candlesticks and tea sets, and such—and some of it looked valuable, but who knew? None of it look used or loved. (There were ashtrays on every surface, though, and those certainly looked used and loved.)
I don’t want to say that the place was a hovel. It wasn’t dirty; it just wasn’t arranged. I caught a glance of a formal dining room—or, rather, what might have been a formal dining room in anyone else’s home, except that a Ping-Pong table had been placed right in the middle of the room. Even more curiously, the Ping-Pong table was directly situated beneath a low-hanging chandelier, which must have made it difficult to play a game.
We landed in a generously sized living room—a big enough space that it could be overstuffed with furniture while also containing a grand piano, which was jammed unceremoniously against the wall.
“Who needs something from the bottle and jug department?” asked Peg, heading to a bar in the corner. “Martinis? Anyone? Everyone?”
The resounding answer seemed to be: Yes! Everyone!
Well, almost everyone. Olive declined a drink and frowned as Peg poured the martinis. It looked as though Olive were calculating the price of each cocktail down to the halfpenny—which she probably was doing.
My aunt handed me my martini as casually as if she and I had been drinking together for ages. This was a delight. I felt quite adult. My parents drank (of course they drank; they were WASPs) but they never drank with me. I’d always had to execute my drinking on the sly. Not anymore, it seemed.
Cheers!
“Let me show you to your rooms,” Olive said.
Peg’s secretary led me down a rabbit warren and opened one of the doors. She told me, “This is your Uncle Billy’s apartment. Peg would like you to stay here for now.”
I was surprised. “Uncle Billy has an apartment here?”
Olive sighed. “It is a sign of your aunt’s enduring affection for her husband that she keeps these rooms for him, should he need a place to stay while passing through.”
I don’t think it was my imagination that Olive said the words “enduring affection” much the same way someone else might say “stubborn rash.”
Well, thank you, Aunt Peg, because Billy’s apartment was wonderful. It didn’t have the clutter of the other rooms I’d seen—not at all. No, this place had style. There was a small sitting room with a fireplace and a fine, black-lacquered desk, upon which sat a typewriter. Then there was the bedroom, with its windows facing Forty-first Street, and its handsome double bed made of chrome and dark wood. On the floor was an immaculate white rug. I had never before stood on a white rug. Just off the bedroom was a good-sized dressing room with a large chrome mirror on the wall, and a glossy wardrobe containing not one item of clothing whatsoever. In the corner of the dressing room was a small sink. The place was spotless.
“You don’t have your own bath, unfortunately,” said Olive, as the men in overalls were depositing my trunks and sewing machine in the dressing room. “There is a common bath across the hall. You’ll be sharing that with Celia, as she is staying at the Lily, just for now. Mr. Herbert and Benjamin live in the other wing. They share their own bath.”
I didn’t know who Mr. Herbert and Benjamin were, but I figured I’d soon enough be finding out.
“Billy won’t be needing his apartment, Olive?”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Are you very sure? If he should ever need these rooms, of course, I can go somewhere else. What I’m saying is that I don’t need anything so nice as all this. . . .”
I was lying. I needed and wanted this little apartment with all my heart, and had already laid claim to it in my imagination. This is where I would become a person of significance, I decided.
“Your uncle hasn’t been to New York City in over four years, Vivian,” Olive said, eyeballing me in that way she had—that unsettling way of making you feel as though she were watching your thoughts like a newsreel. “I trust that you can bunk down here with a certain sense of security.”
Oh, bliss!
—
Iunpacked a few essentials, splashed some water on my face, powdered my nose, and combed my hair. Then it was back to the
clutter and chatter of the big, overstuffed living room. Back to Peg’s world, with all its novelty and noise.
Olive went to the kitchen and brought out a small meat loaf, served on a plate of dismal lettuce. Just as she had intuited earlier, this was not going to be enough of a meal for everyone in the room. Shortly, however, she reappeared with some cold cuts and bread. She also scared up half a chicken carcass, a plate of pickles, and some containers of cold Chinese food. I noticed that somebody had opened a window and turned on a small fan, which helped to eliminate the stuffy summer heat not in the least.
“You kids eat,” Peg said. “Take all you need.”
