Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 25
CHAPTER 59
The sight of a full page of Zave’s handwriting shook me. I felt as though I were meeting him for the first time while already knowing everything about him and everything that would happen. My hand trembled as I began to read.
Dear Evie,
Cleo told me what you saw. Told me everything.
I can never expect you to forgive me. So I won’t ask for that. The most I can hope for is your understanding. I owe you more than I can ever repay. At the very least, I owe you my story. My full story.
I was born Milton Dowd, the second youngest of seven children. From my earliest memories, I was out of place. Where my father and brothers, even my sisters and mother, were oaks, sturdy, strong, and unbending, I was a willow, sickly, weak, and limp.
I had to pause and remind myself to breathe. Seeing how tender and lyrical he was on the page made me yearn again for all I could never have.
I wanted to read books, draw pictures, and play hopscotch. Real boys packed rocks inside of snowballs, jumped out of haylofts, and tied firecrackers to cats’ tails. Boys, real boys, scared me. And I repelled them.
Everything about me was wrong.
The smell of hay and cow shit still reminds me of our barn, where my father tried to beat the sissy out of me. I was never quite sure what my crime was. Had I held my wrists wrong? Or laughed too much? Or spoken in a voice that was too high? Or used words that were too “fancy”? Or expressed undue admiration for a sister’s new pair of shoes? Or, worst of all, danced? Even just swaying to the little tunes I hummed to myself enraged him.
And then the root of my wrongness, my sin, revealed itself: I liked boys. The world saw the evil before I saw it in myself. I tried to change. To be normal. To hide the twisted thing in me. I failed. I never knew what gave me away, but my father knew long before I did. And the other boys knew. They scented me out like a wolf scents a rabbit.
I only felt safe in the dense, sunless woods. There I would take off my mittens, cap, jacket, boots, lie down on carpets of snow and pine needles and pray to Jesus to either take the wrongness, the sickness, the deviancy from me, or to let me die. That was where the boys found me that day. The first time it happened. They trapped me, beat me, used me to “practice” being married. They “gave me” what I was “asking for.” Of this I will say no more.
I told you that your father saved me. Evie, he not only saved my life, he gave me a life worth living. From the moment he twirled onstage, blinding white and pure in the spotlight, all the evil urges simply went away. I was burned clean in the blaze of his glory. I became your father’s shadow. Anytime I wasn’t patching canvas, repainting flats, or running errands, I was studying Denny Devlin.
At first I stayed hidden, copying him in private. Mimicking every step until I could do his whole act. When he noticed me, he didn’t mock me or chase me away or beat me or any of the things I expected—he praised me. He encouraged me. Told me I was the most natural dancer he’d ever seen. And then he taught me how to be a better one.
I was born again. As his son. A Dancing Devlin.
Pretty much from the start our father-son act clicked. After a few months on the hayseed circuit, your father decided that we were too good for the F. Andrews tent show. We started saving to travel east and audition for the Keith-Orpheum Circuit. Then, on the last stop of the western circuit, we set up outside Litchfield and your mother entered the picture. Mamie always had a talent for spotting a soft touch. She told Denny that her father was “interfering” with her and she begged him to save her. All she needed was a lift to Lubbock, where an aunt lived.
There was no aunt, but by that time it didn’t matter. Denny was smitten and Mamie had managed to get herself pregnant. And pretty soon I was kicked out. After that, after your father left, the unnatural urges came over me again. Worse than ever. Evie, back in Houston, before I even knew that you were Denny’s daughter, you were healing me exactly as he’d done. Not just my ankle, but, like your father, you gave me a reason and the strength to overcome my failing.
Though the bennie I took on that awful night did play a part, I can’t completely blame it for my transgression. I was weak and I betrayed you. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I am desperate enough to ask for it. If you give me the second chance I don’t deserve, I will never be weak again. You are the one, single chance I have to be good. Not to be alone. To have what I want most. A family.
