Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  “My chances are much better,” Dolly said, squeezing my hand.

  In reality she was probably more likely to die of an overdose than in a raid. The paraldehyde vials were everywhere in her room, giving it a distinct vinegary smell.

  I knew Dolly wanted desperately to believe in her own glamour and bravery—twenty years ago she had been brave, a volunteer ambulance driver on the front lines of the First War, dodging bombs and changing her own tires under the spray of bullets—but we both knew that instead of making love to androgynous heiresses and sticking it to the Germans, she was now lying comatose in her bed, racked by hallucinations.

  When we were younger I’d envied Dolly’s worldliness and experience to the point of pain; it made me feel weak, pampered, and inadequate. While my brother and Dolly were off fighting, I went with my mother to the cathedral to assemble care packages of Bovril and cigarettes for soldiers. I slept in a soft bed my entire life. I’ve never seen a dead body, let alone thousands.

  “Would you stay with me?” Dolly asked. “We can read the paper and I can make you some tea.”

  “I guess I could stay for a little while,” I said. “But I can’t miss my train.”

  “I’ll braid your hair,” she said, pulling me closer. “The way I used to.”

  I’d never had any boyfriends to speak of. I liked to be touched and she knew it.

  “How’s your mum?” she asked.

  “The nights are hard for her,” I said. “Even out in the country. We can still hear the planes.”

  “I cry myself to sleep every night,” Dolly said, staring at the street. “The sounds, the vibrations. It’s too much.”

  Yes, Dolly had once been a hero.

  Now she was just a coward and we both knew it.

  How had Dolly first come to our house? I can’t remember, but it must have been because of my mother, who was a collector of Oscar’s manuscripts and clothes. She owned two of his dress shirts, a handful of personal letters, early notes for Dorian Gray, and pamphlets from his lecture series, and kept them in a trunk in her room. Over time I’ve come to believe my obsession with Dolly was first hers. My mother, a bored and wealthy housewife, heard of Oscar’s brother’s poverty and helped pay the bills for Dolly’s birth in a pauper’s ward. Over the years she bought artifact after artifact and kept Dolly’s mother afloat.

  Mum’s money hadn’t kept Dolly out of a convent, where she’d been tossed for a while as a child, but she came back to us as an adolescent with some obligation toward my mother that she wanted to honor. She joined us for dinner weekly, and we all fell in love with her in our different ways. My mother loved her resemblance to Oscar. I loved the way she recited Byron, and the way she made me feel. She disarmed my shyness in a way no one else ever had, coaxed words and laughter out of me, forced me into stating my opinions—but how do you really feel about long underwear?—snuck D. H. Lawrence books into my room and left them underneath my silk pillowcase. She knew my insecurities and had once, well into a bottle of wine, recited them: “men, your hawk-like nose, your lack of success as a painter, your knobby knees, and your boring existence supported by your family and not yourself.”

  Dolly was the exclamation point in my life. She made me feel things: adoration, anger, frustration. She was always in love and it made her glow.

  But she didn’t glow anymore.

  The following day I was sitting on the edge of her bed as she slept. We were supposed to go out for tea and then volunteer at the cathedral making care packages for soldiers, but she was in no shape to leave her flat. I knew tears would stream down her face in the afternoon sun; her pale eyes were sensitive to light. Her sheets were damp; she suffered from night sweats. I let her sleep.

  I saw a small packet of letters tied with blue silk ribbon on her bedside table, right next to two vials of what must have been paraldehyde. The letters’ edges were tattered. Curiosity seized me. I knew deep down I shouldn’t read them, that even the most boisterous, immodest people have secrets and a need for privacy, but I wanted to believe—I have always wanted to believe—that I’m Dolly’s sister, or something more, maybe an extension of her, and therefore it would be okay if I merely peeked at a letter or two.

  For years people who admired Dolly’s wit and entertaining personal letters pleaded with her to write a book, but she never had. She was lazy, but I think she was also stymied by her uncle’s shadow.

