The Winter of Her Discontent (12 page)

P
AULETTE'S MEMORIAL SERVICE WAS SCHEDULED
for the next morning. In a rare show of humanity, Walter Friday moved rehearsal to the early evening to give everyone time to pay their respects and to attend the Theater Wing's Memorial at the Winter Garden. Plenty of grief to choose from. No waiting.

Jayne and I dressed in our best show of mourning and arrived ten minutes late to the service at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery at Second Avenue and Tenth Street. It was the perfect place for an actress's funeral. Over the years the church had hosted performances by Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, lectures by Ben Hecht and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and even served as a stage for Harry Houdini. The arts weren't its only concern, however. It had been named one of New York's branches for Bundles for Britain. Throughout the vestibule were boxes and crates marked with hand-scrawled labels indicating which donated item should go in which bin. Larger signs tacked to the walls distributed orders and reprimands: W
E NEED SHOES AND BABY'S CLOTHING
. T
HESE ITEMS ARE INTENDED FOR OUR
E
NGLISH FRIENDS
. I
F YOU ARE IN NEED OF CHARITY, ASK DON'T TAKE.
As Jayne and I passed by these collection stations, I took in the meager offerings that waited in the bottom of the nearly empty containers. Had the war gone on so long that people were already running out of things to donate, or was it difficult to consider sending your belongings overseas when you knew there were people around you who needed them just as badly?

We entered the church and eyeballed the jam-packed pews. As a testament to Paulette's successful career, the place was filled. The
crowd was a weird hodgepodge of family, performers, and the people who ran our industry from behind the scenes. We ended up standing at the rear of the congregation with the other latecomers.

The service was much, much longer than we'd expected.

I don't mean to begrudge my people, but there were moments when I wished actors could shed their need to be the center of attention and just exist. Alas, that's precisely what we were trained not to do, and so those occasions that demanded someone else be the focus of attention—say a bride or a body—typically became mortifying spectacles that those of us who could control ourselves referred to as “inappropriate.” So it was with Paulette's funeral. Surrounded by a hundred of her closest friends and two hundred acquaintances who wanted to claim a brush with fame and infamy, Paulette was remembered with three hours' worth of monologues, songs, poetry, and one rather risqué interpretative dance. I'm not sure who organized the affair or who thought the funeral was the perfect place for such a tribute, but it quickly became apparent that those who chose to honor the deceased were hoping not only to move the crowd but to further their own careers. Paulette, it seemed, had befriended a number of directors and two well known agents.

Jayne and I took in the event the way we took in all bad theater: with our arms crossed, our eyes on the exit, and our elbows at the ready if something should strike us as amusing. Jayne had just finished bruising the lower half of my ribcage, thanks to a lisping portrayal of Juliet's death, when I spied Paulette's fiancé, Captain George Pomeroy, sitting at the front of the church. Beside him sat Olive, Zelda, and Izzie, each in a tasteful black dress. Behind them was Ruby—in a hat so heavily veiled she could've used it for beekeeping. While everyone else feigned interest in the performers, Paulette's friends and her grieving fiancé looked on in disbelief at the sleek white casket covered in a spray of roses and ivy.

I nudged Jayne and directed her to the bereaved. Our enjoyment quickly vanished, and for the rest of the service we watched them as they grimly said farewell in the midst of this grotesque carnival.

When the circus came to an end, we attempted to fight our way to
the front of the church. The crowd blocked our progress. I flattened myself against the wall while Jayne was carried away by a wave of humanity. As I searched the crowd for her low platinum head, a woman with a figure like the
Hindenburg
bumped into me.

“Sorry,” she said with an embarrassed laugh. Her hair was a strange color, closer to pink than blond. It hurt to look at it. “I should've waited things out in my seat. I had no idea it would be so crowded.”

“I guess Paulette had a lot of friends.” We were trapped as the crowd around us struggled to move, so we did what any two people forced into physical intimacy did: we bumped gums.

“How did you know her?” the woman asked me.

A mob thug I thought was my friend killed her. And you? “I'm an actress. We're all one big community. How did you know her?”

“I was her sister-in-law.”

I looked for a trace of George Pomeroy in her. Perhaps her hair wasn't pink. “I'm so sorry. This must be so hard for you. And your brother…” I searched the crowd again for Jayne.

“Yes, it's been very difficult. I met Paulette only once, but it was clear they were very happy. I guess it's a small consolation, knowing they've been reunited.”

I frowned, uncertain if I'd heard her correctly. “Come again?”

“I like to believe that in the afterlife Paulette and Michael are together again.”

“Your last name isn't Pomeroy, is it?” I said.

