Stars Over Sunset Boulevard (31 page)

If you enjoyed
Stars over Sunset Boulevard
and want more historical fiction, read Susan Meissner's

A FALL OF MARIGOLDS

Available in paperback and e-book from New American Library.

Read on to see how an Ellis Island nurse's experience with life and love is not so different from that of a twenty-first-century New York woman's. . . .

Ellis Island

August 1911

I
t was the most in-between of places, the trio of islands that was my world after the fire. For the immigrants who arrived ill from wherever they came from, the Earth stopped its careful spinning while they waited to be made well. They were not back home where their previous life had ended; nor were they embracing the wide horizon of a reinvented life. They were poised between two worlds.

Just like me.

The windowed walkway of the ferry house connected the hospital's bits of borrowed earth to the bigger island known as Ellis: a word that by contrast seemed to whisper hope. Beyond the hospital where I worked as a nurse was Battery Park in Manhattan, a short boat ride away. The hospital at Ellis was the stationary middle place where what you were and what you would be were decided. If you could be cured, you would be welcomed onshore. If you could not, you would be sent back where you came from.

Except for this, I didn't mind living where the docks of America lay just beyond reach. I looked to her skyline with a different kind of hunger.

Five months had passed since I'd set foot on the streets of New York. I could see her shining buildings from my dormitory window, and on gusty mornings I could nearly hear the busy streets coming to life. But I was not ready to return to them. I shared a room with another nurse, Dolly McLeod, who also worked and lived on island number three, the bottom rung of Ellis's E-shaped figure. Our dormitory stood a pebble's throw from the wards where the sick of a hundred nations waited. Their sole desire was to be deemed healthy enough to meet their loved ones on the kissing steps and get off the island. We cooled their fevered brows, tended their wounds, and nurtured their flagging hopes. Some were sick children, separated from their healthy parents. Others were adults who had diseases they had had no idea they were carrying when they set sail.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter. It seemed there were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted. Many would leave the hospital island healthier than when they arrived, but not all, of course. A few would leave this world for heaven's shores.

The work kept us busy from dawn to dusk. Sleep came quickly at night. And there were no remnants of the fire here.

Dolly and a couple of other nurses looked forward to going ashore on their off days and they would come back to the island on the midnight ferry smelling of cologne and tobacco and salty perspiration from having danced the
evening away. In the beginning they invited me to join them but it did not take them long to figure out I never left the island. Dolly, who knew in part what kept me here, told me she had survived a house fire once. I wouldn't always feel this way, she said. After a while the dread of fire would fall away like a snakeskin.

I was not afraid of fire. I was in dreadful awe of how everything you were sure of could be swept away in a moment.

I hadn't told Dolly everything. She knew, as did the other nurses, about the fire. Everyone in New York knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She and the other nurses here knew that I, and everyone else from the seventh floor on down, had escaped to safety when fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building. They knew that one hundred and forty-seven employees of Triangle Shirtwaist had not.

They knew that the door to the stairs for the Washington Street exit was locked—to prevent stealing—and that the only alarm signaling the blaze came from the fire itself, as there was no siren to warn anyone. And they knew that garment workers by the dozens—mostly women—fell from windows to die quickly on the pavement rather than minute by agonizing minute in the flames. They knew the death toll was staggering, because it was in all the papers.

They didn't know about Edward because I had said nothing about him.

I had only just started working as a nurse at the doctor's office on the sixth floor and had few acquaintances in New York. Not even Dolly knew that Edward Brim stole my heart within hours of meeting me in the elevator on my first day.

I had dropped my umbrella and he retrieved it for me.

“Are we expecting rain?” he said, smiling wide. He was first-generation American like me. I could tell from the lilt in his voice that his parents were European. Like mine. His nut-brown hair was combed and waxed into place with neat precision, but his suit was slightly wrinkled and there was a tiny bit of fried egg on his cuff—just the tiniest bit—convincing me without a glance at his left hand that he was a bachelor. His eyes were the color of the dawn after a night of wind and rain. But he had the look of New York about him. His parents surely had stayed in the city after they had come through Ellis, unlike my parents.

“Smells like rain,” I'd responded.

His smile widened as the elevator lurched upward. “Does it?”

“Can't you smell it?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn't. Of course he couldn't. He was from the city.

The man next to him laughed. “She's a country girl, Edward. They always know what's coming.”

“Well, then. I guess I'm glad I didn't bother to shine my shoes this morning!” Edward and the man laughed.

He bent toward me. “Be glad you know when rain is coming, miss. There aren't many things we're given warning of.”

I smiled back at him, unable to wrest my gaze from his.

“New to New York?” he said.

I nodded.

“Welcome to the city, then, Miss . . . ?”

“Wood. Clara Wood.”

He bowed slightly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Wood. Edward Brim, at your service.”

The elevator swayed to a stop on the sixth floor and the doors parted.

“My floor.” I reluctantly nodded my farewell. Edward tipped his hat. And his eyes stayed on mine as the doors closed and the elevator resumed its lumbering ascent.

