Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  She says your work will be displayed at a prominent exhibition in Paris, Mario says.

  Tell her I don’t care. Tell her I’m dead.

  When Mario tells Berthe that Romaine will not see her, Berthe looks down at her feet, then bites her lip, speechless.

  Two hours later, when Mario takes out the trash, Berthe is still sitting on the old stone wall in front of the villa.

  She thinks we’re all out to hurt her, she says. Won’t you tell her she can trust me? That I mean her no harm? All we want to do is secure the legacy she deserves.

  Mario shrugs his shoulders. I’ll tell her, he says.

  I served her lunch nearly every day for twenty years, Berthe says, dumbfounded, on the brink of tears, hands gripping her knees.

  Mario nods curtly at her. She is a threat, someone who might genuinely care for Romaine and threaten his job, his newfound freedom. When he peers out of Romaine’s blinds before supper, Berthe is gone.

  Another letter comes from Natalie, which he doesn’t share with Romaine but reads alone, reclining on the couch downstairs: My Angel is, as ever, first in my thoughts and deepest in my heart.

  It’s hard for Mario to imagine Romaine deep in anyone’s heart. He stares at the lavender card stock with disbelief and jealousy. He wants words this intense, this loving, coming in a letter with his name on it. But he’s never been in love. Only once, perhaps, with a man who was twice his age, a teacher who kissed him behind the changing rooms at the swimming pool one summer, sticking his tongue in his mouth, amidst the blooming flowers and buzzing insects. Mario was fourteen and wrote the man at least fifteen letters and he responded only once, telling him to go to hell and leave him alone.

  Mario falls asleep with Natalie’s letter on his chest. When he wakes up he notices the dust floating through the house, settling on the expensive, unused furniture slipcovered in white muslin. He hasn’t checked on Romaine in some time. Regretfully, he goes to her with a tray of tea and a stale croissant.

  Please draw for me again, he tells her.

  Absolutely not. You’re late. I’ve been sitting here, waiting. I shouldn’t have to wait in my own house.

  If you want pills, you’ll draw, Mario says calmly, leaning on the table, feeling as though he can afford to be casual.

  I won’t stand for this! she crows. I’ll tell—

  Who will you tell? Your mind is slipping. You’re confused, darling. You want pills?

  Mario has no idea what pills Romaine wants, or how to find a doctor on the black market, but he knows she wants both badly. He spreads his palm across Romaine’s shoulder.

  Do I have your word about the pills? she asks, her voice defeated.

  You have my word, he says, handing her the pen.

  He watches as the lines turn into a Pegasus-like figure, with the same bald demons she’d drawn earlier gripping its tail, holding on to the winged horse as if it were a balloon they could ride into the sky. Looking at the simplicity of her drawing, he tries his own hand at the figures.

  Stop, Romaine says impatiently, looking over at his work. You have no talent.

  But if I practice . . .

  Romaine doesn’t hesitate: Not even then. You have no sense of depth or feeling, there is nothing jarring in your line.

  A line is a line, isn’t it?

  It is not, she says, laughing meanly at his ignorance. There is so much behind a line. You see simplicity where there is much more at work. People like you—

  Would you teach me?

  He can feel the new film of self-confidence he has acquired peeling back, revealing the well of self-doubt, the sense he has carried with him his entire life that he has been wronged, that he is owed more. He needs her to see who he really is, who he can become. He hates her and he needs her love, and she is never going to give it.

  You aren’t sufficiently traumatized, Romaine explains, one hand in the air. Teaching you would be a waste of time. I can look at you and tell. Accept it now and save yourself the trouble.

  He leaves abruptly, taking the tray with him. He can hear her laughing. His ears sting.

  One August morning there is vigorous knocking at the front door. He looks out the window and sees two well-dressed people, a man and a woman, waiting.

  Romaine! the man yells. We’re here!

  Mario, caught off guard, locks the bedroom door and quickly changes out of the pink pajamas, panting nervously. He tries to straighten the dressing table and knocks over the perfume.

  Where did they come from? Who called them? How does she have any friends left?

