Strings Attached (10 page)

Twelve

 

Cape Cod, Massachusetts
August 1950

It was the last night of our summer. The cast and crew sat under the trees outside the rooming house, flopped on chairs and blankets in the grass. Those who smoked had lit up cigarettes to drive away the mosquitoes. It was midnight, and still eighty degrees.

I was wearing white shorts and a sleeveless top, a madras shirt that had started the summer with long sleeves that after a week I had cut off to make it easier to work. The cast was expected to pitch in, and I hammered and sawed for the set designer, sewed hems on costumes, and acted as an usher when I didn’t have to be onstage.

It was an outfit I wouldn’t have dared to wear back home, but I’d learned, this summer, that there was another world out there, where people wore as little as possible, said whatever they thought, and cursed cheerfully at the prospect of sixteen-hour days. Things made sense here because nobody cared — if you were hot, you chopped off your shirtsleeves; if you were tired, you drank a pot of coffee; if your heart was broken, you went out that night and sang the pieces of your heart out onstage. Easy.

I was the baby of the group. Nobody made a pass that summer; nobody offered me drinks or cigarettes. I was here
because of Florence Foster. She was the one who’d made the long-distance call, who’d planned the audition, who’d called in favors. “It’s time for you to get out of Providence,” she’d said, “and get some
real
theatrical experience under your belt.”

She could have added
and get away from that boyfriend,
but she didn’t have to. Flo didn’t approve of Billy. She didn’t approve of boyfriends in general, but she’d seen me come to class with reddened eyes and no focus. She’d seen how I’d dress hurriedly, afraid to be late meeting him.

I couldn’t have marked how it happened, or when, and I didn’t love him less, but there was a pulling and a tearing now to our times together. There was an anger in him that would come out if I couldn’t see him, or if I had to work late, or if he saw me talking to a boy at school. He insisted on picking me up at the end of my shift at the Riverbank on Saturday nights, and after my Drama Club meetings. At first I was flattered and grateful, but sometimes I’d want to stay and joke with the waiters about my shift, or gossip with the other actors in the school play. Nobody asked me out for a soda anymore, or to run lines. They knew Billy would be coming.

When Billy wasn’t with me, he was with Jamie. They had a private world of photographs and drawings and talk of light and moments caught in time, truth captured in a frame. I didn’t share their language, but I loved to hear their talk wash over me. It was like a lullaby, making me feel safe and lucky that my brother was my boyfriend’s best friend.

Jamie and Billy had driven me to the Cape in June. It had been unseasonably chilly, and we’d had our last lunch together bundled up in sweatshirts and then had said our good-byes. I’d noticed how Billy looked over the other
actors and saw how the light shut off in his eyes. But instead of being angry, he looked scared, and that melted my heart.

Jamie had given me a quick hug — he hated good-byes — and had gone back to the car while I’d kissed Billy good-bye.

“I love you, too,” I’d said, and was relieved when it made him smile. “The summer will go before you know it.”

“Are you nuts? I’m working for my father, remember? It’s going to be the longest summer in history. Especially without you.”

I’d walked him back to the car and had gone around to the passenger side to say good-bye to Jamie.

“Take care of him for me,” I’d told my brother. Jamie had nodded. Next to Billy’s dark handsomeness, Jamie’s fairness stood out. During the winters his paleness was odd, his strawberry hair freakish, his freckles standing out against his white skin, but in the summers his hair lightened to a shade close to blond, and his skin turned golden. If you saw the two of them walking down the street, you’d see heads turn at the two sides of a coin, the darkness and then the golden beauty of the two of them.

“Sure thing,” he’d told me. “Break a leg. And remember to keep some heads-up pennies around.”

At the end of the summer, the beginning of the summer seemed like a different life. Under a full moon I drank my ginger ale and tried not to think about home, where I’d be starting senior year. Because tonight, I was just one of the cast and crew, and there was a movie star in our midst.

Jeffrey Toland had been Spencer Tracy’s little brother and Carole Lombard’s husband. He’d kissed Bette Davis. He’d been a cowboy, a judge, a gangster, a song-and-dance man, a sailor who died in the Pacific. And now he sat on a wooden Adirondack chair — the best chair, the one that didn’t
wobble — drinking beer with everybody else. It was the first time he’d joined us. As the star, he didn’t room with the rest of us but stayed in a guest cottage on an estate. All that summer he’d left immediately after the show to go to restaurants and parties, driving a blue convertible loaned by another wealthy family that then got to decorate its dinner parties and lobster bakes with his Hollywood presence. When you’ve seen someone’s head blown up to the size of a movie screen, seen him kissing legends — well, it didn’t matter that you’d also seen him hungover in an undershirt. He still had glamour.

We lived in a rooming house with flimsy screen doors that let in black flies and mosquitoes with the size and accuracy of dive-bombers. There was a faint smell of mildew, spiders in the bathroom, and mice in the kitchen.

It had been the best summer of my life.

I was accepted. It didn’t matter that I got the smallest parts or was stuck in the chorus. I got to be onstage, dancing in the musicals. I got to run lines with the ingenue in the early mornings, grabbing a Dixie cup of coffee and complaining with the others about the lack of sleep.

The last show had gone well, and there was a bouncy, boisterous atmosphere that night. Some nights were golden, not a missed cue, not a word wrong, and the audience was in a mood to be amused. Jeff Toland had proved that he was still a star, throwing himself into the songs with the abandon of the twenty-five-year-old he was supposed to be playing.

I had been a part of that energy that night, and it felt like the biggest luxury to indulge my exhaustion and yet not go to bed. There would be no rehearsal tomorrow, no set building, no rushed breakfasts and skipped lunches and quick swims in the ocean. There was only packing up and heading home. Underneath the jokes, there was tension, too. The Korean War had started in June and the young
men were worried about being drafted. We were all heading into an uncertain fall.

