Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  Earlier on the phone Cheryl told me she was hoping for a serene, uneventful summer. Last year actress Jane Wyatt, granting an interview to a giddy high-school student, announced that she was traveling shortly to Italy and hoped to meet Mussolini. “A firestorm, that indiscreet remark,” she’d added. “She also mentioned the Pope, but the protest lingered.”

  I’d shivered. “That horrid man. Hitler’s brutal sidekick.”

  Cheryl was now talking about a phone call earlier that week from Bea, George’s wife. “I found myself saying yes, though I don’t know why.”

  “What are we talking about?” I asked.

  Cheryl looked irritated that I’d not been paying attention.

  George was snickering. “Cheryl, Edna’s already on that stage, taking a bow and accepting my bouquet of golden rod.”

  Cheryl leaned in. “George didn’t tell you? Good God, George, what do you tell Edna?”

  “Only what she doesn’t want to hear.”

  I offered a sickly smile. “Obviously not always.”

  “Bea asked a favor,” Cheryl went on. “It seems she has an old friend from her very short time at Wellesley, whose son is an actor. He asked to understudy the part of Tony, Louis Calhern’s part. I told her we’ve been using another bit player, mostly unnecessary, but…” She breathed in. “Well, this Evan Street is now our understudy.”

  A bad feeling in my gut. “What do you know about him?”

  “I checked, of course. A brief time in Hollywood where everyone spends a ‘brief time,’ a couple minor roles on Broadway, good-looking, eager.”

  George was staring at the Kandinsky. “And obviously a charmer, if he got Bea to pimp for him.”

  “Well, Bea rarely asks for favors.”

  “Which is why she is always granted them,” George noted.

  I added, “I doubt if we’ll need him for one week’s play-acting.”

  Cheryl shrugged. “Won’t hurt.”

  “George, did you know about this?” I pointed a finger at him.

  “Bea may have mentioned it.”

  “What do you know about this Evan Street?”

  “I met him once or twice at some dinner his mother hosted. She’s a schoolteacher in Scarsdale. We actually had to go there.”

  I smirked. “Lord, a pioneer into uncharted wilderness. You and Ponce de Leon.”

  “No Fountain of Youth, I’m afraid. It was Scarsdale, Edna. People believe in manicured lawns and manicured lives.”

  “You didn’t like him,” I concluded.

  George’s eyes were shiny. “Good for you, Edna. He’s tall and athletic and dark and handsome—too handsome, really. Large cobalt-blue eyes. A real lady-killer. Ladies deny such men nothing.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Edna, I said…ladies.” His mouth was filled with chocolate, so his words were mumbled.

  Cheryl was trying to say something, finally cutting in. “You two. You’re always writing dialogue you’ll never use.”

  “Cheryl, you want to say something?” From me, all smiles.

  “Well, this dashing hero, in fact, just called me. He thanked me for giving him a chance. He wanted Maplewood desperately, he said. He claims to know so much about my theater—a lie, of course. Yet he did seem to know Maplewood. The town. God knows why. That gave me pause.”

  “What’s your point, Cheryl?”

  “He flattered me mercilessly, even lowering his voice provocatively. I enjoyed every second of it, though I believed none of it.”

  “That’s why you’re different from Edna,” George insisted. “She believes all of it, but enjoys none of it.”

  “Anyway,” Cheryl went on, “he’s rather a bold sort. Unapologetically brash. He may kill Louis Calhern to get his chance at playing lead.”

  The play starred veteran actors Louis Calhern and Irene Purcell, both solid Broadway troopers. Louis was inspired casting as Tony—dark and striking and muscular—and very charming. The compelling cosmopolite. He’d have to watch his back with that aggressive understudy.

  George shrugged. “Frank Resnick is stage manager, right?”

  Cheryl nodded.

  “Not Frank from The Front Page?” I asked. “I’ve met him.”

  George nodded. “Exactly. Perfect for the job. The ideal stage manager. Taciturn, deliberate. A no-nonsense guy. A man whose pointed finger makes you jump hoops.”

  Cheryl added, “You know, he begged for the summer job, which surprised me. He’s left the hit The Fear Factor at the Selwyn just to work summer stock with me. Unheard of, really. When I asked him why, he said he needed a change. Manhattan was getting to him, he said. Another lie, I figured. But he seemed hell-bent on being in New Jersey this summer. I found it a little odd.”

