Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 32
As we closed the distance between us, Sofie called above the ruckus, “Dr. K loaned me the entire journal. He said the article you need is in it. My shift isn’t over yet, but I came as soon as I could. I didn’t even take time to look at the article.”
Only one couple and a few yards stood between us. My focus narrowed down to the envelope in Sofie’s outstretched hand. I was close enough to see how fatigue had reddened her usually luminous eyes when a great mitt of a hand intruded into my field of vision and clamped itself onto the envelope.
“I’ll take that,” Kane said, ripping the envelope away from Sofie. “What have you got in there? Bennies? Cocaine?”
“Kane,” I moaned at the ridiculous possibility. “Come on.”
“It’s only a medical journal,” Sofie yelled.
“A magazine,” I explained to the ex-boxer.
“What? You think this is the Reading Guild now?”
“Give it to her,” Sofie demanded.
“Get this intruder off my floor,” Kane bellowed, and two trainers immediately appeared. Sofie, already embarrassed by the attention, left without another word.
“Please,” I begged. Tears of frustration, exhaustion, and anger stung my eyes. “Let me have it.”
“Oh, I’ll let you have it, all right,” Kane roared, balling up his fist as though he were going to clobber me. The crowd, thinking it was a bit, cackled.
“But it is just a magazine,” I pleaded.
“‘Just a magazine,’” he taunted. “A magazine with a hole cut into it to hide your goofballs. Your bennies. Your jazz cigarettes. This is going straight into evidence.”
The crowd, enlivened by the sight of my pleading, my tears, booed Kane. They thought it was all an act. Maybe it was. Who knew anymore? I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.
I tried to rip the envelope from Kane’s hand. I didn’t need to pretend that I was close to hysterics. Every dream that had been stolen, every promise broken, every sad Christmas and ignored birthday, every night I’d gone to bed hungry, they were all there in Kane’s spitefulness.
I lunged at him, ready to claw his face off. Kane, still the deft boxer, pivoted, and I fell harmlessly upon his broad back. Though Zave reached for and held me, I remained rooted, glaring hatred at Kane as he stomped away with what I was certain was Zave’s and my passport to a better life.
“Come on,” Zave urged, after I resisted his efforts to get us moving again. “It won’t help if we get eliminated.”
“That was the information I’ve been telling you about. Aren’t you even the tiniest bit upset?” I demanded.
“Sure.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“Evie, come on, you know the score. Kane’s just doing his job. We’ll get the journal from him at the next break.”
As I scowled at his retreating back, Kane did something he never did during prime show hours. He handed his gun and whistle to the other floor judge and, taking Sofie’s envelope with him, he disappeared down the hall that led to the rest quarters and Pops’s office.
“Why is Kane leaving?” I asked.
Before Zane could answer, the alternate judge fired the starter gun. The blast reverberated throughout the Palace, startling me and the swallows in the rafters. I gasped along with the crowd when I saw who had been eliminated: Gerta and her brother, Fritz. They had stumbled and were sprawled on the floor, too tired to get up. The judge hovered above them.
They lay there frozen, disbelieving, smoke still curling from the pistol. The rest of us, all the pros, were just as stunned. Gerta and Fritz were the two horses we considered indestructible. Kane would never have eliminated them. Not until the very end. The show had to have a few horses like that stolid pair. Not to win; they never won. But to come close enough to give every hard-luck plodder in the bleachers hope that they could, if not triumph, at least survive through sheer animal endurance alone to see another, maybe even a brighter day.
All the regulars exchanged nervous glances. This show wasn’t like any other they’d ever been in. If Gerta and Fritz could go down, any of us could go down.
The air horn blasted, signaling the ten o’clock break.
Feathers from the startled swallows were still floating down on the empty floor as we trudged to our rest quarters.
CHAPTER 77
Saturday, July 2, 1932
10:35 p.m.
Buoyed by FDR’s nomination and an ocean of liquor, both bonded and bathtub, the Saturday night crowd was in such a state of giddy intoxication that even the big-city bankers were joining in the toasts. When they weren’t, that is, cursing him and his “buck-toothed, do-gooder, Commie wife” to everlasting damnation. In the end, though, this golden crowd didn’t truly believe that anything could possibly, seriously threaten their gilded lives.
