Then the letter to Max. She had tried over and over again to say it all, to explain it to him so that he wouldn’t merely understand but would applaud, would send her a cable to say, ‘ALL FORGIVEN STOP AM FOLLOWING TO NEW YORK AT ONCE STOP WILL MARRY THERE STOP NO MORE PROBLEMS STOP YOU WILL DANCE WE WILL MARRY.’ But of course that had been impossible. However hard she tried in her mind to force him to see it her way, however hard she worked at creating long imaginary conversations with him, it never came out right. She would explain in the most impassioned of words, deep in her mind, as she stared out at the heaving grey water beyond the glass that enclosed the deck, how desperately important it was to her to have this special chance to prove that Alexandra Asher was the real performer she knew herself to be, and then try to make the shadow of him say the words she wanted, but it never worked. She could see only his face with those deep clefts staring blankly back at her, and sometimes the tears that had streaked it that evening by the river at Maidenhead — and then again she would bend her head to the writing pad and try to get the letter right.
In the end it was even more bald than the letter to Bessie had been. ‘I do love you,’ she had written, ‘but I’ve got to do this. If I don’t, I’ll never feel right again. I will come back, truly I will. I hope you can wait for me. It won’t be long.’
After that, arriving in New York had been what she needed. No more sleepless nights in the narrow bunk of the SS Ascania, rocking queasily across the November-angry Atlantic, but sleep born of the exhaustion of bewilderingly busy days and the newness of it all.
The people at the Cochran office, a small and crowded pair of rooms over a delicatessen on Forty-third Street, had been almost overwhelmingly friendly. At first she had thought that was because they had been told such good things about her, from the London office. It was a week or more before she realized that this was the local style; that everyone was extremely everything — either very friendly and very helpful or very laconic and very rude, but always very immediate. There was none of the restrained, cool politeness that she had always taken for granted at home, but a noisy, sometimes almost overwhelming, openness that she found sometimes very beguiling, occasionally very irritating, and always very fatiguing. But never mind, she told herself, it filled her mind to the exclusion of all else, and that was a good thing.
They set to work immediately. In vain did she protest that she needed some time to find somewhere to live rather than stay at a costly hotel, that she wanted a day or two at least to find her feet. Pete Capitelli, the dance director of the show she was to join, pooh-poohed that.
‘Listen, lady, a place to live in you can find in a coupla hours. We got try-outs in Boston and Philly in less’n a month — you want we should all sit around waiting while you go househuntin’? Cochran says you got to be second lead in this show, and that means we got to get you workin’ right away. I’ll call my cousin, Frankie. He’s got connections down the Lower West Side, he’ll find you an apartment quick —’
‘But I thought I’d try to find my own family here,’ Lexie said, still struggling to do things her own way. ‘It’s not that I want to live with them, you understand, it’s just that I thought they’d be the best people to make sure I chose the right sort of place —’ and don’t find myself being cheated, she thought privately, though was too polite to say so. But at once Pete nodded vigorously.
‘Listen, you got family, o’ course you go to them! They make sure no one tries to do you down! Family you can trust. Even my cousin Frankie, he’d try it on a bit, business being business. This way you got to be better off. Okay, so who are they, where do they live? We’ll call ’em, tell ’em they should start lookin’ for a place for you, and we can start work this morning. I gotta raw line-up of girls there I got to whip into some sort o’ shape fast — I can’t be doin’ with hangin’ around no more. We got to —’
She gave up trying to keep control of her own actions, then. She told him about her half-sister Busha and her brother-in-law Nathan Marks and the three children and how they had come to New York when she had been a baby; that she had never met them herself but that they had written letters occasionally to her other sister in London, and that they lived just off Intervale Avenue in the South Bronx. He had nodded and grunted, ‘A nice neighbourhood, got a good few Italians there —’ clearly feeling this to be an index of its niceness, and reached for the telephone.
So it was that she met her niece. She had spent the morning in a dusty rehearsal room behind the Alvin Theatre where they were ultimately to open after their out-of-town try-outs, working harder than she could ever remember doing. Pete Capitelli was a friendly man, and a helpful one, eager to get the best out of Cochran’s New Revue that could be got, and particularly eager that she should be as perfect as she could be in her dances and two singing numbers; but he was the hardest taskmaster she had ever had. Not since her first lessons with Poppy Ganz all those years ago had she been so aware of shrieking, aching muscles and pulled tendons, and as she went over the complex routines that had been devised for her, doggedly repeating them over and over again, she remembered Poppy Ganz with real affection and a great wash of guilt. After she had become ill and been sent off to convalesce in a small nursing home at Broadstairs, Lexie had never thought of her again. She had visited her a couple of times while she had been in the Middlesex Hospital in London, had sent her fruit and flowers, but then, once she was out of sight and wasn’t at any risk any more, had dismissed her from her mind. Now, pushing herself through Pete Capitelli’s agonizingly athletic routines, she promised herself, breathlessly, between high kicks, that she would write to Poppy at once, today, to tell her what she was doing and ask her how she was.
