“She should try to think more reasonable.”
“She should get herself a butter-and-egg man.”
Who were these people that were being talked about? What was this life that was being suggested? And who was this poor girl being discussed in the stairwell? How was she ever going to advance past being a mere movie usher, if she didn’t start thinking more reasonable? Who’d given her the diamond? Who was paying for all the champagne that was being lapped up? I cared about all these things! These things mattered! And what in the world was a butter-and-egg man?
I’d never been more desperate to know how a story ended, and this story didn’t even have a plot—it just had unnamed characters, hints of wild action, and a sense of looming crisis. My heart was racing with excitement—and yours would have been, too, if you were a frivolous nineteen-year-old girl like me, who’d never had a serious thought in her life.
—
We reached a dimly lit landing, and Peg unlocked a door and let us all in.
“Welcome home, kiddo,” Peg said.
“Home” in my Aunt Peg’s world consisted of the third and fourth floors of the Lily Playhouse. These were the living quarters. The second floor of the building—as I would find out later—was office space. The ground floor, of course, was the theater itself, which I’ve already described for you. But the third and fourth floors were home, and now we had arrived.
Peg did not have a talent for interior design, I could instantly see. Her taste (if you could call it that) ran toward heavy, outdated antiques, and mismatched chairs, and a lot of apparent confusion about what belonged where. I could see that Peg had the same sort of dark, unhappy paintings on her walls as my parents had (inherited from the same relatives, no doubt). It was all faded prints of horses and portraits of crusty old Quakers. There was a fair amount of familiar-looking old silver and china spread around the place as well—candlesticks and tea sets, and such—and some of it looked valuable, but who knew? None of it look used or loved. (There were ashtrays on every surface, though, and those certainly looked used and loved.)
I don’t want to say that the place was a hovel. It wasn’t dirty; it just wasn’t arranged. I caught a glance of a formal dining room—or, rather, what might have been a formal dining room in anyone else’s home, except that a Ping-Pong table had been placed right in the middle of the room. Even more curiously, the Ping-Pong table was directly situated beneath a low-hanging chandelier, which must have made it difficult to play a game.
We landed in a generously sized living room—a big enough space that it could be overstuffed with furniture while also containing a grand piano, which was jammed unceremoniously against the wall.
“Who needs something from the bottle and jug department?” asked Peg, heading to a bar in the corner. “Martinis? Anyone? Everyone?”
The resounding answer seemed to be: Yes! Everyone!
Well, almost everyone. Olive declined a drink and frowned as Peg poured the martinis. It looked as though Olive were calculating the price of each cocktail down to the halfpenny—which she probably was doing.
My aunt handed me my martini as casually as if she and I had been drinking together for ages. This was a delight. I felt quite adult. My parents drank (of course they drank; they were WASPs) but they never drank with me. I’d always had to execute my drinking on the sly. Not anymore, it seemed.
Cheers!
“Let me show you to your rooms,” Olive said.
Peg’s secretary led me down a rabbit warren and opened one of the doors. She told me, “This is your Uncle Billy’s apartment. Peg would like you to stay here for now.”
I was surprised. “Uncle Billy has an apartment here?”
Olive sighed. “It is a sign of your aunt’s enduring affection for her husband that she keeps these rooms for him, should he need a place to stay while passing through.”
I don’t think it was my imagination that Olive said the words “enduring affection” much the same way someone else might say “stubborn rash.”
Well, thank you, Aunt Peg, because Billy’s apartment was wonderful. It didn’t have the clutter of the other rooms I’d seen—not at all. No, this place had style. There was a small sitting room with a fireplace and a fine, black-lacquered desk, upon which sat a typewriter. Then there was the bedroom, with its windows facing Forty-first Street, and its handsome double bed made of chrome and dark wood. On the floor was an immaculate white rug. I had never before stood on a white rug. Just off the bedroom was a good-sized dressing room with a large chrome mirror on the wall, and a glossy wardrobe containing not one item of clothing whatsoever. In the corner of the dressing room was a small sink. The place was spotless.
“You don’t have your own bath, unfortunately,” said Olive, as the men in overalls were depositing my trunks and sewing machine in the dressing room. “There is a common bath across the hall. You’ll be sharing that with Celia, as she is staying at the Lily, just for now. Mr. Herbert and Benjamin live in the other wing. They share their own bath.”
I didn’t know who Mr. Herbert and Benjamin were, but I figured I’d soon enough be finding out.
“Billy won’t be needing his apartment, Olive?”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Are you very sure? If he should ever need these rooms, of course, I can go somewhere else. What I’m saying is that I don’t need anything so nice as all this. . . .”
I was lying. I needed and wanted this little apartment with all my heart, and had already laid claim to it in my imagination. This is where I would become a person of significance, I decided.
“Your uncle hasn’t been to New York City in over four years, Vivian,” Olive said, eyeballing me in that way she had—that unsettling way of making you feel as though she were watching your thoughts like a newsreel. “I trust that you can bunk down here with a certain sense of security.”
Oh, bliss!
—
I unpacked a few essentials, splashed some water on my face, powdered my nose, and combed my hair. Then it was back to the clutter and chatter of the big, overstuffed living room. Back to Peg’s world, with all its novelty and noise.
Olive went to the kitchen and brought out a small meat loaf, served on a plate of dismal lettuce. Just as she had intuited earlier, this was not going to be enough of a meal for everyone in the room. Shortly, however, she reappeared with some cold cuts and bread. She also scared up half a chicken carcass, a plate of pickles, and some containers of cold Chinese food. I noticed that somebody had opened a window and turned on a small fan, which helped to eliminate the stuffy summer heat not in the least.
“You kids eat,” Peg said. “Take all you need.”
Gladys and Roland lit into the meat loaf like a couple of farmhands. I helped myself to some of the chop suey. Celia didn’t eat anything, but sat quietly on one of the couches, handling her martini glass and cigarette with more panache than anything I’d ever seen.
“How was the beginning of the show tonight?” Olive asked. “I only caught the end.”
“Well, it fell short of King Lear,” said Peg. “But only just.”
Olive’s frown deepened. “Why? What happened?”
“Nothing happened per se,” said Peg. “It’s just a lackluster show, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over. It’s always been lackluster. Nobody in the audience seemed unduly harmed by it. They all left the theater with the use of their legs. Anyway, we’re changing the show next week, so it doesn’t matter.”
“And the box office receipts? For the early show?”
“The less we speak of such matters the better,” said Peg.
“But what was the take, Peg?”