Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 1
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To Colista McCabe Bird, RN, 1920–2001,
who sang and danced her way through
the Great Depression and World War II.
Thank you, Collie Mac, for telling me about all the fun you had
watching a dance marathon.
You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.
—John Beecher, activist poet and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression, from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel
That was a time when people’s emotions were raw to begin with. Everyone knew the Depression would be endless. So laughter was hard to find. We all fought in our own way. Mine was the marathons. They helped me survive. Helped a lot of people survive. I was part of the little army that won the war of the Depression.
—June Havoc, vaudevillian, marathon dancer, and sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, in her memoir Early Havoc
GALVESTON
Dance Marathon. Galveston, Texas
Sunday, July 3, 1932
4:25 a.m.
Zave? Where is Zave?
With that question, consciousness thunders back. How long have I been out? Long enough that the wet sand of the narrow beach abutting the Starlight Pier has chilled me despite the muggy night.
I search for him in the crowd. He is not there.
I try to stand and I fail.
No one notices. Not the other dancers. Not the sloppers who’d fed us or the trainers who’d beaten the knots from our muscles or the floor judges who’d determined who stayed and who was eliminated.
They gape, wide-eyed and stricken, mesmerized by the terrible volcano beauty of the Starlight Palace as it burns in the night. A tongue of flame leaps so high into the night sky that it licks at the pale sliver of moon. The fire burns twice. Once in the inferno the dance hall at the far end of the pier has become, and again in the rippled waves lapping at the shore.
Low blue flames escape and snake along the pier, nosing their way toward us. The flames search for the ones who got away. They search for me.
I shake my head, trying to rattle the vision loose. I’ve gone squirrelly. That’s what barely sleeping for five days will do to you. The fire roars. I sit up and its heat warms me.
The few remaining windows ringing the top of the Palace explode. Firemen, leashed to the shore by their hoses, yell orders. Police shout at the crowd and shove them back. In dim, faraway voices, my marathon friends—Minnie, DeWitt, Lily, Ace, Patsy, and Lynette,—yell questions at each other.
Spectators are perched along the top of the Seawall seventeen feet above the beach. They watch just as they’d watched us dancers during the show. It is the Fourth of July holiday weekend and the Starlight Palace had been packed beyond its two-thousand-person capacity, all the way up to the rafters.
That’s where the “cheap seat people” perched. People who pulled mustard-and-sugar sandwiches on day-old bread out of paper bags because they couldn’t spring for a hot dog on top of the dime early-bird admission that let them stay all day. People who knew what it was to go to bed hungry and wake up hungrier.
People like me.
Just a few hours ago, we’d all been jubilant, drunk on bootleg hooch and hope, because Franklin Delano Roosevelt—our guy, the one who was going to pull us out of the goddamn Depression and give us back our jobs and our dignity—had just clinched the Democratic nomination in Chicago.
The oil execs, bootleggers, and movie stars in the high-dollar box seats up front didn’t really care who the president was. For them, the Crash of ’29 had never happened and the Depression was someone else’s bad news. As long as people were putting gas from their refineries in cars, buying hooch from their illegal stills, and going to pictures made in their studios, they would be fine.
But, whether they were worried about where their next dividend check or their next meal was coming from, they had all come for two things.
They’d come to forget.
And they’d come because they’d read the stories.
About Galveston.
About me.
About Zave.
A few seconds later, the fire defeats even the sea, and what remains of the Starlight Palace surrenders. The skeleton of the dance hall wobbles against the lava-bright flames. Its blackened bones dance their last dance.
“Zave,” I beg, though there is no longer any hope that a dark-haired man—hands in his pockets, light on his feet, favoring his right leg because of the injury that had brought us together—would emerge from the inferno. What materialized instead was the question I knew I would have to live with for the rest of my life.
How had I become a person who would cause the man I love to kill himself?
THREE YEARS AGO
CHAPTER 1
Galveston
June 1, 1929
The humidity that day was extreme. Shoes turned velvety green with mildew. Towels hung out to dry came in so damp they had to be cranked through the clothes wringer again. Saltines drooped limp as slices of bologna.
But nothing and no one was going to wilt me. Not today. I had already been a lot of things in my young life—vaudeville performer, dance instructor, waitress, dishwasher, pants presser, babysitter. And other things I won’t mention. Mostly, I was always what Mamie, my mother, needed me to be to earn money.
Today, though, today was the first day of the life that I chose.
By some miracle, I had won a scholarship to study at St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing located on Galveston. I sat up even straighter on my dusty maroon velvet seat aboard the Houston-Galveston Interurban Railway. Even though the island was barely more than an hour away, this was my first visit.
