The Stork Club (5 page)

He was a square-jawed, well-preserved actor of indeterminate age, who, from what Ruthie overheard while she cleaned the ladies' dressing room, still believed his big break was coming. "Little summer-stock jobs" like this one, he said, were just filling his time until the big call came. The call that would make people stop referring to him as "the bus-and-truck John Raitt."

"Little lady," he said greeting Ruthie now, as if he were reciting a line from a play. He was wearing jeans, and his shirt was unbuttoned to the waist the way he'd worn it the first week, when he played Billy Bigelow in
Carousel
. It seemed as if he had appeared from nowhere, and in an instant he was gone.

Ruthie, whose heart was still pounding from the embarrassment of having the gorgeous Bill Crocker see her in her nightshirt and Clearasil, crept into her room and pulled the covers over her head to go to sleep. But the moment her eyes closed they opened again, because a tingling of realization came over her ears and neck and face. Bill Crocker hadn't come out of Polly Becker's room, and the person who was moaning wasn't Polly
Becker. It was Shelly. Bill Crocker had been with Shelly.

Ruthie was awake all night, trying to force pictures out of her mind that kept insinuating their way back in. When the neon sign went off and the chirping birds announced the morning light, she sat up, feeling a stiffness in her back and neck and the kind of dull headache that comes with lack of sleep. She couldn't shake the heavy sadness, and when she put her feet on the floor, she remembered all the mornings she had been so eager to get dressed and rush downstairs to the dining room to see Shelly there.

She would stand for a moment and watch him reading the morning paper and drinking coffee, and imagine the days ahead when he would be doing that in their own little apartment somewhere. Today the thought that she had to face him made her queasy. In the high-school cafeteria one day, she overheard the boys talking about Mr. Lane, the English teacher. Singing to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel," "He doesn't go round with girls anymore, he doesn't intend to marry. He stays at home and plays with himself. Whee. He's a fairy." Ruthie had asked her best friend, Sheila, what the song meant. When Sheila first told her, Ruthie was sure Sheila must be kidding.

This morning she opened her spiral notebook, tore out the list of bridesmaids, and with a match from a Colonial Manor matchbook, put it in the ashtray and set it on fire.

The hallway was empty, and from her open doorway she could see that the bathroom door was open, too. Maybe a hot shower would make her feel less achy. When she closed the bathroom door behind her and locked it and looked at herself in the full-length mirror, her tears finally came.

"Hey, Ruthless," Shelly said to her, putting an arm around her at breakfast. He was using the name he called her when he wanted to tease her. "I've been thinking about all these routines we've been coming up with every night, and it seems to me we ought to put them someplace." As if last night he hadn't ruined her entire life.

"Other than in a porcelain bathroom fixture?" she said, defensive and embarrassed and wishing it weren't too late to switch to the summer job her mother wanted for her, answering phones in Dr. Shiffman's office.

"I mean on the stage. In the lounge of the hotel. When the band takes a break, you and I could perform them. I'll bet we could turn some of our ideas into a comedy act," he said, ruffling the top of her hair in a way she loved. A way that when anyone else did it made her furious. She wanted to say yes to anything he asked of her.

"You mean do them for
other
people?"

"Yeah, do our own little show after the big show, for the people who go over to the cocktail lounge afterward. Most of them are so schnockered anyway they'd never know if we were good or bad. We could be the new Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Think about it," he said.

Over the next few days she hardly thought about anything else. She was much too self-conscious about her appearance to ever display it on a stage. Any aspirations she'd had about show business were about working behind the scenes. She had no interest in being out there in front of people having to worry about how she looked.

But now that marriage to Shelly was clearly out of the question, performing with him was a way to be linked with him and to spend time with him. So after she painted and spackled the scenery until the flats and her overalls were covered with dots of every color, she took out her spiral notebook and wrote a list of ideas
for their show. After all, Elaine May had never been married to Mike Nichols either.

