“You girls wanna come home with me?” he asked, dispensing with the preliminaries. “I gotta friend with a car.”
I studied him more closely. He looked like a piece of very bad business. A wolf with an agenda. This was not somebody a nice girl should tangle with.
“We might,” I said, which was true. “But first we have a meeting to conclude, with our associates.”
“Your associates?” he scoffed, taking in our table with its odd and animated assortment of humanity: a coronary-inducingly gorgeous showgirl, a slovenly white-haired man in his shirtsleeves, a tall and dowdy middle-aged woman, a short and stodgy middle-aged woman, a stylishly dressed lady of means, a strikingly handsome man with a dramatic profile, and an elegant young black man in a perfectly tailored pinstripe suit. “What line of business yous in, doll?”
“We’re theater people,” I said.
As if we could have been anything else.
—
The following morning I woke up early as usual, suffering from my typical summer-of-1940 hangover. My hair stank of sweat and cigarettes, and my limbs were all tangled up in Celia’s limbs. (We had gone out with the wolf and his friend, after all—as I’m sure you’ll be flabbergasted beyond all reason to hear—and it had been a strenuous
night. I felt like I’d just been fished out of the Gowanus Canal.)
I made my way to the kitchen where I found Mr. Herbert sitting with his forehead on the table and his hands folded politely in his lap. This was a new posture for him—a new low in dejectedness, I would say.
“Good morning, Mr. Herbert,” I said.
“I stand ready to review any evidence of it,” he replied, without lifting his forehead from the table.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked.
“Blithesome. Glorious. Exalted. I’m a sultan in his palace.”
He still hadn’t lifted his head.
“How’s the script coming along?”
“Be a humanitarian, Vivian, and stop asking questions.”
—
The next morning, I found Mr. Herbert in the same position—and several of the following mornings, too. I didn’t know how
somebody could sit for so long with their forehead on a table without suffering an aneurysm. His mood never lifted, and neither—at least not that I saw—did his skull. Meanwhile, his notebook sat untouched beside him.
“Is he going to be all right?” I asked Peg.
“It’s not easy to write a play, Vivian,” she said. “The problem is, I’m asking him to write something good, and I’ve never asked that of him before. It’s got his head all screwy. But I think of it this way. During the war, the British army engineers always used to say: ‘We can do it, whether it can be done or not.’ That’s how the theater works, too, Vivian. Just like a war! I often ask people to do more than they are capable of—or I used to do, anyway, before I got old and soft. So, yes, I have full confidence in Mr. Herbert.”
I didn’t.
Celia and I came in late one night, drunk as usual, and we tripped over a body that was lying on the living room floor. Celia shrieked. I switched on a light and identified Mr. Herbert, lying there in the middle of the carpet on his back, staring up at the ceiling, with his hands folded over his chest. For an awful moment, I thought he was dead. Then he blinked.
“Mr. Herbert!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“Prophesizing,” he said, without moving.
“Prophesizing what?” I slurred.
“Doom,” he said.
“Well, then. Have a good night.” I turned off the light.
“Splendid,” he said quietly, as Celia and I stumbled to our room. “I will be certain to do just that.”
—
Meanwhile, as Mr. Herbert suffered, the rest of us went about the business of creating a play that did not yet have a script.
Peg and Benjamin had already gotten to work on the songs, sitting at the grand piano all afternoon, running through melodies and ideas for lyrics.
“I want Edna’s character to be called Mrs. Alabaster,” said Peg. “It sounds ostentatious, and a lot of words can rhyme with it.”
“Plaster, caster, master, bastard, Alabaster,” said Benjamin. “I can work with that.”
“Olive won’t let you say bastard. But go bigger. In the first number, when Mrs. Alabaster has lost all her money, make the song feel overly wordy, to show how fancy she is. Use longer words, to rhyme.
Taskmaster. Toastmaster. Oleaster.”
“Or we can have the chorus run through a series of questions about her,” Benjamin suggested. “Like: Who asked her? Who passed her? Who grasped her?”
“Disaster! It attacked her!”
“The Depression, it smacked her—that poor Alabaster.”
