Almost Famous Women (13 page)

One August morning there is vigorous knocking at the front door. He looks out the window and sees two well-dressed people, a man and a woman, waiting.

Romaine! the man yells. We're here!

Mario, caught off guard, locks the bedroom door and quickly changes out of the pink pajamas, panting nervously. He tries to straighten the dressing table and knocks over the perfume.

Where did they come from? Who called them? How does she have any friends left?

He rushes downstairs to open the door.

May I help you? he asks, aware that he reeks of vanilla.

We're here to move Romaine to Nice, the man says, brushing past him.

Soon there are cardboard boxes, crates for the paintings, radios blaring pop songs and news about factory strikes and student protests, men sweating on the staircase. The friends are in
his
house. They are causing confusion and disarray.

Gray and Michele are in their mid-sixties, elegant, artistic, grossly cheerful. At night they leave the house to go drinking. No one will say it, Mario thinks, but they must know it's the last move, the final time they'll be called upon.

Romaine is silent, brooding, staring out the window as people move around her, rolling up carpets. She is thinner than ever, not eating.

Once, as Gray is talking about his lackluster watercolors, Mario pipes up, hopeful to join the conversation. I'm a failed artist too, he says.

You never had any art to fail, Romaine says.

The quiet is so excruciating that Mario is forced to think of a task. He nods humbly and stumbles out to the patio, which he sweeps furiously, more thoroughly than ever before.

On her last day at Villa Gaia, Romaine requests a lunch of cold
tongue followed by semolina pudding. Michele, glamorous in a pink sheath dress, offers her a glass of verdicchio.

Romaine waves her off. Pink clothes are vulgar, she says, shielding her eyes.

While Mario is preparing the lunch trays, a carabiniere marches up the front stairs in his crisp blue uniform and hat and knocks on the door. Mario answers.

The lady of the house called to report a theft, he says.

Mario covers his mouth with a hand. There's been no theft, he says.

I must be thorough, the carabiniere says. You understand.

Let me show you to her, Mario says, heart pounding. Signor, he says, before entering the room, you should know that her mental powers are greatly diminished. She's moving to Nice tomorrow, and gets very confused. But it's kind of you to humor her.

Mario stands in the doorway as the carabiniere greets Romaine.

The boy has been stealing from me, Romaine says, pointing a finger at Mario. He thinks I don't know what he's doing.

No, no, Officer, Mario hears himself saying. There was a cook here who had some debts. He was fired and left angrily, taking the wine and God knows what else.

Yes, Michele says, stepping forward. Our Romaine can be a little paranoid. She has visions.

The carabiniere smiles. It's a smile that says,
Yes, I'm in on this joke
.
Poor old rich woman with five locks on the door.

But should the carabiniere choose to search the flat Mario shares with his mother, he would not find a stolen painting. He would not find anything unless he looks inside Mario's mother's Bible, where she has stashed Romaine's drawings because she thinks they are evil.
Lavoro del diavolo
, she said, plucking them from his wall. He
brings them home, the few times he has deigned to spend a night outside of Romaine's elegant bedroom. He's kept all but the one he sold to the dealer, the money from which he will use to rent a room in Saint-Tropez. He was tempted to sell more, but it felt like a transgression, even against Romaine, and he loved the feeling of possessing her work.

He can picture Saint-Tropez now: a lover in his bed, the glittering sea, the green hills, the masts of tall boats, the women in their wide-brimmed hats and enormous sunglasses. He will be standing in a window, watching them all.

The carabiniere bids them good afternoon. Hours later, Michele and Gray have gone out drinking, and Mario is home alone with Romaine. He takes his favorite cape from the closet, gently folds it, and places it into a paper bag.

Romaine is having her dinner, hands trembling as she runs her knife through the tongue, leftovers, which she has never deigned to eat before now. But tonight is different from other nights.

I do not care for her, Mario thinks. I do not feel sorry for her. I only want to take some small slice of her life and have it for myself.

He comes to the chair and crouches down at her knees, which he has done so many times.

Can I wash your hair?

Why must you be so tender about everything? she asks, dropping her utensils to the plate. It's unnerving.

He moves silently about the room, adjusting the black curtains, waiting.

It would be nice to be clean before I travel, she says flatly.

He fills the tub with warm, not hot, water. He opens the small window in the bathroom and lets the fresh air in. He helps Romaine undress, steadying her as he unbuttons her blouse, never making eye contact. When she nearly slips he lifts her up like a young bride and lowers her carefully into the soapy water.

The dog is barking. The motorbikes scream underneath the window. This is what his mother does, he thinks, washing something that belongs to someone else. Romaine sits in the tub with her knees up. Relax, he says. Let go.

I can't.

You must. You should.

He grips each side of her face with his hands. It won't hurt, he says.

She is staring at him—or she may be looking through him onto someone else, someone he can't see—with those eyes. One trails off, the other remains steadily on his face, searching. The night comes.

