by Libba Bray
Whoever it was remembered Theta from her days on the Orpheum Circuit, when she played the vaudeville theaters all across the country as Little Betty Sue Bowers, “The Ringleted Rascal.” Betty Sue Bowers wore a pinafore dress, tap shoes, and sweet, girlish curls. Betty Sue Bowers had a stage mother from hell and, later, a handsome husband named Roy who took out his anger at the world on his young wife with his fists. And one night, Betty Sue Bowers had killed him with a power she didn’t know she had: a dangerous ability to start fires with her emotions. As far as anyone else knew, Betty Sue Bowers had also died in the inferno that night. They didn’t know that Theta had hopped a freight car out of Kansas, bound for the bright lights of Broadway. In New York City, Theta had met Henry, cut her hair, traded in Kansas homespun charm for sleek glamour, and become a reinvention: Theta Knight, Ziegfeld Follies girl.
Someone did, though. And now they were in her city, leaving her cryptic notes. Was it Mrs. Bowers? It would be just like her adoptive mother to try for a payday through blackmail. Could it be one of Roy’s former pals at the soda shop? What about the neighbors—would any of them have seen Theta running for her life toward the railroad tracks? (Not that any of the neighbors had ever bothered to come upstairs during the shouting and screaming; not one had ever asked about the bruises and black eyes.) Could one of the hoboes she’d shared the freight car with have told others? All it would take was one of them to see her face in the newspaper, so different but still a ghost of the old Betty left there—Say, doesn’t that look a little like…? It wouldn’t matter that Theta hadn’t meant to kill Roy and that she had very little memory of that night. The world would see a cold-blooded murderess. They’d call Roy a good fella who got involved with the wrong girl. She’d seen such things play out before. She knew the world was stacked against girls like her.
Theta finished her cigarette. She took a bath. Combed out her sleek bob and short bangs. She drew on her pencil-thin eyebrows and painted a Cupid’s bow mouth in crimson. As the dawn inched up along the Manhattan skyline, Theta chose her outfit—a deep blue silk dress, a long strand of knotted pearls, and a gray velvet cocoon coat with a fat fur-trimmed collar that she’d “borrowed” from the Follies costume shop for the day. She stuck out her hand for an imaginary shake. “How do you do?” she said in her smoky purr of a voice. “I am Miss Theta Knight.”
Yes. She was Theta Knight. Not Betty Sue Bowers. Nobody could threaten her back into being that girl. That girl was dead and buried. Theta Knight had a screen test today at Vitagraph. Theta Knight would get that contract and run all the way to Hollywood with Memphis if she had to. She took the elevator down to the lobby.
“Sure look nice today, Miss Knight,” the elevator operator commented.
“Thanks, Tom.”
“You going somewhere special?”
“Vitagraph,” Theta said, enjoying the feel of the word on her tongue.
“Oh, well, good luck. You might say a wish to Mr. Bennington on your way out, then.”
“Come again?”
“That picture of Mr. Bennington that hangs there in the hallway? I heard he looks after the Bennington guests if you ask him to.” Tom shrugged. “Can’t hurt. Here’s the lobby now.”
Theta stopped before the large framed photograph of a somber Reginald Bennington seated at a table in the dining room back when it had been a showplace and not just a shabby spot that served weak coffee. She’d passed the photograph daily, but never really thought to look at it. Reginald Bennington looked to be about sixty, with dark curly hair going to gray, and a salt-and-pepper beard and mustache. Put a cap on his head, and Theta could imagine him as the captain of a grand ship. There were all sorts of stories about him: He was a magician involved with the occult. He performed pagan ceremonies in the basement. He ran naked through Central Park. It was said that he’d had the Bennington constructed according to magical specifications, as both a beacon to the otherworldly and as a protection against evil. Theta glanced up and down the hall. Empty. Feeling the fool, she stepped forward. “Hiya, Mr. Bennington,” she said very softly. “Listen, I, uh, don’t know if you’re really in the wish-granting business, but if you are, I sure could use some luck today. Okay. Thanks. I’m Theta, by the way.”
