by Juliette Fay
I shrugged.
“I think you should go see him.”
I nearly fell off the trunk. “Go see him? You were the one who told me not even to write!”
She lowered her eyes. “I may have been wrong about that.”
“Oh, Nell,” I snapped angrily. “How am I supposed to face him now? And what would I say? “I know it’s been eight long months, and you clearly don’t care about me anymore, but I thought I’d travel several hundred miles to drop in and say hello anyway’?”
Her gaze flicked up to mine and held it. “I’m sorry if I gave the wrong advice. I truly thought it was best at the time, and he’d write to you when he was ready.” She sighed. “People just don’t always do what you expect them to do.”
As if that wasn’t the understatement of the year.
I let my temper cool a minute before responding. If excruciating pain had taught me anything, it was not to spew out all the vitriol in your head in the heat of the moment. Even a nurse who understands the nature of her work will take offense when you yell that she’s a ham-handed incompetent after she removes a stuck dressing and peels open a newly formed scar. “Nell, he doesn’t want to see me,” I said evenly. “If he did, he could’ve gotten on a train any day of the week.”
“That may be true,” she said. “But I’m not concerned with what he does or doesn’t want. I care about you, and what you want. I think you want—need—to find out why he never tried to contact you, and face-to-face is the best way to do it. We’re playing the Orpheum in Boston in a couple of weeks. You could take the train and meet us there.”
“You’re actually advising me to confront him, when no good can come of it.”
“Yes,” she said, meeting my steely gaze with her own. “For your own peace of mind.”
I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “When.”
“The week of July eighth.”
My mind reeled at the thought of facing him. How would I even find him? He’d once named the street where he lived. A funny name for a road . . . a planet? Moon Street.
“If you’re going to see him, there’s something you should know.”
He’s married. He’s dead. He moved back to Italy. The mind will come up with some pretty far-fetched ideas when faced with a comment like “There’s something you should know.”
“What?” I asked.
“Winnie . . . Lucy didn’t make it.”
“Home?”
“No.” Nell took my hand and squeezed it. “She didn’t live. It was the smoke. Even at the hospital, they couldn’t revive her.”
I clutched Nell’s arm, gasping at the incomprehensibility of it. “Oh, God, no!” And then something else hit me, and my blood nearly boiled. “Why in holy hell didn’t any of you tell me?”
Nell sighed, and I knew she was bearing the brunt of what was likely Mother’s decision. Or Gert’s. Or some consensus they’d all come to while I writhed in pain.
“It was too much,” said Nell. “You were clinging to life. Joe was gone, the act was over. We didn’t think you could take one more tragedy. And then you got better, and you didn’t ask.”
“Didn’t ask? I didn’t know to ask! In fact, you all lied about it! You said he’d taken her back to Boston.”
“He did.”
I felt my heart halt in my chest.
Her body. He’d taken her body back to Boston.
42
GERT
I try to bring the audience’s own drama—tears and laughter they know about—to them.
—Judy Garland, singer and actress
The guilt. It was like a starving animal, gnawing at my gut. I should have been there instead of playing my little game of free drinks. Instead of watching girls take their clothes off while men rattled the newspapers in their laps. I would have gotten Kit and Lucy out.
Nell felt it, too, though unlike me, she’d had every good reason to be out of the building, with poor Harry wailing and coughing. Mother—who knows? I’m sure she felt bad that she was star-worshipping fat Trixie Friganza instead of dragging those poor girls from a burning building. But Mother is Mother. We all know remorse isn’t one of her long suits. It’d be like wishing champagne flowed from the kitchen spigot. Go on and wish all you want. Won’t make a lick of difference.
Besides, she was the one who got Nell and Fred back on the road. “You’re not doing Winnie any good sitting around the hospital,” she insisted, which was true. And she was the one who hounded Birnbaum until they had a nice long tour set up. Naturally, they’d need Mother to come along and watch the baby.
