LETTY HAD KNOWN PLENTY OF MELANCHOLY IN HER seventeen years, but melancholy had no hold on her when she woke up at Dogwood on Friday morning, even after she realized that another night had passed without her oldest friend bothering to inform her of her whereabouts. Tonight is my first night onstage, she thought with a smile. On her way into the city her sense of wonder mounted, and by the time she disembarked the wound of Cordelia had shrunk to almost nothing. Instead her attention was grabbed by the whimsical angle of the hats on the women who were filling the train, clusters of shopping bags in tow, for the return trip to Long Island, and the sound of a solo violinist on a nearby platform, and the faint smell of car exhaust mixed with hot dogs.
The glowing sign at the theater that bombastically announced the Paris Revue greeted her like the warm expression of an old friend. As she went in through the side entrance, a heavy young man with a kind, soft face held the door for her.
“You one of the new chorus girls?” he asked.
She nodded and turned to smile at him as they advanced up the stairs.
“I’m Sal.” He offered her his hand.
“Are you in the show?” Letty asked.
It was dark in the stairwell, which had been painted black a long time ago and was papered with well-worn posters and notices, but light enough that she could tell he was giving her a twitching sort of smile.
“What do you play?”
“I’m the fat man, of course!” he said. Letty drew her brows together and wanted to tell him that he wasn’t really so fat as all that, but then she saw the lunatic light in his eye, and knew he didn’t mind.
“Do you make them laugh?”
“Oh, I’m a dangerous sort.” He gave a ghostly flourish of his stubby fingers and bulged his eyes. “Grown men have choked to death laughing over the things I do!”
“I’ll watch myself around you, then,” she replied with a giggle. They had arrived on the second floor, where a hall led to the women’s dressing room on one end and the men’s on the other.
“No, no, you need not worry about me! I’m made of jelly beans.” He grasped his rotund middle in a goofy way that made her want to laugh again and leaned forward conspiratorially, as if to tell her a secret. “The one you need to worry about is Lulu.”
“Lulu?” Letty whispered back, biting her lower lip. “Who’s Lulu?”
“You haven’t heard of Lulu yet? Don’t let that on. Lulu’s the diva who sings the big numbers, and she despises it when people don’t know who she is.”
“Is she very mean?” Letty returned his smile and opened her eyes wide with exaggerated innocence.
“She tortures all the new girls, so be warned!” It was possible, she thought fleetingly, that he was drunk, for he had a way like Union’s town drunk, in whom any ordinary event could cause fits of laughter. But Letty knew that she herself was not drunk, and in Sal’s presence she was finding everything funny, so perhaps it was just his way.
“Is she terribly vain and proud?” Letty went on, matching Sal’s near hysterical tone.
“Is who terribly vain and proud?” A tall woman with white-blond hair was leaning in the door frame at the end of the hall, wearing a Chinese-style robe. Beyond her, Letty could see girls rolling down panty hose and taking curlers out of their hair.
Letty giggled again, and answered her. “Lulu!”
“Oh, Lulu.” She cleared her throat and arched one of her thin brows. “Well, I guess you don’t know yet that I’m Lulu.”
“Oh, no no no! We must have been talking about some other Lulu!” Letty said quickly and absurdly, waving her hands as though that might clear the air of her gaffe. Her cheeks were red and her stomach had dropped, but Sal didn’t seem the least embarrassed—he was snickering into his big, meaty hands.
“Get out of here!” Lulu barked at him, although it seemed possible that she herself was smiling. “Stop trying to get the kid in trouble.”
Sal gave a low, courtly bow, and reached for Letty’s hand, which he kissed once very properly, and then thrice more with a voraciousness that suggested he might soon begin to eat her fingers. It tickled, and she had to swallow another laugh as Lulu reached out, sweeping Letty under her wing, and bringing her into the women’s dressing room. “Lesson number one, my dear, never trust funny men. They don’t even know what they mean half the time, and even if they did, they’d say anything for a laugh.”
“I’m sorry about that—you don’t seem vain at all.” Letty willed away the blush, but her stomach was still aflutter from her misstep. She had been so happy to have someone talk to her, and Sal had seemed so doughy and amusing, and then he’d set her up. “You seem awfully nice, really!”
“Don’t be absurd, honey. I am terribly vain—proud, too. But mean I am not. No, I like to keep all the new girls in my good graces. ‘The diva who is cruel to her underlings merely cultivates her own successor.’ An Ital named Nicky Machiashtelli said that.”
“So you don’t hate me?”
“Not yet, honey.” Lulu winked at her. “What did you say your name was?”
“Letty Larkspur.”
“You’re over there,” she said and pointed Letty in the direction of one of the cubbies that lined the wall. “Better go get ready, call time is now.”
The space of the dressing room was filled with girls who were chewing gum or talking or smoking or singing to themselves or gazing into hand mirrors. None seemed particularly interested in the new girl, and yet Letty couldn’t help but brim with delight to think, I am one of them. The chorus girls were easy to identify—they were the young, sylphlike ones. There were older girls, too, and girls that weren’t so conventionally pretty, who she supposed played types and made jokes or sang beautifully. They were all in various stages of undress but seemed blissfully unaware of their partial nudity, and they made a racket with their passing back and forth of makeup items and hair tonics and sweet-smelling things.
“Thank you,” Letty said, turning toward Lulu. But Lulu had already drifted away to her corner, which had its own vanity mirror and cushioned seat. Shyly, Letty went forward, through the mass of bodies, to her own cubbyhole. Here, her breath was stolen, and she fell in love for the first time.