The cabin—sleek and modern as a rocket ship out of a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comic strip—was the perfect vehicle to launch me into my future. I was so terrified of what lay ahead and so thrilled about what lay ahead that, had I been a dog, I would have stuck my head out the window and panted and drooled from sheer excitement.
But, being a seventeen-year-old girl from Houston’s notorious Vinegar Hill neighborhood determined to hide who she really was, I sat up primly and folded my hands in my lap instead. My palms were sodden with sweat and butterflies churned through my gut. This was worse than any case of stage fright I’d ever endured back on the vaudeville circuit.
School had just let out and jolly vacationers packed the car. No one else onboard appeared to have a care in the world. Not the women in crisp white linen dresses and open-toed sandals. Or the men in straw boater hats. Or the boys in sailor suits. Or the little girls with long curls and short dresses with bloomers.
A party atmosphere pervaded the car. The men talked too loudly. Mothers let their children stand on the seats. A couple of the women, giggling behind their hands at their daring, lit up cigarettes and carefully blew the smoke out the window.
Everyone acted like naughty children playing hooky. And why not? Back on Vinegar Hill, we all knew that Galveston was a wide-open town where Prohibition was a suggestion instead of the law of the land. Where gambling wasn’t considered any worse than chewing tobacco. And the prostitutes who worked openly along Galveston’s infamous Line outnumbered spotted dogs. The island was drenched in a dark and irresistible glamour so potent that the biggest-name entertainers in the country performed in the nightclubs, casinos, and supper clubs there. Duke Ellington. Glenn Miller. Sophie Tucker. Harry James. Phil Harris. They all came.
What impressed us most, though, was that the whole operation had been created and was still run by a pair of brothers who’d emigrated from Sicily. They’d started out as poor as any of us, working as barbers, cutting hair for a quarter a head. When the island’s biggest bootlegger, looking for an inconspicuous spot to stash his hooch, offered the brothers a dollar a case to hide his haul, they snatched up the deal. But, though they didn’t know much English, they knew business. Instead of taking the payoff, they bought their way into the bootleg business. In an astonishingly short time, the brothers, and their network of family members, had created a glorious empire of vice and were running the island.
I tried to recall the family’s name but could only remember how all the small-time Vinegar Hill chiselers always spoke of the island’s ruling family with a combination of admiration and fear.
“Don’t ever cross that family,” they’d warned us kids who stood around, soaking up their street-corner wisdom and lies and not caring which was which . “Unless you want to end up in the Gulf of Mexico. Halfway to Havana. With your throat slit. And nobody in the entire state’s gonna do a goddamn thing about it. Because that family’s got every deputy and every sheriff in the county in their pocket. Shitfire. That bunch even owns the goddamn Texas Rangers.”
An empire of vice, even if it was run by a family, seemed an odd place to start a new, a decent life, but my one and only chance to leave Vinegar Hill and Mamie behind waited for me on Galveston Island. If only I could impersonate a normal girl well enough to seize it.
Gripping my hands so tightly the knuckles whitened, I forced myself to concentrate on the view. We were hurtling across the Galveston Causeway. A vast flatness of sea and sky extended as far as I could see. A flock of gulls circled in a vortex outside my window. They hovered so close and so nearly motionless that I could almost touch them.
When a chubby boy in short pants tossed the crust of his sandwich out the window, the birds responded as one. In perfect synchronization, they all angled their bodies toward the crust and pivoted as if they were one creature. The sunlight momentarily transformed the flock into solid white paper sculptures. The origami seabirds floating in the sunlight were the purest, most beautiful sight I had ever seen.
I relaxed. What was I so nervous about? A place was waiting for me at St. Mary’s. My scholarship application had already been accepted.
Under false pretenses.
My mother’s hissing reminders became the voice of all the doubts slithering through my head.
We passed under the high arc of a sign that read “Welcome to Galveston. Playground of the Southwest.”
Three porpoises, their sleek bodies arcs of silver, leaped from the water at that moment. They dove back under and a fizz of hope bubbled through me.
CHAPTER 2
The street approaching the school was lined with palms and hedges of oleander that dripped gaudy pink blossoms. Not the tiniest hint of a breeze blew. Ahead lay St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing. A ten-foot-high fence of black wrought iron surrounded the austere collection of two- and three-story brick buildings. It seemed like something out of Charles Dickens, too severe to belong to this free and easy city.
Young women in white uniforms crowned with white caps glided serenely about the grounds. My stomach tightened into a hard knot at the prospect of trying to pass as a normal girl among them. I would have to keep my trap shut and try to blend in as much as possible until I got the lay of the land.
A giant statue of Jesus’ mother stood atop the portico at the hospital entrance. Daddy, who’d been a Catholic, had always called her “the BVM,” short for Blessed Virgin Mary, just like she was his pal. I passed beneath Mary’s sorrowful gaze. Her head was tilted down and her expression was sad, as though she already knew that I was going to disappoint her.
