by Miley, Mary
“We’ve been keeping an eye out for something for you too,” said Jock without meeting my eyes. “We care about all four of you, and you’ve been with us a long while. You’re like real family.”
Not quite. Real family wasn’t being cast off. “So the Little Darlings are going to go on, but with only three kids?” I asked, hardly able to breathe.
Jock found something interesting about his fingernails.
“I see.” And I did. With Darcy taking on a bigger role, they could do as well or better with three kids as with seven. And the $50 a week they wouldn’t be giving me, Angie, and the boys would translate into a big raise for them. It was obvious. So obvious it made me want to throw up. How had I not seen this coming?
The betrayal cut into me like a dull knife. In my whole life, I had been with no act longer than the Little Darlings. I had practically raised Darcy and Danny, and I loved little Lizzie and her antics. Francine and Jock were only five or ten years older than me, and I thought of them as a brother and sister. In a flash, I saw how stupid I had been to let myself care and how gullible to think I was ever anything more than hired help.
Orphaned again. Why did each time feel like the first?
I got up off the bed, swallowing hard, determined to die before I let them see me cry. I didn’t want to hear what they had in mind for me. I didn’t need Jock and Francine. I could find my own jobs. Lord knows, I’d done it before. I’d been in this business a lot longer than they had, and I had friends. A lot of friends. And some money saved. There were loads of opportunities for someone with my talents. Right now, I just wanted to escape to my own room where I could be alone before my eyes spilled over.
“I know this has been a shock…” Jock began.
“Not at all,” I lied, swallowing hard. “I’ll find something else.”
“It’s just business. Nothing personal. No hard feelings, hon?”
“None at all.” I lifted my chin and left their room.
5
You can find the location of any act in big-time vaudeville simply by looking in the pages of Variety or Billboard, weeklies that list who, where, and when for the Orpheum and Keith-Albee circuits. The lesser circuits—the Pantages, Western, Interstate, and such—print similar broadsides, not as accurate but serviceable. So it was simple for me to write the larger kiddie acts and request an audition. From Oklahoma City, I sent word to the Darlings’ New York agent—agents are often the first to learn of vacancies—and had a polite reply. This was a particularly bad time for singles to try to break in, he advised. Stick to groups or a double. He’d keep me in mind. It was a good start.
I didn’t limit myself to juvenile. A versatile performer like me can fit into almost any routine. I could sing, dance most styles—ballet, tap, clogging, folk, or ballroom—play a little flute and clarinet, and act in comedies, tragedies, or musicals. I set out to find something good, something long-term. Someone with my talents could afford to be choosy.
Right away I was called to Denver to audition for a part with a troupe that specialized in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I adored Gilbert and Sullivan and knew most of their songs by heart. I’d performed “Three Little Maids from School Are We” when I was ten, dressed in a beautiful green silk kimono Mother had made for me. I did that number for them, minus the kimono. They needed two players, and I was certain I would be offered one of the spots, but I lost out.
In late May in St. Louis I tried for several roles, one with a kiddie song-and-dance troupe, one with the Russian Dolls, an ensemble that specialized in Russian folk dancing, another that put on famous scenes from Shakespeare, and a Wild West show that needed a cowgirl who could sing and do ropes. My rope twirling was weak, but I assured them I was a quick study. I think I’d have gotten that role if I’d been able to shoot a bow and arrow. I finally accepted an offer to assist the Great Adolfo, who seemed impressed with my previous experience in magic. Three days later I walked off—without pay—after it became clear that I was expected to perform in bed as well as on stage.
By then I was in Memphis where I picked up two weeks of work substituting for a girl who had gone home for her mother’s funeral and another week helping behind the scenes with a chicken act, getting my arms pecked bloody while rounding up those nasty creatures when they would try to escape into the wings. I auditioned for a Hawaiian song-and-dance act and was rejected.
