The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  The Stardust’s massive Café Continental stage was larger than a basketball court, with an Esther Williams–like swimming tank for summer shows and a Sonja Henie–like ice skating rink for winter ones. The pipes secreted in the catwalks created rain or snow on demand. The backstage machinery included forty scenery lines, six descending stage units, three hydraulic lifts, sixty fly-loft lines, and a sound control booth that looked like the controls of the Viking rocket itself. The showroom seated seven hundred people and the cavalcade on the stage almost matched that audience in size.

  For the summer show, Donn posed girls in sequined G-strings and shimmering headdresses on a score of platforms suspended from the ceiling, platforms that hung low over the showroom tables, but just out of reach. On the stage, girls dove into our aquacade, complete with waterfalls, smoke plumes, swings, waterslides, sparklers, and our water nymphs, girls who smiled and swam and never resurfaced and who made their exits through special channels at the bottom of the pool. Other girls entered from those ducts to drift a moment, bare-breasted (the Adults Only portion of the show), and then to disappear again into those tunnels. The wings were a mess of mats and sloshed water, stagehands in rubber boots manning the wet mops.

  For our finale, two dozen barely clad boys lined the winding staircase that wrapped the pool, a construct not entirely dissimilar to the set Buzz designed for his long-ago Shadow Waltz number. And I was suspended above this all on a Lucite trapeze that rose higher and higher, my gold sequined ersatz bathing costume and gold turban glinting as I ascended. My eight water nymphs down below wore pink and ocean-green costumes and turbans of their own, but mine hosted a silver crown, to mark me, I suppose, as their water-logged goddess queen. When I was six feet from the catwalks, I dove into the water, into the center of my backstroking girls. Thank God for all my swimming at the Flamingo pool, my shenanigans in the martini glass at the Desert Inn. At the close, the entire ensemble waved to the audience. Above us fireworks crackled.

  By Christmastime, the aquacade was stored away and the ice rink unveiled. In the icy winter world of Donn Arden’s great imagination, I was now drawn on a sleigh pulled out onto the stage by two girls wearing headdresses made to look like reindeer antlers. Crystal earrings dangled like long icicles from my own headdress. No antlers for me. On the back of the sleigh perched my attendant, a footman. At my arrival, the girls in satin skirts and golden sashes paused their skating on the ice pond, girls in headdresses of plumed feathers paused in their labors of pulling at ski poles, girls draped in crystals and long crystal wigs posed quietly in their white jeweled G-strings and bejeweled bras. Scattered amongst them, other girls with sparkled tights, fur hoods, fur muffs, and fur skirts stood stationary, bare-breasted in this pretend winter freeze.

  On a raised platform reached by white filigreed stairways a dozen men snow-dusted white made a row, and across the front of the stage stood another two rows of men in white swallowtails. At the finale’s climax, I twisted myself into a horizontal spindle to be thrown from one partner to the next as the men stood in a circle center stage. Eventually the men held me, straight up, above them. Only God and Arden knew exactly what kind of winter treat I was supposed to be. A wind-driven snowflake? A splinter of hail? A flying icicle? It didn’t matter, just as long as it all looked magnificent.

  54

  Backstage tonight, as we left behind our winter set with its icicle-hung stairways, gazebos, and igloos, the stagehands met us, rolling out a giant, Stardust-size cake on a cart borrowed from the kitchen and covered with a white tablecloth, its naked utility disguised for the occasion. My birthday. I’d told no one, yet the cart with its cake stopped before me. The cake was tall, three layers, like a wedding cake, the top layer thick with pink candles, one for each year and a few extra for good luck and good measure, the little flames almost obscuring what was beneath them, my pink name and the words:

  Happy Birthday, Esme!

  You’re 21!

  Finally Legal!

  Yes, I was twenty-one, now, an age of no small significance in Vegas. The cast was laughing and clapping, even before I held back the icicles of my headdress and bent to blow out the candles, singing “Happy Birthday to You,” sixty men and women in shimmering partial costume, another thirty men in tuxedos joining in from the pit with their brass and strings and a drum roll, the conductor, Johnny Augustine, waving his baton to make them play the birthday song for me. Even Donn Arden stepped up from behind a white-painted scenery flat, bearing Nate along with him. So that’s who had orchestrated this, Nate of whom I now saw little and spoke to even less.