But a movie star was working hard to make us forget it. Because of Jeff, everything was heightened — we laughed more, we listened harder, we told our best stories, and suddenly the cast forgot moments of jealousy or irritation and complimented each other. Jeff lolled in his chair, a slight, amused smile on his face, telling anecdotes about directors and stars and his early days on Broadway while we crowded close, everyone flushed and beautiful that night from the lights of the candles and the cigarettes.

Suddenly, the chatter fell silent, and Jeff’s head dropped back. “Look at that big fat moon,” he said. “I love a big fat moon.”

We all dutifully tipped our heads back. Someone sang out “Some enchanted evening” in an exaggerated basso, like Ezio Pinza on Broadway.

Jeff Toland looked down and held out his hand to me. I took it and we rose together and began to dance. The singing turned from a clownish operatic parody to a sweet lush melody, as all the voices joined in. Jeff played to the crowd, twirling me out occasionally, showing me off.

He looked into my eyes and winked. I caught his mood and I saw what he wanted me to do, act like lovers. We danced close and dreamy, perfectly in step, exaggerating the romance for the crowd.

When the song ended, he didn’t just stop dancing, he unfurled me, then gave me a mock bow as the group burst into applause. I grabbed the cuffs of my shorts and pretended to curtsy, and everyone laughed.

Jeff said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next Broadway star.”

Everyone applauded. It was a joke, but a generous one, and I curtsied again.

This was as magic as real life ever got.

Then I stopped smiling because I saw a dark figure standing by the trunk of the big elm tree — Billy.

He stared at me for just a moment. Then he turned his back and walked away.

 

I looked for Billy for an hour, by the theater, by the beach. I didn’t sleep much, thinking that he’d come to me. The doors of the rooming house weren’t locked; he could walk right in.

I finally fell asleep as the wind picked up, curling around my bare toes in bed and leading me to pull up the cotton cover. For the first time, I could smell the end of summer.

The next morning I waited in my room while I heard doors slamming and taxis pulling up. I had said my good-byes last night. A sense of dread filled me, and I wondered if I’d see him this morning.

This summer had been one of missing Billy. There was only one phone in the rooming house, and we were rarely there to answer it. Messages were supposed to be written down and put on the table in the front hall, but often people forgot or didn’t bother. It was a summer of rushed letters, quick postcards, a few phone calls in which I shouted my “I miss you” while checking my watch. He always managed to call just when I was due down at the theater.

I packed my one suitcase with my shorts and dresses, silly presents for Da and Jamie and Muddie, everything
crammed in so that I had to sit on the suitcase to close it. It was an old one of Da’s, the one we’d used so many years ago on our summer tours of county fairs, and one of the latches wouldn’t latch. I pinched my finger wrestling it shut.

I carried it down the stairs. When I walked into the kitchen, one of the actresses was still there, a girl with the improbable name of Daisy Meadows. Out of the company, she was the one I watched the closest. She wasn’t the prettiest of the actresses but she had an arresting face, startlingly clear blue eyes with dark lashes, and thick black hair that curled in the humidity and couldn’t be tamed with a comb. Every performance of hers was slightly different— not enough to throw off her fellow actors, but enough to shade the performance. She lived in New York and studied with Stella Adler, who I now knew was one of the best acting teachers anywhere. Daisy was part of a world I couldn’t imagine — late nights in Greenwich Village jazz clubs, hard study with tough teachers, a tribe of actors searching for truth in a gesture.

She greeted me by raising her coffee cup. She was still dressed in her nightgown. “Looks like we’re the holdouts,” she said. “Everybody left for New York already. I’m taking off in a bit to crash in on my parents. Need a ride, honey? I can drop you in Providence.”

“Maybe.”

Daisy shrugged her shoulders.

I heard the sound of a car, and I went to the kitchen door and peered out. Billy got out of the car. “I might have a ride.”

Daisy took a sip of coffee and watched as Billy stood uncertainly, looking at the house. Dressed in a white shirt and khakis, tanned and lean, he made me catch my breath.

“Catnip,” she purred. “Is he an actor?”

“No, he goes to Brown.”

“College boy. Lucky you.” I swung open the screen door and stepped out. “I came to surprise you last night,” he said. “I saw you dancing.”

“I know. It was Jeff Toland,” I said. “You should have stayed. We were just dancing.”

“Just dancing. Is that what you call it? I couldn’t slip a piece of paper between the two of you.”

“We were just putting on a show for the others.”

“Some show.”

I took a few steps closer. He wasn’t angry, I saw, just hurt and confused.

“What’s been going on this summer, Kit? Is this why I can’t call you, can’t come up?”

“You could have come up anytime,” I said.

“Why would I, when I couldn’t see you? I thought I’d surprise you last night —”

“It was our last night, we had a party —”

“— and I was standing there, watching you, and I thought, this is how it is. I’m right here. She’s right there. And I can’t have her, I can’t get to her.” He shook his head. “Listen, anytime you want me to walk away, I’ll go. I can do it. I can walk away.”

“I don’t! I just want you to trust me.” I spread out my arms. “I want you to understand this — the theater, what I’m doing. It doesn’t matter to you!”

“That’s not true.” He reached into the car and took out an envelope. He handed it to me. “I made you a present.”

It was full of photographs of me, duplicates of a shot he’d taken last spring. He’d set up the shot with lights, just like a professional. In it I looked fresh and dreamy-eyed, because I was looking through the lens right at him.

“Head shots,” he said. “For you to take around to auditions. I
do
take you seriously.”

I looked down at the pictures. They showed a girl who looked like me, just happier.

“One of the things I love about you,” he said, “is that you really don’t know how beautiful you are.”