Theta shifted from one foot to the other, waiting—for what, she couldn’t say. From his chair in the Victorian-appointed dining room, Mr. Bennington stared back, a lost relic from another generation.
“Yeah,” Theta said on a sigh. “It’s okay. I’m embarrassed for myself. You don’t have to say a word, pal.”
On her way out of the Bennington lobby—I am Theta Knight, I am Theta Knight, I am Theta Knight—Theta bumped into Miss Addie. The old woman looked terrible. Dark shadows ringed her bright eyes, and her frizzy white hair was more of a mess than usual.
“Oh, my dear, can’t you feel it?” Miss Addie said.
“Feel what?”
“Him. He’s coming. He’s coming for us. I fear we shall have to stage quite the battle to beat him this time, for he grows more powerful by the day,” Miss Addie said, her pitch rising in concert with her sparse eyebrows.
Theta fumbled nervously with her handbag. “Sorry. I-I’ve gotta ankle, Miss Addie.”
“Yes. Of course. You know there’s a ghost after you, my dear, don’t you?” Addie blurted.
“A ghost?” Theta said, her voice barely a whisper.
Miss Addie nodded. “It means you harm, I’m afraid. Be careful, my dear girl.”
I am Theta Knight.
Theta shook her head as she pushed angrily through the Bennington’s revolving door. “Terrific. This day just gets better and better.”
A BORN STAR
By eleven o’clock, Theta, Ling, Evie, and Mabel were huddled together in their seats on the elevated Brighton Beach line out to Brooklyn and Vitagraph Studios, hands clapped over giggling mouths as Evie kept everyone entertained with a risqué story about a secretary at WGI who’d been caught petting with an auditioning act.
“Well, she didn’t realize the man had a parrot who’d seen the whole thing—Polly wanted more than just a cracker, and how!” she said to scandalized laughter from Mabel and Ling.
The story was rude, and it was clearly shocking the Blue Noses within earshot, which, with Evie, was the point. Evie loved scandalizing the hypocrites, of course, but more than that, Theta knew, Evie was telling her naughty stories to distract Theta from the butterflies in her stomach. And after her strange morning asking the spirit of Reginald Bennington for luck and then getting a creepy warning from Adelaide Proctor, Theta needed it.
“Brooklyn. Huh. It’s like being in Kansas,” she said, peering out the window at the borough’s low, sleepy houses flying past. Up ahead, she could see a tall smokestack at the corner of Avenue M and Fourteenth Street with black letters down the side spelling out VITAGRAPH.
The girls crowded together at the window to get a good look. The train pulled into the station, and they stepped out onto the platform. “Hold on,” Evie said, fluffing the fur collar to frame Theta’s face. “There. You look like a proper film star now.”
Theta put a hand to her fluttering stomach. “Well. Here goes nothing.”
“Sure is impressive,” Mabel said as they approached the giant brick studio, which took up an entire block. “You think we’ll see any movie stars? Like Harold Lloyd. Oh, I love him!”
“Harold Lloyd!” Evie and Theta complained together before bursting into giggles.
Mabel grinned. “I like his big round glasses! Fine. Who do you like?”
“Gary Cooper, of course,” Evie said, swooning. “Or Ramon Novarro.”
The girls all sighed except for Ling.
“You don’t find him handsome?” Mabel prodded.
Ling made a face. “He’s hammy. I like Anna May Wong.”
Mabel laughed. “No. I mean who do you like?” She waggled her eyebrows as if Ling hadn’t understood the first time.
Anna May Wong, Ling thought, the movie star’s beautiful face s
wimming up so strongly in Ling’s mind that she hoped the embarrassment couldn’t be read on her face.
“Albert Einstein,” Ling said, and pushed forward on her crutches.
“I don’t think he counts,” Mabel said, following after.
“He does in my book.”
Outside, a swarm of Erasmus Hall High School girls milled in front of the studio gate. They were doing their best posing, but trying not to look too obvious about it.
