Almost Famous Women (27 page)

She's driving again, back on 95, almost always 95. Nodding off, jolting upright, pinching her face, biting her fingers to stay awake. Just another half hour and she can park in Rocky Mount. Just another half hour and she can stop having a conversation with herself.

What am I good for? she wonders.

A lot of things. I can play music by ear.
But you can't read it.

I can learn it quickly.
But you can't perfect it. If you could, you'd be on that stage, not driving this bus.

Who cares about me?
Tiny does, sometimes.

Rae Lee settles into the seat behind her, yawning. “Too much champagne,” she says, touching her temples.

Ruby grits her teeth.

“Any trouble?” Rae Lee asks.

“A little,” Ruby says.

“Not the law?”

“Just another man upset that we've got white girls onstage. Upset about mixing.”

Rae Lee nods. “We'll get through tonight, rest, and then next month we'll be back at the clubs. It's safer at the clubs. They don't mind so much.”

“The good ones don't,” Ruby says. She opens and closes her jaw, trying to wake up. Sweat drips down her back. She presses on.

The band is due onstage at the Cotton Ball in one hour, and Roz, the Jewish girl from up north, is a mess. She's looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, frowning, lip quivering.

“Here,” she says, handing Tiny a compact with dark foundation in it. “I want you to put this on my face.”

“Not me,” Tiny says, walking away, holding up a hand. “I don't want nothing to do with that business.”

“Someone,” Roz says, tears in her eyes. “Help.”

Pauline steps up and wipes a sponge through the dark makeup. “Here you go,” she says. “Just don't get worked up now and smudge things.”

Tiny comes closer to have a look. “I know you mean well,” she says. “But you're awfully hard to look at.”

“All the better,” Roz says, sniffling. “I don't want anyone to notice me. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. Not tonight.”

Rae Lee, for once, doesn't have anything to say. She watches the girls over her cat-eye glasses from the corner of the dressing room, then looks back down at the set list on the clipboard.

“You and me next year,” Tiny whispers to Ruby. “Bad as we are, on the road, no crying.”

Ruby nods her head, rocking a little on her stool as she laughs. She likes her laugh, low and throaty. It's a jazz singer's laugh, even if she's not much of a singer.

“Could you put some tea on?” Rae Lee asks Ruby. “Girls, have a little tea before the set. We want to do our best, see if we can get this
gig next year. It's worth two nights at the club, if you know what I mean.”

After preparing tea, Ruby heads out in front of the band to lay down the sheet music. The ballroom is beautiful. There are white flower arrangements everywhere, white lights, white linens, white tufts of cotton, white marble. White, white, and more white.

Moments later the girls file onstage as a short man in a crisp suit hollers, “The best of the Big Band era! Right here in Rocky Mount! On your feet for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm!”

Ruby watches the girls flesh out the bandstand in their white suits, waving politely in their nicest costumes, the ones they save for the best-paying gigs. There's thunderous applause, a sea of white faces in front of them, men with freshly combed hair, women in high heels and pearls. Mink stoles in summer. Ruby wants to be onstage and feels a part of herself go with the band. She imagines the ivory keys beneath her fingers.

Anna Mae, Hepburn-thin and elegant as ever, nods her head to the audience. She has a lush black feather in her hair, a white dress that wraps around her neck, and a brooch on her collar. “I have a question for you,” she says into the microphone. “Do you want to jump tonight?”

The audience claps their hands. Someone whistles.

“I said do you want to jump, children?”

The audience roars and the trumpets kick into gear, the drums, the bass. The sax players turn their bodies in synced-up rhythm. The horns are loud and clear. God, it's a sort of high when they nail a song, Ruby thinks, really nail it. If only I could be part of that flow, part of that sound.

The night starts well, high energy like the best of them, but the
crowd is full of hecklers, men yelling things like “Hey, sweetheart, up there on the drums,” and “brown sugar.”

Ruby feels unsettled. She can see everything registering in Tiny's eyes. Just get through it, she thinks. Just get through it and onto the bus and everything will be fine, just fine.

“When I think of something southern . . . ,” Tiny begins.

Ruby starts to get nervous. Has Tiny been drinking? Maybe she's just tired. She gets tired sometimes.

“I think of corn bread, chittlins . . .”

Tiny isn't the kind of person who needs to drink. Or is she?

“Hey there, black girl!” a man in a blue suit shouts, huge smile on his face. He holds his drink up to toast Tiny, sloshing small, clear drops of gin onto the floor.

“Hey, fella,” Tiny shouts, looking down and gesturing with her trumpet. “It's not about being black. It's not about being a girl, though I like girls. It's about playing your goddamn music. Blowing your goddamn horn.”

“I don't mean no harm,” he says, his face twisted into what Ruby thinks is false contrition. He ain't sorry, she thinks.

Anna Mae is moving for the microphone, but Tiny grips it. “Sure you don't,” she says. “Just like your brothers Klu . . .”

Rae Lee heads for the stage, Ruby not far behind her. Vi rises from behind the bandstand. But the man gets to Tiny first. He leaps onto the stage and goes for her, pulling her off the side of the stage, his arms underneath hers, and suddenly he is dragging her large body. Tiny's heels make a terrible sound going across the dance floor. She's still clutching her trumpet.