When at last Pete called a break and she went off, almost hobbling, in the wake of the chattering girls who were the chorus backing up her solo numbers, rubbing the sweat from her face with a towel, she hardly noticed the anxious little woman hovering in the corner by the door that led to the small room where coffee was waiting for them all, until she coughed awkwardly and stepped forward.
‘Er — would you be Lexie, maybe?’ she said with a little gasp, and then bobbed her head and her nose — a rather long thin one, and went a sudden pink. Lexie stopped and stared at her.
‘I thought maybe — you have kinda the look of my brother Sidney. I mean, you’re real pretty and Sidney ain’t pretty, but you got a kinda look of him. I’m Barbara Marks. I guess you’re my aunt. It’s really crazy having an aunt younger than you are, but I guess I’ll get used to it.’
She was small and painfully thin, with hair that was dust-coloured and meagre, crimped into tight waves as part of an attempt to look fashionable. Her clothes, too, tried very hard to be smart, but somehow missed. Her frock of green tartan was just a little too heavily trimmed with braid. Her coat, in another shade of green that managed to clash disagreeably with the frock, had just a little too much fur on it, and both were a good deal too young in style for a woman who was obviously well into the second half of her thirties. She stood there looking at Lexie with an expression of nervous hope on her face and blinked at her as Lexie rubbed her face once more with the towel, staring at her.
‘Hello,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Yes, I’m Lexie. It’s awfully nice of you to come and see me here. I mean I didn’t expect it. Pete — Mr Capitelli — told me he’d left a message at your phone number but —’
Barbara’s face split into a great smile that transformed her, and made her look, for a moment, quite young.
‘I just love the way you talk! It’s great — I could listen to you all day! Just imagine! You’re my very own aunt and you talk like that. It’s real nice. Sure, I got the message and I asked for time off from work, and they said sure I could come. I said to them I got this new relation arriving and she’s a famous dancer and all, and Mr Guz, he said sure, as long as I make the time up, and I said sure I will, no problem, don’t I always do like you want? So here I am. It’s real good to see you, Lexie. I never thought I’d
get to meet any of my folks from London. Momma used to tell me a lot about you all, when we was kids, you know, on account I’d forgotten all about it — I was nine years old yet when we came here — but now she lives in Seattle with Sidney so I don’t get to talk to her so much no more. I told her in a letter already that you was here, and she’ll be that excited, I just know it. And Melvin — he lives in Duluth, of all the crazy places. He’d be real pleased too if he knew, only I don’t get to hear from him so often, you know how it is with brothers, they don’t care the way women do, do they? Oh, gee, there I go again, just jabberin’ on and on — Momma always said I could talk the birds off the trees and tails off donkeys and all, but living on my own the way I do and not getting the chance to talk that much to people, and being so excited about you coming, well you can understand it, can’t you? I sure hope you can. I’d not want you to feel bad about me or anything —’
Lexie laughed. She couldn’t help it, for this odd chattering little creature was very disarming in her delighted excitement and there was something very likeable about her, and again Barbara produced that great transforming beam and said, ‘So, listen, maybe we can go eat a little lunch? I got all day off, you know, and it’d be great — we could go to the deli, just, and have a sandwich or maybe — I mean the deli don’t cost too much and —’ And her nose went suddenly redder as she fell over her embarrassed tongue.
Lexie shook her head, even more amused. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not short of money, if that’s what you mean. Cochran paid my fares and expenses to get here, and I’m getting a rehearsal salary, and even though I’m living in an hotel I’m not doing too badly. But I can’t eat now. Never do eat much midday while I’m rehearsing. Maybe we could meet this evening? When we’ve finished? Would that suit you?’
‘It’d suit me fine!’ Barbara said, her face blazing with pleasure, and she bobbed her head and gasped and laughed and smiled all at the same time until Lexie feared for a moment she’d choke with it all before she went bustling away down the stairs, promising to come back on the dot of six to meet her.
It had seemed the most natural thing in the world after that first evening that Lexie should move in with Barbara. She assured Lexie earnestly that it would be no trouble to have her there, none at all, that the apartment was too big for her since her folks went away, that she could afford it easily — but then when Lexie had insisted on paying her share of the costs she had tried to protest that she shouldn’t, that relations were relations. ‘If we don’t take care of each other, who will?’ she had finished shyly, and Lexie had leaned forward and patted her hand and said firmly, ‘I insist. Half of everything. Or else I don’t come.’
They’d agreed it all very easily, because Barbara was so desperately anxious to please her. It was almost pathetic, Lexie thought, to see the excitement in her as she took her uptown on a bus and showed her the neighbourhood, pointing out the local sights, like the synagogue and the best grocery store and the library, and to see how proudly she walked along the narrow streets nodding and greeting her neighbours — half the district seemed to know the other half by sight if not by name — with her interesting new relation in tow. Twice she stopped to introduce her to passers by, begging her to talk, to ‘say something in that great accent’, and Lexie to her own surprise had been much amused and willing to oblige. Anyone of her family in London who had made such a fuss over her would have got short shrift, yet now she took no offence at all at Barbara’s excitement. She couldn’t; no one could.
