City of Girls

How could the Watsons have refused? Where else were they going to go?

So they moved in—and that’s how the war made its first direct appearance in my life.

—

The Watsons arrived on one of the first crisp afternoons of autumn.

It happened that I was standing outside the theater talking to Peg when their car pulled up. I’d just returned from shopping at Lowtsky’s, and I was carrying a bag of crinolines which I needed to fix some of the “ballet costumes” of our dancers. (We were putting on a show called Dance Away, Jackie!—about a street urchin who is rescued from a life of crime by the love of a beautiful young ballerina. I had been tasked with the job of trying to make the Lily’s muscular hoofers look like a company of premier ballet dancers. I’d done my best with the costumes, but the dancers kept ripping their skirts. Too much boggle-boggle, I suppose. Now it was time for repairs.)

When the Watsons arrived, there was a small flurry of commotion, as they had a great deal of luggage. Two other cars followed their taxi, with the remaining trunks and parcels. I was standing right there on the sidewalk, and I saw Edna Parker Watson exit the taxi as though she were stepping out of a limousine. Petite, trim, narrow-hipped and small-breasted, she was dressed in the single most stylish outfit I’d ever seen on a woman. She was wearing a peacock-blue serge jacket—double-breasted, with two lines of gold buttons marching up the front—with a high collar trimmed in gold braid. She had on tailored dark gray trousers with a bit of flare at the bottom, and glossy black wingtip shoes, which almost looked like men’s shoes—except for the small, elegant, and very feminine heel. She was wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses, and her short, dark hair was set with glossy waves. She had on red lipstick—the perfect shade of red—but no other makeup. A simple black beret sat angled on her head with jaunty ease. She looked like a teeny-tiny military officer in the chicest little army in the world—and from that day forward, my sense of style would never be the same.

Until the moment I first glimpsed Edna, I’d thought that New York City showgirls and their spangled radiance were the pinnacles of glamour. But suddenly everything (and everyone) I’d been admiring all summer looked gaudy and glitzy compared to this petite woman in her sharp little jacket, and her perfectly tailored slacks, and her men’s-shoes-that-were-not-quite-men’s-shoes.

I had just encountered true glamour for the first time. And I can say without hyperbole that every day of my life since that moment, I have tried to model my style after Edna Parker Watson’s.

—

Peg rushed at Edna and pulled her into a tight embrace.

“Edna!” she cried, giving her old friend a spin. “The Dewdrop of Drury Lane makes an appearance on our humble shores!”

“Dear Peg!” cried Edna. “You look exactly the same!” Edna released herself from Peg’s arms, stepped back, and took a look up at the Lily. “But is all this yours, Peg? The entire building?”

“All of it, yes, unfortunately,” said Peg. “Would you like to buy it?”

“I haven’t a farthing to my name, darling, or I absolutely would. It’s charming. But look at you—you’ve become an impresario! You’re a theater magnate! The façade reminds me of the old Hackney. It’s lovely. I do see why you had to buy it.”

“Yes, of course I had to buy it,” said Peg, “because otherwise I might have ended up wealthy and comfortable in my old age, and that would’ve been no good for anybody. But enough about my dumb playhouse, Edna. I’m just sick about what’s happened to your home—and what’s happening to poor England!”

“Darling Peg,” said Edna, and she placed her palm gently on my aunt’s cheek. “It’s wretched. But Arthur and I are alive. And now, thanks to you, we have a roof to sleep under, and that’s a good deal more than some other people can say.”

“Where is Arthur?” asked Peg. “Can’t wait to meet him.”

But I myself had already spotted him.

Arthur Watson was the handsome, dark-haired, movie-star-looking fellow with the lantern jaw who was, at that instant, grinning at the cab driver and pumping the man’s hand with altogether too much enthusiasm. He was a well-built man with a good pair of shoulders, and he was much taller than he looked on the movie screen—which is highly abnormal for actors. He had a cigar clamped in his mouth, which somehow looked like a prop. He was the best-looking man I’d ever seen at close quarters, but there was something artificial about his good looks. He had a rakish curl that fell over one eye, for instance, which would have been a lot more attractive if it hadn’t looked so deliberately cultivated. (The thing about rakishness, Angela, is that it should never seem intentional.) He looked like an actor, is the best way I can describe it. He looked as if he were an actor hired to play the part of a handsome, well-built man, shaking the hand of a cabdriver.

Arthur marched over to us in great, athletic strides and shook Peg’s hand just as forcibly as he’d done to the poor cabbie.

“Mrs. Buell,” he said. “Awfully good of you to give us a place to stay!”

“A delight, Arthur,” said Peg. “I simply adore your wife.”

“I adore her, too!” boomed Arthur, and he caught Edna in a tight squeeze that looked like it might hurt, but which only made her beam with pleasure.

“And this is my niece, Vivian,” said Peg. “She’s been staying with me all summer, learning how to run a theater company into the ground.”

“The niece!” Edna said, as though she’d been hearing fabulous things about me for years. She gave me a kiss on each cheek, wafting a scent of gardenia. “But look at you, Vivian—you’re simply stunning! Please tell me that you’re not an aspiring actress and that you won’t ruin your life in the theater—although you’re certainly pretty enough for it.”

Hers was a smile far too warm and genuine for show business. She was paying me the compliment of her undivided attention, and thus I was instantly smitten.

“No,” I said. “I’m not an actress. But I do love living at the Lily with my aunt.”

“But of course you do, darling. She’s marvelous.”

Arthur interrupted, to reach in and crush my hand in his. “Awfully nice to meet you, Vivian!” he said. “And how long did you say you’ve been an actress?”

I was less smitten with him.

“Oh, I’m not an actress—” I started to say, but Edna put her hand on my arm and whispered in my ear, as if we were dearest friends, “It’s quite all right, Vivian. Arthur sometimes doesn’t pay the closest attention, but he’ll get it all sorted out eventually.”

“Let’s go have drinks on my verandah!” said Peg. “Except that I forgot to buy a home with a verandah, so let’s go have drinks in the filthy living room above my theater, and we can pretend that we’re having drinks on my verandah!”

“Brilliant Peg,” said Edna. “How violently I’ve missed you!”

—

A few trays of martinis later, it was as if I’d known Edna Parker Watson forever.

She was the most charming presence I’d ever watched light up a room. She was a sort of elfin queen, what with her bright little face, and her dancing gray eyes. Nothing about her was quite what it seemed. She was pale, but she didn’t seem weak or delicate. And she was awfully dainty—with the tiniest shoulders and a slender frame—but she didn’t look fragile. She had a hearty laugh and a robust bounce to her step that belied her size and her pallid coloring.

I suppose you could call her a non-frail waif.

The exact source of her beauty was difficult to place, for her features were not perfect—not like the girls I’d been romping about with all summer. Her face was quite round, and she didn’t have the dramatic cheekbones that were so much in vogue back then. And she wasn’t young. She had to be at least fifty, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. You couldn’t tell her age from a distance (she had been able to play Juliet well into her forties, I would later learn—and had easily gotten away with it, too), but once you looked closely, you could see that the skin around her eyes was crumbling with fine lines, and her jawline was getting soft. There were strands of silver in that chic, short hair of hers, as well. But her spirit was youthful. She was utterly unconvincing as a fifty-year-old woman—let’s just put it that way. Or maybe her age didn’t matter to her, so she didn’t project any concern about it. The trouble with so many aging actresses is that they don’t want to let nature do as it wishes—but nature seemed to have no particular vengeance against Edna, nor did she have a gripe against it.

Her greatest natural gift, though, was warmth. She delighted in all that she beheld, and it made you want to stay near her, in order to bask in her delight. Even Olive’s normally stern face relaxed into a rare expression of joy at the sight of Edna. They embraced as old friends—for that is exactly what they were. As I discovered that night, Edna and Peg and Olive had all met on the battlefields of France, when Edna was part of a British touring company, putting on shows for wounded soldiers—shows that my Aunt Peg and Olive helped to produce.

“Somewhere on this planet,” said Edna, “there’s a photograph of the three of us in a field ambulance together, and I would give anything to see it again. We were so young! And we were wearing those terribly practical frocks, with no waistlines.”

“I remember that picture,” said Olive. “We were muddy.”

“We were always muddy, Olive,” said Edna. “It was a battlefield. I will never forget the cold and damp. Do you remember how I had to make my own stage makeup out of brick dust and lard? I was so nervous about acting in front of the soldiers. They were all so horribly wounded. Do you remember what you told me, Peg? When I asked, ‘How can I sing and dance for these poor broken boys?’”

“Mercifully, my dear Edna,” said Peg, “I do not remember anything I have ever said in my entire life.”

“Well, then, I shall remind you. You said, ‘Sing louder, Edna. Dance harder. Look ’em straight in the eyes.’ You told me: ‘Don’t you dare degrade these brave boys with your pity.’ So that’s what I did. I sang loud and danced hard, and looked ’em straight in the eyes. I did not degrade those brave boys with my pity. My God, but it was painful.”

“You worked very hard,” said Olive, approvingly.

“It was you nurses who worked hard, Olive,” said Edna. “I remember the whole lot of you having dysentery and chilblains—but then you’d say, ‘At least we don’t have infected bayonet wounds, girls! Chins up!’ What heroes you were. Especially you, Olive. Equal to any emergency, you were. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Receiving this compliment, Olive’s face was suddenly lit up by the most unusual expression. By my stars, I do believe it was happiness.

“Edna was performing bits of Shakespeare for the men,” Peg said to me. “I remember thinking it was a terrible idea. I thought Shakespeare would bore them to tears, but they loved it.”

“They loved it because they hadn’t seen a pretty little English lass in months,” said Edna. “I remember one man shouting, ‘Better than a trip to the whorehouse!’ after I gave them my piece of Ophelia, and I still think it’s the best review I’ve ever received. You were in that show, Peg. You played my Hamlet. Those tights really suited you.”

“I didn’t play Hamlet; I just read from the script,” said Peg. “I never could act, Edna. And I detest Hamlet. Have you ever seen a production of Hamlet that didn’t make you want to go home and put your head in the oven? I haven’t.”

“Oh, I thought our Hamlet was quite nice,” said Edna.

“Because it was abridged,” said Peg. “Which is the only thing Shakespeare should ever be.”

“Although you did make an awfully cheery Hamlet, as I recall,” said Edna. “Perhaps the most cheerful Hamlet in history.”

“But Hamlet isn’t meant to be cheerful!” chimed in Arthur Watson, looking puzzled.

The room paused. It was quite awkward. I would soon discover that this was often the effect that Arthur Watson had when he spoke. He could bring the most sparkling of conversations to the most grinding halt, just by opening his mouth.

We all looked to see how Edna would react to her husband’s stupid comment. But she was beaming at him fondly. “That’s right, Arthur. Hamlet is not generally known for being a cheerful play, but Peg brought her natural buoyancy to the role and quite brightened up the whole story.”

“Oh!” he said. “Well, jolly good for her, then! Though I don’t know what Mr. Shakespeare would’ve thought of that.”

Peg saved the day by changing the subject: “Mr. Shakespeare would’ve rolled in his grave, Edna, if he knew that I’d been allowed to share a stage with the likes of you,” she said. Then she turned to me again: “What you have to understand, kiddo, is that Edna is one of the greatest actresses of her age.”

Edna grinned. “Oh, Peg, stop talking about my age!”

“I believe what she meant, Edna,” corrected Arthur, “is that you are one of the greatest actresses of your generation. She’s not talking about your age.”

“Thank you for the clarification, darling,” replied Edna to her husband, with no trace of irony or annoyance. “And thank you for the kindness, Peg.”

Peg went on: “Edna is the best Shakespearean actress you’ll ever meet, Vivian. She’s always had a knack for it. Started as a baby in the cradle. Could recite the sonnets backwards, they say, before she learned them forwards.”

Arthur muttered, “You’d think it would’ve been easier to learn them forwards first.”

“Many thanks, Peg,” said Edna, ignoring Arthur, thank God. “You’ve always been so good to me.”

“We shall have to find something for you to do while you’re here,” announced Peg, slapping her leg for emphasis. “I’d be happy to put you in one of our terrible shows, but it’s all so beneath you.”

“Nothing is beneath me, dear Peg. I’ve played Ophelia in knee-deep mud.”

“Oh, but Edna, you haven’t seen our shows! It’ll make you miss the mud. And I don’t have much to pay you—certainly not what you’re worth.”

“Anything’s better than what we could earn in England—if we could even get to England.”

“I just wish you could get a role in one of the more reputable theaters around town,” said Peg. “There are many of them in New York, rumor has it. I’ve never stepped foot in one myself, of course, but I understand that they exist.”

“I know, but it’s too late in the season,” said Edna. “Middle of September—all the productions have been cast. And remember—I’m not as well known here, darling. As long as Lynn Fontanne and Ethel Barrymore are alive, I’ll never get the best roles in New York. But I’d still love to work while I’m here—and I know Arthur would, too. I’m versatile, Peg—you know that. I can still play a youngish woman, if you put me at the back of the stage, in the correct lighting. I can play a Jewess, or a gypsy, or a Frenchwoman. At a pinch, I can play a little boy. Hell, Arthur and I will sell peanuts in the lobby, if need be. We’ll clean out ashtrays. We only wish to earn our keep.”

“Now see here, Edna,” declared Arthur Watson sternly. “I don’t think I’d much like to clean out ashtrays.”

—

That evening, Edna watched both the early and the late performances of Dance Away, Jackie! She could not have been more delighted with our awful little show if she’d been a twelve-year-old peasant child seeing theater for the first time.

“Oh, but it’s fun!” she exclaimed to me, when the performers had left the stage after their final bows. “You know, Vivian, this sort of theater is where I got my start. My parents were players and I grew up around productions just like this. Born in the wings, five minutes before my first performance.”

Edna insisted on going backstage and meeting all the actors and dancers, to congratulate them. Some had heard of her, but most hadn’t. To most of them, she was just a nice woman giving them praise—and that was good enough for them. The players bubbled up around her, soaking in her generous ministrations.

I cornered Celia and said, “That’s Edna Parker Watson.”

“Yeah?” said Celia, unimpressed.

“She’s a famous British actress. She’s married to Arthur Watson.”

“Arthur Watson, from Gates of Noon?”

“Yes! They’re staying here now. Their house in London got bombed.”

“But Arthur Watson is young,” Celia said, staring at Edna. “How can he be married to her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s quite something, though.”

“Yeah.” Celia didn’t seem so sure. “Where we going out tonight?”

For the first time since meeting Celia, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go out. I thought I might prefer to spend more time around Edna. Just for one night.

“I want you to meet her,” I said. “She’s famous and I’m mad about the way she dresses.”

So I brought Celia over and proudly introduced her to Edna.

You can never anticipate how a woman is going to react to meeting a showgirl. A showgirl in full costume is intentionally designed to make all other females look and feel insignificant by comparison. You need to have a considerable amount of self-confidence, as a woman, to stand in the lavish radiance of a showgirl without flinching, resenting, or melting away.

But Edna—tiny as she was—had just that kind of self-confidence.

“You’re magnificent!” she cried to Celia, when I introduced them. “Look at the height on you! And that face. You, my dear, could headline at the Folies Bergère.”

“That’s in Paris,” I said to Celia, who thankfully did not take note of my patronizing tone, distracted as she was by the compliments.

“And where are you from, Celia?” Edna asked—tilting her head with curiosity and shining the spotlight of her fullest attention upon my friend.

“I’m from right here. From New York City,” said Celia.

(As though that accent could’ve been born anywhere else.)

“I noticed tonight that you dance exceptionally well for a girl of your height. Did you study ballet? Your carriage would suggest you’d been properly trained.”

“No,” replied Celia, whose face was now aglow with pleasure.

“And do you act? The camera must adore you. You look just like a film star.”

“I act a bit.” Then she added (quite archly for someone who had only ever played a corpse in a B movie): “I am not yet widely known.”

“Well, you shall be known soon enough, if there’s any justice. Stay at it, my dear. You’re in the right field. You have a face that was made for your times.”

It’s not difficult to compliment people in order to try to win their affections. What is difficult is to do it in the right way. Everyone told Celia she was beautiful, but nobody had ever told her she had the carriage of a trained ballerina. Nobody had ever told her she had a face made for her times.

“You know, I’ve just realized something,” said Edna. “In all the excitement, I have not yet unpacked. I wonder if you girls might be free to help me?”

“Sure!” said Celia eagerly, looking like she was about thirteen years old.

And to my wonderment, in that instant the goddess became a handmaiden.

—

When we arrived upstairs in the fourth-floor apartment that Edna would be sharing with her husband, we found a pile of trunks and parcels and hatboxes on the sitting-room floor—an avalanche of luggage.

“Oh, dear,” said Edna. “It gives quite the impression of density, doesn’t it? I do hate to trouble you girls, but shall we begin?”

As for me, I couldn’t wait. I was dying to get my hands on her clothes. I had a feeling they’d be splendid—and indeed they were. Unpacking Edna’s trunks was a lesson in sartorial genius. I soon noticed that there was nothing haphazard about her clothing; it was all in keeping with a particular style that I might call “Little Lord Fauntleroy meets French salon hostess.”

She certainly had a lot of jackets—that seemed to be the elementary unit of her aesthetic. The jackets were all variations on a theme—fitted, jaunty, slightly martial in tone. Some were trimmed in Persian lamb, others had satin details. Some looked like formal riding jackets, but some were more playful. All of them had gold buttons of different design, and all were lined with jewel-toned silks.

“I have them specially made,” she told me, when she caught me searching the labels for information. “There’s an Indian tailor in London who has come to know my taste over the years. He never gets bored of creating them for me, and I never get bored of buying them.”

And then there were the trousers—so many pairs of trousers. Some were long and loose, but others were narrow and looked like they would hit above the ankle. (“I got used to wearing these when I studied dance,” she said of the cropped variety. “All the dancers in Paris wore trousers like that, and heavens, did they make it look chic. I used to call those girls ‘the slim ankle brigade.’”)

The trousers were a real revelation for me. I’d never been a firm believer in trousers on women until I saw how good they looked on Edna. Not even Garbo and Hepburn had yet convinced me that a woman could be both feminine and glamorous in pants, but looking at Edna’s clothes suddenly made me think that it was the only way a woman could be both feminine and glamorous.

“I prefer trousers for daily wear,” she explained. “I’m small, but I have a long stride. I need to be able to move about freely. Years ago, a newspaperman wrote that I had a ‘titillating boyishness’ to me, and that’s my favorite thing a man’s ever said about me. What could be better than having a bit of the titillating boy about you?”

Celia gave a puzzled look, but I understood Edna’s point exactly and loved this idea.

Then we came to the trunk filled with Edna’s blouses. So many of them had quaint jabots, or ornamental ruffles. This attention to detail, I grasped, is how a woman could wear a suit and still look like a woman. There was one high-necked crepe de chine chemise in the softest pink you could imagine, and it made my heart ache with longing when I touched it. Then I pulled out an elegant little ivory number of finest silk, with tiny pearl buttons at the neck, and the most infinitesimal sleeves.

