Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 5
Her celebratory mood turned somber. “I know that talk of politics is forbidden at St. Mary’s, but this election is too important for me to hold my tongue. Girls, your future is at stake. Our country is at a crossroads. In the election this November we will choose whether to pursue the path of private gain that will lead to further misery for all but the wealthiest among us. Or whether we shall unite as a people and find salvation by working for the common good.
“You, my angels, have a duty, a mission, to show your fellow citizens the way toward that salvation. Live your lives in service to the common good for, as Albert Einstein tells us, ‘Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.’
“But enough of the harsh realities. Today is a day for celebration. So, let me just say that, having had the supreme privilege of knowing you fine young women for three wonderful years, I am completely confident that each and every one of you shall find places that will bring joy and purpose to your lives and to the lives of all to whom you minister.
“All right, that’s enough from me. Let us adjourn to the courtyard for our private reception before the pinning ceremony begins.”
Blue and white streamers hung from the giant pecans that shaded the courtyard. A refreshment table was laden with platters of dainty sandwiches, cookies, brownies, and even several cakes. An ice mold of a dolphin leaped from a bowl of pink punch. We only saw such bounty at graduation parties.
“Well, Nurse Devlin,” Sofie said, surveying the rare treats. “Shall we divide and conquer? You get the sandwiches. Pimiento cheese for me. And I’ll concentrate on the goodies. What’ll it be? Hummingbird cake or fudge brownies?”
“Do you even need to ask?” I answered.
“One of each for my friend with the hollow leg, coming up,” Sofie said, before diving into the crowd thronging the table. Eager as I was to fill our plates, I needed a moment to absorb the fact that everything was about to change.
Sofie and I had rented rooms in a boardinghouse close to Sealy Hospital and we planned to move in that night after the ceremony. My few belongings were already packed in the battered suitcase I’d carried from Vinegar Hill. I’d been astonished to see that the three years that had transformed me into a nurse as capable of managing an entire ward as she was of calming a small child about to have her tonsils removed could all fit into that small case.
With a pang I realized that as much as I had griped along with my friends about the endless hours of work, the tortures of organic chemistry, the harshness of grumpy surgeons and cranky charge nurses, I didn’t want to leave. St. Mary’s had become the first happy home I’d known since my father died. For a moment, I felt as though I was standing on the beach with the tide going out and the sand shifting beneath my feet. The literal ground I had claimed such a firm footing on was being swept out from under me.
Sofie returned bearing two plates and handed me one. “Hey, probie, why so glum? Also, where the heck are our sandwiches? Aren’t you starving? We missed lunch.”
“Just savoring the moment, I guess,” I said. I took a bite of cake and was suffused by its sweetness. Only then, as I relaxed into my triumph, did I become aware that, for three years, I had been walking on eggshells, bracing myself for the moment when I would be discovered, unmasked. And now it was over. I had done it. I was no longer the grimy girl from Vinegar Hill running from her past.
“We’re nurses,” I said, just to hear the words out loud.
Sofie was about to affirm our new identities when, without warning, a look of mild alarm replaced the delight in her expression. I turned toward the cause and found the Director standing at the edge of the exuberant gathering. My gaze met hers. She stabbed her index finger at me, crooked it, and beckoned me to her.
“What’s going on now?” Sofie asked. “Can’t that cow take one day off from riding you?”
Although the magic of the Amadeo name had protected me for three years, apparently the Director’s petty persecutions weren’t going to stop until I walked out of St. Mary’s with that pin on my chest.
“No idea.” Wearily, I handed Sofie my plate, stood, brushed a few crumbs from my skirt, and followed the Director, who was already disappearing into the main hall.
Inside, I noticed that Hector and Ron, two of the gate guards whom I’d known for the past three years, were sitting outside the office. Though I greeted the usually friendly guards with a smile and a small wave, neither of the men would meet my gaze.
Determined not to be intimidated on my day of triumph, the moment we were in the Director’s office, I demanded briskly, “What is it?”
