The Simon Theater had been a movie palace in the 1920s and then a burlesque house, a dirty-movie joint, a foreign-film venue, and an eyesore slated for demolition. But it had managed to survive urban decay and gentrification to live again in its latest form, having kept, all along, the surname of its original owner, Mr. Arthur Simon. The attractive and well-constructed neon sign that bore Mr. Simon’s name had proved to be more expensive to remove or replace than to repair. And so, with each incarnation, the place remained the Simon Theater.
Audrey’s stage name had come to her in a flash of inspiration when she’d arrived at the theater to audition. Well, it hadn’t exactly been a formal audition. She had been walking past the theater on a hot day and had seen that the front doors of the establishment were propped open, allowing a cool, air-conditioned breeze to escape onto the sidewalk. The promise of relief from the heat had summoned her. She hadn’t even noticed the piano onstage until she was inside, fanning herself in front of a magnificent oak bar. Once Audrey had seen the piano, black and lustrous under the lights, what else was she supposed to do but the thing she had always done? She’d made her way through half-moon-shaped tables ringed by repurposed movie theater seats, stepped onto the stage, and begun to play and sing.
The current owner of the theater, and the person who had given Audrey her job, was a young man with a taste for the music and aesthetics of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations. He was also an ambitious real estate hustler who had leveled historic buildings in a five-block radius around the theater to build unsightly, overpriced condominiums. He had left the Simon and its neon sign in place so he could save a few dollars and proclaim himself a preservationist. The day Audrey had wandered in, he had been in the theater to oversee the final stages of the renovation, not to audition lounge singers. When he’d climbed up to the main floor from the storeroom to discover Audrey—the third neighborhood eccentric to sneak inside that day—he hadn’t had the energy to yell at her as he’d yelled at the previous intruders. He had walked behind the bar and poured himself a club soda, intending to simply wait her out.
He’d listened to two old ballads, followed by a salty blues song, and then he’d offered her a job. When he’d asked her name, she had looked around at the red velvet curtains, the cushioned theater seats, and the film posters—all remnants of a more gracious era—and renamed herself Audrey Crawford, after her two favorite movie stars.
She performed most weeknights and did the early shows on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Her style was too low-key for the late-night weekend audiences. What Audrey did well was what she was doing now. She played the piano. She sang. She talked.
She specialized in themed evenings. She picked a topic and gathered songs from her vast repertoire to go with it, though she never planned out exactly what she was going to play. Often she just talked and let the themes come to her. She ended her sets when her voice gave out or the bartender signaled for her to take a break, whichever came first.
That evening, perspiring under the lights in her silver lamé, she quietly rolled chords and tinkled tunes on the piano, speaking to about one hundred people, a good turnout for the Sunday after-dinner set.
“I was born in a little town called Plainview, Indiana,” Audrey said.
A young man in the audience yelled, “Woo-hoo! State U!” The woman sitting with him woo-hooed back at him.
Audrey said, “Proud alumni in the house tonight.” She played a snippet of State U’s fight song, and the young man howled again.
“I don’t know much about the university side of town. I grew up on the side where the drunks weren’t young or cute, and showing off your smarts was more likely to get you beat down than get you laid.”
She talked about Plainview that night because her hometown had been on her mind. She had awakened with a picture in her head of fireflies in the summer evening sky. Plainview sat in a valley, and from June to August, legions of lightning bugs flashed on and off in the surrounding hills, like a continuous, distant fireworks display. That image was so clear she was sure she must have been dreaming of home during the night. At breakfast, she had found herself thinking of how the trees on those hills appeared to absorb the fog just after dawn. Like magic. Had the place really been that beautiful? The morning’s memories almost made her want to return to Indiana to have another look. Almost.
