After that, there will be doubt. You will wonder if you have been clear-eyed or fatalistic, optimistic or naive. You will hope you have done right by him, that he will go home to the city he loves, do work that he is meant for, and settle into a life that is mostly like the one he wants. I think that is the point, after all. Not to get everything—few people do—but to feel like you got the right things, that you didn’t let them slip away. You want this for him as much as you want it for yourself.
“Okay, honey,” says the woman. “I’ll take your word for it. But I’ll be right inside if you need anything. My name’s Mrs. Timothy H. Kellogg. And you are?”
What should you say? You’re not exactly Gwen anymore, and you’re hardly Leonie. While you consider how you might answer, you shift the handkerchief from one hand to the other, flipping it over to reveal its monogrammed corner. There, above the rolled hem and some pulled thread work, surrounded by tiny embroidered flowers, is the letter K. And then it comes to you—a name from your past, one that might carry you into the future. At first, you are hesitant to say it out loud. Once you do, there will be nothing ahead of you but open road. But what else can you say? You can’t rewind time, and you can’t stop it either. All you can do is go forward.
So what are you waiting for? Go on. Tell her my name.
EPILOGUE
That was the first time I introduced myself as Leigh Kramer. I have been doing it for so long now, nearly sixty years, that I sometimes forget I was ever anyone else. This is how I think of you, whenever something like Mimi’s invitation gives me cause: as someone distinct from me, someone who could—and did—disappear. I guess I thought it would be different here, in front of the home you left in search of the championship, but it’s not. It is all so familiar—the red brick, the arched windows, the unassuming cornice—and yet it feels like it belonged to someone else. A girl I used to know, a girl from another place and time.
When I set out this morning, I didn’t plan to walk all the way to the old neighborhood. But here I am, standing on a sidewalk spoiled by handprints and cracked by overgrown oaks, staring at the stoop where Franz, a Winston dangling from his lips, gave his reluctant consent, and the home just beyond it. The one to its right is cluttered with folding lawn chairs and stacks of old tires; the one to its left—the Rileys’ home, and then Franz and Pat’s place—is boarded up with plywood. But this one has benefited from some recent improvements. The iron handrail has been replaced, and the door and window sashes have a coat of white paint so new it still looks wet. Just below the house number is a local Realtor’s sign. It’s for sale.
I take a seat on those steps and a long pull on my water bottle before I work up the nerve to pull the invite out of my pocket. I am surprised to find myself so rocked by it. I haven’t suffered from sentimentality—nothing, at least, that would send me out on a hunt like this. I have long been rid of the evidence of your existence: the boots and the stilettos, the pencil skirt and the two-piece suit, the magazine clippings and the photographs. And I have no reason to grieve. The fact that Mimi will now be rewarded for her life’s work and take her place among the pantheon of professional wrestling legends only underscores the conclusion I came to long ago: this is how it was meant to be. You weren’t supposed to be champion. You had a more important purpose: you made my life possible. And it is much better to be me than to be you. I get to be my whole self—face, heel, and everything in between.
On the other side of the street, a familiar car pulls along the curb. The door opens, and the driver steps out, hikes up his pants, and walks toward the house. Now here is just the person to orient me in time: the Turnip.
“How did you know I would be here?” I call out.
When I say this, he stops in the middle of the street and stares. It seems he is only now realizing who I am.
“I didn’t. What are you doing here?” Two boys, biking in his direction, pass around him on either side, which he smartly takes as a warning. He makes his way up to the sidewalk and over to where I am sitting. “Did you walk this whole way?”
“Don’t act so surprised. I’m not that old.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not that young, either.”
No, I guess I’m not. Most of my years are behind me now. All the more reason to be satisfied with the life I have led—because it’s too damn late to do anything else.
I look at the Realtor’s sign, and then back toward Harold, suddenly putting two and two together. “This is the house you’re thinking of buying?”
Harold smiles. “I take it you don’t think it’s such a good idea.”
“Why would I? You have a beautiful home. You’ve been working on it for years. It’s practically perfect. Why would you give it up for this?”
I’m not sure why I bother to ask him this when I already know the answer. This was his home, too. He lived here with his mother, next door to his adoring grandparents, harboring poorly understood desires and nurturing private hopes, until, at eighteen, he was let loose into the world and started making the decisions that led him to this point in time, when his daughter is halfway around the world living a life he doesn’t understand. His presence here says something about the security he felt then and the bewilderment he feels now. For the first time in a long time, I feel something resembling tenderness toward the Turnip.
I mean Harold. His name is Harold.
“Oh, I don’t think I could really pull the trigger,” he says. “I just happened to see that it was on the market and couldn’t help myself.” Harold points at the invitation in my hand. “Is this why you’re here? This person you’re looking for—she’s from the neighborhood? Anybody I might know?”
At first, I think about all the clever ways I can answer this so that I might avoid a lie but still keep you a secret (You met her once, but you wouldn’t remember it. You were still an infant.) but then I realize that is not possible. To omit is to lie. I do not want to lie to Harold. I want to love him as much as Sis does, as much as Franz did, and the only way to bring someone closer to you is to tell the truth. I don’t know why I have to keep learning this lesson, but I guess I do.
“The invitation is for me,” I say. “I am Gwen Davies.”
As soon as I say it out loud, it seems true to me in a way that it didn’t before. You are not a separate being, someone I could just abandon in front of that window at Goldsmith’s. You are the small part of me that, despite everything, and beyond all rationality, still wishes that last match had gone differently, and for reasons that aren’t altogether selfless. I don’t really understand how we can coexist—me wanting the life that I have, you wanting the life you didn’t get—but we do.
