Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 6
I returned to my cozy seat far up in the balcony where Dorothy Gale and all my book pals waited. Safely nestled high above the runway, I observed the lanky girl in the skirt up to her bottom caught in the blaze of a blue light. In the audience, silver orbs glistened as the men wearing spectacles tipped their heads up to watch.
The girl looked familiar but she wasn’t me. Couldn’t be me because I was far away, high and safe. The silver orbs of all those hidden eyes couldn’t be turned on me. I was watching. Not being watched.
The men who clustered at the edge of the runway leaned in so close that the girl could smell the peculiar need, the loneliness, the desperation throbbing off of them.
Why, she wondered, did so many of the men have newspapers spread across their laps? Why did the papers rustle when she approached? She toe-walked a stiff, puppet walk, the strings controlled by Mamie’s instructions. She raised a frozen hand, put a frozen finger in her mouth, and sucked. The rustling grew louder, more fevered.
Cast away at the end of a runway in a sea waiting to pull her under, she clung to her mother’s orders. They barely kept the puppet girl afloat as she pirouetted. At her feet, the orbs of glinting light tilted to the side, peering up her skirt at her underwear, her bottom.
“Spread your legs,” a voice commanded.
“Spread ’em,” another demanded.
Give your audience what they want had always been Mamie’s first commandment. The girl had never decoded its meaning until now, when the audience told her exactly what it wanted. And, because her only other choice was Middlefield, she obeyed.
Knish. The word came to her like an entry in the dictionary and she understood.
“The undies. The undies.”
The girl pulled them down. She knew it was wrong, but she still did the wrong thing, because that’s what they wanted. That’s what would keep her out of Middlefield. The rustling grew more furious.
“Hey, Pavlova, Pavlova, look here.”
She looked.
A man, his mouth hanging open, his eyes hidden behind ovals of reflected light, held a small, squirming animal in his lap. The mole popped its round, pink head and one blind eye up out of the dark burrow of the man’s hand as he rhythmically tried to choke it to death.
The girl attempted to escape, but a hand reached up from the murky depths she’d been cast adrift on, grabbed her ankle, hobbled her flight.
Evie was dragged down. Down from the balcony back onto the runway.
I snapped my head around to look over my shoulder in alarm.
A flashbulb exploded.
The screech of several whistles shrilled through the theater. A dozen policemen in double-breasted greatcoats swarmed the crowd. Another half-dozen swept in from the stage, herding shrieking girls in feathered headdresses and flouncy peignoirs and underwear hardly bigger than a Band-Aid.
A policeman clamped a giant hand, wet and cold with melting snow, on my shoulder and, lifting me off my feet, shoved me forward.
More flashbulbs exploded.
CHAPTER 12
May 8, 1932
Those were the photos that stared up at me from the Director’s desk. The headline above them blared, “Pint-Sized Pavlova Caught in Raid at Burlesque Show.”
“You did not mention this on your application,” the Director informed me crisply.
“I was nine years old.”
“The age of reason is seven. More important,” she said, pointing a condemning finger to the photo, “you were, obviously, a willing participant.” Damned by the title “Burlesque Show,” my wide-eyed alarm was easy to interpret as the come-hither expression of a seductress.
Panic, guilt, and warring senses of both absolute injustice and the complete inevitability of this reckoning overwhelmed me. Hadn’t I always known that this moment would come?
“I wasn’t. I was a child.”
“A most precocious child, I would say.”
The familiar sensation of observing myself from a spot far away opened a hollow pit in my stomach. “How did you get these?”
“My informant shall remain confidential.”
“How long have you known?” I demanded with a starchiness I didn’t feel.
“There were doubts from the start.”
“But the photos? You’ve had them for a while, haven’t you?”
“Our faith, excuse me, my faith, teaches me to allow the sinner time to confess her sins. I allowed you that time. You chose not to take it.”
“I was a child. It was one time.”
“Was it? Was working at a dime-a-dance hall any better?”
“What are you talking about?”
