Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (21 page)

T
he girls were old enough to go to a real school, not just the one on the lot—Helen and Millie, Louis Gardner’s daughters, had gone to Marlborough, and Laura wanted Clara and Florence to go too. The school required knee-length skirts and loafers, as well as white collared shirts. Laura loved the idea of an all-girls’ school: all those ponytails thwapping back and forth as they ran around the track, all those small hands raised in class. It was supposed to be the best way for a girl to learn, and Laura wanted her girls to have every chance she never had. Irving was charmed by the whole idea, and didn’t mind footing the bill. He was their father, pure and simple. No one had heard from Gordon Pitts in years. After the war, his contract with the studio had expired, and unlike most lapsed actors, he didn’t come forth and beg for another round. The last Laura had heard, he was living with some other men in a hotel by the beach. Ginger said she’d heard he’d lost a tooth, one of the obvious ones. Laura believed anything Ginger said—she was so busy now, with her show and with her husband, that Laura didn’t get to see her nearly as much as she wanted to. She knew that there were negotiations happening between Ginger and the studio, but no one wanted to tell her what was going on.
It was easiest to assume that everything was going to be all right, the way she would comfort her children, by telling them easy lies about the goodness of the world.

Clara was nervous on her first day: She refused to come out of her bedroom until Laura, Harriet, and Florence were all begging. It would be worse to be late, Florence finally said, and that did the trick. Sisters knew what buttons to push: the trigger points. Laura felt awash with guilt on her sister’s behalf, out of nowhere, like a rogue wave on an otherwise calm ocean. There was a school bus, and it was the girls’ idea to take it, even though their father would have been happy to have one of the Gardner Brothers’ cars take them to and fro. Clara was in the seventh grade, Florence in the fifth. Junior cried all day after his sisters left, inconsolable. It was hard to be so much younger than your siblings; Laura knew that firsthand. He was only two, and wandered bowlegged around the house, searching every room. When he and Laura were alone, she let him wear her shoes, the lowest heels, and it was only then that he would smile for her, his broad face the spitting image of his father.

T
hat fall, Ginger and Bill took their show next door to Triumph, a smaller studio just over the Gardner Brothers’ wall.
Ginger & Bill’s Hoedown Happy Hour
was the same as it had been, and starred Ginger and her husband as only slightly fictionalized versions of themselves. The set was built to look like a ranch, with hitching posts, and hay strewn about the floor. The hairdressers at Triumph dyed Ginger’s hair an even brighter shade of red, saying that it had to look darker to really read as red on a small screen, despite the fact that Ginger had always been happy with the way she’d looked on the small screen before. They painted her lips outside the lines with deep red lipstick, and arched her eyebrows even more than normal.

“I look like a clown,” Ginger said when Laura called. Irving was still angry at Ginger for leaving, and Laura had to call when he was at work.

“You look hysterical,” Laura said, not disagreeing. That was the idea, and Gardner Brothers had sold it over and over again: Ginger was the housewife gone mad.

The show was wackier on the other side of the studio wall—it had slapstick scenes and serious ones. There were intimate moments with Ginger and Bill curled up together on a blanket, and scenes of Bill singing and playing the guitar by a fake campfire. But then there were the moments they really let Ginger fly, things she wouldn’t have been allowed to do at Gardner Brothers because they were too ridiculous: mishaps at the swimming hole, when Ginger’s hair dye turned the water pink; the time Ginger pretended she could speak French and mistakenly agreed to host a two-hundred-person wedding in their living room. It was one of the only shows Laura would let Clara and Florence watch, and only after they were finished with their homework and field hockey practice, and only if their father wasn’t home. They’d rush in, step out of their cleats, and throw their sweaty bodies on the sofa. Clara had just turned fourteen, and her body reminded her mother of a horse, all muscle and motion. The girls would howl with laughter, their throats open wide with unguarded amusement. Florence never laughed that way around her mother, not unless Ginger was involved.

It was while they were watching the
Hoedown Happy Hour
that Josephine called to tell Laura that their father had died. Josephine’s voice was calm and even, which made it seem to Laura like she might be making the whole thing up, playing some kind of sick practical joke. But Josephine persisted, and when Laura hung up the telephone, the girls were staring at her with wide eyes. She hadn’t realized she was making any noise, but when Laura saw the look of horror on Florence’s face, she heard the wailing and realized it was coming from her own throat. Clara called their father, and in turn Irving’s secretary called the airline and booked tickets for the first flight out the next day.

Laura had always intended for the girls to know Door County, to
know where she came from, and it seemed impossible to her that this would be their first trip. It was September, still high season for tourists, and the playhouse would be in full swing. It had been a few years since John and Mary hired on professional help with managing the theater, and though the stage would be dark for the days immediately surrounding the funeral, there were no questions about what would become of the playhouse. Lawyers were involved, and arrangements had already been made. The land went to Josephine, who deserved it, and the theater would remain in operation. Laura hadn’t seen her childhood home for fifteen years. She counted on her fingers twice, sure she’d done the arithmetic wrong.

