Moments, in fact, like this one.
“Did you know I used to whistle for the audience when I was very young?” I asked Linda suddenly.
“Whistle!”
“Yes,” I said. “Whistle and dance and sing. Sometimes Mother would have to come out onto the stage and escort me off, because I wouldn’t want to leave.”
She laughed, draping her arm around my shoulder. “My first experience on the stage was a dramatic recital at Sherman and Clay Hall on Sutter Street,” she told me. “A friend and I performed Shakespeare and scenes from the Greek tragedies. We sold all our tickets, and it was quite the success.”
“I think you’ll be very famous,” I said, watching every gesture she made. The way she flung back her hair, the idle way she plucked a blade of grass and drew it across her face.
“It’s more than the applause, Flo. It’s the magic of it all. The illusion. What things we get to make up! What histories we get to create for ourselves!” She smiled over at me. “We aren’t only this,” she said, pulling at the pink skin on the back of her hand. “We can be so much more.”
It’s true Molly reminded me of Linda. Molly once said a very similar thing to me. “I was only a girl from Iowa before I came here. Now I can be so much more.”
She was blond like Linda—but more like me really when I think of it. Molly didn’t have the aura that seemed to always hover around Linda’s being, like overexposed film. Molly wasn’t nearly so celestial. She was very human. Just a little bit of ant paste and she was gone.
Linda, in contrast, lived into her sixties. I remember seeing the notice in Variety. I clipped it out, kept it in my Bible for decades until it turned yellow and began to crumble.
Linda Arvidson, actress.
Then I threw it away.
It was our last day in San Francisco. My heart was weighted down as if a brick were tied to it. I told Linda to come to meet me in front of the theater. I had a surprise for her.
“Hop in,” I shouted.
There, parked in the street and gleaming in the sun, was a newfangled automobilly.
“Flo!” Linda exclaimed.
Automobillies were suddenly the rage, scaring the horses and kicking up dust all over the city. I’d won over the crabby Mr. Todsol, the theater manager, and he’d agreed to let me drive his.
I turned the crank. It made a horrible noise.
“Oh, Flo!” Linda laughed, clapping her hands to her face. “Have you ever taken one of these things?”
“Sure I have,” I told her. Well, only once: Mr. Todsol had given me a brief lesson. But I was an expert horsewoman. Certainly maneuvering a machine couldn’t be as difficult as breaking in a mare.
It was a two-cylinder Ford Model A, all shiny brass and copper. It held a leather seat that could fit two snugly and a steering wheel mounted in the center on a long angled post. There was no roof to the contraption; if you got caught in a sudden downpour, you’d get drenched.
“Here,” I said to Linda. “Put this on.”
From the seat of the car, I withdrew a long, tightly belted leather overcoat that kept off the grime. She held it up, smiled timidly, and slipped it on. “And these, too,” I said, handing her an elegant pair of fringed foot muffs Mr. Todsol had bought for his wife. They’d ward off the wind that whistled up through the floorboards. Later, I remember owning a pair that could be filled with hot water before a long journey. Oh, the things we did in those early years of automobiling!
We took our seats. I unlocked the brake. And off we went, whizzing down Mission and then up a steep, winding road.
“Oh, do be careful, Flo,” Linda shouted, holding on to her hat.
I felt a surge of passion rise from my gut and force its way through my lips. “Yippee!” I cried as we careened down the other side of the hill, honking at plodding horse-pulled wagons, arousing so much sand and dirt that we both began wheezing and coughing.
“Take it easy,” Linda cried, laughing even as tears streamed down both her cheeks.
I waved to passersby. Linda shouted that I should keep my eyes on the road. It felt so magnificent to be behind the wheel. So powerful. So giddy. I let out another long whoop. “Hooray!” I shouted as the wind took my hat.
We skidded back to a stop in front of the theater. “There,” I said, turning to her. “How alive do you feel now?”
Our eyes held in girlish wonder. Suddenly she leaned over and kissed me square on the lips. A quick, sweet kiss—the only kiss we ever shared.
A kiss that has lingered for a lifetime.
