City of Flickering Light

by Juliette Fay

  They’d never gone back.

  They’d spent every subsequent summer in their heavily draperied home in Springfield, Massachusetts, where any breeze that made its way inside was reduced to a shriveled puff.

  The train was slipping down out of the mountains now—the San Bernardinos to her left and the San Gabriels to her right, as it turned out. She’d asked the conductor and was slightly disappointed to learn they had names, confirming once and for all that hers were not the first eyes to gaze upon them. But of course, she knew that. It was just fun to imagine.

  The train stopped in a little town called San Bernardino, then continued westward through what seemed like endless acres of orange groves. She’d gotten an orange in her Christmas stocking every year as a treat until she was fifteen and things starting going awry at home. It was the last orange she’d seen. The next year she’d gotten coal. And the day after New Year’s she’d be packed off to Miss Twickenham’s.

  Old Twick, Millie thought. Wouldn’t she fall into a dead faint to see me now.

  Surrounded by oranges.

  “La Grande Station!” called out the conductor with unprecedented urgency. “La Grande! City of Los Angeles! End of the line!”

  The entire population of the train smoothed the tangles from their hair and the wrinkles from their clothes as the train groaned its way into the heart of the city, a sort of slow collapse after hurling itself across the continent for so many days.

  Bags and suitcases were collected and coats thrown over arms in the summer heat, as passengers shuffled toward the train doors. They stepped down to a depot yard clogged with people—some arriving, some departing, and many searching the sea of faces for the ones they awaited and claimed with embraces.

  So much hugging! thought Millie enviously and moved a step closer to Irene till their shoulders touched. “Don’t lose me,” she whispered, and Irene took her hand as they wended their way to the street.

  “Head to the cabstand!” Henry raised his voice to be heard above the clatter of shoes on pavement and voices calling out. Irene scanned the chaos of long touring cars, two-seater coupes, and every size in between, and gripped Millie’s hand a little tighter.

  The taxi stand along Santa Fe Avenue was a seemingly endless line of vehicles in various states of dented-ness. An older man in a tweed cap leaned against the fender of the first in line. As the three of them approached, a strange little smile flickered across his face so quickly Millie wondered if she’d really seen it at all.

  “Where to, ladies?”

  “And gentleman,” corrected Millie.

  The cabbie gave a noncommittal grunt at Henry, and the three of them climbed into the back of the cab, which smelled of stale cigars, body odor, and orange. In fact there was an orange peel sticking out from under the front seat.

  “Where to?”

  “Hollywood,” said Irene. “Can you recommend any boardinghouses in the area?”

  “I suppose so,” he said. And there was that flicker of a smile, almost like a tic, as the old car rattled its way up Santa Fe Avenue. “You’ll want to stay at Mrs. Ringamory’s place. Good food, reasonable prices. She knows a lot about the business, too. Actresses, right?”

  “Yes,” said Millie at the same time Irene said, “We’ll see.”

  “Figured as much,” said the cabbie. “The girls all call her Mama Ringa.”

  Millie liked the sound of that. A cozy place with good food and a woman so warm and helpful the girls call her mama. “And what about Henry?” she asked. “Is there a place for him?”

  “The YMCA up on Schrader. ’Bout six blocks from Ringa’s. I’ll drop him there first.”

  “Oh, we don’t want to go just yet,” said Irene. This was clearly something she and Henry had worked out. “Please just let us out in the center of town. We want to walk around a little.”

  As they drove, Millie looked out the window at the palm trees and the tiny houses interspersed with what seemed to be lesser-known castles, with their enormous doors and carefully manicured lawns. California. It was what she and Irene (mostly Irene) had been planning for weeks, and they’d made it happen. The getting here part, anyway.

  “This is it,” the driver said after a while, with no effort to hide his boredom. “Hollywood.”

  “Look at that!” said Henry. “Olympic Studios. I’ve seen that name on plenty of flickers.” The two-story, white clapboard building took up half the block and looked more like an oversize home than a business. The second floor had a long veranda punctuated by a series of about twenty thick white pillars, with enormous iron-framed lanterns hanging in between.

