Melting the Snow on Hester Street

by Daisy Waugh

  ‘He sure did!’ Marion nodded, triumphantly. ‘Can you believe it? He fired Eleanor from Lionsfiel. She’s out of contract! So now they’re b-both out of a job.’

  ‘That’s too bad!’

  ‘You’re telling me it’s too bad. It’s about as l-lousy as it gets! I never liked Butch Menken! I always said he was a creep.’

  Charlie thought about it. They would have taken a knock from the stock market, too, no doubt. ‘Poor devils,’ he murmured. ‘What are they going to do?’

  ‘They’re going to come to San Simeon, and I’m going to give them a great time. And I’m going to seat them beside WR on one side, and Joseph Kennedy on the other.’

  ‘I’m sorry you invited him. Joseph Kennedy is a snake. I think he may be the nastiest man in California.’

  ‘I didn’t invite him, Charlie. WR invited him.’

  ‘Is he bringing his wife?’

  ‘God no! I already told you, Gloria’s coming.’

  ‘Without the marquis, I presume?’

  ‘She’s dumped the marquis – so it’s b-back to plain old Miss Gloria Swanson.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘In any case, you may think Joseph Kennedy’s a snake—’

  ‘Because he is.’

  ‘He’s a snake who owns one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. And if M-Max Beecham is half the man I think he is … I told him on the telephone that “Joseph” was gonna be here. But you know what, he wasn’t himself – he didn’t even ask which Joseph.’

  ‘Perhaps he just assumed.’

  ‘He thought I was talking about his driver!’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘He wasn’t himself, Charlie,’ she said again, shaking her head.

  ‘No. Well. It’s been a bad week. I don’t suppose he was.’ Charlie glanced down at the letter, still held between his dissapproving fingers. It was written on cheap yellow writing paper, in a tiny, looping, girlish hand. ‘Do you really want me to read this thing?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish you would. I’ve not even met her yet, Charlie. We only talked on the telephone, but she’s arriving tomorrow.’ Marion shuddered. ‘She’s living in Los Angeles, if you can believe it. Trying to be an actress …’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘I sent her first-class tickets. But for the earlier train. Oh Ch-Charlie! What have I d-done?’

  ‘I hate to imagine,’ Charlie muttered, looking down at the flimsy paper. ‘I had better read it then.’ He sighed. ‘Well here goes …’

  66

  Dear Miss Davies,

  I hope sincerely that you will forgive me for intruding in this way upon your precious time. I have long been a fan of all your movies and I adored you in Tillie the Toiler which I have seen now five times and I adore it more each time I watch. However, it is not why I am writing.

  I have a most unusual request. It is complicated and I shall try to be brief.

  I have seen your photograph in a thousand magazines, and you always seem like such a merry sort of a girl, gay and laughing with so many friends around you. I suppose it cannot always be so, even for a girl who is quite as splendid as you—

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Charlie Chaplin muttered.

  ‘S-stay with it,’ Marion said, sucking on another peach stone, staring through the window at the distant waves. ‘She takes a while, but then she hits her stride. You g-gotta stay with it, Charlie. I know you p-pretend to think I’m just a floozy – but I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble if I didn’t believe there was something in it. Now would I?’

  He didn’t reply.

  I am a young woman, twenty or so years old, by my calculation (I cannot be certain). And like most girls my age, I am infatuated with the movies. Especially the talkies. I think they’re quite wonderful. It’s such a thrill to hear the stars’ voices.

  Well, and like most girls, I could tell you the names of a hundred different stars – I could tell you almost everything about any of them: the names of their pets, what cars they drive, where they grew up and so on. Of course I know that not all the stories we are told about the stars are true stories. In fact, I wonder sometimes if there is even a grain of truth in a single word of any of them. Nevertheless, the stories are always entertaining, and I simply love to read about them. I suppose I am afraid to get to the point.

  In last month’s issue of Photoplay I spotted a photograph of you with one of my favourite stars. The photograph amazed me. I must have seen a hundred pictures of Mrs Eleanor Beecham over the last several years and almost as many of her husband, Max Beecham, but it is the only one I have ever seen in which she is smiling. In fact, it looks as if the two of you are firm friends—

  ‘Firm friends?’ Charlie repeated aloud. ‘But you’re not, are you?’

