My mouth watered for it. The steak, and this place, and the radiator blasting heat, and the radio, and the pillows. I could see myself here, and I could see Billy knocking at the door in his uniform and me opening the door in a dress and heels and lipstick, welcoming him home.
Maybe I’d been dead wrong about Billy. Maybe the decision to stop seeing him was the latest in the long line of bad Corrigan luck. Wasn’t it true that I was still crazy for him, that I had to stop myself from writing him every single night? That there were plenty of nights I left the theater, hoping he’d be at the stage door in his uniform, with that hungry look in his eyes before he lifted me into his arms? How many times had I played that scene in my head — how I’d shake my head at him, telling him it was still over? Didn’t it always end in a kiss?
There was too much going on in my head, and I was afraid some of it would spill out in front of Nate Benedict.
“I never eat after a show,” I told him.
When we walked out, the wind hit us, cold and damp from off the river, and leaves crunched under our feet as we walked to First Avenue.
“I’ll put you in a cab,” he said.
He raised his arm and directed his next remark to the street. “You said a lot, but you never said you didn’t love him.”
The cab pulled over, and he handed in some bills to the driver. He cupped my elbow, helping me over the curb. Our heads were close together when he murmured, “You and me, we want the same thing. His happiness.”
I slid a bit in my heels and almost fell into the cab. He closed the door. I crashed back against the seat, looking through the window at him. He stood on the corner, bareheaded in the wind, hands in his pockets. It was like we’d made some kind of bargain. Another one, like the ones we’d made before.
In my pocket, my fingers closed around the key.
Two
New York City
October 1950
I hadn’t expected it to be easy to come to New York, but I hadn’t expected it to be so hard, either. Donuts and peanuts for a diet, rooming houses so far north in the Bronx that it took me an hour on the subway to Times Square. The green stain in the sink, the toilet that wouldn’t flush. The sounds from the other rooms — the fights, the crying, the rhythmic thumping that made me put my pillow over my head and hum “Skylark.” The discovery of bedbugs. I’d bounced from one bad rooming house to another.
Then I got smart, and lucky. I found out where all the actors ate lunch, at Walgreens in Times Square, and I squeezed out my dimes and ate lunch there every day, just a bowl of soup I could eat real slow. One day a blonde in a tight red sweater started talking to her friend about a girl leaving a show. In the chorus and had quit right there and then, saying she had appendix trouble. The blonde had snickered, said in a high squeaky voice, “That’s four months’ worth of a swollen appendix if you ask me.” I slapped down my coins and left.
I went straight to the theater and my luck was still holding, because the man at the door was Irish, and he actually remembered the Corrigan Three, the performing triplets from Rhode Island. He waved me through the door and said the director and choreographer were both onstage, right then.
I picked up routines fast. You could show me once and I could do it, straight from the top. And I was strong. That was training. Then there was luck. This time I had the right height and the director didn’t need a blonde. I guess he knew the show was a dog and would be closing soon, and he didn’t really care. I think he patted himself on the back for giving a kid her first break.
I was in a Broadway show. Lights and glory. But it wasn’t much different from summer stock. It was a bunch of girls razzing each other and helping each other, and there was always a mean girl, too. It was “Would you lookit that, I got a run and I just bought these at Woolworth’s yestaday” and “My feet are gonna fall off