For a while, as footsore and fatigued as we all were, the arguing, laughing, and lambasting of either FDR or Hoover kept us energized. By midnight, however, I was nearly catatonic with exhaustion. It was the end of my sixth day with little more than a few catnaps. Still, I believed I was holding my own. Then, with no warning, I slipped directly into a waking dream.
Instead of circling a dance floor, I was back on night duty. In the children’s ward. A familiar sense of contentment filled me as I tended a little one suffering from croup by the faint orange glow of a night-light. A mentholated mist from a vaporizer daubed with Vick’s enfolded us in a cozy cloud. With a joyous lift, I realized that the child was mine. Mine and Zave’s.
A guttural howl yanked me back into reality. The source of the scream was Durwood, a buck-toothed local kid who’d entered with his wife Irma. Durwood, fists churning in the air, shouted at an imaginary foe, “Come on out here, you sidewindin’ son uh bitch. I’ma drop you like an ox. Cheatin’ with my wedded wife. Come on. I’ma clean your plow, you cheap bastard.”
“Shut up, Durwood,” Irma yelled, slapping him hard across the face.
Instantly, he swiveled and threw a punch that would have knocked his petite wife into tomorrow if she hadn’t ducked. Still tossing wild punches, Durwood railed at his imaginary foe, “I’ma learn you good ’bout prowlin’ where you oughten be aprowlin’.” Abruptly, he fell silent and his whirling fists sagged to his sides. Weeping openly, he lamented, “Irma’s my wedded wife. She ain’t yours to lay up with.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone except Irma who, though she hadn’t been eliminated, scuttled out of the open doors as quickly as she could, leading her still-thrashing husband behind her.
“Squirrelly,” DeWitt said, diagnosing the man’s waking hallucinations.
Lily, taking care of Ace, surreptitiously sleeping on her shoulder, added offhandedly, “That is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone take leave of their senses this early in a show. Usually no one loses their wits like that until a few weeks in. Of course, in a regular show we’d all be sleepwalking now and this would be just one, long bad dream.”
She trilled a strange laugh and added with a chilling flatness, “Who knows? Maybe it is.”
CHAPTER 78
Sunday, July 3, 1932
2:16 a.m.
“Welcome to the Dead Zone,” Ace greeted me after the 2 A.M. break. His voice came from far away.
Zave had been required to physically drag me off the cot and onto the floor where, try as I might, I could barely stagger forward. I noted with distant detachment that the stands were still nearly full. Spectators carried on celebrating FDR’s win. Men in shirtsleeves passed bottles around. Mothers gossiped with friends while their children slept beside them. Everyone was on vacation and no one wanted to leave the party.
I felt like a deep-sea diver wearing lead-weighted boots, my head enclosed in a dome of metal trapped far, far below the surface. With each step, I sank further down, further from the noise, the pain. Time this far down was marked only by the shift in illumination as we moved out of the glaring overhead lights and into the shadows at the edges of the floor.
Lily stared either at me or through me and droned, “Given tonight’s attendance, the show’s net—not accounting for pilfering and skimming—was four thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-three dollars.”
It seemed urgent to me that I assemble a response to her perplexing mathematical message, but even as I attempted to stammer out that I didn’t understand, Lily was drifting away. Everyone was drifting. I was drifting. The realization that I was losing my mind sent a bolt of adrenaline through my body. That surge of blind terror was quickly blanketed by a stultifying mental fog. The floor grew soggy beneath my feet. The hot vapor of my own breath choked me. Like urgent communications from a faraway battlefield, I sent myself sent frantic alerts that I had to get the journal from Kane. I caught a glimpse of the judge ducking behind the stage and tried to chase after him. The best I could manage was a sodden trudge.