Ignoring my question, the Director sat behind her massive desk and ordered, “Have a seat.” With unsettling emphasis, she added, “Miss Devlin.”
I started to speak, to object, but my throat had gone dry. She had slid a file across her pristine desk, twirled it so that it faced me, and snapped open the manila cover. Inside were newspaper clippings. One glance was all it took for the past to rise up from where it had been waiting for three years and drag me back.
Back to Detroit.
Back to the National Theatre.
Back to Mamie.
CHAPTER 11
Winter 1921
“There she is,” Uncle Jake said, exhaling a sigh of relief as he pulled out of the frantic Detroit traffic and slid into a parking spot directly in front of our destination, the National Theatre. Even in a district packed with some of the best vaud houses in the country—the Gayety, Liberty, Temple, and Columbia—the National stood out.
“Mamie?” Jake glanced back at my mother for her reaction. My mother was still fast asleep, sprawled out across the seat, as regal as Cleopatra floating down the Nile. Asleep or awake, my mother had the superhuman ability to tune the world out.
“We’ll just let her sleep,” Uncle Jake said with a conspiratorial wink. I nodded; life was always easier when Mamie was asleep.
Uncle Jake wasn’t my uncle. Mamie made me call all the men who’d drifted through her life in the four years since Daddy died “Uncle.” Jake wasn’t a boyfriend either. He’d been Daddy’s best friend and they used to have an act together, The Dancing Devlin Brothers. Jake did what he could to look out for us. Found bookings for me. Did the driving. Worked odd jobs when we were between tours. At least he did when “the gloomies” hadn’t caught him and made him drink.
“Didn’t I promise you?” Jake asked, gesturing expansively toward the theater. “It’s a Moorish palace.”
Not all, or even most of, Jake’s promises had come true, but gazing now at the National’s high, arched entrance flanked by tall minarets topped by golden domes and festooned with rosettes, eagles, and sad-eyed angels, I saw he’d made good on this one.
“It’s like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves come to life,” I said. Too loudly, as it turned out; I’d roused Mamie.
“Oh, stop showing off your damn book addiction,” she griped. Mamie considered my “book addiction” to be unhealthy and the reason I’d lost the “sparkle” that had made me her most glorious creation, the Pint-Sized Pavlova, a toddler who could dance on her toes. When Daddy started losing his wind, adding me to the act was enough of a novelty that the bookings kept coming in. For a while, we even snagged some dates on the exalted Keith-Albee-Orpheum Circuit. But then I committed the unforgivable sin of growing up and, without Daddy to make me look adored and adorable, I was just another brat who’d had ballet lessons.
“That damn Marvin,” Mamie cursed, massaging the space between her eyes where her “sick headaches” always started. “Hadn’t been for him teaching you how to read, we’d still be playing the big houses.”
I didn’t bother pointing the basic facts of biology out to my mother: that reading was not the reason I had shot up. That I hadn’t “chosen” to grow up simply to spite her any more than Daddy had “chosen” to die.
Jake gave me a wink. We both knew that if I opened my mouth Mamie would have silenced me with a harsh “When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”
And she never asked for it.
Gawking at the National, Jake mused, “I think our luck’s about to change.”
“It better had,” Mamie warned, peering into a compact to freshen her lipstick. She tilted her head one way then another to let the sunlight burnish her flawless complexion, her perfect chip of a nose, her fathomless violet eyes, then snapped the compact shut and concluded, “I’ve had it with these four- and five-a-days. They’re killing me.”
Killing her? It was me, the damn Pint-Sized Pavlova, who had to perform four and five times a day since the bookings had dried up and now could only get hired as a filler act between the scene switches.
The relentless schedule had destroyed my feet. They hurt all the time. But I knew better than to complain. If I did, Mamie, with a woebegone look of blameless suffering, would always respond that, of course, I could stop performing any time I liked. But if I did, she would be left with “no other alternative” than to surrender me to the Middlefield Home for Indigent Children.