  “How can I be any good if he has used it all up?” she once said to me.

  When I opened the first letter I found pages of her looping script; I knew it like my own. I was surprised to see it was a letter to a girl named Betty Carstairs, a girl she called Joe. I felt a pang of jealousy, just as I had when Dolly came home and talked ceaselessly about how fast Joe could change a tire, how she cut her hair like a man—the type of women Dolly loved were women I could never be.

  It’s not a dream if it really happened, it’s a memory that comes to me in my sleep, isn’t it? Do you have these same nightmares?

  I’m driving my ambulance over the war-scorched earth, toward the front lines in Verdun. It’s March 1916, and you would have been out doing the same. The ground is black, and covered in piles of receding snow. Naked trees jut from the earth. The Meuse River is an ice slick, its banks covered in unexploded shells, split limbs. I pass the white-rubble ruins of all those nameless villages, approaching Fort Souville from the south. Where farms, churches, and green fields once stood lie piles of German stick grenades, bomb scars, and dead bodies. My wheels shake and skid over potholes. I grip the steering wheel so hard my frozen knuckles bleed.

  In this dream, and maybe you have some like it, I haven’t slept for thirty-two hours. I can’t feel my fingers, nose, or ears. I’ve long since forgotten to be hungry.

  As I get closer to Fort Souville, I can see smoke—or is it fog?—rising from the gouged hills. My windshield is cracked and my jacket is ripped. Everything in me wants to turn around, but I can’t. It’s my duty to continue; this is why I ran away from home; this is the adventure I wanted. I thought I wanted. Dolly Wilde, ambulance driver. Dolly Wilde, patriot. Dolly Wilde, adventuress. And we did have adventures, didn’t we? Valid adventures. But we paid for them, you and I.

  In the dream I can never turn back, and I wake up sick with dread, because I don’t know if I could still do the things that we did then, see the things that we saw. We were just children, weren’t we? Young girls who were going to do their part?

  I thought that life as an ambulance driver—wrapping broken limbs, plucking lice from my hair, kicking ice from the wheels—was the antithesis of pleasure seeking, the only way I could avoid repeating my uncle’s flawed existence. Everyone told me I had his face. Even you said, “It is Oscar incarnate, only much prettier . . .”

  What we saw changed me. Those days are why I don’t cry at weddings, why I drink, why I say something rash at dinner. They are why I forget to pay my bills. They are why I can’t sleep. They are what I see in my sleep. They are why I don’t waste time doing practical things, hoping the world will be good to me when I’m older. Tell me, Joe, do you think the world is still good to women like us? To anyone?

  How are your boats? I miss driving. If only I had a car of my own.

  You said in your last letter that I taught you flexible thinking, but I don’t think anyone can teach you much. As for my writing, I have nothing to show. The world prefers listening to me, looking. That’s what I was made for I suppose.

  When Dolly began to stir I slowly tucked the stack of letters into my leather bag. She would miss it, of course, but given how much of her life she spent blacked out, she’d assume it was misplaced, knocked behind the bureau.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, licking her lips, stretching her arms. She looked old.

  “Only a minute. I’ll let you rest,” I said. I kissed her cheek and let myself out of the flat. I walked to the train, aware that the light was fading and night was coming on soon. The city seemed heavy, mid-sigh, as if b
racing itself for a blow, and I guess it was.

  On the train back home to my mother’s empty mansion in the countryside—I never thought of it as mine, I had nothing—I dozed off, then woke up in a semilucid state. I closed my eyes again and saw Dolly in her prime.

  She was descending a staircase slowly, dressed as her uncle Oscar in a borrowed fur coat. A hush came over the crowded foyer—how many women can silence a crowd? Dolly could.

  The cane Dolly carried clicked on every stair. She thrust her chin into the air and then looked down, making eye contact with the people beneath her. She remained in character, though it wasn’t much of a stretch; Dolly was gregarious at parties and depressed the morning after. But she had dressed to awe us and she did; she made the papers the next day: Niece Dolly Brings Oscar Back to Life.