S
he hadn’t thought to be nervous about the airport itself. They hadn’t even made it to the gate when the first person tapped Laura on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, aren’t you Laura Lamont?” The woman was polite, and so how could Laura not be? She nodded, dipped her neck like a swan, signed a paper cocktail napkin from the lounge. After the first, there were always more. Irving and the children were yards ahead, just watching. Laura tried to catch Irving’s eye for him to make it stop, to make everyone go away in a poof of magical movie smoke, but he had all three children and was only one man. The crowd tightened around her, all the strangers breathing on her face as she bent over to scrawl their names—
H-E-L-E-N, M-A-U-R-I-C-E, for my father, thanks, golly
—and it wasn’t until a voice came over the loudspeaker announcing their flight that Laura felt she could break free. She hurried through the crowd toward her family, her cheeks burning scarlet.

It was the children’s first flight, and only Laura’s third; the first
two had been to New York and back as a docile ward of Gardner Brothers, during the lead-up to
Farewell, My Sister
. She strapped herself into an aisle seat, with the girls and Junior across the way and Irving in the seat beside her. The long-legged stewardess pinned small metal wings to Junior’s jacket, a gesture that made Laura’s eyes water. There was no kindness that went unnoticed. She was glad when they were all in their seats and facing forward, with something concrete to feel nervous about. The plane rattled from side to side as it zoomed down the runway, with the stewardess smiling daftly at Laura the entire time, as though she were sitting in a dark movie theater, her stare that steady. Laura closed her eyes and clutched Irving’s hand with both of hers as the nose tipped upward, into the blue sky. He held her hands tightly for all six hours, until they were back on the ground in Chicago. It didn’t matter that scientists swore that airplanes didn’t simply fall out of the sky—Laura thought that today would be the day, if it was ever going to happen, and she was glad that Irving understood her enough not to let go.

There were so many reasons it seemed impossible that her father was dead: John’s size, his booming voice, his command of Shakespeare, the letters he sent the children on their birthdays. Those things couldn’t just vanish into the ether. Laura fell asleep in the rental car on the way north to Door County, and she dreamed about Hildy for the first time since the girls were little. In the dream, they were sitting in Hildy’s bedroom, which was overflowing with water. It poured through the windows and slid in under the closed door. The room was going to fill, and they were going to drown, and no one would save them. Laura knew this for a fact: She and her sister were going to die together in that room. Hildy and Elsa. She woke up just as the water started to lap at her neck. Junior was looking at her, his eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Hi, sweetie,” Laura said.

“You were making funny noises,” Junior said. He already wore glasses. Laura never knew they made such small pairs, the prescription lenses only an inch and a half wide. He had a small toy airplane, and ran it back and forth across his lap. Junior was a good boy almost all of the time, as well behaved as a loyal hound at his mother’s heel, but when something set him off, his crying fits could last for days. Laura never knew what would push him over the edge.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. Out the window, the afternoon sun shone through the trees and painted the farms beside the highway with an ever-changing pattern. Cows lounged by the side of the road, taking turns swatting the flies away with their tails. It was impossible that her father was gone, impossible that she would never see him again. Laura wanted there to be a button to go back in time, back far enough so that there was never any insurmountable space in between them, back far enough so that she could have visited every summer and moved the girls into the house and sat in the audience, just like anybody else. Laura wanted to push that button and be Elsa Emerson again, and to be alive with Hildy and Josephine, the three of them all together in the same place for as long as it took to bring her father back. Laura Lamont was as much a stranger to the place as Irving and the children. She patted Junior on his narrow thigh—
grandson
. How had she kept her father’s only grandson away? Elsa would never have done such a thing, no matter how busy. Elsa would have picked up her child and stomped home through mud and snow and rain. Junior kept staring at his mother, instead of looking out the window, as if he understood that there was more happening inside her head than in the passing scenery. Irving was in front with the driver, talking Wisconsin politics, which her husband knew nothing about.

L
aura could have given directions with her eyes closed and her mouth shut, just by the feel of the road. She was sure of it. But Cherry County Playhouse Road came sooner than she expected, before she was ready. There were other cars parked in the drive, and outbuildings that Laura didn’t recognize. In her mind the house was a castle, so full of hiding places and secret passageways that it was almost too big to fathom, but now that she was out of the car and standing in front of it, the roof looked like it needed to be redone and the windows cleaned. Her parents were modest people, and had built the house themselves. How big could it have been? How many square feet did children need, when there were the woods and the lakes and the wild, wild universe just out the front door? The roof needed mending, and Laura wondered whether her parents—her
mother
—had the money. But of course no one was going to talk about the roof.