The War Against Miss Winter (14 page)

Of course, you couldn’t place real people on a real set and call it theater. One key element separated drama from real life: conflict. Sure, life had plenty of it, but much of our everyday activity was void of any dramatic push and pull. Fielding wrote, “While we strive to mimic daily goings-on, there’s no reason to be boring about it. Some events in our lives are made for observation; others are undeserving of an audience. We must carefully discern between the two.”

Journey’s End
matched
On Theatre
for length and density. The basic plot was that a man, in the midst of an unnamed war, struggles to get home to his exiled family. Along the way he encounters a variety of characters he needs to spill about his family’s whereabouts. It was clearly intended to be a political allegory, but I wasn’t swift to what he was trying to say. All I knew was that if this was the best example of Fielding’s writing, the only reason it should be prompting anyone’s death was from boredom.

J
AYNE DIDN
’
T COME HOME
on Saturday, and by Sunday I’d convinced myself that Tony had whisked her away for a romantic weekend. I went to bed early that night to avoid Ruby. I’d managed to duck her the entire weekend, but it was going to be impossible to continue dodging her if we were in the same rehearsal hall. From nine o’clock on I tossed and turned, thinking about Jack in the arms of some nameless French nurse with a face like Rita Hayworth’s, thinking about Jim hanging from a rope that creaked with every swing. The images merged until it was Jack I kept finding in Jim’s closet. Despite the noose around his neck, he was still alive and every time I opened the door he presented me with a marked deck of cards while Churchill whispered, “Aces are high.”

At ten o’clock I turned on the lights and let sleep know I was giving it a rest for the night. Churchill was sprawled belly up against Jayne’s pillows. He opened one eye at the return of lamplight, then rotated his head until the pillowcase better blocked his vision.

I rifled through back issues of
Dime Detective
but couldn’t find a single tale that held my attention. I returned the pulps to their teetering pile and retrieved a stash of blank V-mail from under my bed.

Dear Jack…

I passed the next half hour staring at his name, trying to decide on the best opening. We’d left things bad. Very bad. While no one had officially declared the relationship over, it was obvious he believed it to be the case when he packed up his troubles in his old kit bag and left without saying good-bye.

Our problems stemmed from the age-old rule that actors and actresses should never date one another. When and why these two creatures became incompatible I couldn’t guess, though I suspected the
Elizabethans employed cross-dressing to get around the problem. The life of an actor could be an agonizingly lonely one. It was tempting to look for camaraderie among like-minded individuals if for no one other reason than because you believed similarities beget understanding. Plus there was something to be said for the attraction one felt when she witnessed someone succeeding at his craft. A talented man was a powerful aphrodisiac.

The problem with both people in a relationship pursuing the same thing was that inevitably they achieved different levels of acclaim. Before he enlisted, Jack was heavily in demand, so much so that he no longer auditioned for work. I wasn’t bothered by his accomplishments, but I’d grown to dread the way it altered his attitude toward me. Suddenly, he believed he knew the secret to succeeding as an actor and rather than sitting back and supporting my admittedly minor victories, he doled out advice in a way that used my achievements as an example of what I shouldn’t have done.

It’s not that Jack didn’t support me, but he had a different notion about being an actor than I did. I believed acting was a job like any other and if that meant I sometimes did stupid things to guarantee my financial survival, so be it. I took whatever parts I could, working for companies that would be gone tomorrow or reduced to theatrical punch lines. To me it made good sense; to Jack I was compromising myself. In the heat of an argument he once told me that my taking parts that were beneath me was the reason that people thought the word
actress
was synonymous with
whore
. Right before I clocked him, I reminded him that his first name was half of the word synonymous with
donkey
.

