The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

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  FOR BRIANNA, LIAM, NICK, AND QUINN, WITH GREAT LOVE,

  AND FOR FRED DELORME AND MARGARET DELORME DACEY,

  NOW DANCING IN THE HEAVENS WITH STARS FOR THEIR FOOTLIGHTS.

  Vaudeville was the major source of entertainment in America from the 1880s through the 1920s. A vaudeville show was comprised of between seven and fifteen separate unconnected acts—anything from juggling to short plays, comedy routines to performing animals, edifying lectures to singalongs. Even small towns often had vaudeville theatres, and larger cities might have upward of five. In 1914, there were approximately fifty vaudeville venues in New York City alone.

  Full-length plays, often referred to as “legitimate” theatre, tended to be more expensive and highbrow. Burlesque was generally considered too risqué for women and children. Other forms of mass entertainment were still in their infancy: movies were black-and-white, and silent; “talkies” (movies with synchronized sound) weren’t commonplace until the late 1920s; and the first radio broadcasts didn’t begin until 1920. Until then, if you wanted to be entertained, you went to a live show.

  For most of America, that meant vaudeville.

  1

  WINNIE

  Everything I know I learned in vaudeville.

  —James Cagney, singer, dancer, and actor

  Nothing good comes from a knock in the middle of the night.

  The windows rattled in their casings as someone banged on the front door. I roused myself from sleep, thinking that between the banging and the cold, the glass would surely break. As it turned out, mere broken glass would’ve been a blessing.

  I heard Mother’s thumping footsteps in her bedroom below, through the kitchen, and across the living room, and I scurried downstairs to meet her, followed by my older sisters, Gert and Nell. Mother was at the front window, her back hunched against the cold, the few threads of silver in her hair made eerily iridescent by the streetlamp. She peered through the curtains she’d made from cut-rate lace. They did nothing to keep in the heat, but she said they gussied up the place, and the occasional hole in the pattern made it easier to peek through if you didn’t want someone to know you were watching.

  She stood motionless, like a rabbit after the snap of a twig, trying to determine whether the door should be opened or, as was sometimes the case in our neighborhood, a chair wedged under the knob. “Nobody there,” she whispered to us without turning.

  “Where’s Dad?” Nell asked, wrapping her thin arms around her.

  “He went out. Got his temper all twisted up about Prohibition.”

  “His temper?” Gert’s tone conveyed the skepticism we all felt.

  Dad was the most placid man we knew. Yet his voice did take on a slightly brittle edge at the mention of the rapidly approaching Prohibition Act. He didn’t tend toward drunkenness himself, nor to public consumption in rowdy beer halls, preferring to sit home with his Blatz beer and sip quietly in the midst of his own rowdy family. He could not understand why Congress had taken this away from all the well-meaning souls whose lives were speckled with hardships of every variety, and who just wanted to enjoy the gentle lulling effect of a libation or two in the evening.

  Prohibition was passed on January 16, 1919, and the next day the Binghamton Press in Upstate New York, where we lived, had extra-large-type headlines:

  U.S. IS VOTED BONE-DRY

  Though it would not go into effect for another year, once he saw that headline, Dad had been even quieter than usual.

  That tar-black night, Mother opened the front door with the three of us, now joined by our youngest sister, Kit, crowding behind her. What we saw, we’d never seen before.

  Dad leaned against the doorjamb, blinking slowly, a wobbly half smile on his lips. Blood seeped from crooked gashes on his right hand, bone visible at two of his knuckles. His fingers were bent at unnatural angles as if they’d been smashed under the heel of a boot.

  He stumbled through the open door, and Mother lurched forward to catch him. With uncharacteristic care, she half guided, half carried him to a kitchen chair. Kit brought a pot of warm soapy water and a rag, and I dabbed at the jagged, pulpy wounds to get the grit out.

  Then Mother’s temper set in, and her hands balled into fists at her hips. “What in the name of holy hell happened to you! Can’t you go out and tie one on like any other man without disaster striking?”

