Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “It’s so terribly unfair,” Sarah said quietly.

  “It’s simply unfair timing,” Seymour said. “Only the timing is unfair. Really, Sarah, we are quite lucky.”

  “You know, when I was at Smith, there was this girl, Liza something or other, I can’t remember. She got pregnant her freshman year and crossed over into New Hampshire to have it done with once and for all. By a country doctor.”

  “Sarah!” Seymour said. “Please. We wanted another child. We want someone else for Dulcy to be with. How can you even think it?”

  “How far exactly is New Hampshire?” she asked.

  “I cannot have this conversation with you,” Seymour said. “There is a limit,” he said.

  Sarah nodded as she looked out the window. “Even for me there is a limit,” she said. “Limited.”

  When they arrived at Seventy-second Street, Seymour paid the taxi and helped Sarah out of the cab, up the front stairs, and into their bedroom. Still in her mink coat and clinging to her purse, she collapsed on the bed. She turned on her side and curled into a ball, her long body now a question mark. What, it seemed to be asking—herself or Seymour—did you really expect?

  Sarah Bloom lay that way for the rest of the night. She lay like that through the next day and the next, though Seymour was able to get her out of her coat and into her silk pajamas when he came upstairs later that evening, carrying a wobbly glass of hot milk that Mary had heated for her, but that Sarah refused. And this was how Sarah Bloom stayed, curled on the left side of her bed, until, seven months later, David Bloom broke his mother open and fought his way into the world.

  Seymour never told Sarah that perhaps it was all for the best she had been forced out of the production. He didn’t have the nerve to tell her that the Terrier had shown up periodically over the last two months, waving his gun and demanding his sister-in-law at least have a go at the part. “I thought I told you Frances,” he’d say. “Frances! Are you fucking deaf?”

  Seymour had managed the situation by remaining calm. “I hear you, Terrier,” he would say gravely. Inside, he’d been filled with hysteria. What am I doing? he had wondered. How am I going to make it out of this alive? “I’m listening,” he’d told the Terrier.

  When it became clear that Sarah could not play the part of Inez Bloom, Seymour decided to do what his heart had told him to—and what the Terrier’s gun insisted on—in the first place. He phoned Vladimir Zworykin to see if his wife would be interested in the theater.

  Vladimir had to laugh. “Would my wife be interested? I imagine so. Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  Vladimir had always been short with Seymour, and it still irked Seymour that he did not have the power to make the man see his control. He had grown used to a different dynamic with other men.

  Seymour thanked the scientist for the home number he gave him. “And how’s my television going, Vladimir?” he asked.

  “Your television.”

  “Yes,” Seymour said. “How’s it going?”

  “These things take time, you know,” Vladimir said. “Why don’t you give Frances a ring?” he asked him, and hung up the phone.

  When Seymour called Frances Gold to see if she would like to come for an audition for his first production, he told her how he had seen her on television.

  “You were lovely,” he said. “I think you will be perfect for this part.”

  Frances tried to still her heart—could he hear that frantic beating over the phone? The theater! Hollywood! An endless horizon, palm trees blowing in the breeze. “You thought I was lovely?” she asked Seymour. Because seeing herself on the screen was the first time she had felt beautiful on the outside. Capturing her moving made all the difference, she thought. Unlike the still photographs, in which every pore and hair on Frances’s face was evident, here, her personality could come through. Her knowing smile, her laughing eyes, her hair, which, when you looked closely enough, did have a natural sheen. She loved herself on what would become the television, and she was glad Seymour could appreciate her too.

  “I did,” he said. “Are you interested in the theater?”

  “I am,” she said. “Extremely interested. What exactly did you have in mind?”

  When Frances showed up for her audition, Nat Allen was stunned. This was not the beautiful young girl the Terrier had been screaming over. This was not the lovely beam of light Seymour had promised him for his lead.