“Look at that,” Evie said, and Theta knew whatever came next would be a little catty and probably true. “They all hope if they pose and sigh and bat their peepers, they’ll be picked out of the crowd to become the next Norma Talmadge. I’ve got news for them: Not everybody is Norma Talmadge. Excuse us, please,” Evie announced with a circus barker’s flair as she parted the girl-throng. “Miss Theta Knight of the Follies coming through for her screen test. Excuse us, please, thank you, thank you.”
A guard waited at the front gate. He frowned. “Only Miss Knight is expected.”
“Oh, but I’m her sister and her chaperone,” Evie bluffed, putting a hand to her chest as if the idea of Theta going into the Hollywood viper pit unaccompanied was unthinkable. “And this lovely lady is her secretary, Miss Ling Chan, and this is her personal seamstress, Miss Mabel Rose.”
“I’ve made all of Miss Knight’s costumes for the Follies,” Mabel said, falling right in. “I love to sew.”
The guard eyed Ling suspiciously. “And I love to… secretary.”
“Fine. Go in,” the weary guard said, ushering them inside the gates of Brooklyn’s famous film lot.
“I love to secretary?” Mabel whispered to Ling.
“We’re in, aren’t we?” Ling groused.
Theta gawked at the many painted sets and the tall, bright lights, the movie cameras perched like giant birds around the lot. They passed a shop where carpenters hammered away at sets and a costume shop where the sewing machines revved. Actors milled about, drinking coffee, smoking, and going over their lines. A tall, somber-looking man walked past.
“Oh, jeepers! That’s Boris Karloff!” Mabel said excitedly. “I loved him in Flaming Fury!”
“For a socialist, you sure do know a lot about movie stars,” Ling said. She’d stopped to examine a recording machine of some sort. She couldn’t help but fiddle with the gears to see how it worked. A man in a pair of plus fours came racing toward her, his ridiculous puffy trouser legs waffling like a bellows. “Say, what are you doing? Now, come on, sweetheart, come away from there!”
“I like machines,” Ling said quietly.
“She’s very good with machines,” Mabel confirmed.
“That’s no place for ladies,” the man said. “We have a wonderful costume shop if you’d like to visit.”
Ling narrowed her eyes. “Perhaps you could see them about a pair of proper pants, then.”
“I think you might’ve made him angry,” Mabel said with a glance over her shoulder as they walked away.
“Good. Do you know why I like machines?” Ling said.
“Why?”
“They’re not nearly as annoying as people.”
They caught up to Evie and Theta.
“I’m sorry,” a cameraman told them. “But you ladies will have to wait out by the gate until the screen test is over.”
“Good luck, Theta!” Evie called. The girls waved as the cameraman showed Theta onto a stage decorated like a living room, where a camera and several lights had been positioned.
“Doesn’t she look just like a star?” Mabel said wistfully.
“Have a seat right here, sweetheart,” the director said, ushering Theta to a chair beside a table displaying a photograph of a handsome soldier. “You know Warner Brothers owns this whole kit and caboodle now. Do well here, and you’ll be out in Hollywood in no time, kid.”
“Swell,” Theta said, swallowing down her nerves.
“You know what’s coming next, don’tcha?” the makeup man said, touching up Theta’s powder. “Talkies. Warner Brothers—they’ve got us experimenting with sound out here. I hear Al Jolson is gonna sing in a picture!”
“Is that a fact?” Theta said, though she couldn’t imagine anybody talking in a movie. People would probably laugh it out of the theater.
“You ready, sweetheart?” the director asked from behind the camera.
“Sure.”
The director barked out orders, and Theta followed every command.
“Not quite so much, sweetheart. This isn’t like the stage. The camera does some of the work for you,” he said.
“Oh. Got it,” Theta said, even though she didn’t. She was acting, just like she’d been doing her whole life. But she’d figure it out. Theta was a great performer; she knew that. So many performers needed the audience’s love and approval. Theta didn’t need it, and that seemed to be the very thing that drove audiences wild: They wanted what they felt they couldn’t have. When her stage mother, Mrs. Bowers, had forced Theta to smile and curtsy for all the managers and vaudevillians on the Orpheum Circuit, she’d told her again and again, You’re nobody without them and me. You belong to us. Then Roy had come along and told Theta she belonged to him. But when Theta was onstage, she was hers alone. There, no one could have Theta Knight without her permission.