  He came up to me after the cake had been cut and while I was handing out slices of it on little paper plates, some of the girls helping me, our headdresses clinking and clattering as we turned this way and that, and standing there in my jeweled covered wagon and G-string and sparkly fishnet nylon tights, naked before him, or almost, yet again, I offered Nate a slice of cake. It had enough whirls and filigrees to rival my costume. But he shook his head, no thanks, saying only, formally, “Happy birthday, Esme, dear,” before turning away, leaving me standing there holding that paper plate, heading off, probably, to prowl the henhouse of the Sahara’s secretarial pool.

  Since I had reappeared again in all my uncovered flesh this summer, Nate had been cautious with me, keeping his distance. He never brought his new girlfriend to the Stardust, and if our paths crossed, he treated me with a certain gallantry, as if I were his grown-up daughter, which was probably as it should always have been. A formal, “How are you, Esme?” Or “Is Donn treating you well?” A nod. A quick walk away. Perhaps the sight of me reminded him that I was capable of sudden and unpredictable implosions, ones he was capable of triggering. Yet, from afar, he kept a protective eye on me, as did the men he tasked as my bodyguards. One of his men stood at the back of the showroom when I rehearsed, guarded the hallway outside my dressing room when I was made-up and costumed, walked behind me through the Stardust. No one ever approached me, no one ever bothered me. If a man sent flowers to my dressing room, the card was quietly removed. Gifts were returned or thrown out. Visitors were discouraged. It was just like being fifteen again and at the Flamingo, where if any man got too close, the floor manager would escort him away. And so I understood in part why Nate had wanted me back on the Strip, to put me under his purview, to supervise me because he didn’t trust my father to do it properly. The price I had to pay for Nate’s continued beneficence was loneliness. Fine.

  In my dressing room, I didn’t see Nate’s note for me right away. Not until I’d put down my paper plate of cake crumbs with its too-sweet inch-thick white icing, not until my dresser had taken away my last costume of the night, such as it was, to be cleaned, not until I was sitting in my old blue robe in front of my big mirror, peeling off my lashes and wiping at my face with wet cotton pads. Propped up on my dressing table, there it was, a plain envelope with the big black scrawl of Nate’s handwriting across the front of it, an envelope someone, possibly even Nate himself, had placed here at some point while I was onstage. Or while my cake was being wheeled in from the kitchen. The envelope leaned against the emptied Maxwell House coffee jar where I kept my makeup brushes.

  On the front of the envelope he had written only my initial, a giant black “E.” Four scratch marks, a single vowel. A birthday card? I tore open the envelope and drew from it a piece of stiff paper, a correspondence card with the words Desert Inn imprinted across the top of it over its Joshua tree logo, and I read what Nate had written below it:

  Gus Greenbaum’s dead.

  Where’s your daddy?

  Nate should know where my father was, at his shift, at the Riviera. He was there. Surely.

  Breathe, I told myself.

  My hand was afflicted with a sudden tremor. The caged bulbs that rimmed my mirror seemed to glow too brightly and spew flickering stray black marks, like those at the end of a movie reel. The photograph of my mother in her blond wig seemed to spark beneath its yellowed piece of tape. Out
side my dressing-room door roared the usual post-performance pandemonium, the pounding feet, hoots of laughter, screams, the screech of costume racks dragged down the hallway. Someone yelled, “Wasn’t that cake good?”

  I had to put down the card, push it away from me a little, slide it under my makeup tray of paints and powders, make it disappear, find one of my precious Miltowns, which I now begged off my fellow showgirls and hoarded for just these kinds of occasions, which presented themselves more frequently than I could have imagined, and kept with its sisters inside an empty silver tube of lipstick I’d cleaned out for this purpose.

  Never let anybody know what you’re thinking, what you’re doing.