I had my mail forwarded from Oklahoma City to Memphis, where I rewrote fifty letters to see whether anything new had opened up in the past few weeks. Friends sent their best wishes and said they would let me know as soon as they heard of a good lead, but most didn’t respond at all. You can’t bank warm wishes, and my money was running low, but I told myself there was plenty of time.
Even out of a job a while, I wouldn’t starve. Working with magicians had taught me enough sleight of hand to feed myself for free at any grocer’s. In my younger years, after Mother had died and no one was paying me much attention, I’d been a passable thief, stealing from department stores so vast that what I took was never noticed. Except once, when carelessness earned me two nights in a slop-bucket cell with roaches coming out of the cracks faster than I could squash them. I’d learned my lesson. I never stole anything ever again unless I was one hundred percent certain that I wouldn’t get caught.
In Minneapolis in June I teamed up with a man who had lost his female partner to another act. It was a routine full of silly patter where he delivered the straight lines and I provided the zany misunderstandings. We opened at the Hennepin in the dreaded number two position, which I blame for our meager applause. After our first matinee, the manager came backstage and handed us our publicity photos, brusquely uttering the most feared word in vaudeville: “Canceled.” We changed our name twice and tried again at a couple small-time theaters, but no dice.
I told myself my luck would change in Toledo. But Bert Earl and Girls auditioned only tall dancers and my range wasn’t high enough for Hanson’s Double Quartette. I filled in for an usher at one theater and sold tickets at another to pay my room. A roper hired me to give some sex appeal to his cowboy routine, but he figured on going into burlesque and I figured I’d be wearing nothing but a holster, so we parted ways. I worked one-night stands on the “death trail”—five shows a day—with a Polish ethnic act until they finally gave up and went home to Cleveland. I went with them to audition for a job as a song plugger selling sheet music, but they didn’t think I looked the part.
Late July found me sick from bad chili, sweltering in a fifty-cent Akron hotel with seven clams to my name. The bed was set in four pans of oxalic acid, which kept the ants from getting into the sheets but did nothing to discourage the fleas that were already safely tucked in. The god-awful flocked wallpaper on the ceiling was losing its battle with gravity, curling at the seams. With every step in the room above, a delicate shower of dried flour paste snowed down on my sheets.
I was not finished with vaudeville, but vaudeville was finished with me. Even small-time spots I’d gone for had bombed. At every kiddie audition, I had lost to a kid. Why hire a woman to play a girl when they could hire the real thing and pay her less? I was not Mary Pickford after all. The same talents that had seemed so precocious in a ten-year-old turned out to be stunningly average in an adult. It dawned on me that, but for the kindness of the Darlings, I’d have washed up years ago.
Jack-of-all-trades, I had called myself. There was another side to that coin: master of none.
My self-confidence shattered, I examined the options. If not vaudeville, what? How could I make a living? I knew nothing beyond the stage. I had no idea how the civilian world worked. No one would hire me as an office clerk or a telephone operator or a shopgirl with the taint of vaudeville on my skin. Performers are toasted and admired as long as they are onstage. Offstage, we are not respectable, like gypsies or immigrants.
I had no money, no prospects, and no family to turn to for help. The only world I knew had turned its back on me. I felt so sick and alon
e I wanted to die.
Come on, Baby, don’t give up. I heard my mother’s voice in my head as I often did, as clear as if she were standing beside my pillow. We’ve been here before. Remember Cincinnati and that awful stage manager? Remember that winter in Albany? You’ve been through worse than this. Think about what you’ve got going for you. There’s always another job just around the corner.
In point of fact, there was a job for the asking directly across the street. An inner voice forced me to the window where I looked through the grimy glass at the brothel that faced my hotel. A man walked out and paused to light a cigarette. Curtains moved in an upstairs window. Another man went in. There had been a brothel a few blocks down from my hotel in Toledo. There had been a brothel on the corner near my rooming house in Cleveland. And now, here was a brothel across the street. Suddenly, I saw what was happening, and my heart raced. They were getting closer. How much longer before they reached me?
Panic squeezed my chest. “No!” I said aloud.
