Starstruck

by Rachel Shukert

  Amanda felt her eyes sting with unshed tears. Desperately, she looked back to the photo of the young Olive waving to her fans from beneath the blazing marquee. She looked truly radiant, glowing with promise and hope and happiness, and suddenly, Amanda saw for the first time that the young Olive’s hand was tucked into the crook of a tuxedoed elbow. A man’s elbow.

  The man himself had been carefully folded, or maybe cut, out.

  In spite of herself, Amanda felt a flood of compassion for Olive. Her heart was broken! No wonder she was so cynical about friendship, about love. Perhaps the man had been her husband. Perhaps he had left her when her career petered out. It all made sense now. “I understand, Olive,” she said, and impulsively seized the older woman’s hand. “I understand everything. But it’s going to be different for me. Harry loves me. He does. And I love him. We’re going to be happy. I’m going to get everything I want out of life, you’ll see.”

  “Amanda, dear,” Olive said, gently pulling her hand away, “who are you trying to convince?”

  Honestly, Olive Moore thought as she watched the girl walk down the steps, her copper hair glinting in the low lamplight, I should have been expecting something like this.

  Amanda was too beautiful a girl to stay put forever. It was inevitable that she would want more, but Olive had always expected her to be a bit more sensible. She had never been fully apprised of the details of Amanda’s former life—the past was not something you talked about at Olive Moore’s house—but it was hardly an unfamiliar story: the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the drunk stepfather who couldn’t leave her alone. After all that, she’d figured Amanda would want safety, security, the white picket fence. All the hallmarks of respectability.

  And yet here she was, just another starstruck eighteen-year-old girl. A girl in love with a boy and the starry vision of herself she saw in his eyes. A girl in love with her dreams, who thought she was willing to give up anything to make them come true.

  Well, Olive had been that girl herself once, and she’d learned that giving things up at the beginning was the easy part. Afterward, when you realized you’d sacrificed all you hadn’t even known you wanted until it was too late: that was what was hard.

  Sighing, she switched off the closet light and returned to her ledger, to the list of her girls and how much money each of them had brought in that week. Lucy: $200; Dot: $205; Claudie: $315.

  These are my children, she thought. Not the girls: the numbers. The money. Money was the only thing you could count on, the only thing that mattered. Money kept you safe. It could bring people to you, but it could also keep them away. Sure, you could lose it, but unlike a lover, you could always win it back. And when it came back to you, it came back strong. It came back as if it had never left.

  Olive allowed herself a small smile as she ran her finger down the neat list of names, until she came to the one she was looking for.

  Ginger: $750.

  Olive picked up her heavy fountain pen to strike out the name. She’d be sorry to see her go. The girl was a good earner, no doubt about that. Olive Moore was not a sentimental woman, but she’d meant it when she said she was fond of the girl. Not the way she’d felt about Diana, and not exactly as she might about a daughter, but … still … there was a kind of protectiveness there.…

  Olive put down the pen and gulped the rest of her sherry.

  She’d leave the roster as it was for now. Just in case Amanda came back.

  In Olive Moore’s considerable experience, they always came back.

  “Margie! You’re going to be famous!”

  For such a small person, Doris Winthrop had a screech that could wake the dead. Her round gray eyes bulged with amazement as her mouth hung open, revealing a clump of Margaret’s Chinese Red lipstick on her top row of teeth. “I can’t believe it! My best friend is going to be a movie star!”

  “It’s just a screen test,” Margaret tried to protest, but she found herself flushing with pleasure nonetheless. Doris’s ability to get completely overexcited about things was one of her best qualities. She was exactly the person you wanted to tell first when great things happened, because you knew she would react in the most endearing way. “And I still have to get my parents to agree.”

  “Ugh.” Doris wrinkled her nose. Even in Pasadena, which its denizens liked to say was as stuffy as a head cold, Margaret’s parents were notoriously strict. “I see what you mean.”

  “And even if by some miracle they do let me,” Margaret continued, “that doesn’t mean I’ll pass it. After all, I’ve never acted before.”

  “What are you talking about? You played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Judith Bliss in Hay Fever last year at school and you were swell. Everybody said so.”