The tears she could summon on cue would tremble in her eyes as she’d tell me, “Of course, no mother wants to give up her child, her own flesh and blood, but if you leave me no other choice…”
So, instead of complaining, I taught myself the handy trick of leaving my body. I simply abandoned everything that hurt—my feet, my heart, my growling belly—and watched from a faraway place where pain couldn’t reach.
The three of us put on our happiest of happy faces and trooped into the National. It was like entering a jewel box. Tiles the color of sapphires, emeralds, rubies, even gold covered every wall. On second look, however, I noticed that, here and there, like gaps in a gleaming smile, tiles were missing. And that most of the bulbs in the ornate chandelier had burned out, leaving the lobby in a dusky gloom. All over the country, as people flocked to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, the lights were going out for vaudeville.
“Open call don’t start for another hour,” a voice on the other side of the lobby snarled at us. The manager, a husky fellow in a threadbare suit with a prominent shower of dandruff sprinkled across the shoulders, lumbered our way. The instant he caught sight of my mother, however, he put some pep in his step.
“I’m sure, however, that an exception could be made in your case,” he cooed, rushing forward to take Mamie’s daintily extended hand. “Perhaps you’d like to…” He gestured toward a distant door. “… step into my office? Have a drink? Or something?”
Jake shook his head at the predictability of the manager’s response. Mamie was movie-star gorgeous and men melted at her feet.
“Why, I thank you, sir,” Mamie said, faking a honey-drenched Southern accent. “But, truth be told, the performer is my daughter.” She snapped her fingers and flicked her hand impatiently.
I stepped forward.
The manager eyed me. His disappointment was as obvious as it was familiar.
Before he could speak, Mamie interrupted, her tone harshening with the nasal twang of the Texas Panhandle where she’d grown up. “We have a contract.” She extracted the document from her handbag and waved it in the manager’s face.
He batted it away. “You told me the kid was six. All the private advertising I sent out to our select clientele promised a six-year-old girl.”
“And that is what you have here,” Mamie bristled.
I had just turned nine. An exceptionally tall nine.
“If she’s six,” the manager exploded, “I’m a monkey’s uncle. Deal’s off. My clientele will not accept this … this…” He sputtered and waved a finger in my direction. “This giraffe!”
Jake leaned over and whispered, “Hey, Evie, why don’t you go on and explore. This is just business talk. Go find Ali Baba.”
Happy to escape, I raced up a winding staircase that twisted through one of the minarets. Stained glass hung in the windows and threw bolts of colored light across the stairs.
In the balcony, I peered down on the eight-hundred empty seats below as I settled into a maroon velvet seat of my own. Most of the velvet nap had been worn away and the seat smelled of sweat, hair oil, aftershave, and an odd, mushroomy odor I couldn’t recall ever having smelled in any other theater.
Something else I hadn’t ever encountered before was a sort of runway that extended from the center of the stage down the main aisle. Seats had been removed to accommodate this protrusion and others had been rearranged so that they faced the odd runway instead of the stage. I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, but something was off about the National.
I put that, along with my fear that this might be another day when Mamie forgot to feed me, out of my head, and pulled my favorite book in the whole world, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from my coat pocket.
I lost myself in it so thoroughly that Jake startled me when he appeared. “There you are. We’ve been hollering for you. Come on, Mamie’s starving. How does chop suey sound?” I jumped up. Mamie must have saved the booking. Chop suey was her favorite of all our favorite cheap, filling foods.
Fat, fluffy flakes of snow were floating down when we stepped out. Bright halos of light now topped the theaters and movie palaces. We made a beeline for a place called Chop Suey Louie’s. With a bowl of the house specialty warming me and filling all my empty places, I was half dozing when Mamie slapped my cheek and jolted me to attention.
“Have you heard a single word I’ve said,” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am,” I lied.
“You better had because if you louse this up, I just don’t know. I mean…”
I tensed up when I heard that woebegone tremor in her voice.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mame,” Jake said, pulling a pint bottle from his pocket and looking away as she went on.
