City of Girls (31 page)

Peg rolled her eyes. “Yes, that would be
appalling
.”

“I don’t like New York,” he said. “It’s a city full of second-place winners.”

“Yes, famously,” shot back Peg. “Nobody who has ever been successful at anything has ever lived in Manhattan.”

My father must not have cared that much about his argument, though, because he didn’t dig
in.

In all honesty, I think my parents were willing to consider allowing me to leave because they were weary of me. In their eyes, I shouldn’t have been inhabiting their home anyway—and it was
their
home. I should have been out of the house a long time ago—ideally through the portal of college, followed by a finalizing shunt into matrimony. I didn’t come from a culture where children are welcome
to remain in the family household after childhood. (My parents hadn’t even wanted me around that much during childhood, for that matter, if you consider the amount of time I’d spent at boarding school and summer camps.)

My father just had to razz Aunt Peg a little more before he could finally agree to it.

“I’m unconvinced that New York would be a good influence on Vivian,” he said. “I would
hate to see a daughter of mine becoming a Democrat.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Peg, with a fat smile of satisfaction. “I’ve been into the matter. Turns out, they don’t allow registered Democrats into the Anarchist Party.”

That line actually made my mother laugh—to her credit.

“I’m going,” I pronounced. “I’m nearly twenty-two years old. There’s nothing here for me in Clinton. From
this point forward, where I live should be my decision.”

“That’s laying it on a bit thick, Vivian,” said my mother. “You won’t be twenty-two until October, and you’ve never paid for a thing in your life. You don’t have the faintest notion of how anything in the world functions.”

Still, I could tell she was pleased by the tone of resolve in my voice. My mother, after all, was a woman who had
spent her life on horseback, hurling herself at ditches and fences. Perhaps she was of the opinion that when faced with the challenges and obstacles of life, a woman should
leap
.

“If you take on this commitment,” said my father, “at the very least, we expect you to see it through. One cannot afford in life to do less than one promises.”

My heart quickened.

That last, limp lecture was his way
of saying yes.

Peg and I left for New York City the following morning.

It took us forever to get there, as she insisted on driving her borrowed car at a patriotic, gas-preserving thirty-five miles an hour. I didn’t care how long it took, though. The sensation of being pulled back toward a place I loved—a place that I had not imagined would ever welcome me again—was such a delightful one that
I didn’t mind stretching it out. For me, the ride was as thrilling as a Coney Island roller coaster. I was more keyed up than I’d felt in over a year. Keyed up, yes, but also nervous.

What would I find, back in New York?

Who
would I find?

“You’ve made a hefty choice,” said Peg, as soon as we got on the road. “Good for you, kiddo.”

“Do you really need me back in the city, Peg?” It was a question
I had not dared to pose in the presence of my parents.

She shrugged. “I can find a use for you.” But then she smiled. “No, Vivian—it’s quite true. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this Navy Yard commission. I might have come for you sooner, but I wanted to give you more time to cool your heels. In my experience, it’s always important to take a break between catastrophes. You took a bad
knock in the city last year. I figured you’d need some time to recover.”

This reference to my
catastrophe
made my stomach flip.

“About that, Peg—” I started.

“It is no more to be mentioned.”

“I’m so sorry for what I did.”

“Of course you are. I’m sorry for many of the things I’ve done, too. Everyone is sorry. It’s good to be sorry—but don’t make a fetish of it. The one good thing about being
Protestant is that we are not expected to cringe forever in contrition. Yours was a venial sin, Vivian, but not a mortal one.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I’m not sure I do, either. It’s just something I read once. Here is what I do know, however: sins of the flesh will not get you punished in the afterlife. They will only get you punished in
this
life. As you’ve now learned.”

“I only
wish I hadn’t caused so much trouble for everyone.”

“It’s easy to be wise after the event. But what’s the use of being twenty years old, if not to make gross errors?”

“Did you make gross errors when you were twenty?”