  He rushes downstairs to open the door.

  May I help you? he asks, aware that he reeks of vanilla.

  We’re here to move Romaine to Nice, the man says, brushing past him.

  Soon there are cardboard boxes, crates for the paintings, radios blaring pop songs and news about factory strikes and student protests, men sweating on the staircase. The friends are in his house. They are causing confusion and disarray.

  Gray and Michele are in their mid-sixties, elegant, artistic, grossly cheerful. At night they leave the house to go drinking. No one will say it, Mario thinks, but they must know it’s the last move, the final time they’ll be called upon.

  Romaine is silent, brooding, staring out the window as people move around her, rolling up carpets. She is thinner than ever, not eating.

  Once, as Gray is talking about his lackluster watercolors, Mario pipes up, hopeful to join the conversation. I’m a failed artist too, he says.

  You never had any art to fail, Romaine says.

  The quiet is so excruciating that Mario is forced to think of a task. He nods humbly and stumbles out to the patio, which he sweeps furiously, more thoroughly than ever before.

  On her last day at Villa Gaia, Romaine requests a lunch of cold tongue followed by semolina pudding. Michele, glamorous in a pink sheath dress, offers her a glass of verdicchio.

  Romaine waves her off. Pink clothes are vulgar, she says, shielding her eyes.

  While Mario is preparing the lunch trays, a carabiniere marches up the front stairs in his crisp blue uniform and hat and knocks on the door. Mario answers.

  The lady of the house called to report a theft, he says.

  Mario covers his mouth with a hand. There’s been no theft, he says.

  I must be thorough, the carabiniere says. You understand.

  Let me show you to her, Mario says, heart pounding. Signor, he says, before entering the room, you should know that her mental powers are greatly diminished. She’s moving to Nice tomorrow, and gets very confused. But it’s kind of you to humor her.

  Mario stands in the doorway as the carabiniere greets Romaine.

  The boy has been stealing from me, Romaine says, pointing a finger at Mario. He thinks I don’t know what he’s doing.

  No, no, Officer, Mario hears himself saying. There was a cook here who had some debts. He was fired and left angrily, taking the wine and God knows what else.

  Yes, Michele says, stepping forward. Our Romaine can be a little paranoid. She has visions.

  The carabiniere smiles. It’s a smile that says, Yes, I’m in on this joke. Poor old rich woman with five locks on the door.

  But should the carabiniere choose to search the flat Mario shares with his mother, he would not find a stolen painting. He would not find anything unless he looks inside Mario’s mother’s Bible, where she has stashed Romaine’s drawings because she thinks they are evil. Lavoro del diavolo, she said, plucking them from his wall. He brings them home, the few times he has deigned to spend a night outside of Romaine’s elegant bedroom. He’s kept all but the one he sold to the dealer, the money from which he will use to rent a room in Saint-Tropez. He was tempted to sell more, but it felt like a transgression, even against Romaine, and he loved the feeling of possessing her work.

  He can picture Saint-Tropez now: a lover in his bed, the glittering sea, the green hills, the masts of tall boats, the women in their wide-brimmed hats and enormous sunglass
es. He will be standing in a window, watching them all.

  The carabiniere bids them good afternoon. Hours later, Michele and Gray have gone out drinking, and Mario is home alone with Romaine. He takes his favorite cape from the closet, gently folds it, and places it into a paper bag.

  Romaine is having her dinner, hands trembling as she runs her knife through the tongue, leftovers, which she has never deigned to eat before now. But tonight is different from other nights.

  I do not care for her, Mario thinks. I do not feel sorry for her. I only want to take some small slice of her life and have it for myself.

  He comes to the chair and crouches down at her knees, which he has done so many times.

  Can I wash your hair?

  Why must you be so tender about everything? she asks, dropping her utensils to the plate. It’s unnerving.

  He moves silently about the room, adjusting the black curtains, waiting.

  It would be nice to be clean before I travel, she says flatly.

