Maxie Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante

by Monica Nolan

  I’m a working girl now, the aspiring writer reminded herself, squaring her shoulders as she stepped from the phone booth. She’d make the Knock Knock Lounge her next stop. She could observe deviant dress while satisfying her curiosity about last night’s brouhaha. Hadn’t Lon suggested there was a connection between the seedy Dockside dive and the raid on Francine’s?

  Maxie waved down a taxi. After all, it made no sense to risk her safety in the dangerous Dockside district just to save a dollar. And I can expense it! she told herself.

  The cab rolled past dilapidated brownstones, where unshaven men in shirtsleeves sat on the stoop, smoking. A flashy fellow in two-toned shoes climbed out of a double-parked Cadillac, while an artist in paint-spattered pants smoked a pipe, his portfolio under his arm. They turned down Pingst Street, and two girls in black tights and turtlenecks came out of a bar. Beatniks? B-girls? Both?

  Maxie paid the driver and hopped out at the Knock Knock. The neon sign that dwarfed the sagging storefront was unlit, giving the bar the air of an aging star who hasn’t put on her makeup yet. Maxie blinked, momentarily blinded as she came out of the bright sunlight into the dim interior. When her eyes had adjusted, she looked around. The bar was almost empty—just three hardbitten women at the circular booth in the back, a tableful of empty glasses in front of them. Two young men in tight trousers were having an earnest conversation at the far end of the bar while the bartender served a bleached blonde.

  Maxie pulled out a stool at the other end of the bar. There was a pause while everyone eyed her suspiciously. The girl reporter knew she looked out of place in her office-girl attire, carrying her father’s briefcase.

  “Beer,” she said. The bartender drew it without a word and set it down in front of her. “Fifty-five cents.” That was a dime more than Francine’s charged. But Maxie paid it meekly and the bartender went back to her conversation. Maxie leafed through one of her fashion magazines and eavesdropped. The bleached blonde with the heavy mascara was some sort of performer, Maxie gathered. She was complaining about disrespectful audiences and small tips. “The kids today just come for a laugh,” she said bitterly. “And they’re cheapskates to boot. I don’t like this new generation. Think the world owes them a living!” One of the boys from the far end of the bar piped up, “The world’s a mess and we’re just trying to fix it, dig?”

  Maxie sipped her beer and wondered if the visit was going to be a bust. She admired the boy’s narrow, Italian-cut pants, but she couldn’t work them into her article. The fashion magazines weren’t very useful either. One feature was about “Fun in the Sun.” Swimsuits were no good to her—not unless she covered the lifeguarding profession.

  “And now there’s this new boss and the business at Francine’s.” The bartender lowered her voice, and Maxie pricked up her ears. She felt rather than saw the bartender’s wary glance around as she kept her eyes glued on a photograph of beach cover-ups. “I’ve got no beef with Francine. She has her customers, and we’ve got ours.”

  “She should know better than to squawk.” The blonde shook her head. “We’ve all had to pay—” Abruptly she broke off. A shadow fell over the the blue batiste beach cover-up Maxie was pretending to study. “Slumming?” said a familiar, velvety voice.

  Maxie looked up, skin prickling, directly into Lon’s eyes. They were Viking blue in the daylight, and her hair was a tousled golden blond. The handsomest girl she’d ever seen, Maxie had to admit. Like Paul Newman in Hud.

  “Can’t a thirsty girl get a drink?” the ex-deb parried. “It’s been a busy day.”

  The bartender brought Lon a beer and Lon nodded at Maxie. “She’s on my tab.”

  “Thanks,” said Maxie. The woman with the bleached-blond hair had left. Was it the sudden appearance of the beautiful butch that had frightened her away?

  Lon leaned on the bar as if she had all the time in the world. “Busy doing what?”

  “Oh, shopping, getting a manicure—rich-girl things,” Maxie told her. “What have you been doing since I saw you last? Bribed any more cops?”

  Lon smiled at the taunt. “What department?”

  “And what’s next on the agenda for the new boss in town?” Maxie tried.

  “New boss? Is that what I am?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Do you want me to be?” Lon’s voice was a purr.

  “Could you please stop answering my questions with a question?” Maxie begged.

  “Is this an interview, or are we off the record?” Lon sounded serious.

