The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

  From the other bed, Gert glared. What are you doing? she mouthed.

  Desperate to talk to someone—even Gert—I whispered, “Are you worried about all this business?”

  “No.” It was a lie. She was just annoyed with me for asking.

  “Don’t you want to graduate?” I said. “You’ve only got half a year left.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want a life, Winnie, a chance for something different. You’re not planning to hang around and marry some shoemaker, either, so don’t act like you are.”

  “How do you know?” I’d certainly never confided in her—we didn’t even like each other.

  She didn’t dignify this with a response, only said, “You think Birnbaum’s on the level?”

  “Hard to say. I’ve never met anyone like him. You?”

  “Oh, I’ve met plenty like him. They offer you something, but it’s only so they can get a payout themselves. At least he doesn’t hide it.”

  I ruminated on this a moment. “Gert? I don’t want to do it. I just want to stay in school.”

  In the blue-gray light I saw her eyes flash with fury. “Then you’ll never get out of here, and you’ll ruin it for the rest of us, too!” She rolled over and turned her back on me.

  The next morning Mr. Birnbaum returned with a contract, and Mother, Nell, and Gert signed it. Because Kit and I were minors, our signatures weren’t required. In fact, no one even asked our opinion on the matter. The entire course of my life changed without a single word of discussion.

  It had been almost two weeks since Dad’s accident. Mother wouldn’t take him to get the stitches out; she said he could damn well go by himself. She was disgusted with him for imperiling our family over a bar fight, certainly, yet she tied his shoes and buttoned his buttons, even undid his belt when he needed to use the bathroom. He never said a word of thanks. But then, Dad rarely said a word of anything if he wasn’t spoken to first.

  Besides, with her squeamish nature, it was no surprise she wouldn’t accompany him to the hospital. I had been the one to change his dressings, and I’ll admit the first look at all those black threads crisscrossing his fingers bloated with pus made me wince. But you get used to these things. At least I did.

  I knew what infection could do. Sometimes a woman who’d had a cesarean section would return to the hospital with red streaks up her belly, especially if she had no mother or sister to help her. One woman came in with an infected wound and a husband with a gash on his head. He’d tried to help, took one look, and fainted to the floor. The nurses snickered about that for weeks.

  I took Dad to Lourdes Hospital myself. I told him that I wanted to see the stitches come out, but I doubted they’d let me go in with him. “They’ll think I’m too young or squeamish, but I’m not.”

  When the nurse called his name, Dad took my hand and strode toward her. She was plump and plain, gripping his chart as if it’d been her best reason to get up that morning. A plain girl with a good figure gets along okay in this world; so does a plump girl with shiny hair and bright eyes, or some similar attractive combination. Both plain and plump can be a difficult hand of cards to play.

  “Your little girl will have to wait outside.” Her voice rang with officiousness.

  “She’s seventeen,” Dad said with as much firmness as he possessed, which is to say, not very much. “I get real anxious, and I might go a little haywire. She’ll help me stay calm.”

  The nurse shook her head. “I’m afraid that runs contrary to every rule—”

  Dad began to breathe quickly. “Oh dear . . . ,” he panted. “Oh my . . . ,” He mopped his brow, though there wasn’t a bead of sweat on it.

  “Now, now . . . ,” the nurse stammered. “All right, she can come.”

  He gave my hand a little squeeze, and I had to hold myself back from kissing his cheek.

  The doctor was pleased with the state of Dad’s wounds. “I see you’ve been keeping them clean and well dressed,” he said.

  “I have my Winnie to thank for that.” Dad patted my arm with his good left hand.

  The doctor gave me a nod. “You might consider a career in nursing, if you can’t find a man to marry you.”

  Standing beside him, the nurse’s face remained placid, but pink splotches arose on her neck. There was no ring on her finger, and I guessed that people were starting to call her an old maid behind her back. I also guessed that she was acutely aware of this possibility. I had a sudden inclination to pinch that doctor quite hard.

