Beautiful Days

  When she disembarked, the smell of the city rushed back to her, the same way it had on the first day she saw it, and she became elated again with all the possibilities of that first glimpse. By the time she climbed onto the stage at the first casting call, she was able to go through the routine she had practiced so many times in the Dogwood ballroom almost without thinking about her movements. When she finished she heard the clapping of perhaps a dozen people, and she bowed and smiled and lingered for a moment in the glow of the spotlight.

  “Thank you, Miss Larkspur, that was very good,” a reed-thin man in the front row said. His legs were crossed the way a woman might cross her legs and he kept a pencil behind his ear. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the theater, she decided that there was nothing about him that she might be attracted to, at least not in any romantic way, and this fact made her feel instantly more at ease.

  “Thank you.”

  “I like you. Are you available in the evenings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you available for the rest of the afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I think I could use you, but I’ll need to see some other girls first. Have a seat, please.”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. Even though this wasn’t the resounding yes she’d always hoped for, at that particular moment it was enough to fill her with gratitude. “Thank you,” she said again, bowing furtively to the man before making her way up the aisle.

  She was moving carefully in the darkness when she heard someone hiss her name. “Letty, you were great!”

  “Who is that?” she whispered back, putting a hand on one of the velvet-covered seats and sitting down beside the voice. But she knew before the reply came. “Paulette!” she gasped and put her arms around the girl who had taken her in when she was destitute and didn’t know the city at all. “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you. I need a job.” In the dim light of the theater, she could just make out the familiar shiny, wine-colored lips and the dark hair, ironed into big waves.

  Down on the stage, another girl was performing. Her routine involved a parasol, and though her singing was slightly off-key, she had a flirtatious way of moving that Letty was sure would catch the attention of a theatrical producer—at least all the theatrical producers with whom she’d yet come into contact.

  “How is Seventh Heaven these days?”

  “Oh, the same in the bad ways. Mr. Cole is still a miserable sack of beans, and the customers still seem to think they’ve bought a ticket to a petting zoo. But now it’s bad in new ways, too. No one goes there anymore except tourists watching their dime.”

  “But everyone always wanted to go there,” Letty replied in disbelief.

  “Nothing stays the same forever.” Paulette shrugged.

  “Are the same girls living with you in the apartment?”

  “Yes, same girlies. Nothing’s changed, except that I have less money.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So goes life. I was hoping this might be something for me, but from what I can tell he’s only keeping you wee things around. I think he just asked me to stay as a courtesy. But I’m not worried. They can’t say no to a face like this forever, right? I’m glad to see you—I was worried about you, what with the bad way you were in when you went off.”

  “I’m sorry—I should have somehow let you know that I was all right. Life has been swell really. I’ve been staying in White Cove.”

  “White Cove, Long Island?” Paulette exclaimed, loud enough that the man with the pencil behind his ear turned and cleared his throat. “How’d you manage that?” she went on in a low whisper.

  “My friend from Ohio, Cordelia, her father is—was—he has a place there.”

  “Cordelia Grey is your friend?” Paulette’s voice got loud again, and the man in the front row stood up and asked that whoever was making noise be quiet or leave.

  The girls exchanged conspiratorial looks but kept quiet through the next four auditions, after which the man in the front row stood up and announced: “Will Miss Bates, Miss Logan, Miss Appleton, Miss Larkspur, and Miss Preston please stay? As for the rest of you, I am grateful for your time.”

  “Oh, well, you see?” Paulette said. “My luck is down these days, and tall girls are out.”

  “That’s too bad,” Letty said. Everyone in the theater was talking now, and there was no need to whisper anymore, but she couldn’t seem to get her voice to a normal decibel. Her happiness was all tangled up in blue.

  “Oh, honey,” Paulette went on in a softer tone. She must have noticed that Letty’s small face was vacillating between a stricken expression and one of jubilation. “You deserve it. Don’t waste any time feeling bad for me.”

  But Letty couldn’t help feeling bad. “It’s only that it would have been so nice to be in the same show.”

  “It would have, but it’s not to be. Anyway, now that we’ve seen each other, you’ll know not to act like a stranger.”

  Letty nodded sadly. Then her mind grasped onto something that might make it better. Though her heart shrank every time she thought of the nightclub that was supposed to have been her big break, she couldn’t stand the idea of Paulette going off like this, especially since at one time she’d helped Letty so much. “Paulette, would you really rather work someplace else?”

  Paulette laughed faintly. “Yesterday I thought about asking for a job mopping floors at some old ice-cream parlor I passed. I’d probably make more money, and at least I could count on a little sweetness.”

  “Because you see my friend Cordelia is opening a place. A nightclub. If you went there tomorrow and told her you know me I’m sure she’d give you a job. It’s in an old bank, on West Fifty-third.”

  “Thanks, maybe I will.” Paulette bent down and pulled Letty close to her for a hug. “It was good to see you,” she said and went out.