  “It is odd,” I volunteered. “I’ve had only one short conversation with him—at some cocktail party. Like me, he didn’t want to be there. You talk to the man for a few minutes and he looks as though he’s fallen asleep. Then he’ll mumble yes or no or maybe. Then he turns his back on you.” I frowned. “Quite the summer you’ve orchestrated for me, Cheryl.”

  “Only the best,” she said without a smile.

  “He’d best control this…this Evan Street.” I sat back and sipped my coffee, watching Cheryl over the rim. She avoided looking at me.

  “I wonder about that.” Cheryl looked to the door.

  “What?” From George.

  “Well, when he called—earlier today, as I said—I mentioned Edna’s visit for coffee and…”

  “And he wants my autograph?”

  “He invited himself over.”

  “For Lord’s sake, Cheryl.” I put down my cup a little too quickly.

  “He has that way about him.”

  George was enjoying this. “Cheryl, I’ve never considered you subject to frivolous whims and idle flattery—surrendering to a man’s charms.”

  Cheryl didn’t seem pleased with that. She celebrated her own toughness, this feisty woman who’d made and sold bathtub gin during Prohibition and was a legendary hard-nosed poker player. Now she stood and moved dishes and plates into the kitchen, ignoring a look from George. She frowned at the Kandinsky, and I didn’t blame her: it seemed a fourth presence in the room. Her back to us, Cheryl spoke firmly. “I kept saying no, no, no, and ended up giving him directions.”

  Of course, at that moment—with the exquisite timing of a Broadway melodrama—the doorbell chimed. Cheryl jumped, I flinched, and George simply shook his head. “Act one, scene one.” His voice was laced with a mixture of amusement and, I thought, dread.

  Evan Street, the unknown actor, strode into the apartment as though he’d recently conquered in battle, rushing into the center of the room, standing there ramrod straight, arms on hips, head tilted to one side, a dazzling smile directed at no one in particular. The behavior silenced all three of us. I thought suddenly of a Broadway curtain going up and the lead actor assuming the stage and expecting and obtaining the burst of rowdy applause from his loud and devoted claque. But no one applauded now. Evan Street laughed at something no one else heard, and half-bowed.

  You saw a young man who seemed a refugee from a nineteenth-century melodrama, the swashbuckling hero—true, sans moustache or goatee—but with coal-black hair abundantly swept back from an imposing brow, a wide expansive face, darkly tanned, with a chiseled chin and riveting cobalt-blue eyes that seemed to purposely not blink. Tall, slender with a sinewy muscular frame, he stood there, a man used to being considered overwhelmingly attractive, and thus deferred to, willingly, happily. Now, after another rumbling laugh, he seemed to be waiting for an offstage cue to speak. George cleared his throat, and Evan Street spoke. “Hello.” A velvet voice, a lover’s smooth tenor, calculated, one that no one is born with.

  He was still not looking at any of us, his greeting addressed to the Kandinsky
on the wall.

  It struck me that there was something wrong with his attire. Once you moved your gaze from the classical profile, eerily reminiscent of John Barrymore himself—once you allowed yourself to ignore the rich blueness of those eyes—you noticed the shabby pale blue dress shirt, frayed at the cuffs, the old-fashioned white linen sports jacket, the dark stain on one knee of his rumpled slacks, the cracked leather of his unpolished black-and-white tie shoes. A floppy derby hat, bent, protruded from a pocket of his jacket. The cultivated facial expression and the careful haircut clashed with the Hoover-village tramp. A poor boy, this one.

  His was, it turned out, a gaudy cameo performance. He refused coffee, though he did eye the remaining apple strudel with a covetous eye. George had already devoured the remaining chocolate. Evan announced that he’d stay but a second, and began an apology about intruding that rang false. He spoke of the honor of being a part of our ensemble—of working with Cheryl, of working with George and me. “Miss Ferber, you and Mr. Kaufman wrote those words.” Something I already knew, thank you very much. To George in an old boy’s-club chuckle, “You, too.”

  To which George grumbled, “Only the funny parts. Edna wrote the stage directions.”