“It’s not as if I want to send you to Middlefield. What kind of mother would want that? But if you choose to leave me no other alternative, well…”
Tears welled up in her eyes as she gazed out at the opalescent curtain of snow that now hung over the city. Lillian Gish, I thought. Even as the prickly nausea of panic rose at the mention of sending me to an orphanage, I admired how perfectly my mother imitated the actress’s expression of beatific mournfulness.
“I’ll be good. I’ll be good. I’ll be good,” I promised.
And, backstage in the freezing theater, I was good. I questioned nothing and no one. I didn’t ask where the Indian club jugglers and magicians, baggy-pants comics and animal acts that usually crowded the backstage area of any vaudeville show were. I didn’t question why everyone behind the curtain was female and everyone in the audience was male. I didn’t say a word when the ladies applying their makeup took special pains to rouge their nipples.
I raised no objection when Mamie told me that I had to walk down the runway and do my act out there. Right in the middle of the audience. Close enough that I could see the faces that were usually, mercifully, either a distant blur or entirely erased in the glare of the footlights. Now they would be near enough that they could touch me. Near enough that, for the first time, the watchers would be real people.
All I dared say when Mamie dragged out one of my old flouncy-skirted ballet dresses was, “It’s too short, Mamie. My bottom will show.”
“Don’t speak like a guttersnipe. You know how it offends me.”
Far worse, the costume’s bodice that had once covered my chest now fell halfway down my chest nearly exposing the nubs of the almost-there breasts that I knew were supposed to be covered at all times.
Jake, who’d been out “rounding up some more bug juice,” appeared backstage, his cheeks and nose scarlet. He took one look at me and confirmed my worst fears. “This isn’t right, Mame.”
“Yeah, well,” Mamie sneered. “It isn’t right that you can’t get off the sauce long enough to find us some decent dates. Or even sober up enough to start dancing again and help me try to keep this family together because I’m doing the best I can.”
“Mamie, vaudeville is dead unless you’re a headliner.”
“Or not a stumbling drunk.”
Mamie, who’d been fluffing up my tutu, gave Jake a look of such fury that the goose bumps covering my freezing flesh rose even higher. That look contained all the hard arithmetic of our lives. We’d spent the last of our savings—which Mamie carried in the velveteen grouch bag on a cord around her neck—on the chop suey. There was no way to make us add up if I didn’t do the show.
Defeated, Jake hung his head and muttered, “A kid in a cooch show. You know this isn’t right.”
Cooch show. What was a cooch show?
Vibrating with rage, Mamie held her hands up stiffly beside her ears. “I forbid you to use such vulgarity in my presence. I specified that she would not be required to show her…” She gestured vaguely toward me.
“What?” Jake demanded, and my heart swelled. He was standing up to her. He would save me. “Her knish?” he said.
“Stop! Either be a man and support this family or leave. You ridiculous, impotent stumblebum.”
At the last two words, Jake’s shoulders sagged. He took his bottle and left. A chill deeper than any I’d ever felt shivered through me.
I didn’t know what a cooch or a knish were and got no further clues when Mamie issued her final instructions: “Toe-walk to the end of the runway, finger in your mouth, turn at least five slow three-sixties, smile at the men, bend over, pretend to fix the strap on your toe shoe, toe-walk back to the stage slow like you don’t want to leave, look around over your shoulder, wave bye-bye, blow kisses, and you’re out. Got it?”
I couldn’t answer. None of it made sense. This wasn’t dancing. A sick feeling of utter wrongness washed over me.
At my hesitation, Mamie leaned in so close that the beads of black resin she’d artfully applied to the end of each of her eyelashes tickled my cheek, and told me flatly, “I won’t be allowed to visit you at Middlefield.”
Even as I commanded my body to move forward on legs turned to wood, I did what I’d learned to do when things hurt too much or got too sad or hard or mean. I simply left my body.