The woman creased her fleshy face and shook her head. “Of course not. I'm Phyllis Dewey.”

“And your brother was Michael Dewey. Paulette's husband.”

“Yes.” She widened her eyes, uncertain if I was slow or merely one of those people who liked to repeat information. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all. I hadn't seen Paulette in quite a while, and I guess I somehow missed the news that she'd been widowed. When did your brother die?”

“Last March. He was a bomber pilot.”

I thumped myself on the noodle. “That's right. It's all coming back
to me. It was such a tragic loss. We didn't think Paulette would ever recover from it.”

She titled her noggin to the left. “I thought you said you didn't know?”

“How could I forget a thing like that?” Jayne appeared on the other side of the aisle, and with a quick jerk of my neck I begged her to rescue me.

She fought her way to my side and put a firm hand on my arm. “There you are! I've been looking for you everywhere.”

I looked at my wristwatch. “Why did you wander away? You know we have to be at the theater at one.”

Like a ballroom dancer, Jayne carefully followed my lead. “My watch stopped,” she said. “I didn't realize how late it was.”

“If you'll excuse us,” I told Phyllis Dewey. She bid me farewell with a tight smile. I matched her grin and pulled Jayne out the church's door.

“You're not going to believe this,” said Jayne as we turned down Second Avenue. “I got stuck having my ear talked off by Paulette's mother-in-law.”

“Let me guess: a Mrs. Dewey?”

“No. Her name was Boatwright. Her son, Edward, was shot down six months ago in North Africa. Paulette and he had been married only a few weeks when it happened.” Jayne lifted an eyebrow. “Who's Mrs. Dewey?”

“Mother to the big broad with the bad dye job. She was Paulette's sister-in-law and her brother, Michael, was apparently also Paulette's husband at the time of his death.”

Jayne scrunched up her nose like I'd just offered her a bad piece of fish. “So Paulette was—”

“Extremely popular and very unlucky. I don't get it: two husbands, a fiancé, and a boyfriend? Was she going for a world's record?”

“What do we do with this?” asked Jayne.

I searched the street before us for the answer. It was a gray day, the sky hammered out of new steel, the ground littered with dirty pools of water. “We go see Al.”

T
HE DAME AT THE DESK
at the 19th Precinct gave us the same instructions as before. We waited only five minutes before being ushered into the little room at the end of the hall.

Al was waiting for us. His street clothes had been replaced with striped pajamas.

“New rags?” I asked by way of greeting.

He scowled as we walked in. It was getting harder and harder to remember a time when he ever liked us. “What do you want? I thought I told youse not to come back here.”

“And yet here we are.”

The guard lingered in the back of the room, his attention divided between the sports page and us. The paper was abuzz with that night's upcoming fight at the Garden. Heavyweight Tami Mauriello was hoping to best Jimmy Bivins before he departed for basic training.

“We've been digging into your former girlfriend's past,” I said. “We have some questions.”

“Ask someone else,” he said. “I don't have time for this.”

“Seems to me all you've got is time.”

His shoulders rolled forward the way a bull-mastiff rippled its muscles to intimidate predators. “I told you two to leave me alone. What's done is done.” He turned his attention to Jayne, knowing that if I didn't shrink away from him, she might. “Tony know you're here?”

“It's not Tony's business,” she squeaked.

“I bet he'd think otherwise. I bet he wouldn't be too happy know
ing you were spending your time here.” It was clearly intended to be a threat, but Jayne was past the point of being afraid of Tony.

“Is that how you felt when Paulette was seeing other guys?” I asked.

“Who?” His expression was blank. If this was a put-on, he was doing a fabulous job hiding his tells.

Jayne tapped a red painted nail on the table. “Paulette Monroe. The girl you killed.”

“That's between me and her.”

“And her two dead husbands and her devastated fiancé,” I said. The guard stopped pretending to read the paper. Murder and bigamy were much more interesting than heavyweight fighting. “She was a popular girl, Al. You couldn't have been too happy about that. Assuming you knew.”

“Of course I knew.”

I raised an eyebrow. “She was straight with you?”

He put his hands together and pointed his fingers at me. “Like an arrow.”

“And it didn't bother you that she was stepping out?”

He leaned back in his chair and his shoulders lost their bulk. He was trying to look defeated. “Sure it bothered me, but Pauline's business was Pauline's business.”

“Her name was Paulette.”

He straightened up again, perhaps recognizing the futility of continuing his act. “What do youse want from me? Why are you here?”

“Because there are two things I hate: bad theater and bad acting, and you, my friend, are guilty of both.”