  The man with the pencil behind his ear called the five remaining girls down to the front row of seats. They all looked like her—petite and pale-skinned and dark-haired. The job he was offering wasn’t glamorous, and he went to some lengths to impress upon the girls that they would have to start tomorrow night, no exceptions, that they would get no special treatment, that they would be required to be on hand six nights a week, indefinitely, and that the pay would be low. Apparently these grueling conditions were the reason that the revue was constantly in need of new chorus girls, and Letty supposed she should have felt mistreated by them, except that she was so euphoric with the miracle of having been given her first job as an actress that she almost couldn’t stop smiling.

  Mr. Archly—for that was the name of the man who had cast her—did not exaggerate. He kept them through the afternoon to learn their parts, and the choreographer, whose name was Miss Chastain, did not smile once as she corrected the placement of their feet and their musicality and the quality of their arm gestures. By the time the wardrobe man Mr. Singer came out to measure them, they had already lost one of the girls, but Mr. Archly said he knew that would happen, and that he really had only needed four. For the first time he smiled, and said that he’d thought the remaining four had been the strongest from the beginning. Then Mr. Singer went away and Miss Chastain clapped her hands and they were back to work.

  By the time Letty and the other new chorus girls were dismissed, the actors and singers and comedians who were performing that night had begun to arrive, carrying shopping bags and waving cigarettes and laughing. Letty watched them shyly in the hallway as they passed, wondering what they had filled their daylight hours with, and what assignations they had to look forward to when the show was over. Out on the sidewalk, the light had faded enough to make the big sign proclaiming the Paris Revue glow against the plum dusk. Her whole self swooned with the bittersweetness of having secured a show business job and having no Grady to tell about it.

  “Isn’t that sign beautiful?” Letty asked Mary Preston, one of the other new girls, as they lingered in front of the theater whil
e the after-work crowds streamed past. The streets were littered with wrappers and papers and other discarded items, but in the magic-hour light, even trash looked like treasure.

  Mary grinned. “You know I came all the way from Alabama for a chance like this?” she said in her pretty lilting Southern way.

  “I’m from Ohio,” was all Letty could manage in return, but she was smiling so big that her actual words were insignificant. This seemed to her like the first real moment of her life.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow?” Mary said.

  Their heads bobbed in agreement, and then they parted, two small girls following their own paths into the wide city. If she hurried, she knew that she could make the 7:58 train back to White Cove, but she was in no mood for hurrying off. She wanted to walk slowly and smell the wafting perfumes of bouquets that men had bought for their sweethearts and watch couples holding each other tight as they dashed along the pavement on their way to or from something that made them grateful to be in each other’s company. Going home felt the same as going to sleep, and she was too bouncing, too overcome with bliss, for that. She wished her mother could see her now, a New York girl who had just earned her first real job.

  Her chest rose and fell with the thrill of her new life, and with the prospect of soon telling Cordelia everything. Of course she still felt a touch wounded by how harshly Cordelia had taken away the thing she’d promised, but Letty felt she understood what Cordelia had done better now that she herself had a vocation. They were not children anymore and fate was sure to throw them in the way of hard choices. Yet the many years when Letty and Cordelia had been each other’s only sympathetic ear were a bond that would not be easily dissolved. And so it was natural that Letty should feel desperate to tell her old friend that she had finally gotten what she’d always wanted, the thing they had gushingly talked of on their long walks home from Defiance: a paid job at a real theater.

  “Hey there, Miss Larkspur.”

  The sound of her own name—the name she’d given herself—startled Letty from her thoughts. She glanced up at the pretty windowless limestone facade and then to Danny, whose gentle eyes could barely hold hers.

  “You found us,” he said with a smile. The building was a bank; her feet had carried her to Cordelia’s club.

  She nodded her hello, and then he turned awkwardly and went down the street on some errand or other.

  Other young men, most of whom she recognized from around Dogwood, were streaming in and out the big doorway, and curious passersby clotted the sidewalks, whispering to each other about what was being built there. That she had been recognized by one of these men made her look like a very important person, Letty sensed, and for a moment she felt quite fully like a chorus girl who is recognized by doormen everywhere and shepherded into whatever charmed room she desires to enter. She reached the entrance with her head high and an air of drama to her gait.

  “Hey there!” were the brunt words that halted her parade. She had just stepped over the threshold, and a bear-sized man with a hat pulled down over his eyes appeared and blocked her way.

  “Hello.” She smiled up at him before trying to pass.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She peeked around his big frame at the frenzied activity of the room—small wrought iron tables were being arranged across a vast floor, and some sort of construction was being done behind the walls of teller windows that flanked the main space. “I’m Letty.”

  “Who?”

  This bruised her confidence some, but then she remembered what she had done today, and the thought put a smile of impenetrable confidence on her face. “Letty, Cordelia’s friend. I’m here to see Cordelia. You can ask Danny, if you want.”