  I stuck my head under the sink faucet to swallow the pill I could no longer find any doctor to prescribe for me, not even the house physician here at the Stardust. Especially not the house physician. Hence my begging and hoarding. “I’m gonna lose my job, Esme,” the girls would say, “I’ll be fired if Mr. Stein finds out.” Everyone knew I was watched and to whom the watchmen made their reports.

  Then I slid Nate’s note out from under my makeup tray and read it again.

  Gus Greenbaum’s dead.

  Had Gus died here or in Phoenix, at home with his wife? What I knew about Gus, other than the fact that he was now dead, was that he owed money everywhere, to Nate, to Chicago, to Lansky. And on top of that, Gus had been stupid, shoveling even more of their money off the counting-room tables into his own pants pockets, stealing from the very men he already owed. Everyone knew that Gus Greenbaum, stupid on heroin and made stupider by all his gambling and whoring, was unraveling. My father had told me Nate had tried to buy the Riviera out from under him, but Gus had said, “No, no, no, the Riviera’s my house,” that’s how unraveled and how stupid Gus had become. Johnny Rosselli had sat him on a bar stool for hours and begged him to sell to no avail. And so now Gus was gone, knocked off his bar stool, if not by a heart attack or a stroke or liver failure, then by someone like Johnny Rosselli, if not by Rosselli himself. And if so, the only people who would know this right now were the big boys, men like Nate, who knew tonight what everybody else would find out tomorrow morning.

  Gus’s house? Not anymore.

  Nate was scrubbing it down, getting ready to move in.

  For it was clear to me now that the Riviera management was being cleaned out. Over the past year, one by one the men from the Flamingo who’d moved over to the Riv alongside my father were being killed. Big Davey Berman had died in the hospital, ostensibly after surgery. Moe Sedway of a heart attack. The entertainment director, that slimy Willie Bioff, had been killed by a car bomb. Now Greenbaum, somewhere, somehow. It seemed everyone associated with the Riv, anyone stirring so much as a pinkie finger in the Riviera skim was vulnerable.

  I looked down at the note.

  Where’s your daddy?

  Solicitude?

  Warning?

  Threat?

  As soon as I could stand and shower and dress, I headed with Nate’s note out into the casino, which was banging tonight, fools throwing chips as if they really were just circles of sand, chalk, clay, and paper, as if they were not at all the hundreds of dollars dropped onto the table where they would subsequently be swept up by the croupier, all the while the cash that bought them being stacked up in the humid counting room, so wet in there that hundred-dollar bills would stick to the walls and flap in the breeze from the ineffectual fans. It was brilliant, really, the whole idea of chips, the way it was so easy to forget what you’d paid for them. And the slot machines tinged and tinged, though little of consequence was won; but now and then there was the occasional great rustle and clang of a great burst of bells delivering a big win and the promise of more of the same to every hapless player in the room.

  The Stardust held inside its bowels over 16,000 carpeted square feet of luck, good and bad. And the bell-ringing, chip-clacking furor, I no longer found exhilarating, not after more than half a decade of listening to it. Tonight all I heard was a tin buzz, partly from panic, partly from the Miltown, which had by now laid out the white carpet of its calming effect. Most of the players here had never even heard of Gus Greenbaum nor would they care if they had about what happened to him, but everyone who worked in Vegas, every dealer, pit boss, and box man, knew who he was, one of Meyer Lansky’s men and one of the most experienced casino managers in Vegas. And when they found out he was dead, everyone would want to know what the news meant for them, just as I wanted to know what it meant for my father.

  I walked through the drape-lined, carpeted casino, no clocks, no windows, no clue as to the passing time, past every table, past the bar, past the slots, past the little starry Christmas trees propped up everywhere and green-and-silver tinsel hung like boughs and sparkling white reindeer with pink-feathered headdresses turning circles on a music box–like platform past throngs of people, but I couldn’t find Nate, so I went up to the pit boss, who knew me, everyone in Vegas knew me, had known me since I was fourteen years old, and who, when I asked, called over to the Riviera’s counting room.

  He spoke into the phone and then he said to me, “Your father didn’t show up for work tonight.”

  Where’s your daddy?