I saw her face when she looked at Winnie, though. She’d always been afraid of fire, and now her worst nightmare had come true. Or almost—at least Kit and Winnie were still with us. But seeing their pain was truly more than she could take.
We all wanted our version of freedom, every last one of us.
For me, it helped to sit there with Winnie as she endured the unendurable, squeezing her one good hand with my one good one. Together we made a whole person.
I caught her. And so did my collarbone, shoulder, and wrist, all of which broke. There was so much plaster, sometimes I wondered if there was still an arm underneath it all. Except of course when it itched, and I wanted to cut the damn thing off and be done with it. Then I’d look at Winnie, and hate myself all over again.
I often read Variety while she slept. A week after the fire, I saw the notice.
BENNY WHEELER DIES ONSTAGE
Benny Wheeler, of the comedy duo Case and Wheeler, suffered a heart attack at the Lotus Theatre in Sheridan, Wyoming, and was pronounced dead on the scene. His partner, Nat Case, said he hadn’t been feeling well, but wanted to go on. He died while taking his bows. Mr. Case will conduct auditions for a replacement after an appropriate period of mourning.
I never told anyone. It would’ve been more than my sisters could bear. As it was, I had to go back to my hospital bed, bury my head under the covers, and pretend to sleep for hours after I read it. I didn’t want them to see me weeping.
That’s when I decided we wouldn’t tell Winnie about Lucy.
“Oh, Gert,” Nell said. “She’ll be so angry when she finds out we didn’t tell her.”
“How will she ever know?”
“Joe will contact her eventually.”
“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. Either way, she can’t take one more piece of bad news. Not right now. Not while she’s fighting for her life.” I turned to Kit. “And you’d better not let it slip, either, not if you care about her.”
Kit’s eyes began to leak, of course, which they did anytime Lucy’s name was mentioned. She hadn’t been able to get Lucy out, either. We had all failed that poor girl—Joe most of all, which is why I was pretty sure he’d never contact Winnie. He was only at the hospital for a few hours when Lucy and Winnie were brought in, but it was long enough for me to see how deep his self-hatred ran.
Guilt and shame. The only one of us who didn’t visibly stagger under that burden was Mother. Badgering Birnbaum, quibbling with the hospital about every bill, packing Kit off to Johnson City, and ordering Nell to pull herself together so she could work, Mother kept herself too busy to wallow in regret. To be honest, I’m thankful for that. Once again, Ethel Turner’s grit and smarts saved the family from utter ruin.
“You’ll stay here with her,” Mother told me as she latched up her trunk and doled out ten dollars—probably her last—along with the name of a boardinghouse a couple of blocks away. “And you’ll have to get a job.” She eyed the sling around my shoulder. “Get rid of that thing or no one will hire you.”
She didn’t say it particularly nicely, but she was right. No one did hire me. The cast was off, but my arm was still too weak to wait tables, much less do a handspring. What kind of work could I do? I put on my best dress and went to The Gaiety.
“I’m looking for Nils Magnusson,” I said to one of the stagehands.
“Isn’t every girl?” His eyes
crawled all over me like an octopus.
I drilled him with a cold glare. “What was your name? I’m sure he’d like to know.”
Suddenly I was being politely escorted to the theatre manager’s office. Nils was seated, squinting through a glass eyepiece at some sort of ledger, while the manager stood by, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Nils looked up. “Why, hello there. Bertha, was it?”
“Gert,” I said. “Gert Turner. I’m here for a job.”
He smiled the kind of smile I hate. The kind that says they have the upper hand. “What kind of job were you looking for?”
I kept my chin high so he wouldn’t know how desperate I was. “Anything but onstage.”
43
WINNIE
Never place a period in your life where God only meant to place a comma.
—Gracie Allen, actress and comedian
I got off the train at North Union Station on Causeway Street with a pit the size of a granite quarry in my stomach. I had told myself over and over that I’d already lost him. The only thing I was here for was to express my condolences about Lucy.
