Beaches (2 page)

“Last night, kid,” said Jerry directly to Cee Cee, “unbeknownst to even me, there was a guy from Hollywood in the audience.”

“Hollywood,” Leona screamed out, so loud it made Bertie jump. “Oh, my God!”

“Seems the guy couldn’t sleep, so he was walking on the boardwalk and stopped in for our twelve o’clock show. See? And all the mothers thought I was a slave driver making you kids do three shows last night. Well, God moves in mysterious ways.”

Cee Cee sat silently.

“Well, he liked Lewandowski a lot. A whole lot. Thought her handwalk on the lighted staircase was great.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Leona impatiently, starting to pant again.

Jerry didn’t look at her. “But he loved you, kid! He called me this morning and that’s all he could talk about. Besides mentioning Lewandowski, that is. The kid that did the Mama number. The son of a gun couldn’t believe that was really you singing. Said you must have been pantomiming a record.”

Bertie looked at Cee Cee for a hint at the excitement she must be feeling.

Cee Cee’s face was a blank. “So?” she asked.

“So?” Grey said excitedly. “So? So he wants you to have a screen test.”

Leona let out a wail and waddled over to Bertie’s chair.

“Oh, my God. I gotta sit down,” she said, tapping Bertie hard on the arm. Bertie jumped up, and Leona’s big body fell into the chair.

“Oh, my God. A screen test.”

“When?” Cee Cee asked.

“Well, he wants to see you again. Today. I’ll call him now. I’ll have him here right away. At three o’clock. Hollywood,” said Jerry Grey.

Bertie wasn’t sure, but she thought his eyes filled with tears.

“Some of my kids have been on Broadway . . . but Hollywood.” He put his head in his hands and just sat there.

Bertie, Cee Cee, and Leona walked down the stairs and through the building.

“You start getting ready,” Leona said. “I’ll go get some sandwiches.”

“C’mon, kid,” Cee Cee said, taking Bertie’s hand. Leona walked out of the building, and Cee Cee walked

with Bertie to a big brown door marked ‘Backstage.’ She pushed the door open, and cool darkness surrounded them as they walked inside.

Bertie looked up at the enormous fly gallery and the massive area beyond it that she figured must be the stage. She couldn’t move. She had never seen anything like it before.

“Move it, kid,” Cee Cee said, pulling Bertie’s arm. “I gotta be in full dress, fa chrissake.” They walked past the various colored flats and behind the vast black curtains to the dressing room. A small room with six mirrors, each surrounded by six bare light bulbs.

Cee Cee plopped herself down in a chair. There was a telegram stuck in the corner of her mirror.
YOU
MAY
SING
ABOUT
YOUR
MAMA
BUT
YOU’RE
STILL
MY
GIRL-LOVE
DADDY
. Cee Cee opened what looked like a blue metal toolbox. It was filled with makeup. Bertie peeked inside. She gazed at the little round metal containers. Some had names on them. Clown white. Lip rouge. Some of them had only numbers.

Cee Cee pulled out a parrot green tube with a black cap and removed the cap. She turned on the mirror light and squeezed some of the contents of the tube onto her finger. A little blob on her forehead, one on each cheek, and one on her chin. Quickly she smoothed them out across her face until it was a creamy suntan color.

Bertie watched the way Cee Cee’s tiny red-tipped hands dug into the blue metal chest, taking out first one little container and then another. Blue for her eyelids, red for her cheeks, a little white under the eyebrows, a different red for her lips, some black stuff in a tiny red box marked Maybelline that she applied to her eyelashes with an itty-bitty brush.

Bertie couldn’t believe it. Cee Cee looked like a movie star.

The door opened and Leona came in carrying a paper bag.

“Anybody hungry? I’m starving,” Leona said, rummaging through the bag, peeking in the waxed paper for her own sandwich.

Cee Cee didn’t answer. Bertie wasn’t hungry. Leona started eating.

“What time is it?” Cee Cee asked, getting up.

“Ten to three,” Leona told her.

“Is Harry gonna be here?” Cee Cee asked. “Is he playin’ for me?”

“I guess so,” Leona said, getting up. “I’m sure Jerry‘11 get him over here.” She wiped her hands off on a napkin and started going through the rack of clothes that hung near the wall.

“Which one?” she asked.

“The red,” Cee Cee said positively.

“Why the red?”

“It’s what I wore last night. Sit down and eat, Leona. Bertie will help me.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll eat later!”

“Leona!”

“Okay.”