  And though I was fascinated by her, I hated seeing her like this, drinking up her own social success. Her laugh reached across the room and strangled me. No, I preferred private Dolly. I liked Dolly in my library with a book on her lap, not perched on the arm of a plush sofa with champagne in hand, someone, anyone, kissing her neck.

  I left the party early that night.

  I always left parties early.

  A week later I went to meet Dolly at Russo’s and was disappointed to see her friend Jeanette there. She and Dolly were overdressed for the venue, but they both had more panache than money, a quality in a woman that bothered my mother, and I guess it bothered me too.

  Jeanette wore a fox stole and tapped her nails on her water glass as I approached. She shifted in her chair. She was bird-thin and just past pretty, her blond hair going gray, her gray eyes blinking repeatedly. She lit a cigarette, looking at her fingers as if she was impatient with their inability to move faster with the match. She brought the small fire to her face.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Let’s get another chair,” Dolly said apologetically, waving to the waiter, her waiter.

  “Welcome,” Jeanette said, exhaling. Her voice was pitchy and plaintive.

  She and Dolly had been friends for years now. They’d met over an opium pipe at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

  “I love meeting people that way,” Dolly had once confided in me. “Colliding into them. There’s a strange intimacy that comes with intoxicated conversations. You discard barriers. You’re interesting and filled with a peculiar energy, and you just want to share it.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I’d said.

  Dolly had nodded and patted my thigh in a way that was both insulting and compassionate.

  The waiter brought the third chair and we sipped water in silence. Jeanette muttered something awful about “death and destruction becoming monotonous,” and Dolly rose from the table.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

  “Here,” Jeanette said, fishing around inside her worn leather handbag to produce a monogrammed silver compact. “Take this.”

  I knew it was packed with cocaine. I also knew Jeanette thought I was naïve. These situations were common in Dolly’s company and used to make me feel insecure. Now I just felt infuriated, fatigued.

  Dolly placed the compact into her own bag and walked through the restaurant with feigned elegance. Whenever I watched her walk in public I remembered a line someone had written anonymously about her during a Victorian parlor game called Honesty: Dolly doesn’t walk, she lumbers.

  Dolly had cried to me that night. “They used to call Uncle Oscar elephantine. I’m the same way. I’m not built like a woman.”

  I knew she’d made efforts to shorten her stride and straighten her shoulders. I still felt anger toward whoever had written such a cruel sentence, the kind of sentence that stays with a woman.

  I followed Dolly to the small bathroom, which smelled strongly of bleach. The white plaster walls were chipped, and blue curtains framed one small window. Dolly stood in front of the sink blotting her armpits with paper, then her face.

  “The cancer makes me sweat more,” she said, wrinkling her nose, sniffing.

  “I know what’s in that compact,” I said, standing behind her.

  Dolly didn’t say anything, but shrugged her shoulders and resumed blotting her face in the mirror.

  I returned to the table and sat with my arms crossed. Dolly had a way of making me feel like a petulant child.

  “I’m short on cash,” Jeanette said, rifling through her leather purse.

  “I’ll cover you,” Dolly said, sitting down. I could tell she was impatient to get home and away from my judgment, maybe away from Jeanette’s bony and depressed face. But while she hated to suffer through inconvenient social situations, she also hated being alone.

  Dolly’s black book—I’d looked through it before—contained contact information for one-night stands, theater boys, dealers, doctors, fake doctors, nurses, ex-girlfriends, aristocrats, art thieves, sodomites, artists, race car drivers, actresses, writers, amateur philosophers, politicians, soldiers, housewives. She wasn’t picky, not these days. She just wanted company, or maybe drugs. She went to parties in abandoned underground stations and on rooftops and God knows where else.

  We said good-bye to Jeanette and walked to Dolly’s flat in silence.

  “It amazes me,” she said as we reached her front door, “that you still find the energy to be disappointed in me.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” I said, clutching her hand. “I’m worried.”

  “I’m late with rent again.”