Ruby tries to get there. And she does, just not in time to stop Tiny from smashing her trumpet into the man's face, flinging it
backward, connecting again. Ruby gets there only in time to grab the trumpet before Tiny goes for his face a third time. Ruby knows once Tiny starts she won't stop, and if she doesn't stop—

What happens to women like us? Ruby thinks. Her back is sore. She's been sitting in the same position on the cement floor for a while, holding Tiny's head in her lap. She has a busted lip and a cut above her eye, and all they've given her to stop the bleeding is a dirty-looking rag.

Tiny sits up gingerly, touches her lip with her fingers. “Two girls like us,” she says, cracking a smile. “We can make it on our own.”

Not in this world, Ruby thinks, but she's not in the mood to disagree. “We sure can, sugar,” she says, sighing. “Grab your horn and let's try.”

“We're going to do better than try. I can pack a joint.”

“Well, grab your horn.”

“Are you driving?”

“Find me a car,” Ruby says, clasping her knees as if she's going to rise up and go somewhere. “Find me a car and I'll take you anywhere. Let's go to Chicago.”

“I don't want to go to Chicago. I want to go to Memphis.”

“Memphis then.”

“Where's my horn, anyway?”

Ruby shrugs her shoulders and stands up. She doesn't know. The naked bulb hanging from the ceiling of the jail cell flicks on and off.

“Anybody got a cigarette?” Ruby asks through the bars.

The guard does, but he's eating a chicken sandwich. Ruby can smell it and she's starving, really starving. He throws one cigarette, and then another at her.

“But ain't nobody got a light,” Tiny says, cigarette already in her mouth. “Not for us.”

“Sing for it,” the guard says, laughing. “Give me a torch song.”

“Not for you, baby,” Tiny says. “Not for you.”

She gets up and flops down on the single cot in the cell. There isn't any room for Ruby.

Got what I wished for, Ruby thinks, leaning against the cinder-block wall, which is strangely cool against her back. I'm finally alone with my girl. Got her all to myself.

Ruby closes her eyes and begins to drift away, the cigarette falling from her lips. It's been a long time since she's slept, a long time since she's fallen asleep without the roar of the road underneath her.

R
obert de Montesquiou once said of the painter Romaine Brooks that she was a “thief of souls”—perhaps this thieving is what happens when an artist uses a real subject as inspiration. The stories in this collection are born of fascination with real women whose remarkable lives were reduced to footnotes. Many of these women came to light only because of intrepid biographers like Carol Loeb Shloss, Joan Schenkar, Kate Summerscale, and Meryle Secrest, who sourced photographs, letters, and interviews before they were lost to time.

I've never been comfortable with writing historical fiction, though I love reading it. When forming these stories, I kept with me Henry James's notion that all novelists need freedom, and I gave myself permission to experiment, and to be honest about my inspiration. These were stories I wanted to unlock from my imagination after a decade of reading and research. I wanted to talk about these women; I daydreamed about their choices as I was building my own life, one that seemed tame in comparison. I did
not want to romanticize these women or dwell in glittering places; I'm more interested in my characters' difficult choices, or those that were made for them. I'm fascinated by risk taking and the way people orbit fame. I wanted to explore the price paid for living dangerously, such as undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in women who served in World War I.

Suffice it to say, the world has not always been kind to its unusual women—though I did not intend these stories to serve as cautionary tales.

While I absorbed facts about these women's lives, I did not stay inside the lines; each of these stories is unequivocally a work of fiction. The women at the heart of my stories lived. And in my imagined events I have drawn upon their real lives and personalities and involved a few of their famous friends and lovers. I have, however, placed them in events and surrounded them with characters of my own creation. I'm indebted to the following resources for planting the seeds that became stories:

The Pretty, Grown-Together Children:
I heard a whisper or two about the Hilton twins while living in North Carolina, then came across an entry about them on
RoadsideAmerica.com
.

The Siege at Whale Cay:
I devoured Kate Summerscale's incredible, must-read biography of Joe,
The Queen of Whale Cay
. Further research has led me to the exceptional
Time Life
photoshoot of Joe and Whale Cay, as well as videos of Joe's races, which can be found at
http://www.britishpathe.com/search/query/carstairs
. I also found inspiration, though not philosophical agreement, in Helen Zenna Smith's novel about the female war experience,
Not So Quiet
 . . .

Norma Millay's Film Noir Period:
A friend turned me on to Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Savage Beauty
, and like many young women I was perhaps, at first, fascinated more by her biography than by her work. When I was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts at Steepletop in 2007, I became acquainted with the wild stories about Edna's sister Norma, and found myself returning to her in my imagination, particularly the fact that she was an actress in her own right, with the renowned Provincetown Players, and inhabited her sister's estate for decades. Norma was a true force, and it was her presence I felt so keenly at Steepletop. Other resources include Cheryl Black's
The Women of Provincetown
, Daniel Mark Epstein's
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed
, Edna St. Vincent Millay's
Collected Poetry
, and her
Collected Letters
edited by Allan Ross MacDougall.