Linda told Mother she wouldn’t be performing that night, our last in San Francisco.
“What do you mean? How dare you quit now?” Mother screamed.
“I can’t go on. My throat is sore.”
I looked at her. What could she mean? Just hours before, she’d laughed and sung as we drove over the hills. But she insisted.
“Where can I find an ingenue for one night?” Mother lamented.
“Behind you,” Linda said.
Mother didn’t even need to turn around. I saw her back stiffen, her shoulders square. “Absolutely not,” she said.
Ducks added in his two cents. “Well, Lotta, Florrie does know all the lines, all the action.”
“No,” Mother snarled and stormed off in a huff. Ducks followed her. Linda slipped out the back door, but I hovered near the curtain. From the stillness behind, I heard Mother continue to refuse.
“Now, Lotta, be reasonable,” Ducks cajoled.
I heard something crash. She had thrown something. “She’s not ready, I tell you!”
“You always said she’d be the greatest actress in the world someday!” Ducks shouted back at her. “You’ve been priming her since she was three!”
“Yes, someday!” she snapped. “Not now!”
I stood in a fold of the curtain, the rope of the pull in my hands. Their voices echoed through the cavernous old theater—the very place where Caruso would sing a couple of years from then, just as the earthquake struck.
“Lotta, you have no other choice. We have no other girl. Flo knows all the lines, all the bits of business—”
“She’s not ready! She’s not!”
“It’s not she who’s unready, Lotta.” Ducks’s voice was low and hard now. “I think it’s you who are not yet ready, unwilling to acknowledge your daughter is a woman—a young, beautiful woman who will steal some of your applause and pull the spotlight from your own careworn face!”
Mother was quiet. Then I heard a horrible sound like none before. Mother was crying. In all my life, I’d never known her to cry. I pulled the curtain rope to my mouth and bit hard.
“Oh, Ducks,” she said, “the years go so fast—faster for a woman, don’t you think?”
Ducks made a small laugh. I could hear him pat his belly. “Perchance you’re right, Lotta. We of the male species can get away with far more. A protruding gut, a shiny pate covered by poorly woven wigs. What a sight most leading men are! And yet still we go on.”
“Oh, Ducks, it’s not just that. It’s all of this—this vagabond life. My own mother called it sinful, and who am I to argue that she was wrong? Who am I?”
There was a heavy silence. I sensed that their eyes spoke to each other in ways words could not. I heard her move away then and approach the stage. I tensed in the curtains, terrified that she’d apprehend me there. But she stopped.
“Ducks,” she said, and I heard her skirts swish as she turned. “When I married Bridgewood, do you remember what I said?”
“I’ll never forget,” he said. “You told me, ‘I am going to leave the stage and live the way life’s supposed to be.’ It nearly broke my heart watching you go.”
“I believed that,” Mother said. “It’s what my mother always wanted for me. The stage—what kind of life is that? What legacy am I giving to my daughter? My baby? A night here, a week there, in one-room flats, at the mercy of gin-soaked theater managers—what kind of life is that?”
“The li
fe I want,” I said, surprising myself, emerging from my hiding place. I stood there unblinking, staring at them.
Mother just looked at me. “Oh, Florrie,” she said at last, a rare instance of her calling me anything other than Florence. I thought she might cry again. Or embrace me. But she didn’t. She simply looked at me and then looked away.
“More than anything I want to be an actress, Mother,” I said.
She sighed. “And so you will.” Her brow was creased; her lips were tight. She looked over at Ducks, who nodded at her in support. She looked back at me. “Will Linda’s costumes fit you?”
“Oh, Mother, thank you!”
“Ducks, print up a new bill replacing Linda’s name with Florence’s,” Mother instructed. She paused. “She’ll be … Florence Lawrence, of course.”
“Florence Lawrence?” I asked. “It sounds … peculiar.”
Mother arched an eyebrow at me. “This is the Lawrence Dramatic Company, and I’m Mrs. Lawrence, and you’re my daughter. So you’ll be Florence Lawrence.”
That was the night she came into being. Florence Lawrence. The night I became the creature the world would eventually come to know as The Biograph Girl. Come to know—and forget.