Jack had to believe everything he did was Art (capital A), from the production of
A Doll’s House
set in the human digestive system (Nora’s exit wasn’t so much a choice as an expulsion) to the version of
Twelfth Night
that played out over as many evenings so the audience could no longer connect what had just happened in the play with what had occurred two weeks prior. In Jack’s mind what counted wasn’t your paycheck but how each role would serve to make people remember your name as a performer. This was a decision he could afford to make be
cause he hailed from a wealthy family. I, on the other hand, had rent to pay and a nasty desire to eat three squares a day.

Even if I didn’t have all those responsibilities hanging over me, there was no guarantee I would’ve achieved greater success by being more particular about what roles I accepted. We didn’t live in a perfect world where every actor with talent was guaranteed meaningful work. Putting aside the nepotism and politicking that took most casting decisions out of the realm of logic, I wasn’t a contender for every good part. I was tall and imperious onstage, no matter how I tried to hide it, which limited the kinds of roles I could play. Jack didn’t see that though. If I failed it was because of something I hadn’t done rather than something I couldn’t.

Jack enlisted because of me. We’d been having one of the many fights that characterized the end of our relationship. He’d taken me to task for working for Jim, an arrangement he believed was my way of declaring I was abandoning my acting career once and for all. I explained that that wasn’t the case, that when one job didn’t pan out, you took another to get through the lean times, but he would hear none of it. Before I knew it, I was challenging him to descend his throne and try living like everyone else for once. I had no idea he’d use that as rationale for the Actor to become a soldier.

That’s not to say that I was the
only
reason he signed up. You couldn’t get through the year since Pearl Harbor without feeling that you should be doing something to help. Friend after friend of ours joined up and shipped out, until Jack was one of the few actors in his twenties still working. It must’ve bothered him, though he never admitted it, just like it had to drive him crazy when soldiers passed him on the street and laughingly referred to him as the Home Guard. I wished I knew that side of him. It might’ve helped me handle his going off to basic training better. And maybe, when he finally returned, I wouldn’t have greeted the news that he’d received his orders with a torrent of tears and accusations about how he was doing this to punish me—that he’d never really loved me. That had to make it easy for him to leave without saying good-bye.

I picked up my pen and scribbled beneath the salutation, “Please don’t die,” then I crumbled the paper into a ball and threw it at the
wastebasket. Shortly thereafter I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, Jayne had turned off the lights and was creeping about the room with a stiffness that suggested she was aiming for invisibility.

I rose up on my elbow and clicked on my bedside lamp. “Hiya, stranger.”

She kept her back to me and struggled to take off her clothes. “Hiya, yourself. You can turn off the light. I don’t need it. I’m almost changed.” There was an air of insistence to her voice that told me to either obey or face her wrath. Jayne was happy-go-lucky to a fault so hearing her tone set on edge signified something was seriously wrong.

I clicked off the lamp and watched her form struggle to dress by the light of the pulsing neon motel sign across the street from us. “You all right?”

“Fine. Just tired.” With her back still to me, she slid into bed and pulled the covers past her neck. “You have a good weekend?”

I laughed at the night and pulled the sheet to my chin. “Allow me to boil its bleakness down to one activity: I spent a large part of the evening trying to write Jack.”

“That is bleak.”

The room grew strangled with a silence so oppressive only Churchill’s snores could be heard. My instincts told me to leave Jayne alone, but I had a feeling doing so was the last thing she needed. I climbed out of bed and took a seat on the edge of hers. As gentle as a butterfly, I set my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Her arm vibrated in response and I realized Jayne hadn’t stopped speaking because she wanted to but because it was the only way she could quiet the sobs wracking her body.

“What’s wrong?”

She turned to me, her hand on top of mine, and showed me through the throbbing light what had kept her from the Shaw House for two days. Her left eye was lost in a shadow that started above her penciled eyebrow and ended below the top of her rouged cheek. Her lips rippled
as though she’d hastily eaten a piece of cake without wiping her mouth. I turned the lamp back on and the shadow became a bruise, the cake a poorly healed scab. A crevice ran vertically from her upper lip to her lower, making her mouth appear like lava that leaked from a wound in the earth.