  ‘W-well th-that’s just what I thought, Charlie. Eleanor doesn’t really h-have any friends. Does she? When you really actually think about it. Well, and I looked up the photograph in that magazine. And it’s true, we do look as though we’re sharing the most terrific little secret.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘It’s a trick of the light, I guess. I don’t imagine we were. It was a terribly dull evening. Remember the Academy Awards back in May. Do you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At the Roosevelt. You must remember! All the fuss! Dougie gave a d-dreadful little s-speech. At least I thought it was dreadful. The whole s-silly evening was dreadful. But you know they’ve decided it was such a success, God knows why – they’re going to do it again next year! Did you know? They’re to be an annual thing.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Charlie sighed. ‘It’s hard enough concentrating on this drivel.’

  ‘It’s not drivel, Ch-Charlie. It’s quite fascinating. And she’s j-just a kid, y’know? Give her a break. And it’s really a t-terrible story …’

  Until I saw the picture of you two laughing so gaily, I thought that Eleanor Beecham was not like you, not merry and cheerful, but a lonely sort of a person, similar to the sort of characters she plays in the movies and, truthfully, it broke my heart. That might seem odd to you. But if you are still reading, I shall explain.

  I understand from your interviews that you grew up in New York. But not (I think!) in the slum areas of the Lower East Side of the city. It’s where I was born and where I spent the first several years of my life. I remember almost nothing of it. But I think we lived on Allen Street because, you can see for yourself, that is the name written on the photograph. And we lived together in a great crush, with cousins and aunts and uncles and just about anyone who could pay a few dollars for board, all of us squeezed in together. Of course, there were so many new people coming into America in those days – before the quotas came in, and every day there were more. I was so young, I remember so little. In my long search to uncover the mystery, I have looked at the newspaper reports and my mind sometimes confuses what I have read with what I truly remember, but I remember the hot summer nights, I think, when the heat and the crush were so terrible, we used to sleep side-by-side, like sardines, out there on the fire escapes. It has changed now, of course. This was some years back, around the time of the fire at Triangle.

  I remember the fire. I was very young – still just a baby: two or three years old. That is to say, I remember there was talk of a terrible fire – and I remember the smell of it filling our small living space that night as the adults came and went. I remember the weeping. So much weeping. And the streets filled with more people weeping and then, after that, nothing. Everything changed. Death seemed to be everywhere, and only my grandmother left. I wish I could be more exact. It seems so flimsy when I see it written it down. And yet and yet and yet.

  In my memory it seems to be part of the same day, but I know that it cannot be. They said my grandmother was sick. People were dying, there were bodies carried down the stairs under gray sheets. I remember she lay still for so long. I remember being pulled from her arms: and then a journey, and another, and another. All this I remember but only in the smallest
of flashes. And perhaps I will tell you more, one day, if you ever reply to me. But this letter is too long already. I lived at an orphanage in Brooklyn for a short while, and then at another, that one in New Jersey. I know this, because I have documentation. And then there was another and another – and here I am: more fortunate than I dared to dream; far more fortunate than the many I left behind. But along the way I lost my name.

  At the first orphanage, the very first one, we arrived in a small group. The woman who collected us up must have been kind. I don’t remember. There were two or three children – not only me. They were collecting up the lost children. She packed me with a small case with some clothes. I had a chamsa which my grandmother gave to me from her own neck – and which I have worn every day since, and which I wear today.

  I left the apartment with only that and a photograph. It was the photograph that hung on the wall by the door. I saw the lady take it down for me: at least I think I saw it. It left a mark on the wall behind, a small, clean square, which the city grime couldn’t reach.

  And here it is. It is my only clue. It is only a copy of the photograph, of course. On the back of the original, which I have kept with me, it says in ink:

  Eleana and Matz Beekman, 2109 Allen Street, 1909

  I can find no listing of their marriage and no listing of the baby anywhere. It is as if the baby had never existed. And yet – there you see the three of them, mother, father and child – as alive as any you could hope to lay eyes on.