  Dad seemed as surprised as we all were at the state of his hand. “There was a fight . . .”

  “Frank Turner, when have you ever, in all your born days, gotten into a fight?”

  “Wasn’t me. Coupla guys at the tavern,” he slurred, shaking his head mournfully. “Tried to stop it . . .”

  Mother’s face twisted in disgust. “Of all the stupid—”

  Gert cut her off, ice-blue eyes flashing with annoyance. “It doesn’t matter how it happened, Mother,” she muttered. “It only matters that it can be fixed.”

  Mother hustled Dad and me through the dark streets toward Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, our breath pluming like frozen feathers into the air, and I practically had to skip to keep up. I had an after-school job as a nurse’s aide in the Lourdes maternity ward; Mother brought me along in case my experience or connections, lowly as they were, might come in handy.

  They did not. I recognized a nurse in the Emergency Department, but she didn’t have a reciprocal response. Without my uniform, she likely mistook me for a child, as my small stature often prompted people to do.

  As for experience, I could have discussed any number of baby delivery procedures (having shut my mouth and listened carefully in the nurses’ break room as often as I could justify my presence there), but thankfully broken bones and torn tendons were not issues we generally faced on the maternity ward.

  The Emergency Department halls were quiet, save for the murmurs of worried family members or nurses checking vitals, white curtains billowing with their comings and goings. The place smelled strongly of carbolic, and I knew some poor nurse’s aide like myself had recently cleaned up a mess of some kind. I looked down at my hands, dry and cracked around the knuckles. At seventeen years old, I had already scrubbed away a lifetime’s worth of bodily events.

  We were ushered behind one of those curtains, and the doctor, an elderly fellow with a tentacular bush of gray hair, applied shots of Novocain to numb Dad’s hand. He then began the lengthy task of stitching up all that damage. The old doctor’s fingers trembled as he stabbed the needle under the skin and tugged it out on the other side, the stitches growing increasingly more uneven. Though I was a poor seamstress, I had the absurd notion to offer to help. Dad lay on the gurney with his eyes closed. Mother always went gray as old bedclothes at the sight of a pinprick, so she’d stayed in the waiting room. I was the sole witness to the doctor’s skill slowly wilting like a dying flower.

  After he’d bandaged up Dad’s hand, the old doctor said, “Now say your prayers that the nerve damage isn’t too bad, and there’s a reasonable chance he might recover full use.”

  This was the one moment when I did prove useful. I asked, “What are the chances that he won’t recover full use?”

  The doctor blinked at me once or twice as if just now noticing my presence. “Well, I suppose there’s a reasonable chance of that, too.”

  The sun was just beginning to lick up through the treetops in the Floral Park Cemetery as we walked home.
Mother was quiet, but her fury pulsed like aftershocks from an earthquake. Father, now sober enough to suffer both the physical pain and the mental anguish caused by what he’d done, was also mute. For myself, I vacillated between the childish belief that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they seemed, and the adult knowledge that they could hardly be any worse.

  Mother suddenly turned on Dad. “You’re a boot stitcher, for godsake!” she hissed.

  My father worked at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory. He spent each day with a large metal needle in one hand, wrenching it through stiff soles and thick leather uppers grasped in the other. I’ll make it plain: there is no such thing as a one-handed boot stitcher. In fact, in a shoe factory, there is no manual labor that can be done by a man with a crushed dominant hand.

  When we opened the front door, my sisters were crowded into the kitchen. Nell poured coffee from the percolator. Kit sat at the gate-leg table eating a soft-boiled egg; Gert ironed her shirtwaist. To their credit, no one gasped when they saw Dad’s hand wrapped up like a mummy.

  Then Dad spoke. “I . . . I’m sorry . . . ,” he stammered, eyes damp with remorse. My throat clenched in sympathy. Nell bit at the inside of her lip, Gert’s nostrils flared, and Kit inhaled a childish little sniffle.