  He stayed for perhaps fifteen minutes, doing virtually all the talking now, charming, laughing, flattering, twisting his body left and right, yet rarely looking any of us in the face. It was, perforce, Shakespearean monologue. A feckless Romeo in a West Side pied-à-terre, with nary a Juliet in sight. “I just wanted to say hello. I know I’ll never be onstage in Maplewood, but to watch Louis Calhern doing Tony—an honor for me. I met Fredric March, you know. I understudied for him at a playhouse in Pasadena, in fact. He told me…” And off he went, lionizing, name-dropping. The fate of modern theater rested on his broad shoulders. Atlas in stage makeup. And Hollywood: that new theater for the world. Another horizon to conquer…someday…first to watch the master…New Jersey…Maplewood…

  Maddening. Saccharine.

  I interrupted him. “Have you been in Maplewood before?”

  That stopped him. He hesitated. “No.”

  But that was a lie, I sensed—blatant, deliberate. A dark shadow in the eye corner, his head bowed. And for a moment I froze: I did not like this young man. True, I found most young men callous and vainglorious and…well, annoying. A cocksure and preening lot, most of them. The depth of oil cloth. Here, in Evan Street, was their unofficial leader. I understood how easily he could charm folks, particularly unsuspecting women—like, especially, Bea Kaufman, herself delirious around compelling and romantic bounders—but there was something else about this Evan Street: a streak of sly cunning that smacked of cruelty.

  I shivered.

  And just like that he was gone. Perfunctory handshakes, a curtain-call bow, servility that suggested its opposite—and still an avoidance of eye contact. Waving his hand in the air like a passenger setting sail for Europe from a Manhattan pier, he disappeared.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a show that’ll close on Saturday.”

  Cheryl was biting a nail. “I may have made a colossal mistake listening to Bea.”

  “Get used to it.” George grinned. “I have.”

  “But I have to act with him.” I glanced toward the doorway.

  “Only if Louis Calhern dies.”

  I shivered again.

  Chapter Two

  Two days later, two suitcases and a hatbox in hand, I boarded the Lackawanna train at Penn Station and traveled to Maplewood, watching Manhattan disappear. Automobile junkyards and filling stations speckled the landscape. As I stepped off the train, I felt a tug of emotion: the small village with its quiet, lazy-afternoon station, lines of automobiles parked in the shadow of the latticed two-story façade, brought me back to Stepney Depot, the train stop in Connecticut where I lived now, having built a massive fourteen-room Georgian stone house atop a thickly covered hill, just over a year ago. From my terrace I could see Long Island Sound. There, perhaps, the caretaker was now debating whether the old white birch had to be axed. There, now, most likely, my imperious mother was battling with Jason the gardener over the blackberry bushes she insisted were doomed to fail. Or she was sitting by the pool, shaded by a monstrous straw bonnet, writing me a cautionary note that reiterated how foolish my behavior was—once again. “Edna, I’m eating here alone with strangers.” Yet I missed that country home because I’d worked for every piece of stone, every positioned fruit tree. Treasure Hill, I called it.

  I glanced down the street. With Myer’s General Store, Gruning’s Ice Cream and Candy Shop, and the clapboard-sided Grange Hall, Maplewood seemed removed from the slick confection of The Royal Family, all that Upper East Side banter and privilege and opulence. Here was Norman Rockwell on a Saturday Evening Post cover. A placard in the train station announced: “Rosalie Gay and her Accordion,” appearing at the Chi Am Chateau, a Chinese restaurant.

  “Miss Ferber?”

  I faced a smiling young man decked out in baggy white linen trousers and a periwinkle-blue tennis shirt, a happy-go-lucky blond kid with an unwieldy cowlick and an eager grin. I nodded as he scooped up my suitcases, half-bowed, and directed me to a cream-colored station wagon with faux-wood side paneling and a discreet lettered sign on the door: Jefferson Village Inn. “This way, please.”

  The inn was steps away—in fact, across from the train station and the grand Maplewood Theater, its welcoming sign visible above a line of Hawthorne trees that dotted the median strip down the center of the street. Very pastoral. The inn was tucked under ancient hemlocks and oaks, with a cobblestone pathway and an intimate gazebo too close to the sidewalk. A lovely three-story house, doubtless an old Victorian homestead with its wraparound porch, cluttered rows of weathered Adirondack chairs, and gingerbread ornamentation decorating the high eaves. Here was a whitewashed edifice that once catered to the Manhattan rich who summered in the town at the turn of the century.

