When she came out, Bobby was holding a stack of vintage picture postcards from Paris. They had considered French names like Joan (of Arc), Yvette, Babette, and Bernadette, but none of those sang out.
“Hmm.” Bobby held one of the cards. He showed it to Sue. “The Rue Saint-Honoré. Pronounced ‘Honor-ray.’ That’s the masculine. The feminine has an extra e on the end and is pronounced the same. Honorée. Isn’t that lovely?”
“I’m not French.”
“We could try an Anglo-Saxon surname. Something simple, one syllable. Bates. Church. Smythe. Cooke.”
“None of those are good.” Sue flipped through the stack of old postcards—the Eiffel Tower. Notre Dame. Charles de Gaulle.
“Honorée Goode?” Bob repeated the name and liked the sound of it. “E’s on the ends of both.”
“They’d call me Honorée Goody Two-shoes.”
“No, they wouldn’t. Everyone pretends they speak French, mon petite teet-mouse. Honorée Goode is honestly good.” He reached over and pulled a black Princess-model phone off a bookshelf and dialed a number.
“I have a friend at Equity. They have a computer so no names get duplicated. Jane Fonda. Faye Dunaway. Raquel Welch. Taken!”
“Raquel Gliebe? My parents would have no problem with that.”
Bob was connected to his friend Mark. “Mark-y Mark-a-lot, Bob Roy. I know! It has? Not since she went out of town, on that cruise liner. It’s good money! Can you do me a little service? Check the database for a stage name. No, for one not taken. Last name Goode with an e on the end. First name Honorée.” He spelled it out. “With an accent or schwa or whatever on the first e. Sure, I’ll hold.”
“I don’t know, Bobby.” Sue was running the new name over and over again in her head.
“You can decide when you march into Equity with your first contract and a check for the dues. Then, you can be Sue Gliebe or Catwoman Zelkowitz. But I have to tell you…” Someone came on the phone, but it wasn’t Bob’s friend. “Yes, I am holding for Mark. Thank you.” He turned back to Sue. “I walked into that run-through of Brigadoon. Up there onstage was a girl playing Fiona who was going to have a career.”
Sue smiled and blushed. She was that Fiona. She had crushed that role, her first out of the chorus. Her Fiona had led to all the roles the ACLO had given her, had pushed her off to NYC, and had made her clean in Bob Roy’s kitchen tub.
“I loved that girl,” Bob said. “I loved that actress. She wasn’t some bitter leading lady pissed off that New York had had enough of her. Or a painted starlet doing Civic Light Opera because the distance and makeup hid the fact she was forty-three years old. That Fiona was no mutton. No, she was a local lamb, an Arizona gal who could hold the stage like a Barrymore, sing like Julie Andrews, with a set of boobs that set the boys a-flutter. If you had introduced yourself to me as Honorée Goode, I would have said, ‘Well, you certainly are!’ But no, you were Sue Gliebe. I thought, Sue Gliebe? That’s just not going to fly.”
Sue Gliebe felt warm inside. Bobby Roy was her biggest fan and she loved him. If he had been fifteen years younger, forty pounds lighter, and not a homosexual she would have spent the night in his bed. Maybe she would, regardless.
Mark came back on the phone. “Are you sure?” Bob asked. “That spelling, with the e? Okay. Thanks, Marco. I will. Thursday? Why not! Bye!” He hung up the phone, tapping it with his running fingers, and said, “Big decision time, titmouse.”
Sue leaned back in her overstuffed chair. The rain had stopped outside. Her skin had been dried by the terry cloth of the robe and she smelled of delicate rosewater from the bath soap. The big radio was softly playing an orchestration of a nightclub standard, and, for the first time ever, New York City seemed like the place Sue Gliebe belonged…
HONORÉE GOODE (Miss Wentworth)—Ms. Goode trained at the Arizona Civic Light Opera. She was nominated for an Obie last year for her role as Kate Brunswick in Joe Runyan’s Backwater Blues. This marks her Broadway debut. She thanks her supportive parents and Robert Roy, Jr., for making it all possible.
A Special Weekend
It was the early spring of 1970 and because his tenth birthday was in a week and a half, Kenny Stahl, still thought of as the baby of the family, did not have to go to school. He was going to be picked up by his mother around noon to spend a special weekend with her, so he came to the breakfast table in his ordinary, nonschool clothes. His older brother, Kirk, and older sister, Karen, both in their uniforms for St. Philip Neri School, thought the deal was unfair. They wanted their mom to come and pick them up, too—to take them away, out of the house they had been moved into, to live again in Sacramento or anyplace else as long as they were the only kids and the dark moodiness of their father and the constant, sunny practicality of his second wife would not make their lives an emotional teeter-totter.
Kenny’s three stepsisters were seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen years old. His stepbrother had two years on him. None of them had opinions as to the fairness of the birthday plan. They had always lived together in Iron Bend, attended the unified public schools, and never had to wear uniforms. This weekend didn’t strike them as interesting, notable, or in any way special.
The small house they all lived in was far out of town on Webster Road, closer to Molinas than to Iron Bend, which was the county seat and where Kenny’s father was head cook at the Blue Gum Restaurant. Eucalyptus trees—blue gums—lined both sides of Webster Road for most of the miles between the two towns, scattering their leaves and nuts all over the two lanes and both shoulders. Decades ago the messy imports from Australia were planted as windbreaks for the almond groves as well as in a misinformed attempt to farm the trees for railroad ties. This was back when big money could be made in railroad ties, as long as they were not made of eucalyptus. Fortunes were lost on the twisting, peeling, gnarly-growing trees, three of which were spaced across the front yard of Kenny’s house; the constant rain of debris laid waste to every attempt to plant decent grass there. The backyard had sort of a lawn, a patch of weed-studded green, which the kids took turns mowing on occasion. Across the road were almond orchards. Almonds were a big industry then and still are now.
Kenny’s father had found a new job in Iron Bend, a new home, a new school, and, it turned out, a new family. He’d moved his three kids into the small house the very same night they had left Sacramento. All the boys slept in what had been a screened-in porch. All the girls were in one bedroom with twin bunk beds.
After two school buses had come and gone, Kenny spent the morning shuffling around the house as his father slept and his stepmother quietly cleaned up the breakfast dishes. He had never been at home without the other kids and was thrilled to have the run of the place. His only instruction was that he was to keep quiet. For a while, he watched TV with the volume nearly mute, but there was just one channel, Channel 12 from Chico, and during school hours there was nothing on that interested him. He played with the model ships and planes he had made from kits, using the top of the living room coffee table as the vast sea. He went through the dresser drawers of his brother and stepbrother looking for secrets, but their treasures were hidden elsewhere. In the backyard, he punted a football, trying to clear the nearest almond trees, gambling that in failure the ball wouldn’t get stuck in their branches. He tied a cut of an old bedsheet to a discarded beanpole, making a flag that he ran around with like he was leading a charge in the Civil War. He was trying to plant the flag into a hole when his stepmom called to him from the kitchen window she had cranked open.