New York Echoes (19 page)

“I'm so excited I could scream,” Peggy
said as she and Charlie moved out of the Port Authority bus station on 42nd Street into the light-spangled city of New York on a mild autumn day just as the sky
darkened. Culture shock could barely describe their disorientation.

Charlie rolled their suitcase through
the solid wall of people, trying to get his bearings. Confused by the signs,
they had already made a number of wrong turns and had to ask people directions
just to get to the exits. In the street they stopped other people, whom they
found, contrary to expectations, surprisingly polite, although not informed.
Two people had accents neither Peggy nor Charlie could understand.

Finally they made it into the lobby of
the Metropole Hotel, which, as had been advertised, was two blocks from the
Port Authority terminal in midtown Manhattan.

“Like being inside a zoo,” Charlie
remarked as they finally arrived, but she could tell he was as excited as she
was.

“Like in the movies,” Peggy said in
contradiction, remembering New York scenes.

The movies were her
point of reference and her obsession. It was at the very heart of the dream she
had for her daughter. Above all else, she yearned to be the mother of a movie
star and here at last, she knew in her soul, that Aggie had embarked on the
first rung of the ladder that was going to take her straight to stardom. She
was absolutely certain that this was going to happen. God's will, she told
herself.

“One day, you'll see,” she told Charlie.
His response was invariably a hopeful shrug. Of course, she knew, he wanted it
to happen but it was obviously too remote from his expectations. But then, he
had never had big dreams. Peggy was convinced that, at last, this was to be the
beginning of her validation, the ultimate “I told you so.”

For months now she had noted that
friends, relatives, and co-workers at Wal-Mart had, she was certain, exhibited
a kind of smirking expression of sarcastic disbelief in the notion that her
daughter Aggie was on the road to celebrity and movie stardom. She admitted to
herself that she had been a bit outspoken when Aggie left three years ago for
New York to pursue the route to stardom from actress in plays, to discovery, to
roles in motion pictures, a path mapped out by her mother from the moment Peggy
realized Aggie's potential.

“My daughter is
destined to be a star, just like Donna Reed,” she told everybody within hailing
distance in Denison, Iowa, where they lived. It was the same town where Donna
Reed had come from and was now a kind of shrine to that late actress who had
won an Oscar for
From Here to Eternity
. “Actually Aggie is more talented
and better looking than Donna,” she would whisper as an aside to close friends,
although to others she would acknowledge that Donna was Aggie's role model.

In addition to talent,
which everybody agreed she had in spades, Aggie was quite beautiful with
cerulean blue eyes, a perfect nose, natural shiny blonde hair that she wore
long, and a perfect figure that was the envy of every young woman in town. A
miracle, Peggy had decided, considering that both she and Charlie weren't
exactly Brad and Angelina, even when they were younger.

Aggie turned eyes
everywhere and was the acknowledged celebrity of Denison for her starring roles
in the high school plays. She was an absolutely knockout Annie when she was
twelve years old and was a wonder as Juliet, not to mention as good as Betty
Hutton in
Annie Get Your Gun
.

“Another Donna.”
Everybody said so.

“Better,” Peggy would
say with what she hoped was a haughty pose and a knowing wink.

In the last year, she deliberately hid
her enthusiasm, acknowledging that Aggie was out there in the Big Apple honing
her skills and waiting for her big chance, which was sure to come. She did
note, however, that people were asking her less and less about what was
happening with Aggie's career. At times she got downright edgy about it.

Once when she was sitting together with
her co-workers in the coffee-break room for employees at Wal-Mart, Daisy
Parker, whom she never liked, made some sarcastic inquiry about Aggie's career,
referring to her as a “Donna Reed wannabe,” and Peggy exploded.

“What does a fat ass ignoramus like you
know about such things, Daisy? Your kids are ignorant dropout scumbags with the
ambition of petrified turds and an intelligence that registers lower than a
snake's asshole.”