“What an impeccable blouse!” I said.

“Thank you for noticing, Vivian. You’ve got a good eye. That little blouse came from Coco Chanel herself. She gave it to me—if you can imagine Coco ever giving somebody something for free! It must have been a weak moment for her. Perhaps she had food poisoning that day.”

Celia and I both gasped, and I cried out, “You know Coco Chanel?”

“Nobody knows Coco, my dear. She would never allow for that. But I can say that we are acquainted. I met her years ago when I was acting in Paris and living on the Quai Voltaire. That was back when I was learning French—which is a good language to learn as an actress, because it teaches you how to use your mouth.”

Well, that was the most sophisticated combination of words I’d ever heard.

“But what’s she like?”

“What’s Coco like?” Edna paused, closed her eyes, and seemed to be searching for the right words. She opened her eyes and smiled. “Coco Chanel is a gifted, ambitious, cunning, unloved, and hardworking eel of a woman. I’m more afraid of her taking dominion over the world than I am of Mussolini or Hitler. No, I’m teasing—she’s a fine enough specimen of a person. One is only ever in danger from Coco when she starts calling you her friend. But she’s far more interesting than I’m making her sound. Girls, what do you think of this hat?”

She had pulled from a box a homburg—like something a man would wear, but not at all. Soft and plum colored, and dressed with a single red feather. She modeled it for us with a bright smile.

“It’s wonderful on you,” I said. “But it doesn’t look like anything I’m seeing people wearing right now.”

“Thank you,” said Edna. “I can’t bear the hats that are in style just now. I can’t endure a hat that substitutes a pile of miscellany on the top of your head for the pleasing simplicity of a line. A homburg will always give you a perfect line, if it’s specially made for you. The wrong hat makes me feel cross and oppressed. And there are so many wrong hats. But alas—milliners need to eat, too, I suppose.”

“I love this,” said Celia, pulling out a long, yellow silk scarf, and wrapping it around her head.

“Well done, Celia!” said Edna. “You are the infrequent sort of girl who looks good with a scarf wrapped around her head. How fortunate for you! If I wore that scarf in that manner, I would look like a dead saint. Do you like it? You may keep it.”

“Gee, thanks!” said Celia, parading around Edna’s room, searching for a mirror.

“I can’t think why I ever bought that scarf in the first place, girls. I suppose I bought it during a year when yellow scarves were in fashion. And let that be a lesson to you! The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don’t need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember—and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?”

We can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris!

As long as I live, I shall never forget those words. That speech was certainly more stirring to me than anything Churchill had ever said.

Celia and I were now busy unpacking a trunk filled with the most delicious items of bath and beauty—articles of toilette that made us swoon with joy. There were carnation-scented bath oils, lavender alcohol rubs, pomander balls to spice up the drawers and closets, and so many alluring glass vials of lotions with French instructions. It was positively intoxicating. I would have been embarrassed by our overenthusiasm, but Edna seemed to be genuinely enjoying our squeaks and squeals of delight. In fact, she seemed to be having just as much fun as we were. I had the craziest sensation that Edna might actually like us. This was interesting to me then, and it is still interesting now. Older women don’t always relish the company of beautiful young girls, for obvious reasons. But not Edna.

“Girls,” she said, “I could watch the two of you effervesce for hours!”

And boy, did we effervesce. I’d never seen such a wardrobe. Edna even had a valise filled with nothing but gloves—each pair wrapped lovingly in its own silk.

“Never buy inexpensive or poorly made gloves,” Edna instructed us. “That’s not the place to save your money. Whenever you are faced with the prospect of purchasing gloves, you must ask yourself if you would be bereft to lose one of them in the back of a taxicab. If not, then don’t buy them. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart.”

—

At some point, Edna’s husband walked in, but he was inconsequential (handsome as he was) compared to this exotic wardrobe. She kissed his cheek and sent him on his way, saying, “There’s no room in here yet for a man, Arthur. Go have a drink somewhere and entertain yourself until these dear girls are done, and then I promise I’ll find space for you and your one sorry little duffel bag.”

He sulked a bit, but did her bidding.

After he left, Celia said, “Say, but he’s a looker, ain’t he!”

I thought Edna might be offended, but she only laughed. “He is indeed, as you say, a looker. I’ve never before seen his like, to be candid with you. We’ve been married nearly a decade, and I haven’t grown tired of looking at him yet.”

“But he’s young.”

I could’ve kicked Celia for her rudeness, but Edna, again, didn’t seem to mind. “Yes, dear Celia. He is young—far younger than me, in fact. One of my greatest achievements, I daresay.”

“You don’t get worried?” Celia pressed on. “There’s gotta be a lot of young dishes out there who want to put the moves on him.”

“I don’t worry about dishes, my dear. Dishes break.”

“Ooh!” said Celia, and her face lit up with something like awe.

“When you have found your own success as a woman,” explained Edna, “you may do such a fun thing as marry a handsome man who is very much your junior. Consider it a reward for all your hard work. When first I met Arthur, he was just a boy—a set carpenter for an Ibsen play I was doing. An Enemy of the People. I was Mrs. Stockmann, and oh, it’s a dull role. But meeting Arthur livened things up for me during the run of that play—and he has kept things lively for me since. I’m awfully fond of him, girls. He’s my third husband, of course. Nobody’s first husband looks like Arthur. My first husband was a civil servant, and I don’t mind saying that he made love like a civil servant, too. My second husband was a theater director. I won’t make that mistake again. And now there is dear Arthur, so handsome and yet so cozy. My gift, till the end of my days. I’m so fond of him that I even took his name—though my theater friends warned me not to, since my own name was already well known. I’d never taken the names of any of my other husbands before, you see. But Edna Parker Watson has a nice ring to it, don’t you agree? And what about you, Celia? Have you ever had any husbands?”

I wanted to say: She’s had many husbands, Edna—but only one of them was her own.

“Yeah,” said Celia. “I had a husband once. He played the saxophone.”

“Oh, dear. So we may assume that didn’t last?”

“Yeah, you guessed it, lady.” Celia drew a line across her own throat, to indicate, I guess, the death of love.

“And what about you, Vivian? Married? Engaged?”

“No,” I said.

“Anybody special?”

“Nobody special,” I said, and something about the way I uttered the word “special” made Edna burst out laughing.

“Ah, but you have a somebody, I can see.”

“She has a few somebodies,” Celia said, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“Good work, Vivian!” Edna gave me an appraising second look. “You’re growing more interesting to me by the moment!”

—

Later on in the evening—it must have been well after midnight by then—Peg came in to check on us. She settled into a deep chair with a nightcap in her hand and watched with pleasure as Celia and I finished unpacking Edna’s trunks.

“Gadzooks, Edna,” Peg said. “You have a lot of clothes.”

“This is a mere fraction of the collection, Peg. You should see my wardrobe back home.” She paused. “Oh, dear. I’ve just now remembered again that I’ve lost everything back home. My contribution to the war effort, I suppose. Evidently Mr. Goering needed to destroy my more-than-three-decades-in-the-making costume collection as part of his plan for making the world safe for the Aryan race. I don’t quite see how it served him, but the sad deed is done.”

I marveled at how lightly she seemed to take the destruction of her home. So, apparently, did Peg, who said, “I must admit, Edna, I was expecting to find you a bit more shaken up by all this.”

“Oh, Peg, you know me better than that! Or have you forgotten how good I am at adjusting to circumstances? You can’t lead the sort of patched-together life that I’ve lived and get too sentimental about things.”

Peg grinned. “Show people,” she said to me, shaking her head with an insider’s appreciation.

Celia had just now pulled out an elegant floor-length, high-necked, black crepe gown with long sleeves, and a small pearl brooch set deliberately off center.

“Now that’s something,” said Celia.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” said Edna, holding the dress up to herself. “But I’ve had a difficult relationship with this dress. Black can be the smartest of colors, or it can be the dowdiest, depending on the line. I wore this gown only once, and I felt like a Greek widow in it. But I’ve kept it because I like the pearl detail.”

I approached the dress, respectfully. “May I?” I asked.

Edna handed me the dress and I laid it out on the sofa, touching it here and there, and getting a better sense of it.

“The problem isn’t the color,” I diagnosed. “The problem is the sleeves. The material of the sleeves is heavier than the material of the bodice—can you see that? This dress should have chiffon sleeves—or none at all, which would be better for you, petite as you are.”

Edna studied the gown and then looked at me with surprise.

“I believe you’re on to something there, Vivian.”

“I could fix it for you, if you’ll trust me with it.”

“Our Vivvie can sew like the devil!” Celia said, proudly.

“It’s true,” put in Peg. “Vivian is our resident dress professor.”

“She makes all the costumes for the shows,” said Celia. “She made the ballet tutus everyone was wearing tonight.”

“Did you?” said Edna, more impressed than she should’ve been. (Your cat could sew a tutu, Angela.) “So you’re not only beautiful, but gifted as well? Imagine that! And they say the Lord never gives with both hands!”

I shrugged. “All I know is that I can fix this. I would shorten it, as well. It would be better for you if it landed at mid-ankle.”

“Well, it appears as if you know a good deal more about clothes than I do,” said Edna, “because I was ready to relegate this poor old gown to the ash heap. And here I’ve been, filling your ears all night with my noise and opinions about fashion and style. I should be the one listening to you. So tell me, my dear—where did you learn how to understand a dress so well?”

—

I can’t imagine that it was fascinating for a woman of Edna Parker Watson’s stature to listen to a nineteen-year-old girl blather on about her grandmother for the next several hours, but that’s exactly what happened, and she bore it nobly. More than nobly—she hung on every word.

Somewhere during the course of my monologue, Celia wandered out of the room. I wouldn’t see her again until just before dawn, when she would come tumbling into our bed at the usual hour, in her usual state of drunken disarray. Peg ended up excusing herself, as well—once she got a sharp knock on the door and a reminder from Olive that it was past her bedtime.

So it ended up being just me and Edna—curled up on the sofa of her new apartment at the Lily—talking into the wee hours. The well-raised girl within me did not want to monopolize her time, but I could not resist her attentions. Edna wanted to know everything about my grandmother and delighted in the details of her frivolities and eccentricities. (“What a character! She should be put in a play!”) Every time I tried to turn the subject of the conversation away from myself, Edna would turn it back to me. She expressed sincere curiosity about my love of sewing and was astonished when I told her that I could make a whalebone corset if I had to.

“Then you’re born to be a costume designer!” she said. “The difference between making a dress and making a costume, of course, is that dresses are sewn, but costumes are built. Many people these days can sew, but not many know how to build. A costume is a prop for the stage, Vivvie, as much as any piece of furniture, and it needs to be strong. You never know what’s going to happen in a performance, and so the costume must be ready for anything.”

I told Edna about how my grandmother used to find the tiniest hidden flaws in my outfits and demand that I fix the offending article on the spot. I used to protest that “Nobody will notice!” but Grandmother Morris would say, “That is not true, Vivian. People will notice, but they won’t know what they’re noticing. They will just notice that something is wrong. Don’t give them that opportunity.”

“She was correct!” said Edna. “This is why I take such care with my costumes. I hate it when an impatient director says, ‘Nobody will notice!’ Oh, the arguments I’ve had about that! As I always tell the director: ‘If you put me in a spotlight with three hundred audience members staring at me for two hours, they will notice a flaw. They will notice flaws in my hair, flaws in my complexion, flaws in my voice, and they will absolutely notice flaws in my dress.’ It’s not that the audience members are masters of style, Vivian: it’s merely that they have nothing else to do with their time, once they are held captive in their seats, except to notice your flaws.”

I thought I’d been having adult conversations all summer, because I’d been spending my time around such a worldly group of showgirls, but this was truly an adult conversation. This was a conversation about craftsmanship, and about expertise, and about aesthetics. Nobody I’d ever met (except Grandmother Morris, of course) had ever known more about dressmaking than me. Nobody had ever cared this much. Nobody understood or respected the art of it.

I could have stayed there talking to Edna about clothing and costumes for another century or two, but Arthur Watson finally burst in and demanded that he be allowed to go to ruddy bed with his ruddy wife, and that put an end to it.

The next day marked the first morning in two months that I did not wake up with a hangover.

TEN

By the next week, my Aunt Peg had already begun creating a show for Edna to star in. She was determined to give her friend a job, and it had to be a better job than what the Lily Playhouse currently had to offer—because you can’t very well put one of the greatest actresses of her age in Dance Away, Jackie!

As for Olive, she was not convinced this was a good idea in the least. As much as she loved Edna, it didn’t make sense to her from a business standpoint to attempt to put on a decent (or even halfway decent) show at the Lily: it would break formula.

“We have a small audience, Peg,” she said. “And they are humble. But they are the only audience we have, and they are loyal to us. We must be loyal to them in return. We can’t leave them behind for one play—certainly not for one player—or they may never come back. Our task is to serve the neighborhood. And the neighborhood doesn’t want Ibsen.”

“I don’t want Ibsen, either,” said Peg. “But I hate seeing Edna sitting about idle, and I hate even more the idea of putting her in any of our draggy little shows.”

“However draggy our shows may be, they keep the electricity on, Peg. And just barely, at that. Don’t chance it, by changing anything.”

“We could make a comedy,” Peg said. “Something that our audiences would like. But it would have to be smart enough to be worthy of Edna.”

She turned to Mr. Herbert, who had been sitting there at the breakfast table in his usual attire of baggy trousers and shirtsleeves, staring sorrowfully at nothing.

“Mr. Herbert,” Peg asked, “do you think you could write a play that is both funny and smart?”

“No,” he said, without even looking up.

“Well, what are you working on now? What’s the next show on deck?”

“It’s called City of Girls,” he said. “I told you about it last month.”

“The speakeasy one,” said Peg. “I remember. Flappers and gangsters, and that sort of fluff. What’s it about, again, exactly?”

Mr. Herbert looked both wounded and confused. “What’s it about?” he asked. It seemed that this was the first time he’d considered that one of the Lily Playhouse shows should be about something.

“Never mind,” said Peg. “Does it have a role that Edna could play?”

Again, he looked wounded and confused.

“I don’t see how it could,” he said. “We have an ingénue, and a hero. We have a villain. We don’t have an older woman.”

“Could the ingénue have a mother?”

“Peg, she’s an orphan,” said Mr. Herbert. “You can’t change that.”

I saw his point: the ingénue always had to be an orphan. The story wouldn’t make sense if the ingénue wasn’t an orphan. The audience would revolt. The audience would start throwing shoes and bricks at the players if the ingénue wasn’t an orphan.

“Who’s the owner of the speakeasy, in your show?”

“The speakeasy doesn’t have an owner.”

“Well, could it? And could it be a woman?”

Mr. Herbert rubbed his forehead and looked overwhelmed. He looked as though Peg had just asked him to repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

“This causes problems in all aspects,” he said.

Olive chimed in: “Nobody will believe Edna Parker Watson as the owner of a speakeasy, Peg. Why would the owner of a New York speakeasy be from England?”

Peg’s face fell. “Blast it, you’re right, Olive. You have such a bad habit of being right all the time. I wish you wouldn’t do that.” Peg sat in silence for a long moment, thinking hard. Then suddenly she said, “Goddamn it, but I wish I had Billy here. He could write something smashing for Edna.”

Well, that caught my attention.

This was the first time I’d ever heard my aunt curse, for one thing. But this was also the first time I’d ever heard her mention her estranged husband’s name. And I wasn’t the only one who snapped to fullest attention at the mere mention of Billy Buell’s name, either. Both Olive and Mr. Herbert looked as though they’d just had buckets of ice poured down their backs.

“Oh, Peg, no,” said Olive. “Don’t call Billy. Please, be sensible.”

“I can add whoever you want me to add to the cast,” said Mr. Herbert, suddenly cooperative. “Just tell me what you need me to do, and I’ll do it. The speakeasy can have an owner, sure. She can be from England, too.”

“Billy was so fond of Edna.” Peg seemed to be talking to herself now. “And he’s seen her perform. He’ll understand how best to use her.”

“You don’t want Billy involved in anything we do, Peg,” warned Olive.

“I’ll call him. Just to get some ideas from him. The man is made of ideas.”

“It’s five A.M. on the West Coast,” said Mr. Herbert. “You can’t call him!”

This was fascinating to watch. The level of anxiety in the room had risen to an undeniably hot pitch, merely with the introduction of Billy’s name.

“I’ll call him this afternoon, then,” said Peg. “Though we can’t be sure he’ll be awake by then, either.”

“Oh, Peg, no,” said Olive again, sinking into what looked like leaden despair.

“Just to get some ideas from him, Olive,” said Peg. “There’s no harm done with a phone call. I need him, Olive. As I say: the man is made of ideas.”

—

That night after the show, Peg took a whole lot of us to dinner at Dinty Moore’s on Forty-sixth Street. She was triumphant. She had spoken to Billy that afternoon and wanted to tell everyone about his ideas for the play.

I was there at that dinner, the Watsons were there, Mr. Herbert was there, Benjamin the piano player was there (first time I’d ever seen him out of the house), and Celia was there, too, because Celia and I were always together.

Peg said, “Now, listen, everyone. Billy’s got it all figured out. We’re going to put on City of Girls after all, and we’re setting it during Prohibition. It will be a comedy, of course. Edna—you will play the owner of the speakeasy. But in order for the story to make sense and be funny, Billy says we’re going to have to make you into an aristocrat, so that your natural refinement will make sense onstage. Your character will be a woman of means who ended up in the bootlegging business somewhat accidentally. Billy suggests that your husband died, and then you lost all your money in the stock market crash. Then you start distilling gin and running a casino in your fancy home, as a way of getting by. That way, Edna, you can keep the gentility for which you are known and loved, while at the same time being part of a comic revue with showgirls and dancers—which is the kind of thing our audience likes. I think it’s brilliant. Billy thinks it would be funny if the nightclub was a bordello, too.”

Olive frowned. “I don’t like the idea of our play being set in a bordello.”

“I do!” said Edna, shining with glee. “I love all of it! I’ll be the madam of a bordello and the owner of a speakeasy. How pleasing! You can’t imagine what a balm it will be for me to do a comedy, after so long. The last four plays I’ve been in, I was either a fallen woman who murdered her lover, or a long-suffering wife whose husband was murdered by a fallen woman. It wears on one, the drama.”

Peg was beaming. “Say what you want about Billy, but the man is a genius.”

Olive looked as though there was a lot she wanted to say about Billy, but she kept it to herself.

Peg turned her attention to our piano player. “Benjamin, I need you to make the music exceptionally good for this show. Edna’s got a fine alto, and I would like to hear that voice filling up the Lily properly. Give her songs that are snappier than those mushy ballads I normally make you write. Or steal something from Cole Porter, the way you do sometimes. But make it good. I want this show to swing.”