Hazel Marion Eaton Watkins performing on Hager's Wall of Death, 1927.

Photo originally published in the
Portland Sunday Telegram,
March 12, 1939.

1921

S
he survives by telling herself not to think.

Just do. Just move. Just balance. Forget yourself.

She often feels as if she leaves her body before a performance and returns to it when her motorcycle is still and her feet are planted on the ground.

But sometimes not thinking means death, or almost death, and today she's lying in a hospital room in Bangor, in and out of consciousness, with facial lacerations, broken ribs, a fractured femur, and a concussion, which happened when her rear brake locked up as she was circling the motordrome at sixty miles per hour. She slid down the wall like grain pouring from a sack, fast and haphazard, with her heavy bike following her body, pinning her leg.

Shit, she thinks. I'm going to throw up.

Now she knows the sound of an audience's horror, and it is different than rapt joy and amazement. And so she's left alone for the moment, watching clouds move beyond the windowpane, and realizes that she's afraid. Fear, in the past, has been something
she can turn off, but she can't find the energy today to move it aside.

It's only when she's afraid that she second-guesses her decisions, and it's only when she second-guesses her decisions that she thinks of her daughter, Beverly, who lives in Vermont with Hazel's mother.

Am I a terrible person for giving her up?

“I'm cold,” she says, but her face is bandaged and she can only moan. She tries to rub her arms, but maybe one of them is broken, and then she's out again, riding a morphine high into nothingness.

Out of that nothingness emerges the candy-striped lighthouse at West Quoddy Head in Lubec, Maine, where she was born, the easternmost point in the United States, a beautiful, lonely, and snow-drenched place where her father dutifully tended the light to keep schooners from crashing into the jagged rocks, hidden by fog banks and dark nights.

She can still hear the boom of the fog cannon, still smell lard oil and kerosene on her father's hands. Many of their belongings—mirrors, clocks, the silver tea set—took on a crusty salinity. She frequently cut her feet on the barnacled rocks, swam out into swirling currents because she was bored.

She had loved her parents but not the long stretches of loneliness; days in the keeper's cottage were too quiet, too monotonous, and she ran away at fifteen to join the Johnny Jones Exposition.

She thinks of those first weeks, the vigor of the itinerant carnival life, how seductive the sounds and smells were after years of looking out over the Bay of Fundy. There was gregarious music and conversation, the burnt sugar smell of cotton candy, and the savory smell of meat roasting. God, the only live music she heard
the first years of her life was the calls of loons, the tinkling of sailboats, the whinnies of horses, the rhythm of waves. She'd craved volume, intensity, action, and Johnny had put her in a high-dive act, which, a few dives in, had also landed her in this very hospital, when she struck her head and split her scalp down to the bone. That's when she took to the motorcycle.

“Who recovers on a motorcycle?” her mother had asked, hysterical.

She never wore a helmet, even when she could feel the wind rushing over the bald spot on her head where the stitches were. You couldn't let fear in, she figured, and a helmet was one way of admitting the anticipation of being hurt, of breaking. A helmet acknowledged your vulnerability.

There is coughing nearby, the sound of another gurney's wheels squealing over the waxed wooden floor. Someone down the hall is going on and on about President Harding's poker habit.

“Stop,” she mumbles, injuries throbbing. “I need quiet.”

She retreats into her memories, and recalls the way a storm looked as it approached the lightkeeper's house, the way you had to brace yourself for the onslaught of waves and wind because the house was literally on the edge of the island; she could stare down into the opaque sea from her bedroom window, which the wind rattled and flew underneath, chilling her even on summer nights. Her father would tend the light no matter how bad the gales got. Even during hurricanes, he ran up and down the winding wrought-iron stairs. She remembers the sound of his feet, the clunk-clunking, the urgency. Through him she learned what stupid devotion to a task feels like, repetitive motion. She lives it. Around and around the motordrome she lives it, her slender foot on the gas.

A brisk, starched nurse stands over her for a minute and feels for her pulse. Her fingers are rough and warm.

“Don't tell my parents,” Hazel slurs, but the nurse is gone. Her parents will see reports of the crash in the papers anyway, and her mother will write her a letter asking,
Why? Why must you put yourself in harm's way every week? Every day?

What they don't know: nothing has topped the feeling of standing next to the motordrome, smiling into the din of applause. Nothing has topped the way men shake her hand and look her in the eye, what it's like to be able to call a man chickenshit to his face and get away with it, to mean it, to feel free and dominant and in control of your life.

I'll fight my way back to that vital feeling, she thinks. I will raise the stakes, put a lion in my sidecar like they do down in Alabama.

Her coastal life had been full of loons, gulls, rocks, and maps. “We're the first to see the sunrise at the equinox,” her mother had reminded her, as if this alone was compelling enough to keep a family isolated from society, tending a light day in and day out.

The sunrise is beautiful, Hazel had thought then, but it will never be enough. She was questioning then, as she does now: what makes you empty and what makes you full?