Authors: Frank Juliano
“Next year at this time, everybody will be singing “Katie Went to Haiti’ and “In the Morning, No” the legendary musical comedy star said. “Mark my words. The whole score is one hit after another.”
Joyce was trying to think of a graceful exit line, sure that she had already taken up enough of Merman’s time, when the actress stood up and stepped toward her.
“Bob will be calling your sister, or she should stop around to see him,” she said to Joyce, lowering her voice. “Ya know, sweetie, you got talent too. You might have gotten this show, if only you were more serious about it.
“You coming and going the way you do makes people nervous,” Merman said.
Joyce nodded, a bit sadly, and then bid Merman goodbye as people pushed past her and into the star’s presence.
“Break a leg, kid,” Merman called out after her.
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Joyce floated back out to the sidewalk, blinking in the bright sunshine. Her grandmother had always said that Merman was friendly and helpful to all the aspiring “kids” in her shows.
Joyce had read that Merman helped cast her shows, from her friends like Venay Benuta, Billy Gaxton and Victor Moore, to the chorus. But she hadn’t realized that Merman knew who her grandmother and great-aunt were, even if she didn’t know them by name.
Lost in her reverie, Joyce stopped to get her bearings. Suddenly a man came up next to her and gripped her upper arm roughly. He reeked of perspiration, and smelled sour, almost skunky.
“You’re leaving me at the wrong time, Connie,” the man hissed at her. His breath smelled of whiskey and stubble covered his chin.
“I told you if you’re patient, everything will get straightened out.” He started moving Joyce toward a large black car parked at the curb, its passenger door open and a driver idling the engine.
She struggled to get out of his grip, and whacked him with her free hand on the side of his head. But the man gave no sign it was having any effect.
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Joyce yelled for help, and several people wheeled around on the sidewalk to confront the man, as he dragged Joyce toward the car.
“What are you doing, mister?” an elderly man in a worn brown suit asked. “I don’t believe the lady wants to go with you.”
“Mind your own goddman business!” the man holding Joyce screamed at the gentleman coming to her aid.
Her head and shoulders were already inside the sedan, and the driver had ahold of one of her wrists, when Joyce felt her assailant loosen his grip.
With a shout Bart ran up to the car and pulled the man back, away from Joyce. The attacker let go of Joyce’s arm and spun around, shoving Bart backwards onto the sidewalk.
A crowd had gathered and they formed a tight circle around the combatants. Joyce huddled against a parked car and a woman who had come out of a nearby restaurant put her arms around her protectively.
“It’s going to be all right, honey,” she said. The men squared off in boxing stances and circled each other warily. Bart peered through his fists, which he held pressed together in front of his face.
He used his forearms to shove Joyce’s assailant backwards several times, until he had backed him up against the wall of the theater.
“For Chrissake Harry, help me!,” the man called out. “Get out of the g.d. car.”
Joyce saw a boy detach himself from the edge of the crowd to run up the block after a policeman.
Bart threw one tight, compact punch, extending his right fist no more than six inches and ramming it into the attacker’s jaw.
The man crumpled against the building with a deflated sigh, and Bart stood over him, triumphant. “Is that all you got?” he mocked him.
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Then he spun on his heel and searched the crowd for Joyce.
The murmur behind Bart grew and Joyce frantically pointed.
The musician turned back to see the man had pulled himself up off the ground and had whipped out a small pistol from a holster he wore under his jacket.
Bart picked up the battered case his saxophone rested in, and bashed it down on the goon’s head. That staggered him again, sending the gun flying out of his hand.
With one wild, desperate look at Joyce, the man dove head first into the waiting car. It pulled away with a screech, the driver reaching over his flailing companion to slam the door.
Shrill whistle blasts announced the arrival of the beat patrolmen, who ran into the midst of the dispersing crowd.
“That was close,” Joyce said, looking up at Bart appreciatively.
They stayed for several minutes giving the cops the best description they could of the man who accosted Joyce and of his car. Other witnesses gave their accounts.
