Prologue

Christopher Street

1955

Only two things had come with me all the way to New York City from south of the Mason-Dixon Line: a bottle of Wild Turkey from what I once called home and an orange telephone. I lived in a basement unit on Christopher Street that tended to take on a bottle-green tinge from the scummy light that pushed through the single mail-slot window high up on the street-side wall, and I liked to think the orange complemented the space quite nicely.

The line trilled as I waited for it to connect me to Edie Bishop’s apartment a few blocks down the road, where the West Village took on a slightly more bourgeois cant. I turned a shallow lowball cup around between my fingers a few times, one of five mismatched glasses I’d magpied over time—it was Jim Beam, not the Wild Turkey; I only slugged straight from the old bottle when I was celebrating something. The rattan chair I’d rescued from the curb gave a crackle as I shifted my seat.

The connection clicked. “Bishop.”

“Have you met the new ingénue Ezra hired?” I lipped at the glass and transferred the handset to my other ear. “Apparently he did pictures in California.”

“A new one? Now?”

“I know.” The telltale chip-chip-chip of Edie making a drink on her end scored the line. Great minds. “I already gave him flak for it—he spends all last year grousing about his budget, and he hires someone from California. I don’t think there are any designs of getting him to bed; I think he just feels bad for him.”

“Would I know his name?”

I sipped. “Shoard, Wesley Shoard. I haven’t seen him in anything.”

Edie made an unassuming grunt. “Maybe they weren’t the most legitimate pictures.”

I rattled my ice shallowly. “Not sure. He’s handsome. Seems nice enough. We’re getting a drink tomorrow.”

An audible smirk emerged in Edie’s voice—“Oh?”

“Stop.”

“What, stop?” She was clearly still smirking. “Tell me about him.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s a fencer. Great posture. Incredible eyes, like quicksilver. Handsome as anything. Studied at Oxford, did a Rhodes stint in Britain before enlisting. Navy.”

“You sound halfway in love already,” Edie said. I shook a chunk of my own ice into my mouth.

“Couldn’t be,” I said around it. “He’s queer.”

Ezra Pierce, the director of the Bard Players on Commerce Street, collected his company like teeth scattered on the curb after a brawl. We were all of us strays, blacklisted or rich enough yet stymied by arrest records, the city’s shiniest if unpalatable dross, which Ezra molded with pride and a wealth of lenders that were best not examined in direct daylight.

Lisette Greene, one of the other women in the company, was a divorcée from Oshkosh who made her way to Manhattan by way of sex work and good instincts. Our comic lead, Irwin Drake, went by the mononym Chap and could be found drying out in an overnight cell at least two weekends out of every month. As for myself, I had escaped the fate of becoming the second-rate wife of some third-rate racketeer from Cherokee Park, Kentucky—and landed myself in the muck of more dangerous relations in Richmond, Virginia, but that was neither here nor there, and in the past besides.

And now there was Wesley Shoard from California, formerly of the pictures, doing Shakespeare with the rest of us. He would be a fine addition to the company if his pedigree held up under Ezra’s high expectations. Our theater on Commerce Street was a far cry from Broadway, but we were good. That was all that mattered to me.

“That’s hardly stopped the most audacious,” Edie said.

“No? He had a commission as a lieutenant.”

Edie made a considering sound. “Officers are usually more hard-lined with their preferences. Is he any good? Remind me what you’re putting together this season.”

“Twelfth Night.”

“So he’s your Orsino?”

“At least he’ll appreciate the buckskins,” I said. I looked at myself in the mirror across the apartment—my hair was still in rollers.

If I stretched my arms out wide, I could almost touch both walls of the place at once. The room was a shallow shotgun shape. A sagging armoire stood beside the knocking radiator. My bed shrugged up against one wall like a figure trying to shield itself from rain. A sheepish kitchenette stood past my table and chair.

I had dressed up these droll basement digs with framed art and furniture dragged in from other people’s castoffs—a sofa with corduroy upholstery that was still more mint green than gray, a side table carved from a knotholed length of unstained wood, an eclectic collection of candlesticks set up throughout the apartment to fill it with a warm, sparse glow instead of the harsh and hideous glare of the ceiling fan and its limping arms. The place looked better in lower light.

My best find was the long gilt mirror, nearly four feet across, that took up one whole wall and gave me the perfect setup to pace and practice my lines. I could watch my face and my entire body at once, tuning my performances just so.

I primped at the rollers cinched against the nape of my neck. It was a slow Monday. I was meeting Lisette for lunch in SoHo in two hours, giving myself a good dish with Edie before she headed off to do God only knew what with her day off.