“I don’t steal from Cole Porter,” said Benjamin. “I don’t steal from anyone.”

“Don’t you? I always thought you did, because your music sounds so much like Cole Porter’s music.”

“Well, I’m not quite sure how to take that,” said Benjamin.

Peg shrugged. “Maybe Cole Porter’s been stealing from you, Benjamin—who knows? Just write some terrific tunes, is what I’m saying. And be sure to give Edna a showstopper.”

Then she turned to Celia and said, “Celia, I’d like you to play the ingénue.”

Mr. Herbert looked like he was about to interrupt, but Peg impatiently waved him into silence.

“No, everyone, listen to me. This is a different sort of ingénue. I don’t want our heroine this time to be some little saucer-eyed orphan girl in a white dress. I’m imagining our girl as being extremely provocative in the way she walks and talks—that would be you, Celia—but still untarnished by the world, in a way. Sexy, but with an air of innocence about her.”

“A whore with a heart of gold,” said Celia, who was smarter than she looked.

“Exactly,” said Peg.

Edna touched Celia’s arm gently. “Let’s just call your character a soiled dove.”

“Sure, I can play that.” Celia reached for another pork chop. “Mr. Herbert, how many lines do I get?”

“I don’t know!” said Mr. Herbert, looking more and more unhappy. “I don’t know how to write a . . . soiled dove.”

“I can make up some stuff for you,” offered Celia—a true dramatist, that one.

Peg turned to Edna. “Do you know what Billy said when I told him that you were here, Edna? He said, ‘Oh, how I envy New York City right now.’”

“Did he?”

“He did, that flirt. He also said: ‘Watch out, because you never know what you’ll get with Edna onstage: some nights she’s excellent, other nights she’s perfect.’”

Edna beamed. “That’s so sweet of him. Nobody could ever make a woman feel more attractive than Billy could—sometimes for upwards of ten consecutive minutes. But, Peg, I must ask: Do you have a role for Arthur?”

“Of course I do,” said Peg—and I knew in that moment that she did not have a role for Arthur. In fact, it was pretty clear to me that she’d forgotten about Arthur’s existence entirely. But there was Arthur, sitting there in all his simpleminded handsomeness, waiting for his role like a Labrador retriever waits for a ball.

“Of course I have a role for Arthur,” Peg said. “I want him to play”—she hesitated, but only for the briefest moment (you might not have even noticed the hesitation, if you didn’t know Peg)—“the policeman. Yes, Arthur, I plan for you to play the policeman who’s always trying to shut down the speakeasy, and who’s in love with Edna’s character. Do you think you could manage an American accent?”

“I can manage any accent,” said Arthur, miffed—and I instantly knew that he absolutely could not manage an American accent.

“A policeman!” Edna clapped her hands. “And you’ll be in love with me, dear! What larks.”

“I didn’t hear anything before about a policeman character,” said Mr. Herbert.

“Oh, no, Mr. Herbert,” said Peg. “The policeman has always been in the script.”

“What script?”

“The script you’ll commence writing tomorrow morning, at break of day.”

Mr. Herbert looked like he was about to be afflicted with a nervous disorder.

“Do I get a song of my own to sing?” asked Arthur.

“Oh,” said Peg. There was that pause again. “Yes. Benjamin, do be sure to write that song for Arthur, which we discussed. The policeman’s song, please.”

Benjamin held Peg’s gaze and repeated with only the slightest sarcasm: “The policeman’s song.”

“That’s correct, Benjamin. As we’ve already discussed.”

“Shall I just steal a policeman’s song from Gershwin, perhaps?”

But Peg was already turning her attention to me.

“Costumes!” she said brightly, and scarcely had the word left her mouth before Olive declared, “There will be virtually no budget for costumes.”

Peg’s face dropped. “Drat. I’d forgotten about that.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll buy everything at Lowtsky’s. Flapper dresses are simple.”

“Brilliant, Vivian,” said Peg. “I know you’ll take care of it.”

“On a strict budget,” Olive added.

“On a strict budget,” I agreed. “I’ll even throw in my own allowance if I have to.”

—

As the conversation continued, with everyone except Mr. Herbert getting more excited and making suggestions for the show, I excused myself to the powder room. When I came out, I almost ran into a good-looking young man with a wide tie and a rather wolfish expression, who’d been waiting for me in the corridor.

“Say, there, your friend’s a knockout,” he said, nodding in the direction of Celia. “And so are you.”

“That’s what we’ve been told,” I replied, holding his gaze.

“You girls wanna come home with me?” he asked, dispensing with the preliminaries. “I gotta friend with a car.”

I studied him more closely. He looked like a piece of very bad business. A wolf with an agenda. This was not somebody a nice girl should tangle with.

“We might,” I said, which was true. “But first we have a meeting to conclude, with our associates.”

“Your associates?” he scoffed, taking in our table with its odd and animated assortment of humanity: a coronary-inducingly gorgeous showgirl, a slovenly white-haired man in his shirtsleeves, a tall and dowdy middle-aged woman, a short and stodgy middle-aged woman, a stylishly dressed lady of means, a strikingly handsome man with a dramatic profile, and an elegant young black man in a perfectly tailored pinstripe suit. “What line of business yous in, doll?”

“We’re theater people,” I said.

As if we could have been anything else.

—

The following morning I woke up early as usual, suffering from my typical summer-of-1940 hangover. My hair stank of sweat and cigarettes, and my limbs were all tangled up in Celia’s limbs. (We had gone out with the wolf and his friend, after all—as I’m sure you’ll be flabbergasted beyond all reason to hear—and it had been a strenuous night. I felt like I’d just been fished out of the Gowanus Canal.)

I made my way to the kitchen where I found Mr. Herbert sitting with his forehead on the table and his hands folded politely in his lap. This was a new posture for him—a new low in dejectedness, I would say.

“Good morning, Mr. Herbert,” I said.

“I stand ready to review any evidence of it,” he replied, without lifting his forehead from the table.

“How are you feeling today?” I asked.

“Blithesome. Glorious. Exalted. I’m a sultan in his palace.”

He still hadn’t lifted his head.

“How’s the script coming along?”

“Be a humanitarian, Vivian, and stop asking questions.”

—

The next morning, I found Mr. Herbert in the same position—and several of the following mornings, too. I didn’t know how somebody could sit for so long with their forehead on a table without suffering an aneurysm. His mood never lifted, and neither—at least not that I saw—did his skull. Meanwhile, his notebook sat untouched beside him.

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked Peg.

“It’s not easy to write a play, Vivian,” she said. “The problem is, I’m asking him to write something good, and I’ve never asked that of him before. It’s got his head all screwy. But I think of it this way. During the war, the British army engineers always used to say: ‘We can do it, whether it can be done or not.’ That’s how the theater works, too, Vivian. Just like a war! I often ask people to do more than they are capable of—or I used to do, anyway, before I got old and soft. So, yes, I have full confidence in Mr. Herbert.”

I didn’t.

Celia and I came in late one night, drunk as usual, and we tripped over a body that was lying on the living room floor. Celia shrieked. I switched on a light and identified Mr. Herbert, lying there in the middle of the carpet on his back, staring up at the ceiling, with his hands folded over his chest. For an awful moment, I thought he was dead. Then he blinked.

“Mr. Herbert!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

“Prophesizing,” he said, without moving.

“Prophesizing what?” I slurred.

“Doom,” he said.

“Well, then. Have a good night.” I turned off the light.

“Splendid,” he said quietly, as Celia and I stumbled to our room. “I will be certain to do just that.”

—

Meanwhile, as Mr. Herbert suffered, the rest of us went about the business of creating a play that did not yet have a script.

Peg and Benjamin had already gotten to work on the songs, sitting at the grand piano all afternoon, running through melodies and ideas for lyrics.

“I want Edna’s character to be called Mrs. Alabaster,” said Peg. “It sounds ostentatious, and a lot of words can rhyme with it.”

“Plaster, caster, master, bastard, Alabaster,” said Benjamin. “I can work with that.”

“Olive won’t let you say bastard. But go bigger. In the first number, when Mrs. Alabaster has lost all her money, make the song feel overly wordy, to show how fancy she is. Use longer words, to rhyme. Taskmaster. Toastmaster. Oleaster.”

“Or we can have the chorus run through a series of questions about her,” Benjamin suggested. “Like: Who asked her? Who passed her? Who grasped her?”

“Disaster! It attacked her!”

“The Depression, it smacked her—that poor Alabaster.”

“It gassed her. It smashed her. She’s poor as a pastor.”

“Hey there, Peg,” Benjamin suddenly stopping what he was playing. “My father’s a pastor and he’s not poor.”

“I don’t pay you to lift your hands off those piano keys, Benjamin. Keep noodling about. We were just getting somewhere.”

“You don’t pay me at all,” he said, folding his hands in his lap. “You haven’t paid me in three weeks! You haven’t paid anyone, I heard.”

“Is that true?” Peg asked. “What are you living on?”

“Prayers. And your leftover dinner.”

“Sorry, kiddo! I’ll talk to Olive about it. But not right now. Go back and start over, but add that thing you were doing that time when I walked in on you playing the piano, and I liked what I heard. You remember? That Sunday, when the Giants game was playing on the radio?”

“I can’t begin to know what you’re talking about, Peg.”

“Play, Benjamin. Just keep playing. That’s how we’ll find it. After this, I want you to write a song for Celia called ‘I’ll Be a Good Girl Later.’ Do you think you could write a song like that?”

“I can write anything, if you feed me and pay me.”

—

As for me, I was designing costumes for the cast—but mostly for Edna.

Edna was concerned about being “swallowed” by the waistless 1920s dresses that she saw me sketching.

“That style didn’t look good on me back then when I was young and pretty,” she said, “and I can’t see it looking good on me now that I’m old and stale. You have to give me a waistline of some sort. I know it wasn’t the fashion back then, but you’ll have to fake it. Also, my waist is more stoutish right now than I would like it to be. Work around it, please.”

“I don’t think you’re stoutish at all,” I said, and I meant it.

“Oh, but I am. Don’t worry, though—in the week before the show, I’ll live on a diet of rice water, toast, mineral oil, and laxatives, like always. I’ll slim down. But for now, use gussets, so you can tighten my waistline later. If there’s to be a lot of dancing, I’ll need you to create purposeful seams—you understand, don’t you, darling? Nothing can fly loose when I’m in the spotlight. My legs are still good, thank heavens, so don’t be afraid to show them. What else? Oh, yes—my shoulders are narrower than they seem. And my neck is awfully short, so proceed with caution, especially if you’re going to put me in some sort of a large hat. If you make me look like a stubby little French bulldog, Vivian, I’ll never forgive you.”

I had such respect for how well this woman knew the vagaries of her own figure. Most women have no idea what works for them and what doesn’t. But Edna was precision incarnate. Sewing for her, I could see, was going to be its own apprenticeship in costuming.

“You are designing for the stage, Vivian,” she instructed. “Rely upon shape more than detail. Remember that the nearest viewer to me will be ten strides away. You have to think on a large scale. Big colors, clean lines. A costume is a landscape, not a portrait. And I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don’t want the dress to be the star of the show. Don’t outshine me, darling. You understand?”

I did. And oh, how I loved the shape of this conversation. I loved being with Edna. I was becoming quite infatuated with her, if I’m being honest. She had nearly replaced Celia as the central object of my devoted awe. Celia was still exciting, of course, and we still went out on the town, but I didn’t need her so much anymore. Edna had depths of glamour and sophistication that excited me far more than anything Celia could offer.

I would say that Edna was somebody who “spoke my own language” but that’s not quite it, because I was not yet as fluent in fashion as she was. It would be closer to the truth to say that Edna Parker Watson was the first native speaker I’d ever encountered of the language that I wanted to master—the language of outstanding apparel.

—

A few days later, I took Edna to Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions to look for fabrics and ideas. I was a bit nervous about bringing someone of such refined taste to this overwhelming bazaar of noise, material, and color (to be honest, the smell alone would turn off most high-end shoppers), but Edna was instantly thrilled by Lowtsky’s—as only somebody who genuinely understood clothing and materials could be. She was also delighted by young Marjorie Lowtsky, who greeted us at the door with her standard demand: “Whaddaya need?”

Marjorie was the daughter of the owners, and I had come to know her well over my past few months of shopping excursions. She was a bright, energetic, pie-faced fourteen-year-old, who always dressed in the most outlandish costumes. On this day, for instance, she was wearing the craziest getup I’d ever seen—big buckled shoes (like a Pilgrim in a child’s Thanksgiving drawing), a gold brocade cape with a ten-foot train, and a French chef’s hat with a giant fake ruby brooch pinned to it. Underneath all that, her school uniform. She looked patently ridiculous, as always, but Marjorie Lowtsky was not one to be taken lightly. Mr. and Mrs. Lowtsky didn’t speak the best English, so Marjorie had been doing the talking for them since toddlerhood. At her young age, she already knew the rag trade as well as anyone, and could take orders and deliver threats in four languages—Russian, French, Yiddish, and English. She was an odd kid, but I had come to find Marjorie’s help essential.

“We need dresses from the 1920s, Marjorie,” I said. “Really good ones. Rich lady dresses.”

“You wanna start by looking upstairs? In the Collection?”

The archly named “Collection” was a small area on the third floor where the Lowtskys sold their rarest and most precious finds.

“We don’t have the budget just now to even be glancing at the Collection.”

“So you want rich lady dresses but at poor lady prices?”

Edna laughed: “You’ve identified our needs perfectly, my dear.”

“That’s right, Marjorie,” I said. “We’re here to dig, not to spend.”

“Start over there,” Marjorie said, pointing to the back of the building. “The stuff by the loading dock just came in over the last few days. Mama hasn’t even had a chance to look through it yet. You could get lucky.”

—

The bins at Lowtsky’s were not for the faint of heart. These were large industrial laundry bins, crammed with textiles that the Lowtskys bought and sold by the pound—everything from workers’ battered old overalls to tragically stained undergarments, to upholstery remnants, to parachute material, to faded blouses of pongee silk, to French lace serviettes, to heavy old drapes, to your great-grandfather’s precious satin christening gown. Digging through the bins was hard and sweaty work, an act of faith. You had to believe that there was treasure to be found in all this garbage, and you had to hunt for it with conviction.

Edna, much to my admiration, dove right in. I got the sense she’d done this sort of thing before. Side by side, bin by bin, the two of us dug in silence, searching for what we did not know.

About an hour in, I suddenly heard Edna shout “a-ha!” and looked over to see her waving something triumphantly above her head. And triumphant she should have been, for her find turned out to be a 1920s crimson silk-chiffon and velvet-trimmed robe de style evening dress, embellished with glass beading and gold thread.

“Oh, my!” I exclaimed. “It’s perfect for Mrs. Alabaster!”

“Indeed,” said Edna. “And feast your eyes upon this.” She turned over the back collar of the garment to reveal the original label: Lanvin, Paris. “Somebody très riche bought this dress in France twenty years ago, I’ll wager, and barely wore it, by the looks of it. Delicious. How it will glint on stage!”

In a flash, Marjorie Lowtsky was at our side.

“Say, what’d you kids find in there?” asked the only actual kid in the room.

“Don’t you start with me, Marjorie,” I warned. I was only half teasing—suddenly afraid she was going to snatch the dress away from us to sell in the Collection upstairs. “Play by the rules. Edna found this dress in the bins, fair and square.”

Marjorie shrugged. “All’s fair in love and war,” she said. “But it’s a good one. Just make sure you bury it under a heap of trash when mama rings it up. She’d murder me if she knew I let that one get away from us. Lemme get you a sack and some rags, to hide it.”

“Aw, Marjorie, thanks,” I said. “You’re my top-notch girl.”

“You and me, we’re always in cahoots,” she said, rewarding me with a crooked grin. “Just keep your mouth shut. You wouldn’t want me getting fired.”

As Marjorie wandered off, Edna stared at her in wonder. “Did that child just say, ‘All’s fair in love and war’?”

“I told you that you’d like Lowtsky’s,” I said.

“Well, I do like Lowtsky’s! And I adore this dress. And what have you found, my dear?”

I handed her a flimsy negligee, in a vivid, eye-injuring shade of fuchsia. She took it, held it up against her body, and winced.

“Oh, no, darling. You cannot put me in that. The audience will suffer from it even more than I will.”

“No, Edna, it’s not for you. It’s for Celia,” I said. “For the seduction scene.”

“Dear me. Oh, yes. That makes more sense.” Edna took a more careful look at the negligee and shook her head. “Goodness, Vivian, if you parade that girl around stage in this tiny getup, we are going to have a hit. Men will be lined up for miles. I’d best get started on my rice-water diet soon, or else nobody will be paying attention to my poor little figure at all!”

ELEVEN

I turned twenty years old on October 7, 1940.

I celebrated my first birthday in New York City exactly as you might imagine I would: I went out with the showgirls; we gave the jump to some playboys; we drank rank after rank of cocktails on other people’s dime; we had tumults of fun; and the next thing you know we were trying to get home before the sun came up, feeling as if we were swimming upstream through bilgewater.

I slept for about eight minutes, it seemed, and then woke to the oddest sensation in my room. Something felt off. I was hungover, of course—quite possibly still even officially drunk—but still, something was strange. I reached for Celia, to see if she was there with me. My hand brushed against her familiar flesh. So all was normal on that front.

Except that I smelled smoke.

Pipe smoke.

I sat up, and my head instantly regretted the decision. I lay back down on the pillow, took a few brave breaths, apologized to my skull for the assault, and tried again, more slowly and respectfully this time.

As my eyes focused in the dim morning light, I could see a figure sitting in a chair across the room. A male figure. Smoking a pipe, and looking at us.

Had Celia brought someone home with her? Had I?

I felt a heave of panic. Celia and I were libertines, as I’ve well established, but I’d always had just enough respect for Peg (or fear of Olive, more like it) not to allow men to visit our bedroom upstairs at the Lily. How had this happened?

“Imagine my delight,” said the stranger, lighting his pipe again, “to come home and find two girls in my bed! And both of you so stunning. It’s as though I went to my icebox to get milk and discovered a bottle of champagne, instead. Two bottles of champagne, to be exact.”

My mind still couldn’t register.

Until then, suddenly, it could.

“Uncle Billy?” I asked.

“Oh, are you my niece?” the man said, and he started laughing. “Damn it. That limits our possibilities considerably. What’s your name, love?”

“I’m Vivian Morris.”

“Ohhhh . . .” he said. “Now this makes sense. You are my niece. How disheartening. I suppose the family wouldn’t approve if I ravaged you. I might not even approve of myself if I ravaged you—I’ve become so moral in my old age. Alas, alas. Is the other one my niece, too? I hope not. She doesn’t look like she could be anyone’s niece.”

“This one is Celia,” I said, gesturing to Celia’s beautiful, unconscious form. “She’s my friend.”