Around lunchtime, Audrey recalled the smell of southern Indiana air on the first warm afternoons of spring—mossy, green, and alive. As she walked along the Chicago pavement on her way to the theater, her mind leapt back to the elastic quality of the earth beneath her bare feet when she’d strolled the Indiana woods after a light rain shower. Plainview lacked so much, but that day she remembered the qualities that had made her hometown wonderful for short bursts of time.
“Plainview wasn’t such a good place for me. You’ve heard the story. Bad daddy, dead mama, poor innocent waif facing the nasty old world on her own.” Audrey played the opening phrase of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” “But one day a voice whispered in my ear. It said, ‘Child, you better put a swing in your hips and march your fine ass on away from here if you wanna live.’ So I left Plainview and I made a new home here.
“Tonight, folks, I’ll be performing songs about home.” She surprised herself with that one. She had thought she was going to sing about friendship. But now that she’d changed course, songs about home it would be. She said, “Home is where the hate is, right?”
“Heart!” the State U graduate yelled back at her.
Audrey winked at him. “Like I said, college boy, we knew totally different sides of town.”
She crescendoed through a series of arpeggios, intending to make her way toward the opening of “Green, Green Grass of Home.” Instead, she surprised herself again by launching into the introduction to the unofficial state song of Indiana, a tune she hadn’t sung since the year her fourth-grade music teacher had drummed it into her head.
Well, this is as good a place to start as any.
She pursed her lips to blow away the droplet of perspiration that dangled from the tip of her nose. Then she crooned, “Back home again, in Indiana…”
CHAPTER 4
Clarice and Richmond Baker were no more than two feet inside Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat when Richmond placed a hand on Clarice’s arm and, after a slow, deep inhalation, gasped, “Oh, sweet Lord, it’s cherry pie.”
Clarice sniffed the air. “That’s cherry pie, all right.”
Recently, pies of any sort had been in short supply at Earl’s, where the Supremes and their spouses had met for after-church supper for more than forty years. Concerned about her husband Little Earl’s hypertension and dangerously high cholesterol, Earl’s co-owner and the primary baker at the diner, Erma Mae McIntyre, had taken up the cause of healthier eating. She had revamped the restaurant’s menu, expanding the vegetarian offerings and preparing lighter desserts. These days, she rarely made the rich treats for which she had become widely known since she and Little Earl had taken over the restaurant from its founder, Big Earl McIntyre.
In spite of Erma Mae’s efforts, Little Earl maintained every ounce of his three-hundred-pound frame through frequent excursions to Donut Heaven, just down the block. However, without the extra calories from testing batter and gobbling up the last bits of leftover cobblers, cakes, and puddings, Erma Mae had shed fifty pounds. The short supply of her popular baked goods had created a demand that bordered on hysteria. Once word circulated that there was cherry pie at Earl’s, the place was likely to be mobbed. Even now, as churchgoers trickled in, Clarice could hear patrons excitedly whispering into their phones, “Get here now.”
From the cash register, Little Earl called out to Richmond, “How ’bout those Reds?” Eager to talk sports, even though he’d be talking about little else once James Henry and Ray Carlson arrived, Richmond began walking toward the register.
Clarice waved hello to Little Earl and called out to Richmond, “I’m going to head for the des
sert table.” She rushed past the steam tables that held meat and side dishes to claim her place in the line that was already forming around the sweets. She wanted to be sure to get pie for Odette and Barbara Jean, in case they were late.
Once she had acquired her slices of pie, she wove her way through the diner, pausing along the way to say hello to several acquaintances. Congratulating herself for not having dropped one morsel of flaky crust from the three plates she held, Clarice sat at her usual spot at one end of the window table. From this vantage point, she watched Richmond as he moved through the crowded diner. As always, he was a pleasure to behold, slapping old friends on their backs and charming women with his Barry White basso voice and his fluorescent smile.