  When the doctor finished snipping at the black threads, my father’s hand seemed to have tiny railroad tracks running every which way, and his index finger was bowed crookedly toward the others. He couldn’t even make a fist. The doctor said he might still regain almost full use of his fingers, though his hand strength would never be the same. I was grateful for the doctor’s thoroughness and encouragement. But I still disliked him for the way he shamed that nurse.

  I suppose I felt a bit of worry, as well as indignation. I was small and slight, though not entirely without physical merit. I didn’t have Gert’s curves or citrus blond hair, but my nose was straight and my light brown hair curled enough not to look like a broom. Gert herself had once pronounced my green eyes “pretty, especially if you like the look of an empty bottle of ale.”

  Everyone likes to think they might be appealing to someone, somewhere, and hopes that person has all of his mental faculties, most of his teeth, and might even be kind and lovable, too. I had yet to find any evidence that this person existed for me, and I had my doubts about it. What did I have to offer, after all? I wasn’t beautiful or coy, and my vocabulary alone was enough to make most boys scratch the backs of their necks and eventually turn to talk to someone else.

  “Dad?” I said as we walked home. “How did you know you wanted to marry Mother?”

  A glimmer of a smile peeked out from his normally stoic expression. I couldn’t tell if it was happy or sad. Then he sighed. “Well, you know, I grew up in a pretty quiet place.”

  He’d told us about it when we girls had demanded stories of his boyhood. He was raised outside of Theresa, New York, in the far north of the state, which is to say (in the kindest possible terms) off the beaten path. His family’s farm never did that well, but mostly faltered along like a drunken monk—solemnly, with devotion, but without any actual direction in mind.

  “We Turners were a pretty quiet bunch,” he went on. “It was silence within stillness, and I guess I needed to find some noise. So I moved to Albany and met your mother. She was . . . well, maybe the word for her is boisterous.” It occurred to me that his choice of mate was the only truly complicated thing he’d ever done, and its repercussions were many.

  “And why . . . um, well, why do you think she . . . um . . .”

  He chuckled at my stammering. “Why did she marry me? Well, I suppose it started with your grandparents. They were very strict, never let the leash out. And your Mother . . . well, she needs a long leash, doesn’t she? Room to speak her mind, and have ideas. I give her that.” He raised his chin a little. “I have always given her that.”

  Before I could question him further, he asked, “So, how’s the act coming along? Think you’ve got a chance of performing at a real theatre?”

  As we’d seen at the Kalurah Talent Show, being good wasn’t always the definitive factor. “I suppose we have as much of a chance as any,” I said, trying to sound more hopeful than I truly felt.

  “That’s right,” he said, brightening a little. “You’ve been practicing so hard, and you all look so pretty. Mr. Birnbaum’s bound to find you something. He’s just got to.”

  I saw the worry pinching around his eyes. “Are we going to be all right, Dad?”

  “Oh, we’re just fine, honey,” he said. His tone was high but his face remained doubtful. “February’s rent is sitting right in our bank account.”

  “And March?”

  “Well, March is a long way off,
isn’t it? Anything can happen. Anything at all.”

  “Good news!” Mr. Birnbaum told us two days later, dropping by the house just after we’d gotten home from school. “I got you a half-week tryout. You’re the dumb act at Earlville, come Monday.”

  Dumb act? We shot surreptitious glances at one another.

  “It’s not dumb like stupid. It’s dumb like you don’t talk.” His gaze shifted from person to person, searching for comprehension. “You know, so folks taking their seats don’t miss anything.”

  “Won’t they be missing our act?” Kit asked.

  “Now look,” he said, “opener isn’t so bad. It’s better than chaser, at least.”

  Kit pondered this a moment. “Chaser?”

  He sighed, straining for patience. “The last act on the bill is the worst one—it chases people out so the stagehands can get the theatre ready for the next show. The chaser sees the backs of people’s heads as they leave. We call that “playing to the haircuts.’ But don’t worry, that’ll never be you girls.”