Florence Lawrence made her debut on the stage of the Grand Opera House in the magical city of old San Francisco—in a theater that no longer exists, in a city that has long since crumbled into dust and blown away with the breeze.
But I’ve never forgotten that night. I remember the long white dress I wore, pinned hastily in back, my hair braided with leaves. I remember gesturing with my arms to the audience, throwing my voice as far as it could go, all the way up to the balconies, the wonderful, delirious echo it made through the old hall.
And the applause. Oh, how I remember the applause. The lights came up and the audience stood. Hats were tossed in the air. There were whistles and hoots and the stamping of feet. So what if they cheered more for that puffy old papier-mâché volcano than they did for me? I was still there, in the spotlight, taking my curtsy. And in the front row beamed Linda, standing and cheering. When the lights came up, I could see her eyes were only on me.
The Present
The leaves have started to fall in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Many of the old maples are already bare. In autumn, the city is picturesque, with golden trees embracing red-bricked smokestacks visible from the interstate. But once the leaves are gone, the barren city stands naked before the world: the boarded-up factories are revealed for what they are. Francis Xavier Sheehan, father to Ben and Richard, was once an assemblyman in Chicopee’s rubber plants, back in the days when the smells of steam heat and sulfur wafted over the neighborhoods of orderly Victorian homes.
The factories are vacant now, but Ben remembers those odors, sharp and tart, mingling with the slightly kinder fragrances of kielbasa and sauerkraut coming from the houses up and down Grand Avenue. He can see Grand now, up ahead. This is where he and his friends would play stickball in between the rumbling trucks that used the street as a shortcut to the factories. They were a bunch of rowdy youths, smoking and cursing, for whom Ben imagines just two fates: jail or the U.S. Army. Mostly Irish and Polish kids back then, in the late 60s, the days of the moon walk and Laugh-In and riots on the UMass campus. Now most of Chicopee is Puerto Rican. Kowalski’s Super is now Ortiz Deli.
A sudden boom overhead. Anita arches her neck to look out the car window. “Jesus,” she says as a great shadow passes over the car.
“Westover Air Force Base,” Ben tells her. “Growing up here, you get used to it.”
“I’d be afraid to walk out on the street with those monstrosities flying overhead.” She shivers. “That thing looked like the Batplane.”
Ben laughs. Three blocks ahead, he can see his mother’s street. He just can’t bring himself to say his street anymore, not after so many years living along the cracked concrete avenues of New York. But this was his neighborhood—his and Richard’s. Grand Avenue was Ben’s paper route, in fact—the Caseys and the Piatrowskis and the Driscolls and the Adamczyks and the Fletchners—an unbroken sequence of green lawns, gray driveways, Virgin Marys, and mailboxes with names stenciled in gold.
Ben delivered the afternoon daily, his burlap sack slung over his shoulder, heavy with papers. It took him exactly one hour and fifteen minutes if he didn’t encounter an unruly dog. Meanwhile, Richard would be home watching the soaps with Mom, the shades drawn in the living room. Often, when Ben got back, they’d have eaten dinner already, early at four o’clock, sitting in front of the TV.
“Ben,” Anita had asked him last night, “tell me again why we’re going to see your mother.”
They had just crawled into bed. She was wearing her black teddy, the one Ben had bought for her as a first-year anniversary present. Usually she wore a T-shirt and panties to bed, cold cream on her face; by wearing the teddy, she was signaling she wanted to have sex. But Ben was far too tired to comply. He’d worked ten hours over at the ad agency, splicing together video clips of a family on a cruise ship off the coast of Norway for a travelogue. And he’d been up late the night before typing up a synopsis of the Marge Schott idea to send over to Xerxes.
“We’re going because I haven’t been home in a while,” Ben answered Anita, closing his eyes, trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed the teddy.
She curled up beside him. He could feel her warm breasts resting against his shoulder. Once that might have sent him over the edge; tired or not, he’d have risen to the occasion.
“I’d rather we just stayed home,” she purred into his ear. “What do you say? We could sleep in late.”