The cocktail lounge was seedy and mercifully dimly lit, and after the band played a barely recognizable version of "Misty," the guitarist walked up to speak into the microphone, even though the six people in the audience were two feet away from the bandstand. He told them that while the band was taking a break, some "kids are going to do their stuff." The people, who were on their second round of drinks, chatted loudly to one another through the first few minutes of Ruthie and Shelly's show.

But after a short while, something caught their attention, and soon they were laughing and then applauding in the right places. The act worked so well that when the reviewer from the
Pittsburgh Press
came to the theater to see
Li'l Abner
and stumbled afterward on Shelly and Ruthie's show in the lounge, he mentioned them in his column, calling their show "clever, zany, and witty."

As September drew nearer, the Pennsylvania nights grew brisk and fresh, so that by the time the company was doing the last production, which was
South Pacific
, the big barn doors to the theater had to be closed while the show was in progress. During the last performance when Bill Crocker played the soldier who sang "Younger than Springtime" without a shirt on, Ruthie could tell all the way from the wings that he had goose bumps on his naked chest, and she looked away.

Later, while the actors were drinking champagne in the dressing room downstairs, she slowly swept the stage with the heavy push broom, moving the dust from behind the thick musty-smelling velour curtain downstage toward the sky blue scrim upstage. When she turned from downstage, Shelly was watching her.

"You know about me and Crocker, don't you?" he
asked her. With the big blue background behind him he looked eerily like a character in a dream. She'd been composing speeches in her head all day, knowing they would be saying good-bye that night, wanting to be eloquent when she did. But to be confronted with this subject was too painful. She'd been certain it would be something that would always remain unspoken between them.

"Yeah," she said, "I do," clutching the broom handle hard.

"I love you so much, I can't believe it," he said, moving a few steps closer. She didn't mean to let go of the broom handle, but she did, and it hit the ground with a sharp rap. "You get my jokes, you look at me the way Doris Day looks at Rock Hudson in all those schmucky movies, you're funnier than any five people I've ever known, and I love you."

He'd said he loved her. Twice. No one, not even her parents, had ever said those words to her. She knew what was supposed to happen now. She'd seen enough movies, read enough books to know it was her turn to speak next, to say words she'd practiced saying to her pillow to some generic fantasy lover for years, and had never said to a living soul. But now she did. She looked into Shelly Milton's eyes and said, "Oh, Shel, I love you too."

"Thank God," he said, and they moved together. When they collided, they held each other so tightly that Ruthie could barely breathe. Or maybe she couldn't breathe because it felt so good to feel so good. Her face was buried deeply in the front of his blue oxford-cloth shirt and his face rested on the top of her thick frizzy hair as the laughter of the actors downstairs floated up to the stage where the two of them stood. After a few minutes, they looked puffy-faced at each other.

Shelly wiped his eyes where a tear had formed and
brushed it across his cheek with the palm of his hand, then felt in the back pocket of his pants for a handkerchief. When he couldn't find one, he pulled the sleeve of his shirt across his face to dry it.

"I'm not going back to Northwestern," he told her. "I'm leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow with Crocker. We won't officially be living together, but I am going to stay with him until I can somehow get a job, maybe playing piano and eventually writing." Then he said in a way that seemed to be partly teasing and partly testing her, "Want to come along?"

"My parents would kill me first," she said.

"Mine weren't thrilled. But I convinced them everything would be okay when I told them I had a nice roommate." They both smiled an aren't-parents-dumb smile, and hugged again.

When the dressing rooms had been cleaned out and only the two of them were left in the theater, they sat on the stage, which was empty except for the piano and a work light. Shelly played songs from the summer and songs the two of them had invented for their act. When it was nearly dawn they walked hand in hand back to the hotel. Outside Ruthie's room, he held her in his arms and they swayed, then he twirled her around, and bent her back into the dip they always did in the "Top Hat" sketch. When he pulled her up to both feet he looked into her eyes. "You'll always be my Ginger Rogers," he promised. It was a promise he would never break.