“All right, you prefer to call it the Bennett Academy of Dance.”
“Uncle Jake’s dance school? Yes, I worked there. As a dance instructor. I helped teach cotillion classes and debutantes and their escorts. I was a dance instructor.”
“Were you?”
Seeing the futility of arguing any further, I summoned up the hard lessons in faking it that vaudeville had taught me and said firmly, “The pinning ceremony will begin in a few minutes. I’m leaving.”
“Oh, rest assured, you will be leaving. And, certainly, yes, do go to the ceremony. But there will be no pin with your name on it.”
The destiny that the Director had plotted for me from the beginning was there in her expression. “You never even submitted me for registration, did you?”
“What would have been the point? Putting aside the more sordid aspects of your past, the nursing board would never certify a candidate who’d falsified her application. A few phone calls confirmed that the grade schools you claimed to have attended either had never heard of you or didn’t exist.”
“I was the sole support of my mother. We traveled constantly. What does grade school matter? I graduated from high school. And I graduated from St. Mary’s. And I earned my pin.” Though my knees trembled, I rose to my feet. I had one card left to play. I didn’t want to play it, but there was no other choice. Hating the words, I said, “I’ll tell the Amadeos.”
She heaved a weary sigh. “Yes, certainly, through whatever unhealthy influence you have exerted over our impressionable Sofia, you may seek their intervention.”
Unhealthy influence. My skin crawled at her insinuation.
“I’ll tell the paper.”
“Indeed, do, by all means. You did attain a certain level of fame as this … this … Pint-Sized Pavlova. I’m certain that the tabloids will be eager to update the entire country about your attempt to infiltrate the nursing profession after a career in burlesque.”
“It wasn’t a career.”
“You can certainly choose to make that case to the papers. The public has a boundless appetite for salacious stories. I’m sure that your sordid tale will receive ample coverage.”
“You would ruin my life out of petty vindictiveness? Why? Because of some point you’re trying to prove to Sister T? Or to your bosses in St. Louis?”
Though her nostrils flared, the Director went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I would have thought, though, you’d want to keep this matter private. That you wouldn’t want your classmates, your teachers, Sofia’s family, and every decent employer you might ever apply with to know about all of this.” She prodded the clippings with the tip of her pencil.
I braced every muscle in my body, stood like a rock, and told her, “I am not leaving. I’m not. Yes, I want to make a scene. This is wrong. You can’t do this.”
Like an echo from Mamie’s direst threat, the Director said, “I see you leave me no alternative.” Emotionless as a robot, she picked up the receiver of her old-fashioned candlestick phone and tapped the switch hook twice. As she waited for the operator, she called out to the guards in the hall to come in.
Hector, a genial guy who liked to show me photos of his seven beautiful children, whispered, “Be better if you don’t make a fuss.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
Ron, a beefy numbskull, clamped hold of my other arm.
When the operator came on the line, the Director said, “Connect me to the police.”
She held the receiver away from her ear so that I could hear: “Galveston Police Department, how may I direct your call?”
“I would like to report a trespasser on the grounds of St. Mary’s Hospital School for Nurses.”
“We’ll dispatch a squad car.”
Smiling serenely, she thanked the operator and hung up.
“Who told you?” I asked.
“That shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out,” the Director answered in a bored voice as if I were an onerous piece of business she could finally cross off her list. “Who knew your secrets?”
The answer to that question was a punch in the gut. Sofie. She would never have told intentionally. But had she dropped enough unintentional clues to somehow lead the Director to Detroit?
The sag in my spirits must have been evident, because Ron tightened his grip on my arm.
Hector took the other one, murmuring, “I’m sorry, Evie. If I could get another job, I wouldn’t do this, but you gotta let me escort you out. If I don’t, she’ll just fire me and find someone who will.”
I shook off Ron’s arm and left with Hector.
With the suddenness of a car crash, I was on the other side of the fence. Ron slammed the wrought-iron gate closed and locked it behind me.
I stood on the empty street with my suitcase at my feet and night coming on rapidly. Shock paralyzed me.