Clarice knew that she had aged well. She’d always been an attractive woman, and nightly applications of face cream had helped her to maintain the illusion of youthful skin tone. Though she had never achieved a level of thinness that satisfied her mother, regular exercise and periodic starvation had enabled her to hold on to her shapely figure. But Richmond was something special. At sixty-two, he was in better shape than most thirty-year-olds. His once-black hair had evolved into a glistening silver-white mane that demanded to be caressed. He had a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. Today he was dressed in a tan suit and a mauve shirt. With his broad chest and narrow waist, he looked like a G.I. Joe action figure masquerading as a Ken doll.
It was Richmond who had restarted Clarice’s abandoned piano career. She had been a child prodigy, winning contests and performing with symphony orchestras throughout the Midwest, but she had waved good-bye to all of that when she’d married Richmond. Then, decades later, after she had finally tired of his cheating and walked out on him, Richmond had surprised her by secretly sending recordings of her playing to the man who had offered to manage her career when she was young. To Clarice’s further amazement, that manager, Wendell Albertson, had remembered her and was still interested in working with her. Now Clarice was enjoying the career she had dreamed of as a young woman. She was traveling, giving concerts around the country. If Wendell Albertson had his way, she’d soon be performing around the world.
The musical life Richmond had engineered for her was just one of the wonderful things about him. She loved him. She always had. She supposed that she always would. He’d been a wonderful father to their four children, and he was an even better grandfather. He was unfailingly charming and capable of great kindness. Of course, during the same years when Richmond had been demonstrating his talents as a good father, a reliable provider, and an amusing and consistently presentable dinner companion, he had also repeatedly humiliated her and broken her heart.
Now, with his wife living across town in a house she rented from Odette, it seemed that Richmond had actually grown up. He was finally ready to be the husband Clarice had spent their entire marriage hoping for.
The problem was that Clarice didn’t want a husband. What she wanted was a little bit of amicable companionship and a lot of great sex. Richmond was brilliantly adept at both of those jobs. Conversations with Richmond didn’t tend to be deep, but they were pleasant. And Richmond had honed his lovemaking skills to a fine edge through years of scandalous behavior. Whenever Clarice’s new life onstage became overwhelming, it was a godsend to know that he was ready and able to provide stress relief.
Clarice, lost in her thoughts of Richmond, didn’t notice when her cousin Veronica sidled up to the table. When she felt the table jerk from something being slapped down beside her plate and heard Veronica squeal, “Isn’t he gorgeous,” Clarice snapped out of her reverie and let out a startled yelp. And when she beheld the photograph that her cousin had flung in front of her, she yelped again.
“Honestly, have you ever seen a baby this beautiful?” Veronica said.
Clarice didn’t want to lie on a Sunday, so she searched hard for something nice to say about Veronica’s grandson, Apollo, the ugliest baby she had ever seen. She turned her head sideways to get a new perspective on the infant’s teapot ears, his blotchy skin, and the oddly shaped mouth, which seemed to be impossibly far from his porcine nose. Don’t worry, he’ll grow out of it didn’t feel like the right response. Clarice’s late aunt Glory had charitably described her daughter, Veronica, as “touchy,” and Clarice knew that she would have to choose her words carefully if she wanted to be even remotely truthful and also have her cousin act civilly toward her at the next few family gatherings.
Veronica’s tendency to take quick offense and to lose control of her anger had steadily grown over the thirty-seven years since a member of the Temptations had broken her heart. In 1973, Veronica and Clarice had gone to see the Temptations perform in Louisville. Clarice had come back to Plainview alone and informed Veronica’s parents that their daughter had fallen in love with one of the band members and would be traveling for the next year as part of the group’s entourage.
After about two weeks, Veronica’s singer boyfriend got tired of her and called her father to tell him where he could pick her up.
For months, Veronica blamed her father for separating her from her one true love, and she refused to speak to him. Then her next-door neighbors’ son, Clement Swanson, started dropping by. Clement had a reputation for being both lecherous and stupid. But even those who disparaged his morals and mocked his intelligence admitted that he was good-looking. So the moment Veronica’s father saw Clement sniffing around, he built a six-foot-high picket fence on the line that divided his property from the Swansons’. He decreed that any interaction between Veronica and Clement would happen from opposite sides of that fence.