5

A
FTER SUMMER STOCK Ruthie moved into the college dormitory with a hole in her heart so big that the cold Pittsburgh wind blowing off the Monongahela River went right through it. All she did was sit in her room like a zombie, longing for Shelly, fearing she'd never hear from him again. She was as obsessed with getting a letter from him as if she were on death row and he were the governor deciding on her pardon.

She registered for classes, but spent the next three weeks never attending any of them. She looked out the window from her pie slice-shaped cell in the cylindrical, architecturally monstrous dormitory, watched the cars go by on the street below, and thought about the summer. Later she wondered how she ever survived those twenty-one days in the dorm eating only pepperoni pizza brought to the desk downstairs by the delivery boy from Beto's on Forbes Street. The only time she left the room
was to go down to pick the pizza up, after which she walked to her mailbox and opened it with the key to check for certain, though she could already see through the glass door there was nothing inside.

When the letter came, she read it standing right there with the mailbox door hanging open, and wept openly, her tears of thanksgiving wetting the pizza box, because her prayers had been answered. On her way back to her room she did a little dance of joy that was witnessed with raised eyebrows by the girl on her floor she liked the least and to whom she was happy to offer a gesture she'd only seen others use but whose meaning she now fully understood.

Ruthless,

      
Enclosed are the lyrics of "Hooray for Hollywood." It is my new favorite song about my new favorite place. I love everything about it. The weather. (It never rains.) The palm trees. The weirdos, or should I say the other weirdos. It truly is screwy and ballyhooey, and there is only one thing missing from my life here and that is you. Every day I wish you were here with me. Drop out of school (Everyone who is anyone
has
, you know!) and come to the land of show business. I'll pick you up at the airport.

Shel

She jumped into the shower where she sang while she washed her hair, then she went to the Laundromat and did three weeks' worth of laundry. When she got back she called her parents from the pay phone in the hall and was relieved when it was her father who answered

"Daddy," she said, "I need you."

Manny Zimmerman was a Russian immigrant whose grocery store, Zimmerman's Fine Foods, had been on the same corner in the East End of Pittsburgh for thirty years, maintaining its loyal clientele who wouldn't set
foot in a Giant Eagle or Kroger's when they could get Manny's personal service. After all, poor Manny and his family had been through so much. People still mentioned the accident when they talked about the Zimmermans, even though it had been so many years.

Ruthie's memories of Martin and Jeffrey were vague and dreamlike. She was only two when they were killed in an automobile accident on the Boulevard of the Allies in a collision with a bus. All she remembered about her two older brothers was the way they used to lift her high into the air to play "see the baby fly." But maybe she didn't remember that at all, maybe her mother had told her about it.

Her parents' grief over the loss of their two sons permeated everything about the family's lives forever. Ruthie would never look at a flickering candle that wouldn't remind her of the two yahrtzeit candles her mother lit every year in memory of Martin and Jeffrey on the anniversary of their deaths. That day when her father walked into the lobby of the dormitory, Ruthie could see he feared the news she was about to deliver was as bad as the news he'd received that night the police came to tell him about Martin and Jeffrey.

She put her arm through his and moved him through the lobby toward a circle of naugahyde chairs, and as they walked, in her mind she went over the words she was going to say. Manny Zimmerman sat, and the sofa squeaked under him.

"You're all right?" he asked her.

"I am, Daddy, and I didn't mean to scare you, but I didn't want to say this on the phone and I wanted to try it out on you before I mentioned it to Ma, but I'd like to drop out of school and move to California."

Her father reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a Marsh Wheeling cigar, peeling off the cellophane, and then by virtue of a custom they'd shared for
years, he removed the paper ring and slid it onto his daughter's finger. "After you finish, maybe. But not now."

"I don't want to finish, Daddy. I want to leave school now. To go out there and be with my friend Shelly."

The wood match Manny Zimmerman lit flared against the blunt end of the cigar, and he puffed and puffed until the thick tobacco smell that would remind Ruthie of him every time she whiffed the odor of cigar for the rest of her life filled her nose and eyes.