“It gassed her. It smashed her. She’s poor as a pastor.”
“Hey there, Peg,” Benjamin suddenly stopping what he was playing. “My father’s a pastor and he’s not poor.”
“I don’t pay you to lift your hands off those piano keys, Benjamin. Keep noodling about. We were just getting somewhere.”
“You don’t pay me at all,” he said, folding his hands in his lap. “You haven’t paid me in three weeks! You haven’t paid anyone, I heard.”
“Is that true?” Peg asked. “What are you living on?”
“Prayers. And your leftover dinner.”
“Sorry, kiddo! I’ll talk to Olive about it. But not right now. Go back and start over, but add that thing you were doing that time when I walked in on you playing the piano, and I liked what I heard. You remember? That Sunday, when the Giants game was playing on the radio?”
“I can’t begin to know what you’re talking about, Peg.”
“Play, Benjamin. Just keep playing. That’s how we’ll find it. After this, I want you to write a song for Celia called ‘I’ll Be a Good Girl Later.’ Do you think you could write a song like that?”
“I can write anything, if you feed me and pay me.”
—
As for me, I was designing costumes for the cast—but mostly for Edna.
Edna was concerned about being “swallowed” by the waistless 1920s dresses that she saw me sketching.
“That style didn’t look good on me back then when I was young and pretty,” she said, “and I can’t see it looking good on me now that I’m old and stale. You have to give me a waistline of some sort. I know it wasn’t the fashion back then, but you’ll have to fake it. Also, my waist is more stoutish right now than I would like it to be. Work around it, please.”
“I don’t think you’re stoutish at all,” I said, and I meant it.
“Oh, but I am. Don’t worry, though—in the week before the show, I’ll live on a diet of rice water, toast, mineral oil, and laxatives, like always. I’ll slim down. But for now, use gussets, so you can tighten my waistline later. If there’s to be a lot of dancing, I’ll need you to create purposeful seams—you understand, don’t you, darling? Nothing can fly loose when I’m in the spotlight. My legs are still good, thank heavens, so don’t be afraid to show them. What else? Oh, yes—my shoulders are narrower than they seem. And my neck is awfully short, so proceed with caution, especially if you’re going to put me in some sort of a large hat. If you make me look like a stubby little French bulldog, Vivian, I’ll never forgive you.”
I had such respect for how well this woman knew the vagaries of her own figure. Most women have no idea what works for them and what doesn’t. But Edna was precision incarnate. Sewing for her, I could see, was going to be its own apprenticeship in costuming.
“You are designing for the stage, Vivian,” she instructed. “Rely upon shape more than detail. Remember that the nearest viewer to me will be ten strides away. You have to think on a large scale. Big colors, clean lines. A costume is a landscape, not a portrait. And I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don’t want the dress to be the star of the show. Don’t outshine me, darling. You understand?”
I did. And oh, how I loved the shape of this conversation. I loved being with Edna. I was becoming quite infatuated with her, if I’m being honest. She had nearly replaced Celia as the central object of my devoted awe. Celia was still exciting, of course, and we still went out on the town, but I didn’t need her so much anymore. Edna had depths of glamour and sophistication that excited me far more than anything Celia could offer.
I would say that Edna was somebody who “spoke my own language” but that’s not quite it, because I was not yet as fluent in fashion as she was. It would be closer to the truth to say that Edna Parker Watson was the first native speaker I’d ever encountered of the language that I wanted to master—the language of outstanding apparel.
—
Afew days later, I took Edna to Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions to look for fabrics and ideas. I was a bit nervous about
bringing someone of such refined taste to this overwhelming bazaar of noise, material, and color (to be honest, the smell alone would turn off most high-end shoppers), but Edna was instantly thrilled by Lowtsky’s —as only somebody who genuinely understood clothing and materials could be. She was also delighted by young Marjorie Lowtsky, who greeted us at the door with her standard demand: “Whaddaya need?”
Marjorie was the daughter of the owners, and I had come to know her well over my past few months of shopping excursions. She was a bright, energetic, pie-faced fourteen-year-old, who always dressed in the most outlandish costumes. On this day, for instance, she was