“That son of a bitch! I’ll kill him.” I rose from the bed but made it no farther than the iron footboard before Jayne pulled me back down beside her.

“Don’t, Rosie. Please.”

“Why? Because he’s a good guy? Because you deserved it? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t clean his clock.”

Jayne again turned off the light as though she believed the wounds disappeared when I could no longer see them. “Just don’t. Okay? I need to think. Then maybe…” Her voice trailed off. She fumbled with her nightstand drawer until she located a cigarette and lighter. The flame momentarily illuminated Tony B.’s damage before again masking it in darkness.

“When did this happen?”

She tilted her head back and exhaled. The smoke drew a lazy line in the air. “Friday. After.” She rested the hand holding the cigarette by her cheek to ease her pain with its warmth. “I don’t know what happened. We were dancing, having a good time. Everything was great.” Tears choked her words. Jayne’s eyes lit on a spot on the wall opposite her and I had the same feeling I had the one time she was miscast in a tragedy. Her hands moved too much; her facial expressions were too extreme. Jayne played drama like a clubfoot tap-danced. “Then some guy starts making eyes at me, only Tony’s not game for it. I told him off, but it wasn’t good enough for Tony. He made out like I was asking for the attention.” I thought back to Friday night. It didn’t make sense that someone could go from loving the spotlight to bashing the bulb in. “I tried to tell him he’s the only man for me, but everything came out wrong and before I knew it…”

“He was hitting you.”

Her face changed and her eyes left their spot and returned to me. “I just stood there. I kept thinking he’d stop. He’d see the blood and he’d
stop.” She pulled down the front of her gown and showed me what I couldn’t see from a distance: her chest, her shoulders, her back—all of it was black and blue.

I was overcome with a mix of pity and anger. I was mad at Jayne for not telling me the truth and bewildered by the clear evidence that someone had hurt her. How could I make things right when I didn’t know what had happened to begin with?

A better person might have been able to get the real story out of her, but I tripped and stumbled over my fat tongue and asked, “Why didn’t you stop him?”

Her eyes went blank, as if I’d asked her a complicated math question. She ran her index finger over her split lip and winced. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Of course you could. You could’ve hit him back. You could’ve screamed for help. You could’ve done something.”

“I couldn’t.” Her voice grew more forceful. “He’s stronger than me, see? He was too far off the track. And I knew if I tried to do anything to stop him it would make it worse.” She wielded the cigarette with such ferocity that I had to duck out of the way to keep from getting burned. “If I yelled, no one would’ve come. If I’d hit him, he would’ve hit me harder. I’m not smart. I’m not good at defending myself. All I could do was stand there and take it. I’m sorry if that wasn’t good enough for you.” She curled her legs toward her body and hugged her knees. Never had I seen Jayne so defeated.

“Have you been with him this whole time?” I asked.

Her fingers searched her lips and plucked a stray hair from the scab. “No. I went home.” Jayne’s family ran a dairy farm two hours north of the city. Since I’d known her, they hadn’t come to see one of her shows; nor had she ever bothered to go home for a visit. “I couldn’t stay there, but I needed to get away, you know? I was scared he’d find me.”

I nodded. “What are you going to do?”

She rolled over until her back was to me. Churchill delicately picked his way across her bed and settled in the hollow beneath her stomach. “I’m going to sleep.”

I
GOT UP EARLY THE
next morning and tiptoed about the room while Jayne continued to sleep. Churchill remained in the curve of her belly, one grave eye set upon me as I went about my business. By eight o’clock I was downstairs and eating breakfast alone in the dining room, a treat I usually missed out on. In exchange for our sugar ration coupons, the Shaw House provided us with two hot meals of varying quality. If you were up before ten, you got a stack of wheats and a cup of joe. As delectable as this might sound, the house cook, Ellen Deering, was a cousin of Belle’s. What Belle was to hospitality, Ellen was to food, meaning the pancakes were the consistency of paving brick.