“We have to talk,” Bart said grimly. They walked wordlessly into a coffee shop at the end of the block and settled into a back booth.
“Connie is alive, at least she was as of this morning,” he said.
When Joyce brightened up and leaned over to kiss him in joy, Bart put his hand up to stop her.
“She’s in a lot of trouble, and she’s running around like a chicken with her head cut off. A lot of people are looking for her,”
he said.
Joyce tapped her spoon against the ceramic cup and waited.
“A girl in my show told me that Connie was there when that butcher messed up and that dancer died. Connie really didn’t understand what “help’ this quack was giving out, and on top of that, when she saw her friend die, she flipped her wig.”
“So that’s why she’s hiding,” Joyce prompted.
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“She also threw over her latest flame this morning after coaxing him into giving her a loan. She showed up after several days and told him she was blowing town. He was more upset about her leaving than about the money,” Bart related.
“See this guy is part of a group that doesn’t take too well to being left…”
“The Mob?” Joyce asked.
“Yea. A good friend of Ben Siegel as it turns out,” Bart said.
“Your, ah, great-aunt could really pick them.”
“Was this guy in front of the theater…”
“The jilted Romeo,” Joyce’s friend confirmed. “He’s been embarrassed, disgraced. Connie poured coffee on him while they were having breakfast. A lot of people saw it. He’s not a happy guy. It’s a good bet he doesn’t just want to kiss and make up.”
“So where is Connie now?” Joyce asked.
“She could be anywhere. It’s likely she’ll slip back into your apartment to get some things before she tries to get back to Maine.
“I guess we can assume she doesn’t reach to make it back to Maine, or we’d already know that,” he said. He shook his head at the complexity of it all.
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“We ought to try to wait for her at the apartment, or catch up to her at the place she supposedly disappears from; do we know where that is?” he asked, thinking out loud.
“My grandmother always told me that Connie was spotted coming out of the Empire Theater on June 4. But because she took off so much no one even started to look for her until later that, THIS summer, and they found her body in the fall.”
Joyce shivered involuntarily, and her coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “If there was a specific time mentioned, I don’t remember it. It didn’t sound like things were too precise.”
Frances Langford’s cover of “Stormy Weather” was playing on the Victrola in the living quarters behind the coffee shop. Whenever somebody moved the curtains that separated the business from their residence, the dreamy music filtered out.
“This is so unreal,” Bart said. “I would be having a wonderful time sitting with you here, but we’re talking about stopping a murder and getting you back to your own time.
“Just my luck. I meet a nice girl and she’s too young for me.
You were born in 1986?”
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Joyce nodded over her cup, her cheeks warm with an incipient blush. He likes me too! she was thinking.
“I was born in 1915. So I would be 71 years old when you were born, and at least 85 when you start dating…”
“I’m here now and we’re the right ages to be seeing each other, if that’s what you want to do,” Joyce said. She reached across the table to put her small white hand over his thick one.
Her cheeks were burning now.
Funny
, she thought.
I never got
embarrassed talking to guys. I usually didn’t find that they were worth the
time, but when I decided to deal with them, I always felt like I had the upper
hand. I feel like I’m 12 now.
“Let me ask you something?” Bart ventured shyly.
Joyce smiled her encouragement.
“Have you ever heard of me? I mean 68 years from now.
When you were growing up.” His voice wavered. “Bart McCauley,” he said tentatively. “I play the sax. Maybe I was on radio, or television…”
She shook her head slowly, trying not to laugh at his earnestness. “You mean, are you famous later on? You couldn’t tell by me. I’m not into jazz, and all my Broadway cast albums—
they’re going to start putting shows on record after the war—I have to say I’ve never read the musicians’ credits.”
“Do you know who Alberta Hunter is?” Bart asked. With Joyce’s nod he pressed on: “Fats Waller? Benny Goodman? Glen Miller?” With each affirmative nod, he grew more sullen.
“You know jazz,” he said. “Those people are big now and you heard of them 70 years later.”