Well, not quite the only thing.
“You have to ask,” Nell had said about a dozen times before she’d left Johnson City two weeks before. “He’s not going to offer up an explanation out of nowhere.”
Why didn’t you write to me?
I know you must have been overcome with grief.
I understand that I’m not the same girl you loved. I wouldn’t have held you to anything.
But couldn’t you have written to find out what had become of me? To offer your support and good wishes? Wasn’t I important enough to you even for that courtesy?
That’s what I’m here for, I reminded myself all the way down Causeway Street. An answer. Nothing more.
Moon Street wasn’t hard to locate. I needed only to find someone who spoke English, and I was soon walking down Prince Street, past four- and five-story brick apartment buildings, some with copper bay windows jutting out over the narrow cobblestone street. I passed St. Leonard’s Church, with its full-sized statue of the saint pointing toward the heavens, and Salem Street, where the Old North Church ruled over the smaller buildings. I crossed Hanover Street, the main thoroughfare, lights from countless shops, bars, and cafes flooding the growing darkness.
Even after a year and a half, the smell of molasses was unmistakable in the July heat. I found myself thinking of Joe’s mother, wondering if she still had dreams of drowning.
Prince Street ended at a little triangular area called North Square. On the other side was Moon Street. I stood there, heart pounding, a drop of sweat trickling down the unnatural streambeds carved into the terrain of my back.
This is crazy, I thought. And pointless.
Nell and I had planned to meet at their hotel after the show. It was nine o’clock. I could go a few hours early and wait in the lobby. I could leave this place and never come back.
A figure sat on a stoop nearby, his back hunched, face as pockmarked as the surface of the moon. “Ti sei perso?” he called, his voice so cracked with age I could barely tell if he was speaking or clearing his ancient throat. He awaited my answer, then tried again. “Lost?”
“I’m looking for Joe Cole.”
“Ah.” He nodded and pointed to one of the doors on Moon Street. “He live there. But he’s-a not there now. He play at the Trattoria Pagliacci on Hanover.” He pointed a crooked finger back the way I had come.
“Thank you,” I said, and he waved me away, anxious to have his instructions followed.
I passed the Trattoria Pagliacci three times before I saw the small sign on the wooden door, and then I just stood there staring at it. Joe was on the other side of that door.
My fingers instinctively went to the knuckle of my opposite hand, and I must have played an entire symphony, trying to gather up enough courage to enter.
But I couldn’t do it. I turned and rushed up Hanover, quickly at first, strangely worried about being followed. But who would follow me? No one. In a couple of blocks my heart rate slowed and so did my stride. When I came to the end of Hanover I turned left and walked along the wharves, gazing out to Boston Harbor, where lights from a hundred ships of all sizes and uses made the darkness seem like only twilight.
This was Joe’s neighborhood. He had an ocean for a backyard.
Shortly I came to an open area, so unexpected on the crowded waterfront, as if some giant hand had wiped away the buildings and warehouses. The site of a cataclysm of some sort.
Molasses. The tank had exploded right here. This was where Joe’s father had drawn his last breath. Then, ten short months later, his sister had drawn hers. They had both suffocated, and Joe had been unable to save either of them. For all he knew, I was dead, too.
I sat down on an old crate and thought for a long time. I didn’t want to face him, didn’t want to ask hard questions. But maybe he deserved at least to know that I was alive.
I gathered up my courage and walked back to Hanover Street and opened the old wooden door. The room was cavernous and dark, much larger than its humble exterior hinted. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the upright piano against the wall by the bar. The round stool was empty. Maybe the old man had been wrong.
It was late, and I was suddenly so tired, and wanted only to sit down, sip something cool, and consider my options. A plump waitress with silver threads running through her black hair led me to a small table on the other side of the dining area. I ordered sarsaparilla, and she pecked at me to get some food, more from motherly pity at my small size, I suspected, than from a desire to run up the bill. “I can’t read Italian,” I told her, pointing to the smudged menu.