“Listen to that overbearing, bragging
cunt,” Daisy countered, flinging a stream of lukewarm coffee at Peggy that
stained the front of her red Wal-Mart smock. “Thinks she's hot shit because her
little girl is in fuckin' Noo Yawk waving her pussy around and sucking cock to
make it in the big time. Hell, did any of you ever see her in one single flick.
Maybe in the pornos.”

That was too much for Peggy to bear and
she lost it and swung a fist right into Daisy's face, knocking out two front
teeth. The incident brought her to the attention of the manager, who mandated
that she take a month's therapy in anger management or lose her job. She
complied, of course. The company, thankfully, paid for Daisy's dental work.
Unfortunately, the incident was broadcast all over town and greatly diminished
any further temptation for Peggy to offer any news about Aggie's progress in New York.

The anger management course seemed to
help, although Charlie told her that he would often hear her mumbling nasty
curse words in her sleep. Apparently while she was learning to inhibit any
overt anger, agitated emotion was seeping into her dreams.

The undeniable facts,
as Peggy interpreted them, were that Aggie was destined by fate and the miracle
of talent and beauty to be everything that her mother dreamed she would be. In
school, she starred in every play from the fifth grade on. Peggy had made
certain that she was taught all the skills required by a budding performer. She
could sing and tap dance, and she had taken acting lessons from Mrs. Meyers,
who had appeared in two movies and one Broadway show in her career.

“Just like Donna,” Mrs. Meyers
acknowledged about Aggie, although she had come to town long after Donna had
gone.

“You're gonna be a movie star, baby,”
Peggy enthused. The line became a mantra, and it was apparent as Aggie matured
that she had absorbed its message of unbridled hope as certainty.

Watching her daughter
perform on stage was the absolute zenith of Peggy's early motherhood
experience. She would attend every single performance, and invariably when she
saw her daughter onstage, her eyes would fill with tears of pride and it was
all she could do to restrain her sobbing. It was, she acknowledged to herself,
a profound spiritual experience.

Peggy had drummed it into her daughter
that, under no circumstances, was she to go steady with one boy, that God had
singled her out to be a movie star celebrity and nothing, but nothing, must
interfere with that goal. She had dates, of course, and it was perfectly
natural for her to go out with the stars of the athletic teams, which she did.
What she feared most was that Aggie would get pregnant like many of her friends
and find herself in a situation where she would be waylaid from her career
goals.

“There are other ways to keep these
horny goats calmed down,” Peggy instructed, leaving out the gory details. It
was an accepted fact of life that young people in small towns started having
sex very early, perhaps out of boredom or peer pressure. It had happened to
Peggy. Charlie had impregnated Peggy before she had graduated from high school.

Thankfully, blessedly,
Aggie had apparently obeyed the parental constriction and had concentrated on
the dream inculcated by her mother. As evidence of the possibility, aside from
the miraculous rise of Donna Read, Peggy had rattled off the biographical facts
of numerous female stars who had grown up in small towns and came from humble
beginnings. She would always cite Frances Gumm, who became Judy Garland, and
everyone knew that Donnabelle Mullenger had become Donna Reed. By the time
Aggie was fifteen, Peggy had amassed a notebook full of possible stage names.
Both favored Melody Francis as a perfect choice, a lot more interesting and
mainstream than Agatha Pachowski.

Aggie's brother Ben,
two years her senior, had no such grandiose ambitions and was content to work
in a paint store on Main Street. Charlie worked at his brother's used-car lot
at the edge of town and the Pachowskis were able, with the help of Peggy's
Wal-Mart job, to squeak by financially, although it was a stretch to provide
Aggie with all the expert instruction she needed to prepare for a show-business
career.

It was inevitable that after high
school, Aggie would head to New York to hone her acting, singing, and dancing
skills and, as it was ordained, she would appear in various stage plays and
follow the usual path of discovery and stardom. Both mother and daughter were
not naïve enough to believe that such a discovery would happen instantly. There
were dues to pay as evidenced by the biographies of stars that Peggy had read.
Kirk Douglas and Sylvester Stallone both worked behind delicatessen counters,
and everyone brought up on Golden Age of Hollywood lore knew that Lana Turner
was discovered in a drugstore.

