too?!”) She could have been any middle-aged brunette, by the sight of her. But I would’ve known that voice anywhere: it was Celia Ray!
I had thought of Celia so many times over the years—with guilt, with curiosity, with anxiety. All I could ever imagine for her life were bad outcomes. In my darkest fantasies, the story was this: After being exiled from the Lily Playhouse, Celia had lived a life of doom and ruin. Perhaps she had died in the streets somewhere along the way, brutalized by the kind of man she had once so effortlessly controlled. Other times, I imagined her as an old prostitute. Sometimes I would pass by a drunken, middle-aged woman on the street who looked (there is no other word for it) trashy, and I would wonder if it was Celia. Had she dyed her hair so blond that it had turned brittle and orange? Was she that woman over there in the tottering heels, with the bare, veined legs? Was that her, with the bruised circles under the eyes? Was that her, picking through the garbage can? Was that her red lipstick on that collapsing mouth?
But I’d been wrong: Celia was fine. Better than fine—she was selling floor wax on TV! Oh, that stubborn, determined, little survivor. Still fighting her way into the spotlight.
I never saw the ad again, and I never tried to track Celia down. I didn’t want to interfere with her life, and I knew better than to assume that she and I would have anything in common anymore. We’d never really had anything in common in the first place. Scandal or no scandal, I believe that our friendship was always destined to have been momentary—a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men’s heads. That’s all it had ever been, really, and that was perfect. That’s all it had ever needed to be. I’d found deeper and richer female friendships later on in life, and I hoped that Celia had, too.
So, no, I never sought her out.
But it is impossible for me to convey the amount of delight and pride that it gave me to hear her voice blasting out of my television set that evening.
It made me want to cheer.
A quarter of a century later, folks, and Celia Ray was still in show business!
TWENTY-NINE
In the late summer of 1965, my Aunt Peg received a curious letter in the mail.
It was from the commissioner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The letter explained that the Navy Yard would soon be closing down forever. The city was transforming, and the Navy had decided that it was no longer feasible to maintain a shipbuilding industry in such an expensive urban area. Before it closed, however, the Yard would host a ceremonial reunion—throwing open the gates once more, in celebration of all the Brooklyn workers who had labored there so heroically during World War II. Since it was the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, this kind of celebration seemed particularly appropriate.
The commissioner’s office had gone through their files and found Peg’s name on some old paperwork, listing her as having been an “independent entertainment contractor.” They’d managed to track her down through city tax records and now they were wondering whether Mrs. Buell might consider producing a small commemorative show on the day of the Navy Yard reunion, to celebrate the accomplishments of the wartime laborers? They were looking for something of a nostalgia piece—just twenty minutes or so of old-time singing and dancing, in the style of the war days.
Now, Peg would have enjoyed nothing more than to take on this job. The only problem was, she was no longer in good health. That big, tall body of hers was starting to break down. She was suffering from emphysema—not surprising after her lifetime of chain-smoking—and she also had arthritis, and her eyes were starting to go. As she explained it: “The doctor says that there’s nothing much wrong with me, kiddo, but there’s nothing much right with me, either.”
She had retired from her job at the high school a few years earlier, due to her failing health, and she didn’t get around easily anymore. Marjorie and Nathan and I had dinner with Peg and Olive a few nights a week, but that was about all Peg could handle in terms of excitement. Most evenings, she