I got the sense that Olive disapproved of this offering—but then again, Olive mostly disapproved of everything that Peg offered to people for free. This wasn’t a palatial offering in any case. Celia’s little room down the hall was far more humble than my fancy setup over in Uncle Billy’s never-used pied-à-terre. Celia’s bolt-hole wasn’t much more than a utility closet with a cot and a tiny bit of floor upon which to strew her clothing. The room had a window, but it faced a hot, stinking alley. Celia’s room didn’t have a carpet, she didn’t have a sink, she didn’t have a mirror, she didn’t have a closet, and she certainly didn’t have a large, handsome bed, like I had.
All of this probably explains why Celia moved in with me my second night at the Lily. She did so without asking. There was no discussion about it whatsoever; it just happened—and at the most unexpected time, too. Somewhere in the dark hours between midnight and dawn on Day Two of my sojourn in New York City, Celia stumbled into my bedroom, woke me up with a hard bump to the shoulder, and uttered one boozy word:
“Scoot.”
So I scooted. I moved over to the other side of the bed as she tumbled onto my mattress, commandeered my pillow, wrapped the entirety of my sheet around her beautiful form, and fell unconscious in a matter of moments.
Well, this was exciting!
This was so exciting, in fact, that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I didn’t dare to move. For one thing, I’d lost my pillow, and I was now pressed against the wall, so I was no longer comfortable. But the more serious issue here was this: what is protocol when a drunk and fully dressed showgirl has just collapsed onto your bed? Unclear. So I lay there in stillness and silence, listening to her thick breathing, smelling the cigarette smoke and perfume on her hair, and wondering how we would manage the inevitable awkwardness when morning came.
Celia finally roused herself around seven o’clock, when the sunlight that was glaring into the bedroom became impossible to ignore. She gave a decadent yawn and stretched fully, taking up even more of the bed. She was still wearing all her makeup and was dressed in her reckless evening gown from the night before. She was stunning. She
looked like an angel who had fallen to earth, straight through a hole in the floor of some celestial nightclub.
“Hey, Vivvie,” she said, blinking away the sun. “Thanks for sharing your bed. That cot they gave me is torture. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
I hadn’t been fully confident at this point that Celia even knew my name, so to hear her use the affectionate diminutive “Vivvie” flooded me with joy.
“That’s all right,” I said. “You can sleep here anytime.”
“Really?” she said. “That’s terrific. I’ll move my things in here today.”
Well, then. I guess I had a roommate now. (That was fine with me, though. I was just honored that she’d chosen me.) I wanted this strange, exotic moment to last as long as possible, so I dared to make conversation. “Say,” I asked, “where’d you go out to last night?”
She seemed surprised that I cared.
“El Morocco,” she said. “I saw John Rockefeller there.”
“Did you?”
“He’s the pits. He wanted to dance, but I was out with some other fellows.”
“Who’d you go out with?”
“Nobody special. Just a couple of guys who aren’t about to take me home to meet their mothers.”
“What kind of guys?”
Celia settled back into the bed, lit a smoke, and told me all about her night. She explained that she had gone out with some Jewish boys who were pretending to be gangsters, but then they ran into some real Jewish gangsters, so the pretenders had to scram, and she ended up with a fellow who took her to Brooklyn and then paid for a limousine to take her home. I was entranced by every detail. We stayed in bed for another hour as she narrated for me—in that unforgettably gruff voice of hers—every detail of an evening in the life of one Celia Ray, New York City showgirl.
I drank it all down like spring water.
—
By the next day, all of Celia’s belongings had migrated into my apartment. Her tubes of greasepaint and pots of cold cream now
cluttered up every surface. Her vials of Elizabeth Arden competed for space on Uncle Billy’s elegant desk against her compacts of Helena Rubinstein. Her long hairs laced my sink. My floor was an instant tangle of brassieres and fishnets, garters and girdles. (She had such prodigious quantities of undergarments! I swear, Celia Ray had a way of making negligees reproduce.) Her used, perspiration-soaked dress shields were hiding under my bed like little mice. Her tweezers bit into my feet when I stepped on them.