An attack of chills drove me to dig my winter coat out of my trunk. Shivering in the summer heat, I slipped my arms into the sleeves and my hands into the pockets. In the right pocket, my fingers closed around a business card. Oliver Beckett must have placed it there without my knowledge back in March.
An omen? I’d once helped fleece gullible people at séances. Was that so different from helping to con a wealthy family out of their money by playing the role of an heiress? Another town, another name, another role. It was just a job, and for once, a well-paying one. No one gets hurt; no one is left destitute. I glanced down at Oliver’s card and saw in my mind the photograph of the poor little rich girl who looked like me, and I couldn’t help wondering, What really happened to her?
Firmly I pushed that thought aside. Never mind the heiress. I was in this for the money. Thoughts of the real Jessamyn Carr dimmed, like a fade-out at the end of a sad moving picture.
6
A faint knock at my bedroom door. A creaking noise. The ruddy round cheeks of the housekeeper peeping in once again. Yes, I was awake. Yes, I could see Mr. Oliver Beckett. “As soon as I’m dressed, I’ll come—”
But he was right behind her.
I pushed myself up against the pillows and yawned as Oliver lumbered into the room. I didn’t care. Oliver had no interest in women. Besides, I was swathed from neck to wrist to ankle in a maidenly nightgown supplied by the housekeeper herself after I had arrived at the door of the Beckett mansion four days earlier, feverish, incoherent, and “without suitable nightclothes.” As Oliver had promised, an army of servants and two doctors mobilized to wait on me. And I let them.
He beamed. “I came as soon as I could, my dear. I trust everyone has been taking good care of you?”
“The heir to the throne could not have received better care, thank you very much. I’ve been bathed, brushed, spoon-fed, and pampered like a French poodle.” The sickness that had started with something I ate had taken a detour through fever territory, keeping me in bed for several days, but I felt better today. I stretched my lips into a smile. No matter what I thought of Oliver, I was going to have to work with him.
Oliver snapped his fingers at the housekeeper, who bobbed her head and backed out of the room. He smiled at me. “Let me have a good look at you,” he said in a jovial voice, sweeping open the draperies to the four o’clock sun. “I’ve been quite worried about you.”
A shame if I were to die and ruin his only chance at a fortune.
“I’ll make it. Lucky you have a house in Cleveland. I was so sick, I don’t believe I could have managed a longer trip.”
I had come, as he instructed, on the train from Akron, arriving at Cleveland’s Union Terminal an hour after we had exchanged telegrams. A uniformed chauffeur had met me on the platform, lugged my luggage and me to the car, and drove us west along the Gold Coast of Lake Erie. The trip was a blur.
“But this is not my house! Did you think that? No, it belongs to a dear chum, Randolph Stouffer, who is traveling in Europe. When I realized your dire straits, I thought through my list of pliable friends for one close to Akron. Randy came first to mind. He was delighted to lend me his home for as long as we want it. Keeps the servants out of mischief, he said.”
So that was how Oliver lived—mooching off rich friends in the best four-flusher tradition. Nice work if you could get it. He pulled a chair over beside my bed and sat. We pretended not to notice the protesting creak.
“While you have been recuperating, my dear, I have not been idle. I have drawn floor plans and family trees, made lists of what you’ll need to learn, and gathered information and photographs to help you.”
A pretty young maid stopped at the doorway and cleared her throat. “Excuse me, sir, miss. Mrs. Wisniowolski is wanting to know if you’d care for tea?”
Oliver barely noticed her. I told the girl we would love tea. And some of those dainty bread-and-butter sandwiches I was unable to stomach yesterday. “So that’s how you say her name,” I mused when the maid was out of earshot. I repeated the unfamiliar sounds softly.
“Surely you, of all people, are accustomed to foreign-sounding names. I thought vaudeville was full of Polacks, niggers, kikes, and other … well, immigrants.” And he could look down his nose at them because his grandfather had come over on an earlier boat. I had known snooty people like him before.