  An act whose sole purpose was to make the audience leave? I certainly hoped it would never be us.

  “Now listen,” Birnbaum went on. “John Castleberry’s the manager at the Earlville Opera House. He’s a tough customer, so keep your yaps shut, and don’t be late to rehearsal.”

  We’d be paid forty dollars for those three days in Earlville—about three weeks’ wages for our father at the shoe factory.

  We felt as if we’d struck gold.

  6

  GERT

  Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

  —Fanny Brice, comedian and singer

  Forty dollars! Mother sent Dad to the butcher for a beef shank and kidney to make a pie. Having the cash for real meat—even a cheap cut—made us feel like Rockefellers, and the luxury of it tasted even better than the meal itself. Except to Kit, of course, who made damned sure there were no leftovers.

  Earlville was sixty miles away. “We’ll have to stay in a hotel,” I said as we sat around the dinner table, feeling leisurely for the first time in forever. We guessed the cost would be about a dollar a night per room, and we’d need two rooms for three nights. That was six dollars right there. Add on train fare, meals, and Birnbaum’s ten percent, and suddenly our forty dollars was more like twenty-five. Still, it was big money for the Turners.

  “I’ll have to bring the baby,” said Nell.

  “Now, Nell,” Mother said. “We just can’t take him. With all his crying, he’ll get us thrown out. And besides, you don’t want him mixing with stage people—who knows what kinds of germs they pick up, hanging around dusty theatres, carousing till all hours.”

  “But, Mother,” Nell said, voice trembling. “He’s nursing.”

  “He’s six months now. He can drink cow’s milk like the rest of us. And Dad’ll take good care of him.” She cut her eyes toward our father. “What else has he got to do?”

  Nell clutched little Harry to her like he might vanish and hurried upstairs. I went up later to get my sweater and heard her crying. I crossed to the other bedroom and took Winnie’s sweater instead, so poor Nell could sob in private. I’d never want anyone to see me cry.

  Earlville is a flyspeck of a town, and the Opera House only holds about four hundred. It was pretty, I suppose—four stories of brick with little crisscrossed transoms above the windows—but we didn’t have time to stop and admire the architecture. We were late, and practically sprinted into the theatre only to find rehearsal in full swing.

  Onstage, a man in a clown costume bent over at the waist while his little dog jumped through a hoop he made with his arms. When the heavy theatre door banged shut behind us, he turned toward the sound, and the dog slammed into the side of his face. The dog yelped, the clown bellowed, “Goddamn it, Rover!” and a man in the front row stood up. That last item was the worst part.

  John Castleberry had a head the size of a bread box. It must have created a sort of megaphone effect, because when he boomed out, “What in the hell?” I felt the floorboards quiver.

  Mother hurried forward panting, “Mr. Castleberry, our deepest apologies! That Erie Railroad ought to have its trains melted for scrap, for all the service it provides! We—”

  Castleberry’s tree-limb-sized arm flew out, pointing at us. “Actors come in the stage door! They do not ever—ever—enter through the theatre doors.”

  We slunk back outside, around to the alley at the back of the building, and went in through a battered wooden door. There were no dressing rooms, so the backstage area was crowded with trunks and props and people packed into every corner.

  A man in a long-tailed tuxedo rubbed black polish onto his shoes, while his partner in a pale blue ball gown painted on gobs of heavy black eyeliner. I wondered if it took effort to blink. Mother saw this and beckoned us over for a recoating of makeup. “Will someone call us out to the stage?” I asked as she dusted my cheek with a cloud of rouge.

  “How am I to know?” Mother muttered back. “I’m just as new at this as you are, Gert.”

  We were the last to rehearse, and when I did my handsprings out onto the stage, I stared straight into the huge bread-box face of Mr. Castleberry, standing in the front row. He was scowling, but in the three beats I stood there with my arms outstretched, his face softened into something that looked like, with a little sunlight and water, it might grow into a smile someday.