  I took a few bills from my purse—half of my monthly allowance—and pressed them into her hand. I had never been good at telling her no, and I wanted to be useful—to anyone, but especially to Dolly. Decades into our relationship, helping her was a reflex.

  She kissed the top of my forehead. It was a sisterly gesture.

  “Call if you need me,” I added.

  She nodded and the lock clicked behind her. I headed for the train, aware that after every visit with Dolly I felt exhausted. But these visits were the only breaks in the monotony of my life with Mum, of teas gathered around the wireless, long stretches of reading time, unsatisfactory sessions at my easel.

  A few blocks away I heard something moving behind a trash can. Cowering among crates of rotting produce was a brown dog so emaciated I could count her ribs. The dog bared her broken, black teeth and I inched away, wishing I had a few pieces of bread, or anything, to give her.

  I hurried into the station.

  Safely on the train, I pulled out Dolly’s letters and read from them, as I’d developed the habit of doing. This letter was to Natalie, a lover she’d lived with on and off in Paris, and who never had anything to say to me the times I’d visited Dolly in the little garden there.

  I hope you’ll forgive me for what I said yesterday. I know I’ve outstayed my welcome, but for Romaine to call me a rat—my temper rose. I’ll find a way to repair the vase, darling.

  I think, some days, that I’m a broken human being. Last week, the pop of a champagne cork made me sweat. If I stare too long into a fire or smell certain brands of cigarettes and tea, I feel sick, as if the night is coming on in Verdun. Dearest Natalie, please understand—I dream of burned flesh.

  Were these drafts of letters, or were they never sent? I folded the papers, carefully tied the ribbon, and stared out of the window. Dolly had a habit of using people like me and Natalie; this was not news. There were years when I convinced myself that she had to rely on others because she was a woman without means who didn’t want to marry, and there were years when I got tired of trying to save her, tired of trying to coax her into the incredible woman she should have been. There shouldn’t have been flashes of greatness; there should have been a lifetime of it.

  A general uneasiness came over me. The train ride was long, cold, and silent.

  The next time I came to her door it wouldn’t open. The maid had called me.

  “I haven’t seen Dolly in two days,” she said, “but I’ve heard her and she’s howling again, and throwi
ng things at the wall. I think you should come.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow morning,” I said. “Offer her some coffee or even some bread.”

  Sensing the maid’s hesitation, I added, “I’ll pay you. Plus a service fee. Just offer her food and drink and let her know that someone cares about her. That part is important.”

  When I got to Dolly’s at ten the next morning, the place was silent. I knocked on the door—nothing. No footsteps, no hello, no swearing. It occurred to me that the inevitable might have happened, that she might have overdosed. I tried my key but couldn’t budge the door; she’d pushed something in front of it.

  “Dolly!” I screamed, jostling the doorknob, shouting through the small opening. “Let me in.”

  I pressed my ear to the crack. I heard faint sobbing, then louder cries. I jostled the door some more, but to no avail. At least she was alive.

  Because it was a ground-floor apartment, I went around to the outside window and rapped repeatedly.

  “Dolly!” I shouted, over and over again. “Let me take you home. Let me take you to the country.”

  A middle-aged man opened his window and yelled down to me. “Can’t you two keep it together? Must you cry and shout so often?”

  I glared at him. For the first time I felt as if I had the will to hurt someone. I started to go to the train station, then turned back toward Dolly’s flat, feeling as if I’d left something unfinished. I could try harder. I could do more.

  I should tell you about her death. No one came to Dolly’s funeral but me and two other friends, one who was on crutches. There were fires burning in the city from the evening’s raids when she was buried; we could see the smoke and there was, I think, a universal feeling of dread. An urge, maybe, to put Dolly’s life and death in context. Did it matter? What was more suffering in a year like this? How many people we knew and loved were dying each day?

  The police didn’t know the cause of death, and I don’t think they cared. Here was an addict who was already dying of cancer; what was her life valued when there were so many children and heroes at risk?