  “What do you mean?” It was Maxie’s turn to evade.

  “I hear you do some digging for Mamie McArdle—are you here on her account?”

  “How do you know so much about me?” demanded Maxie.

  “Maybe I’ve done some digging of my own.” Lon’s blue eyes darkened as if a cloud had covered the sun.

  “Business or pleasure?” Damn! Maxie thought with dismay. I’m flirting again!

  “Maybe a little of both,” Lon answered with a cryptic smile. She glanced down at her wristwatch and slid off the barstool. “See you,” she said, and vanished as suddenly as she’d appeared, while Maxie sat and tried to decide if she’d learned anything at all from their interchange. Not really, she decided. She’d only confirmed her hunch that Lon was criminally attractive!

  Chapter 9

  Blind Item

  Saturday morning Maxie was sitting up in bed, impatiently filing her nails. At a discreet tap she cried, “Finally!” and throwing back the wadded rose satin coverlet, she leaped out of the bed to open the door. Lois entered, carrying three cups of coffee, while Phyllis, behind her, bore a plate of toast and a bowl of hot cereal.

  “Darlings!” exclaimed Maxie. “I was about to expire! Lois, you remembered cream and sugar?”

  “Yes, Maxie,” said Lois. “But I don’t think we can do this every day. Mrs. DeWitt nearly caught us before the elevator door closed.”

  Lois had been grumpy ever since she’d seen the state of her new spring ensemble. Maxie had waded through the weedy garden and climbed the rusty fire escape to avoid Mrs. DeWitt last night, snagging the borrowed skirt as she came through the hall window. If only Lois hadn’t spotted her, before she had time to at least brush herself off! Since then she’d been harping on Maxie “coming clean” with Mrs. DeWitt.

  “Just as soon as I have money coming in, I’ll stop hiding from Mrs. DeWitt,” she promised Lois now. “I’m going to have another go at Mamie on Monday.”

  “Speaking of which, I brought the Sentinel,” Phyllis said, as she and Lois settled on the pair of pink slipper chairs with their own cups of coffee. Phyllis kept the front page, and handed Maxie the local news with Mamie’s “Confidentially” column. Lois leafed through the rest, looking for her agency’s advertisements.

  “Mrs. Johnson’s visiting Kentucky,” Phyllis reported. “She wants to examine the poverty situation from up close.”

  Lois held up a page for Maxie to look at. “What’s the first thing you notice?”

  Maxie studied the page as she spooned up her Cream of Wheat. “The special offer for stainless-steel silverware in a Danish Modern design?”

  “Oh, you’re just saying that!” Lois turned the page, pleased.

  Phyllis read, “Unrest increases in second week of civil rights push.” Lois looked up in alarm, and Phyllis added reassuringly, “In St. Augustine.”

  “Netta wrote me that someone threw a rock through their window,” Lois told them in a worried tone. “But does that make the news? She’ll have to be dead before I hear anything!”

  Maxie wiped the bottom of her bowl with the last crust of toast. “Nothing will happen to Netta. Didn’t she say she’s having the time of her life?” She picked up the paper and turned to “Confidentially.” She’d felt badly about not getting the story on Elaine from Sookie the other day, and wondered whether Mamie had used the engagement item.

  A gay gathering of the finest hens in Bay City’s flock . . . Maxie read. Mamie had eviden
tly decided to do the DAP tea, dull as it was.

  Suddenly Mamie’s assistant sat up straight. The coffee sloshed in her cup as she set it down hard on her bedside table. “Mamie used me!” she squeaked.

  Her two friends looked up as the unemployed heiress read in a shaking voice:

  “ ‘. . . speaking of fancy plumage, a certain bird of paradise in the aging debutante set has gotten her wings clipped after a sexsational pas de deux in the Bay City Women’s Club powder room left the fine-feathered Daughters of the American Pioneers all aflutter. Can this Mainstay of Bay City society learn to feather her own nest? A little bird told me that Mama and Papa Peacock have cut off the birdseed after this latest shenanigan.’ ”

  Maxie put down the paper, horrified. This wasn’t the way she’d hoped to see her name in the Sentinel!

  “I don’t think you’re an aging debutante.” Phyllis tried to console her. And Lois added, “Lots of people won’t know it’s you. The ones who don’t know you already, I mean.”