“Your very particular friend,” Billy said, in an amused tone, “if one is to judge from the sleeping arrangements. How modern of you, Vivian! I approve heartily. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your parents. Though I’m sure they’d find a way to blame me for it, if they ever found out.”

I stammered, “I’m sorry about . . .”

I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. I’m sorry about taking over your apartment? I’m sorry about commandeering your bed? I’m sorry about the still-wet stockings that we’ve hung from your fireplace mantel to dry? I’m sorry for the orange makeup stains that we’ve smeared into your white carpet?

“Oh, it’s quite all right. I don’t live here. The Lily is Peg’s baby, not mine. I always stay at the Knickerbocker Club. I’ve never let my dues lapse, though God knows it’s expensive. It’s quieter there, and I don’t have to report to Olive.”

“But these are your rooms.”

“In name only, thanks to the kindness of your Aunt Peg. I just came by this morning to get my typewriter, which, now that I mention it, appears to be missing.”

“I put it in the linen closet, in the outside hallway.”

“Did you? Well, make yourself at home, girlie.”

“I’m sorry—” I started to say, but he cut me off again.

“I’m joking. You can keep the place. I don’t come to New York much, anyhow. I don’t like the climate. It gives me a raw throat. And this city is a hell of a place for ruining your best pair of white shoes.”

I had so many questions, but I couldn’t formulate any of them with my dry and foul-tasting mouth, through the buzzing haze of my gin-soaked brain. What was Uncle Billy doing here? Who had let him in? Why was he wearing a tuxedo at this hour? And what was I wearing? Apparently nothing but a slip—and not even my own slip, but Celia’s. So what was she wearing? And where was my dress?

“Well, I’ve had my fun here,” said Billy. “Enjoyed my little fantasy of angels in my bed. But now that I realize you’re my ward, I’ll leave you be and see if I can find some coffee in this place. You look like you could use some coffee, yourself, girlie. May I say—I do hope you’re getting this drunk every night and tumbling into bed with beautiful women. There could be no better use of your time. You make me awfully proud to be your uncle. We’ll get along famously.”

As he headed to the door, he asked, “What time does Peg get up, by the way?”

“Usually around seven,” I said.

“Capital,” he said, looking at his watch. “Can’t wait to see her.”

“But how did you get here?” I asked, dumbly.

What I meant was, how did you get into this building (which was a silly question, because of course Peg would’ve made sure that her husband—or ex-husband, or whatever he was—had a set of keys). But he took the question more broadly.

“I took the Twentieth Century Limited. That’s the only way to get from Los Angeles to New York in comfort, if you’ve got the peanuts for it. Train stopped in Chicago, to pick up some slaughterhouse high-society types. Doris Day was in the same carriage with me, the whole ride. We played gin rummy, all the way across the Great Plains. Doris is good company, you know. A great girl. Much more fun than you’d think, given her saintly reputation. Arrived last night, went right to my club, got a manicure and a haircut, went out to see some old robbers and derelicts and ne’er-do-wells that I used to know, then came here to pick up my typewriter and say hello to the family. Get yourself a robe, girlie, and come help me scare up some breakfast in this joint. You won’t want to miss what happens next.”

—

Once I was able to rouse myself and get vertical, I headed to the kitchen, where I encountered the most unusual pairing of men I’d ever seen.

There was Mr. Herbert sitting at one end of the table, wearing his usual sad trousers and undershirt, his white hair tousled and hopeless looking, his customary Sanka in a mug before him. At the other end of the table was my Uncle Billy—tall, slim, sporting a sharp-looking tuxedo and a golden California tan. Billy was not so much sitting in the kitchen as lounging in it, taking up space with an air of luxurious pleasure while enjoying his highball of scotch. There was something of Errol Flynn about him—if Errol Flynn couldn’t be bothered to swashbuckle.

In short: one of these men looked like he was about to go to work on a coal wagon; the other looked like he was about to go on a date with Rosalind Russell.

“Good morning, Mr. Herbert,” I said, as per our habit.

“I would be shocked to discover that was true,” he replied.

“I couldn’t find the coffee and I couldn’t stomach the idea of Sanka,” Billy explained, “so I settled on scotch. Any port in a storm. You might want a nip yourself, Vivian. You look as though you’ve got a heck of a sore dome.”

“I’ll be all right once I make myself some coffee,” I said, not really convinced of this fact myself.

“So Peg tells me you’ve been working on a script,” Billy said to Mr. Herbert. “I’d love to have a look at it.”

“There’s not much to see,” said Mr. Herbert, glancing sorrowfully toward the notebook that sat before him.

“May I?” Billy asked, reaching for the notebook.

“I’d rather you . . . oh, never mind,” said Mr. Herbert—a man who always managed to be defeated before the battle had even begun.

Billy slowly paged through Mr. Herbert’s notebook. The silence was excruciating. Mr. Herbert stared at the floor.

“It looks as though these are just lists of jokes,” Billy said. “Not even jokes, all of them, but punch lines. And a lot of drawings of birds.”

Mr. Herbert shrugged in surrender. “If any better ideas should develop themselves, I’m hoping to be alerted.”

“The birds aren’t bad, anyway.” Billy set down the notebook.

I was feeling protective of poor Mr. Herbert, whose response to Billy’s teasing was to look even more tortured than usual, so I said, “Mr. Herbert, have you met Billy Buell? This is Peg’s husband.”

Billy laughed. “Oh, don’t you worry, girlie. Donald and I have known each other for years. He’s my attorney, actually—or used to be, when they still let him practice law—and I’m Donald Jr.’s godfather. Or used to be. Donald’s just feeling nervous because he knows I’ve arrived unannounced. He’s not sure how that’s going to go over with the upper-echelon management around here.”

Donald! It had never occurred to me that Mr. Herbert had a first name.

Speaking of upper-echelon management, at that very moment in walked Olive.

She took two steps into the kitchen, saw Billy Buell sitting there, opened her mouth, closed her mouth, and walked out.

We all sat in silence for a moment after she left. That had been quite an entrance—and quite an exit.

“You’ll have to excuse Olive,” said Billy at last. “She’s not accustomed to being this excited to see someone.”

Mr. Herbert put his forehead back down on the kitchen table and literally said, “Oh, moan, moan, moan.”

“Don’t worry about me and Olive, Donald. We’ll be fine. She and I respect each other, which makes up for the fact that we dislike each other. Or, rather, I respect her. So that’s something we share, at least. We have an excellent relationship based on a deep history of profound one-way respect, and plenty of it.”

Billy took out his pipe, scratched a match into flame with his thumbnail, and turned to me.

“How are your parents, Vivian?” Billy asked. “Your mother and the mustache? I always liked them. Well, I liked your mother. What an impressive woman, that one. She’s careful never to say anything nice about anyone, but I think she was fond of me, too. Don’t ever ask her if she likes me, of course. She’ll be forced by propriety to deny it. I never warmed to your father. Such a stiff man. I used to call him the Deacon—but only behind his back, of course, out of politeness. Anyway. How are they?”

“They’re doing well.”

“Still married?”

I nodded, but the question took me aback. It had never occurred to me that my parents could be anything but married.

“They never have affairs, do they—your parents?”

“My parents? Affairs? No!”

“That can’t hold much novelty for them, can it?”

“Umm . . .”

“Have you been to California, Vivian?” he asked, thankfully changing the subject.

“No.”

“You should come. You’d love it. They have the best orange juice. Also, the weather is outstanding. East Coast people like us do well out there. The Californians think we’re so refined. They give us the sun and the moon, just for classing up the joint. You tell them you went to boarding school and you’ve got Mayflower ancestors in New England, and you might as well be a Plantagenet, as far as they’re concerned. Come at them with a blue-blood accent like yours, and they’ll give you the keys to the city. If you can play a decent game of tennis or golf, that’s almost enough to get a man a career—unless he drinks too much.”

I was finding this to be a very quick-paced conversation for seven o’clock on the morning after my birthday festivities. I’m afraid I might have been just staring at him, blinking, but honestly, I was doing my best to keep up.

Also: did I have a blue-blood accent?

“How are you entertaining yourself around the Lily, Vivian?” he asked. “Have you found a way to be useful?”

“I sew,” I said. “I make costumes.”

“That’s smart. You’ll always find work in the theater if you can do that, and you’ll never age out of it. What you don’t want to be is an actress. What about your beautiful friend in there? Is she an actress?”

“Celia? She’s a showgirl.”

“That’s a tough gig. There’s something about a showgirl that always breaks my heart. Youth and beauty—they’re such a short lease, girlie. Even if you’re the most beautiful girl in the room right now, there are ten new beauties coming up behind you all the time—younger ones, fresher ones. While the older ones are rotting on the vine, still waiting to be discovered. But your friend, she’ll leave her mark while she can. She’ll destroy man after man in some great romantic death march, and maybe someone will write songs about her, or kill himself for her, but soon enough it will end. If she’s lucky, she might marry a rich old fossil—not that this fate is anything to envy. If she’s very lucky, her old fossil will die on the golf course one fine afternoon and leave her everything while she’s still young enough to enjoy it. The pretty girls always know it will end soon, too. They can feel how provisional it all is. So I hope she’s having a good time being young and beautiful. Is she having a good time?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

I didn’t know anybody who had a better time than Celia.

“Good. I hope you’re having a good time, too. People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian—squander it.”

—

That’s when Aunt Peg walked in, bundled up in her plaid flannel bathrobe, her hair pointing in every direction.

“Pegsy!” cried Billy, leaping up from the table. His face was instantly bright with joy. All the nonchalance was gone in a heartbeat.

“Forgive me, sir, but your name escapes me,” said Peg.

But she was smiling, too, and in the next moment they were embracing. It wasn’t a romantic embrace, I would say, but it was robust. This was an embrace of love—or at least very strong feeling. They pulled back from the embrace and just looked at each other for a while, holding each other lightly by the forearms. When they stood like that together, I could see something profoundly unexpected, for the first time: I could see that Peg was kind of beautiful. I’d never noticed it before. She had such a shine on her face, looking at Billy, that it changed her whole countenance. (It wasn’t merely the reflected light off his good looks, either.) Standing in his radius, she looked like a different woman. I could see in her face a hint of the brave young girl who went off to France to be a nurse during the war. I could see the adventurer who’d spent a decade on the road with a cheap theatrical touring company. It wasn’t only that she suddenly looked ten years younger; she also looked like the most fun gal in town.

“I thought I’d pay you a visit, honey,” Billy said.

“So Olive informed me. You might have let me know.”

“I didn’t want to bother you. And I didn’t want you to tell me not to come. I figured it’d be best if I made my own arrangements. I have a secretary now, who takes care of everything for me. She made all the travel plans. Jean-Marie is her name. She’s bright, efficient, devoted. You’d love her, Peg. She’s like a female version of Olive.”

Peg pulled away from him. “Jesus, Billy, you never quit.”

“Hey, don’t be sore at me! I’m just teasing. You know I can’t help it. I’m just nervous, Pegsy. I’m afraid you’ll throw me out, honey, and I just got here.”

Mr. Herbert stood up from the kitchen table, said, “I’m going somewhere else now,” and left.

Peg took Mr. Herbert’s seat and helped herself to a sip of his cold Sanka. She frowned at the cup, so I got up to make her a fresh cup of coffee. I wasn’t sure if I should even be in the kitchen at this sensitive moment, but then Peg said, “Good morning, Vivian. Did you enjoy your birthday celebration?”

“A bit too much,” I said.

“And you’ve met your Uncle Billy?”

“Yes, we’ve been talking.”

“Oh, dear. Be careful not to absorb anything he tells you.”

“Peg,” said Billy, “you look gorgeous.”

She ran a hand through her cropped hair and smiled—a big smile that settled deeply into her lined face. “That’s quite a compliment, for a woman like me.”

“There is no woman like you. I’ve checked into it. Doesn’t exist.”

“Billy,” she said, “give it a rest.”

“Never.”

“So what are you doing here, Billy? Do you have a job in the city?”

“No job. I’m on civilian furlough. I couldn’t resist making the trip when you told me Edna was here, and that you’re trying to make a good show for her. I haven’t seen Edna since 1919. Christ, I’d love to see her. I adore that woman. And when you told me you’d enlisted Donald Herbert to write the script, of all people, I knew I had to come back east and rescue you.”

“Thank you. That’s terribly kind of you. But if I needed rescue, Billy, I’d let you know. I promise. You’d be the fourteenth or fifteenth person I’d call.”

He grinned. “But still on the list!”

Peg lit a cigarette and handed it to me, then lit another one for herself. “What are you working on out there in Hollywood?”

“A bunch of nothing. Everything I write is proudly stamped NSA—No Significance Attempted. I’m bored. But they pay me well. Enough to keep me comfortable. Me and my simple needs.”

Peg burst out laughing. “Your simple needs. Your famously simple needs. Yes, Billy, you’re quite the renunciate. Practically a monk.”

“I’m a man of humble tastes, as you know,” said Billy.

“Himself, who comes to the breakfast table dressed like he’s about to be knighted. Himself, with his house in Malibu. How many swimming pools do you have now?”

“None. I just borrow Joan Fontaine’s.”

“And what does Joan get out of that arrangement?”

“The pleasure of my company.”

“Jesus, Billy, she’s married. She’s Brian’s wife. He’s your friend.”

“I love married women, Peg. You know that. Ideally, happily married ones. A happily married woman is the most solid friend a man could ever have. Don’t worry, Pegsy—Joan is just a pal. Brian Aherne is in no danger from the likes of me.”

I could not stop looking from Peg to Billy and back again, trying to imagine these two as a romantic couple. They didn’t look like they belonged together physically—but their conversation flickered so bright and sharp. The teasing, the jabs of knowing, the fullness of the attention they gave each other. The intimacy was more than obvious, but what were they, within that intimacy? Lovers? Friends? Siblings? Rivals? Who knew? I gave up trying to figure it out and just watched the lightning flash between them.

“I’d like to spend some time with you while I’m here, Pegsy,” he said. “It’s been too long.”

“Who is she?” Peg asked.

“Who is who?”

“The woman who just left you, which has caused you to feel so suddenly nostalgic and lonely for me. Come on, spill it: who was the latest Miss Billy to leave your side?”

“I’m insulted. You think you know me so well.”

Peg just gazed at him, waiting.

“If you must know,” said Billy, “her name was Camilla.”

“A dancer, I boldly predict,” said Peg.

“Ha! There’s where you’re wrong! A swimmer! She works in a mermaid show. We had a pretty serious thing going for a few weeks, but then she decided to take another path in life, and she no longer comes around.”

Peg started laughing. “A pretty serious thing, for a few weeks. Listen to you.”

“Let’s go out together while I’m here, Pegsy. Just you and me. Let’s go out and allow some jazz musicians to waste their talents on us. Let’s go to some of those bars we used to like, that close at eight o’clock in the morning. It’s no fun going out without you. I went to El Morocco last night and I found it so disappointing—filled with all the same people as ever, making all the same conversation as ever.”

Peg smiled. “Lucky for you that you live in Hollywood, where the conversation is so much more varied and engaging! But no, no, no. We shan’t be going out, Billy. I don’t have that kind of durability anymore. That kind of drinking isn’t good for me, anyhow. You know that.”

“Really? You’re telling me you and Olive don’t get drunk together?”

“You’re joking, but since you asked—no. Here’s how it works around here now: I try to get drunk and Olive tries to stop it from happening. It’s a good arrangement for me. Not sure what Olive gets out of it, but I’m awfully glad she’s there to be my guard dog.”

“Listen, Peg—at least let me help you with the show. You know that this pile of pages is a long way from being a script.” Billy tapped a manicured finger on Mr. Herbert’s dismal notebook. “And you know Donald can’t get it any closer to being a script, no matter how hard he tries. You can’t squeeze this out of him. So let me go at it with my typewriter and my big blue pencil. You know I can do this. Let’s make a great play. Let’s give Edna something worthy of her talents.”

“Shush.” Peg had put her hands over her face.

“Come on, Peg. Take a risk.”

“Hush,” she said. “I’m thinking at the top of my lungs.”

Billy hushed and waited her out.

“I can’t pay you,” she said, finally looking up at him again.

“I’m independently wealthy, Peg. That’s always been a talent of mine.”

“You can’t own the rights to anything that we make here. Olive won’t stand for it.”

“You can have all of it, Peg. And you might even make a nice lump of brass off this venture, too. If you’ll only let me write this show for you—and if it’s as good as I think it could be—why, you’ll make so much money, your ancestors will never have to work again.”

“You’ll have to put that in writing—that you’re not expecting to earn anything out of this. Olive will insist on it. And we’ll have to produce it on my budget, not yours. I don’t want to get tangled up with your money again. It never ends well for me. Those have to be the rules, Billy. It’s the only way Olive will let you stick around.”

“Isn’t it your theater, Peg?”

“Technically, yes. But I can’t do anything without Olive, Billy. You know that. She’s essential.”

“Essential but bothersome.”

“Yes, but you are only one of those things. I need Olive. I don’t need you. That’s always been the difference between you.”

“By God—that Olive! Such staying power! I never could understand what you saw in her—other than that she comes dashing to serve you whenever you have the smallest need. That must be the appeal. I never could offer you such loyalty, I suppose. Solid as furniture, that Olive. But she doesn’t trust me.”

“Yes. Precisely true on all counts.”

“Honestly, Peg—I don’t know why that woman doesn’t trust me. I’m very, very, very trustworthy.”

“The more ‘very’s’ you use, Billy, the less trustworthy you sound. You do know that, right?”

Billy laughed. “I do know that. But, Peg—you know that I can write this script with my left hand while playing tennis with my right hand and bouncing a ball off my nose like a trained seal.”

“Without spilling a drop of your booze in the process.”

“Without spilling a drop of your booze,” corrected Billy, lifting his glass. “I took this from your bar.”

“Better you than me at this hour.”

“I want to see Edna. Is she awake?”

“She doesn’t get up till later. Let her sleep. Her country is at war and she just lost her house and everything. She deserves some rest.”

“I’ll come back, then. I’ll head back to the club, take a shower, have a rest, come back later, and we’ll get started. Hey, thanks for giving my apartment away, I forgot to mention! Your niece and her girlfriend have stolen my bed and thrown their underwear all over my precious place that I never once used. It smells like a bomb went off in a perfume factory in there.”

“I’m sorry,” I began, but both of them waved at me dismissively, cutting me off. It obviously didn’t matter in the least. I’m not sure I mattered in the least, when Peg and Billy were so focused on each other. I was lucky I got to be sitting there at all. It occurred to me that I should just keep my mouth shut so I would get to stay.

“What’s her husband like, by the way?” Billy asked Peg.

“Edna’s husband? Apart from being stupid and talentless, he has no faults. I will say he’s alarmingly good-looking.”

“That, I knew. I’ve seen him act, if you can call it acting. I saw him in Gates of Noon. He’s got the vacant eyes of a milk cow, but he looked like a million bucks in his aviator scarf. What’s he like as a person? Is he faithful to her?”

