“The man has a record.”
“It should have been scrubbed,” Eleanor said. She felt hot inside, her muscles out of control with fury.
Everyone in the room looked at her.
At that moment, Rosie returned, coffee in hand. “I know you don’t take sugar, but I thought some might help right now. You’re a bit drawn.”
“What record?” Tommy asked.
“It was an accident, even the victim said so.”
Officer Heizer turned an appreciative eye at Rosie in her pink satin as she set up Eleanor’s coffee on the table. Eleanor glared at him.
“Sir, the man in the cell was framed for a crime,” Harry said. “Don’t let a retracted incident from five years ago stand in the way of his freedom.”
Eleanor knew that incident wasn’t what was standing in his way and was about to say so when Harry touched her elbow. She glanced his way, and he gave her a tiny shake of his head.
It took forty minutes of begging, but Harry was able to post bail. Charles emerged a few minutes later, still in costume, his jeans torn and dirty, a bruise forming under his eye.
Eleanor ran up to him. “What did they do to you?” Her breath was hard to catch. Her tremors became overwhelming, and then she was crying.
“Let’s go home,” Rosie said, wrapping an arm around Eleanor.
It wasn’t until they were all piled into a cab, Rosie sitting on Tommy’s lap so they could fit everybody, that Eleanor burst forth with what she wanted to say.
“So we aren’t even going to acknowledge why Charles was in jail tonight?” she asked. She turned to Harry and Tommy. “Neither of you said anything about how unfair it was. They just locked him away. And why? Why?”
A streetlight lit their faces. No one looked at her.
“Give it a rest, Eleanor,” Charles said. “It wouldn’t have helped.”
“That officer needed a good kick in the ass. Whoever loaded that gun,” Eleanor said, “wanted something terrible to ruin the show—maybe even get Charles thrown in jail—”
“Eleanor.” Charles reached out and took her hand. He sounded exhausted, even annoyed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Yes, but—”
“I said no more.” He held a hand up to his swollen eye.
Eleanor fought back her words. She looked at Charles and felt a rush of affection and pain, like the turning over of her own heart. His wounds looked worse by the minute. Each time she glanced at him, she was reminded of what people had done, what she had been a part of, wittingly or not. A lump rose in her throat and stayed there. “Let’s get you some ice. Where are we going anyway?”
They decided Tommy and Rosie’s place would be safest and directed the driver there.
“Where’s Don?” Eleanor asked Harry.
Harry counted money for fare. A beat went by. “He’s at home.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s devastated,” Harry said. The driver pulled over to the curb.
Eleanor swung her feet out of the car, a question on her mind. It knotted her stomach, and she almost didn’t ask. But she saw Charles, following Tommy and Rosie into their apartment so he could call Gwen, and felt a wave of fury. “Why didn’t he come with you to the station?”
Harry sighed. “Don isn’t one for conflict.”
“He wrote the show that landed us in this mess.”
Harry’s face was blank.
“He made a lot of people angry,” Eleanor said. “And Charles had to pay for it.”
“I understood what you meant.”
“He . . .” Emotion was coming over her fast, and she realized she couldn’t keep enough of a handle on it and still speak with Harry. She didn’t want to have her meltdown there, one foot out of the cab, in front of a man whom she still barely trusted, no matter what had passed in the last two hours. She reached out and offered her hand to him. “Thank you, Harry.”
“Stay safe, Eleanor. Don’t speak to any reporters.”
* * *
“You should eat something.”
“I had a sandwich.”
Rosie touched Eleanor’s forehead. “You’re not hot, but you’re shaking like you have a fever.”
“Here.” Tommy shoved a glass under her nose. She drank what was inside without looking. Whiskey.
He handed one to Charles.
Charles didn’t move. “I need to call my wife.”
Tommy kept his mouth shut tight. Charles had called Gwen every five minutes from the hall phone in Rosie and Tommy’s new place, but no one was picking up except for Charles’s downstairs neighbor, who said she hadn’t seen his family return after the show.
“We left the number,” Rosie said. “Gwen will know where to call. I’m sure she waited somewhere safe for the streets to clear.”
“I have to go.”
Eleanor gripped his arm. “You can’t go out there.”
“You have no idea what could be happening to her,” Charles said. He did another lap of the apartment. They all watched him. No one wanted to bring up the baby, the fact that she couldn’t walk far in her condition. Eleanor felt useless; she could hardly imagine how Charles felt.
“Charles, it’s dangerous.”
“The pigs let me go,” he said. “So I’m going home to my damn wife.”
Tommy added more liquid to Charles’s glass. “You have a much better chance of coming home to her if you stay the night.”
“I’ll get you blankets,” Rosie said. She had still not removed her pink silk dress, though hours ago she’d lost a rhinestone clip-on. Eleanor watched her go barefoot into the bedroom and emerge with blankets, her head lopsided with just the one chandelier. Rosie draped each of them in a comforter. She looked up at Tommy. “Would soup help them?” Rosie dug through the freezer.