“Maybe Sunday.”
“I have an audition on Sunday.”
“Oh, well, then.”
He heard her sigh. “Oh, Ben,” she said and rolled over to her side of the bed.
He felt shitty doing this to her. But he just didn’t have it in him these days to make love to her. Part of him wished that Anita would go off and move to L.A. He knew that was what she wanted to do. He’d miss her, of course, but there would be a certain relief, a certain lifting of responsibility. Go, he thought sometimes when he’d wake earlier than she did. He’d lie there, head in his arm, watching her sleep. Go before you waste any more time.
He knows he’s holding her back. Just why she stays, he cannot fathom. Looking over at her last night in bed and looking over at her now in the car, Ben can still see the pretty girl he’d fallen in love with, the woman with whom he’d expected to spend his life. But now …?
I don’t deserve her, he thinks. I’ve held her back too long. Mom is right. I’m nothing but a—
“Your mother has the wierdest ideas,” Anita says suddenly, startling Ben. He looks over at her. “I mean, I just hope she doesn’t start going on about how sick she is.”
They’ve just turned right onto Ben’s childhood street. Anita sighs. “I mean, I’m always this close to saying, ‘Well, if you’d drop a hundred pounds—’”
“Don’t,” Ben snaps. “I mean it, Anita. Don’t say that.”
She’s right, of course. All of Mom’s health problems—from her asthma to her arthritis to her high blood pressure—were exacerbated by her weight. Yet in twenty years—ever since Mom had started packing on the pounds after Dad died—Ben has never once mentioned her weight to her. It’s as if she was as trim as she used to be—the pretty, smiling mother staring out at him from photos in his scrapbook, her twin three-year-old sons on each knee, her husband standing stoically behind her.
Not that he indulges her the way Richard does, bringing her boxes of Little Debbies as treats. He’ll confront Richard, telling him he’s killing her, but he never says a word to his mother. She just goes on eating whatever Richard brings her, patting his face with her big chubby mitt of a hand.
“Well,” Ben says now, taking in a long breath, “here we are.”
The house looks the same as it always has: a small ranch at the end of a dead-end street in a neighborhood of ranch houses that all look
exactly alike. Over the garage hangs the rusty rim of a basketball hoop; the netting is long since gone. Under the large picture window in the living room, the facade of pink brick is slightly cracked and worn. The rest of the house is sided in beige aluminum; one wooden shutter is missing from an unused bedroom window. That was Ben’s and Richard’s room. He notices with a small smile that on the window is the remnant of an old Tot Finder decal stuck on by Mom when he and Richard were five. In case the house ever went up in smoke, she wanted the firefighters to know who to rescue first.
The morning is bright. There are songbirds chirping in the trees. Mom’s in the doorway. The whole doorway. She opens the screen door.
“Well, I was starting to get worried,” she calls out to them.
“Hello, Mrs. Sheehan,” Anita says, approaching her. They kiss.
“Hi, Mom,” Ben says.
She gives him her cheek. He kisses it. “Is that your car?” she asks. “Did you finally buy one? What kind is that?”
“No, it’s a rental,” Ben says.
“It’s a Geo,” Anita says.
“A Geo? Never heard of it. You’re father used to swear by Oldsmobiles. Well, don’t buy a car if it’s going to be that small.”
They all enter the house.
Right away Ben is once again struck by the smell. Mom’s house always smells the same: bacon. She might not have cooked bacon in weeks, but somehow the smell permeates everything: the emerald green shag rug, the brown corduroy sofa, the long dark green curtains in the living room, which are, as always, drawn. On the wall, Ben’s and Richard’s high school pictures hang over the television set. They both wear absurdly wide ties and lapels, and their hair is identically parted in the middle—except Richard’s is neater. And his tie isn’t askew.
“When you called yesterday to say you were coming, I thought maybe you had an announcement or something,” Mom says, waddling in front of them into the kitchen. She’s got an Entenmann’s apple strudel cake set out on a plate for them. “Here,” she says, “sit down and cut yourself a piece. Benny, you want milk?”
He smiles. “Sure.”
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