“I’ve never heard otherwise.”

“Well, that’s a thing, isn’t it?” said Billy.

Peg smiled. “Yes, it’s a real marvel, isn’t it, Billy? Imagine! Fidelity! But yes, that’s a thing. So she could do worse, I suppose.”

“And probably will someday,” added Billy.

“She thinks he’s a great actor, is the problem.”

“He has offered the world no evidence of this fact. Bottom line—do we have to put him in the show?”

Peg smiled, ruefully this time. “It’s slightly disconcerting to hear you use the word ‘we.’”

“Why is that? I’m simply crazy about that word.” He grinned.

“Until the moment you stop being crazy about it, and you disappear,” she said. “Are you really part of this venture now, Billy? Or will you be on the next train back to Los Angeles as soon as you grow bored?”

“If you’ll have me, I’ll be part of it. I’ll be good. I’ll behave as if I’m on parole.”

“You should be on parole. And yes, we do have to put Arthur Watson in the play. You’ll figure out a way to use him. He’s a handsome man who isn’t very bright, so have him play the role of a handsome man who isn’t very bright. You’re the one who taught me that rule, Billy—that we must work with what we have. What did you always tell me, when we were on the road? You’d say, ‘If all we’ve got is a fat lady and a stepladder, I’ll write a play called The Fat Lady and the Stepladder.’”

“I can’t believe you still remember that!” said Billy. “And The Fat Lady and the Stepladder is not such a bad title for a play, if I do say so myself.”

“You do say so yourself. You always do.”

Billy reached over and laid his hand on top of hers. She let him do it.

“Pegsy,” he said, and that one word—the way he said it—seemed to contain decades of love.

“William,” she said, and that one word—the way she said it—also seemed to contain decades of love. But also decades of exasperation.

“Olive’s not too upset that I’m here?” he asked.

She took back her hand.

“Do us a favor, Billy? Don’t pretend to care. I love you, but I hate it when you pretend to care.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I care a lot more than people think I care.”

TWELVE

Within a week of his arrival, Billy Buell had written a script for City of Girls.

A week is an awfully short time in which to write a script, or so I’ve been told, but Billy worked nonstop on it, sitting at our kitchen table in a cloud of pipe smoke, clattering away steadily at his typewriter till the thing was done. Say what you want about Billy Buell, but the man knew how to bang out words. Moreover, he didn’t seem to suffer at all during his creative burst—no crises of confidence, no tearing at the hair. He hardly paused to think, or so it appeared. He just sat there in his fine doeskin trousers, and his bright white cashmere sweater, and his spotless ecru Maxwell’s of London custom-made shoes, calmly typing away as though taking dictation from some invisible and divine source.

“He’s monstrously talented, you know,” Peg said to me, as we sat in the living room one afternoon, making sketches for costumes and listening to Billy’s typing in the kitchen. “He’s the kind of man who makes everything look easy. Hell, he even makes it look easy to make things easy. He produces ideas in torrents. The problem is, you can usually only get Billy to work when his Rolls-Royce needs a new engine, or when he gets back from vacationing in Italy and notices that his bank account is down a few bucks. Monstrously talented, but also monstrously inclined toward laziness. That’s what you get for coming from the lolling-about class, I suppose.”

“So why is he working so hard now?” I asked.

“I’m not able to say,” said Peg. “Could be because he loves Edna. Could be because he loves me. Could be because he needs something from me and we just don’t know what it is yet. Could be because he’s gotten bored out there in California, or even lonely. I’m not going to examine his motives too fiercely. I’m glad he’s doing the job, in any case. But the important thing is not to count on him for anything in the future. By future, I mean ‘tomorrow’ or ‘in the next hour’—because you never know when he’s going to lose interest and vanish. Billy doesn’t like it when you count on him. If I ever want privacy from Billy, I’ll just tell him that I desperately need him for something, and then he’ll run straight out the door and I won’t see him for another four years.”

—

The script was intact on the day Billy typed the last word. I don’t recall him editing any of it. And his script didn’t just have dialogue and stage directions; it also included lyrics of the songs that Billy wanted Benjamin to write.

And it was a good script—or at least I thought so, based on my limited experience. But even I could understand that Billy’s writing was bright and funny, fast-paced and upbeat. I could see why 20th Century Fox kept him on payroll, and why Louella Parsons had once written in her column: “Everything Billy Buell touches is box office! Even in Europe!”

Billy’s version of City of Girls was still the tale of one Mrs. Elenora Alabaster—a wealthy widow who loses all her money in the crash of 1929 and transforms her mansion into a casino and bordello in order to keep herself afloat.

But Billy added some interesting new characters, as well. Now the play also included Mrs. Alabaster’s fantastically snobbish daughter, Victoria (who would sing a comic song at the beginning of the show called “Mummy Is a Rumrunner”). There was also a gold-digging, penniless aristocrat of a cousin from England, played by Arthur Watson, who is trying to win Victoria’s hand in marriage, in order to lay claim to the family mansion. (“You can’t have Arthur Watson playing an American police officer,” Billy explained to Peg. “Nobody would believe it. He has to be a British dolt. He’ll like this role better, anyway—he gets to wear finer suits and he can pretend to be important.”)

The romantic male lead would be a scrappy young kid from the wrong side of the tracks named Lucky Bobby, who used to fix Mrs. Alabaster’s cars but who now helps her set up an illegal casino in her home—the result being that they both get stinking rich. The romantic female lead was a dazzling showgirl named Daisy. Daisy has a body that won’t quit, but her simple dream is to get married and have a dozen children. (“Let Me Knit Your Booties, Baby,” would be her signature song—performed in the manner of a striptease.) That role, of course, would be played by Celia Ray.

At the end of the play, Daisy the showgirl ends up with Lucky Bobby, and the two of them head off to Yonkers to have a dozen babies together. The snobbish daughter falls in love with the toughest gangster in town, learns how to shoot a machine gun, and goes on a bank-robbing spree in order to finance her expensive tastes. (Her big number is “I’m Down to My Last Pint of Diamonds.”) The shady cousin from England is banished back to his shores without inheriting the mansion. And Mrs. Alabaster falls in love with the mayor of the city—a real law-and-order type, who has been trying and failing to shut down her speakeasy throughout the entire production. The two of them get married, and the mayor resigns his political post in order to become her bartender. (Their final duet, which would turn into the big closing number for the whole cast, was called “Let’s Make Ours a Double.”)

There were some new smaller roles in the play, too. There would be a purely comical drunkard character who pretends to be blind so he doesn’t have to work, but who is still a mighty fine poker player and pickpocket. (Billy talked Mr. Herbert into taking the role: “If you can’t write the script, Donald, at least be in the damn play!”) There would be the showgirl’s mother—an old floozy who still wants to be in the spotlight. (“Call Me Mrs. Casanova” was her signature tune.) There would be a banker, trying to repossess the mansion. And there would be a large company of dancers and singers—far more than our usual four boys and four girls, if Billy had anything to say about it—in order to make the play into a bigger and more energized production.

—

Peg loved the script.

“I can’t write for free seeds,” she said, “but I know what a smashing story is, and this is a smashing story.”

Edna loved it, too. Billy had transformed Mrs. Alabaster from a mere caricature of a society dame into a woman of real wit and intelligence and irony. Edna had all the funniest lines in the play, and she was in every single scene.

“Billy!” exclaimed Edna, after reading the script for the first time. “This is delightful, but you’re spoiling me! Doesn’t anyone else in the show get to speak?”

“Why would I take you offstage for a moment?” Billy said to her. “If I have the chance to work with Edna Parker Watson, I want the world to know I’m working with Edna Parker Watson.”

“You’re a dear,” said Edna. “But I haven’t performed comedy in so long, Billy. I’m afraid I’ll be quite stale.”

“The trick of comedy,” said Billy, “is not to perform it in a comic manner. Don’t try to be funny, and you’ll be funny. Just do that effortless thing you Brits do, of throwing away half the lines as though you can scarcely be bothered to care, and it’ll be brilliant. Comedy is always best when it’s thrown away.”

It was interesting to watch Edna and Billy interact. They had a real friendship, it appeared—based not only on teasing and playfulness, but on mutual respect. They admired each other’s talents, and genuinely had a good time together. The first night they saw each other, Billy had said to Edna, “Very much of little consequence has transpired since last we met, my dear. Let’s sit down for a drink and talk about none of it.”

To which she had replied, “There is nothing I would rather not talk about, Billy, and nobody whom I would rather not talk about it with!”

Billy once told me, in front of Edna, “So many men had the pleasure of having their hearts broken by our dear Edna, back when I knew her in London so long ago. I didn’t happen to be one of them, but that’s only because I was already in love with Peg. But back in her prime, Edna cut down man after man. It was something to see. Plutocrats, artists, generals, politicians—she mowed them all to bits.”

“No, I didn’t,” Edna protested—while smiling in a manner that suggested: Yes, I did.

“I used to love to watch you break a man apart, Edna,” Billy said. “You did it so beautifully. You broke them with such force that they would be enfeebled forever, and then some other woman could come and scoop them up and control them. It was a service to humanity, really. I know she looks like a little doll, Vivian, but never underestimate this woman. She is to be respected. Be aware that there’s an iron spine hidden under all those stylish clothes of hers.”

“You give me far too much credit, Billy,” said Edna—but again, she smiled in a manner that suggested: You, sir, are absolutely correct.

—

A few weeks later, I was fitting Edna in my apartment. The dress I’d designed was for her final scene. Edna wanted it to be sensational, and so did I. “Make me a dress I have to live up to” had been her direct instruction—and forgive my boasting, but I had done it.

It was an evening gown composed of two layers of robin’s-egg-blue silk soufflé, draped with sheer rhinestone netting. (I’d found a bolt of the silk at Lowtsky’s and had spent nearly all my personal savings on it.) The dress sparkled with every movement—not in a garish way, but like light reflected on water. The silk clung to Edna’s figure without clinging too hard (she was in her fifties, after all) and there was a slit up the right side so she could dance. The effect was to make Edna look like a fairy queen, out for a night on the town.

Edna loved it, and was spinning in the mirror, to capture every twinkle and gleam.

“I swear, Vivian, you’ve somehow made me look tall, though I can’t credit how you’ve done it. And that blue is so refreshingly youthful. I was petrified you would put me in black, and I would look as though I should be embalmed. Oh, I cannot wait to show this dress to Billy. He has the best comprehension of women’s fashion of any man I’ve ever met. He’ll be just as excited as I am. I’ll tell you something about your uncle, Vivian. Billy Buell is that rare man who claims to love women and actually does.”

“Celia says he’s a playboy,” I said.

“But of course he’s a playboy, darling. What handsome man worth his salt is not? Though Billy is a special sort. There are a million playboys out there, you must understand, but they don’t typically enjoy a woman’s company past the obvious gratifications. A man who gets to conquer all the women he wants, but who does not prize any of them? Now, that is a man to be avoided. But Billy genuinely likes women, whether he’s vanquishing them or not. We’ve always had a wonderful time together, he and I. He’d be just as happy talking with me about fashion as trying to seduce me. And he writes the most delicious dialogue for women, which most men cannot. Most male playwrights can’t create a woman for the stage who does anything more than seduce or weep or be loyal to their husbands, and that’s awfully dull.”

“Olive thinks he’s not trustworthy.”

“She’s wrong about that. You can trust Billy. You can absolutely trust him to be himself. Olive just doesn’t like what he is.”

“And what is he?”

Edna paused and thought about it. “He’s free,” she decided. “You won’t meet many people in life who are, Vivian. He’s a person who does quite as he pleases, and I find that refreshing. Olive is a more regimented soul by nature—and thank goodness for it, or nothing around here would function—and thus she’s suspicious of anyone who is free. But I myself enjoy being around the free. They excite me. The other magical thing about Billy, I dare say, is that he’s so handsome. I do love a handsome man, Vivian—as surely you have already gathered. It’s always been a pleasure just to be in the room with Billy’s handsomeness. But with that charm of his, beware! If he ever puts the full game on you, you’re a dead pigeon.”

I had to wonder if Billy had ever “put the full game” on Edna, but I was too polite to pursue it. I did, however, have the courage to ask: “About Peg and Billy . . . ?”

I wasn’t even sure how to finish the question, but Edna instantly understood my gist.

“You’re wondering about the nature of their alliance?” She smiled. “All I can tell you is that they do love each other. Always have. They are so similar in intellect and humor, you see. They used to positively spark off each other when they were younger. If you were a non-initiate into their brand of wit, it could be intimidating—one never quite knew how to jump into the mix. But Billy adores Peg and always did. Now, to be loyal to just one woman would be awfully narrowing to a man like Billy Buell, of course, but his heart has always belonged to her. And they delight in working together—as soon you shall see. The only problem is that Billy has a deft hand with chaos, and I’m not certain that Peg is seeking chaos anymore. These days, she wants loyalty more than fun.”

“But are they still married?” I asked.

By which I meant, of course: Do they still sleep together?

“Married by whose standard?” Edna asked, folding her arms and looking at me with her head tilted. When I didn’t answer the question, she smiled again and said, “There are subtleties, my dear. You will discover as you get older that there’s practically nothing but subtleties. And I hate to disappoint you, but it’s best you learn now: most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial. Still and all, love must be respected, and Billy and Peg possess true love. Now if you could fix this belt for me, darling, and find a way to stop it bunching about my ribs whenever I lift my arms, I will absolutely die with gratitude.”

—

Because Edna’s prestige was going to elevate the tone of the play, Billy was convinced that the rest of the production had to be of equal quality to its star. (“The Lily Playhouse just got her pedigree papers” was how he described the situation. “This is a whole new dog show, kids.”) Everything we created for City of Girls, he instructed, would have to be far better than what we were accustomed to creating.

This would not be easily achieved, of course, given what we were accustomed to creating.

Billy had sat through a few nights of Dance Away, Jackie! and he made no secret of his disdain for our current troupe of players.

“They’re garbage, honey,” he said to Peg.

“Don’t butter me up,” she said. “I’ll think you’re trying to get me into bed.”

“They are twenty-four-carat garbage, and you know it.”

“Just give it to me straight, Billy. Stop flattering me.”

“The showgirls are fine as they are, because they don’t need to do anything other than look good,” he said. “So they can stay. The actors are vile, though. We’ll need to get some new talent in here. The dancers are cute enough, and they all look like they come from bad families, which I like . . . but they’re so heavy on their feet. It’s assaulting. I love their tarty little faces, but let’s keep them in the background and bring in some real dancers to put up front—at least six. Right now, the only dancer I can stand to watch footing around the front of the stage is that fairy, Roland. He’s terrific. But I need everyone else to be of his caliber.”

In fact, Billy was so impressed with Roland’s charisma that he’d initially wanted to give the boy a song of his own to sing, called “Maybe in the Navy”—a tune that would seem to be about a boy wanting to join the Navy in order to pursue a life of adventure, but would actually be a clever and veiled reference to Roland’s very obvious homosexuality. (“I’m picturing something like ‘You’re the Top’” is how Billy had explained it to us. “You know, a suggestive little double entendre of a song.”) But Olive had instantly shut down the idea.

“Come now, Olive,” Peg had begged. “Let us do it. It’s funny. The women and children in the audience won’t catch the reference, anyhow. This is supposed to be a racy story. Let’s allow things to be more spirited for once.”

“Too spirited for public consumption” was Olive’s verdict, and that was the end of it: Roland didn’t get his song.

—

Olive, I should say, was not happy about any of this.

She was the only person at the Lily who didn’t get caught up in Billy’s excitement. On the day he arrived, she commenced sulking, and the sulk never lifted. The truth is, I was beginning to find Olive’s dourness awfully irritating. The constant niggling over every dime, the policing of sexually suggestive material, the slavish devotion to her rigid chain of habits, the way she gave Billy the brush on every clever idea he proposed, the constant fussbudgeting, and the general quashing of all fun and enthusiasm—it was just so tiresome.

For instance, let’s consider Billy’s plan to hire six more dancers for the show than we normally had onstage. Peg was all for it, but Olive called the idea “a lot of fuss and feathers for nothing.”

When Billy argued that six more dancers would make the show feel more like a spectacle, Olive said, “Six more dancers adds up to money we don’t have, with no discernible difference to the play. Rehearsal salaries alone are forty dollars a week. And you want six more of them? Where do you propose I get the funds for this?”

“You can’t make money without spending money, Olive,” Billy reminded her. “Anyway, I’ll spot you.”

“I like that idea even less,” Olive said. “And I don’t trust you to deliver. Remember what happened in Kansas City in 1933.”

“No, I don’t remember what happened in Kansas City in 1933,” said Billy.

“Of course you don’t,” Peg put in. “What happened is that you left me and Olive holding the bag. We’d rented out that massive concert hall for the big song-and-dance spectacle you wanted me to produce, and you hired dozens of local performers, and you put everything in my name, and then you vanished to St. Tropez for a backgammon tournament. I had to empty the company’s bank account to pay it all back, while you and your money were nowhere to be found for three solid months.”

“Geez, Pegsy—you make it sound like I did something wrong.”

“No hard feelings, of course.” Peg gave a sardonic grin. “I know how you’ve always loved your backgammon. But Olive’s got a point. The Lily Playhouse is barely in the black as it is. We can’t go out on a limb for this production.”

“Naturally, I’ll be disagreeing with you now,” said Billy. “Because if you ladies will go out on a limb for once, I can help you to create a show that people will actually want to see. When people want to see a show, it makes money. After all these years, I can’t believe I need to remind you of how the theater business works. Come on, Pegsy—don’t turn on me now. When a rescuer comes to save you, don’t shoot arrows at him.”

“The Lily Playhouse doesn’t need rescuing,” said Olive.

“Oh, yes, it does, Olive!” said Billy. “Look at this theater! Everything needs to be repaired and updated. You’re still using gaslights, practically. Your seats are three-quarters empty every night. You need a hit. Let me make one for you. With Edna here, we have the chance. But we can’t go slack on any of it. If we get some critics in here—and I will get critics in here—we can’t have the rest of the production looking ramshackle, compared to Edna. Come on, Pegsy—don’t be a coward. And remember—you won’t have to work as hard as usual with this play, because I’ll help you direct it, like we used to do. Come on, honey, take a chance. You can keep on producing your catchpenny little shows and creeping along toward bankruptcy, or we can do something great here. Let’s do something great. You were always a reckless dame with a buck—let’s give it a go, one more time.”

Peg wavered. “Maybe we could hire just four additional dancers, Olive?”

“Don’t you let him Ritz you, Peg,” said Olive. “We can’t afford it. We can’t even afford two. I have the ledgers to prove it.”

“You worry too much about money, Olive,” said Billy. “You always have. Money’s not the most important thing in the world.”

“Thus speaketh William Ackerman Buell III of Newport, Rhode Island,” said Peg.