Eleanor felt the exhaustion in her eyes—they drooped and blurred, stinging, but she still wondered if she would be able to sleep. Thank goodness she hadn’t had the chance to drink the sugared coffee.
Seeing Eleanor blink, Tommy gripped Rosie’s shoulder. “Time for bed,” he said. “All of us.”
Eleanor turned out the living room lamp. Charles lay on the floor in a makeshift bed of the comforter and extra pillows, his head propped on his arm. “I should call Gwen again.”
Eleanor didn’t want to tell him not to, even though she knew another call would make things worse. Gwen wasn’t home. The thought was harrowing.
“Gwen is a smart woman. She probably didn’t want to get stuck in the crush in midtown and hid out with a friend.”
“She’s the wife of a madman with a gun. Carrying my mad baby.” He rolled onto his back. It was dark, but she could see the light from the streetlamps shining on his eyes. “You don’t know what happened.”
“Does she have friends in Hell’s Kitchen? Maybe someone let her stay.”
“She would’ve found a way to tell me.” Charles was quiet. “I think I should go.”
If Eleanor loved someone like he did, she would have gone. “Cover your costume.”
He shrugged. “On the street, I’m just another black guy.”
He spoke with bitterness, but there was a slight tremor to his voice.
It was chilly out; she went to the hall closet, gave him a sweater she had bought Tommy.
Eleanor stood there, watching him. His eyes were wide. She wanted to wrap him in her arms and keep him in the apartment. But he looked at her again and shrugged, picking his keys off the coffee table.
“Be safe,” she said.
“I will.”
“Call when you get home?”
“Yes,” he said, though she knew he wouldn’t. If Gwen wasn’t home, he’d go out looking for her, and Eleanor would be far from his mind.
He touched the knob, his fingers loose, and stopped. His shoulder
s made a smooth curve under the sweater, his head bowed. He turned back and met Eleanor’s eyes. It had seemed that in the past months, they had built a pocket of safety between the two of them. Eleanor felt as though he were looking back at her from a place far away. Charles’s eyes were wide and sad, and he breathed out, his chest going concave. Eleanor felt her anger from the evening shiver and fall away, and in its place, felt a profound and deep grief. She didn’t want to let him leave. They looked at each other for another moment.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said.
His mouth was tight and thin, his nod just one quick jerk. Then he turned away and opened the door.
She watched him go, his slender body lonely in the empty stairwell. When she heard him reach the street, she turned the dead bolt.
She dragged the comforter off the floor and lay back on the couch. Alone, with her friends asleep and Charles out on the streets, she let herself think.
Violent tremors wracked her body. She thought of Don. How could he have left them? If that bullet had hit someone, Charles would never have seen his way out of prison—no matter his innocence. It wasn’t fair to blame that on Don. But he had been so callous with their welfare, had known Charles’s unstable position without doing a thing about it.
She turned over, facing the upholstery. Of course she knew he hadn’t intended the violence to happen. Don didn’t plant the gun. But even before that, he had to have known the show would be an enormous news piece. I’m investing in my legacy, he’d said. Had he even believed in the show, the way Eleanor had, the way she knew, against his better judgment, Charles had begun to?
Don had known how big this musical would be. Why hadn’t he thought about the actors? That he’d put them into dangerous positions, stalked by reporters and abandoned by their families?
Harry had been difficult, but in a way, weren’t his criticisms acts of protection? He’d set her up with an agent, tried to instruct her on the business. Hell, he hadn’t even wanted a girl this green. But Don had. He’d used her as a date, as a pretty girl on his arm, even as a source of inspiration and the occasional lyric—but Eleanor would never forget the terror she’d felt onstage after the gun went off. Where had he been? He hadn’t even checked in backstage. He’d gone home.
For so long, she had thought she and Don were the same, but wondered if that was still true. Musicals had always represented something more to her: tales, humanity, tied up in two-act arcs. She saw the world through them. They’d brought emotion into her childhood bedroom. A Tender Thing meant more to her now, after this night, than ever before. But Don? What did he love about musicals? His talent? All those characters under his control?
Eleanor gave up on sleep and went to the window. It was near morning; outside, she could see a man preparing for the commute, stacking papers into his newsstand. Those papers reported the end of something she and Charles might have been foolish to believe in from the beginning. Charles would probably be on the front page, in handcuffs, disgraced. The truth was—and Eleanor felt this deep in her bones—the onlookers wanted someone to blame. They hadn’t caught the person who’d planted the gun, and Charles was next in line.
Gwen had been right all along—there was no happy ending for Molly and Luke.
* * *
Charles met her outside the hospital waiting room. She’d come as soon as he called, hailing the first cab with its lights on. When she saw him, her breath came out in a rush. He looked drained, but his eyes were relaxed, and his smile lifted every muscle.
“Gwen’s resting.” His bruise had darkened, made worse by lack of sleep. A vessel had burst in his eye, so when he looked to the side, she saw bright red. “She’s healthy. I’m a father.”
Eleanor wrapped her arms around him. At first he was stiff, but slowly, the tension left his body, until he collapsed. His usual buoyancy, the life that thrummed through his bones and lit his smile and added that essence to his voice that made him an irresistible performer, was defeated by exhaustion. He caught his breath in gasps, the relief acute and painful. People passed them in the hallway, parting like a current.
