“Same time next week?”
“Same time next week. At my apartment. And thank you, Miss Lane. Thank you very much.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank your sister. And you can call me Dolly,” I say.
“And you can call me Perry.”
I look into his eyes. “I can, but I won’t. I always call my employers by their full name. This is strictly business, Mr. Clements. Nothing more. Please thank Miss May very much for her hospitality.”
Elsie shows me out. I follow her down the elegant staircase, somehow resisting the urge to turn around to see if he is watching.
I walk from the building with my head held a little higher than usual. Fat rose-tinted snow clouds have settled above the city again, lending a sense of magic to the air. I tip my head back and gaze up, appreciating its beauty. My steps feel light against the streets, my heart feels secretive and hopeful.
I feel hope in my heart and love in the air and wonderful adventures beginning.
27
LORETTA
Nobody had ever made me feel more loved or alive and I adored the very bones of him.
There is a moment just before curtain up when I feel completely alone in the world. I close my eyes, embracing the hush that settles across the auditorium; the orchestra’s tune-up dissipating into the very last hum of a violin string until that too fades and is gone. There is no going back now. The lines of script have been memorized, the delivery rehearsed, the dance moves meticulously choreographed, the notes and harmony of each musical number sung time and again until everyone is pitch-perfect. I am surrounded by prop hands and directors, chorus girls and rigging assistants. I am anticipated by the audience, all of whom have come to hear my famous husky voice, to stamp their feet at my innuendo-laden lines, to gasp at the beauty of my costumes. And yet I remain entirely alone, my thoughts and fears, my doubts and insecurities my only companions. In that dark silence my thoughts meander back across the years to the night when Jimmy passed me the letter in the interval and my entire world shifted.
It was March 1917. The start of my second full season, and my first principal role. I was a triumph, that opening night. It was pure joy. Cockie didn’t even see my performance. He sat with his back to the stage so he could watch the reaction of the audience. “Why would I want to watch the stage?” he said. “I know the thing inside out and back to front. It’s the audience that matters now. I can tell immediately if a show will be a hit from the reaction of the first-night audience.”
They adored the principals and fell in love with the chorus. Every one of our girls was beautiful, fashionable, and talented, a far cry from the corseted burlesque girls of vaudeville and music hall.
Lucile, Cockie, and I were a powerful team. Her clothes were so perfect for me that everyone wanted to copy them. Lucile laughed. She said there were few women who could wear her clothes with even a fraction of my style and elegance. And of course there were the streams of gentlemen callers. Stage-door Johnnies, we called them. Silly fools with romantic notions in their heads and lavish gifts in their arms. I was young and easily impressed. I adored the fame and attention, but I wasn’t interested in them. Despite my best efforts to be rude and discouraging, the marriage proposals kept coming, some of them screamingly funny, others deadly serious. The colder I acted toward my admirers, the more in love with me they became. Men are such infuriating creatures that way.
The brilliant performances continued night after night and my name became synonymous with beauty and success. Every producer in town wanted to engage me for their latest production. My star shone ever brighter amid the curfews and blackouts of war.
Even the after-show parties and suppers continued, although we often felt more than a shade of guilt while we danced and drank. We all had a story to tell about a loved one we were missing and worrying about, but what use was there in locking ourselves away to be miserable? We couldn’t stop the war, couldn’t bring our men home. Blocking it out with a bottle of champagne or something stronger, putting on a dazzling show to provide a distraction . . . it was the only way we could carry on.
And then the letter arrived.
It was written by a Roger Dawes, an officer on the Western Front. Jimmy handed it to me in the interval. I thought about it all the way through the second and third acts.
Somewhere in France. March 1917
My dear Miss May,
You must forgive me, but I have fallen hopelessly in love with you and I must tell you that you are now inextricably linked to my survival in this dreadful war.
I know nothing about you. I have never met you, nor seen you perform, and yet I have an image of you stuck to the wall of my dugout. It belonged to one of the privates but I won it from him in a game of poker. The stakes were high, the prize was your picture, and I was the victor.
So now you are mine.
Please know that to see your beautiful smiling face each morning makes me determined to survive this wretched war so that I might one day watch you perform and meet you in person. I would like to see for myself how true the likeness is. Is it possible for someone to be so beautiful?
Please write a reply. You will make a lonely soldier very happy indeed.
Officer Roger Dawes
I replied.
We exchanged letters for six months. At first they were brief and frivolous. Roger joked about the holes in his socks and the trench rats, choosing not to dwell on what life was really like at the front. I wrote to him of life in London, of brighter things: my latest show, society gossip. I sent him photographs and notices from the papers describing my dazzling performances. But as the months passed our exchanges became more serious. He shared his deepest thoughts and darkest fears. I told him I took morphine to escape from the dreadful reality of it all. I told Roger things I had never told anyone, not even my closest friends.
I soon found myself waiting desperately for news, for Jimmy to hand me another little blue envelope. As the number of losses and casualties increased, a call was put out for more volunteer nurses. I told Cockie I was stepping out of the limelight for a while to concentrate on nursing full-time.