Still, I wolfed down the food, hoping speed would bump off taste, and entertained myself with an abandoned newspaper. Babe Ruth was making personal appearances at movie theaters to get kids involved in the war effort. Jane Russell was the number-one pinup choice of the armed forces. Twelve percent of the motion picture industry had enlisted, including Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable. It was a good heartwarming look at how fame could be a positive thing, but it couldn’t trump the news that five brothers were missing after fighting the same battle in the Pacific. All five from one family gone in an instant. Now
that
was reality.

I was about to put my cup down and declare breakfast conquered when Ruby promenaded into the dining room and blocked the exit with her body. She was wearing a stunning royal blue silk shantung suit (bought, I assumed, before the ration kicked in) and matching mules. Her hair and makeup made it clear she’d been up since six to make sure nobody at rehearsal looked better than she did.

“Eating all alone?” she cooed.

“Finishing actually.” My cup met its saucer and rattled a warning.

“You’re lucky you’re so tall. I can’t imagine a smaller woman eating what you do and getting away with it.” Ruby left the doorway and sat at the table. “How was your date?”

“Swell.”

She sat with her back straight, her hands palms down on the tabletop. Despite this front, there was something hinky about her, as though she was as disturbed by me as I was by her.

“What about you, Rube—what were you up to this weekend?”

“Me?” She fluttered her eyelashes to communicate how strange it was for her to jaw about herself. As if I’d believe that. “Why, I didn’t really do anything.”

I raised a questioning eyebrow and pushed forward. “So you were here all weekend?”

“Here and there.” Her napkin lighted into the air and settled gracefully on her lap. “By the way, when should I expect my dress back?”

“Soon. I took it to a dry cleaner.” I’d never had anything dry-cleaned in my life, but I hoped the process took a while and ended with the garment looking worse for wear.

Ruby’s forehead crinkled with concern. “You didn’t get anything on it, did you?”

I rose from the table. “I was on a date, Ruby. I was nervous.”

She pursed her lips into a tiny red oval. “That dress cost a hundred dollars.”

Overcooked pancakes leaped from my stomach and lodged in my throat. My entire wardrobe didn’t cost $100. I’d hoped no one’s did. “Let me finish, would you?” Faster, brain, faster! “I was nervous and thought I’d better get the dress cleaned in case it…um…” I checked the door and lowered my voice. “In case it smelled.”

“Oh.” Her acrylic smile returned and she shifted her body to further increase the distance between us. “I appreciate the thought. So why are you up so early? Did you get another job?”

“No, I’m going to rehearsal. With you. Remember?”

Ruby nodded deeply as people will do when they’re pretending to learn something for the first time. “That’s right, you’re in
my
show.” Her
show.
Her
show. Jayne had been beaten and was lying about why. Jack had shipped out. My boss was dead. And the one potential bright spot in my life had been snatched by Little Miss Did It First and Did It Better. No longer was I worried I’d destroyed her dress; I only wished I’d set it on fire.

Ruby retrieved a wheat from the platter and carefully scraped away its burned outer layer. “Maybe we can share a cab to rehearsal. What time were you planning on leaving?”

I plastered a fourteen-karat smile on my face. “That’s awfully swell of you, but I have a few things I have to do this morning. Maybe we can share a cab home?”

Her own smile grew, silently spilling that the original offer had been a sham. “Unfortunately, I have to go uptown. I have a lunch date, and then I have to work on my radio show.”

I snapped my fingers. “Oh, that’s right—you got that little radio gig.”

A deep, throaty laugh sounded in her chest. “I’d hardly call it
little
. I’m the lead.”

“Well, that’s swell, Rube. Really, truly swell.” I should’ve dusted then, but I couldn’t help myself. If Ruby was going to ruin my day, I could ruin her meal. “You know, it’s wonderful that you’re so secure about taking radio work. I’ve heard some directors assume anyone on the radio is using their voice to compensate for other…shortcomings.”