The apartment was really rather small and poky. At first Lexie’s heart sank as she looked round the tiny living room. It was very reminiscent of the first home she could remember, in Sidney Street. But after Mulberry Walk with its glass, its chrome, its elegant furniture, which she had enjoyed all to herself, how, she asked herself, could she live here in this boxy place, with its noisy neighbours and the sound of the elevated railway thumping through the thin walls? She looked at Barbara and was about to say something to that effect but closed her mouth, for she was gazing at her with such proud pleasure it would have been impossible to say anything that might hurt her. So she said nothing, just promising herself privately that as soon as possible, once the show was established on Broadway after its out-of-town try-outs, she’d be able to find somewhere better, somewhere she’d be more stylish and comfortable.
But in fact she forgot that plan quickly. Barbara absorbed her into her life so thoroughly and made such efforts for her that she knew she could never be as comfortable anywhere else. She cleaned and cooked, much as Bessie always had, but without ever making Lexie feel, as Bessie somehow always had, that she wanted anything back for herself. If Lexie was too tired after rehearsals to talk, that was fine with Barbara, who would sit and listen to her radio contentedly, leaving Lexie to be alone in her room as much as she chose to.
The room itself Barbara worked on with great diligence, while Lexie was in Philadelphia and Boston for the first weeks of try-outs, so that she came back to New York to find it freshly papered and furnished. It was rather like Barbara herself; furniture just that little bit too fussy in style to be elegant, curtains and carpets that little bit too frilly, but the overall effect was also like Barbara: warm, affectionate and unquestioning of Lexie. She could be herself there in a way she would not have thought possible so far away from all that was familiar and homelike.
So they had settled together well enough; if there was any problem at all it was that Barbara, like Bessie, was a shade too solicitous for her health. The least hint of pallor on Lexie’s face would make her bustle about anxiously with aspirin and cups of hot broth and the offer of hot water bottles to supplement the apartment’s steam heat, and that was tiresome for Lexie because she was often pale, and often looked out of sorts these days.
There were many reasons why she should be so. The amount of work that Pete Capitelli was demanding of her increased rather than eased as rehearsals and then performances went on; she was enjoying the work, was certain that the routines she had been given were ideal for her style of dancing, and knew that once the show opened on Broadway she’d get the sort of attention she’d always wanted, for the try-out audiences were loving her. But for all that it was a gruelling pace that he set, and its effect showed on her face.
The newness of the food she ate upset her too; she wasn’t used to the vast quantities of corned beef sandwiches and Danish pastry and coffee they all seemed to eat with such relish, nor to the amount of sugar everyone seemed to regard as normal; the doughnuts were too sweet for her and the cheesecake too rich. She found herself eating erratically and then, when she did succumb to hunger, eating food that disagreed with her. It made her feel queasy sometimes and occasionally she actually threw up. She would emerge from the washroom behind the rehearsal rooms or in the dressing rooms pale and shaken and with her head spinning, to pull herself together as best she might to get back on stage and start working again.
Add all that to this dreadful climate, she thought now, back under the coffee shop canopy and peering out in search of a cab that she could get to before other determined New Yorkers could beat her to it, and no wonder she’d been feeling so bad lately and looking so peaky. It would have been nice to tell Barbara, to ask her to come with her to see a doctor to get herself sorted out, be given a tonic perhaps to bring her up to strength, but that would have been such a drama — it would have made her feel worse. It was bad enough that Barbara already worked so much overtime at the millinery factory where she was chief trimmer, to make up for the hours she lost running around doing things for Lexie; to ask her to take off even more time would be impossible.
She had to find a doctor for herself, and now, waiting for a cab, she told herself sourly that by the time one did come she’d probably have pneumonia and really something to tell him. She sniffed a little dolorously and pushed away a wave of homesickness as at last a cab did come and she could scramble in and tell the driver breathlessly to take her to 177 East Eighteenth Street, an
address given her by one of the girls in the chorus line when she’d asked casually for the name of someone who could give her a check-up. She had just an hour before she was due at the theatre for the last rehearsal before tomorrow’s opening; she had to get her tonic now and start taking it and be really ready for what was to come. The first night of her first Broadway show, and she hugged herself trying to raise a wave of excitement and pleasure to wash away the misery she had been feeling.
But it didn’t work. She only felt queasy and she sank back in the corner of the dusty cab and stared out of the streaming windows and tried not to think of Max at home in London, three thousand miles away, concentrating instead on controlling her rebellious stomach.
27
‘Jesus!’ Lily said and stared at her. ‘I thought you English girls was too ladylike to get yourselves knocked up.’
‘Knocked up?’ Lexie said, trying not to sound as angry as she was getting. She’d had to ask someone to help and this girl, of all the girls in the line, had seemed the most sensible, but already she was regretting speaking to her.
‘Sure knocked up! Ain’t that what you call it? What do you say in London, then?’
‘Pregnant,’ Lexie said, and then had to shut her eyes and lean back. Lily tutted softly and reached over and pulled on her shoulders, making her bend forwards with her head down.
‘Listen, sweetie, you feel faint, lean over, not back. You ought to know that. So, listen, what you want to do?’
Family Chorus Page 29