“Of course I did. Not nearly so bad as yours, but I had my days.”

She smiled to show she was teasing. Or maybe she wasn’t teasing. It didn’t matter. She was taking me back.

“Thank you for coming to get me, Peg.”

“Well, I missed you. I like you, kiddo, and once I like a person, I can only like them always. That’s a rule of my life.”

This was the most wonderful thing anyone had ever said to me. I marinated in it for a while. And then slowly the marinade turned sour, as I recalled that not everyone was as forgiving as Aunt Peg.

“I’m nervous about seeing Edna,” I said
at last.

Peg looked surprised. “Why would you see Edna?”

“Why would I
not
see Edna? I’ll see her at the Lily.”

“Kiddo, Edna’s not at the Lily anymore. She’s in rehearsals right now for
As You Like It,
over at the Mansfield. She and Arthur moved out of the Lily in the spring. They’re living at the Savoy now. You didn’t hear?”

“But what about
City of Girls
?”

“Oh, boy. You really haven’t heard
anything, have you?”

“Heard anything about what?”

“Back in March, Billy got an offer to move
City of Girls
to the Morosco Theatre. He took the offer, packed up the show, and went.”

“He packed up the
show
?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“He
took
it? He took it from the Lily?”

“Well, he wrote that play and he directed it—so technically it was his to take. That was his argument, anyway. Not that I argued
with him about it. Wasn’t gonna win that one.”

“But what about—?” I couldn’t finish the question.

What about
everything
and
everyone,
is what I might have asked.

“Yes,” said Peg. “What about it? Well, that’s how Billy operates, kiddo. It was a good deal for him. You know the Morosco. It has a thousand seats, so the money is better. Edna went with him, of course. They did the show for a few
months, same as always, until Edna got tired of it. Now she’s gone back to her Shakespeare. They’ve replaced
her with Helen Hayes, which isn’t working, as far as I can see. I like Helen, don’t get me wrong. She’s got everything Edna’s got—except that
thing
that Edna’s got. Nobody’s got that
thing
. Gertrude Lawrence might have been able to do it justice—she’s got her own version of that
thing—
but she’s not in town. Really, nobody can do what Edna can do. But they’re still packing the house night after night over there, and it’s like Billy’s got a license to print money.”

I didn’t even know what to say to all this. I was appalled.

“Pick up your jaw, kiddo,” Peg said. “You look like you just fell off a turnip truck.”

“But what about the Lily? What about you and Olive?”

“Business as
usual. Scrambling along. Putting on our dumb little productions again. Trying to lure back our humble neighborhood audience. It’s harder now that the war is on, and half our audience is off fighting it. It’s mostly grandmothers and children these days. That’s why I took the commission at the Navy Yard—we need the income. Olive was right all along, of course. She knew we’d be left holding the bag
after Billy took his playthings and went away. I guess I knew it, too. That’s always the way it goes with Billy. Of course, he took our best performers with him, too. Gladys went with him. Jennie and Roland, too.”

She said all this so mildly. As though betrayal and ruin were the most mundane happenings you could ever imagine.

“What about Benjamin?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, Benjamin got drafted.
Can’t blame Billy for that. But can you imagine Benjamin in the military? Putting a gun in those gifted hands? Such a waste. I hate it for him.”

“What about Mr. Herbert?”

“Still with me. Mr. Herbert and Olive will never leave me.”

“No sign of Celia, though?”

It wasn’t really a question. I already knew the answer.

“No sign of Celia,” Peg confirmed. “But I’m sure she’s fine. That cat has about
six more lives in her, believe me. I’ll tell you what is interesting, though,” Peg went on, clearly not concerning herself with the fate of Celia Ray. “Billy was right, too. Billy said we could create a hit play together, and we actually did it. We pulled it off! Olive never believed in
City of Girls
. She thought it would bomb, but she was dead wrong. It was a terrific show. I was right, I believe,
to take the risk with Billy. It was an awful lot of fun while it lasted.”