  Nat grabbed Seymour by the wrist and pulled him to a dark corner of the theater. “You promised me a beauty!” he hissed.

  “Well, she looks a lot like Inez,” Seymour said. She did seem far less ethereal in person, it was true. But, truth be told, she looked a lot more like his mother than Sarah had.

  “Look,” said Nat. “The hourglass on this one is missing at least half a day. Instead of big tits, we have a big ass to contend with. And what of those delicate blond curls? She’s got a veritable bird’s nest up there.”

  As Nat berated Seymour for his choice, Frances felt disappointment of her own. When she’d pushed her way into the theater and saw the stage, empty, naked, unlighted, strewn with seltzer bottles and balled-up tissues, she had been taken aback. Frances had never seen a stage without its set, the lighting, the actors stomping back and forth, holding hands and taking their collective bow. And this director, he was a hostile one.

  Nat and Seymour came back to their seats in the front row. Nat cleared his throat.

  Drawing on her experience at the candy store, where she had sensed what each person needed from her and responded in kind, Frances waddled to center stage, leaned over, and shook Nat’s hand aggressively. “Don’t look so glum.” She laughed, sensing his disappointment. “A dance comes with this walk too.”

  Nat relaxed and laughed. “Pleasure to meet you, Frances,” he said.

  Nat was furious at the time that Seymour had made him waste on this girl, but, as he would later tell the producer, she somehow got softer on the eyes. It was as if the more she talked, the more one’s perception of her, the very eyes with which he watched her, drenched her in soft, flattering light. As soon as Frances read, he told Seymour, he knew she would have an ability to connect with an audience.

  “Can you sing, Frances?” he screamed up to her.

  “I can!” she said. She tapped her foot and looked over at the piano, as if it would just begin to play her a tune.

  “I was blue, just as blue as I could be, ev’ry day was a cloudy day for me.” Frances sang as if her very life depended on that song, and she smiled broadly, shaking her voluminous bottom and lightly snapping her fingers.

  It is certainly hard not to be taken with her, thought Seymour. He looked over at Nat, who was inadvertently smiling back up at Frances.

  “Oh, it doesn’t even matter,” Nat said. “It’s what the Terrier wants anyway.”

  The next day Frances Gold was cast as Inez.

  Seven months later, in the autumn of 1931, the Terrier was made head of the bootleggers in New York. It was right after Japan invaded Manchuria, and Seymour would always associate these two events, despite the massive difference in global implications. It was just that, everywhere on earth, someone small was being overtaken. As Japan planned to colonize East Asia, so began the Terrier’s work in narcotics, establishing a ring that expanded his empire across the nation.

  Two weeks after the Manchurian Incident, The Joint was set to open.

  “A little early if you ask me,” Seymour told Nat.

  “Agreed, agreed, but we said October, and here it is, October.”

  “What’s the hurry?” said Seymour.

  “Why don’t you ask the Terrier?” Nat said. “He seems to be on a tighter schedule. And we can’t postpone now! Do you know how that will look to the press? We’ll get reamed!”

  “It’s better to be prepared than to rush a show into opening,” Seymour said with as much authority as he could muster.

  Nat laughed. “Seymour,” he said. “Sometimes you just gotta sit back a
nd take it like a man.”

  On October 6, two days before The Joint previewed, Sarah Bloom gave birth to David Bloom. She had sobbed so hard throughout the labor that the nurses had to slap her three times to make her breathe. She was so inconsolable that David had to be taken away by the nurses, who were worried Sarah’s breast milk would never come in because of her excessive grief.

  She insisted on drawing the blinds and lying in the dark.

  “Poor woman!” they all said to one another at the nurses’ station outside her dark window. “Why is she complaining?” one asked.

  “Dumb Doras,” Sarah said to her husband. “Nitwits.”

  Seymour could see the sliver of light beneath the door. He could hear them chewing like cows, eating their cream cheese sandwiches and sipping coffee from the Horn & Hardart Automat.