Peggy had also learned a great deal from
watching Barbara Walters on television and was an avid reader of
People
magazine
and other celebrity-featured publications that she read off the
Wal-Mart magazine racks. She prided herself too on having viewed every movie on
tape and DVD that was offered in the Denison public library.

Every year watching
the Oscars, a very serious mother-daughter ritual, Peggy would remark:
Some
day, Aggie, that will be you walking up the red carpet.

It had been three years since Aggie had
gone off to New York. At first, she had been a dutiful daughter calling every
week reporting on her various courses and adventures, bubbling with excitement
and enthusiasm, working odd jobs to pay her share of the rental of an apartment
in Manhattan.

That first year she
came home for Christmas. Her mother threw her a big party and invited all her
relatives, co-workers from Wal-Mart, and friends from high school, many of them
now married with kids. As always, Aggie was the center of attraction, ever the
local star, on her way to celebrity status in the Big Apple. She sang the
Annie
song “Tomorrow” and got a roaring round of applause.

“It will happen, you'll see,” Peggy told
everyone. “One day she will be walking that red carpet on Oscar night.”

Aggie called less
frequently from New York and on occasion Peggy called her, but, after a mild
admonishment by Aggie that her calls on her cell sometimes came at inopportune
moments, Peggy, out of respect and considering that her daughter was doing
important work for her career, desisted.

Although the calls from New York became more and more sporadic as time went on, Aggie was always optimistic and
chatty although increasingly non-specific in answering Peggy's questions about
her career progress. No, Aggie had not yet gotten an agent, but she was
auditioning and getting “callbacks.” Peggy, from careful listening, had learned
the lingo, and tried her best not to show any anxiety or disappointment when
Aggie did not get chosen, although her insides raged with anger and
disappointment. Most people don't know great talent when they see it, she told
Charlie numerous times.

All budding actors went through the
terrible disappointment of rejection she had learned from reading the
biographies of stars. Undeterred, Peggy continued her cheerleading since, in
her mind, it was impossible for Aggie to remain undiscovered.

“Maybe she should try something else,”
Charlie had suggested one day with obvious timidity, revealing that he had not
entirely bought into Peggy's dream for her daughter. Peggy's reaction was
thunderous and demolishing, revealing all her pent-up disappointment and frustration.
It was as if she had backslid from what she had learned in her anger management
course.

“Why? Because you are
a loser, Charlie? Because you never had a dream or the guts to pursue anything
worthwhile? All your brains and your ambition are in your balls, Charlie.
Eating, beer with your buddies, sports, and fucking is all you care about.
Marrying you was the worst decision of my life. I dropped my drawers for a dumb
bastard and here I am paying the piper. And now you're suggesting that your
daughter follow in your footsteps. That kind of negativity is what destroys
people and ruins people's lives. It sure has ruined mine. No way, Charlie. I
will continue to believe that Aggie will be a star as long as I have breath in
my body.”

“All I said . . .” Charlie began but
words failed and, as always, he quickly acknowledged defeat. In fact, Peggy
knew, that was his destiny, to reaffirm his own defeat by his clumsy
submission. Worse, he had brought her down with him. Indeed, Marlon Brando's
quote from
On the Waterfront
had always resonated in her mind. “I could
have been a contender,” was the line. Not that she had ever had an ambition for
herself, a real ambition not a fantasy, to be a real contender for anything.
But she was an obsessed and determined contender for her daughter and that was
the focus of her life.

 Peggy was well aware that she had
intimidated Charlie enough to keep such negativity at bay. Then, out of the
blue, Aggie had informed them that she had finally gotten a part in a play.
Peggy was ecstatic.

“You see. It's happening,” she enthused
to Charlie and anyone else that she encountered. After all, most of their
friends and relatives had begun to avoid the subject of Aggie's march to
stardom. Charlie welcomed this respite from intimidation, visibly remorseful
that he had dared to suggest that Aggie try something else.