  In all my research, I found one or two mentions of Matz Beekman – in police records, which I won’t go into here. Apparently he was active in the unions. There were charges. He was arrested on the day of the fire, at a workers’ rally. And there the trail stops. It’s impossible to know what quite happened next. Because you see, in all the records, I could find only one mention of Eleana and Matz Beekman of Allen Street. According to official documentation, both burned to death on that same terrible day, in that terrible fire: 25 March 1911.

  I hardly dare to write what I am hoping: it seems too absurd. But there were so many deaths on that day of the fire, and many remains were so badly burned they were unrecognizable. Some were never identified at all. Do you see what I am trying to say? Perhaps they escaped, after all. It’s possible. Isn’t it? If the police were after him, and they wanted to start afresh. Perhaps they came back to fetch me and they never found me again. I keep telling myself it’s absurd. But then I look at the photograph. And I know it’s possible.

  Look closely at the photograph – won’t you, please? Also, please, at the photograph I have sent you of myself, taken three weeks ago.

  Am I imagining resemblances that simply are not there? Or are they as I think they are? I cannot see beyond them …

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Charlie burst out, laying the paper on the bed, ‘why she wouldn’t have contacted Max and Eleanor herself? Why is she sharing all this nonsense with you?’

  ‘Well, that’s just what I asked her, Charlie, when we spoke on the telephone. Except I didn’t say “nonsense”. Of course I asked her that.’

  ‘And?’

  Marion hesitated. ‘She has tried. She says she has tried on countless occasions … She has written to them and received no reply. She has camped at the bottom of their drive, Ch-Charlie! Almost been crushed to d-death by Max, in his auto, but he wouldn’t stop. Why – on the night of the party, she dressed as a waitress, but they threw her out before she had a chance … And then again – only last week – she approached the girl, the little reporter girl Max is so friendly with … I f-forget her name …’

  ‘Blanche Williams.’

  ‘That’s right. She spoke to Blanche. Or she was about to say something to Blanche. But …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She lacked the courage,’ Marion said simply. ‘Each time it got so c-close. But she lacked the courage.’

  ‘Oh, well then.’ It was sarcastic. ‘So she writes to a strange woman whom she happens to see smiling in a magazine.’ Charlie laughed. Shook his head.

  ‘W-well, you can ridicule that if you want to.’

  ‘I’m not ridiculing it.’

  ‘She’s alone in the world, Ch-Charlie … Think back – why won’t you do that? And remember yourself. It’s not so completely different from your own life, now is it?’

  ‘I didn’t write to unknown movie stars suggesting they were my kin.’

  ‘When they took your ma away from you. And then they took you and your brother and put you into the poorhouse.’

  ‘Thank you, Marion. I know what happened. I wish I had never told it you.’

  ‘But Charlie, of course you should’ve told me!’

  ‘And if you don’t mind—’

  Marion leaned towards him. ‘All right, then. Just imagine it. This poor little kid, she’s been tossed into who-knows-how-many orphanages – she gets an idea in her head that maybe she isn’t so alone after all. Imagine that! Imagine it Ch-Charlie! I know you can! Can you imagine how precious it would be? That there might be somebody out there in that big, wide, cruel world who l-loves you, after all? A mother and a father—’

  ‘Far-fetched.’

  ‘And not just any mother and f-father, Charlie, but these guys! M-Matz and Eleana Beekman: Max and Eleanor Beecham. The happiest married couple in Hollywood! Rich and beautiful and famous and—’

  ‘Dead, by the girl’s own admission.’

  Marion reached into the pocket of her satin day pyjamas and pulled out a second envelope. She tossed it across to him, missing her target by half a room once again: ‘Look at the photographs, Ch-Charlie.’

  Charlie Chaplin hesitated. He resented being asked to grovel on the floor to pick anything up. It was a hangover from his workhouse days, no doubt. Marion knew him well enough to know it would infuriate him and moved to fetch them for him herself. But Charlie’s curiosity got the better of him before she had a chance. He swooped down and scooped them up.

  Inside were two photographs. The first, of a young woman. Pretty, he thought. Big, sad eyes, just like Eleanor. Thick dark hair, wide mouth – like Eleanor. So what?