  “Sarah,” he said, reaching for her hand and trying to catch a glimpse of his watch at the same time. Curtain was at eight o’clock, he reminded himself nearly each minute. “They’ll hear you.” As he did with most women, Seymour had a way with the nurses, who had swooned over him when he had come to meet his wife after the delivery. He had laughed and smiled at them, knowing this would guarantee they took good care of his son.

  His son. Seymour thought of David Bloom’s red, crooked little face. It had been a fairly easy birth, but still the newborn’s head had been slightly misshapen, though the doctor had assured Seymour this was temporary.

  Sarah curled into a ball and wept. All Seymour could think of was the curtain opening with a swish and those nurses feeding his newborn son with a bottle on the floor below.

  Seymour arrived at the Majestic just as the houselights went down. It was probably for the best that he missed the scene outside, theatergoers, actors, producers, and lawyers milling about. He would one day be able to predict with uncanny accuracy the outcome of any show by the crowd gathered on the street on opening night, but for his first show, who knew? And who knew if one of Greenberg’s yes-men, mad as hell that Seymour could just walk away from all they’d been doing in town—walk away from the money, the nightclubs, the girls, but also walk away from the hard part, the worry, the violence, and now all this business with drugs—who knew if he wouldn’t come by this very night and do Seymour in? He’d heard just last week that Benny Long-man, a two-bit pickpocket who had been out three months, who wanted to become an honest-to-goodness family man, was brought to a house in the country where three street punks threw acid at his face and hands. Seymour couldn’t imagine the pain of one’s flesh being eaten by chemicals and then, of course, the mark of that day branded on one’s skin forever.

  He knew the Terrier certainly wouldn’t protect him. Or protect his children.

  As Seymour slid into his seat between his brother and Inez, his anxiety slipped away and he was filled with nothing but pride. He was proud of his show, and he was proud to be the father of a son.

  Inez Bloom slapped her son on the knee. “How’s my grandson?” she asked him as the orchestra began its tuning. She squeezed both his cheeks, hard.

  Pride. It was not a feeling he recognized—so much of his life had been ruled by shame. Feeling proud was a hell of a lot better, Seymour thought as the conductor tapped his stand. That delicate little stick! This sure is the life, he thought.

  And then the show began: Frances entered in an enormous feather hat. She looked sideways at the audience, shook her hips, and in a thick, French-Russian accent said, “Well, I sure could use a drink.”

  The audience was already in stitches.

  Seymour swiveled in his seat. Laughter? He hadn’t anticipated this. This was supposed to be drama.

  “What is this?” Inez hissed to her son.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. His pride was beginning to fade.

  “That,” said Inez, “is not me.”

  Frances began belting out a cheerful tune about loving America.

  “Everyone’s a star at the Joint’s glorious bar,” she sang, her cheeks puffed as if with chocolates. She greeted all the clientele and posed with them for the camera. There were flashbulbs popping, gossip columnists typing, and affairs and intrigues among the tables. Frances negotiated them all, as the story wove back and forth from the present of the Joint to the past of her childhood. Flashbacks to Paris were at stage right, where a young Inez pranced around the Eiffel Tower, a satchel of books dangling from her arm. Romping through the Champ-de-Mars, she sang a charm song about what it would be like to go to America and walk on the shining streets.

  But things changed in the second act. Here Frances made her entrance alone again, her housedress torn and her fading expression forlorn.

  “Woe is me, it’s already nine,” she sang. “I confess, I confess, the Joint is not mine!” she sang.

  Frances, who had taken a few lessons from her hero, Fanny Brice, looked overly despondent. She turned to the audience, her mouth practically hitting the floor, her large eyes drooping.

  At stage right, the young Inez made crepes, handing them to a queue of men waiting outside the Moulin Rouge. They watched her as she poured the batter, laughing because she was not one of the spectacular girls inside.

  The audience laughed again.