Ruby’s fingers, still bearing the pancake’s carbon, danced along her hairline and pushed her glossy curls into place. “Obviously that’s not a problem for me.”

“Obviously.” I started to leave but paused long enough to admire the crumbs glistening like black pearls against white silk. “But give it time.”

Since I had nowhere to go and an hour and a half to kill, I decided to walk to rehearsal. People’s Theatre was north of the Shaw House on West Fourteenth Street, an address that had served many other theaters with small budgets and big mouths since the beginning of the century. The
morning was warm enough that street vendors assumed their stations and grocers spilled their wares onto the sidewalks to compensate for their cramped, overstocked spaces. A mix of accents—some Irish, some Italian—hawked produce I didn’t need and couldn’t afford. A pair of sailors wandered among them, their eyes lighting on each sight as if they were attempting to commit every detail to memory in case they should never see it again. Across the street a courier checked an address from the list in his hands while women peeked around the drapes in their living rooms, their faces tensed in preparation for the starred telegram they might be getting. “The War Department regrets to inform you,” it would say, the rest of its text unreadable once their tears began.

By the time I arrived at the theater a light mist had saturated my coat and hat, turning my formerly neat appearance to wrinkled, wet, and odorous. I was still a half hour early and the building appeared empty, so I ducked into the ladies’ room and did my best to pat myself dry. Once I was less waterlogged, I took a stroll around the lobby and examined framed photos and reviews from the last several shows.

People’s Theatre specialized in realistic, contemporary productions, many of which had a political bent. During the Depression, they’d become world-renowned for a musical about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, starring real-life survivors of the accident instead of actors. Many of their productions had been endorsed by labor unions while being defamed as subversive and reckless by local politicians. The photos from the shows told of gritty, realistic sets and actors made human by uncombed hair, smudges of dirt, torn costumes, and stark lighting. Had they not been identified as pictures from plays, I would’ve thought all the images were
Life
magazine portraits of people pushed to their limits so those of us safe in our living rooms could humanize the tales we read in our papers.

In addition to the photos, there was a large brass plaque lining one wall, engraved with the names of those who’d helped People’s Theatre establish, grow, and continue to exist. The usual suspects were listed—well-to-do families and captains of industry who supported the arts not because they cared about theater but because they had a quota of
plaques to appear on. There were also well-known performers, directors, and writers who may have pursued their careers elsewhere but believed enough in People’s Theatre to continue to contribute to its efforts. There was even a name that had been removed, its shadow a tale of someone who’d withdrawn his support after something he didn’t approve of was done.

That didn’t bode well. I didn’t want a company with an agenda. I wanted a job.

To warm up for the read-through, I began to read the names on the plaque aloud, exaggerating each syllable until the monikers lost their meaning: Sarah Plotkins. Amos Carraway. Alan Detmire. Georgia T. Boyles. Raymond Fielding.

I stopped and went back to the last name. Fielding’s work had been performed here. Here! And that other name—Alan Detmire. Hadn’t I seen his name in one of the newspaper articles in Nussbaum’s office?

“Like what you see?” A male voice sounded behind me. I whirled around and found the director from my audition—the one I’d dubbed Dull and Dramatic—standing at attention.

“Uh, hiya,” I said. “It’s certainly…interesting stuff. You guys aren’t afraid to take a stand.” I sidestepped back to the photos and he joined me, looking upon them like a proud father displaying the artwork of his children.

“The only way theaters in this town get noticed is by being controversial.” He offered me his hand. It was a nice hand. “I’m Peter Sherwood.”

This
was Peter Sherwood, the mysterious guy who had invited me to the audition in the first place? “I’m Rosie Winter, and unless I’m mistaken you just cast me.”

He peered through small wire-rimmed glasses that were fashionable ten years before but had since fallen out of favor. “You’re the ‘Tea for Two’ girl.”