“Give it a rest, Pegsy. You know I never cared about money.”

“That’s right, you never cared about money, Billy,” Olive said. “Certainly not to the extent that those of us who forgot to be born into wealthy families care about it. The devil of it is—you make Peg not care about money, either. That’s how we’ve always run into trouble in the past, and I won’t let it happen again.”

“There’s always been plenty of money for all of us,” said Billy. “Stop being such a capitalist, Olive.”

Peg started laughing and stage-whispered to me: “Your Uncle Billy fancies himself a socialist, kiddo. But apart from the aspect of free love, I’m not sure he understands its principles.”

“What do you think, Vivian?” asked Billy, noticing for the first time that I was in the room.

I felt deeply uncomfortable being pulled into this conversation. The experience was something akin to listening to my parents argue—except that there were three of them now, which was extra disconcerting. Certainly over the last few months I’d heard Peg and Olive arguing about money plenty of times—but with the addition of Billy into the story, things had gotten more heated. Navigating a dispute between Peg and Olive I could handle, but Billy was the wild card. Every child learns to negotiate delicately between two bickering adults, after all, but among three? This was beyond my powers.

“I think you each make a strong argument,” I said.

This must have been the wrong answer, because now they were all irritated with me.

In the end, they settled on hiring four additional dancers, with Billy picking up the tab. It was a decision that left nobody happy—which is what my father might have called a successful business negotiation. (“Everyone should leave the table feeling as if they’ve gotten a bad deal,” my father once taught me joylessly. “This way, you may rest assured that nobody was taken for a ride, and that nobody can get too far ahead.”)

THIRTEEN

Here was another thing I noticed about the effect that Billy Buell had upon our little world: with his arrival at the Lily Playhouse, everyone started drinking more.

A whole hell of a lot more.

Having read this far, Angela, you may be wondering how it was physically possible for us to drink more than we already did, but here is the thing about drinking: one can always drink more, if one is truly committed. It’s just a matter of discipline, really.

The big difference now was that Aunt Peg was drinking with us. Where once she’d stopped after a few martinis and had gone to bed at a reasonable time—as per Olive’s strict schedule—now she and Billy would head out together after the show and get three sheets to the wind. Every single night. Oftentimes Celia and I would join them for a few drinks, before heading off to make revelry and trouble elsewhere.

If at first it seemed awkward for me to be gadding about town with my plainly dressed middle-aged aunt, the awkwardness soon faded when I learned what a gas Peg could be in a nightclub—especially once she had a few drinks in her. Largely this was because Peg knew absolutely everybody in the entertainment business, and they all knew her. And if they didn’t know Peg, then they knew Billy, and wanted to catch up with him after all these years. Which meant that drinks arrived at our table in snappy time—usually accompanied by the owner of the establishment, who often sat with us to gossip about Hollywood and Broadway.

Billy and Peg still looked so mismatched to me—he, so handsome in his white dinner jacket and slicked-back hair, and she in her matronly B. Altman dress and no makeup whatsoever—but they were charming, and wherever we went they quickly ended up the center of any gathering.

And they lived large. Billy ordering up filet mignon and champagne (he often carelessly wandered away before it was time to eat the steak, but he never neglected to drink the champagne) and inviting everyone in the room to join us. He talked nonstop about the show that he and Peg were producing, and what a smash hit it was going to be. (As he explained to me, this was a deliberate marketing tactic; he wanted to get word out that City of Girls was coming and that it would be good: “I have yet to meet the press agent who can spread gossip faster than I can do at a nightclub.”)

It was all fun, except for one thing: Peg was always trying to be responsible and head home early, while Billy was always trying to get her to stay out late. I remember one night at the Algonquin when Billy said, “Would you like another drink, my wife?” and I saw a look of real pain cross Peg’s face.

“I shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s not good for me, Billy. Let me collect my thoughts for a moment and try to be sensible.”

“I didn’t ask if you should have a drink, Pegsy; I asked if you wanted one.”

“Well, of course I want one. I always want one. But make it a mild one, please.”

“Shall I cut to the chase and order you three mild ones at the same time?”

“Just one mild one after another, William. That’s how I like to live my life these days.”

“To your very good health,” he said, lifting his glass to toast her and then waving to get the waiter’s attention. “As long as the man keeps ’em coming, I might be able to survive an evening of mild cocktails.”

—

That night, Celia and I peeled off from Billy and Peg, to go have our own adventures. When we stumbled home at our standard gauzy-gray presunrise hour, we were startled to find all the lights on in the living room, and an unexpected tableaux within. There was Peg sprawled out on the couch—fully dressed, unconscious, and snoring. She had an arm flung over her face, and one of her shoes was kicked off. Billy, still wearing his white dinner jacket, was dozing in a chair next to her. On the table between them was a pile of empty bottles and full ashtrays.

Billy woke up when we walked in and said, “Oh, hello girls.” His voice was slurred, and his eyes were Bing cherries.

“I’m sorry,” I said, in my own slurred voice. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You can’t disturb her.” Billy waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the couch. “She’s pickled. I couldn’t get her up the last flight of steps. Say, maybe you girls can help me . . . ?”

So the three of us drunks tried to help an even drunker person get upstairs to bed. Peg was not a small woman, and we were not at our strongest or most graceful, so this was no easy operation. We more or less dragged her up the stairs the way you would transport a rolled-up carpet—thumping our way along until we reached the door to the fourth-floor apartments. I’m afraid we laughed like sailors on leave the whole time. I’m also afraid that was an uncomfortable trip for Peg—or that it would have been uncomfortable, had she been conscious.

And then we opened the door and there was Olive—the last face you want to see when you are at your drunkest and most guilty.

In one glance, Olive took in the situation. Not that it was difficult to read.

I expected her to strike out in anger, but instead she dropped to her knees and cradled Peg’s head. Olive looked up at Billy, and her face was overcome with sorrow.

“Olive,” he said. “Hey. Look. You know how it is.”

“Please get me a wet towel, someone,” she asked in a low voice. “A cold one.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do that,” said Celia, sliding down the wall.

I ran into the bathroom and flopped about until I could solve the problem of how to turn on a light, how to procure a towel, how to turn on a tap, how to discern hot water from cold, how to soak the towel without also soaking myself (I utterly failed at that step), and how to find my way out of the bathroom again.

By the time I got back, Edna Parker Watson had joined the scene (wearing an adorable red silk pajama set and a lush gold dressing gown, I couldn’t help but notice) and was now helping Olive drag Peg into her apartment. The women, I’m sorry to say, looked as though they had done this before.

Edna took the damp towel from me and pressed it against Peg’s forehead. “Come now, Peg, let’s wake up now.”

Billy was standing back a bit, wavering on his feet, looking green around the gills. He looked his age, for once.

“She just wanted to have some fun,” he said weakly.

Olive stood up and said—again, in that low voice—“You always do this to her. You always give her the spur when you know she needs the reins.”

Billy looked for a moment as if he were going to apologize, but then made the classic drunkard’s mistake, instead, of digging in. “Ah, don’t blow your lid about it. She’ll be all right. She just wanted to have a few more when we got home.”

“She’s not like you,” Olive said, and unless I was mistaken, her eyes were sprinkled with tears. “She can’t stop after ten drinks. She never could.”

Edna said gently, “I think it’s time for you to go, William. You, as well, girls.”

—

The next day, Peg stayed in bed until late afternoon. But aside from that, business went on as usual, and nobody mentioned what had transpired the evening before.

And by the next night, Peg and Billy were out at the Algonquin all over again, buying rounds for the whole house.

FOURTEEN

Billy had committed the outrageous act of calling auditions for the play—real auditions, advertised in the trade papers and everything—in order to get a higher class of performer than the Lily was accustomed to.

This was a wildly new development. We’d never had auditions before. Our shows always got cast through word of mouth. Peg and Olive and Gladys knew enough of the actors and dancers around the neighborhood to be able to pull together a cast without anyone having to try out. But Billy wanted a better class of performers than what we could find within the perimeter of Hell’s Kitchen, so official auditions it was.

For an entire day, then, we had a stream of hopefuls pouring into the Lily—dancers, singers, actors. I got to sit with Billy and Peg and Olive and Edna as they reviewed the aspirants. I found it to be such an anxiety-producing experience. Watching all those people on the stage who all wanted something so badly—so glaringly and openly—made me nervous.

And then, very quickly, it made me bored.

(Anything can get tedious after enough time, Angela—even watching heartbreaking acts of naked vulnerability. Especially when everyone is singing the same song, doing the same dance steps, or repeating the same lines, hour after hour.)

We saw the dancers first. It was just one pretty girl after another, trying to stampede her way into our new chorus line. The sheer volume and variation of them made my head spin. Auburn curls on this one. Fine blond hair on that one. This one tall. That one short. A big-hipped, huffing, snorting, dancing dragon of a girl. A woman who was far too old to be dancing for a living anymore, but who had not yet boxed up her hopes and dreams. A girl with sharp bangs who was so awfully severe in her efforts, it looked like she was marching, not dancing. All of them breathlessly hoofing with all their hearts. Puffing away in a hot panic of tap dancing and optimism. Kicking up great clouds of dust motes in the footlights. They were sweaty and they were loud. When it came to dancers, their ambitions were not merely visible, but audible.

Billy made a slight effort to engage Olive in the audition process, but the effort was futile. She was punishing us, it seemed, by barely watching the proceedings. In fact, she was reading the editorial page of the Herald Tribune.

“Say, Olive, did you think that little birdie was attractive?” he asked her, after one very pretty girl had sung a very pretty song for us.

“No.” Olive didn’t even look up from her newspaper.

“Well, that’s all right, Olive,” said Billy. “How dull it would be if you and I always had the same taste in women.”

“I like that one,” Edna said, pointing to a petite, raven-haired beauty throwing her leg over her head onstage as easily as another woman might shake out a bath towel. “She doesn’t look quite as desperate to please as the others do.”

“Good choice, Edna,” said Billy. “I like that one, too. But you do realize that she looks exactly like you looked, twenty-odd years ago?”

“Oh, dear me, she does a bit, doesn’t she? That would be the one I was drawn to, wouldn’t it? Heavens, I’m such a vain old bore.”

“Well, I liked a girl who looked like that back then, and I still like a girl who looks like that,” said Billy. “Hire her. In fact, let’s be sure to keep the height down on all the chorus girls. Make them all match the girl we just picked. I want a bunch of cute little brunette ponies. I don’t want any of them dwarfing Edna.”

“Thank you, love,” said Edna. “One does awfully dislike being dwarfed.”

—

When it came time to audition the male lead—Lucky Bobby, the street-smart kid who teaches Mrs. Alabaster how to gamble and who ends up marrying the showgirl—my attention was miraculously and quite suddenly restored. Because now we had a parade of good-looking young men gracing the stage, taking their turn singing the song that Billy and Benjamin had already written for the part. (“In summertime when days are nice / a fella likes to roll his dice / and if his baby doll’s a bore / he likes to roll a little more.”)

I thought all the guys were terrific, but—as we have established—I wasn’t that discerning in my taste for men. Billy, though, dismissed them one after another. This one was too short (“He’s got to kiss Celia, for the love of God, and Olive probably won’t let us invest in a stepladder”); this one was too all-American-looking (“No one’s going to buy that corn-fed midwesterner as a kid from a tough New York neighborhood”); this one was too effeminate (“We already have one boy in the show who looks like a girl”); this one was too earnest (“This ain’t Sunday school, folks”).

And then, toward the end of the day, out of the wings came a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man in a shiny suit that was a bit too short on him in both the ankles and the wrists. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he had a fedora pushed way back on his head. He was chewing gum, which he didn’t bother to conceal as he took the spotlight. He was grinning like a guy who knows where the money is hidden.

Benjamin started to play, but the young man put up a hand to stop him.

“Say,” he said, staring out at us. “Who’s the boss around here, anyhow?”

Billy sat up a bit straighter at the sound of the young man’s voice, which was purest New Yawk—sharp and cocky and lightly amused with itself.

“She is,” said Billy, pointing to Peg.

“No, she is,” said Peg, pointing to Olive.

Olive kept reading her newspaper.

“I just like to know who I gotta impress, you know?” The young man peered closer at Olive. “But if it’s that broad, maybe I should just quit right now and head home, if you see my point?”

Billy laughed. “Son, I like you. If you can sing, you’ve got the job.”

“Oh, I can sing, mister. Don’t you worry about that. I can dance, too. I just don’t wanna waste my time singing and dancing when I don’t gotta sing and dance. You hear what I’m saying?”

“In that case, I amend my offer,” said Billy. “You’ve got the job, period.”

Well, that got Olive’s attention. She looked up from her paper in alarm.

“We haven’t even heard him read,” Peg said. “We don’t know if he can act.”

“Trust me,” Billy said. “He’s perfect. I feel it in my gut.”

“Congratulations, mister,” said the kid. “You made the right call. Ladies, you won’t be disappointed.”

And that, Angela, was Anthony.

—

I fell in love with Anthony Roccella, and I’m not going to dillydally around, pretending that I didn’t. And he fell in love with me, too—in his own way, and for a little while at least. Best of all, I managed to fall in love with him within the space of just a few hours, which is a model of efficiency. (The young can do that kind of thing, as you must know, without difficulty. In fact, passionate love, executed in short bursts, is the natural condition of the young. The only surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened to me sooner.)

The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion. And for me, the exciting thing about Anthony was his arrogance. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, of course—that cockiness was how he got cast in our play, after all—but I was the one who fell in love with it.

Now, I’d been around plenty of arrogant young men since arriving in town a few months earlier (it was New York City, Angela; we breed them here), but Anthony’s arrogance had a special twist to it: he genuinely didn’t seem to care. All the cocky boys I’d met thus far liked to play at nonchalance, but they still had an air about them of wanting something, even if it was only sex. But Anthony had no apparent hunger or longing about him. He was fine with whatever transpired. He could win, he could lose, it didn’t shake him up. If he didn’t get what he wanted out of a situation, he would just stroll away with his hands in his pockets, unfazed, and try again somewhere else. Whatever life offered, he could take it or leave it.

He could even take it or leave it when it came to me—so, as you can imagine, I had no choice but to become completely smitten with him.

—

Anthony lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Forty-ninth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. He lived with his older brother, Lorenzo, who was the head chef at the Latin Quarter restaurant, where Anthony worked waiting tables when he didn’t have an acting job. His mom and pop used to live in that apartment, too, he told me, but they were both dead now—a fact that Anthony relayed to me with no evident sense of loss or sorrow. (Parents: another thing he could take or leave.)

Anthony was Hell’s Kitchen born and raised. He was pure Forty-ninth Street, right to the core. Grew up playing stickball on that very street, and learned how to sing just a few blocks away at the Church of the Holy Cross. I came to know that street awfully well in the next few months. I certainly came to know that apartment awfully well, and I remember it with warm fondness because it was in his brother Lorenzo’s bed that I experienced my first climax. (Anthony didn’t have a bed of his own—he slept on the couch in the living room—but we helped ourselves to his brother’s room when Lorenzo was at work. Thankfully, Lorenzo worked long hours, giving me ample time to receive pleasure from young Anthony.)

I’ve mentioned before that a woman needs time and patience and an attentive lover in order to get good at sex. Falling for Anthony Roccella finally gave me access to all three of those necessary features.

Anthony and I found our way to Lorenzo’s bed on the first night of our acquaintance. After the auditions were over, he’d come upstairs to sign a contract and to get a copy of the script from Billy. The adults all conducted their business, and then Anthony left. But only a few minutes after he’d walked out, Peg instructed me to run after him and speak to the young man about costumes. I snapped right to duty, yes ma’am. I’d never flown down the Lily’s stairwell faster.

I caught up with Anthony on the sidewalk, grabbed him by the arm, and breathlessly introduced myself.

In truth, there wasn’t much I needed to discuss with him. The suit he had worn to his audition would be perfect for his costume. Yes, it was a bit modern for our play, but with the right suspenders and a wide, garish tie it would do the trick. It looked just cheap enough, and just cute enough, to suit Lucky Bobby. And while it might not have been the most politic thing for me to say, I told Anthony that his existing suit would be perfect for the role, precisely because it was so cheap and so cute.

“You callin’ me cheap and cute?” he asked, his eyes crinkling in amusement.

He had highly pleasant eyes—dark brown and lively. He looked like he spent most of his life amused. Examining him this closely, I could see he was older than he’d looked onstage—less of a rangy kid, and more of a lean young man. He was more like twenty-nine than nineteen. It’s just that his skinniness and his carefree step made him seem a lot younger.

“I might be,” I said. “But there’s nothing wrong with cheap and cute.”

“You, on the other hand—you look expensive,” he said, and gave me a slow appraisal.

“But cute?” I asked.

“Very.”

We stared at each other for a while. There was a good deal of information conveyed across the silence—a whole conversation, you might say. This is what flirtation is in its purest form—a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word:

Maybe.

So Anthony and I just looked at each other for a good long while, asking the unspoken questions, and silently replying to each other: Maybe, maybe, maybe. The silence went on so long that it became uncomfortable. In my stubbornness, though, I wouldn’t speak, but nor would I break eye contact. Finally, he started laughing, and I laughed, too.

“What’s your name, baby doll?” he asked.

“Vivian Morris.”

“You free tonight to spend some time with me, Vivian Morris?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Yes?” he asked.

I shrugged.

He tilted his head and looked at me closer, still smiling. “Yes?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I decided, and that was the end of the maybe.

But then he asked it again: “Yes?”

“Yes!” I said, thinking perhaps he hadn’t heard me.

“Yes?” he said one more time, and now I realized that he was asking me about something else here. We weren’t talking about going out for dinner and a movie. He was asking me if I was really free tonight.

In an entirely different tone, I said, “Yes.”

—

Within a half hour, we were in his brother’s bed.

I knew instantly that this was not going to be the same sort of sexual experience to which I was accustomed. First of all, I wasn’t drunk and neither was he. And we weren’t standing up in the cloakroom of a nightclub, or fumbling in the back of a cab. There was no fumbling to be had here. Anthony Roccella was not in a hurry. And he liked to talk as he worked, but not in a horrible way like Dr. Kellogg. He liked to ask me playful questions, which I loved. I think he just liked to hear me say yes again and again, and I was more than happy to oblige him.

“You know how pretty you are, don’t you?” he asked, once he’d locked the door behind us.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re gonna come sit on this bed with me now, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m gonna have to kiss you now, cuz of how pretty you are?”

“Yes.”

And sweet mercy, could that boy kiss. One hand on each side of my face, with his long fingers reaching behind my skull, holding me still while he softly tested out my mouth. This part of sex—the kissing part, which I always loved—was usually over far too quickly in my experience, but Anthony didn’t seem to be heading toward something more. This was the first time I’d been kissed by somebody who was getting as much pleasure out of kissing as I was.