Edie Bishop didn’t act, not anymore, but she had deep pockets and good taste and the ear of every producer worth his salt in the city. She had scooped me under her wing after she’d watched me botch an audition for a screwball sex comedy from the other side of the cattle-call casting table within the first month of my arrival to the city. I’d read from Macbeth.

Those men in there, she told me point-blank in the particular balsa-wood coil of her Aussie accent, her fine red mouth pecking from one of her brisk and toasted cigarettes, they aren’t looking for talent. They’re just looking for the best set of tits in the bunch.

Is that what you were doing at the table with them? I asked, leveling a look at her. Looking at our tits?

The keen smile in Edie’s eyes sparked with laughter. I have a friend you should meet, Ms. Wolf.

The friend had been Ezra. He hired me after hearing the same monologue in Edie’s apartment two weeks after I met her—Lady Macbeth, my favorite of Shakespeare’s women. Yet here’s a spot, et cetera, et cetera. I’d been with the Bard Players ever since.

“True; he won’t have to try very hard to make your Cesario scenes smack of mixed-up sex,” Edie teased.

“Wesley seems perfectly kind,” I said, “he really does. Is there any gossip going around about him yet?”

“How new is he?”

“I think he only just got settled after the holidays; he’s nearby, somewhere off Morton. He walked me home after our first rehearsal.”

“What a gentleman.”

Edie Bishop wasn’t quite patron, not quite mother, not quite friend. I got the sense she saw glimmers of herself in me, from when she was also a wandering talent on the short side of twenty-five trying to make something of herself. Edie’s glamour was ageless. I could never quite tell if I wanted to be her or impress her. Usually, both.

“I’ll ask around the uptown scene next time I’m there,” Edie said. “Does he go to parties?”

“I should hope so, he’s too pretty not to.”

“They probably already know his Social Security number and blood type. Those queens in Lenox Hill are better than the Federal Bureau.”

Edie let me go after more idle chatter—her obnoxious downstairs neighbor was finally readying to move out in the coming months, taking the noisy parties with him; I’d gone to an opening off-Broadway that could have used another month of rehearsing.

“Alright,” Edie finally said, “ooroo, Margot; come for coffee soon, won’t you?”

“Of course, call and I’ll be there.”

“See you, luv. Bye.” She hung up first, as always.

I looked at myself in the mirror as I listened to the dial tone, the orange handset pressed to my cheek and the powder-pink of the rollers peeking through the shiny brown hair wrapped around them. As I replaced the handset on its cradle, I peered for a moment at my forearms, bare inside the bell sleeves of the dressing gown I’d bought at a costume warehouse clearance.

I had been doing it for as long as I could remember, roving angry red scratches along the insides of my wrists and elbows without even realizing it. It started when I was girl, but I never could recall exactly when or why.

The habit was at its worst when my nerves heightened. I’d done my best to hide it from my mother when I was small—the hideous rashes left behind were an embarrassing manifestation of anxieties dreamed up for nothing but the perversely comforting weight of owning them: that something terrible would happen to my mother, because she had no husband to protect her for most of my life; that I would suddenly stop breathing in my sleep and never wake up again; that awful, dark things lurked in the corners and would sink their teeth into me if my vigilance slipped.

I ran my thumb over the roughened skin there, shallow scars from years past. The scratching was my warding ritual, the way I dispelled the fear of my own loneliness. To be alone was to be afraid. Luckily, with work and ambition and the daily chaos of the city, I hadn’t felt the need to do it for a long time.

Pleased with myself, buoyed by a good chat with Edie, I got up to put my face together for lunch.

Margaret Wolf was my own creature, and nothing could take that from me. What mattered to the people who came to watch me onstage was not the sad little thing I had been once, but rather the women I became night after night. If this—the basement apartment, the two-bit theater company—was the best I was to have for the moment, I would make do until I could rise. The play was the thing.

There was no going back the way I’d come. There was always a bigger role to aspire to. There was always something better waiting just ahead.

There must be. Or else what was any of this stumbling forward for?

In front of the mirror forty minutes later, dressed in a smart tweed set in teal with my face painted, I put on a hat and smiled at my reflection in the gilt mirror. I left the apartment and stepped out onto Christopher Street.

The buildings had taken on a fiery rosiness in the noon sun. The West Village was comfortable, familiar, inspiring to me in its off-kilter way. Manhattan was a place where monumental things happened, but the Village stood on the west side like a scab proud of its pucker along the spotless skin it held together—the seedy pride of unflappable moxie. It felt like home to me.

I made for the train with my shoulders drawn back and my hat angled to catch the warmth of daylight on my face. A new production was about to begin. I would become someone else, take on another life, and give the little girl at the core of me the proof that I loved her best and dearest.