As she told me all this, I stared at her profile, searching for signs of disturbance or suffering—but there were none.

She turned her head, saw me staring at her, and laughed. “Try not to look so shocked, Vivian. It makes you look simple.”

“But Billy promised you the rights to the play! I was there! I heard him say it
in the kitchen, the first morning he came to the Lily.”

“Billy promises a lot of things. Somehow, he never got around to putting it in writing.”

“I just can’t believe he did that to you,” I said.

“Look, kiddo, I’ve always known how Billy is, and I invited him in anyway. I don’t regret it. It was an adventure. You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing.
Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there’s no war, and then there’s another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person—and where’s the good in that? Now enough about Billy—how was your year? Where were you when Pearl
Harbor happened?”

“At the movies. Watching
Dumbo
. Where were you?”

“Up at the Polo Grounds, watching football. Last Giants game of the season. Then suddenly, late in the second quarter, they start making these strange announcements, asking all active military personnel to report immediately to the main office. I knew right then something
bad was afoot. Then Sonny Franck got injured. That distracted
me. Not that Sonny Franck has anything to do with it. Hell of a player, though. What a tragic day. Were you at the movies with that fellow you got engaged to? What was his name?”

“Jim Larsen. How did you know I’d gotten engaged?”

“Your mother told me about it last night while you were packing. Sounds like you escaped by the skin of your teeth. Sounds like even your mother was relieved, though
she’s tough to read. She was of the opinion that you didn’t much like him.”

This surprised me. My mother and I had never once had an intimate conversation about Jim—or about anything, really. How had she known?

“He was a nice man,” I said lamely.

“Good for him. Give him a trophy for it, but don’t marry a man just because he’s nice. And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first
place, Vivvie. It can lead to marriage if you’re not careful. Why’d you say yes to him, anyhow?”

“I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Like I say, he was nice.”

“So many girls get married for that same reason. Find something else to do with yourself, I say. Gosh, ladies, take up a hobby!”

“Why did
you
get married?” I asked.

“Because I liked him, Vivvie. I liked Billy very much. That’s
the only reason to ever marry somebody—if you love them or like them. I still like him, you know. I had dinner with him only last week.”

“You
did
?”

“Of course I did. Look, I can understand that you’re upset with Billy right now—a lot of people are—but what did I tell you earlier, about my rule in life?”

When I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t remember, she reminded me: “Once I like a person,
I can only like them always.”

“Oh, that’s right.” But I still wasn’t convinced.

She smiled at me again. “What’s the matter, Vivvie? You think that rule should only apply to you?”

It was evening by the time we arrived in New York City.

It was July 15, 1942.

The town was perched proud and solid on its nest of granite, tucked between its two dark rivers. Its stacks of skyscrapers glittered like
columns of fireflies in the velvety summer air. We crossed over the silent, commanding bridge—broad and long as a condor’s wing—and entered the city. This dense place. This meaningful place. The greatest metropolis the world has ever known—or at least that’s what I’ve always thought.

I was overcome with reverence.

I would plant my little life there and never abandon it again.

TWENTY-FOUR

The next morning, I woke up in Billy’s old room all over again. It was just me in the bed this time. No Celia, no hangover, no disasters.

I had to admit: it felt good to have the bed to myself.

For a while I listened to the sounds of the Lily Playhouse coming to life. Sounds I never thought I would hear again. Someone must have been running a bath, because the pipes were banging
in protest. Two telephones were already ringing—one upstairs, and one in the offices below. I felt so happy, it made me light-headed.

I put on my robe and wandered forth to make myself some coffee. I found Mr. Herbert sitting at the kitchen table just like always—wearing his undershirt, staring at his notebook, drinking his Sanka, and composing his jokes for an upcoming show.

“Good morning,
Mr. Herbert!” I said.

He looked up at me and—to my amazement—he actually smiled.