  The driver pulled over.

  “Are we getting out here?” asked Irene.

  “As good a place as any if you want to see it. Hollywood Boulevard is a couple of blocks north. They both run east west. Sunset goes all the way out to the Pacific.”

  “Ocean?” said Millie, thinking of that glorious summer in Beverly. “Can we walk?”

  “Sure,” he said with that sly smile. “Only take you half a day. It’s twelve miles, easy.”

  He scribbled an address on a piece of paper, tore it off, and hung his arm over the back of the seat to hand it to Irene. “You’ll want to end up here before it gets dark. Tell her I told you.”

  “And who are you?”

  “She’ll know.”

  He said the fare was a dollar and seventy-five cents. Henry and Irene exchange looks. “You sure?” said Henry.

  The man eyed Henry like he was deciding how well done he’d like to cook him. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure. And no charge for the tip on where to stay. I threw that in for free.”

  When the cabdriver pulled away, they stood in the afternoon sun on a sidewalk in the middle of Hollywood, California. It looked and felt and even smelled different from anywhere Millie had ever been before. Bright and lemony, and so darned hopeful!

  This is just right, she thought. Just what I was looking for without even knowing.

  They strolled west on Sunset Boulevard, maneuvering down the busy sidewalk, taking in the palm trees and the cars speeding along, everything from rattling old flivvers to long, brightly colored phaetons. A woman rode by in a little coupe, top down, copper colored, and shiny as a new penny. She wore bright red lipstick and a sheer yellow scarf tied loosely over her head and crossed at the neck so the ends luffed behind like dainty flags.

  “Actress?” Millie asked the others.

  “Or heiress,” snickered Henry.

  I was an heiress once, she thought. But her parents had made clear that they had cut her from their will after things had gone decidedly downhill from Miss Twickenham’s Finishing School for Young Ladies. Or School for Slaves, as Millie liked to call it.

  But here she was with Irene and Henry, two wonderful people whom she loved. Yes, she did, she just loved them. Her father owned a shiny car, and she’d ridden in it plenty of times. It had never made her as happy as being here with these two friends.

  At Sunset and Gower, there were more studios—CBC and Christie were two of the names they saw—but the buildings were much smaller and more slapdash-looking than Olympic, as if they’d been built in a morning after a long night of drinking.

  “We could start our job search here,” said Henry.

  “Or we could start at Olympic, and see if we end up here,” said Irene.

  He smiled. “I like your thinking.”

  “Well, Olympic is no Warner Brothers or Famous Players-Lasky. I’m not trying to start at the top. I’m just trying not to start at the bottom.”

  A police officer stood on his wooden box in the middle of the intersection directing traffic. As they waited for his signal that it was safe to cross, a long black touring car, extra tires mounted on the sides, hurtled down Gower toward them, then screeched through a turn onto Sunset followed immediately by a police car. A man hung out a window of the touring car with a gun, thrusting it over and over at the police car, and blue-uniformed men dangled from the windows of the
police car, aiming back at him.

  Henry immediately corralled Millie and Irene into his arms and pressed them up against the wall of a studio. After a moment, they heard laughter and dared to come out of their huddle to see what was happening.

  A boy of about twelve was pointing at them. “They thought it was real!” he sang out. “You dopes, it ain’t real! You hear any gunshots?”

  Millie peeked beyond Henry’s arm to see the police officer who’d been directing traffic shake his head in annoyance. Then he wagged his finger in the direction of the opposite corner, where a handful of men stood around a contraption atop three long wooden legs.

  “There’s the camera, right there!” the boy told them. “It ain’t nothin’ but a flicker!”

  As they meandered up Sunset, Henry carried Millie’s suitcase, his rucksack slung over his shoulder. About once a block he offered to take Irene’s battered case, but she kept insisting she could carry it, which annoyed Millie because it intruded on her fantasies about all she was seeing around her: the shoe and clothing stores filled with styles she’d never even seen yet, and restaurants serving delicious food, interspersed with lemon trees and houses.