Clement liked a challenge, and he wasn’t about to let a fence stop him. Knowing that Veronica was still pining for her Motown man, he showed up for one of their chats through the pickets wearing a pale lavender three-piece suit and sang “My Girl” while performing a few Detroit-flavored dance moves. Veronica’s resistance caved in right on the spot.
Their first daughter was born nine months to the day after Clement did that dance. At Veronica and Clement’s wedding reception, her father, who never did warm to Clement, spent most of the evening slumped in a corner, crying about how he should have nailed the pickets close enough to provide effective contraception.
Clarice turned the picture of Apollo in her hands, hoping to find a side of him that she could enthusiastically compliment. She decided to comment on the baby’s extraordinary hair. It was shiny and black, and there was a tremendous amount of it. Hair sprouted from his wide forehead, nearly merging with the thick eyebrows that accented his squinty eyes.
Clarice said, “He’s got quite a head of hair on him.”
Veronica, who seemed to have forgotten about the existence of her three granddaughters since the birth of her first grandson, gushed, “He’s a beauty, all right. I’ve got a hundred new pictures of him to show you. Sorry, I can’t do it now, though. I need to consult with Madame Minnie, and I want to make sure I’m first in line when she gets here.”
Minnie McIntyre, the widow of Big Earl, ran a fortune-telling business from a table in the corner. Those who swore by her gift listed the few instances when the messages she’d received from the spirit world had proved accurate as evidence of her psychic ability. Nonbelievers maintained that anyone who issued dozens of predictions a day over the course of fifty years had to strike it lucky occasionally.
Veronica had been on both the devoted and the disgruntled customer sides of the Minnie McIntyre argument. Their warm relationship had soured after Minnie’s prediction that Veronica’s daughter Sharon would be swept off her feet by a tall, handsome stranger motivated Veronica to push Sharon into an ill-advised engagement. That whirlwind romance had ended abruptly when police officers interrupted the wedding ceremony to arrest the groom, who turned out to be a fugitive felon.
In the weeks following the wedding disaster, brokenhearted Sharon had comforted herself by working her way through nearly a third of the three hundred servings of uneaten wedding cake in her mother’s deep freez
er. With every pound Sharon gained from her mostly cake diet, Veronica grew angrier with Minnie. All was forgiven, though, after Sharon attempted to swallow the head and torso of the marzipan groom from her cake topper and was literally swept off her feet by a good-looking, lanky paramedic who performed the Heimlich maneuver on her to save her from choking to death. The young hero turned out to have quite a sweet tooth and, with the promise of all the cake he could eat, began visiting Sharon regularly. The young people were married the following summer.
Seeing then that Minnie had been spot-on in every aspect of her prediction, except for properly identifying the groom, Veronica’s faith in her psychic was restored.
“I’ll come by the house with more pictures later,” Veronica said to Clarice, snatching up the photo of Apollo and hurrying across the room to the corner to wait for Minnie. Clarice heard a series of squeaks and gasps just after Veronica walked away and she knew her cousin was showing off her picture of her shockingly piglike grandbaby on her way to the fortune-telling table. She thought, What on earth am I going to say when I have to look at a whole stack of those things?
Through the diner window, Clarice saw Odette and James Henry crossing the street, heading toward Earl’s. They were far enough down the block that she couldn’t see their faces, but their silhouettes were unmistakable. James was slender and a foot taller than his round wife. Clarice’s mother, always one for pointing out traits she found aesthetically displeasing, had taken note of the disparity in Odette’s and James’s physiques even before they’d married. Beatrice had said, “I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be together. I’m just saying that you might be doing your friend a favor by telling her that they look like a giant number ten when they stand next to each other. I wouldn’t want to go through life like that.”
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 4