I glanced up at Mary’s sorrowful face, white against the night sky, and only the awful inevitability of this moment penetrated my brain. Of course they found out who I really was. And of course I had to be cast out. I picked up my suitcase and walked, not knowing where.
“Evie!”
On the other side of the high fence, Sofie ran to me.
I dropped my suitcase and clung to the bars that separated us.
“Sister T told me what happened. You can’t leave. This is ridiculous.”
“She found out, Sof. About me. About all the lies.”
Sofie wrapped her fingers over mine. “So what?” Her face was all shadows in the night. “Who cares that you were in vaudeville or didn’t go to regular school?”
Sofie had never cared. That had been my blessing. It had allowed her to accept me. And, apparently, it had also been my curse. She hadn’t thought my secrets shameful enough to keep to herself. Who knew what blabbermouth she had inadvertently spilled the beans to? What did it matter? It had been enough to put the Director on my trail.
Off in the distance I could see the graduates’ families streaming onto the grounds, eager to find seats in the chapel for the pinning ceremony. Even from this far away, it was obvious when Sofie’s parents arrived. The crowd froze at their appearance, then quickly parted to allow them through.
“You should go,” I said. “The ceremony will start soon.”
“Not without you, Evie. Dammit, you deserve that pin more than any of us. Come back in and get it.”
“Sofie, there’s no pin for me. She didn’t even submit my application to the board.”
“Then we’ll go to Austin and talk to the board.”
“Why?” I asked. “The first thing they’ll do is call the Director. The instant she tells them that I falsified my school record to gain admission, my case will be closed.”
“That’s not fair,” Sofie protested. “It’s not right.”
Instead of telling her that the world is never fair or right, unless you have the money or power to make it fair and right, I withdrew my hand, picked up my suitcase, and started plodding toward the train station.
Sofie, on the other side of the fence, stayed with me. “Evie, please, you promised. Don’t leave.”
“I’m sorry, Sof, sorrier than you will ever know.”
“No, Evie, come on. You can’t just give up without a fight.”
“‘Just give up’?” I imitated the sound of a laugh, then told her the truest thing I could at that moment. “Sofie, I’ve been fighting my entire life. I’m tired. I can’t do it anymore. Can’t keep having my dreams jerked away. I can’t keep fighting when I’m beaten.”
“No,” Sofie called out, as I walked away on the path that deep in my bones I’d always known I was fated to walk. I called to my friend, my sister, my unknowing betrayer, “Be a wonderful nurse, Sofie. Be that for both of us.”
Minutes later, I was on the electric train, being transported back to the prison of a life I’d tried, and failed, to escape.
HOUSTON
CHAPTER 13
Still in shock after the short train trip, I stood, blinking and disoriented, outside Houston’s Union Station. After three years away, Houston was louder and jitterier and even more prosperous than I remembered. I stood rooted in place as businessmen in seersucker suits and women in cloche hats with the brims pulled seductively over one eye jostled past me.
Just like Galveston, the city had floated triumphantly above the dim and distant Depression that was hobbling most of the rest of the world. Instead of oceans of bootleg whiskey, though, Houston had bobbed along happily on gushers of oil and clouds of cotton. The lucky parts of Houston, that is. Vinegar Hill had never been lucky.
Struggling to get my bearings, I lingered by a newsstand and read the headlines. “Four Hundred Men Answer Fake Help Wanted Ad. Riot Ensues.” “Funeral Planned for Lindbergh Baby.” “Commie Party Leads ‘March on Hunger.’” “Capone Starts Tax Evasion Sentence.” “German Nazis Assault Journalists.” “13 Million Out Of Work: Hoover Orders Wages/Hours Cut for Employed.”
The metal wheels of a trolley screeched and the electric line overhead sparked. The odor of scorched metal and burned oil filled the air. I hoisted up my suitcase and began the long trudge back to the only place I’d find a bed that night.
Back to Vinegar Hill.
Back to Mamie.