  “That was onstage, though,” Margaret said. “The camera is entirely different. I mean, look at all those great Broadway stars who can’t make a go of it in Hollywood.”

  “Can’t make a go of it because they’re uglies up close, and that, Margie, is one thing you’re not. You want to see an ugly? Look at me.” Doris excavated a crumpled handkerchief from the detritus of makeup and movie magazines strewn across the carpet of Margaret’s bedroom and began to rub her stained teeth furiously in the dressing-table mirror. “I can’t so much as get a boy to invite me to watch the pictures, let alone be in them.”

  “Doris, you know that’s not—”

  “No, don’t go buttering me up,” Doris interrupted. “I’m actually awfully sore at you. Sneaking off to Hollywood all those times without asking me to come along. What, did you think I’d embarrass you or something?”

  “Of course not,” Margaret murmured, although neither of them had forgotten the time Doris had screamed so loudly when she saw Carole Lombard riding on the beach in Santa Monica that the terrified horse had nearly trampled three small children building sand castles nearby. “I just thought you probably shouldn’t miss class, that’s all.”

  Doris rolled her eyes. “Don’t remind me. If Mother and Dad find out I’m failing French, I honestly think they’ll cancel my coming-out ball. And then it’s goodbye to life.”

  The coming-out ball. For Margaret, Doris, and practically every last one of their classmates, the upcoming debutante season was supposed to be the highlight of their lives. In just a few short months, it would begin. A debutante was expected to attend the entire whirlwind of parties and teas and dances, but the personal coming-out ball, in which a girl was officially presented to polite society as an eligible young lady suitable for courting, marrying, and replenishing the ranks of Pasadena’s better families, was the most important night of all. It was a night that could decide the course of a girl’s entire life. True, things had been scaled back in some ways since the Gilded Nineties, when solid gold cutlery and precious gems presented as party favors were the norm. That kind of thing might still fly among the new money crowd in New York, but in ossified Pasadena, whose lofty inhabitants had perhaps been hit slightly harder by the Depression than they cared to admit, such a display would be considered the height of bad taste. Yet to forgo the ritual entirely was unthinkable. After all, if you didn’t have a coming-out party, you’d never get a decent man to propose to you, and—as mothers, teachers, and virtually every other adult with whom an Orange Grove girl came into contact expressed repeatedly in manners both implicit and explicit—if you couldn’t get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead.

  “I told you I’d help you,” Margaret said. “You just need to spend some time on it, that’s all.”

  “Oh, it’s no use. It might be French, but it’s all Greek to me. The whole class is positively idiotic, anyway. I mean, who are we supposed to speak French to in Pasadena? The gardener?”

  “You’re good at math,” Margaret said, eager to pull her friend out of this familiar rut. “Great, in fact.”

  “Yes, but math isn’t an ‘accomplishment’ for young ladies, is it?” Doris tossed the scarlet-smeared handkerchief back down to the floor. “Oh, and speaking of young ladies and t
heir dubious accomplishments, Evelyn Gamble was going around telling everyone today that you were absent because you had ‘female trouble.’ ”

  “She said what?” Margaret blanched. Evelyn Gamble was the privileged daughter of Pasadena’s wealthiest family. She was also a six-foot-tall psychopath with the body of a Valkyrie, the brain of a giraffe, and the personality of Vlad the Impaler who never missed a chance to humiliate anyone outside of her tiny clique of appointed lackeys. If Evelyn had started to notice Margaret’s absences and saw an opportunity, it could mean big trouble indeed. “When? Where?”

  “Oh, in Poise and Presence, mostly.” Doris hooted. “You should have seen the look on Schoonmaker’s face! She went positively white as a sheet.” Thrusting her chin in the air, Doris peered cross-eyed down the bridge of her nose in a frighteningly accurate imitation of their teacher. “ ‘Miss Gamble, I have no females in my classroom, only ladies. And a lady never discusses such matters in the presence of other ladies. Therefore, the only female present is you.’ That told her! The whole class was positively in hysterics.”

  “Still. I don’t know why she has to be so nasty.”