Even that momentum was halted when Mamie grabbed me. I tried to bat her away, but she clawed at me, pulling me back. Back to her. Forever. I punched out even as some distant part of my brain sent the message that my mother wasn’t really there with me. That I was flailing at a phantom. That blip of knowledge vanished when the Director joined Mamie. Though I was dimly aware that they were both phantoms, I still had to fight them or I would die. I clawed and punched. From far away, a distant voice commanded, “Evie, stop. Stop.”
“Look at her,” a voice shouted from the crowd. “The nurse. She’s cracking up.”
“Did you see that?” another voice asked. “She tried to paste Zave.”
Who were they talking about? Who tried to hit Zave?
I looked around frantically for him. Finally, in the reflection from the double doors, I found Zave. But I couldn’t recognize the person he had wrapped in his arms. I knew that it was supposed to be me. But it wasn’t me. The person he was holding with such heartbreaking tenderness was Mamie. Then Cleo. Then the beautiful boy from the Pansy Club. Not me. Never me.
And then I felt his arms. Felt him holding me. Protecting me, and my racing heart slowed. I knew what was happening: I had gone squirrelly. But I didn’t know how to stop it. Or if it ever would stop. Or that it would be so terrifying. With an enormous effort, I formed the words “Something. Bad.”
I felt more than heard Zave’s words as they rumbled against my chest. “It’s okay, Evie. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You’ll be fine.” He guided me to a shadowed spot. “You’re just a little squirrelly. Happens to everyone. It just hit you early because you’re a greenhorn and you came in exhausted. Nothing to worry about. Just hang on to me. It’ll pass. I’ll take care of you.”
I was panting and could feel my eyes pushing out of their sockets. “Lost. Everything. Lost. Pin. You. Everything.”
“No, sweetie, I promise, you haven’t lost anything. You’re with me. I’ll take care of you. Just rest your head, okay?”
I did.
“Now, close your eyes.”
“Scared.”
“I’ve got you, baby. I won’t let anything happen to you. Not to Denny Devlin’s daughter. Close those beautiful peepers. The fix is in for us. You’re the local girl making good, you’re Nurse Gravy. Get some sleep.” He held me tighter and began swaying gently from side to side as he softly crooned, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”
I wanted to tell him that my father used to sing that lullaby to me, but my mouth wouldn’t work. The leaden deep-sea diver boots pulled me down. I fought to return to the surface but my struggle only made me sink even faster. I was being pulled to a destination I’d been meant to arrive at all along. I somehow knew that a reckoning awaited me far beneath the surface of my consciousness and I surrendered to it.
They were all down there. The girl from the hobo camp whose family had turned her out for eating too much. The emaciated twins clinging to their emaciated dog on the back of the Model A truck heading west. The prostitutes sitting in the steam cabinet, dying of syphilis. The kid with croup. The veterans of the Great War destroyed by mustard gas. The hungry newsboy. Marvin the Man of Marvels. They all waited for me. They had all needed me. They’d been sick and hurting and I’d yearned to help them. To make them well. And now, amazingly, they were.
Marvin stood on two strong legs and waved to me. The prostitutes fanned themselves and gossiped happily. The veterans gave me snappy salutes. The children were plump-cheeked. Even the dog was healthy. They had all been healed. They were whole again.
Then, like a scene shift onstage, the spotlight blinked out. When it blinked on again, my father—tuxedoed, grinning, pomaded, and luminous with life—was dancing within its radiant embrace. So, I thought, losing my mind was the price for being with my father again; I wish I’d known sooner how easy it was.
My father rainbowed the cane in his hand over his head while he danced beneath its silvery arch until, stopping abruptly, he extended the cane out, drawing my attention to another part of the stage. The spotlight blazed on and there was Terry, my friend who’d left one night and never returned. Terry’s darlings, his beloved dogs, scampered around him.
Terry conducted them as if they were his own personal orchestra. With the barest tilt of a finger or flash of his palm, they twirled, they spun arabesques, they pranced about on their hind legs, front paws held up like dainty dowagers extending genteel hands. Terry, aglow with the excellence of the moment, was their rhapsodic maestro.
“Perfect,” I whispered.