  He turned his attention to the formal portrait of a young couple holding a small child. The girl, in clothes that looked worn and dated: a shirtwaist, a long skirt, a wide-brimmed hat and a sash across her chest, the word PICKET emblazoned upon it, sat in the foreground. The young man – wearing a jacket that hung together, a waistcoat too large for his skinny frame and a cloth hat half covering his eyes – stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder. And on the girl’s lap sat a toddler swaddled so tight in raggedy blankets as to be hardly visible: Charlie Chaplin looked at the raggedy, hungry-looking young couple and let out a gasp.

  Marion, watching him closely, smiled at his reaction. She stood up and crossed the room to look at the picture again. ‘Y’see?’ she said. ‘Who’s the floozy now, huh?’

  67

  It’s hard to know what not to pack for a stay at such a place and in such elevated company. Joseph, the Beechams’ driver, couldn’t fit the Beecham luggage and the Beechams into a single car journey, so he delivered the cases to the train first. Max and Eleanor, waiting for him to return, tried to talk to each other as they normally did, just as they had for years.

  ‘Marion said Joseph Kennedy would be there,’ Max said. He was sitting in the early evening sunshine, on the stone balustrade at the edge of the Italianate terrace where, only a week or so earlier, he and his wife had entertained the cream of Hollywood, King and Queen of all they surveyed. Now, of course, the house would be put up for sale. Soon they would be homeless, jobless, broke – and divorced. But Max and Eleanor kept the conversation light.

  ‘Joseph Kennedy!’ Eleanor groaned, sitting on a sunny stone bench nearby. ‘Joseph Kennedy is a dreadful man. I hope I don’t have to sit next to him. Is Rose coming?’

  ‘I doubt it. Rose never goes anywhere. Marion said Gloria’s going to be there.’

  ‘Without the marquis?’

  �
��He’s been shipped off, back to Paris.’

  They fell silent. It was too quiet. They both knew how absurd it was, to keep up this pretence, and yet neither knew how to stop it. Last night, they were too tired to fight. They ate at different times, in different rooms. Max slept in his study. And now, today – it was a Sunday. They had read the papers in separate rooms.

  Eleanor asked: ‘I suppose it’s too late for us, is it? Financially. Even if the markets recover?’

  If Max could only have persuaded his broker to hold off while stock prices readjusted, as everyone said they would, he told Eleanor, their finances might have weathered it. But yes – it was too late. Their broker had forced him to sell everything they owned on margin, which was almost everything. It had wiped them out.

  ‘We’ll be OK,’ he said, automatically. He looked about him at the cool green lawn, the trickling fountains, the granite statues of Neptune behind them. It was beautiful, this place they had built together. But it was too big and too empty. He wouldn’t be sad to see it go.

  ‘You know Lionsfiel are cutting me loose, don’t you?’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ll bet you do know.’ She smiled. ‘You probably knew before me … They sent me a lousy script – I haven’t looked at it.’ She shrugged. ‘So, it’s goodbye Lionsfiel. Did you know?’

  ‘No,’ he lied automatically. ‘I didn’t know that. How do you know it’s a lousy script, if you haven’t even looked at it?’

  She glanced at him, disconcerted. They caught each other’s eye, the two habitual liars, and quickly looked away again. She could have admitted that Butch told her so – he would have guessed it anyway. But what was the point? ‘Well, I did skim through,’ she said, aimlessly. ‘I mean – it’s a lousy script for me. I don’t come in until the third act.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  ‘Oh … It’s upstairs somewhere. Really Max. I can’t be bothered.’

  ‘So. What are you going to do?’

  She thought of Butch: he’d told her he would look after her. She wondered, suddenly, if she believed him. Once she and Max divorced, Butch would have won. And that would be it. There would be no cruelty on his part, just a switch of gaze. And it would sadden her – of course it would, deeply, after all these years of loving him, leaning on him, bathing in his desire and care and admiration. Except she had known it all along: that his love for her, and for everything in his life, was really only a private thing, between himself and himself. He didn’t know how to love. Any better than she did, any more. It was no doubt what had drawn them together in the first place. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said, gazing steadfastly at the fountain. ‘What about you?’