After a long time—a very good long time—he pulled back. “Here’s what we’re gonna do now, Vivian Morris. I’m gonna sit here on this bed, and you’re gonna stand right there, under the light, and take your dress off for me.”

“Yes,” I said. (Once you start saying it, it’s so easy to keep going!)

I walked to the center of the room and stood—just as instructed—right under the lightbulb. I took my dress off, and stepped out of it, covering up my nervousness by throwing my hands up in the air. Ta-da! As soon as my dress came off, though, Anthony started laughing, and I was catapulted into shame—thinking of how thin I was, and how small my breasts were. When he saw the look on my face, he softened his laughter and said, “Oh, no, doll. I’m not laughing at you. I’m just laughing because I like you so much. You’re a fast little operator, and it’s cute.”

He stood up and picked my dress up off the floor.

“Why don’t you put this dress back on, doll?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s all right, I don’t mind.” I was making no sense, but I was thinking: I blew it, it’s over.

“No, listen to me, baby. You’re gonna put this dress back on for me, and then I’ll ask you to take it off for me again. But this time, you’re gonna slow it way down, okay? Don’t be such a fast worker.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I just want to see you do it again. Come on, doll. I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life. Don’t rush it.”

“No, you have not been waiting for this moment your whole life!”

He grinned. “Nah, you’re right. I haven’t. But I sure do like it, now that it’s here. So how ’bout you give it to me again? But real slow.”

He sat back down on the bed, and I put my dress on. I came over and let him do up the buttons in the back, which he did, slowly and carefully. I could have reached the buttons myself, of course, and in just a few moments I would be unbuttoning them all over again, but I wanted to give him the task. Honestly, the experience of feeling this young man buttoning up my dress was the most erotic and intimate sensation I’d ever experienced—although it was soon to be surpassed.

I turned around and went back to the center of the room, fully dressed again. I fluffed my hair a bit. We were smiling at each other like fools.

“Now try it again,” he said. “Go real slow for me. Make like I’m not even here.”

This was my first experience of being watched. And while I’d had plenty of men put their hands all over me in the past few months, I’d not had nearly enough of them appraise me with their eyes. I turned my back to him, as if I were shy. Truthfully, I was a bit shy. I had never felt quite so nude, and I was still clothed! I reached back and unbuttoned the dress. I allowed it to drop from my shoulders, but it caught around my waist. I left it there. I unhooked my brassiere and slid it over my arms. I placed it on the chair next to me. Then I just stood there and let him look at my naked back. I could feel him looking at me, and it was like a current running up my spine. I stood there for a long time, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t speak. There was something thrilling about my not being able to see his face—not knowing what he was doing behind me on the bed. To this day, I can still feel the quality of air in the room. That cool, fresh, autumnal air.

Slowly I turned around, but kept my eyes down. My dress was still gathered loosely about my waist, but my breasts were bare. Still, he said nothing. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be inspected and contemplated. The voltage I’d felt running up my spine had now circled to the front of me. My head felt light and spinny. The prospect of moving or speaking seemed impossible.

“That’s right,” he said finally. “That’s what I’m talking about. Now you can come over here next to me.”

He guided me down onto the bed and pushed my hair back away from my eyes. I expected him to more or less attack my breasts and mouth at this point, but he didn’t go near them. His lack of urgency was driving me a bit wild. He didn’t even kiss me again. He just smiled at me. “Hey, Vivian Morris. I’ve got a big idea. You wanna hear it?”

“Yes.”

“So, here’s what we’re gonna do now. You’re gonna lay back on this bed and let me take off the rest of your clothes. And then you’re gonna shut your pretty little eyes. And then you know what I’m gonna do?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m gonna show you what’s what.”

—

It might be difficult for someone of your age, Angela, to understand how radical a concept oral sex was for a young woman of my generation. I knew about B.J.’s of course (that would’ve been our term for “blow jobs”—which I’d done a few times and wasn’t sure I liked or even exactly understood), but the idea of a man putting his mouth on a woman’s genitals? This was not done.

Let me amend that. Of course I’m sure it was done. Every generation likes to think that they discovered sex, but I’m sure that far more sophisticated people than me were experiencing cunnilingus in 1940, all over New York City—especially in the Village. But I’d never heard of it. God knows, I’d had everything else done to the flower of my femininity that summer, but not this. I’d been palmed and rubbed and penetrated, and certainly fingered and probed (my heavens, how the boys liked to poke about, and so vigorously, too)—but never this.

His mouth had ended up between my legs so fast, and the sudden realization of his destination and his intent had shocked me to the point that I said “Oh!” and started to sit up, but he reached up one of his long arms, placed his palm on my chest, and firmly pressed me back down again, without once stopping what he was doing.

“Oh!” I said again.

Then I felt it. There was a sensation occurring here that I didn’t even know could occur. I took the sharpest inhale of my life, and I’m not sure I let my breath out for another ten minutes. I do feel that I lost the ability to see and hear for a while, and that something might have short-circuited in my brain—something that has probably never been fully fixed since. My whole being was astonished. I could hear myself making noises like an animal, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably (not that I was trying to control them), and my hands were gripping down so hard over my face that I left fingernail divots in my own skull.

Then it became more.

And after that, it became even more still.

Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet.

And then it was the most, and I more or less died.

When it was all over, I was panting and crying and laughing and could not stop shuddering. But Anthony Roccella just smiled that same cocky smile as ever.

“Yeah, baby,” said the skinny young man whom I now loved with all my heart. “That’s what’s what.”

—

Well, a girl is never really the same after something like that, now is she?

Here’s the extraordinary thing, though: on that night of our remarkable first encounter, Anthony and I did not even have sex. By which I mean—we did not engage in literal intercourse. Nor did I do anything to Anthony that first night, to offer him pleasure in return for the potent revelation he had just delivered unto me. Nor did he seem to need me to do anything. He didn’t seem to mind in the least if I just lay there, as immobilized as if I’d just fallen out of an airplane.

Again, this was part of the charm of Anthony Roccella—that incredible lack of urgency. The way that he could take it or leave it. I was beginning to understand the origins of Anthony Roccella’s immense self-confidence. It now made perfect sense to me why this penniless young man strutted about as though he owned the whole town: because if you’re a fellow who can do that to a woman without even needing anything in return, why wouldn’t you think awfully highly of yourself?

After he’d held me for a while and teased me a bit for having screamed and cried in pleasure, he’d gone to the icebox and come back with a beer for each of us.

“You’re gonna need a drink, Vivian Morris,” he said, and he was right about that.

He never even took his clothes off that night.

That boy had ravaged me right to the point of unconsciousness without even removing the jacket of his cheap, cute suit!

—

Of course I was back there the next night to writhe around once more under the magnificent powers of his mouth. And the next night, too. Still, he stayed fully dressed, without asking for anything in reciprocation. On the third night, I finally dared to ask, “But what about you? Do you need . . . ?”

He grinned. “We’ll get around to it, baby,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

And he was right about that, too. We got around to it—boy, did we ever—but he waited until I was famished for it.

I don’t mind telling you, Angela—he waited until I was begging for it.

The begging bit was somewhat tricky on my part, because I didn’t know how to beg for sex. What sort of language does a nicely bred young lady use to plead for access to that unnamable male organ, which she so dearly wants?

Could you kindly . . . ?

If it’s not any trouble . . . ?

I just didn’t have any of the terminology required for this sort of exchange. Sure, I’d been doing a lot of dirty, filthy things since my arrival in New York, but I was still a nice young lady at my core, and nice young ladies don’t ask for things. For the most part, what I had been doing over the course of these past few months was allowing dirty, filthy things to happen to me, at the hands of men who were always in a big hurry to get it done. But this was different. I wanted Anthony, and he was in no hurry to give me what I wanted, which only made me want him more.

When it got to the point when I would stammer things like, “Do you think we might someday . . . ?” he would stop what he was doing, rise up on one elbow, grin at me, and say, “How’s that, now?”

“If you ever wanted to . . .”

“If I ever wanted to what, baby? Just say it.”

I would say nothing (because I could say nothing) and he would just grin wider and say, “Sorry, baby, I can’t hear you. You gotta enunciate.”

But I couldn’t say it—at least not till he taught me how to say it.

“There are some words you need to learn, baby,” he told me one night while he was toying with me in bed. “And we ain’t doin’ nothing more till I hear you say it.”

Then he taught me the nastiest words I’d ever heard. Words that made me blush and burn. He made me repeat the words after him, and he relished how uncomfortable it made me. Then he went to work on my body again, leaving me splayed and flayed with longing. When I had reached such a peak of desire that I could scarcely draw a breath, he stopped what he was doing, and turned on the light.

“So, here’s what we’re gonna do now, Vivian Morris,” he said. “You’re gonna look me dead in the eye, and you’re gonna tell me exactly what you want me to do to you—using the words I just taught you. And that’s the only way it’s ever gonna happen, baby doll.”

And Angela, God help me, I did it.

I looked him dead in the eye, and I begged for it like a two-dollar hooker.

After that, it was Katy bar the door.

—

Now that I was infatuated with Anthony, the last thing I wanted to do anymore was go out on the town with Celia, picking up strangers for cheap, fast, pleasureless thrills. I didn’t want to do anything anymore but be with him—pinned to his brother Lorenzo’s bed—every moment that I could get. All of which is to say: I’m afraid I dropped Celia rather unceremoniously once Anthony showed up.

I don’t know if Celia missed me. She never showed any indication of it. Nor did she pull away from me in any notable way. She just went about her life, and was friendly to me whenever we collided (which was usually in bed, when she would come stumbling in drunk at the usual hour). Looking back on it now, I feel that I wasn’t a very loyal friend to Celia—in fact, I’d dumped her twice: first for Edna, and then for Anthony. But maybe the young are just feral animals in the way that they shift their affections and allegiances so capriciously. Celia could certainly be capricious, too. I realize now that I always needed somebody to be infatuated with when I was twenty years old, and it didn’t really matter who, apparently. Anybody with more charisma than me would do the trick. (And New York was filled with people more charismatic than me.) I was so unformulated as a human being, so unsteady in myself, that I was constantly grasping for attachment to another person—constantly anchoring myself to someone else’s allure. But evidently, I could only be infatuated with one person at a time.

And right now, it was Anthony.

I was glassy-eyed in love. I was dumbstruck with love. I was all but undone by him. I could barely concentrate on my duties at the theater, because honestly, who cared? I think the only reason I even went to the theater anymore is because Anthony was there every day, spending hours a day in rehearsal, and I got to see him. All I wanted was to be in his orbit. I would wait around for him after every rehearsal like the most absurd little twit, following him back and forth to his dressing room, running out to buy him a cold tongue sandwich on rye whenever he wanted one. I bragged to everyone who would listen that I had a boyfriend, and it was forever.

Like so many other dumb young girls throughout history, I was infected with love and lust—and moreover, I thought Anthony Roccella had invented the stuff.

—

But then there was the conversation I had with Edna one day, when I was fitting her with a new hat for the show.

She said, “You’re distracted. That’s not the color ribbon we’d agreed on.”

“Is it not?”

She touched the ribbon in question, which was scarlet red, and asked, “Does this look emerald green to you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“It’s that boy,” Edna said. “He’s commanding all your attention.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “He sure is,” I said.

Edna smiled, but indulgently. “When you are around him, dear Vivian, you should know that you look exactly like a little dog in heat.”

I rewarded her for her candor by accidentally stabbing her in the neck with a pin. “I’m so sorry!” I cried out—and whether it was about the pin-stabbing, or about looking like a little dog in heat, I could not have said.

Edna coolly dabbed at the spot of blood on her neck with her handkerchief and said, “Don’t give it another thought. It’s not the first time I’ve been stabbed, my dear, and it’s probably richly deserved. But listen to me, darling, because I’m old enough to be an archaeological relic, and I know some things about life. It is not that I don’t celebrate your affections for Anthony. It is delightful to watch a young person fall in love for the first time. Chasing your boy about, as you do—it’s very sweet.”

“Well, he’s a dream, Edna,” I said. “He’s a living dream.”

“Of course he is, darling. They always are. But I have a spot of advice. By all means, take that racy young man to bed with you and put him in your memoirs when you get famous, but there is something you must not do.”

I thought she was going to say, “Don’t get married,” or “Don’t get pregnant.”

But no. Edna had a different concern.

“Do not let it capsize the show,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“At this point in a production, Vivian, we all must count on one another to sustain a certain degree of judiciousness and professionalism. It may seem as though we are just having some larks here—and we are having larks—but much is at stake. Your aunt is pouring everything she has into this play—heart, soul, and all her money, too—and we wouldn’t want to drive her show over a cliff. Here is the solidarity of good theater people, Vivian: we try not to ruin each other’s shows, and we try not to ruin each other’s lives.”

I didn’t understand what she was on about, and my face must have showed it, because she tried again.

“What I’m trying to say, Vivian, is this: if you’re going to be in love with Anthony, then be in love with him, and who could blame you for wanting your little exploit? But promise me that you will stay with him till the end of the run. He’s a good actor—far better than average—and he’s needed for this production. I don’t want any disruptions. If one of you breaks the other’s heart, I stand to lose not only a surprisingly excellent leading man, but also a damn good dresser. I need you both right now, and I need you to be in your right minds. Your aunt needs it, too.”

I still must have looked awfully stupid, because she said, “Let me put it to you even more plainly, Vivian. As my worst ex-husband—that awful director—used to say to me, ‘Live your life as you wish, my peach, but don’t let it bitch up the bloody show.’”

FIFTEEN

City of Girls was now in the full swing of rehearsals, with the date set for the premiere of November 29, 1940. We would open the week after Thanksgiving, to try to snag the holiday crowd.

Mostly it was going well. The music was sensational and the costumes were choice, if I do say so myself. The best thing about the play, of course, was Anthony Roccella—or at least in my opinion. My boyfriend could sing, act, and dance up a storm. (I’d overheard Billy saying to Peg, “You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a man—that’s not easily found. This kid is everything I’d hoped he would be.”)

Furthermore, Anthony was a natural comic, and he was absolutely convincing as a clever delinquent who could hustle a rich old lady into establishing a speakeasy and bordello in the great room of her mansion. And his scenes with Celia were fantastic. They were such a great-looking couple on stage. They had one particularly outstanding scene together, where they did the tango as Anthony seductively sang to Celia about “A Little Spot in Yonkers” that he wanted to show her. The way Anthony sang it, he made “A Little Spot in Yonkers” sound like an erogenous zone on a woman’s body—and Celia certainly responded as though it were. It was the sexiest moment of the play. Any woman with a pulse would have agreed. Or at least I thought so.

Others, of course, would have claimed that the best thing about the play was Edna Parker Watson’s performance—and I’m sure they were right. Even I, in my infatuated daze, could tell that Edna was brilliant. I’d seen a lot of theater in my life, but I’d never seen a real actress at work before. All the actresses I’d met so far were dolls with four or five different facial expressions to choose from—sadness, fear, anger, love, happiness—that they kept in rotation until the curtain went down. But Edna had access to every shade of human emotion. She was natural, she was warm, she was regal, and she could do a scene nine different ways in the space of an hour and somehow make each variation seem like the perfect one.

She was a generous actress, as well. She made everyone’s performances look better, by her mere presence onstage. She coaxed the best out of everyone. She liked to step back a bit in rehearsal and let the light shine on another actor, beaming at them somewhat as they played their role. The great actresses are not often this kind. But Edna always thought of others. I remember Celia coming to rehearsal one day wearing false eyelashes. Edna took her aside to caution her not to wear them in performances, as they would cast shadows over her eye sockets and make her look “corpselike, darling, which is never what one wants.”

A more jealous star would not have pointed out such a thing. But Edna was never jealous.

Over time, Edna made Mrs. Alabaster into a far more subtle character than what the script suggested. Edna transformed Mrs. Alabaster into a woman of knowing—a woman who knew how ridiculous her life was when she was rich, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be broke, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be running a casino in her drawing room. Yet she was a woman who bravely played the game of life anyhow—and allowed the game of life to somewhat play her. She was ironic, but not cold. The effect was a survivor who had not lost the ability to feel.

And when Edna sang her romantic solo—a simple ballad called “I’m Considering Falling in Love”—she brought the room to a state of silent awe, every single time. It didn’t matter how many times we’d heard her sing it already; we all stopped whatever we were doing to listen. It’s not that Edna had the best singing voice (she could be a tad chancy sometimes on the high notes), but she brought such poignancy to the moment that one couldn’t help but sit up and pay attention.

The song was about an older woman who was deciding to give herself over to romance one more time, against her own better judgment. When Billy wrote the lyrics, he hadn’t intended them to be quite so sad. The original point, I think, had been to create something light and amusing: Look, how cute! Even older people can fall in love! But Edna asked Benjamin to slow down the song and alter it to a darker key, and that changed everything. Now when she got to the last line (“I’m just an amateur / But what are we here for? / I’m considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was already in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.

I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.

“She’s the real deal, kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”

—

A more problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.

Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about all I can say in his favor.

When it became evident that Arthur couldn’t manage the role, Billy pared down the character’s lines as much as possible, to make it simpler for the poor man to get through a sentence. (For instance, Billy had changed Arthur’s opening line from “I’m your late husband’s third cousin, Barchester Headley Wentworth, the fifth earl of Addington” to “I’m your cousin from England.”) He also took away Arthur’s solo. He even took away the dance number that Arthur was meant to have with Edna as he was attempting to seduce Mrs. Alabaster.

“Those two dance as though they’ve never been introduced,” Billy said to Peg, before finally giving up on the idea of having them dance at all. “How is it possible that they are married?”

Edna tried to help out her husband, but he didn’t take direction well and got sputteringly offended at any efforts to refine his performance.

“I never understand what you’re talking about, my dear, and I always will!” he snapped at her once, insensibly, when she tried to explain the difference between stage right and stage left for the dozenth time.

The thing that drove us the craziest was that Arthur could not stop himself from whistling along with the music coming from the orchestra pit—even when he was on stage, and in character. Nobody could get him to stop.

One afternoon, Billy finally shouted, “Arthur! Your character can’t hear that music! It’s the theme from the goddamn overture!”

“Of course I can hear it!” Arthur protested. “The bloody musicians are right there!”

This had caused the exasperated Billy to go on a long rant about the difference in theater between diagetic music (which the characters onstage can hear), and non-diagetic music (which only the audience can hear).

“Talk English!” Arthur had demanded.

So Billy tried again: “Imagine, Arthur, that you are watching a western with John Wayne in it. There is John Wayne, riding his horse all alone across a mesa, and suddenly he starts whistling along to the theme music. Do you see how ridiculous that would be?”

“I just don’t see why a man can’t whistle these days without being attacked,” sniffed Arthur.

(Later, I heard him ask one of the dancers, “What the devil is a mesa?”)

—

I used to look at Edna and Arthur Watson and try with all my might to imagine how she coped with him.