Then, as if he’d always been there, Zave, the gangly, ten-year-old Zave still growing into his front teeth, appeared beside my father. I saw the fine, confident man which that boy, protected and guided by my father, would have grown into if Mamie hadn’t betrayed him. Zave gazed at my father with fathomless admiration as he mirrored his every movement so impeccably that again I gasped, “Perfect.”
Before the words were out of my mouth, Zave vanished. The stage went dark, my father was gone, and I was left with that one word: perfect. Whole and complete, the realization dawned on me: Zave had always been perfect, but I’d wanted him to be perfect for me. And so I’d made him into a person that I could change. A person who needed to be healed. A sick person.
The verdict was swift: I had been wrong and I had wronged.
After seeing Mamie again in Litchfield, I believed I was correcting her horrible wrong. I believed I was accepting Zave in a way that Mamie had never accepted me. But I hadn’t. That is what my father had shown me. Hiding behind the shield of science and medicine, I was insisting that Zave “fix” himself. I shuddered thinking of all the times and all the ways that I’d told him that he was a broken thing that could only be made right and normal with a surgery that I still knew nothing about beyond a half-remembered lecture.
All these thoughts sputtered and flashed across a brain so exhausted that only a new jolt of adrenaline kept it from shutting down entirely. I had one last critical mission before I could sleep: I had to tell Zave that I was wrong. That he was now and had always been … Perfect.
First, though, I needed to pull myself out of the muck of half-conscious delirium that had swallowed me. I had to open my eyes, my mouth, and form words coherent enough to tell Zave that medicine was wrong and that he was right. Exactly as he was. That there was nothing to be fixed or cured or healed. There never had been.
I struggled toward the surface, toward the small pearl of light that was consciousness gleaming in the darkness. I had to wake up, and I had to do it now. There wasn’t a moment to lose. I had already inflicted too much damage, but the lead boots kept dragging me down. Finally, I managed to rouse myself enough that I heard whispered words, angry words. Though it was painful, I forced my shut-down mind to make sense of the words.
“Have you seen this?” a harsh voice demanded.
If there was an answer, I couldn’t summon the energy to attend to the soft syllables.
“Is this what you want?” the angry voice demanded. The question was accompanied by the intrusive sound of papers being rustled next to my ear.
Again, any answer was too soft for me to hear, though I did detect a rumbling against my chest which made me remember that Zave was holding me. So, yes, I concluded dimly, Zave was giving the inaudible answers spoken in a voice so soothing that, in spite of the adrenaline, in spite of the terrible wrong I had to put right, I slipped again into the exquisite blackness.
Only the jarring anger of the other man’s voice could shock me back into consciousness as it asked, “Goddammit, Zave, how much more do you need to see?”
I couldn’t recognize the speaker’s voice. If only I could open my eyes. I tried, but my body was as far away and beyond my command as it had been on the stage of the National Theatre when I’d observed myself from the balcony.
“You have to decide. Now. Before it’s too late.”
“I can’t.” It was Zave and he was in pain. I had to stop his pain. Everything depended on me reaching him in time.
It took several minutes, but I finally forced my eyes open. I gazed at Zave, but my fractured mind scrambled his face into all the paintings and statues at St. Mary’s. He became all the saints porcupined with arrows. Jesus on the cross. Mary holding her dead son. He became sorrow.
I tried to tell him not to be sad. That there was nothing to be sad about. Nothing to cure. Nothing to change. But my feet were icepicks stabbing pain through every cell in my body. And my brain was a wad of scorched wires that refused to communicate with my mouth and continued to feed me bizarre images instead.
I thought I caught a glimpse of Kane, bent beneath the weight of an enormous duffel bag, slide unnoticed through the shadows, toward the rest area. My brain wanted me to believe that snakes, thick black pythons, writhed from the open top of the bag.
Stop hallucinating, I ordered myself. But the black snakes wouldn’t go away. Kane punched the black snakes back into the bag and hurried away.
“Whuh…?” I asked in a dry croak. But the snakes were already gone.
“Go back to sleep, Evie,” Zave told me. “Everything will be fine.”
