When I come in from work, he’s there. Sitting like his heart is breaking.”
“I have to go, Muddie,” I said.
I had to be off the phone, doing anything but talking to my sister, thinking about our father sitting, just sitting.
She either didn’t hear me or ignored what I said. “It’s worse than when Elena left him. Oh, that reminds me! She’s back! I mean, she’s back in Fox Point. She got a divorce.” Muddie whispered the terrible word. “And her father won’t take her in. So she’s living with her sister. I ran into her yesterday; she’s still so beautiful…. Da knows she’s back, I can’t imagine a man feeling worse. I think he doesn’t care anymore what he does…. Say — have you heard from Jamie?”
“How could I have heard — he doesn’t know where I am. Have you?”
“No, not since he wrote and told us where he was. I look every day for a letter. I’ve written him every week — I’ll send you the address. Oh, I don’t want to use up your money. Good-bye, then, and I’ll tell Da you’re settled. He’ll be glad, no matter what he doesn’t say.”
“Bye,” I said, then hung up the phone and reached for the teacup I’d balanced on the wide rolled back of the couch. As I stood, the phone cord scraped against the cup and I just barely caught it before it fell. The spoon slid off the saucer and I heard it clatter behind the couch.
I put down the cup and the phone, happy I hadn’t stained the couch. I laid myself flat to fish for the spoon. I could see the glint of it and I stretched, fingers splayed, to find it. My cheek flat on the floor, I groped through the dark. My fingers slid over metal and I pulled it out.
It wasn’t a spoon. It was a woman’s compact, slim and silver, something you could buy at Woolworth’s. That’s what I thought at first. I turned it over in my hands and felt the weight of it and realized it was expensive. I opened it and saw that the mirror was cracked. The powder had dried. I snapped it shut, turned it over, and saw the initials in curlicue script: B.W.
It had belonged to the woman who’d lived here before. Or could it have been someone else, a woman Nate had brought here? Someone with a sophisticated name that clanged with brass. Barbara, or Brenda.
I wasn’t very bright, but I was starting to get wise, just by keeping my ears open. I was beginning to realize how New York worked, how the men chased their secretaries or the Broadway dancers and brought them to discreet hotels or apartments they kept without their wife knowing. I figured Angela Benedict didn’t know about this apartment. And how would she find out, if she never left the house back in Providence?
I leaned back into the pillows and looked out at the gathering dusk. I held the compact in my hand. Suddenly, I could feel someone else here, a presence. Another woman had sat here, had hung that mirror at an awkward height just so she could see the river. I shivered. I didn’t know why it should have spooked me, but it did. With the compact still in my hand, I went around the apartment and turned on all the lights.
Chorus girls’ dressing rooms had their own rules and their own comradeship. We were there to make ourselves beautiful, borrow lipsticks, complain about our aching feet and our boyfriends. I’d noticed a certain frost in the air during my week of rehearsals, but after my debut on Saturday night, I settled into a chair at the mirror and felt the atmosphere shift. I hadn’t tripped into someone’s drink, I hadn’t lost my headdress in the “Hoop-De-Doo” number, and I hadn’t stolen the show. I was okay.
At first, I hadn’t been able to attach names to faces. Polly, Mary, Edna, Darla, Mickey, Barb, Pat. But after a week I knew them all.
“So how old are you, kid? Twenty-one, you say?”
“Yeah, and you have the papers to prove it, right?”
“Leave off the kid. I started when I was fifteen. Said I was eighteen.”
“When was that, honey — in 1933?”
“Hardey-har-har.”
“I like your hair. Is it natural?”
“You’re lucky, only redhead in the line. People will remember you.”
“Don’t say that or Pat will dye her hair again.”
“Dry up. I get more dates with blond hair. You think I’m going to go changing