Under the name LETTY LARKSPUR, in a worn wooden cubby, in the soft light of many bare Edison bulbs, hung a white costume covered with downy feathers. The neckline was a subtle sweetheart shape, and the waist was marked with ivory grosgrain ribbon. A feathered cap hung next to it on the hook, along with a pair of white hose. Letty caught her breath finally, and ran her fingers down the costume, and closed her eyes. The mingled smells of stale smoke and tuberose perfume filled her nose, and for a moment she thought she might cry, because she had never been so happy.
At evening time all manner of cars were passing through Manhattan, some looking for trouble, some with trouble already in their backseats. Many others had by then committed to their first stop of the evening. Cosmopolitan New Yorkers had been called upon by their personal bootleggers and were pouring drinks in the carpeted sunken living rooms of their apartments, or otherwise they had been led to a corner table at their favorite restaurant. And in one particular theater, the orchestra was launching into the resounding opening strands of its final number.
The chorus girls lined up in the wings, and Letty, sixth of eight, held her breath and waited for her turn to enter stage right at a theatrical prance. Like the other girls, she kept her hands at her waist and her elbows high and lively and she put her feet forward in such a way that her hips swiveled back and forth. Her mouth was open, wide and red and happy, and she looked into the audience as she went out. The stage lights were bright, but she could still see all the people in suits and dresses, inclined forward, animated by the dazzle of the show. As the chorus girls swirled onstage, Lulu was lowered, singing, on a golden swing, her twenty-foot-long feather boa dangling across her bosom and down to the floor.
The song was about the show itself and thanking the audience for lending their hearts to the endeavor, and as Lulu came closer and closer to the stage, the girls began to dance around her, their bodies rising and falling in a wave, their voices backing hers up. The girls were supposed to each make their own individual gestures—by turns goofy and graceful—and though earlier Letty had feared she would forget the timing of her parts, and had rehearsed them obsessively in her head, she didn’t need to think now. She moved naturally with the other girls, as though everything she did really was spontaneous. When Lulu reached the stage floor, she stepped off her swing and advanced toward the audience, her arms raised toward the corners of the theater with an invincible smile.
Then the music was over suddenly and the audience stood and began to clap. The applause, when Letty heard it, seemed almost like a tangible thing, a great lumbering friendly animal coming toward her. Her chest was pumping, and though they had been instructed to wear giant gleeful smiles at that moment, she could not possibly have done otherwise. In front of her stood Lulu in her gauzy gown taking several sweeping bows before slinking off the stage. When she was gone, the chorus girls popped up and, holding hands, went forward to take their bows. They bowed twice, turned at the same time, and skipped off the stage in a line. The applause was still strong as Letty left the heat of the stage lights and passed through the slightly cooler darkness on the stage’s margins, and it went on ringing in her ears and buoying her up as she hurried after the other girls toward the dressing room.
“I can’t believe we did it,” Mary said, putting her arm around Letty’s waist. “That was better than I ever could have imagined.”
“Yes,” Letty said, because there was no word to describe the amazement she felt. “Yes, yes, yes!”
As they came into the dressing room, Letty saw Lulu sitting at her vanity. The blond hair was gone—or rather, it was perched on a nearby mannequin’s head—and she was removing a hairnet from her short, mousey brown locks.
“Larkpsur,” she said when she saw Letty. “You were good.”
“Really?” Letty said, unable to hide the happiness this brought her.
Lulu shrugged. “Someone thinks so—there are flowers for you in your cubby.”
“Oh.”
Mary lifted her eyebrows at her and gave a squeal of excitement. A second wave of girls—the more experienced dancers, the ones who did the really ornate routines—were coming in from their bows now, wearing gold tap pants and black tops, and they flowed around Letty. Everyone was talking—someone’s costume had broken mid-performance, and another girl was shouting that she was in a hurry to get to her date. The word date made Letty think of Grady, and then her heart skipped when she realized that perhaps he had been out among the audience, that he had seen her onstage her first night, and that he was going to forgive her.
This prospect set her aglow as she advanced toward the vase of two dozen red roses. Her hands floated up to cover her mouth when she got close to them, for she’d never seen buds so dark or so big.
“Who are they from?” Mary urged, as she bent to pull down her tights.
Though Letty was tempted to tell her the entire story of the millionaire who lived in a garret down in the Village, she just gave her new friend an excited shrug and plucked the card.
Her body slumped when she saw instead Cordelia’s familiar handwriting, and the words:
Dear Letty,
Congratulations. How I wish I could see you tonight. I’m sorry I haven’t been a very good friend lately. I hope you’ll forgive me and that you’ll come by The Vault tonight and have some fun.
Love, Cord
“Ah, me,” she said and sighed.
Mary glanced over at her, but didn’t say anything, for which Letty was grateful, because it gave her a minute to straighten her spine and let the disappointment roll away. Once she had accepted the fact that Grady probably hadn’t sent a limousine to pick her up after her show, and almost certainly wasn’t going to whisk her off for an intimate dinner at the Plaza, she began to melt somewhat toward Cordelia. The person to whom she had first whispered her visions for a grand life still remembered her, still cared about those long-ago hopes. And she’d sent a gift that was making the other girls shoot Letty winks and good-naturedly envious glances. Plus, the flowers were very striking. They were good enough for a star.
“Some of the boys in the band invited me to a coffee shop down the street,” Mary said as she pulled a brush through her hair. “Want to come?”
“Oh, that sounds fun!” Letty bent to roll down her tights, and knew that she needed Cordelia to see her like this, shimmering with the confidence of her performance. “But tonight I have something I just have to do.”
“Well . . . maybe tomorrow?”
Letty unzipped her costume and returned Mary’s smile. “Yes, I’d like that.”