“Says you. You want to see my confession? How about the crime scene photos?” He lowered his chin and set his gaze to seething. “I did her real good, Rosie. Smashed her head in with a lamp. The guys downstairs had to identify her by her teeth.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. It wasn't real; it couldn't be. “I don't believe you, Al. You can dig up her body and kill her again and I'm still not going to believe you.”

“I don't care. Jimmy!” The guard at the door snapped to attention. “Get 'em out of here. And don't let them in again. Get it?”

“Whatever you say, Al.” Jimmy rose to his feet and approached us. It wasn't what I imagined the prisoner-guard relationship to be like, but then nothing was what I imagined it to be anymore.

“Easy, Jimmy,” I told him. “We're big girls. We can see ourselves out.” I shook my head at Al one final time and made it to the door. Jayne lingered behind me.

“I'm disappointed in you,” she said.

“Yeah?” said Al. “You and me both.”

 

We stopped off at the house to change, then shared a plate of Spanish spaghetti at Schrafft's on Christopher Street. From our window booth we watched a line of women snaking out of a cobbler shop. The tightening shoe ration had inspired every skirt in the West Village to take in her best pumps for a little repair work.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Jayne.

The war had even changed pennies. We were being encouraged to keep the copper coins in circulation so the government could replace them with another, less useful sort of metal. “They've taken our shoes; they've taken our stockings. What are they going to ration next?” I asked Jayne. “Brassieres?”

She didn't answer. Neither of us was very hungry. Al's feigned confession loomed above the plate, turning the red sauce from appetizing to appalling. Had there been much blood? Was Paulette alive for most of the attack? Or had she mercifully fallen unconscious when the first blow struck, never even knowing who it was that hit her?

I shook the questions from my head. “I'll bet Paulette's friends know what's going on.”

“Al doesn't want our help,” said Jayne.

“You think I don't know that?” I downed a swallow of hot tea with lemon. “I can't give up on him, Jayne. He can tell me to breeze off a dozen times, but it doesn't change the fact that he came to me
that day looking for something.” My worst fear was that the window of opportunity had passed and Al knew it was fruitless to seek my assistance any longer. I couldn't bear to think that the chance for me to help him had been lost.

“What if he's guilty?”

“What if he's not?” I scratched at my chin to let Jayne know she had a little bit of sauce on hers.

“What if he is? Tony wouldn't let him rot in jail if he didn't deserve to be there. You know that.”

I sighed and fished my tea bag out of my cup. It had steeped too long, turning the liquid completely opaque. “Then I'll accept that I'm wrong and that this was all a waste. I'm not there yet. I need more time.” I sank the lemon with the spoon. “What do you make of Paulette's past?”

“Odd, but not unheard of.”

“So you think she's just really unlucky in love?”

Jayne picked through the sauce with her fork, looking for meat. “What's the alternative? That she's marrying these guys and arranging for their planes to crash?”

“I guess that's unlikely, huh?”

She didn't respond. I knew I was being silly, but desperation does that to a girl. Besides, something told me George Pomeroy was a very lucky man. Paulette's first husband's death would've felt like some random tragedy, but her second husband's must've seemed like confirmation that Paulette was destined to a life alone. Maybe she ran out and got engaged to George to see if she could break her unfortunate streak. If they married and he lived, then Michael's and Edward's deaths were an unfortunate coincidence. And if he didn't…

Jayne pushed her plate away and folded her napkin. “Do you really want to go to this thing at the Winter Garden?”

“You don't have to go with me.”

“It just seems like it'll be so…depressing.”

“So's half of Shakespeare and yet you sit through that.” I put on my coat and pulled on my gloves. “I won't mind if you skip it.”

“No, I'll go. But the minute I hear crying, we're out of there.”

We headed to the Winter Garden, for a little festival of fun the American Theater Wing War Service had dubbed “The Theater People's Dedication to a Cause.” The event was a kind of entertainment world powwow designed to recognize the people in our industry whom we'd lost to the war. It was the last place I wanted to be, but I felt obligated to go. It was my way of keeping vigil for Jack.

About three hundred of us showed up at three o'clock for a somber afternoon of poetry and music. Lawrence Tibbetts sang the Lord's Prayer, Lynn Fontane read “Shakespeare Bids Adieu to the Stage,” and the Fred Waring Choral Group roused us with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In between the performances, the head of Actors' Equity lectured us on the actor's part in the war. We were already doing a lot, it turned out, but we needed to be doing more.

As he spoke, we rifled through programs listing the names of those who were already lost. Actors, writers, directors, dancers, designers, and technicians—both men and women—had left the New York theater for the European one and found that their brand of drama didn't end the same way ours did. More would be lost, our speaker reminded us. We needed to do whatever we could to bring this war to a swift end.