“Okay, sweetheart! Give me those sad peepers!” the director shouted from behind his camera.
Theta gave a deep sigh, letting her shoulders sag as she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead.
“That’s it! Now I want you to show me your bear cat, but not too hot. You still want the Sunday school crowd thinking you’re pure. That’s the trick: Make ’em want you, make ’em think they’ve got a chance at making whoopee; then show ’em you’re strictly the marrying kind. Think you can do that?”
Theta resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Can I do that? Pal, that’s what every girl learns along with her ABCs,” she mumbled. “Just keep that contraption pointed at my face.”
Theta lowered her head and looked up longingly at the camera with her soulful brown eyes. Lips parted slightly, she stared back at the camera as if it were her lover while she crept a hand up her neck in a desperate caress. She closed her eyes and shuddered. Then, just when she was on the brink of wanton, she clutched the picture of her soldier boy to her chest, kissed his face gently, put it down, and clasped her hands in prayer, beseeching the heavens for his safe return.
“You and your lover have been separated by cruel fate! You fear you will never see him again!” the director yelled.
She kept her eyes trained upward and thought of Memphis. His sweet, slow grin. The way he looked at her sideways from under cover of those long lashes, his head slightly bowed, like he was almost embarrassed by how much he liked her. When Theta was with Memphis, she felt as safe and happy as she could allow herself to be. She could be not just herself but all her selves. So why was she so afraid to tell him about the fire that burned inside her? About Roy and Kansas and the menacing notes that had been left for her? It was like being in a dream and reaching for something that was always just beyond your grasp. Would she always be reaching for a happiness she couldn’t hold?
A single tear coursed down Theta’s cheek, and then she was crying openly.
“That’s incredible,” the cameraman said. “Oh, baby. Keep it coming.”
“And cut!” the director shouted. He applauded enthusiastically. “Astounding.”
“Big word. Was I good or bad?” Theta said, wiping her eyes. They didn’t need to know how real it had all been.
“Good. Very, very good.”
Theta sniffed up the last of her tears and took out a cigarette. “Swell. Anybody got a light?”
“Miss Knight. How’d you like a contract at one hundred and fifty per week?” the director said.
Theta’s mouth hung open. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Forget the light. Got a pen?”
The cameraman finally offered Theta a
match. “Honey, you should see yourself through that thing. Why, it’s like you’re lit from the inside.”
“Oh, um. Is that good, too?” Theta’s hands trembled on her cigarette, but at least they didn’t feel warm. Yet.
“You kidding me? It’s better than good. You’re a born star.”
A born star, Theta thought on her way out of Vitagraph Studios, past the revving sewing machines and hammering carpenters engaged in the world of make-believe.
A born star.
For no reason she could name, she stopped and said a silent thank-you to Mr. Bennington. “Just in case,” she told herself.
“Well?” Evie said when Theta exited the gate again onto Avenue M.
The girls rushed forward, eager for news. Theta decided to keep them in suspense. She sighed heavily. “Oh, well…”
The girls glanced nervously at one another.
“Oh, gee. Oh, Theta, why, you’re the darlingest girl in the world! If they don’t want you, why, why, they’re chumps!” Evie declared.
Mabel and Ling nodded decisively.
Theta burst into a grin. She struck a pose like a proper motion picture vamp. “Oh, well… it looks like somebody’s making pictures with Vitagraph!”
With a collective, delighted clamor, Mabel and Evie crowded Theta, hugging and congratulating, while Ling stood at a comfortable distance.
“Congratulations. You should be very proud,” Ling said evenly.
Mabel laughed. “I believe that’s the Ling Chan Hip, Hip, Hooray.”
“One hundred and fifty clams per week!” Theta crowed to her friends. They had spread out in the mostly empty street as if, for just a while, they owned it. “We’ll be living like sheiks! I’m gonna get me a mink! And I’m gonna buy Henry that piano, finally.”
“A mink-lined piano!” Evie said, looping her arm through Theta’s, and Theta knew that this was a day she’d remember forever.
Mabel giggled. “Every single key!”