Gladys and Roland lit into the meat loaf like a couple of farmhands. I helped myself to some of the chop suey. Celia didn’t eat anything, but sat quietly on one of the couches, handling her martini glass and cigarette with more panache than anything I’d ever seen.
“How was the beginning of the show tonight?” Olive asked. “I only caught the end.”
“Well, it fell short of King Lear,” said Peg. “But only just.”
Olive’s frown deepened. “Why? What happened?”
“Nothing happened per se,” said Peg. “It’s just a lackluster show, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over. It’s always been lackluster. Nobody in the audience seemed unduly harmed by it. They all left the theater with the use of their legs. Anyway, we’re changing the show next week, so it doesn’t matter.”
“And the box office receipts? For the early show?”
“The less we speak of such matters the better,” said Peg.
“But what was the take, Peg?”
“Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to, Olive.”
“Well, I will need to know. We can’t keep having crowds like tonight.”
“Oh, how I love that you call it a crowd! By actual count, there were forty-seven people at the early show this evening.”
“Peg! That’s not enough!”
“Don’t grieve, Olive. Things always get slower in the summer, remember. Anyway, we get the audiences we get. If we wanted to draw larger crowds, we would put on baseball games instead of plays. Or we would invest in air-conditioning. Let’s just turn our attention now toward getting the South Seas act ready for next week. We can get the dancers rehearsing tomorrow morning, and they can be up and running by Tuesday.”
“Not tomorrow morning,” said Olive. “I’ve rented the stage out to a children’s dance class.”
“Good for you. Resourceful as ever, old girl. Tomorrow afternoon, then.”
“Not tomorrow afternoon. I’ve rented the stage out for a swimming class.”
This caught Peg up short. “A swimming class? Come again?”
“It’s a program that the city is offering. They’ll be teaching children from the neighborhood how to swim.”
“To swim? Will they be flooding our stage, Olive?”
“Of course not. It’s called dry swimming. They teach the classes without water.”
“Do you mean to tell me that they will teach swimming as a theoretical concept?”
“More or less so. Just the basics. They use chairs. The city is paying for it.”
“How about this, Olive. How about you tell Gladys when you haven’t rented our stage out to a children’s dance class, or to a dry swimming school, and then she can call a rehearsal to begin working on the dances for the South Seas act?”
“Monday afternoon,” said Olive.
“Monday afternoon, Gladys!” Peg called over to the showgirl. “Did you hear that? Can you gather everyone together for Monday afternoon?”
“I don’t like rehearsing in the mornings, anyhow,” said Gladys, although I wasn’t sure this constituted a firm reply.
“It shouldn’t be hard, Gladdie,” said Peg. “It’s just a scratch revue. Throw something together, the way you do.”
“I want to be in the South Seas show!” said Roland.
“Everyone wants to be in the South Seas show,” said Peg. “The kids love performing in these exotic international dramas, Vivvie. They love the costumes. This year alone, we’ve had an Indian show, a Chinese maiden story, and a Spanish dancer story. We tried an Eskimo romance last year, but it was no good. The costumes weren’t very becoming, to say the least. Fur, you know. Heavy. And the songs were not our best. We ended up rhyming ‘nice’ with ‘ice’ so many times, it made your head ache.”
“You can play one of the hula girls in the South Seas show, Roland!” Gladys said, and laughed.
“I sure am pretty enough for it!” he said, and struck a pose.
“You sure are,” agreed Gladys. “And you’re so tiny, one of these days you’re just gonna float away. I always gotta be careful not to put you right next to me on the stage. Standing next to you, I look like a great big cow.”
“That could be because you’ve gained weight lately, Gladys,” observed Olive. “You need to monitor what you eat, or soon you won’t fit into your costumes at all.”
“What a person eats doesn’t have anything to do with her figure!” Gladys protested, as she reached for another piece of meat loaf. “I read it in a magazine. What matters is how much coffee you drink.”
“You drink too much booze,” Roland cried out. “You can’t hold your liquor!”
“I surely cannot hold my liquor!” Gladys agreed. “Everybody knows that about me. But I’ll tell you another thing—I wouldn’t have as big a sex life as I have, if I could hold my liquor!”