  “Just give it to him!” she said finally, startling Henry and Irene both. “You’ve got that knee, and he won’t stop asking till he has it.” Irene glared, but she gave him the suitcase.

  They passed a restaurant, its front windows open, white linen tablecloths swaying in the light breeze, the aroma of fresh bread wafting toward them. Millie looked at Irene.

  “We’d better find this Mama Ringamory’s in time for dinner.”

  “But can’t we have a little something now? We have the money.”

  “Until we find work, we have to be careful, Millie. That cab ride alone cost us almost as much as a meal for the three of us at this place would.”

  On the next block sat a long two-story stucco building with gracefully scrolling wrought iron letters: THE HOLLYWOOD ATHLETIC CLUB. Just then they saw a short, slim man with a shock of wavy black hair heading down Sunset toward them. Irene stopped suddenly and stared. “Chaplin,” she breathed. “That’s Charlie Chaplin.”

  “It can’t be,” said Henry.

  “Let’s talk to him!” said Millie. But Irene grabbed her arm, and they stood gawking. The man suddenly turned his feet out and walked the last few steps to the door of the club in the penguin-like gait of his beloved Little Tramp character, then touched the brim of his homburg, winked, and whisked into the building.

  Irene clamped her hands over her mouth. “Chaplin!” she squeaked through her fingers. “I’ve seen every one of his pictures at least twice. He’s brilliant!”

  They laughed and squeezed one another’s arms, and Henry said, “Our first day in Hollywood, and we see a star—not twenty feet away!”

  “Even better,” said Millie, “he saw us!”

  “It’s good luck,” said Irene. “I just know it.”

  That luck seemed less certain after they asked directions to the address the cabbie had given them and turned up a side street. Suddenly the heady brightness of downtown Hollywood began to change. Behind the stores and restaurants that lined the boulevard, people lingered in alleys: a man in a threadbare suit jacket smoking a cigarette leaned idly up against the back of the building as if he had grown there like moss; a cluster of women with skirts shorter than they should have been eyed Henry as they passed.

  A few blocks later, they were in front of a house—at least they assumed there was a house, somewhere down the dark walkway crowded with overgrown hedges on either side. A branch took Millie’s black hat right off her head as they followed it. The house itself was tall and narrow with a sort of turret on one side. A few of the wooden shingles on the porch walls around the front door hung askew, as if the door had been slammed so often it had caused them to come loose. There were large ring hooks in the ceiling from which a porch swing might have hung, but that was gone now.

  “You sure about this?” murmured Henry.

  “I’m sure it’s no worse than some of the places we stayed with Chandler,” said Irene, but the way her eyes flicked from peeling paint to the bare bulb above the door belied her confidence. “It’ll do for now.”

  She rang the bell, and the door was soon answered by a girl with tomato-red hair cut short and plastered to the sides of her head with pomade. She looked Irene up and down, turned, and yelled toward the back of the house, “Mama! More girls!” Then she walked away.

  A large woman, tall and lumpy like a camel with saddlebags, lumbered toward them. “What have we here! If you’re looking for a warm bed and good food, you’ve come to the right place!” When her broad frame reached the doorway and she spied Henry, however, her face fell. “You somebody’s boyfriend?” she said flatly.

  “No—” said Henry.

  “Not at all!” insisted Irene. “Just a friend. He walked us here to—”

  “No men allowed,” the woman said sternly. “Not even on the porch. Say your goodbyes now, girls, or our business here is done.”

  Irene stood uncharacteristically dumbfounded by the woman’s blunt dismissal, so Millie jumped in. “Henry, you can find the YMCA, right? The cabbie said it wasn’t far. Why don’t we come by after breakfast tomorrow morning”—she was making this up as she went—“and we’ll make a plan. We’ll all find out what we can, and then meet up to share the news.”