Cee Cee had removed her bathing suit and now stood naked. She pulled out a pair of red mesh stockings and put them on. Here and there in the mesh was a tiny rhine-stone. Her grown-up, made-up face looked weird with her little-girl body. She took down a hanger with something red and sparkly on it and handed it to Bertie.

“You hold it while I step into it,” she said.

Bertie wasn’t sure she was holding it right, but she held it anyway. It didn’t seem to have any recognizable form, no arms or legs or a label on the back so you could tell where the front was. Cee Cee seemed to know what she was doing, though. With great agility, she stepped into two holes, put her arms through two others, did a little shimmy to pull it up, and there she was, resplendent in a tiny red-sequined suit that clung to her child’s body in a way that made it look almost curvy. Out of a little

cardboard box she pulled a sparkly red pair of shoes with taps on them and sat down on the floor to put them on.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Tune up,” said Leona.

“No.”

Cee Cee took Bertie’s hand and they walked back toward the backstage area. Cee Cee’s taps clicked on the hard floor.

“Sometimes I puke before I go on,” she told Bertie, “but this is just an audition.” As they approached the area next to the stage, a tall man wearing a bright purple long-sleeved shirt and a matching scarf around his neck came running toward Leona.

“Oh, my God,” he said, “can you believe this?”

“You got the music?” Leona asked.

“Oh, sweetie, do I ever,” the man named Harry said. “And when the kid’s a star, honey, just remember who never played a wrong note for her, even saved her ass a few times on the high notes. You know?”

Cee Cee had wandered over to the stage. She took the edge of the large curtain in her hand and pulled it back ever so slightly and peeked out at the auditorium.

“They’re coming in,” she said, turning quickly to Harry, Leona, and Bertie. It was the first trace of true excitement Bertie had seen from her.

“Harry, hurry up.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Get to that piano,” Cee Cee said, her teeth clenched.

“I’m not moving until Jerry tells me to,” Harry said haughtily. “He’s my boss, little Miss Movie Star, not you.”

“Aw, go on, Harry,” Leona pleaded. “Warm them up a little. Play a few tunes.”

“Absolutely not,” Harry said.

“Fine, Harry,” Cee Cee said. “You’re right. Wait till Jerry Grey, the king of the kiddie shows, tells you what to do.”

“But it would be such a good warm-up,” Leona began.

“Say, Ma,” Cee Cee said sweetly. It was the first time Bertie had heard her call Leona anything but Leona. “What’s Charlie doin’ these days? The crippled kid who used to play for my recitals? I’ll bet he’d love Hollywood.”

Harry pouted and walked across the stage and down the steps to the piano. Bertie could see him from where she was standing, even though the piano was in the orchestra pit. He spread all the music out on the piano and then he waved to Jerry Grey and said something that sounded to Bertie like, “Any requests?” Then he laughed and dusted off the piano stool and twisted it around a few times to make it just the right height, and unbuttoned his cuffs and shuffled through the music a few times and smiled out to where Jerry Grey was sitting and brushed back his hair, and buttoned his cuffs, until Jerry Grey finally yelled, “Hey, Harry. Get on with it. Bring out the kid.”

Bertie was nervous. All of a sudden, she had a strange feeling that she was the one who was supposed to go out there. It was as though any second, by mistake, somebody might give her a big push and she’d find herself standing on the stage wearing the mesh stockings that had a rhine-stone here and there, and that red-sequined thing, singing that song of Cee Cee’s. Bertie came out of her reverie. Cee Cee was already on stage. And that voice. That great big grown-up voice was a hundred times bigger, a hundred times better than it had been when they were standing near the boardwalk earlier. Bertie moved closer to the stage. It was difficult seeing past Leona who stood clinging to the curtain’s edge, moaning ever so slightly.

Now Cee Cee was doing what Bertie figured must be the part Cee Cee had described as the “hot tap.” Harry pounded a few chords on the piano and then he stopped. The only sound in the place was Cee Cee’s taps on the wooden floor. Then Harry played a few more chords and Cee Cee moved those bright red shoes and made her feet

fly all around. Harry began to play the regular music again, and Cee Cee whirled in a giant circle around the stage until she was almost near the center. Then suddenly, as if she’d just thought of it, she did a perfect cartwheel and stood up. Without a gasp, in perfect control, the voice came, belting out the last two lines.

You’ve got to see mama ev’ry night, Or you can’t . , . No, you can’t . . .

Harry pounded the piano dramatically.

See mama . . . At all!!!!