Inside, the hospital was a serene world of silent corridors with ceiling fans quietly circulating air that smelled of floor wax, carbolic acid antiseptic, and Flit mosquito spray. It smelled like the hospital where Daddy had died. Where the nurses had been so kind and did so much to relieve his suffering.
I followed a sign marked “School of Nursing” and headed down a broad hallway. Almost immediately two nuns approached. They glided forward in their long black gowns and brimmed veils. Their faces floated between starched white headbands and high bibs. They seemed like sentries, guards posted to repel intruders like me. I quickly glanced away and pretended to be fascinated by a painting of a saint in a loincloth, porcupined with arrows.
“Hey.” A peppy voice startled me. “You must be Evie Grace Devlin.”
The voice belonged to a girl my age dressed in a uniform of blue chambray with puff sleeves and a Peter Pan collar covered by a crisp white Mother Hubbard apron.
How did she know my name?
“Sorry to spook you. I assigned myself to meet the new probie and since you’re the only one around here who’s not either in a uniform, a habit, or a bed, I figured that had to be you.”
With her masses of dark curls, thick, unplucked eyebrows, and the slightest hint of a mustache, she had the innocent but determined aspect of a curious woodland creature. A friendly chipmunk, maybe.
“Probie?” I asked.
“Probationer,” she clarified brightly. “Beginning nursing student?” she added when I didn’t respond.
I nodded and she gave me a once-over so obvious that the Vinegar Hill girl I was suppressing want to tell her to take a picture, that it’d last longer.
“You’ll do,” she announced.
I’ll do?
Though I winced at her comment, like all the smart players who kept their cards close to the vest, I said nothing.
“First thing, you need to check in with the director of nurses. Let’s go.”
Without another word, she throttled off down the hall, leaving me to stumble behind. Slowing down, she reached back, ordered, “Here, give me that,” and snatched my suitcase away. “You pack light,” the chipmunk observed, hefting the case up and resting it on top of her head like a safari bearer.
What an oddball. I figured her for some lonely do-gooder whose only hope at making friends was picking off newcomers like me. Fair enough, I thought. I’d take any acceptance that came my way.
I followed her through a swinging door and the world of silent serenity fell away. We entered a hive thrumming with purposeful activity. A student nurse pushing a cart clattering with dirty lunch dishes hurried past. A white-coated doctor with round glasses and a goatee dictated notes to a nun holding a clipboard. A young nurse hurried up a flight of stairs carrying a metal tray loaded with metal hypodermics that clattered with every step.
Chipmunk raced on. A cluster of girls dressed in chambray uniforms like the one my guide wore approached us. Expecting them to ignore my oddball escort, I was surprised when they all lit up like the Fourth of July, shouted excited greetings, and converged on her like they were autograph hounds and she was some kind of starlet.
“Make way, probies,” she said, shoving through the giddy throng. “I’ve got the new probationer here and we’re late to meet the Director.”
Apparently, I thought, as we pushed on, this girl wasn’t the lonely do-gooder I’d had her pegged as. In fact, she seemed distinctly popular. Then I glanced back at the girls who’d been so eager to talk to her and saw that some of them were whispering madly to each other and casting odd looks her way. Looks that I couldn’t quite interpret.
On either side of the wide hallway, doors opened to large wards. Men’s Surgical. Labor and Delivery. Bone Deformities. Women’s Surgical. Children’s.
I paused outside the children’s ward and peered in at a large room swept by radiant light beaming in from high windows that reflected off polished floors. Two long rows of beds made up with snowy white sheets were occupied by sick children.
At one bed a nurse took a child’s temperature. At another, a nurse helped a little girl sip from a straw. Several rocking chairs were in use by nurses holding limp or sleeping children. It exuded the calm efficiency of the ward my father was in near the end.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” my guide asked, staring at the magical assembly line of care.
“Everyone knows exactly what to do,” I marveled.
“After three years, we will too,” my new acquaintance assured me.
“Maybe.”
She heard the hesitant yearning in my voice and, as if I’d passed a test I hadn’t known I was taking, she stuck her hand out. “Sofia. But if you call me that, I’ll clock you. It’s Sofie.”
“Evie Grace, but you already know that.”
A white-jacketed orderly, gliding up silently behind in his rubber-soled shoes, his vision obscured by the tall, metal cart he was pushing, nearly crashed into us.
“Jeezo, probies,” he hissed, the steel instruments laying atop his metal cart and rattling wildly as he veered past.
“Aw, go soak your head,” Sofie called after him, sounding exactly like one of my tough-girl friends on Vinegar Hill. “Can’t let anyone run over you, right?” she asked me.