  He fills the tub with warm, not hot, water. He opens the small window in the bathroom and lets the fresh air in. He helps Romaine undress, steadying her as he unbuttons her blouse, never making eye contact. When she nearly slips he lifts her up like a young bride and lowers her carefully into the soapy water.

  The dog is barking. The motorbikes scream underneath the window. This is what his mother does, he thinks, washing something that belongs to someone else. Romaine sits in the tub with her knees up. Relax, he says. Let go.

  I can’t.

  You must. You should.

  He grips each side of her face with his hands. It won’t hurt, he says.

  She is staring at him—or she may be looking through him onto someone else, someone he can’t see—with those eyes. One trails off, the other remains steadily on his face, searching. The night comes.

  Hazel Marion Eaton Watkins performing on Hager’s Wall of Death, 1927.

  Photo originally published in the Portland Sunday Telegram, March 12, 1939.

  HAZEL EATON AND THE WALL OF DEATH

  1921

  She survives by telling herself not to think.

  Just do. Just move. Just balance. Forget yourself.

  She often feels as if she leaves her body before a performance and returns to it when her motorcycle is still and her feet are planted on the ground.

  But sometimes not thinking means death, or almost death, and today she’s lying in a hospital room in Bangor, in and out of consciousness, with facial lacerations, broken ribs, a fractured femur, and a concussion, which happened when her rear brake locked up as she was circling the motordrome at sixty miles per hour. She slid down the wall like grain pouring from a sack, fast and haphazard, with her heavy bike following her body, pinning her leg.

  Shit, she thinks. I’m going to throw up.

  Now she knows the sound of an audience’s horror, and it is different than rapt joy and amazement. And so she’s left alone for the moment, watching clouds move beyond the windowpane, and realizes that she’s afraid. Fear, in the past, has been something she can turn off, but she can’t find the energy today to move it aside.

  It’s only when she’s afraid that she second-guesses her decisions, and it’s only when she second-guesses her decisions that she thinks of her daughter, Beverly, who lives in Vermont with Hazel’s mother.

  Am I a terrible person for giving her up?

  “I’m cold,” she says, but her face is bandaged and she can only moan. She tries to rub her arms, but maybe one of them is broken, and then she’s out again, riding a morphine high into nothingness.

  Out of that nothingness emerges the candy-striped lighthouse at West Quoddy Head in Lubec, Maine, where she was born, the easternmost point in the United States, a beautiful, lonely, and snow-drenched place where her father dutifully tended the light to keep schooners from crashing into the jagged rocks, hidden by fog banks and dark nights.

  She can still hear the boom of the fog cannon, still smell lard oil and kerosene on her father’s hands. Many of their belongings—mirrors, clocks, the silver tea set—took on a crusty salinity. She frequently cut her feet on the barnacled rocks, swam out into swirling currents because she was bored.

  She had loved her parents but not the long stretches of loneliness; days in the keeper’s cottage were too quiet, too monotonous, and she ran away at fifteen to join the Johnny Jones Exposition.

  She thinks of those first weeks, the vigor of the itinerant carnival life, how seductive the sounds and smells were after years of looking out over the Bay of Fundy. There was gregarious music and conversation, the burnt sugar smell of cotton candy, and the savory smell of meat roasting. God, the only live music she heard the first years of her life was the calls of loons, the tinkling of sailboats, the whinnies of horses, the rhythm of waves. She’d craved volume, intensity, action, and Johnny had put her in a high-dive act, which, a few dives in, had also landed her in this very hospital, when she struck her head and split her scalp down to the bone. That’s when she took to the motorcycle.

  “Who recovers on a motorcycle?” her mother had asked, hysterical.

  She never wore a helmet, even when she could feel the wind rushing over the bald spot on her head where the stitches were. You couldn’t let fear in, she figured, and a helmet was one way of admitting the anticipation of being hurt, of breaking. A helmet acknowledged your vulnerability.

  There is coughing nearby, the sound of another gurney’s wheels squealing over the waxed wooden floor. Someone down the hall is going on and on about President Harding’s poker habit.

  “Stop,” she mumbles, injuries throbbing. “I need quiet.”

