I would let the phone ring twenty-five times, then hang up and start over again with the same phone number and the same nickel. Sobbing and hiccupping all the while.
It became hypnotic—dialing, counting the rings, hanging up, hearing the nickel drop, putting the nickel back in the slot, dialing, counting the rings, hanging up. Sobbing, wailing.
Then suddenly there was a voice on the other end. A furious voice. “WHAT?!” someone was shouting in my ear. “Goddamn WHAT?!”
I almost dropped the phone. I’d fallen into such a trance, I’d forgotten what telephones are for.
“I need to talk to Walter Morris,” I said, when I recovered my senses. “Please, sir. It’s a family emergency.”
The man on the other end sputtered out a litany of curses (“You Christless, piss-soaked eight ball!”), as well as the expected lecture about do you have any idea what time it is? But his anger was no match for my desperation. I was doing an excellent rendition of a hysterical relative—which, in point of fact, is exactly what I was. My sobs easily overpowered this stranger’s outrage. His shouts about protocol meant nothing to me. Eventually he must’ve realized that his rules were no match for my mayhem, and he went searching for my brother.
I waited for a long while, dropping more nickels into the phone, trying to collect myself, listening to the sound of my own ragged breath in the little booth.
And then at last, Walter. “What happened, Vee?” he asked.
At the sound of my brother’s voice, I disintegrated all over again, into a thousand pieces of lost little girl. And then—through my waves of sobbing heaves—I told him absolutely everything.
“You have to get me out of here,” I begged, when he’d finally heard it all. “You have to take me home.”
I didn’t know how Walter managed to arrange it all so fast—and in the middle of the night, no less. I didn’t know how these things worked in the military—taking leave, and such. But my brother was the most resourceful person I knew, so he’d solved it somehow. I knew he would solve it. Walter could fix anything.
While Walter was pulling together his part of my escape plan (gaining leave and finding a car to borrow), I was packing—stuffing my clothes and shoes into my luggage, and putting away my sewing machine with shaking fingers. Then I wrote Peg and Olive a long, tear-stained, self-lacerating letter, and left it on the kitchen table. I don’t remember everything the letter said, but it was full of hysteria. In hindsight, I wish I’d just written, “Thank you for taking care of me, I’m sorry I was an idiot,” and left it at that. Peg and Olive had enough to deal with. They didn’t need a stupid twenty-page confessional from me, in addition to everything else.
But they got one, anyhow.
Just before dawn, Walter pulled up to the Lily Playhouse to collect me and to take me home.
He wasn’t alone. My brother had been able to borrow a car, yes, but it came with a catch. To be more specific, it came with a driver. There was a tall, skinny young man at the wheel, wearing the same uniform as Walter. An OCS classmate. An Italian-looking kid with a thick Brooklyn accent. He would be taking the drive with us. Apparently the beat-up old Ford was his.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care who was there, or who saw me in my fragmented state. All I felt was desperate. I just needed to leave the Lily Playhouse right now, before anybody there woke up and saw my face. I could not live in the same building as Edna, not for another minute. She had, in her own cool way, effectively commanded me to leave, and I had heard her loud and clear. I had to go.
Right now.
Just get me out of here was all I cared about.
We crossed the George Washington Bridge as the sun was coming up. I couldn’t even look at the view of New York City retreating behind me. I couldn’t bear it. Even though I was taking myself away from the city, I experienced the exact opposite sensation—that the city was being taken away from me. I’d proven that I couldn’t be trusted with it, so New York was being removed from my reach, the way you take a valuable object out of a child’s hands.
Once we were on the other side of the bridge, safely out of the city, Walter tore into me. I had never