  “Because she’s jealous,” Doris said simply. “She may be rich, but you’re prettier. And you’re the one Phipps McKendrick kept asking for all the slow dances at the Christmas dance, and that’s not even counting what happened outside on the golf course after. Which no one knows about but me,” Doris added hastily. “And Phipps, of course.”

  “Well, I’m sick to death of it. And the next time I see her I’m going to give her what for.”

  “You’d better start practicing, then. I mean, just think how jealous she’s going to be when she finds you’re going to have a screen test in Hollywood! Imagine all the stars you’re going to see! You might meet Diana Chesterfield!”

  “Doris—” Margaret bit her lip. Should she tell Doris what the soda jerk had said about Diana being missing? Doris would never forgive her if she kept something juicy to herself, but then again, Doris had an awfully big mouth, and the whole Diana thing seemed like awfully sensitive information.…

  “Or Dane Forrest!” Doris shrieked, before Margaret could make up her mind. “Maybe you’ll get to meet Dane Forrest!” Scrambling onto the bed, Doris gazed in mock adoration at the framed photo of the handsome star that hung on the wall above. “Do you think you’ll be in a movie where you get to kiss him on the mouth?”

  “Doris! Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Oh, Dane!” Doris shrieked, peppering the photo with slurping mock kisses. “I love you! I want to kiss you until our faces melt together and we have only one face!”

  “Doris, stop it! You’ll get lipstick all over him!”

  Shrieking with laughter, Doris expertly dodged Margaret’s volley of pillows. “Just remember,” she shouted, “when you’re a big famous star with the world falling at your feet: you leave Jimmy Molloy alone. Jimmy Molloy is mine!”

  “Just what in the name of heaven is going on in here?”

  Looming in the doorway was the well-upholstered figure of Emmeline, looking like someone had set her girdle on fire—while she was still in it. Both girls froze.

  “Well?” The housekeeper crossed her arms over her chest. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing up here, screaming your heads off like a couple of banshees?”

  “Oh, Emmeline—”

  “Don’t you ‘oh, Emmeline’ me, Miss Margaret! Never in all my born days have I heard such hooting and hollering from a pair of young ladies! I don’t like to think what the missus must have thought.”

  “Mother?” Margaret’s stomach lurched. “She’s home?”

  Emmeline’s eyes glittered. “And the mister.”

  “B-but I thought they were dining at the club tonight!” Margaret sputtered.

  “There’s been a change of plans. They’re having their cocktails in the library now. And I hope you don’t mind me saying it, Miss Margaret, but you’re mighty lucky it was me up here in the next room and not her.”

  Margaret gasped. Emmeline must have heard everything. This was a catastrophe. She’d counted on time to plan, to figure out the best way to broach the subject with her parents. Now she would have to tell them tonight, before Emmeline could.

  “Dinner at home,” Emmeline muttered furiously. Clearly, she was in one of her moods. “And me without so much as a joint or a bird for the table. But the missus wants what the missus wants. Young Miss Doris better hightail it on out of here. She’ll eat better at her own table tonight than at this one, to be sure. And you, Miss Margaret.” The housekeeper rounded on Margaret, her red round face like a thundercloud. “You’d best be downstairs at seven on the dot, scrubbed and dressed something proper, or you’ll have hell to catch from the missus.” She cast a long look around Margaret’s ruined bedroom. “And best clear up this mess or you’ll have hell to catch from me. I’m a housekeeper, not a chambermaid.”

  “Jeepers.” Doris watched Emmeline’s plump form retreat down the carpeted hallway. “What a grouch.”

  Margaret sighed. “Believe me, if you had to spend all day trapped in this house with my mother, you’d be pretty grouchy too.”

  The tall carved chairs lined the long polished table like faceless sentries. Dark velvet curtains, tightly drawn, seemed to mock even the possibility of light. The food, which Mrs. Frobisher summoned wordlessly from the kitchen course by course by means of a little brass bell, was a punishment in and of itself: brown soup, brown vegetables, brown sauce, brown meat so defiant in its dullness that Margaret sometimes imagined she could hear the recently deceased animal speaking from beyond the grave: Go on, eat me. I promise you won’t enjoy it.