“I see you’ve been reinstated, Miss Morris,” he said. “
Good
.”

By noon that day, I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Peg and Olive, getting oriented to the job at hand.

We’d taken the subway from midtown to the York Street station, then transferred to a streetcar. Over the next three years, I would make this commute
nearly every day and in every kind of weather. I would share that commute with tens of thousands of other workers, all changing shifts like clockwork. The commute would become tedious, and sometimes spirit-breakingly exhausting. But on that day, it was all new and I was excited. I was outfitted in a snazzy lilac suit (although never again would I wear something so nice to that filthy, greasy
destination) and my hair was clean and bouncy. I had my paperwork in order so that I could be officially inducted as a Navy employee (Bureau of Yards and Docks, Classification: Skilled Laborer). The job came with a salary of seventy cents an hour, which was a fortune for a girl my age. They even issued me my own pair of safety glasses—although my eyes were never in danger from anything more serious
than Peg’s cigarette embers flying up in my face.

This would be my first real job—if you don’t count the work I did in my father’s office back in Clinton, which you shouldn’t.

I’d been nervous to see Olive again. I still felt so ashamed of myself for my shenanigans, and for having needed her to rescue me from the talons of Walter Winchell. I was afraid she might chastise me, or look upon me
with contempt. I had my first moment alone with her that morning. She and Peg and I were walking downstairs, on our way out the door to Brooklyn. Peg had to run back up to get her thermos, so for a minute it had just been Olive and me standing there on the landing between the second and third floors of the playhouse. I decided this would be my opportunity to apologize, and to thank her for having
gallantly saved me.

“Olive,” I began. “I owe you a great debt—”

“Oh, Vivian,” she interrupted, “don’t be so
grasping
.”

And that was the end of that.

We had a job to do, and there wasn’t any time for flimflam.

Specifically, our job was this:

We were assigned by the military to put on two shows a day at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a bustling cafeteria located right on Wallabout Bay. You have
to understand, Angela, that the Navy Yard was
huge
—the busiest in the world—with over two hundred acres of buildings and almost a hundred thousand employees working around the clock throughout the war years. There were over forty active cafeterias at the Yard and we were in charge of “entertainment and education” for just one of them. Our cafeteria was number 24, but everyone called it “Sammy.”
(I was never clear on why. Maybe because they served so many sandwiches? Or maybe because our head cook was named Mr. Samuelson?) Sammy fed thousands of people a day—serving enormous piles of limp and tired food to equally limp and tired laborers.

It was our task to entertain these weary workers while they ate. But we were more than entertainers; we were also propagandists. The Navy filtered
information and inspiration through us. We had to keep everyone angry and fired up at Hitler and Hirohito at all times (we killed Hitler so many times, in so many different skits, that I can’t believe the man wasn’t having nightmares about us all the way over there in Germany). But we also had to keep our workers concerned about the welfare of our boys overseas—reminding them that whenever they slacked
off on the job, they put American sailors at risk. We had to issue warnings that spies were everywhere, and that loose lips sink ships. We had to give safety lessons and news updates. And in addition to all that, we had to deal with military censors who often sat in the front row of our performances to
make sure we were not deviating from the party line. (My favorite censor was a genial man named
Mr. Gershon. I spent so much time with him, we became like a family. I attended his son’s bar mitzvah.)

We had to communicate all this information to our workers in thirty minutes, twice a day.

For three years.

And we had to keep our material fresh and fun, or the audience might start throwing food at us. (“It’s good to be back in the field,” Peg said happily, the first time our audience started
booing—and I think she truly meant it.) It was an impossible, thankless, exhausting job, and the Navy gave us precious little to work with, in terms of our “theater.” At the front of the cafeteria was a small stage—a platform, really, built of rough pine. We didn’t have a curtain or stage lighting, and our “orchestra” amounted to a honky-tonk stand-up piano played by a tiny old local named Mrs.
Levinson who (incongruously) could pound those keys so hard you could hear the music all the way from Sands Street. Our props were vegetable crates, and our “dressing room” was the back corner of the kitchen, right next to the dishwasher’s station. As for our actors, they were not exactly the cream of the crop. Most of New York’s showbiz community had either gone off to battle or gotten good industrial
jobs since the advent of the war. This meant that the only people left for us to recruit were the sorts of folks whom Olive, not very kindly, called “the lost and the lame.” (To which Peg replied, also not very kindly, “How does that differ from any other theater company?”)