Prickles of embarrassment burned across my hairline. “That’s me.”

“My apologies for not recognizing you sooner.”

“Perhaps I would’ve been more familiar if you’d encountered me feet first?” What I took from a distance as boring and serious, was, up close, much more exciting. He was in his early thirties and possessed a bookish charm that doomed him to a life behind the scenes. His hair had a shaggy irregularity that suggested he’d either cut it himself or paid someone too little for the privilege. Stripped down or dressed up, he would’ve been a handsome man but left as he was, he was much more interesting.

“Don’t take it personally, Rosie. I rarely remember the actors I cast, which is half the reason I cast them.” Peter shifted a book he had wedged beneath his arm. A long German title stood stark against a woven red and tan cover. A sticker on the spine identified it as having come from the New York Public Library.

“Good book?” I asked.

He appeared startled to find the tome, as though the discomfort from having six hundred pages shoved into his armpit was something he’d grown to accept as normal. “Interesting book. I wouldn’t say anything the Germans are churning out these days is good.” He winked. “You never know who might be listening.”

“That seems dangerous.”

“That I’m reading their literature or that anyone has access to it?” He leaned in close to me and I inhaled a scent of oatmeal and Ivory soap. I bet he had a mother who didn’t understand what he did but still came to every show he directed.

“Both, I guess,” I said.

“If we’re ever going to understand the enemy, shouldn’t we know what they’re being told?”

I had a feeling Henry Nussbaum wouldn’t agree with him.

I wanted to ask him why he’d invited me to the audition and if he’d ever met Raymond Fielding or Alan Detmire, but before I could, two women I didn’t recognize entered the lobby. Peter greeted them and instructed them that the read-through would be upstairs.

“Are you rehearsing two shows today?” I asked.

“No, just the one.”

I waited for further explanation. When none came, I plowed forward. “Then are you sure I’m supposed to be here? The show I auditioned for needed two older men, an older woman, and me, and now you have several much younger female faces traipsing through your lobby.”

“You’re very observant.”

“I don’t know if I’m observant or paranoid. I’ve had a hell of a two weeks and I’m running low on sleep, so if I’m getting canned, please do it before I climb two flights of stairs.”

“Don’t worry: I’m not letting you go.” He crossed his arms and shifted his weight. His left shoulder was curiously higher than his right. I followed the line of his body, seeking out the reason for the inequity. One of his legs was shorter than the other.

“Polio,” he said.

My eyes snapped to his face. “I thought I was being more subtle than that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s kept me out of the war. My mother swore I’d eventually be grateful for it.”

I couldn’t decide what was safe to set my eyes on, so I held his gaze and changed the subject. “So about the show—why the new cast?”

“We’ve switched shows. I’ll be telling everyone about it today.”

Ruby was right—that alone was vexing.

Before Peter could tell me any more, the lobby door yawned and the devil herself glided into the room, affecting an accent not heard since Philip Barry’s last play.

“Peter, darling!”

At the sight of the ethereal beauty with the evil disposition, Peter forgot about me and limped into Ruby’s arms. “Ruby! It’s so good to see you. I was worried you wouldn’t show.”

She pulled out of the embrace and castigated him with a wagging finger. “I’d never disappoint you, darling. I overslept. I rushed over here so fast I must look a mess.” She looked exactly as she had at breakfast, excepting the crumbs she’d wiped from her hairline.

Peter stepped back so he could better take all of her in. “If this is
your idea of a mess, I’d hate to see what you do when you have time on your hands.” Although the distance between them increased, there was intimacy in the way they stood that hinted that if they weren’t lovers yet, they would be soon.

Ruby turned from him and focused on me. “Rosie, it’s so good to see you.”

I raised an eyebrow. Surely she didn’t expect me to play like we were long-lost pals? What had she told Peter about me? If it were negative, would he have been so chummy with me? Or perhaps he’d forgotten whatever had been said and just now realized I was foe not friend.