Evie, like your father, you are already more of a family to me than my own ever was. No matter what happens, that will never change. But I promise that if you will allow me to redeem myself in Galveston, I will never let you down again.
Please meet me in Galveston. Please give me another chance. We can win that competition, take the money, and start a new life together. A happy life.
That is my promise and my plea,
Zave
CHAPTER 60
June 27, 1932
“Evie, are you feeling all right?” my grandmother asked while we ate our usual lunch of beans, supplemented with the treat of a store-bought banana that we split.
“What?” I asked, pretending I was not still reeling from Zave’s letter.
“I don’t mean to pry. But you seem a bit puny. How are your lungs? Not getting that dust new-mony, are you?”
I plastered on a smile that never reached my eyes and answered too brightly, “I’m fine.”
We finished our meal in silence. Figuring, as always, that I needed solitude, Granma went to check on Daisy. As soon as I was alone, I did what I’d been trying most to avoid doing. I thought.
No, Zave and I could never be together. Not after Chicago. Although my head had completely accepted Zave and whatever arrangement we might make, thanks to Cleo I knew that my heart never truly would. The pain would simply be too great.
Then I thought of the sad, abused little boy trapped in a world of ice and hate. I saw myself rescuing little Milton and nearly melted. I had to be strictly analytical then and accept that the powerful pull I felt was bound up with my own thwarted yearning to rescue both my father and the sad, abused little girl that I had been. I reminded myself sternly that my going to Galveston would not change a single minute of either of our wretched childhoods.
Though my mind was made up, every molecule of my body remained unconvinced, and I ached for Zave right down to the sinews holding muscle to bone.
In any event, it no longer mattered. It was too already late. The countdown had already started. All the pros and the horses were already there, staying at whatever fleabag hotel Pops could get the cheapest rate on. The paper would be full of ads. Handbills were plastered on every telephone and utility pole in town. They’d start registering locals soon. I could never make it to Galveston in time.
The dates had really lined up for Pops, though. The Fourth of July was on a Monday. That meant there would be a huge holiday crowd for the July 1 opening. And it would only get bigger over the long weekend.
In spite of myself, I yearned to be part of it again, to belong to a group that squabbled and competed, but also came together and protected each other, a group that was almost a family. But all that, even the dim possibility of what I might have had with Zave, was nothing compared to what I had truly lost: my pin.
That, too, was impossible. Now that I was welching on a deal I’d made with the Amadeos, I could never show my face in Galveston again. Sofie’s friendship aside, it was not entirely out of the question that Mr. Amadeo would send one of his enforcers all the way to Litchfield to make an example of me about what happens when you cheated the Amadeos.
A loud knocking at the door startled me. They were here. The enforcers.
Before I could even think about hiding, the door flew open. My visitor marched in, took one look at me, emitted a dry laugh, and said, “Well, look who’s here.”
“Hello, Mamie.”
CHAPTER 61
A man with a thin mustache and a weak chin, wearing a suit of black-and-yellow windowpane plaid, followed my mother in. Though he was probably only in his early thirties, the man’s hair, combed straight back, was so thin that streaks of pink scalp showed through the sparse, dust-colored strands. Outside, a forest-green Packard touring car sparkled in the harsh sunlight.
Mamie glanced around as if seeing the modest house she’d grown up in for the first time. As though she’d accidentally entered the past of some other girl. Some ordinary girl not destined from birth for stardom.
Gone was the bedraggled, shopworn tarnish of Vinegar Hill. She wore a smart, dusty-rose dress with flutter sleeves that floated about her slender arms and hugged her newly toned figure. A pendant of what might actually be a real diamond on a braided gold chain rested on her delicate collarbones. Her nails were impeccably manicured and painted a tasteful seashell pink. Her hair floated in soft waves around her face.
In spite of myself and all the hard lessons she had forced me to learn, a spasm clenched my heart. She was again the great beauty of my childhood. The distant star whose light I reflected, though it never warmed me. Like an outgoing tide, I felt the gravity of the fairy-tale world she’d constructed tugging on me. The one where she had reigned as a queen as beautiful as she was blameless.