  Mother let her hand rest on Dad’s shoulder, perhaps in acceptance of his apology, or perhaps it was simply to steady herself. After a moment, she gave him a little push toward their room behind the kitchen. “Go on and get some rest,” she said, her voice hoarse with exhaustion.

  She dropped onto one of the mismatched chairs and Nell put a mug of hot coffee in front of her. Mother took a sip, and we waited—for the solution to this seemingly insurmountable problem, or for her to howl like a wounded animal and throw her mug against the wall.

  I don’t believe I would have been truly surprised by almost anything she could have said or done in that moment. She could have told us she was selling our father into indentured servitude to pay the bills, and I wouldn’t have been truly shocked.

  She stared menacingly at the frost lacing the kitchen window, and we could almost see the schemes she silently conjured as they took shape and then were cast aside. Mother is a force, sometimes for our betterment, sometimes for retribution, and sometimes simply for her own entertainment. We waited, barely breathing, for her word.

  Her expression shifted almost imperceptibly, from desperation to determination. What she said was this:

  “Be ready to work on the act when you get home from school. And I mean work.”

  That was unexpected.

  2

  GERT

  If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.

  —Milton Berle, comedian and actor

  The act.

  It was Mother’s idea, and so of course I hated it. At first.

  It was one of the few things we Turner girls had in common: no desire to perform. We were never the types to twirl around or sing as we hung the washing. Honestly, I don’t even hum.

  Mother, on the other hand, had always wanted to be onstage. Her grand plans for stardom had been tut-tutted away by her parents, then she got married quickly—very quickly—and had Nell right away. She made her bed, is all I’ll say about that.

  “Gert, the way you turn heads, you’d be the star of any show,” she’d whisper in my ear. Of course, there was no money for dance or voice lessons, so she didn’t have the means to bully us into it, which she certainly would’ve done, given the dough. Lord knows Dad couldn’t have stopped her. Then again, Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders probably couldn’t have, either.

  I’ll give her this: she always had her nose to the wind, sniffing out ways to improve our station in life. Once it was aprons fashioned like a cigarette girl’s outfit in a swanky dinner theatre. She sewed them in black satin, with cinched waists and darts to make plenty of room at the bosom. We hawked them door to door, wearing them as we went. “Like models,” she said.

  I had the most success when a husband answered the door. I’d slide a hand down over my hip and say, “Wouldn’t you like to come home to your wife cooking dinner in this?” He’d fork over the dollar, barely remembering to ask for change, and I’d beat a quick exit to the sidewalk, taking care to pinch the boredom from my cheeks before I rang the next fellow’s bell.

  “Gert’s my top seller,” Mother announced one night, trying to stir up sisterly competition.

  “No surprise,” Kit had muttered. She was thirteen years old and almost six feet tall, so her figure didn’t exactly lend itself to fashion sales. With her longish face, big brown eyes, and unruly brown mane, she looked like a baby giraffe.

  As for Winnie, I nearly laughed out loud when Mother found her with a stack of unsold aprons behind a tree, reading a mouse-nibbled copy of Anne of Green Gables.

  “What are you doing with that old book?” Mother snapped. “You’ve read it so many times it’s a wonder there’s still ink on the pages!”

  “That’s all right, Mother,” I said. “Winnie wasn’t selling many anyhow. She doesn’t have enough up front to advertise their best feature.” Seventeen years old and she was still the size of an underfed fifth-grader. Her face had a childish sweetness, but her green eyes always seemed to be squinting at something—a book, her homework, or me when she didn’t get my humor.

  Mother let her be after that, but did I get any thanks from Winnie? Not a whisper.

  Aprons were going like hotcakes (thanks mainly to my sales strategy) until the president of the St. James Ladies’ Guild accused Mother of trying to turn Johnson City into one big cathouse. Sales slowed to a dribble. Murderous as a jilted bride, Mother shoved the yards of black satin she’d bought up into the attic. It sat there bunched like a panther ready to strike.