I tramped past the Glove-Grip Shoe Store, the Eureka Laundry, the Western Union office. I glanced at the line of phone booths inside and ached to call Sofie. I wanted to beg her to wave the magic wand of her money and family power and…?
And what? Rewrite the past I’d lied about? Even on Galveston there were limits to what the Amadeos could do. If they even wanted to do it.
The humidity thickened as I approached Buffalo Bayou. The air dragged on me more with every step I took.
Halfway across the Capitol Avenue Bridge, I stared down into the water. The muddy churn of the bayou was caught in the reflection of the bridge lights. The familiar oily rag/rotten egg smell of the refineries wafted up. The low blat of a freighter’s horn drifted in from the ship channel’s turning basin.
Dread settled over me as I recalled the last time I’d crossed this bridge heading toward Vinegar Hill. It was the day I’d graduated from high school and I had run out of time. I had to tell Mamie the secret I’d managed to keep from her: that I had won the scholarship she’d told me I’d never get.
I had to tell her that I was leaving.
I remembered my hand, slick with sweat, as I turned the knob on her bedroom door.
“Mamie—” I’d started, but stopped dead when I saw that my mother was bringing a long hatpin directly toward her eye. On its tip trembled a molten drop of jet-black Beadex. She was performing that most delicate of operations, the one that transformed her from an ordinary beauty into a matinee idol.
Mamie was beading her lashes.
The scent of her Shalimar perfume, combined with the sickly odor of Beadex melting in a tiny, battered pot perched over a burning candle, filled the small room. My mother sat on an upholstered stool in front of her vanity, her silk kimono printed with pink peonies, a present from the last “uncle,” sliding off her creamy shoulders. Without ever looking away from her reflection, Mamie caught my eye in the mirror, and demanded, “Are you trying to make me put my eye out?”
My world, my future, shrank down to the miniscule globe trembling on the end of Mamie’s hatpin. That globe contained all the worlds of fame, of adulation, that Mamie had ever dreamed of. The worlds that a woman as breathtaking as she deserved. She delivered the shimmering bead to the end of one single eyelash then started on the next bead for the next eyelash.
I took a seat on her bed and did the only thing allowed during this meticulous process: I watched.
The mirror was haloed by photos of Mamie. Most were head shots, each more luminously beautiful than the last, along with a few full-length portraits of Mamie in satin gowns that flowed over her like melted butter. Though she hadn’t worked since I had “wrecked her plumbing,” all of the images were printed with “Available for Bookings” and the name of one of the long-gone uncles.
Only one photo in the constellation orbiting her mirror wasn’t of my mother. In that single photo, my father stood all alone. He was the father who visited me in my dreams. Young and handsome. White tie and tails. Top hat. Forever reaching his white-gloved hand out to a partner. A partner who had been torn away.
Of course, Mamie would have ripped out any evidence of a rival. Even one who had been part of my father’s life long before she arrived.
I loved studying that photo while Mamie performed her lengthy “toilette.” My father had a smile that was both showstopping and, where it could have been cocky, was only kind. His dark hair was pomaded to a soft luster, parted in the middle and slicked down with the tiniest bit of a mischievous curl at the ends. The words “Dandy Denny Devlin and…” were written in old-timey lettering above his head. His partner’s name had been torn away. Beneath my father’s gleaming patent leather shoes was printed “Headliner with the F. Andrews Traveling Vaudevil—” The rest of that name, of my father’s life before Mamie, had been ripped away as well.
I had hazy memories of other photos from Dad’s career. In the earliest pictures my father had posed with a woman wearing a feathered headpiece like a circus elephant. Another partner sported an old-fashioned Gibson Girl hairdo. Later ones showed him glancing up at the camera with eyes smoldering like Valentino’s as he dipped his partner so low that her dark hair was a puddle of ink on the floor. There had been other partners. Other acts. There had been photos of my father holding me when I was a baby. I even vaguely recalled one of all three of us taken when I was a baby and my father was still healthy. All of us were smiling in that one. Even Mamie.