She swatted her thick hand in the air. “I’ll get you something.”
Sitting back in my chair, I felt relief settle on me for the first time since Nell had proposed this crazy plan. Maybe I wouldn’t have to face him after all. At least I could say I had tried.
Then I heard the first few notes of “In the Good Old Summertime.”
Panic set the blood coursing through my veins. He was there at the piano, his back bent toward the keys, his black hair curling in its familiar way.
Joe. I wanted to sprint across the dim room and throw my arms around him, to yell and unleash my anger, and to run away, all at the same time. But I only sat watching him until the waitress brought a plate of linguini with meatballs.
At first I couldn’t eat, my stomach clenched in nerves. But eventually I took a bite, and the savory spiciness of the sauce distracted and calmed me. The waitress came by scoffing at my pathetic attempts to eat the long strands of pasta and showed me how to twirl it around my fork.
I ate slowly as I listened to Joe play, and remembered: the moment I first saw him at the train depot in Cuba, and how drawn to him I’d been from that moment. The night we searched for Gert, how first our friendship and then our romance had grown and bloomed. The fights we had. The passion we felt.
I really had nowhere to go, and he was the only reason I’d come, and so I finished eating, paid my bill, and sat with a glass of sarsaparilla until after eleven when he pulled the fallboard over the keys, stood and stretched, said good-bye to the bartender, and left.
I followed him down Hanover to quieter, narrower Prince Street, finally marshaling the courage to say his name.
“Joe.”
He turned immediately, eyes wide with shock, almost fearful, as if I were a spectral presence calling him to the afterworld instead of the girl he’d once loved.
“Dio mio . . . ,” he breathed.
As I came toward him I studied his familiar face in the streetlight—the sadness that had been etched around his eyes when we’d met seemed to have taken over the entire landscape of his face.
No time for sentimentality, I told myself. Get down to business.
I straightened myself and felt the warped skin on my back pull tight. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about Lucy.” I’d practiced the words so many time
s it felt like reciting an assigned poem in English class. “I only heard the news a few weeks ago, or I would have contacted you sooner.”
Halfway there, I thought.
He put a hand out and steadied himself on the brick wall of the building beside him. “Winnie, dio mio . . . you’re alive. I heard the doctors talking about you at the hospital . . . they said you were so burned, you probably wouldn’t . . . And then I had to bring . . . I had to go back . . .”
I took a deep breath. Part two, I told myself. That’s why you’re here.
“Why didn’t you write and find out? I was there for months. Didn’t I mean at least that much to you? Enough to offer some expression of friendship and concern for my well-being?” I felt the ire in my voice, and took a breath to calm myself. I’d never get a straight answer if he felt attacked. “I have no expectations, if that’s what you were worried about. I know I’m not what . . . what a man might . . . want . . . anymore.”
Not as smooth as I’d practiced, but the words were finally out, and I felt a sense of relief at having accomplished the task I’d come so far to complete. The relief was short-lived, however, as Joe crumpled against the side of the building and gasped in misery.
“You must hate me,” he said, squeezing the words from his half-strangled throat. “You must wish I died, too.”
“No, of course not! Why in the world would you say such a thing?”
“I left you there—”
“I told you to!”
“But I should have made you come. I wanted to make you come with me, but I . . .” He gasped as if he could barely breathe. “I only had two hands . . . and I . . . I chose her. And she died anyway. I didn’t save either of you. I only saved myself. ” He inhaled a little sob, and tears filled his eyes. “I was sure I would never see you again. The doctors said . . . and anyway I didn’t deserve to. Your family must hate me. It’s unforgivable, what I did.”
“Joe.” I stepped toward him and almost reached out to comfort him, but stopped myself. He wasn’t mine to touch anymore. “You weren’t trying to save yourself, you wanted to save everyone, remember? That’s what you said before you went into a burning building while everyone else was running out. You were brave even to try!”