“Yep, and they always seem to be the most talented performers too. But on their way through the stage door, they usually trade their originals for something catchy the public will remember. Years ago, when I was in the Kid Kabaret with Eddie Cantor, he told me his real name was Israel Iskowitz. Who’s going to remember that, let alone spell it? I could give you dozens of examples like that.”
No need. Oliver was all business at hand.
“What made you change your mind?”
It was a question I had wrestled with during the past few days as I lay in bed. Why had I changed my mind? The easy answer, of course, was that I had been sick, scared, and desperate enough to snatch at any way out. In my fevered state, Oliver Beckett’s card in my coat pocket represented the solution to all my troubles. Penniless and alone, I had few options. And yet … it wasn’t that simple.
My mother would have disapproved. Well, you’re not sick anymore, I could hear her say. I’m still very weak, I protested. So wait a few days and then tell him you can’t go through with it. But I can’t find work. You can sell tickets at a box office in Cleveland until a suitable act passes through. I’m not good enough. Anything I got would be Small Time or “death trail.” Nonsense, you’ve more talent than that. I’m just trying the part on for size. I can always back out. It’s dishonest. No more than most. We’re not cutting the family off, you know, just spreading the wealth a bit further. It’s really no different than what those spiritualists do, taking money from people who can afford it and making them happy by contacting their lost loved one. No harm done. It’s dangerous. No one will get hurt.
Mother came to me every night in my dreams, but I wouldn’t listen to her. Vaudeville had beaten me down and humiliated me beyond recovery. I couldn’t go back for another punch in the face. I wasn’t as talented as Mother thought. As I myself had once thought. And I had found work, I argued. I had taken a role in Oliver Beckett’s production of She Stoops to Con, and if I played the part well, I had a shot at real money, a comfortable life, and something else. Something money couldn’t buy. Suppose they were happy to see me? Suppose I really could take Jessie’s place in Jessie’s family?
And then there was that feeling I could not quite put into words, even to Mother. The sense that this was what Jessie wanted. From the moment I saw her photograph, I had liked her, and I suspected she liked me. We had something in common, Jessie and I, something more than just our looks, as remarkable as that resemblance was. Something beyond our shared status as orphans. But what? I was no threat to her, and she knew it. If she were still alive and returned home, I’d exit stage left faster than you could say “Jack
Robinson.” If she were dead … but she felt too alive to be dead.
To be sure, masquerading as an heiress would be tricky. I’d been impersonating people all my life, but this was a tougher gig than any I’d ever had, being on stage every waking minute. The challenge roused me from the melancholy that had held me down for weeks. I could do this. I could do it well.
I looked at Oliver. I had anticipated his question. Still, I cocked my head to one side and paused so my reply would not sound rehearsed.
“Jock and Francine decided to shrink the act to genuine Darlings. I had a lot of offers—good ones—but, to be honest, nothing appealed. In twenty-five years of vaudeville, I’ve played every part the circuit has to offer. I want to see what it’s like to live somewhere for longer than a week. I want to wear clothes that aren’t costumes and makeup that isn’t greasepaint. I want to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower before I die. I want some money.”
“You realize you are going to have to work hard?”
“I’ve always worked hard, Mr. Beckett,” I said in a tone that would freeze water.
“And it involves a good deal of risk. More for me than you.”
He was right about that. In a pinch, I could disappear into anonymity with little lost, since I came into this escapade with nothing but my face and my acting talents. Somehow I couldn’t picture portly Oliver hopping a boxcar with a cardboard suitcase and making for Mexico. It was an advantage I had over him, something I could use if he became too domineering and started treating me as rudely as he treated Randy Stouffer’s servants.
“Will you be ready to begin tomorrow morning?”
Some of my old self-confidence had returned with my health. Like a soldier coming home from the war, I’d been wounded in battle and shaken to the core, but I had survived with a more realistic notion of my worth. I had accepted a job, and I would handle it like the professional I was. Still, the notion of me waltzing into high society without anyone noticing I didn’t belong there rattled me more than I wanted to admit.