She eyed me up and down with bitterly familiar disdain and the spell was broken. Like a lens shifting in a camera, I zoomed out from the close-up, suffocating focus my mother had always required, and drew farther and farther away until I might have been observing the two of us through a telescope.
Or from the balcony of a drafty theater in Detroit.
Mamie stared pointedly at the sofa. A moment passed before her escort twigged to what was required, whipped out a large, monogrammed handkerchief, and flapped it on the cushions, raising a few puffs of dust. Mamie settled herself, folded her white-gloved hands on her lap, crossed her dainty ankles, and said airily, “I didn’t expect to see you here,” as if I were a distant acquaintance she’d happened to bump into at a party.
“Monty,” she told the man. “This is the baby sister in all those newspaper stories that I showed you.” She shot me a sharp glance of warning. I didn’t need it. I had always been her baby sister, never her daughter, when a new man friend was around.
“Delighted to make your acquaintance.” Monty gripped my hand in his doughy palm, shook it too heartily, and glancing from me to Mamie, said, “You’re right, darling. There isn’t much of a family resemblance.”
“We had different fathers,” I said, smiling at Monty more out of pity than anything else. He was trying to please my mother; I knew how lethal that was.
Mamie tugged off her gloves and beckoned the weasel-faced beau to join her. He responded like a well-trained schnauzer, plunking himself down next to her. Once settled in, he threw his arms onto the back of the sofa like he owned the place. I figured him for some well-heeled trust fund brat. A not-terribly-bright or well-liked rich boy that Mamie had managed to momentarily enchant.
I wondered what she wanted and decided to open the negotiations by telling her what she always wanted to hear. “You’re looking well. Sis.”
“Why, thank you,” she purred, taking Monty’s hand and gazing at him adoringly. “It’s all because of Monty. He is a very shrewd businessman. Titan of industry, to be exact. Anyhow, Monty came up with the positively inspired idea that he should represent me for both film and theatrical opportunities. It took a lot of convincing, but Monty finally got it through my silly head that anything spent on my ‘upkeep’ was simply a wise investment.”
While Monty preened like someone had just handed him a Phi Beta Kappa key for his brilliance, Mamie opened her beaded clutch a tiny crack. I caught a glimpse of a full pack of Luckies. Immediately, she snapped the bag shut and lamented, “Oh, phooey, Monty, I’m out.”
Monty was offering Mamie a cig from the gold case he whipped out of his pocket before Mamie had time to finish arranging her lips into a fetching pout. “Oh, darling, you know I can’t smoke your big, strong Chesterfields. Only a man’s lungs can stand up to those brutes. I have to have my ladies’ Luckies.” Her hand fluttered about the ivory column of her neck. “The toasted tobacco is more soothing to a girl’s throat, doncha know?”
Monty was out the door and raising dust, racing back into Litchfield before Mamie’s hand had left her delicate “girl’s” throat.
Mamie reopened her purse and pulled a cigarette from her pack. On her first exhale, she asked, “Where’s our grandmother?”
“‘Our’?” I answered, marveling that her annoyed tone had no effect on me.
“You know what I mean. I can’t have Monty thinking I have a daughter as old as you and a mother who’s a grandmother.”
“So how old does Monty think you are?”
“You’re only as old as you feel.”
“Okay, how old does Monty think you feel?”
“Sarcasm does not become you.”
Mamie turned her head away, blew out a column of smoke, and fiddled with the diamond around her neck. “You show me an actress who divulges her true age and I’ll show you an unemployed bit player. Where is she?”
“You mean your mother? Probably hiding from you.” I was delighted to learn that with my new sense of detachment had come a courage I’d never before felt around her.
“Well, aren’t you just as sweet as ever? Actually, I’m glad you’re here. You’re in all the papers. You must have really raked it in in Chicago.”
“I am not giving you any money. Not one, single, solitary dime.”