  We didn’t make any mistakes, I’ll say that for us. After our curtsy we hustled offstage, panting with relief. Well, some of us were and some of us weren’t. Nell’s cheeks were sopping with tears. “I miss Harry,” she whispered through her silent sobs.

  “Oh no,” said Mother. “No, no! Don’t think of the baby or your milk will let down—you’ll ruin your costume!”

  “I can’t help it,” Nell whimpered. “I miss him so.”

  “Turn around quick,” said Mother. “Girls, hold up your coats.”

  We curtained Nell off from the rest of the performers, and she took down the top of her costume. Mother gave her a scarf to hold against her leaking bosoms while she cried.

  I stood there, arms high, creating a coat-and-human screen to hide Nell and her sorrow from the world, and wondered what it must feel like to love another person so much that your body takes up the job of loving, too, without your consent.

  Then I realized she’d said, “I miss Harry.” We always called the baby little Harry. We called his father . . . well, we didn’t call him anything at all. We didn’t speak of him; it was the only way to train your mind away from rebreaking your heart every moment of the day.

  Winnie shot me a look that said, This is never going to work.

  Finally, Nell quieted and pulled her costume back up. Kit scavenged a couple of stools for us to sit on. The stage manager tacked the order of acts to the board beside his office, and I walked toward the gaggle of actors jostling to see the lineup. Birnbaum had said that while we might be offered a particular spot, it could change without notice, based on the rehearsal, but also because of staging. Managers wanted rapid-fire timing, and would switch things up so there were no lulls in the program. Your spot was never your spot until the moment you walked onstage.

  “There are no guarantees in life,” Birnbaum had warned us. “And in vaudeville, even fewer.”

  I kept my chin high as I walked back to Mother and the girls. I didn’t want the other acts to see how bad I felt. When I reached our little circle, I murmured one word.

  “Chaser.”

  As we waited for the first real show of our vaudeville career to begin, Winnie pulled me aside. “What are we going to do about Nell?” she whispered.

  “Tell her to quit blubbering?” I said, only half kidding.

  “Gert, for goodness’ sake! She’ll fall to pieces completely if we don’t do something.”

  “Like what, genius?”

  “Like . . . like tell Mother to go home and get the baby.”r />
  I laughed out loud. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Fine.” She narrowed her bottle-green eyes at me. “If the act fails, and we get sent home to clean bedpans and serve sandwiches for the rest of our lives, don’t blame me.”

  I never hated that little smarty-pants more than when she was right. “Fine,” I said. “You tell Mother.”

  “And you back me up when she refuses.”

  But Mother didn’t fight us. In fact, she’d already thought of it. “We can’t have her ending up in a straitjacket,” she murmured. “The act will suffer, and God knows we don’t have the money for a sanitarium.” She hoped to be back with the baby before the theatre closed that night.

  “You could sleep at home and come back tomorrow morning,” Winnie suggested.

  “And miss the end of our first day in vaudeville?” said Mother. “Not on your life.”

  After she left, the theatre manager, Mr. Castleberry, came backstage, a well-gnawed cigar sticking out of his huge face. He gave us an up-and-down look and said, “Those your costumes?”

  No, I thought, we just walk around like this because we’re hoping to be brought up on indecency charges.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “They’re a mite short, is all, especially when you jump around and they fly up in the air. This ain’t New York City, ladies. Earlville is good, simple churchgoing folks.”

  His glare shifted from our legs to the couple behind us. “Delorme and Delorme?”

  “That’s us,” said the man with the tuxedo. He was somewhere in his late twenties, tall and thin, with dark wavy hair that fought the brilliantine he’d applied to tame it. His face was that earnest type, the kind that makes you think he’d never lied to his mother, not even once. His partner, the woman with the blue ball gown, was another sort altogether. As she leaned against him and squinted away from the bright stage lights, I guessed she’d told her share of fibs.