I relocated to Guy’s Hospital, once again photographed in my nurse’s uniform. The newspapers thrived on good news stories like this.
BRAVE THEATER STAR TO CONCENTRATE ON ASSISTING THE WAR WOUNDED
I worked a full shift during the day, and often continued through the night. I rose early every morning to help with the rounds of temperature checks and dressings and cooking the men’s meals, all the while knowing that another wave of injured men would come through the doors that day, and the next, and the next. None of us knew when it might end, when our lives might return to normality, and through it all, Roger and I opened our hearts to each other.
For eighteen months we exchanged letters. Toward the end of that time, I had returned to the theater for occasional special performances. And then Roger sent word that he was coming home on a period of special leave. I will return to battle the happiest man in the world if you would do me the honor of meeting me, my dear Loretta. I wrote back immediately, telling him to come to the Shaftesbury and to give Jimmy, the stage-door manager, his name.
I could not have imagined a moment more wonderful or perfect than when he stepped into my dressing room, all smiles and peonies, his cap in his hand, his searching emerald eyes meeting mine. He was here. Roger. My darling Roger. Without hesitation, I flew into his arms and there I stayed for the most glorious time. I felt safe. I felt loved. I felt real.
I feigned a dose of laryngitis and informed Matron I would be absent for the week.
We spent our first night together at The Savoy drinking Ada Coleman’s decadent cocktails in the American Bar and dancing the foxtrot in the ballroom while everyone watched, spellbound by the inescapable chemistry between us. I didn’t care about the whispers and glances as we took the lift together to a river suite on the top floor. We gazed at the stars from the balcony and drank the finest champagne. We danced cheek to ch
eek to a gramophone record before he lifted me into his arms and carried me to the bedroom. He was the perfect gentleman. So gentle and yet so passionate. He insisted we leave the blinds open so that we could see the stars as we made love. He was so delicious that night, so perfect. He took my breath away.
I awoke to morning sunshine that spilled across the crumpled bedsheets, luxuriating in the warmth of Roger’s naked body beside me. We were married by special license later that day, traveling on to Brighton for our honeymoon, like forbidden lovers eloping to Gretna Green. Roger was everything to me, and I to him. I reveled in the knowledge of Mother’s disappointment when she learned that I had married a man like him: untitled, unimportant, Roger Dawes. Exactly what I had always longed for in a lover and husband. Exactly the type of man my mother loathed.
We spent our third day together blissfully alone and in love.
They were the most perfect three days of my life. He could not have been kinder, warmer, funnier, or more thoughtful. For the first time in my life, I felt loved for who I really was, not just admired because of my fame and my beauty. Roger had started with fame and beauty and spent eighteen months getting to know the real person behind the dazzle. When I told him my real name he insisted on calling me Virginia. Ginny. “It suits you,” he teased. “It’s especially perfect for someone who drinks so much gin!” Nobody had ever made me feel more loved or alive and I adored the very bones of him.
My heart shattered when he returned to France. I stayed in bed for two days, convinced that nothing could ever console me. But my misery then was nothing compared to what was ahead. Roger’s letters stopped. I couldn’t understand why, although I feared the worst.
He was killed exactly a week after we were married. A shell explosion in a deadly offensive near the Belgian town of Ypres.
I didn’t find out until three months later, by which time the war was over and I was back at the theater full-time. Jimmy passed me the letter during the interval. It was from Roger’s mother. She’d enclosed a bundle of letters found in his greatcoat. My letters. “It was as if they were trying to protect him,” she wrote. “A barrier of love, wrapped around his heart.”
My life as Mrs. Roger Dawes was at an end. The life I had carried secretly within me for three months ended soon after, a crimson bedsheet all I had to show that either my husband, or our child, had ever existed. I was left with nothing. Just a bundle of scorched letters and a broken heart.
The houselights go down, plunging me into darkness. The conductor taps his baton on his music stand. The orchestra settles and the pianist strikes up the first bar. The curtain goes up, the passing glare of the spotlight offering a glimpse of the audience. Couples in love, out for an evening at the theater together. Press reporters and society-magazine columnists, eager to write their reviews and gain the admiration of their editor. And way up, in the farthest reaches of the cheap seats in the gallery, I see the hopeful, adoring faces of the ordinary girls who wish to be everything that I am.
Right on cue I step forward, spread my arms wide, and smile. The audience cheer wildly as I search for him in the dark, willing my imagination to find him. And there he is, resting casually against a pillar at the back of the stalls. He smiles and blows kisses and Virginia Clements’s heart breaks into a thousand tiny fragments, dragging her to her knees, crushed beneath the immense weight of her grief, and yet all the while, Loretta May dazzles. Loretta May keeps dancing, keeps performing and everybody in the auditorium loves her, unaware that her world is crumbling around her.
28
DOLLY
“Music is nothing without an audience. We must have people to hear it; otherwise it is just markings on a page.”