  Their attempts at comfort were fruitless. Her erstwhile employer had hung her out to dry! The columnist had never taken her seriously, Maxie saw now. She was just so much grist for the gossip mill, no different than the silly society types Mamie twitted behind their backs!

  “I’m through with Mamie!” she declared.

  “Finish your coffee.” Lois tried to pacify the irate ex-deb. “Don’t go off half-cocked!”

  It crossed Maxie’s mind that if she’d come through with the goods on the Ellman-Driscoll engagement, Mamie wouldn’t have been short on copy for the column. But no—that was no excuse. Mamie had paraded Maxie’s private problems for the entertainment of her gossip-hungry public.

  “No one makes a blind item out of me,” she told Lois, crumpling the column and throwing it into the corner. “It was a dead-end job anyway.”

  First Mumsy, then Pamela, now Mamie. She was cutting ties so fast she’d soon be completely adrift!

  She was still fuming when her door was flung open. “Is it true?” Mrs. DeWitt intoned, in the voice she reserved for recitations of Lady Macbeth’s famous monologue. “Are you, indeed, destitute?”

  The three girls were open-mouthed at this sudden apparition. Rumor had it Mrs. DeWitt hadn’t been above the first floor in twenty years. She stood in the doorway, her gray hair trailing down her back in a disordered braid. She wore a moss-green wool cardigan over a bias-cut, lace-edged, lavender satin nightgown.

  And Maxie saw, with a sinking feeling, that she clutched a copy of “Confidentially” in one hand.

  “Mrs. DeWitt, you shouldn’t pay any mind to Mamie.” Maxie scrambled out of bed. “She’s always exaggerating and getting details wrong, and anyway, I’ll come into my trust soon, a few birthdays from now, practically right around the corner—”

  Mrs. DeWitt swooped down and enveloped her startled tenant in a smothering embrace. “You poor girl!” Her voice throbbed with passionate sympathy. “You poor rejected child!”

  Maxie struggled to breathe through the combined scents of gin, tobacco, and violet water. Mrs. DeWitt finally released her, but kept a grip on her shoulder as she gazed down at her tenderly.

  “I, too, was once expelled from my happy home,” she told the astonished girls. “I, too, have been reviled by society!” In a ringing voice, she recited:

  “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!

  Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!”

  Then, from the pocket of the wool cardigan, she withdrew an old photograph of a little girl with a large ribbon in her hair, sitting on a pony in front of a many-gabled mansion. “Before!” she intoned. She pulled out another photo. “And after,” she added sepulchrally. The second photo showed a laughing girl with bobbed hair surrounded by soldiers and beer steins.

  Maxie was weak with relief, once she understood the Magdalena Arms’ housemother had seen a parallel in their lives. “Gee, Mrs. DeWitt, you were a looker!” she complimented their landlady.

  “I was one of the most popular chorus girls at Die Schwarze Katze,” the old woman declared with pride.

  “Was it hard—being on your own, at first?” Maxie was eager for advice from one who’d been through her ordeal.

  “I nearly starved,” Mrs. DeWitt stated solemnly. “My clothes were in tatters. I subsisted for one whole winter on nothing but cold soup.” Maxie started. “I lined my shoes with cardboard, which soaked through every time it rained. I lived in an unheated room. I pawned every piece of jewelry I owned, even down to my baptismal bracelet, just to pay the rent. Which reminds me . . .” Mrs. DeWitt stopped projecting to the balcony, and her voice became pleading. “Do try to get me a little on account. I hate to hound you, but the Magdalena’s finances aren’t as flush as they were in the days when our benefactress was alive.”

  The Magdalena Arms had been founded by Mrs. DeWitt’s childhood friend Mrs. Payne-Putney to provide a respectable and affordable place for actresses and other independent-minded young women to live, but it had lost its popularity as other options for single girls appeared.

  “I’ll scrape up something,” Maxie vowed. She might be capable of robbing her rich mother, but she’d never do anything to hurt the Magdalena Arms!

  “Fortunately I’ve finally rented Jeannette’s old room.” Mrs. DeWitt meant “Janet.” “So you’ll have a new neighbor. A lovely girl—very studious. Kelly Connor. She’ll be here at least for the summer. Do make her welcome to the Magdalena family.”