“You are Gwen Davies,” repeats Harold. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s a long story,” I say. “I am going to need some sustenance to tell it. Take me home so I can eat my MoonPie, would you?”
“The Realtor’s supposed to meet me here any minute.”
“I can’t wait. I’m old. You said so yourself.”
“Just walk through the house with me first. You must be curious.”
“I’m not. And you shouldn’t be, either.” I wave the invitation at him. “You should take me home and help me figure out what I’m going to do about this.”
“It will take ten minutes. Twenty, tops.”
“It is more important for you to hear what I have to say. It might teach you something about parenting independent young women.”
Harold studies me for a while, which is just fine. I don’t have an angle. I just want to talk, for once.
“Okay,” he says, “you win. Let’s go.”
When we are buckled in, Harold motions for me to hand him the invitation. He studies it for a while. “Mimi Hollander,” he says. “Should I know that name?”
“Everybody should know that name,” I say. “She was the show.”
“Then we should g
o.”
We. I don’t know why, but that gets to me. I have to swallow hard before I can talk. “You haven’t heard the story yet.”
“I know it starts with you being someone called Gwen Davies and ends with you getting this,” he says. He hands the invitation back to me and starts the car. “I am pretty sure that whatever you say, I’m going to want to go.”
I nod and slip the invitation back in my pocket. Maybe we should go, maybe we shouldn’t. That doesn’t seem so important right now. At least, not as important as what I am about to do. I start fiddling with the radio. I have a lot to think about before we get back to the house, and I could use some tunes.
“What’s that station I like?” I ask, but instead of waiting for an answer, I push all the buttons until I find it, where Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man, Crazy” is just getting under way. “Did your mother ever tell you about the time she and I danced on Bandstand?”
“Only every time she hears this song. So, about a million times.”
“Alright, then. I won’t make it a million and one.”
“How about you dedicate the song instead?”
Harold is referring to a tradition I began as a DJ for WHER-AM, Sam Phillips’s All-Girl Radio Station, where I spun slow, square tunes for the old and unhip. This was the job that helped me find my footing after those first few years of purgatory, waiting tables (the only other skill set I had) and torturing myself with hindsight. At that stage of my life, radio was the perfect fit: the studio combined some of the pleasures of the arena—most notably, a ready, waiting audience—with the privacy and security of the hotel room. One evening, I ended my show with a Tony Bennett song and, in a fit of nostalgia, said, “This one’s for you, Father.” After that, I finished every shift with a personal dedication to someone who figured in my life. I never offer any backstory, just the dedication and the name.
This song is as good as any to send out to someone I love. It is the one that started it all, and I could dedicate it to many people. To my sister, Cynthia, who led me on the dance floor and said, “Do it, Leonie!” To Joe, who told me to get to work. To Sal, for discovering me, or Monster, for seeing me, or Sam, for letting me go. To my father, as I could almost every song I hear. To Pat, for loving him. It could go to my friend Screaming Mimi Hollander, the meanest bitch that ever walked the face of the earth. And, of course, it could go to you, the girl I used to be and, in some modest way, still am. But it is time for me to get back to the work of being Leigh Kramer, and I can’t think of a better way to start that work than to dedicate this song to the man who is sitting right beside me.
“This one’s for you, Harold,” I say. “Now, please. Take me home.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I found inspiration and information for this novel from the following texts: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Tess Slesinger’s “On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover,” Jeff Leen’s biography of Mildred Burke, The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend, Ruth Leitman’s documentary, Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling, and two highly unreliable but infinitely colorful autobiographies by two of those first ladies: Penny Banner’s Banner Days (with Gerry Hostetler) and Lillian Ellison’s The Fabulous Moolah: First Goddess of the Squared Circle (with Larry Platt).
Thank you to Hasanthika Sirisena, Julia Kenny, and Lauren Pearson for their help with the early drafts. I am especially grateful to Tony Earley, Joe Regal, and Markus Hoffman for their insights and enthusiasm, and to Emily Graff and everyone at Simon & Schuster. Thanks also to the family, friends, writing communities, and literary journals who helped me become a better writer and gave me reasons to keep trying: my mom, Serena, and my dad, Al; my brother, John, and his limitless wrestling knowledge; the Florida State University Creative Writing Program (2000–2003), the 2007 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, and The Greensboro Review. And I am forever in the debt of my husband, who risked sleeping on the couch to tell me the truth, and who sacrificed his own precious little time so I could have a few more minutes to write. This book was written for my babies, but it would not exist without their father. I love you, Jack.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angelina Mirabella received her master of arts in English (creative writing) from Florida State University in 2003. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Mid-American Review, and The Greensboro Review. In 2007, she attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a Tennessee Williams scholar. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two daughters. The Sweetheart is her first novel.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Angelina Mirabella
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2015
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Interior design by Aline Pace
Jacket design by Evan Gaffney
Jacket photograph: Model sitting on convertible © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis
Author photograph © Amy O’Brian
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mirabella, Angelina.
The sweetheart : a novel / Angelina Mirabella.— First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Women wrestlers—Fiction. 2. United States—History—1953–1961—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.I745S94 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014001457
ISBN 978-1-4767-3387-6
ISBN 978-1-4767-3391-3 (ebook)
The Sweetheart Page 34