“Fats Waller’s music was used in a show called “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Joyce said. “That’s how I heard of him. I learned a lot of things through Broadway musicals. Fanny Brice’s life was a show, “Funny Girl’. People my age don’t know her except from that show.”
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“How about Harry Carney, Benny Carter, Jimmy Lunceford, Jimmy Dorsey or Charlie Parker?” Bart asked.
“Only the last two,” she smiled. “I saw a movie about Charlie Parker. “Bird’ they call him, right?”
“They made a movie about that kid’s life?” Bart mused. “Right now he does club gigs with Art Tatum; Jo Jones kicked him out of his band for losing the beat too often. Last I knew he had a $9
dishwashing job at Jimmie’s Chicken Shack, just to pay the bills.”
“Hence the name?” Joyce broke in. “I guess. So, who are the big saxophone players in your day?” the musician asked with feigned indifference.
“Clarence Clemons. He plays with Bruce Springsteen. They’re from New Jersey.”
“Swing music?” Bart asked.
“Rock,” she said. “When you hear it, you’ll probably like it a lot. It has a faster, choppier beat.”
“Who else?”
“David Sanborn. Stan Getz. Kenny G. was big in the ’80s, But not so much anymore. I told you I don’t know jazz.”
Bart leaned back in the booth, and looked at Joyce shyly again.
“Since it looks like you might be here awhile, and since you want to be an actress, I went ahead and told a friend of mine about you.
“He’s putting together a club show, a supper club, and he needs singers and dancers who can do skit comedy,” Bart said, stroking his chin whiskers thoughtfully. “His name is Remy and if you call him and say I told him about you…”
So it was me Bart was talking about with his friends at the drugstore!
Joyce glowed while she wrote down the information.
“It isn’t Broadway but it’s all on the up and up,” Bart said. “A lot of people get their starts in clubs and then do legitimate theater.”
Joyce nodded, she knew this was true.
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Bart threw a handful of coins on the table and stood up. “I have to be there at half-hour, my instrument on my lap, or I get docked,” he said.
“You can stay here and have another cup of coffee and then walk over, or we can go together,” he said.
“I’ll come now,” she smiled up at him. She slid out of the booth and took his hand. They walked through the fading light of early evening toward the Broadhurst, Bart jauntily swinging his sax in its case with his free hand.
He kissed her lightly before going in through the stage door.
Joyce joined the pressing crowd in the vestibule, startled at first to see it was nearly 8:15.
“What time is the curtain tonight?” she asked a young couple just ahead of her.
“The same time it always is, 8:40,” the woman snapped at her.
That was 40 minutes later than Joyce was used to.
The marriage of Gilbert and Sullivan and swing music was made at the point of a shotgun. The show did not work, except when one style or the other thoroughly dominated.
Bart had gotten her a house seat, so that Joyce was in the second row, practically dead center in front of the stage.
She was almost too close to see the performance without craning her neck, leaning back in her chair and looking up. She noticed with a start, though, that her seat gave her a perfect view into the orchestra pit below the stage.
The musicians were arranged in a semicircle around the conductor, who stood with his back to the audience and his shiny bald pate peaking out above the red velvet curtain surrounding the pit like a volcanic island.
Bart sat directly in front of Joyce and facing her. He waved sheepishly at her when he caught her looking at him. Another time, over the turning of pages, she heard the trombone player 171
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lean over and whisper, “Whatsa matter Mac, you never had a date before?”
When he soloed, Bart’s face took on a dreamy, faraway look, and his dark eyes danced. Joyce noticed he would sometimes squeeze his eyes shut, and his face would take on the sweet, happy expression of a nursing baby.
When Bart wasn’t actually playing he stared impassively at the music on his stand, tapping his foot to the beat. During one dialogue scene Joyce saw him twist the mouthpiece off his instrument, gently loosen the metal band holding the reed in place, and remove the reed.
He rubbed it on his trouser leg, held it up to the light on his stand to examine it, and then flipped it into his open case.
All in one fluid motion he took a new reed out of his shirt pocket with two fingers, slipped it into his mouth as if it was a tongue depressor and moved it around like a lollipop.