Not everyone had been lost in battle. The month before, Pan Am's
Yankee Clipper
crashed in Lisbon and took a number of entertainers traveling with the USO with it. I recognized some of the names in the program, but the majority of the dead had been unknown to me. Somehow this made me sadder than if I'd known every one of them. I used to joke that the number of actors in New York was infinite, but seeing so many of them lost, it became frightfully clear that the number was much smaller than I'd assumed, and shrinking every day.

 

From the Winter Garden we headed to the Sarah Bernhardt, anticipating replacing our day of grief with an equally trying evening with Maureen.

We weren't so lucky.

The theater was silent when we arrived, the usual chatter of arriving actors and set construction absent. I checked my wristwatch and Jayne's to verify we were neither early nor late, then quizzed her to make sure we hadn't misremembered the call time.

“Six,” she said. “I swear on my mother's life.”

We journeyed upstairs to the rehearsal halls and found our usual room empty, save for a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray on top of the piano.

“This is weird,” said Jayne.

The hairs on the back of my neck agreed. I'd read a tale like this in
Amazing Stories,
where our eager hero discovers the rest of the world has gone missing during the brief length of his afternoon nap. What if all the directors, dancers, and actors had disappeared? Would that mean I'd finally get a decent part?

“Let's check Friday's office,” I said.

Jayne followed me through the actor's rehearsal room, out the door Minnie had shown me, and into the corridor to the administrative offices. Friday's door was closed, but a light leaked out from under it. Two voices took turns in conversation. One was Friday's baritone; the other was also male but high-pitched and nervous.

“Who's the jobbie?” I asked Jayne.

She bent down to the doorknob and peered through the keyhole. After a beat she returned to her feet and pulled me to the side. “The nervous guy from the audition. You know, the one with the thing in his eye?”

I'd forgotten about him. “What's he doing here?”

Jayne put a finger to her lips and again lowered herself to the doorknob. I did the same, balancing my head atop hers until we looked like a totem pole.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Friday. But there isn't money for that.”

“There's never any money, for crying out loud! For someone being squeezed for so much juice, I sure am left thirsty.”

“The show's been expensive, sir. You know that.”

“You think I haven't cut corners? And what do I get? One disaster after another. And now the press has wind of it.” A newspaper rattled. “Did Vinnie see today's papers? They're already predicting the show's going to fold and they don't even know about Olive yet.”

“Mr. Garvaggio said he'd take care of it.”

“Yeah, I know how he's going to take care of it. No thanks. We should just shut down the show now. Cut our losses.”

“You would still have to pay…”

“I know that, you idiot. We've been through this, a thousand times we've been through this.” There was a rustle of movement and then a sound like a muted moan. “Beat it,” said Friday. “I don't want to see your mug again today.”

Jayne and I scurried to the edge of the corridor and pressed ourselves against the wall. Seconds later, the nervous man with the giant specs departed Friday's office with a ledger book clasped to his chest and a frown so pronounced we could've used it for an umbrella.

“Accountant?” I said to Jayne.

“What else?”

We looked at each other for instruction on what to do next. She took a deep breath, inflating her bosom to comical proportions, and approached the door.

“Mr. Friday?”

His voice was still muffled. “What is it?”

Jayne turned the knob, unwilling to await invitation, and we both went inside. Friday sat at his desk, a half-empty liter of Black & White scotch resting in front of him. He hadn't bothered to use a glass. It wasn't necessary when you were planning on finishing the bottle. “It's Jayne Hamilton and Rosie Winter, sir. We were told rehearsal was at six, but it doesn't look like anyone's here.”

“You didn't get a call?”

“We've been out all day,” said Jayne.

“Rehearsal's canceled until further notice. Go home, girls.” He set his red eyes back on the bottle and gripped the drink with a swollen hand. His tongue darted in front of his teeth and he made a sucking sound.

We shared a look of confusion and turned on our heels.

“Wait.” The bottle danced unsteadily on the desktop. He pointed a shaking finger my way. “What's your dress size?”

I did my best to cover my upper body with my arms. “Who wants to know?”

He rose unsteadily from the desk and swayed. “Don't take it wrong. Can you wear an eight?”

That was the nice thing about being poor: I never had enough money to overeat. “Sure. Why?”

“Can you act?”

I put my hands on my hips and stared down at him. “What do you think I'm doing right now?”

He moved close enough that I could trace the red veins threading his eyes. “We know you're a lousy dancer. How's your voice?”

“Do you want sixteen bars or will you take my word for it?”