  Everyone was laughing at his mother, and Seymour’s heart, soaring when he had walked into the theater, now banged hard and heavy in his chest.

  Then Frances, as Inez, begged Madame Lutille for a job as a sous-chef. Frances played up the despair, begging and then placing the back of her hand to her forehead and throwing her head back in mock misery.

  Again, laughter. The audience was whooping.

  “I bring you to this country and you make me a stock of laughing?” Inez clutched Seymour’s arm.

  Seymour shook his head. “No, Mama,” he said. He felt her nails, filed to points, digging into his skin. For a brief moment, he wondered what his mother had been like then, dusting the crepes with sugar and seeing the men disappear into the Moulin Rouge to watch beautiful women dance.

  Seymour was brought back to the here and now quickly and surely. He watched in horror as his mother, overcome with the rage and humiliation of this moment and, Seymour could tell, the humiliation of her life, stood up. She wagged her finger toward the stage. “Horse-feathers!” she screamed—to Frances—in flawless English.

  The actors stopped their singing and held their hands to their foreheads like sailors on the bows of boats squinting into the light. Frances peered out into the audience, hands on her hips. She pointed at Inez, who was stomping out of the theater. The actress shrugged her shoulders and, as the spotlight trailed Inez’s departure from the Majestic, the audience was again in hysterics.

  It was a shame that wasn’t the opening night and the performance the press would see. But the audience loved it—they cheered as Inez left the building. And when the curtain closed and then opened again, the crowd stood and called out Frances’s name, whistling as she folded herself in half for her bow. Looking out into the audience, she caught herself searching for her sister. Perhaps, Frances thought, Pauline would come to see her here. Perhaps she would realize that, though Frances was not the pretty one, she too was tapped for greatness. Why, Frances thought, at the greatest moments of my life, do I always think of Pauline?

  Knowing it did not go as he’d always imagined it would, the way it did in all of his dreams, Seymour declined all postshow invitations, even to the cast party. He did not want to stand around eating canapés with Frances Gold, and he did not want to see Caleb Candor. He did not want to rub elbows with the Terrier’s minions, who were sure to be milling around, casing the place. Besides, Seymour had to go to the house to get ready for his first night with his son, who was expected home from the hospital the next day. On his way backstage to congratulate the cast—he had resolved to not so much as shake Frances’s hand—he ran into Vladimir, also on the way to his wife.

  Seymour wagged his finger. “Your wife!” he said.

  Vladimir shook his head, and, for a fleeting moment, Seymour
sensed in him the same fear he’d felt when Seymour had met him at the New Amsterdam Theater. “I know,” Vladimir said. “She played it all for laughs. I had thought she would be a little more…Tolstoy.”

  Seymour couldn’t wrap his head around it. The rehearsals had been different. Had it been the audience that changed the performance? Had Frances tricked him?

  “But she has a gift. Did you see the audience? Everyone responded to her. My wife,” Vladimir said, shaking his head. “She will be terrific for the shortwave,” he said. “Just you wait, Seymour!”

  “I’m waiting,” Seymour said. “And waiting.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Seymour said when Vladimir did not respond.

  “A great show, my friend.” Vladimir put his heavy hand on Seymour’s broad shoulder. “Congratulations to you.”

  Seymour continued on to the cast, where he wished everyone well, slapped Nat on the back, nodded in Frances’s direction.

  When she came over to speak with him, Seymour, nearly three heads taller, looked down at her and scolded his leading lady.

  “Like Show Boat,” he told her over and over. “Show Boat. That is the tone of it, and if you don’t like it, well, go get a part in someone else’s show.”

  Frances’s mouth quivered, her eyes filling with tears, and Seymour willed any of the consequences of speaking so harshly to the lead of the show away. So, the Terrier came for him. Better to be dead than to have his musical become a comedy that humiliated his mother. Better to be shot in the eye than to go home to the despair of his wife.