Acting as though my words had wounded her delicate sensibilities, she whimpered, “I knew that the marathon world would coarsen you. That and nursing. All those naked bodies. And the Catholics. Why, you’re tough as an old boot now, aren’t you?”
“Now? Now I’m tough?” I asked. “As if my childhood was Easy Street. As if you ever, even once, sheltered me from anything.”
Mamie plucked a flake of tobacco off her tongue. “You always were so harsh and unforgiving. I could never do anything right in your book, could I?”
“I was a child, Mamie. Your child.”
A bottomless chasm opened up. One that would swallow me whole if I moved one centimeter closer to Mamie. Stripping my voice of all emotion, I asked in a robotic monotone, “What do you need money for? Seems like Monty’s loaded and that he’s crazy for your knish.”
“I beg your pardon,” Mamie demanded. “When did you start talking like a guttersnipe?” She fanned herself as if my vulgar words had to be batted away.
“Maybe it was around the time you shoved me onstage at a burlesque show.”
“That is a lie,” she declaimed with a thunderous rage. “I would never stoop to appearing at a burlesque hall.”
“Yet you seemed to have had no trouble forcing your child to do so.”
Mamie’s eyes popped open as wide as a heroine in a horror movie. Some of the shock was genuine. I’d never mentioned that nightmarish time before. Never spoken to her like this. Doing so now left me both terrified and exhilarated, as though I’d suddenly discovered a fearsome power I hadn’t known I possessed: the power not to care.
She immediately shifted gears when I failed to react and, once more the wounded victim, whimpered, “There it is again. All the injustices that you imagined I inflicted upon you. I was always wrong, wasn’t I? Never the parent that you believe your sainted father would have been. I was never good enough for you to love. Not the way you loved him.”
What always confused me growing up was that, in the moment she spoke them, Mamie absolutely believed every word she uttered. The tears she shed now were real, welling up from all the injustice of my rejection. She really should have been on some screen other than the one in her head, where she never stopped starring.
Angry that I was not playing my part, she sniped, “Well, pardon me for not being the perfect mother. But who the hell do you think kept you alive after your precious father abandoned us?”
I laughed at the fathomless depths of her deluded narcissism. “Me,” I answered simply. “I kept myself and you alive, and my father didn’t abandon us, he died.”
She waved that detail away as if death were a lover he’d chosen to cheat on her with and said, “You go ahead and tell yourself whatever story you choose about all the petty trials you imagine I inflicted upon you. The truth is you owe me. The absolute least you can do is loan me enough to get my start in Hollywood.”
“If you need a stake, why don’t you hock that rock around your neck?”
She slapped her hand over the gem as if she feared I’d steal it. “Monty gave this to me.”
“Then get Monty to front you the dough.”
“Monty’s finances are rather tightly controlled by his ridiculous family.”
“I bet,” I said, exalting in my snide tone. “Keep your jewels, but I don’t have any money, and if I did, I wouldn’t give you a cent.”
Mamie shot me a gimlet-eyed glance. “You are a very poor liar, my dear. Your face has positively leapt out at me from the front pages of newspapers in several cities. Even though these dance marathons are the absolute lowest form of entertainment—if they even qualify as entertainment—I know that you had sponsors for your wedding from Marshall Field’s to the Palmer Hotel and that thousands of dollars in prize money were awarded. So, please, don’t insult me by saying you have no money.”
“Nope, no prize money. No wedding. It was all a put-up job.”
“Well, obviously, I knew it was a lavender wedding.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked, immediately regretting that I had allowed myself to be lured back into engaging with her.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you know. That boy, Zave or whatever Milton is calling himself now, hated me from the instant Denny fell for me. He adored Denny. The attachment was positively unhealthy.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Oh, not like that. Denny had many flaws but he was the farthest thing from a deviant you could imagine. Definitely a soft touch but not a swish. Man could not keep his hands off of me.” She shuddered before heaving a gusty sigh and concluding, “Oh well, leave it to you to marry a faggot.”