  The idea for the sister act came to her like a brick through the window in September 1918. Of course it didn’t include our oldest sister, Nell. She was married and living in an apartment the size of a hatbox a couple of blocks away, honorably discharged from Mother’s army of foot soldiers. To clinch her escape, she’d just given birth to a fat baby boy who, if he wasn’t sleeping or nursing, was bawling his brains out. Somehow he was beautiful, though, I suppose simply because he was ours.

  A vaudeville act, for cripes’ sake. How I rolled my eyes at that.

  “What do you think?” Mother whispered as a three-girl tap-dancing act shuffle-hop-stepped their way across the stage. “You could learn that, easy as pie.”

  We were at the Stone Opera House in Binghamton, in plush velvet front-row seats for once instead of in the gallery up by the rafters, which smelled of workingman’s sweat and cheap pomade. We loved vaudeville—who didn’t?—but we didn’t always have the two bits to go. Once Mother had her bright idea, we ate less and went more often. It was research, she said. Stealing was more like it.

  The tap dancers belted out a whiny version of “Frankfurter Sandwiches” and tried not to maul one another with their metal-tipped shoes. “You know I can’t carry a tune,” I said.

  “Winnie’s voice isn’t bad,” Mother countered. “You could sing quietly.”

  I crossed my arms. “Maybe I won’t sing at all.” I saw Winnie shift in her seat.

  “They look kind of ridiculous,” she said to Kit, and Kit nodded.

  And that’s how it was. Clearly they would rely on me to be the brightest, shiniest star of our little three-girl galaxy. Well, if I’m to shoulder the weight, I thought, it better be something less embarrassing than singing stupid songs about cheap food.

  Mother huffed and glared back up at the stage.

  The next act was a fat woman in a black dress the size of a deflated hot air balloon. She’d taught six white rats to do tricks. For a finale they scuttled up through her dress and out the sleeves to perch on her arms. She shimmied, and they all stood up on their hindquarters. Then one of the rats fell off—now I see it was a gag—and ran full tilt to the edge of the stage toward us. Thinking I was about to have vermin clawing up my shirtwaist, I screamed so
loud I could’ve knocked the glass windscreen out of every car within four blocks. The audience roared with laughter, the rat ran back to its mistress, and she curtsied without losing a single rodent.

  Mother glanced at us, eyebrow raised. Shameless, I tell you.

  “Absolutely not!” I said. Mother, of course, looked to Winnie for reinforcement, because she never defied her.

  “How would you actually train rats?” Winnie asked. “It seems like it might take a while.”

  I suppose it did the trick, because Mother sighed and sat back in her seat. But it wasn’t exactly a show of sisterly support, either. Winnie could never just say no and let the chips fall as they might. She always had some high-minded reason why, and it made me look like a tantrum-throwing child by comparison.

  The next act was a regurgitator. Bloated and barrel-chested, the man swallowed things—a goldfish or a hard-boiled egg, shell and all—and then heaved them back up. When the egg came up, his assistant rinsed it in water, cracked the shell, and ate it to prove it was real. When the fish came up, it went right into a bowl of water and darted crookedly around its little glass prison.

  Thankfully, Mother didn’t even glance over after the regurgitator. Sometimes I wondered exactly how far she would go to make us a success, but apparently upchucking household items was a step too far. On that day, at least. On another day, she might’ve found it perfectly reasonable. Fickle as young love, our mother.

  She never wavered about Dad, though, always poking at him to do better at the factory. “Your damned paycheck is a mortifying pittance!” she’d rail.

  “It’s enough, Ethel,” he’d say. Then he’d lean as close to the dented metal horn of his phonograph as humanly possible without actually climbing into the thing. All he wanted was his house warm, his beer cold, and his phonograph needle sharp so he could play his Enrico Caruso records at a volume just above what Mother could bear. By which I mean in any way audible.