The Fly.”
Steve glanced across. “Why would you want to see Auntie Mame?”
“Why would I want to see The Fly?”
Steve turned to face the window, already giving up. Eleanor felt a flash of pain, then satisfaction—he couldn’t even handle three sentences between them.
Rosie jumped in. “Hersh’s is fine—as long as you boys buy us a milkshake.”
Eleanor recognized every single person inside the diner. They filed into a red plastic booth, and Eleanor ordered grilled cheese, extra pickles. Rosie ordered a milkshake, extra whipped cream. Steve surprised them all by ordering pancakes. “With bacon, please.”
“Well, I for one need a real meal.” John ordered a burger, pleased with himself for maintaining the status quo.
At the thought of bacon, Eleanor lost her appetite. She leaned against the vinyl with a sigh.
“You all right, Ellie? You look a little . . .” Rosie pushed her soda toward Eleanor.
She held up a hand, hoping her suffering was apparent. “I’m fine.”
Rosie turned to the boys. “Eleanor doesn’t like bacon because she lives on a pig farm.”
“You can only name so many pigs before you lose your appetite for them.” Eleanor stood. “I have to use the ladies’.”
Rosie leapt to join her. When they were alone, Eleanor turned to her. “He’s got the brain of a sardine.”
Rosie plumped her breasts in her brassiere. “He’s nice.”
“Oh, well then. Doesn’t he just razz my berries.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, all the good ones are taken,” Rosie said. “Soon I’ll have to go to Madison for a typing course to meet someone.”
“Your daddy would never let you go to Madison. Too commie.”
“So don’t ruin this for me,” Rosie said. “I’ll be single forever!”
Compared to life with these fools, Eleanor didn’t think that sounded so bad. Men! How could the same word describe John Plutz and Don Mannheim—the latter so vital and handsome, and able to spin lyrics that wrenched her very soul? They didn’t seem the same species.
“I wouldn’t mind being single forever.” Eleanor thought of Pat, putting on a record as he set the table for one, maybe adding candles to heighten the evening, and her hands went numb. But wouldn’t she be just as lonely, married to someone who stifled who she was?
“It’s not about John,” Rosie said. “It’s about kids.”
When they returned to the table, Eleanor tried to talk to the boys. But she couldn’t be so unfaithful to herself as to laugh at John’s jokes. Eleanor watched Rosie, who didn’t seem nearly as torn apart by the act of pretending, who could act happy despite it not being true. Eleanor sat against the vinyl, aware she was pouting, feeling sorry for herself as they stopped including her. She watched them, wanting to be someone who could participate, lost as to how, feeling nothing but a persistent anxiety that put her off even pickles.
They skipped the movie and stopped instead at a bar, where the conversation got bawdier and John and Rosie disappeared for long minutes, during which Eleanor pushed her bottle cap along the sticky tabletop while Steve talked to a group of girls she had known in high school but no longer pretended to be friends with. Then, at midnight, Rosie and John dropped her home, John harping on about doing this again next week. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Eleanor left it at good night.
Chapter Two
In her bedroom, Eleanor took the false bottom out of her jewelry box and removed the money she’d amassed during the last twelve years. It wasn’t enough. She had counted many times and knew there wasn’t enough to get her to New York. She flung herself on th
e bed, but the tears didn’t come. Instead, she went to the old fantasy that she often played in her head: A spotlight. A costume, a crowd. All the people in Wisconsin talking about how she’d done it, really made it to Broadway. Don Mannheim, holding a dozen roses, watching from the wings.
Rolling onto her stomach, she reached for her pocketbook and retrieved the audition notice from Pat. The open call was in five days. An eastbound train came through the Wisconsin Dells on Sunday mornings. She could arrive Monday afternoon for the Tuesday audition. Eleanor knew her voice was good, and it wasn’t because of what people said, nor was it ego. She knew because of how good it felt to sing. Her voice rang in her face, her throat, her chest. The sound vibrated between her molars, up the socket behind her tongue, in her forehead. Resonance. No breathy, wispy sound; it was full and powerful and a real, solid thing. It wasn’t something just anyone could do. She didn’t have money or experience, but she could sing.
She’d sing a Gershwin song, wear her blue dress, and borrow Rosie’s red pumps. Her résumé was blank and she had a school photograph instead of a headshot, but she had talent. Enough that she deserved a chance. Maybe her life didn’t have to be filled with distant obsessions about the latest record in Pat’s store. Maybe she could spend her mornings inside rehearsal rooms instead of pigsties. People would respect her instead of offer ridicule. She’d spend evenings memorizing lines instead of out with boys who ignored her if she didn’t pretend to laugh at their jokes.
Her body tightened with anger until she was wide awake, her skin hot. She sat up. She wasn’t a farmer; she was a singer. As Pat had said, an artist. When had she decided that this place—Hersh’s, the boys, her parents’ harping about grandchildren—was what she deserved? Here was a chance, a slim but real one, to get out.
A Tender Thing Page 2