She was outrageously entitled. She wiped her lipstick on my towels. She borrowed my sweaters without asking. My pillowcases became stained with black smudges from Celia’s mascara, and my sheets were dyed orange from her pancake makeup. And there wasn’t anything this girl wouldn’t use as an ashtray—including once, while I was in it, the bathtub.
Incredibly, I didn’t mind any of this. On the contrary, I never wanted her to leave. If I’d had a roommate this interesting back at Vassar, I might’ve stayed in college. To my mind, Celia Ray was perfection. She was New York City’s very distillation—a glittering composite of sophistication and mystery. I would endure any filth or befouling, just to have access to her.
Anyhow, our living arrangement seemed to suit us both perfectly: I got to be near her glamour, and she got to be near my sink.
—
Inever asked my Aunt Peg if this was all right with her—that Celia had moved into Uncle Billy’s rooms with me, or that the showgirl seemed
intent on staying at the Lily indefinitely. This seems awfully illmannered, when I think back on it now. It would have been the most basic act of politeness to at least clear this arrangement with my host. But I was far too self-absorbed to be polite—and so was Celia, of course. So we just went ahead and did whatever we wanted to do, without giving it another thought.
What’s more, I never really worried about the mess that Celia left behind in that apartment, because I knew that Aunt Peg’s maid, Bernadette, would eventually take care of it. Bernadette was a quiet and efficient soul who came to the Lily six days a week to clean up after everyone. She tidied up our kitchen and our bathrooms, waxed our floors, cooked dinner for us (which we sometimes ate, sometimes ignored, and sometimes invited ten unannounced guests to). She also ordered the groceries, called in the plumber nearly every day, and probably did about ten thousand other thankless tasks, as well. In addition to all that, she now had to clean up after me and Celia Ray, which hardly seems fair.
I once overheard Olive remark to a guest: “Bernadette is Irish, of course. But she is not violently Irish, so we keep her on.”
This is the kind of thing that people used to say back then, Angela.
Unfortunately, that’s all I can remember about Bernadette.
The reason I don’t remember any particular details about Bernadette is because I didn’t pay much attention to maids back then. I was so very accustomed to them, you see. They were nearly invisible to me. I just expected to be served. And why was that? Why was I so presumptuous and callow?
Because I was rich.
I haven’t said those words yet in these pages, so let’s just get it out of the way right now: I was rich, Angela. I was rich, and I was spoiled. I’d been raised during the Great Depression, true, but the crisis never affected my family in any pressing manner. When the dollar failed, we went from having three maids, two cooks, a nanny, a gardener, and a full-time chauffeur to having just two maids, one cook, and a part-time chauffeur. So that didn’t quite qualify us for the breadline, to put it mildly.
And because my expensive boarding school had ensured that I never met anybody who wasn’t like me, I thought everyone had grown up with a big Zenith radio in the living room. I thought everyone had a pony. I thought every man was a Republican, and that there were only two kinds of women in the world—those who had gone to Vassar, and those who had gone to Smith. (My mother went to Vassar. Aunt Peg went to Smith for one year, before dropping out to join the Red Cross. I
didn’t know what the difference was between Vassar and Smith, but from the way my mother talked, I understood it to be crucial.)
I certainly thought everyone had maids. For my entire life, somebody like Bernadette had always taken care of me. When I left my dirty dishes sitting on the table, somebody always cleaned them up. My bed was beautifully made for me, every day. Dry towels magically replaced damp ones. Shoes that I tossed carelessly upon the floor were straightened out when I wasn’t looking. Behind it all was some great cosmic force—constant and invisible as gravity, and just as boring to me as gravity—putting my life in order and making sure that my knickers were always clean.
It may not surprise you, then, to learn that I didn’t lift a finger to help out with the housekeeping, once I moved into the Lily Playhouse —not even in the apartment that Peg had so generously bestowed upon me. It never occurred to me that I should help. Nor did it occur to me that I couldn’t keep a showgirl in my bedroom as a pet, just because I felt like it.
I cannot comprehend why nobody ever throttled me.
You will sometimes encounter people my age, Angela, who grew up experiencing real hardship during the Depression. (Your father was one such person, of course.) But because everybody around them was also struggling, these people will often report that they were not aware as children that their deprivations were unusual.
You will often hear such people say: “I didn’t even know I was poor!”
I was the opposite, Angela: I didn’t know I was rich.