  Maxie hoped this Kelly, or whatever her real name was, would fit in with her neighbors. The fifth floor had a certain reputation to maintain.

  “I’m glad that’s straightened out,” said Lois after Mrs. DeWitt departed. She was clearly relieved that her wardrobe was safe again. “I told you Mrs. D. would understand!”

  “Mrs. DeWitt is the perfect example of a real progressive,” Phyllis declared.

  Their landlady had drifted to the stairs and begun her slow descent. “Hello, Priscilla,” Maxie heard her greet someone on the way up.

  Priscilla—that’s what Mrs. DeWitt always called Pamela!

  And then Pamela herself appeared, out of breath after the climb, but looking wonderful in her weekend uniform of white shirt and plaid pedal pushers. “Pam!” Maxie breathed. Phyllis and Lois evaporated discreetly as Pamela approached.

  Pam paused uncertainly in the doorway. “Hello, Maxie.” Her greeting was stiff, but Maxie pulled her into the room and closed the door. She slipped her arms around Pam’s waist, inhaling Pam’s clean, spicy smell. “Mmmm—I’ve missed you.”

  “It’s only been two days.” But Pam’s arms encircled Maxie tightly.

  “Two nights and a day and a half,” Maxie corrected.

  “You’re still in your pajamas.” Pam’s voice was muffled in Maxie’s hair.

  Maxie kissed Pam’s neck. “All ready to crawl back into bed. Want to join me?”

  She felt Pam sigh. “Maxie, what am I going to do with you?”

  Maxie had a number of suggestions, and soon the two girls were in the nest of satin quilts, and Maxie was unbuttoning Pamela’s crisply ironed blouse. Pamela told her, “The reason I stopped by is that I heard from Louise at The Step Stool that you’re going to do an article for them—that’s just swell, Maxie!”

  Maxie shrugged off the compliment along with her pajamas. “Well, Mamie was twitting me about my lack of writing samples, and so I figured . . .” Maxie’s lips grazed Pamela’s throat as she helped the Junior Buyer wiggle out of her plaid pedal pushers.

  “It shows real initiative.” Pamela’s breath came faster. “I always said that you could do anything you wanted if you just put your mind to it!”

  “Anything?” Maxie panted, as Pamela did that thing to her left nipple that she always liked. And then the two girls abandoned the conversation about Maxie’s prospects to give themselves over to a more basic form of communication.

  But later Pamela returned to the topic. “Initiative has n
ever been your problem; it’s stick-to-itiveness you lack!” The hardworking girl was tucking in her shirt, while Maxie lit a cigarette.

  Maxie squirmed as she lounged back in bed. This sounded like the beginning of another lecture. While she was content to bask in bed, Pamela had put on practicality with her penny loafers.

  “Stability—the ability to be there for the long haul,” Pamela continued. She picked up Maxie’s brush and brushed her hair with quick decisive strokes. “That’s what counts!”

  Maxie had a presentiment they were no longer talking about her employment prospects.

  “This quarreling and making up—it’s getting to be as predictable as florals in spring.”

  “Well, that’s a kind of stability, isn’t it?” Maxie argued, tapping her cigarette in the ashtray. To distract her improvement-oriented girlfriend, Maxie adroitly switched subjects. “Say, would you look at my piece for The Step Stool? I knocked together a rough draft last night, but I need a fashion expert’s opinion.”

  The ploy worked. “Of course,” agreed Pamela. She read through the looseleaf pages while Maxie got dressed. The ex-deb couldn’t help hovering over Pam as her girlfriend finished her article. She was quite proud of her first piece of real writing.

  “ ‘What to Wear While Cruising.’ ” Pamela returned to the title. “I think that’s a little frivolous, when it’s supposed to be about working women!”

  “I wanted something attention-getting.” Maxie defended her choice. She was disappointed Pamela hadn’t laughed at any of the quips Maxie had been so pleased with last night. She hadn’t even cracked a smile.

  “Well.” Pamela was visibly hunting for something to praise. “It certainly is peppy. But I wonder if The Step Stool will be expecting a more, well, serious piece.”

  “Didn’t you like the part where I wrote, ‘It’s not about what a girl wears but what she wore’?”