So we improvised. We had men in their sixties playing young swains. We had hefty middle-aged women playing the parts of
ingénues, or boys. We couldn’t pay our players nearly as much as they could earn working on the line, so we were constantly losing our actors and dancers to the Navy Yard itself. Some pretty young girl would be singing a song on our stage one day, and the next day you’d see her eating at
Sammy on her lunch break, with her hair up in a bandanna and coveralls on. She’d have a wrench in her pocket
and a hearty paycheck on its way. It’s tough to get a girl back in the spotlight once she’s seen a hearty paycheck—and we didn’t even
have
a spotlight.

Putting together costumes was, of course, my primary job, although I also wrote the occasional script, and even sometimes penned a song lyric or two. My work had never been more difficult. I had virtually no budget, and, because of the war, there
was a nationwide shortage of all the materials I needed. It wasn’t just fabrics that were scarce; you couldn’t get buttons, zippers, or hooks and eyes, either. I became ferociously inventive. In my most shining moment, I created a vest for the character of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy using some two-toned jacquard damask I’d ripped from a rotting, overstuffed couch I’d found on the corner
of Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street one morning, awaiting removal to the dump. (I won’t pretend that the costume smelled good, but our king really looked like a king—and that’s saying something, given the fact that he was portrayed by a sunken-chested old man who only one hour before showtime had been cooking beans in the Sammy kitchen.)

Needless to say, I became a fixture at Lowtsky’s Used
Emporium and Notions—even more than before the war. Marjorie Lowtsky, who was now in high school, became my partner in costuming. She was my fixer, really. Lowtsky’s now had a contract to sell textiles and rags to the military, so even they didn’t have as much volume or variety to choose from anymore—but they were still the best game in town. So I gave Marjorie a small cut of my salary and she
culled and saved the choicest materials for me. Truly, I could not have done my job without her help. Despite our age difference, the two of us grew genuinely fond of each other as the war dragged on, and I soon came to think of her as a friend—although an odd one.

I can still remember the first time I ever shared a cigarette with
Marjorie. I was standing on the loading dock of her parents’ warehouse
in the dead of winter, taking a break from sorting through the bins in order to have a quiet smoke.

“Let me have a drag of that?” came a voice next to me.

I looked down, and there was little Marjorie Lowtsky—all ninety-five pounds of her—wrapped up in one of those absurdly giant raccoon fur coats that fraternity boys used to wear to football games in the 1920s. On her head, a Canadian Mountie’s
hat.

“I’m not giving you a cigarette,” I said. “You’re only sixteen!”

“Exactly,” she said. “I’ve already been smoking for ten years.”

Charmed, I caved in to her demands and handed over the smoke. She inhaled it with impressive expertise, and said, “This war isn’t satisfying me, Vivian.” She was gazing out at the alleyway with an air of world-weariness that I couldn’t help but find comical.
“I’m displeased with it.”

“Displeased with it, are you?” I was trying not to smile. “Well, then, you should do something about it! Write a strongly worded letter to your congressman. Go talk to the president. Put this thing to an end.”

“It’s only that I’ve waited so long to grow up, but now there’s nothing worth growing up for,” she said. “Just all this fighting, fighting, fighting, and working,
working, working. It makes a person weary.”

“It’ll all end soon enough,” I said—although I was not sure of that fact myself.