Cee Gee’s arms stretched to the sky until her last note was completed, and when it was, she leaned forward at the waist in a deep, deep bow.

Bertie and Leona jumped up and down with excitement. Leona was crying and laughing, and without warning, she picked a surprised Bertie up into her big flabby arms and swung her happily in a circle.

Harry was still playing as Cee Cee ran off the stage in the other direction and then ran back on, blowing kisses.

She ran offstage for the last time and the music stopped. There had been some applause during the playoff, but now there wasn’t a sound. Bertie and Leona stood looking across to the other side of the wings at Cee Cee who just stood there as though she was in shock.

Everyone, including Harry, was frozen to the spots they were in when the song ended. The silence seemed to go on forever.

Jerry Grey’s voice broke the stillness. “Kid,” he yelled, “kid, c’mon out.”

Cee Cee took a deep breath and walked slowly to the edge of the stage.

“This is Joe Melman,” Jerry said, “and his wife, Irene. Mr. Melman is a casting director in Hollywood and he saw you in the show last night,” he continued, as if all of them didn’t know what they were doing there.

Bertie got brave and nudged Leona out of the way so she could peek out. Melman was a handsome man. He was tall, with dark hair and glasses, and he wore a shirt and a tie and a seersucker jacket. His wife was pretty enough to be a movie star.

“How do you do,” Gee Cee said in a voice that was so polite, it sounded to Bertie like a foreign accent. “I’d like you to meet Harry Chalmers, my accompanist,” she continued, “and my mother, who is here as well. Perhaps you’d like to meet her.”

Melman nodded.

Leona adjusted her dress and walked out onto the stage, timidly. Bertie followed a few feet behind.

“My mother, Leona Bloom. This is Mr. Melman and his wife, Irene,” Cee Cee said. “Oh, and this is Bertie, my younger sister.”

Bertie flushed. Her sister. Wouldn’t it be something to have a sister like Cee Cee Bloom.

“You’re very talented, Cee Cee,” Melman said. “And I’d like to arrange for you to come out to California and test for a-”

Suddenly, there was a loud rumbling noise from the back of the theater and some shouting. Everyone turned to look.

“Let me in there, Grey, you son of a bitch,” screamed a voice. “Open these lousy doors or I’ll kill somebody, Grey, you bastard.” Just then, one of the doors in the back of the theater crashed open. A skinny, dark-haired woman stood there wild-eyed, surveying the scene at the edge of the stage. Then she charged down the aisle toward the assembled group.

“You got some guy here from Hollywood, huh, Grey, you no-good? What’s the matter? My Karen’s no good for

Hollywood? Three summers you been making her stay up till two in the goddamned morning. Since she was a baby. I ought to report you to the child labor people.”

“Mrs. Lewandowski,” Jerry Grey said nervously, “this man, Mr. Melman, he asked for Cee Cee.”

“Cee Cee, my ass. I know he liked my Karen. Handwalks she does. On a lighted staircase. She sings, too. ‘Stairway to Paradise.’ Been doing the act for that ungrateful son of a bitch, three years,” she said, pointing to Grey. “Three shows on the weekend. Then Hollywood comes, and does he give my Karen a chance? Hell, no! Listen, Mr. Melman from Hollywood. What’s the sense of just seeing one kid? You know what I mean? While you’re in the neighborhood, see two kids.”

No one had moved since Mrs. Lewandowski burst in. Melman adjusted his tie uncomfortably. Harry’s mouth was open in surprise. Leona’s breathing was loud enough for Bertie to hear several feet away.

“Well, I don’t mind, Jerry. Do you?” Melman asked diplomatically.

Jerry Grey collected himself. “No. No, Joe. Please. I mean, it’s nice of you. How about your lovely wife. Does she mind?”

The lovely wife just smiled.

No one asked Cee Cee if she minded.

“How long will it take Karen to get ready?” Grey asked.

“She’s ready now,” Mrs. Lewandowski said.

All heads turned toward the wings, and there, in a bright yellow sequined leotard, stood tiny Karen Lewandowski. Six. Next to her was a little staircase, which she leaned on expectantly.

“Hello, Karen,” said Jerry, in a tone completely different from the one he used with Cee Cee. “Come on out, honey,” he said.

“Hi, Mister Grey,” Karen said in a sweet, baby-girl voice.

Bertie stared. Karen Lewandowski was the most beautiful child God ever made. Long blond braids, bangs that were perfectly even, big blue eyes, a perfect face, and a tiny athletic-looking body.