I saw him later that day as he ran for a trolley car in the rain. And I saw him nearly every day after that, either on the elevator or in the lobby of the Asch Building. I heard him talk about his work as a bookkeeper at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the tenth floor, and I knew the coworker who often rode the elevator with him was a fabric buyer named Oliver. I knew Edward liked Earl Grey tea and macaroons and spearmint, because I could smell the fragrance of all three on his clothes.

He always said good morning to me, always tipped his hat to me, always seemed to be on the verge of asking me something when the elevator arrived at my floor and I had to get off. The day of the fire, just as the elevator doors parted, he asked me whether I might want to see the work floor just before the shift ended. I said yes.

The nurses on Ellis didn't know I watched Edward leap from the ninth floor, a screaming girl in tow, her hair and skirt ablaze. The girl had been afraid to jump alone and Edward had grasped her hand as the fire drove them out the window.

Dolly and the others thought I was spectacularly fortunate to have escaped.

“You're very lucky, Clara,” they said.

I didn't feel lucky.

When I was little, luck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or having every dance filled on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled upon by the Fates.

Good luck made you feel giddy and invincible.

Good luck didn't leave you desperately needing a place that was forever in between yesterday and tomorrow.

My parents wanted me to come home to Pennsylvania when word of the fire reached them. But I didn't want to go back to what I had been, back to the rural landscape where everything is the same shade of brown or green. I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday. I was living in New York City, where every hue audaciously shone somewhere, day or night. I had been on the cusp, or so it seemed, of the rest of my life. Edward would have asked me to dine with him or see a show if the fire had never come. We were destined to fall in love; I was sure of it, even though I had known him for only two weeks.

But as ashes and burned fabric fell like snow on Edward's broken body and on so many others, none of whom I could help, I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had. Only an in-between place could grant me that.

If you enjoyed
Stars over Sunset Boulevard
and want to meet another woman who reinvents herself, read Susan Meissner's

SECRETS OF A CHARMED LIFE

Available in paperback and e-book from New American Library.

Read on to meet the woman who calls herself Isabel and lived through the London Blitz. . . .

The Cotswolds, England

I
sabel MacFarland steps into the room. She is a wisp of tissue-thin skin, weightless white hair, and fragile-looking bones. She is impeccably dressed, however, in a lavender skirt that reaches to her knees and a creamy white blouse with satin-covered buttons. Her nails are polished a shimmery pale pink and her cottony hair is swept up in the back with a comb of mother-of-pearl. She carries a fabric-wrapped rectangle, book shaped and tied with a ribbon.

I rise from my seat to see if I might need to assist her.

“Miss Van Zant. How very nice to meet you.” Her English accent is not like Beryl's. There is something about it that seems stretched.

“Can I help you?” I take a few steps forward.

“No. Thank you, though. Please sit.”

I return to the love seat and she lowers herself slowly to the sofa across from me. “Thank you so much for agreeing to see me,” I say. “And on your birthday, too.”

She waves away my gratitude. “It's just another day.”

Beryl appears at the doorway with a tea tray. “Ninety-three is not just another day, Auntie.”

Isabel MacFarland smiles as if she has just thought of something funny. Beryl sets the tray down and hands Mrs. MacFarland her cup, already creamed and sugared. Then she hands a cup to me and I add a teaspoon of sugar to it. The stirring of a silver spoon in an English china teacup is one of the sounds I will miss most when I head back to the United States.

“Thank you, Beryl,” Mrs. MacFarland says. “You can just leave the tray. And can you be a dear and close the door so that we aren't in anyone's way?”

Beryl glances from me to Mrs. MacFarland with an unmistakably disappointed expression on her face. “Of course,” she says with feigned brightness. She shuts the door softly behind her.

“I think she was hoping she could stay,” I venture.

“Beryl is a sweet companion and I could not live here on my own without her, but I'd rather have the freedom to say whatever I want, if that's all right with you.”

I am not prepared for such candor. “Um. Of course.”

“When you get to be my age, your physical frailties cause people to think other things about you are frail as well, including your ability to make your own decisions. It's my decision to meet with you today. And my decision to say what I will about what happened during the war. May I call you Kendra?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

Mrs. MacFarland sips from her cup and then sits back against the couch. “And you will call me Isabel. So how are you enjoying your studies at Oxford, Kendra?”

Her interest in my life has an amazingly calming effect.
“I will leave here kicking and screaming at the end of next month. I've loved every minute of it. There's so much history compacted into one place.”

“And is there no history where you are from?”

“There is. It's just different, I guess. Not quite so ancient. Where I'm from, the oldest building isn't even two hundred years old.”

“You are a history major, then?”

I nod my head as I sip from my cup.

“And what is it about history that interests you?”

“How can a person not be interested in history?” I crack a smile so she won't take offense. But really, how can someone who survived the London Blitz not see the significance of an appreciation of history?

Isabel finds my question back to her amusing. “Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?”

“I think it's both,” I answer. “It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don't remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.”