She took another deep drag off the cigarette and said in a very different tone, “All my relatives in Europe are in big trouble, you know. Hitler won’t rest till he’s gotten rid of every last one of them. Mama doesn’t even know where her sisters are anymore, or their kids.
My father’s on the phone with embassies all day, trying to get his family over here. I have to translate for him a lot of the time. It doesn’t look like there’s any way for them to get through, though.”

“Oh, Marjorie. I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

I didn’t know what else to say. This seemed like too serious a situation for a high school student to be facing. I wanted to hug her, but she wasn’t
the sort of person who cared for hugs.

“I’m disappointed in everybody,” she said after a long silence.

“In who, exactly?” I was thinking she would say the Nazis.

“The adults,” she said. “All of them. How did they let the world get so out of control?”

“I don’t know, honey. But I’m not sure anybody out there really knows what they’re doing.”

“
Apparently not,
” she pronounced with theatrical
disdain, flicking the spent cigarette into the alley. “And this is why I’m so eager to grow up, you see. So I won’t be at the mercy anymore of people who have no idea what they’re doing. I figure the sooner I can get full control of things, the better my life will be.”

“That sounds like an excellent plan, Marjorie,” I said. “Of course, I’ve never had a plan for my own life, so I wouldn’t know.
But it sounds as though you’ve got it all sorted out.”

“You’ve never had a
plan
?” Marjorie looked up at me in horror. “How do you
get by
?”

“Gosh, Marjorie—you sound just like my mother!”

“Well, if you can’t make a plan for your own life, Vivian, then
somebody
needs to be your mother!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Stop lecturing me, kid. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”

“Ha! My parents
would never leave me with somebody as irresponsible as you.”

“Well, your parents would probably be right about that.”

“I’m just teasing you,” she said. “You know that, right? You know that I’ve always liked you.”

“
Really?
You’ve always liked me, have you? Since you were what—in eighth grade?”

“Hey, give me another cigarette, would you?” she asked. “For later?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said, but I
handed her a few of them, anyhow. “Just don’t let your mother know I’m supplying you.”

“Since when do my parents need to know what I’m up to?” asked this strange little teenager. She hid the cigarettes in the folds of her enormous fur coat, and gave me a wink. “Now tell me what kind of costumes you came in for today, Vivian, and I’ll set you up with whatever you need.”

New York was a different
place now than it had been my first time around.

Frivolity was dead—unless it was useful and patriotic frivolity, like dancing with soldiers and sailors at the Stage Door Canteen. The city was weighted with seriousness. At every moment, we were expecting to be attacked or invaded—certain that the Germans would bomb us into dust, just as they’d done to London. There were mandatory blackouts. There
were a few nights when the authorities even turned off all the lights in Times Square, and the Great White Way became a dark clot—shining rich and black in the night, like pooled mercury. Everyone was in uniform, or ready to serve. Our own Mr. Herbert volunteered as an air-raid warden, wandering around our neighborhood in the evenings with his official city-issued white helmet and red armband.
(As he headed out the door, Peg would say, “Dear Mr. Hitler: Please don’t bomb us until Mr. Herbert has finished alerting all the neighbors. Sincerely, Pegsy Buell.”)

What I most remember about the war years was an overriding sense of
coarseness
. We didn’t suffer in New York City like so many people across the world were suffering, but nothing was
fine
anymore—no butter, no pricey cuts of meat,
no quality makeup, no fashions from Europe. Nothing was soft. Nothing was a delicacy. The war was a vast,
starving colossus that needed everything from us—not just our time and labor, but also our cooking oil, our rubber, our metals, our paper, our coal. We were left with mere scraps. I brushed my teeth with baking soda. I treated my last pair of nylons with such care, you would have thought they
were premature babies. (And when those nylons finally died in the middle of 1943, I gave up and started wearing trousers all the time.) I got so busy—and shampoo became so difficult to acquire—that I cut my hair short (very much in the style of Edna Parker Watson’s sleek bob, I must admit) and I’ve never grown it long again.