  At the front desk the clerk bowed and gushed and screamed approval of my stay. I learned that Sinclair Lewis had stayed there earlier that summer and had signed a menu, now framed and displayed in the dining room. “You are the second Pulitzer Prize novelist,” he gushed. He directed the young chauffeur to carry my bags up to the second floor, and the boy, still grinning but awash now in sweat, beamed. I also learned that most summer theater folks chose to take the half-hour train ride back into the city each afternoon. The stars of The Royal Family—including Louis Calhern and Irene Purcell—would do so, to my consternation. They would only book rooms during the week’s run. Cheryl Crawford, I learned, had rented a bungalow for the summer, though she scuttled back and forth to her Manhattan pied-à-terre. So, it seemed, for the moment I was the sole and lonesome grande dame from the Maplewood Theater in attendance in the venerable inn.

  Of course, I’d come early on purpose—time to learn my lines, to relax, to walk, to feel the pulse of the town. Here was solitude. After all, this was my stage debut. In my nightmares I stood on the stage and opened my mouth: no sound escaped. And the audience, rolling in hysterics, pointed at me, tears coursing down their shiny cheeks. Some nights I startled myself awake, panicked, and I cringed.

  Settled in, at leisure, I gazed down onto the avenue from my window, a gigantic tree nearby shimmering in the late-afternoon breeze. A rain shower was coming because the leaves of the sugar maple turned upright, and dust swirled in pocket eddies on the sidewalk.

  I glimpsed a man hurrying by, then stepping behind a car and waiting. Then he ran, hunched over. Something about his posture…something familiar…but how would I know him? But something about the bowed head…

  I shut the window and sat in a blue wing chair, my marked-up Samuel French copy of The Royal Family in my lap. Fanny Cavendish’s lines. Too many of them, I realized. I had to memorize them now, and that stressed me. I practiced a line out loud, my voice sounding artificial and dull in the small room. Words echoed in
my mind: pace, projection, cues. Disaster. Reading the script, I remembered—yes, George wrote that line. I wrote this one. We fought over that speech. I insisted…George glowering…me fiery.

  The beginning of a slight headache. This was not going to end well, I realized—George had tried to warn me. Certainly his riotous laughter when I mentioned Cheryl’s offer of the part should have tipped me off. Others had warned me. Neysa McMein’s nervous titter. My sister Fannie’s phlegmatic dismissal. My innate stubbornness, to be sure, bred in the blood. A vice I joyfully cultivated. And sheer Midwestern orneriness, hard-fought and decently come by.

  The rains came, the drumbeat of heavy splatter against the panes.

  At suppertime I strolled downstairs into the dining room where the waitress seated me at a small table by the back window. I could watch the rain splatter on the cobblestones as twilight settled in. The smallish room was sparsely populated. Two portly businessmen in wrinkled seersucker suits were laughing like schoolboys over some whispered joke; a moody mother eyed her squirming daughter of perhaps ten; three old women who could be sisters all talked over one another.

  Quietly I ordered a simple sirloin steak with onions and mushrooms, expecting disaster, and a martini. The waitress, a chubby girl with her hair in Mary Pickford ringlets, winced at my order of a drink, her pencil frozen in the air. “Is Maplewood a dry county?” I babbled, but she had no idea what that meant. I gathered that a single middle-aged woman in a light rose-colored dress with three strands of sensible pearls should not be ordering firewater unless she was the local madam who’d taken a wrong turn from Newark.

  The room featured heavy, ornate Edwardian curtains that festooned the floor-to-ceiling windows, dark burgundy with dusty gold tassels. Clumsy tables with legs the size of elephant trunks looked permanently in place—you’d need a waterfront crew to shift that furniture. Old faded white damask tablecloths reminded me of an ancient relative in Chicago—the persistent finery of those who insist anything one hundred years old is religiously worthy. A mausoleum, this petrified chamber, though the gum-clacking young waitress had been dropped, willy nilly, from a time capsule.