  She retreats into her memories, and recalls the way a storm looked as it approached the lightkeeper’s house, the way you had to brace yourself for the onslaught of waves and wind because the house was literally on the edge of the island; she could stare down into the opaque sea from her bedroom window, which the wind rattled and flew underneath, chilling her even on summer nights. Her father would tend the light no matter how bad the gales got. Even during hurricanes, he ran up and down the winding wrought-iron stairs. She remembers the sound of his feet, the clunk-clunking, the urgency. Through him she learned what stupid devotion to a task feels like, repetitive motion. She lives it. Around and around the motordrome she lives it, her slender foot on the gas.

  A brisk, starched nurse stands over her for a minute and feels for her pulse. Her fingers are rough and warm.

  “Don’t tell my parents,” Hazel slurs, but the nurse is gone. Her parents will see reports of the crash in the papers anyway, and her mother will write her a letter asking, Why? Why must you put yourself in harm’s way every week? Every day?

  What they don’t know: nothing has topped the feeling of standing next to the motordrome, smiling into the din of applause. Nothing has topped the way men shake her hand and look her in the eye, what it’s like to be able to call a man chickenshit to his face and get away with it, to mean it, to feel free and dominant and in control of your life.

  I’ll fight my way back to that vital feeling, she thinks. I will raise the stakes, put a lion in my sidecar like they do down in Alabama.

  Her coastal life had been full of loons, gulls, rocks, and maps. “We’re the first to see the sunrise at the equinox,” her mother had reminded her, as if this alone was compelling enough to keep a family isolated from society, tending a light day in and day out.

  The sunrise is beautiful, Hazel had thought then, but it will never be enough. She was questioning then, as she does now: what makes you empty and what makes you full?

  The morphine is a tidal wave of warmth through her body. She shudders. Her eyes are closed, but she can sense light, a sort of redness seeping in through her lids. She’s living now in the interior of her mind, and there is the familiar view of looking up, forty-nine feet up, at the twisting staircase that leads to the blinding light. Tend it; do not look into it.

  What do my daughter’s eyes look like? she wonders, th
inking back to the moment when the screaming child had slid from her body, the child that could have changed everything, if she’d let her, and she had not let her. The first time she held the child she’d let her fingers rest on the baby’s soft spot, the place where the skull had not yet closed over the pulsing brain.

  There’s also the familiar view of looking up from the cylindrical wall of death, the sensation of seeing people but not knowing them as individuals, never catching their eyes.

  The audience is looking down, she thinks, or is it my father? I am looking up. I am spinning. I am fast but not empty. I am swimming in the strong currents near the jetties, I am crying with the gulls, bobbing like the buoy on a lobster trap, looking through the fog banks over the churning Bay of Fundy.

  Allegra Byron, illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, 1817.

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALLEGRA BYRON

  On the first of March, 1821, Allegra Byron entered the Convento di San Giovanni like a small storm, accompanied by nonrelations, overdressed women who handled her with cool affection. It was a clear morning, so we met our charge in the prayer garden, a patch of grass where a few ancient olive trees were waking up to spring. Though lauded by her guardians as an early talker, three-year-old Allegra greeted us with silence.

  This, her chaperone said, is your new home.

  Allegra looked at our faces, then the grounds and buildings. I don’t like it, she said.

  I stood with another Capuchin sister, flanking the abbess, who lorded over the garden with a solemn stare. A breeze whipped our brown habits around our knees, exposing our humble shoes. I felt my job was to soften the harsh presence of the abbess. These moments, when a child was left in our care, struck me as pivotal in the child’s life.

  The convent was not a place of peace; it was a place of noise, an almost holy sanctuary carved out in the heart of Bagnacavallo in northeast Italy. It was a boarding school, repository for unwanted children, and abbey for Capuchin nuns. The surrounding buildings were a pastiche of gray-, cream-, and flesh-colored bricks and plaster; the streets were irregular and winding and smelled of thick peasant soups. Soon the convent gardens would be tilled and planted with lettuces and herbs that could withstand late frosts.