Isabel's mouth straightens into a thin, hard line and I am wondering whether I offended her and just ruined my last chance at an interview.

But then Isabel inhales deeply and I see that she is not angry with me. “You are absolutely right, my dear. Absolutely right.” She takes another sip of tea. For a moment she seems to be very far away, lost in a memory—an old and aching place of remembrance. Then she returns the cup to its saucer and it makes a gentle scraping sound. “So, what will you do when you return to the States, Kendra?”

“Well, I've another year at USC and then I'm hoping
to head straight to grad school,” I answer quickly, eager to be done with pleasantries and get to the reason I am here. “I plan to get my doctorate in history and teach at the college level.”

“A young woman with plans. And how old are you, dear?”

I can't help but bristle. The only time a person asks how old I am is when they think the answer is somehow relevant to him or her. It usually never is.

“You don't have to tell me, of course. I was just wondering,” she adds.

“I'm twenty-one.”

“It bothers you that I asked.”

“Not really. It just surprises me when people ask. I don't know why it should matter.”

“But that is precisely why it does bother you. I felt the same way once. People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.”

The bristling gives way to a slow sense of kinship. “Yes, they do.”

“I understand completely. You are the oldest in your family?”

“I have a sister who's four years younger.”

“A sister. Just the one?”

I nod.

She seems to need a moment to process this. “I'd surmised you might be the oldest. We firstborns are driven, aren't we? We have to be. There's no one leaving bread crumbs for us on the trail ahead. We blaze our own trail. And the younger ones, they look to us. They watch us—they take their cues from us, even if we don't want them to.” She drains her cup and sets it carefully on the tray.

I'm not sure what she is getting at. “I guess. Maybe. I'm
not sure my sister would agree. She's got pretty strong opinions of her own. I think she'd say she's leaving her own bread crumbs.”

Isabel laughs and it is light and airy. It's the kind of laugh that spills out when a memory is triggered; the kind of memory that perhaps was not funny in the slightest when it was being made.

“Now, then,” Isabel says, and I sense she is at last shifting the focus from me. “Charles tells me this interview is more than just for an essay for a class.”

It takes me a second to make the connection that Charles is Professor Briswell. “Yes. The seventieth anniversary of VE Day is next month. The professor for one of my other classes has made an arrangement with a London newspaper. The five best term papers will be published in the paper the week of May eighth.”

I watch her face carefully to see whether this additional information is going to spell trouble for me.

“So what you write will be read widely?'

“Only if mine is one of those chosen. And I don't know that it will be. Is that okay with you if it is?”

Isabel leans back. “What did Charles tell you about me?” she says.

I'd done all the research on the effect of the Blitz on London's female population and had needed only the interview to write the paper and be done with it. When the woman I was to interview died, it was too late to change the subject matter without setting myself so far back that I would never finish the paper on time. I had mentioned as much to Professor Briswell, and he had told me that an elderly friend might be convinced to help me out. This person was one to decline interviews, though, even regarding her watercolors for which she was known throughout the southwest of
England. He'd ask her anyway and tell her I was in a tight spot. But he said I should expect her to say no.

“He told me that you typically decline interviews,” I say.

She smiles. “That's all?”

“He said you are known for your watercolors. I love your work, by the way.”

“Ah, yes. My Umbrella Girls.”

I turn my head in the direction of one of the more prominent paintings in the room: A young girl in a pink dress is walking through a field of glistening-wet daisies and holding the trademark red-and-white polka-dot umbrella. A brave sun is peeking through clouds that are plump with purpose. “Have you always painted girls with umbrellas?”

“No. Not always.” Her answer is swift and without hesitation. But the way she elongates the last word tells me there is more behind the answer. She doesn't offer more even though I wait for it.

“Tell me, Kendra,” Isabel says after a pause. “What is it about the Blitz that you would like to know? I should think there are dozens of books out there. What information do you lack that you cannot read in a book?”

I fumble for an answer. “Well, uh, aside from that I'm required to interview someone, I think . . . I think information is only half of any story about people. Personal experience is the other part. I can't ask a book what it was like to survive the bombs.”

Isabel cocks her head to one side. “Is that what you want to ask me? What it was like to have my home bombed?”

It occurs to me that I posed a rather elementary question with surely an equally elementary answer. I am suddenly superbly underconfident about all my questions. I
glance at the notepad in my lap and every bulleted sentence looks superficial to me.

What was it like in the shelter night after night?

Were you afraid?

Did you lose someone you loved or cared about?

Did you wonder if it would ever end?

As my fingers close around the tablet, I realize that there is really only one question to ask this woman who for seventy years has refused all interviews, and who told me not ten minutes ago when she told Beryl to shut the door that she would say only what she wanted to.

I place the pad on the seat cushion next to me. “What would you like to tell me about the war, Isabel?”

She smiles at me, pleased and perhaps impressed that I figured out so quickly that this is the one question she will answer.

She pauses for another moment and then says, “Well, first off, I'm not ninety-three. And my name's not
Isabel.”