BELLA COOKED FOR HER new family and she danced on the boardwalk almost every day. Mostly hula numbers. Sometimes she sang and played the ukulele while whirling around the stage. For a while she was an integral part of Tweety’s team, but it wasn’t long before she became the main attraction, backed by the other ladies.
Bitter, party of three.
Men from miles around came to see the Belladonna Marie, the Coney Island Hula Queen.
“Where is that Belladonna Marie? Where is she?”
Bella quickly graduated to one of the peekaboo booths inside the theater. Her glass closet was sandwiched between Wilma the Human Wonder Wheel and Tessie the Tornado.
Peekaboo! I see you!
Drop a dime into the slot and watch the velvet curtain lift to reveal …
“Our Lady of Steeplechase, Miss Belladonna Marie! The Queen of Sin City!”
Sometimes wearing her tomato-red bathing costume, sometimes sporting a ruffled pair of bloomers and tasseled pasties. Always dancing and singing,
All of Me!
Each coin dropped bought the viewer a sexy surprise.
A dime brought the blow of a lipsticked kiss.
A quarter might inspire the flash of one of her luscious tits.
If a dollar was folded and slipped into the cashbox, the secret door might pop open.
Unless the customer flashed a sawbuck.
Then all bets were off.
Bella met a regiment of men this way. Steamy encounters that fogged up the glass and blew the top off the place. Some with fudge smudged across their lips. A few with sand still stuck between their toes. Important-looking men in pinstriped suits, hair slicked back with expensive pomade. Paupers who scrimped and saved for a Coney Island holiday. Twice she saw two sailors at the same time. When they kissed each other, she squealed with delight. Even Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor waggled their whoopee-makin’ frankfurters in front of her.
It’s showtime!
Once a musclebound man with a crepe mask over his eyes materialized. He looked like a burly burglar. As Bella danced, he knelt in front of her booth and cried. Then he disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.
Cap guns fired. A graveled voice cried …
Francis! Francis Anthony Mozzarelli!
She tried like hell to dance and strip her memories away. She performed and fucked to keep her mamma’s sharp knife at bay. To forget about her baby and wounded belly. Eight shows a day. Every day except Sunday. That’s when she slipped on her white church gloves and ran to the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Solace to confess and pray.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Tell me your sins.”
“Father, I’m afraid I’m such a whore …”
The attending priest went to see Bella after mass every Wednesday. He dropped church donations into her cashbox for a private trip all the way to Heaven.
“You’re not a whore. You’re a goddess. You’re a Queen.”
What did Bella buy herself with her hard-earned Peek-a-Booth money?
At Joy Bell’s Lady’s Unmentionables, a saucy little lingerie store over on Surf Avenue, she purchased fancy showstopping undergarments.
At L’Antiquaire du Petit Oiseau, a queer little antique shop that had just opened on Mermaid Avenue, she picked up an orange parasol from the nineteenth century.
When she stumbled into that place, the Japanese proprietor, feather duster in hand, was flitting around piles of junk like a hummingbird, bartering and gossiping with his customers and scolding his foulmouthed parrot.
The little ball of green feathers cursed like a sailor on shore leave.
“Fuck you! Come again!”
“Shut your beak, Honeybee!”
“Fuck you! Eat me!”
The bird cursed just like her long-lost friend, Terelli Lombardi.
Tweet! Tweet!
Bella blew a kiss at the feathered little thing. “Say Bella! Say pretty Bella! Please!”
“Pretty Bella!” the bird screeched. “Bella pretty!”
The shopkeeper gasped. “She never listens to anyone except me! She must really like you!”
“Everyone likes me!” Bella placed the orange parasol next to the register. “I’ll take this umbrella, please. I’m gonna use it in my act.”
After the shopkeeper rang her up, he asked her what she did for a living.
“I dance and sing.”
“Oh! Are you a chorus girl?”
“If you say so!”
“How charming!”
“Pretty Bella!” the bird screeched.
Bella smiled and the shop’s proprietor suddenly saw the heartbreak behind the sparkle and bravado in her eyes. He recognized the pain and heard her cries. He knew he had found someone who, like himself, had fought the worst the world had to hurl and survived.
“I have something else for you, I think.”
He disappeared in back for a while. While he was gone Bella talked to the parrot. When he reappeared, he presented her with a big, bowed dress box fancier than anything she had ever seen in Rowe~Manse Emporium.
“What’s this?”
“Something for you to dance in.”
The box contained a Hollywood Made knee-length, tangerine-colored, glass-beaded affair from the roaring twenties. Layers of accordion-crinkled taffeta and sparkling strings.
Not since her missing friend Terelli Lombardi had presented Bella with his mother’s jewel-topped box containing his handmade baby cap and booties for her lost son had anyone given her anything so beautiful. It was overwhelming. Her eyes filled with tears of joy and grief.
“This is gorgeous! Is it really for me?”
“Yes, please.”
Bella gave the little man a sweet kiss on his cheek. “Thank you!” she said, clutching the dress to her breasts. “I’m gonna wear the hell out of it!”
“It once belonged to me. I used to be professional dancer too.”
“You were?”
“Yes. Until it got me locked away.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
“Not to worry. True love rescued me.”
“It did? Where is she? Can I meet her?”
“He’s in New Jersey.”
“Oh, sorry. He, of course.”
“He’s been there for over a month. His evil mother has a nasty illness in her liver and in her lungs. He is taking care of her. He is very forgiving. Not like me.”
“Will she get better, do you think?”
“I hope she dies soon. I miss my lover terribly. I love him like crazy. And he truly loves me.” The slight man looked at Bella. “I hope true love finds you too. Maybe it already has. It will when you wear this dress, I think.” He winked.
On rainy days and sunny days, too, Bella slipped the orange frock over her head. Then she popped open her matching parasol and floated around the Brooklyn beachside town, blazing up and down the boardwalk like a Jazz-Age Queen. Like human lightning.
Simply stunning!