He wiped his eyes. “God. I nearly lost her, Eleanor. She fell in the crowd and went into early labor. I got home and found a note to come to the hospital. My mother didn’t want to wait for me, in case . . .”
Eleanor gripped his arm. “But she’s fine. And your baby?”
“A boy. The worst night of my life turned into the best.” Charles’s smile split through the fatigue and anguish, turning his tears joyful. “Do you want to see him?”
On the way to the nursery, Charles talked about the baby’s loud cry, what Gwen said when she saw him. He asked if the police had come to her apartment, then told her the baby had a birthmark on his tummy. He looked ready to faint.
“There he is.” Charles and Eleanor stood by the window. He pointed at a baby in a blue blanket near the edge.
“What’s his name?”
“Donald. Donald Harry.”
Eleanor widened her eyes. Charles laughed out loud.
“Jesus, no. Your face.” He went quiet, touched the glass. “His name is James, for my father. James Luke.”
“Luke?”
“Yes. We’ll call him Jimmy.”
She watched Jimmy, what she could see of him. “Is that him crying?”
“Don’t you dare suggest he become a singer.”
Eleanor hesitated. “The gun—I think it was Connor Morris. The reporter.”
Charles didn’t respond and instead rested his brow on the glass, closing his eyes. He opened them again and looked at his son. Eleanor watched the baby twist in his blanket, the little impression from the umbilical cord.
“When he was born,” Charles said, “his daddy was in prison.”
“His daddy is the bravest man I know.”
Charles looked at her, smiled.
At the elevator, a middle-aged white woman stared at them for a long time. She held flowers, probably celebrating a grandchild. Eleanor wasn’t sure why the woman stared. Did they look like a couple, or did she recognize them from the papers?
Eleanor was still wearing her costume. The cream sheath was stained with sweat and drops of blood from the cut under her eye. It would need to be replaced—but then Eleanor realized she’d never need to wear the costume again.
* * *
“What makes you say Connor Morris?” Charles asked Eleanor once they had some food in the hospital cafeteria.
“I think I saw him,” she said. “Backstage. I saw his hair. I didn’t even remember until last night.”
Charles tore the crust off the sandwich and rolled the bread into tiny sticky balls. Eleanor didn’t like it and looked away.
“I already put in word to the police,” she said. “I hope they take it seriously.”
Charles crumpled the wrapping. “Now what?”
“Time to find another job, I suppose.” Eleanor pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I don’t want that.”
“This might sound crazy, but I don’t either.”
“There’s going to be a news story tomorrow morning confirming that the gun was planted,” Eleanor said. “Otis, Harry, Franny, and the stage manager have all given statements to the Times.”
“Well, that’s good. But if audiences weren’t convinced before, I don’t think a loaded gun did us any favors, planted or no.”
At his words, Eleanor felt a fall in her chest. He was right, of course. But that didn’t mean she was ready for the show to be over. This entire section of her life, over. They sat in silence. Eleanor closed her eyes, feeling a feverish haze from so many hours awake. Just when she was about to fall asleep, Charles shook her.
“Now you’re going to really think I’m crazy,” he said.
He was smiling. Eleanor, so tired she felt drunk, was in such despair that she was ready to seize on any happiness. “
What is it?”
“What if we fixed the show?”
“How?”
“I have some ideas.” He started balling up the paper from their sandwiches. “I know you do, too. Between you, me, and Don, maybe we can come up with something.”
Charles was out of his seat before Eleanor could wrap her mind around his words.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m not letting that Morris fellow dictate my life,” he said. “Or my son’s.”
“After last night, I thought you’d be ready to retire from the stage forever.”
His exhaustion was gone. “I’ve got a boy upstairs, a healthy wife sleeping down the hall. What can I say? I’m feeling lucky.”
She pulled him by the arm until he stopped. “Charles. Are you sure?”
“What’ll Jimmy say when he learns his daddy gave it all up when it got hard?”
“You gave it all up for him, and for his mother.”
Charles shook his head. “I have a duty now, Eleanor. I have to make this world as safe a place for him as I can. And quitting might keep him safe today. But with this show, I’ve got a chance to change a few people’s hearts for good.”
Eleanor’s eyes filled with tears. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted this, too. “I have plenty of ideas.”
“Attagirl.”
Eleanor waited while Charles spoke to Gwen. She could see them through the glass, Gwen, dark circles under her eyes, shaking her head and looking at her husband with a mixture of bemusement and annoyance. She patted the bed and he sat, and she took him by the shoulders and kissed him, pressing their brows together. Eleanor turned away until Charles emerged, coat on, grinning, and rushed toward the elevator, beckoning her to keep up.
“Gwen says if I don’t come home, she’ll kill me,” he said.
“If we give even one more performance, I can die happy,” Eleanor said. “Connor Morris can’t win.”
“The show must go on.”
Eleanor smiled. “As they say.”
A Tender Thing Page 30