  “Nah, that’s all right,” the man said after a minute. “I remember you now. Sorry to give you any trouble, miss—but the Hales followed Miss Cordelia again last night, and we’re all a little on edge that they’ll try to nab her. Or worse.”

  “I understand. You were only doing your job.”

  “She’s that way.” The man pointed toward two big copper doors on the far side of the room. Letty curtsied and moved forward, slowly so that she could take the place in. Old murals covered the ceiling, which gave the whole place a celestial ambiance, and the mystical sunset light filtered down from high up on the walls. On the east wall of the building—Letty noticed with a tiny pang—several of the teller windows had been removed and a stage was being erected. It glistened for a moment before her like a mirage, and she had to close her eyes until the pang had passed and she had remembered how much better off she was forging her own path. No less an authority than Astrid Donal had assured her of this.

  She was halfway across the mosaic floor when the room fell quiet. A saw stopped, and the various male voices shouting back and forth ceased. Letty herself paused and unconsciously stepped to the side. A woman in a white, drop-waist summer dress and pearls, her artfully made-up face shadowed by a wide-brimmed white hat, was gliding through the maze of tables toward the exit.

  A slow, lone whistle cut through the silence. From a distance the woman’s beauty had looked impeccable, but when she gusted by in a gardenia-scented cloud Letty could tell that she was at least thirty-five. The perfume was still lingering in the air when the woman stepped into the sliver of streetscape, and outside.

  “That was Mona Alexander,” one of the men working on the bar said, as activity resumed.

  “Who?” his partner replied.

  “Mona Alexander. When I was coming up, she was the hottest singer around. She’s going to perform on opening night.”

  Letty had never seen a woman silence a room like that, and she felt almost ridiculous for having believed she was capable of doing what this woman was going to do—hold the attention of a big rowdy drinking audience and make them listen to her. But, perhaps someday she would—and with that happy thought Letty advanced through the copper doors that the man in the hat had indicated.

  Cordelia’s back was turned when Letty came in, and she held the telephone in her hand. She wore brown wide-legged trousers that Letty had never seen before and a pale pink blouse, and Letty almost didn’t recognize her. She was nodding and listening to someone talk, and then she said, “Thanks, Roger,” in the voice of a much older woman and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Letty asked.

  “Oh, Lets! I’m so glad you’re here,” Cordelia said, though she gave no sign of coming to greet Letty in the door frame where she was standing. The girls smiled at each other almost shyly, as though over the several days that had passed without seeing one another they had become strangers.

  “Who is Roger?” Letty repeated the question since she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “My press agent.” Cordelia lit a cigarette. “Isn’t this place tops?”

  Letty’s mouth opened and framed the foreign phrase press agent.

  “We’re opening tomorrow night, and we’re calling it The Vault, and Roger says everyone wants to come and his line is always engaged.” Cordelia rested her hips against the desk, which was an imposing mahogany piece of furniture with massive, engraved legs, the kind the director of a bank might sit behind. “I found a whole box of rolls of amusement park tickets at a supply store down on Thirty-seventh Street that already had The Vault printed on them. Apparently there was a ride that went by that name at a park in Queens, but they had to close after an old lady had a heart attack and died. Anyway, how it will work is, the customers will walk in and buy tickets at the first teller window, and then they can use their tickets to buy drinks at other windows further in. Isn’t that clever? I thought of that. And the drinks will come in Ball jars, won’t that be pretty? And Mona Alexander, who was one of Dad’s girls a long time ago, said she wanted to perform for no fee in Dad’s honor, and—”

  Cordelia seemed to have plenty more to say, and probably would have gone on, but the phone rang and she turned around and picked up the receiver. Letty had never heard Cordelia talk so
much at once. In Union, she’d been the kind to say little and watch, and had always seemed more interested in Letty’s fantasies of stardom and fame than in telling her own stories. Now she spoke a few rapid sentences into the receiver and glanced back over her shoulder as though checking to see if Letty were still there.

  “I only wanted to tell you that I got a job,” Letty said, as though to justify her continued presence. Though her voice was irritatingly meek when she had most definitely instructed it to be bold and careless, she went on: “A part. In a revue—”

  “Isn’t that something?” Cordelia’s red lips sprang into a smile. Letty could hear the mechanical voice on the other end of the receiver, and in the next moment, Cordelia returned her attention there. “Sorry, what was that?”

  Letty felt as though she had just dropped a precious heirloom down a long elevator shaft, and had to watch as the treasured object fell into the gloom and disappeared without a sound forever. It was perfectly obvious from Cordelia’s posture, which was straight and full of newfound importance, that the telephone call was not going to be a short one, and Letty did not think she could withstand even another minute of lingering invisibly, half in and half out of the room. She was all the way in the hall by the time Cordelia noticed her departure.

  “Tomorrow night is the opening!” she called after Letty. “Wear the red dress we got you that day we went to Bergdorf, all right? To match the tickets.”

  “I can’t,” Letty said, although the telephone conversation had started back up, and she was the only one to hear herself. “It’s my first night at the Revue.”