The only explanation I could come up with was that Edna genuinely loved beauty—and Arthur was undeniably beautiful. (He looked like Apollo, if Apollo were your neighborhood butcher—but, yes, he was beautiful.) This made a certain amount of sense, because there was nothing in Edna’s life that wasn’t beautiful. I never saw anybody who cared about aesthetics more than that woman did. I never once saw Edna that she wasn’t exquisitely put together, and I saw her at all times of the day and night. (To be the kind of woman who is perfectly kempt even at the breakfast table or in the privacy of her own bedroom requires a certain amount of labor and commitment—but that was Edna for you, always ready to put in the hours.)

Her cosmetics were beautiful. The tiny silk drawstring purse in which she held her loose change was beautiful. The way she read her lines and sang onstage was beautiful. The way she folded her gloves was beautiful. She was both a connoisseur and a radiator of pure beauty, in all its forms.

In fact, I think part of the reason Edna liked to have Celia and me around her so much was that we were beautiful, too. Rather than being competitive with us—as many other older women might have been—she seemed enhanced and invigorated by us. I remember one day the three of us were walking down the street together, with Edna in the middle. She suddenly clasped us each by the arm, smiled up at us, and said, “When I walk around town with the two of you towering young ladies at my side, I feel like a perfect pearl, set between two gleaming rubies.”

—

It was now a week before our opening and everyone was sick. We all had the same cold, and half the girls in the chorus line had pink eye from sharing the same infected cake of mascara. (The other half had crabs, from sharing their costume bottoms, which I had told them a hundred times not to do.) Peg wanted to give the performers a day off to rest up and heal, but Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He still felt that the first ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.

“You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate the first one.”

“They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.

And they were tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.

“Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”

He made them do the opening number three more times that day—and each time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.

The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere. An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.

One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch, and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.

“Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.

“Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”

“What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del Rio.”

“That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What? No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.

—

Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she would take frequent nips. Careless as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.

Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught Anthony and me necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal, and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.

“Goddamn it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for ten minutes to keep your lips off my leading man?”

(The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)

And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.

Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read City of Girls. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but ADMISSION), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one of my stupid girlie shows.”

Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”

Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”

“Our audience can’t afford that, either.”

“Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”

“We don’t serve the carriage trade,” Olive said. “We serve working people, or do I have to remind you?”

“Well maybe the working people of this neighborhood would like to see a quality show, Olive, for once in their lives. Maybe they don’t like being treated like they are poor and tasteless. Maybe they think it would be worth it to pay a bit extra to see something good. Have you considered that?”

The two of them had been bickering about this for days, but it all came to a head when Olive burst in on a rehearsal one afternoon—interrupting Peg while she was talking to a dancer about some confusion over blocking—and announced, “I’ve just been to the printers. It’s going to cost two hundred and fifty dollars to print the five thousand new tickets you want, and I refuse to pay it.”

Peg spun on her heel and shouted: “Goddamn it, Olive—how much money do I have to pay you to stop talking about fucking money?”

The whole theater fell silent. Everybody iced over, right where they stood.

Maybe you remember, Angela, what a powerful impact the word “fuck” used to have in our society—back before everybody and their children started saying it ten times a day before breakfast. Indeed, it was once a very potent word. To hear it coming out of a respectable woman’s mouth? This was never done. Not even Celia used that word. Billy didn’t even use that word. (I used it, of course, but only in the privacy of Anthony’s brother’s bed, and only because Anthony made me say it before he would have sex with me—and I still blushed whenever I spoke it.)

But to hear it shouted?

I had never heard it shouted.

It did cross my mind for a moment to wonder where my nice old Aunt Peg had ever learned such a word—although I guess if you’ve taken care of wounded soldiers on the front lines of trench warfare, you’ve probably heard everything.

Olive stood there with the invoice in her hand. She had a distinctly slapped look about her, and it was something terrible to behold in one who was always so commanding. She put her other hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears.

In the next moment, Peg’s face went sodden with remorse.

“Olive, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m an ass.”

She stepped toward her secretary, but Olive shook her head and skittered away backstage. Peg ran after her. The rest of us all looked around at each other in shock. The air itself felt dead and hard.

It was Edna who recovered first, perhaps not surprisingly.

“My suggestion, Billy,” she said in a steady voice, “is that you ask the company to start the dance number again from the top. I believe Ruby knows where to stand now, don’t you, my dear?”

The little dancer nodded quietly.

“From the top?” asked Billy, a bit uncertainly. He looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him before.

“That’s correct,” Edna said, with her usual polish. “From the top. And Billy, if you could please remind the cast to keep their attention on their roles and the job at hand, that would be ideal. Let us be mindful to keep the tone light, as well. I know you are all tired, but we can do this. As you are discovering, my friends—making comedy can be hard.”

—

The ticket incident might have dissolved from my memory, but for one thing.

That night, I went to Anthony’s place as usual, ready for my standard evening fare of sensual debauchery. But his brother, Lorenzo, came home from work at the unforgivably early hour of midnight, so I had to beat it back to the Lily Playhouse, feeling more than a little frustrated and exiled. I was irritated, too, that Anthony wouldn’t walk me home—but that was Anthony for you. That boy had many sterling qualities, but gentlemanliness was not among them.

Okay, maybe he only had one sterling quality.

In any case, I was flustered and distracted when I arrived back at the Lily, and it’s likely that my blouse was on inside out, as well. As I climbed the stairs to the third floor, I could hear music playing. Benjamin was at the piano. He was playing “Stardust” in a melancholy way—more slowly and sweetly than I’d ever heard. Old and corny as that song was even back then, it has always been one of my favorites. I opened the door to the living room carefully, not wanting to interrupt. The only light in the room was the small lamp over the piano. There was Benjamin, playing so softly that his fingers barely touched the keys.

And there, standing in the middle of the darkened living room, were Peg and Olive. They were dancing with each other. It was a slow sort of dance—more of a rocking embrace than anything. Olive had her face pressed against Peg’s bosom, and Peg was resting her cheek on the top of Olive’s head. They both had their eyes closed tightly. They were clinging to each other, squeezed together in a silent grip of need. Whatever world they were in—whatever era of history they were in, whatever memories they were in, whatever story they were knitting back together in the tightness of their embrace—it was very much their own world. They were somewhere together, but they were not here.

I watched them, unable to move, and unable to comprehend what I was witnessing—while at the same time, unable to not comprehend what I was witnessing.

After a while, Benjamin glanced over to the doorway and saw me. I don’t know how he sensed that I was there. He didn’t stop playing, and his expression didn’t change, but he kept his eyes on me. I kept my eyes on him, too—maybe looking for some kind of explanation or instruction, but none was offered. I felt pinned in the doorway by Benjamin’s gaze. There was something in his eyes that said: “You do not take another step into this room.”

I was afraid to move, for fear of making a sound and alerting Peg and Olive to my presence. I didn’t want to embarrass them or humiliate myself. But when I could feel that the song was ending, I had no choice: I had to slip away, or be caught.

So I backed out and gently closed the door behind me—Benjamin’s unblinking gaze on me as he finished playing the song, watching to make sure I was good and gone before he touched the final, wistful note.

—

I spent the next two hours in an all-night diner in Times Square, not sure when it would be safe to return home. I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go back to Anthony’s apartment, and I still felt the power of Benjamin’s stare, warning me not to cross that threshold—not now, Vivian.

I had never been out alone at this hour in the city, and it frightened me more than I cared to acknowledge. I didn’t know what to do, without Celia or Anthony or Peg as my guides. I still wasn’t a real New Yorker, you see. I was still a tourist. You don’t become a real New Yorker until you can manage the city alone.

So I had gone to the most brightly lit place I could find, where a tired old waitress kept refilling my coffee cup without comment or complaint. I watched a sailor and his girl arguing in the booth across from me. They were both drunk. Their fight was about somebody named Miriam. The girl was suspicious of Miriam; the sailor was defensive about Miriam. They were both making a strong case for their respective positions. I went back and forth between believing the sailor and believing the girl. I felt like I needed to see what Miriam looked like before rendering a verdict on whether the soldier had been untrue to his sweetheart.

Peg and Olive were lesbians?

It couldn’t be, though. Peg was married. And Olive was . . . Olive. A sexless being if ever there was one. Olive was made of mothballs. But was there any other explanation for why those two middle-aged women were holding each other so tightly in the dark while Benjamin played the world’s saddest love song for them?

I knew they had quarreled that day, but is this how you make up with your secretary after an argument? I hadn’t been around a lot of business concerns in my life, but that embrace didn’t seem professional. Nor did it seem like something that would happen between two friends. I slept in a bed with a woman every night—not just any woman, but one of the most beautiful women in New York—and we didn’t embrace like that.

And if they were lesbians—well, since when? Olive had been working for Peg since the Great War. She’d met Peg before Billy did. Was this a new development or had it always been this way? Who knew about this? Did Edna know about this? Did my family know about this? Did Billy know about this?

Certainly Benjamin knew. The only thing that had rattled him about the scene was my presence in it. Did he play the piano for them often, so they could dance? What was going on in that theater behind closed doors? And was this the real source of the constant bickering and tension between Billy and Peg and Olive? Was their underlying argument not about money or drinking or control, but about sexual competition? (My mind raced back to that day at auditions when Billy had said to Olive, “How dull it would be if you and I always had the same taste in women.”) Could Olive Thompson—she of the boxy woolen suits, and the moral sanctimony, and the thin line of a mouth—be a rival to Billy Buell?

Could anybody be a rival to the likes of Billy Buell?

I thought of Edna saying of Peg: “These days she wants loyalty more than fun.”

Well, Olive was loyal. You had to give her that. And if you didn’t need to have fun, you’d come to the right place, I suppose.

I could not parse what any of it meant.

—

I walked back home around two thirty.

I eased open the door to the living room, but nobody was there. All the lights were off. On one hand, it was as if the scene had never occurred—but at the same time, I felt that I could still see a shadow of the two women dancing in the middle of the room.

I slipped off to bed and was awoken a few hours later by Celia’s familiar boozy warmth, crashing down next to me on the mattress.

“Celia,” I whispered to her, once she’d settled in beside me. “I have to ask you something.”

“Sleeping,” she said, in a gluey voice.

I poked her, shook her, made her groan and turn over, and said louder, “Come on, Celia. This is important. Wake up. Listen to me. Is my Aunt Peg a lesbian?”

“Does a dog bark?” Celia replied, and she was sound asleep in the very next instant.

SIXTEEN

From Brooks Atkinson’s review of City of Girls in The New York Times, November 30, 1940:

If the play is destitute of veracity, it is by no means destitute of charm. The writing is quick and sharp, and the cast is nearly universally excellent. . . . But the great pleasure of

City of Girls

lies in the rare opportunity to witness Edna Parker Watson at work. This lauded British actress possesses a flair for the comic that one might not have expected from so illustrious a tragedienne. Watching Mrs. Watson stand aside to appraise the clown show in which her character regularly finds herself is a marvel. Her reactions are so richly humorous and subtle as to make her walk away with this delightful little piece of lampoonery tucked tidily under one arm.

—

Opening night had been terrifying—and also contentious.

Billy had stocked the audience with old friends and loudmouths, columnists and ex-girlfriends, and every publicist and critic and newspaperman he knew by name or reputation. (And he knew everyone.) Peg and Olive had both objected to this idea, and strongly.

“I don’t know if we’re ready for that,” Peg said—sounding just like a woman who is panicked to learn that her husband has invited his boss over for dinner that night and expects a perfect meal on short notice.

“We’d better be ready,” said Billy. “We’re opening in a week.”

“I don’t want critics in this theater,” Olive said. “I don’t like critics. Critics can be so unsympathetic.”

“Do you even believe in our play, Olive?” Billy asked. “Do you even like our play?”

“No,” she replied. “Except in spots.”

“I cannot resist asking, though I know I’ll regret it—which spots?”

Olive thought carefully. “I might somewhat enjoy the overture.”

Billy rolled his eyes. “You’re a living tribulation, Olive.” Then he turned his attention to Peg. “We’ve got to take the risk, honey. We’ve got to spread the word. I don’t want the only important person in the audience that first night to be me.”

“Give us a week at least to work out the kinks,” said Peg.

“It doesn’t make any difference, Pegsy. If the show is a bomb, it’ll still be a bomb in a week, kinks or no. So let’s find out right away whether we’ve wasted all our time and money, or not. We need big gravy people in the audience, or it’ll never work. We need them to love it, and we need them to tell their friends to come and see it, and that’s how the ball rolls. Olive won’t let me spend money to advertise, so we need to ballyhoo the hell out of this thing. The sooner we start selling out every seat in the house, the sooner Olive will stop looking at me like I’m a murderer—and we can’t sell out every seat in this house unless people know we’re here.”

“I think it’s vulgar to invite one’s social friends to one’s place of work,” said Olive, “and then expect them to provide free publicity.”

“Then how do you aim for us to alert people to the fact that we have a show, Olive? Would you like me to stand on the street corner in a sandwich board?”

Olive looked as though she wouldn’t be against it.

“As long as the sign doesn’t say THE END IS NEAR,” said Peg, who did not seem certain that it wasn’t.

“Pegsy,” said Billy, “where’s your confidence? This mule kicks. You know it does. You know this show is good. You can feel it in your belly, just like I do.”

But Peg was still uneasy. “So many times over the years you have told me that I was feeling something in my belly. And usually the only thing I was feeling was the unsettling sensation of having just lost my wallet.”

“I’m about to stuff your wallet, lady,” said Billy. “Just you watch me do it.”

—

From Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Post:

Edna Parker Watson has long been a gem of the British stage, but after watching

City of Girls,

one wishes she had come to brighten our shores sooner. What might have been seen as a mere curio transforms into a memorable night of theater, thanks to Mrs. Watson’s rare understanding and wit, as she portrays a down-on-her-luck society doyenne who must turn bordello madam in order to save the family mansion. . . . Benjamin Wilson’s songs crackle with delight, and the dancers are brilliantly ascending. . . . Newcomer Anthony Roccella smolders as a flashy urban Romeo, and Celia Ray’s distracting carnality gives the show an overall adult savor.

—

In the last few days before opening night, Billy spent money like crazy—even crazier than usual. He brought in two Norwegian masseuses for our dancers and stars. (Peg was appalled by the expense, but Billy said, “We do it in Hollywood all the time, with your jumpier stars. You’ll see—it calms them right down.”) He had a doctor come to the Lily Playhouse and give everyone vitamin shots. He told Bernadette to bring in every cousin she’d ever had—and their kids, too—to clean that theater until it was unrecognizable. He hired men from the neighborhood to hose down the façade of the Lily, and to make sure every lightbulb in the big electric sign was firing at full blaze, and he put new gels on all the stage lighting, as well.

For the final dress rehearsal, he brought in catering from Toots Shor’s—caviar, smoked fish, finger sandwiches, the works. He hired a photographer to take publicity photos of the cast in full costume. He filled the lobby with large sprays of orchids, which probably cost more than my first semester at college (and was probably a better investment, too). He brought in a facialist, a manicurist, and a makeup artist for Edna and Celia.

On the day of our opening, he wrangled up some kids and unemployed men from the neighborhood, and hired them (at fifty cents a pop, which was a pretty good wage, for the kids, at least) to mill about outside the theater, giving the impression that something tremendously exciting was about to happen. He hired the kid with the loudest mouth to keep shouting, “Sold out! Sold out! Sold out!”

On the evening of opening night, Billy presented Edna, Peg, and Olive with surprise gifts—for good luck, he said. He gave Edna a slim gold bracelet from Cartier that was just to her taste. For Peg, there was a handsome new leather wallet from Mark Cross. (“You’ll need it soon, Pegsy,” he said with a wink. “Once the box office starts pouring in, your old wallet will bust at the seams.”) As for Olive, he ceremoniously bestowed her with an overwrapped gift box, containing—once she had finally gotten all the paper and bows off it—a bottle of gin.

“Your own stash,” he said. “To help you anesthetize yourself during the utter boredom that you apparently suffer from this production.”

—

From Dwight Miller, in the New York World-Telegram:

Theatergoers are urged to ignore the saggy and worn seats of the Lily Playhouse, and to ignore the flakes of ceiling that may land in their hair as the hoofers dance onstage, and to ignore the ill-designed sets and the flickering lights. Yes, they are urged to ignore every discomfort and inconvenience, and get themselves over to Ninth Avenue to see Edna Parker Watson in

City of Girls

!

—

Then the audience was entering the theater, and we all crowded backstage—everyone in full costume and full makeup—listening to the glorious din of a packed house.

“Gather round,” said Billy. “This is your moment.”

The nervous, high-strung actors and dancers all formed a loose circle around Billy. I stood next to Anthony, as proud as I had ever been, holding his hand. He gave me a deep kiss, then dropped my hand and shifted back and forth on his feet lightly, jabbing the air with his fists, like a boxer about to fight.

Billy took a flask out of his pocket, helped himself to a generous swig, then passed it to Peg, who did the same.

“Now I’m not one for speeches,” said Billy, “given that I’m unfamiliar with stringing words together and I don’t enjoy being the center of attention.” The cast laughed indulgently. “But I want to tell you people that what you’ve made here in a short amount of time and on a shoestring budget is just as good as theater can ever be. There is nothing playing on Broadway right now—or in London, too, I would wager—that’s any better than the goods we’ve got to offer these folks tonight.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything playing in London at all right now, darling,” corrected Edna dryly, “except maybe ‘Bombs Away’ . . .”

The cast laughed again.

“Thank you, Edna,” said Billy. “You’ve reminded me to mention you. Listen to me, everyone. If you get nervous or unsettled onstage, look to Edna. From this moment on, she’s your captain and you couldn’t be in better hands. Edna is the coolest-headed performer with whom you will ever have the privilege of sharing a stage. Nothing can shake up this woman. So let her steadiness be your guide. Stay relaxed by seeing how relaxed she is. Remember that an audience will forgive a performer for anything except being uncomfortable. And if you forget your lines, just keep talking gibberish, and Edna will somehow fix it. Trust her—she’s been doing this job since the Spanish Armada, haven’t you, Edna?”

“Since somewhat before then, I should think,” she said, smiling.

Edna looked incandescent in her vintage red Lanvin gown from the Lowtsky’s bin. I had tailored the dress to her with such care. I was so proud of how well I’d dressed her for this role. Her makeup was exquisite, too. (But of course it was.) She still resembled herself, but this was a more vivid, regal version of herself. With her bobbed, glossy black hair and that lush red dress, she looked like a piece of Chinese lacquer—immaculate, varnished, and ever so valuable.

“One more thing before I turn it over to your trusty producer,” said Billy. “Remember that this audience didn’t come here tonight because they want to hate you. They came because they want to love you. Peg and I have put on thousands of shows over the years, in front of every kind of audience there is, and I know what an audience wants. They want to fall in love. So I’ve got an old vaudevillian’s tip for you: If you love them first, they won’t be able to help themselves from falling in love with you right back. So go out there and love them hard, is my advice.”