There is a wonderful silence to the hotel in the predawn dark. While the guests lounge in their apartments and sleep off the effects of too many highballs, I lie awake, a hand on my chest, feeling the rise and the fall of a hundred beating hearts. I think about the governor’s words; the connection with the hotel that he spoke of. I’m beginning to understand what he meant. I imagine the locked doors are closed eyes; the shutters and curtains tired eyelids, too weary to pull apart. And then I hear hushed whispers, soft footsteps in corridors as the hotel yawns, stretches, flexes its fingers, and gently wakes up.
Everything seems so simple in these silent hours. I think about my first meeting with Perry in his apartment. He called me Miss Lane. I called him Mr. Clements. He was clumsy and untidy. I was (he said) entertaining and intriguing. We drank pots and pots of tea, ate cake, and talked beyond the intended hour. He made me smile with his fancy notions of life. I made him laugh with what he calls “my northern outlook.” I sensed a pleasant understanding developing between us. I think about him often while everyone else sleeps.
But more than anything, in these quiet moments, I think about Teddy and little Edward, both of them out there somewhere, distant and fading. I try not to dwell on the past, to keep looking forward, but it isn’t easy. Like a shadow, my past lingers beside me always. Strange things remind me of them, small insignificancies that send my memories tumbling forward like water on a mill wheel: the smell of a rose in the Embankment Gardens, the song of a blackbird, a butterfly, the distant stars, the shape of my mother’s handwriting.
Her latest letter arrives with a Christmas package. She wishes me well and writes about the safe, predictable events that communities like ours have always relied on: marriages, babies born, the little runt who had thrived with the other piglets that spring. She doesn’t write of the difficult realities we sweep aside when we choose to.
With the letter is a separate note scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Dear Dorothy,
I found these when I was clearing out your room. I thought you might like to have them. Or maybe not. I wasn’t sure.
I will be thinking of you this Christmastime. I hope you are happy.
Your loving Mother
X
The package contains a lavender bag that I had made as a young girl, a yard of fabric, a bundle of letters, and a khaki-colored button from Teddy’s tunic. I remember him giving it to me before he returned to the front from leave. I treasured that button as if it were a diamond, as if every part of him was contained within it.
With unsteady hands, I untie the string around the letters. His handwriting is so familiar, so haunting. He took to reading and writing poetry when he went to war. His writing became almost musical.
As I take the letters from their envelopes, I think of all the times I had longed to see his neat script, to read his gentle words. Now they only torment me.
Somewhere in France. February ’17
My dear Little Thing,
Do you sleep well? Sleep is broken and fleeting here. There is little to distinguish between night and day during these long winter months, so that I can’t be sure if the sky is tricking me. We sleep in the dugouts, our bodies too wearied from marching and shivering to care about the discomfort. And to think that I used to complain of a broken spring in the mattress back home. What any of us would give for a mattress full of broken springs.
We long for the dawn, the first gray light to signal the end of another night of shelling and invisible enemies lurking over the top. The darkness plays tricks on the mind. The scratching of a rat becomes a German sniper, his gun barrel pressed against your temple. But that first sliver of light—the relief at knowing I have lived another day and that I am one day closer to seeing you again, my dear little girl. And the dawn is so beautiful, such color above all that is dreary and murk in the fields below. I think of you when I watch the dawn sweep across the sky. I imagine you sleeping as the light blooms through the window of your little bedroom. I imagine myself creeping in to sit beside you and I watch you sleep, until you sense me near and open a sleepy eye.
What do you hear, Dolly? Tell me what you hear when you wake in the morning, for I hear only dreadful things. Even in the silence I hear death and fear.
Please write to me, my dear Little Thing, and remind
me of the whispers of the reeds on the riverbank. Tell me about the birdsong and the cries of the swallow chicks in the eaves. Tell me about the rumble of thunder and the hiss of a summer rainstorm on the tin roof of the hay barn. Tell me about the clang of the milk churns, the crackle of the knife through the crust of the morning’s bread, the spit and sizzle of bacon frying. Do you hear the ringing of the school bell, the rumble of the coal cart, the cry of a newborn baby?
What do you hear, Dolly? Please tell me. Fill my ears with life again.
Yours always, Teddy
X
Somewhere in France. November 1917
My dear Little Thing,
We are on the march in these short dark winter days. Just as the earth tilts away from the sun in the wintertime, so I feel a shadow fall over me as I move farther away from you.
How awful it was to leave you again. Worse than the first time we parted. I didn’t know what awaited me then. Now I know what terrors await and I’m not ashamed to admit that my legs tremble at the thought.
They shoot the deserters and cowards. They are court-martialed and shot at dawn by firing squad. An example to us all. A reminder of how cowardice ends. But I cannot blame those poor boys. War can turn a man’s mind inside out, so that the thought of being shot by your officer is better than being taken prisoner or torn apart by enemy shells. Who would ever have thought such decisions would have to be made? Who would ever have believed this was possible, Dolly?
Before I came home on leave, I scratched the days until I would see you into a wooden post in the dugout. I couldn’t wait for the others to return so I could move up the list and get closer to seeing you. We all prayed for our brothers to come back so we could take our turn. And then I got my papers and I was walking away from that place and walking toward you, Dolly. There you were, hands on your hips, the sun in your hair, and I could not have been happier if I had seen an angel from heaven.