  If my father wasn’t at the Riviera tonight, there was a reason for it and it wasn’t going to be a good one. Had my father, following Gus’s example, mopped up too many of those sodden paper bills from the counting-room tables, and if so, how many, and based on that answer, I’d know how long he had to live. Because if my father were already dead, Nate wouldn’t be asking me where he was.

  At my terrified face, the pit boss pulled a concerned one in concert. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  I couldn’t speak. It was so much like the terrible night at the Flamingo when my father came up to me in the casino to tell me about Benny Siegel’s death that for a moment I felt I was fourteen years old again, the world tipping, sickeningly, beneath me.

  “E?”

  I couldn’t answer him.

  He took my hand. “Do you need to sit down?”

  If only my father hadn’t gone to the Riviera with Gus. If only he had stayed back at the Flamingo. My fault. I’d bitten off that promotion for him from Nate, too guilty at the time to refuse me anything.

  “Esme? Do you need a drink?”

  Because today I was finally old enough to be served one.

  I smiled at the pit boss, shook my head again to let him know this was nothing, it didn’t matter, I was silly. He smiled back, reassured. I turned away. I had to find my father before anyone else did, but I couldn’t run out of here like a crazy person. So I walked through the Stardust casino and out into the December night like a queen, because after all I was a showgirl, a headliner, the pride of Las Vegas.

  55

  The Strip, like the casino, was decorated a bit sadly for Christmas, layered over in tinsel, tinsel Christmas trees in metal stands lining the curbs, stars and bells and ornaments strung on wire swinging above me in the December wind. Silver tinsel and red bells shook on their wires across Fremont Street, too, over the old Block 16, over the older casinos, over the depot for the San Pedro Las Vegas Salt Lake Railroad that started it all. Was it all so frugal-looking because the decorations had been ordered by Greenbaums and Dalitzes and Lanskys and Sedways and Steins, Jewish men to whom the holiday meant little? Because compared to the jewel-colored lights running up and down each hotel’s exterior, the tinsel seemed like a Tiny Tim afterthought. Oh, yeah, it’s Christmas, string something up. Or perhaps it was just that there was nothing, no star, no bell, no trim that could possibly compete with the gleaming neon already in place.

  If Nate didn’t know where my father was that meant he wasn’t anywhere here on the Strip. He wouldn’t be anywhere he could easily be found, not at the Flamingo, the Riv, the Players Club, the Glitter Gulch. He wasn’t likely to be at home, either, so I wasn’t surprised to see when I pulled up into the carport that my father’s car was gone. I sat in my Ambassador for a minute
looking at our front door, at the strand of red-and-green Christmas lights, unlit, sagging across the top of the casing, our little nod to the holiday for the sake of the neighborhood. I was afraid to go any farther, afraid of what I might see inside the house.

  Eventually, I made myself get out of my car and unlock the front door. At least it was locked, possibly a good sign. I leaned in. “Dad?”

  No answer, though I hadn’t expected one.

  We had, still, despite living here almost a year, little furniture in the living room—because just as with the bungalow at the Flamingo, we spent so little time at home awake. The television screen was dark. No sound came from it or from anywhere in the house. My father wasn’t here. I could sense it. The house was empty. No one mixing drinks in the shiny kitchen. No one swimming laps in the pool, the cheap rubber raft lying on the cement beside it. No one singing in the pink-tiled shower. But every cupboard in the house was open, every drawer emptied, the items in every closet dropped to the floor, as if these were my childhood closets. And when I went down the length of our short hallway and reached my father’s bedroom, I found the pull cord in the ceiling of his closet had been yanked and the ladder unfolded to the small crawl space above.

  I stood there a minute in the tiny closet, my father’s suits around me, redolent with his cologne. Cold dank air shuttled down from the opened hatch. Then I climbed halfway up the ladder and looked, tentatively, across the attic floor. We’d put the boxes of my old toys up here, an immediate bore once we’d hit Vegas. I could see their battered cardboard sides with my name written on them, as if we might somehow one day forget whose property those boxes contained. They lay on their sides now, though, flaps open, my dolls and cards scattered across the splintery plywood subfloor. My mildewed board games, my Coloredo card tricks, my dolls flat on their backs. Had they squawked a protest for me?