  Other families might playfully tease one another over dinner, sharing stories of their day or raucous jokes, but at the Frobisher table, children were encouraged to be silent, and women ornamental. This left just her father to hold forth, through course after course, on the pressing social issues of the day. If it weren’t for the specific targets of his rants, Margaret thought with increasing despair, a casual observer could be forgiven for believing they had somehow time-traveled back to the nineteenth century.

  “And as for Roosevelt,” Mr. Frobisher was saying, brandishing a forkful of the disconcertingly chewy lamb Emmeline had rustled up from who knew what godforsaken corner of the icebox, “don’t even get me started on that traitorous criminal.”

  He’d gotten started on “that traitorous criminal” during the consommé and hadn’t let up since. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, currently in his second term as president, was at the head of a long list of people Lowell Hornsby Frobisher III did not care for, a rogue’s gallery that also included (but was hardly limited to) immigrants, Democrats, Communists, Jews, Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, psychiatrists, interior decorators, hoboes, Catholics, jazz musicians, and so-called warmongers (a term that, in his mind, was generally interchangeable with immigrants, Democrats, Communists, and Jews). Margaret, who was expected to remain dutifully silent throughout her father’s oratories, often kept herself sane by running a mental tally of how many times he could mention one of those despised groups in a single sentence.

  “As if the blasted New Deal weren’t bad enough,” her father continued, “with him and his Democrats (ding!) giving a bunch of no-good hoboes and immigrants (ding, ding!) the rightful property of millions of decent, hardworking Americans like us, now he’ll try to drag America into a war with Germany, a war that will benefit absolutely no one except a bunch of warmongering Communists and Jews.”

  Ding, ding, ding! Margaret thought with satisfaction.

  “Never mind the fact that Herr Hitler hasn’t given us the slightest indication he has any intention of war.” Mr. Frobisher paused to spread a bit of his lamb chop with a dollop of unaccountably olive-colored mint sauce before he continued. “Germany is simply exercising the right of a sovereign nation to arm itself. As for this latest business in Austria, well, the Austrians greeted Herr Hitler with open arms. Two peoples with the same c
ulture, the same language, the same blood; there’s no point in keeping them divided.”

  Mrs. Frobisher nodded vigorously as her husband triumphantly chewed his morsel of meat. “Of course, dear.” Her face was as rapt as though she hadn’t heard this exact lecture at least a hundred times before. It was an endless source of mystery to Margaret how her mother, capable of striking terror in the stoutest of hearts, could so convincingly play the “little woman” in the presence of her father. It almost gave her a strange kind of hope for her own future as an actress. “Of course, you’re perfectly right. Still, there’s just something about Mr. Hitler that rubs me the wrong way.” Mrs. Frobisher gave a little shake of her head. “I understand he’s done wonderful things for Germany. But I’m afraid when I see him in the paper, or in the newsreels, I can’t help but cringe. With all that shouting, he just seems terribly uncouth.”

  “Uncouth?” Mr. Frobisher roared with laughter. “Uncouth indeed! And that, my dear, is precisely why women have no place in politics.” He wiped his eyes with the corner of his monogrammed linen napkin. “Herr Hitler is governing a nation, Mildred, not presiding over a meeting of the Junior League.”

  “Oh dear.” Mildred Frobisher tittered along gamely. “I suppose I’ve made myself look rather silly.”

  “Never mind.” Mr. Frobisher patted his stomach. “We’ll turn the conversation to something of more interest for you ladies. Let’s see … Margaret.” He turned to his daughter with a start, as though surprised to see she’d been sitting there all this time. “What happened to you today?”

  Here it was. The chance she’d been waiting for since she’d come downstairs for dinner. She took a deep breath, struggling to control the butterflies fluttering wildly in her stomach. “Well, Father, actually, my day was rather interesting.”

  “Oh?” Her mother’s tone was superficially friendly, but Margaret could immediately hear the suspicion in her voice, and she knew at once she’d used the wrong word. Interesting? The guiding principle of the Frobisher household was to make sure nothing interesting happened, ever. “And just what might you mean by that?”