  Henry and Irene seemed startled by this sudden outburst of sense from Millie, but they nodded in agreement. “Nine o’clock, then,” said Millie with a definitive little clap of her hands. Then she lunged at Henry and hugged him as if he were heading off to battle instead of the YMCA. He hugged her back, and it felt lovely.

  Irene held out her hand for Henry to shake. He took it, then suddenly leaned forward and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “I’m glad I jumped off that train,” he murmured.

  Irene’s face went a little rosy. “I am, too,” she said.

  Mama Ringamory ushered them into the house, which was dark even though the sun had yet to fully set. The front room was likely a parlor at one time, but now it was crowded with a long wooden table, scarred and slicked with grease in several places and flanked by benches on either side. Through a doorway that had lost one board of its doorjamb was a kitchen with blackened pots hanging from a metal ring over the stove. There was a smell of bitter vegetables wafting toward them. Cabbage, Millie guessed, or turnips. Mama asked their names, where they were from, and what line of work they’d been in until now.

  “Vaudeville,” said Irene quickly.

  “Dancers?” Mama said. “We get a lot of dancers here.”

  “Actresses,” corrected Irene. “We have a skit we do about a runaway bride and a gypsy. Brings down the house every time.”

  Well, at least that one time it did, thought Millie, but that was because I got the giggles.

  Mama shrugged, as if in the end it didn’t matter one whit to her if they were dancers, actresses, or ditch diggers. “Price is nine dollars a week, includes dinner and breakfast, but no lunch. And you’ll have to do some chores. This isn’t a hotel, you understand. Also, you’ll share a room with two other girls, two to a bed. Payment in advance, and no refunds if you decide to leave before the week’s out.” At this she held out her hand.

  Irene took the bills from her little string bag and paid out the eighteen dollars. “Oh, by the way, it was a cabbie who told us about you. He said you’d know who he is?”

  “That’ll be Al.” Mama’s eyes went half-lidded with annoyance. “His way of letting me know he wants his cut.” She hooked a thumb toward the stairs. “Third floor. Room on the right.”

  Dinner was late. And bad—mostly cabbage. Mama said she cooked it with a ham bone, but Millie figured that pig must have been made out of wishful thinking. Not quite the savory home cooking that she’d been hoping for, but she was so tired, she almost didn’t care.

  The other girls at the table weren’t terribly friendly; they seemed more concerned about
getting their fair share of the salty, overcooked meal and swallowing as fast as possible. Most of them headed out for the night right from the dinner table. “To a dance party,” Mama Ringa told Millie and Irene as they carried the other girls’ dishes to the kitchen. But those sullen faces didn’t look like they were heading to any kind of party Millie had ever been to.

  Their small room on the third floor felt even smaller by virtue of a sloped ceiling and only a single gabled window to let in any air or light. The wallpaper was so yellowed and faded it was hard to discern a pattern. In the corner nearest her head, a piece of it had peeled back to reveal the previous paper, blue-flowered vines on a lemon-yellow background. She wished she could peel it all, and be surrounded by those happier colors.

  That night she lay back-to-back with Irene, listening to the soft snores of the two girls in the next bed. Despite the disconcerting creaks of the strange old house, Millie felt herself slip into a state of satiny-soft calm. Irene was near, Chandler’s Follies was far, and it seemed that whatever the next day would bring, they would manage somehow.

  Irene suddenly rolled over to face Millie and whispered into the dark, “Are you awake?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Millie, turning toward her.

  “When we jumped off that train yesterday, you said something about how they didn’t teach you that kind of thing in finishing school . . . that was a joke, right?”

  “Well, it was supposed to be funny, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “What I’m asking is, how do you know what they teach in finishing school?”

  “Because I went to one, silly!”

  “I thought finishing school was for rich girls.”

  “I suppose it is. My father was always complaining about how expensive it was. Which was the real joke of it, because it was more like a workhouse than a fancy girls’ school.”