“Now, this next little girl is someone you all know and love,” she said. “Give a big welcome back to the stage to this little one, former Ziegfeld Folly Miss Olive Shine.”
I sauntered onstage wrapped in feathers and began to sing. It felt good. I didn’t have to do any fancy footwork or think about the precision of the Ziegfeld walk. I started off slowly as I made my way to the grand piano, brushed past the pianist, a much older gentleman called Bones. I ran my hand along his shoulder, then climbed up a few steps at the rear of the piano and arranged myself sitting on top. Toward the end of the song, I threw off my feather cloak and bared almost all. The crowd cheered and it was nice to be back. But it didn’t give me the thrill I’d expected. Instead, my mind went to the money. Please the audience and you’ll increase your pay, I thought. Make them happy, they’ll buy more booze, Texas will have more money in her pocket and she’ll be more inclined to raise my pay. I’d never thought about money like this before. It hadn’t mattered. As long as I could be on that stage, I would have done almost anything.
It was five in the morning when I left the club. The sun would beup soon, and West Fifty-fourth Street was quiet except for the last few patrons leaving the 300. I hailed a taxi to take me to the boardinghouse and was asleep by the time I arrived.
I fell into a new routine, sleeping all day and staying out at the club all night, an arrangement that the nuns at Saint Agnes wouldn’t have liked one bit if I hadn’t lied through my teeth, telling them I took a job as a nurse’s assistant working the night shift. I was grateful to have money coming in. It made me feel slightly less desperate for the future, but it definitely felt like work. For the first time, performing felt like an obligation.
We changed up the numbers nightly, so that repeat customers wouldn’t have to watch the same acts night after night. I sang “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which Irving Berlin had written when he was drafted in the army, and I think the audience liked that I put my own spin on it. But the only time I didn’t feel that I was putting on a whole lot of worthless razzle-dazzle was when I sang the rueful songs “What’ll I Do?” and “When I Lost You,” also by Berlin but written when his wife died of typhoid fever, contracted on their honeymoon in Havana. Somehow feeling the sadness and regret in his lyrics made me feel less alone and more truthful.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was Sister Theresa, I could tell from the sound of her quick, light step coming down the hall. “Olive, visitor in the parlor.” We’d become friendly, she and I. She saved me a boiled egg and a piece of bread from breakfast most mornings, and I ate them at the kitchen table around lunchtime. Afterwards, I helped her prepare for that night’s dinner by peeling potatoes or chopping onions. I didn’t have anything else to do during the day, and by lunchtime I’d usually caught up on enough sleep to make it through the rest of the day and night. She’d asked me about my nursing duties and it felt wrong to lie to a nun, especially one who was being so kind and helpful, so I told her it was against hospital policies to discuss the ins and outs of it all, I had to respect the patients’ privacy.
“Who’s the visitor?” I called out after she’d knocked, but she was already making her way back downstairs. It could only be Ruthie again, but I was surprised Lawrence had let her leave the house when she was due to have that baby any day now. Maybe it wasone of the other girls, Pauline, or maybe Gladys. I quickly dressed, smoothed my hair, then went downstairs.
“Mother!” I said, shocked, seeing her sitting tightly on the edge of the tufted cream-colored armchair. Her face was pale. She was dressed in a black day dress and matching coat, with a single string of pearls—formal for the daytime at a boardinghouse. I quickly glanced down at my jodhpurs and sweater, something I wore most days at the house when no one except the nuns would see me. They were comfortable and sporty and reminded me of my days at the camp. My mother also glanced at my attire, then shifted in her seat and pressed her lips together.
“Olive,” she said. “Here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“We had to track you down. You know, it would have been nice to receive a letter telling us of your whereabouts.”
“I know, I’m very sorry. I meant to, I was just trying to get settled after…” I didn’t want to talk to her about the canceled wedding, about Archie. My stomach clenched at the thought of him. I couldn’t bear to be questioned about it all, not yet, and her visit had caught me so off guard.
“Yes,” she said stiffly. “I can imagine it’s”—she looked around—“quite an adjustment.”
I took a deep breath, preparing myself to be bombarded with questions: What happened? Why did he leave you? What did you do? How are you going to make this right? But instead she simply sat there, her hands folded in her lap, her face pained. It was distressing to see her like that, looking as if she might burst into tears. I wondered if my circumstances were causing her all this pain. Despiteher look of upset and disapproval, some small part of me felt cared for, that she had come to find me, to check on me. Maybe she didn’t want me to be alone.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, but she just looked at the floor. “Is everything okay, Mother?” I asked finally. And when I said it, the tears sprang from her eyes.
“Oh, Olive,” she said quietly, quickly trying to wipe away her tears.
I was wrong, this wasn’t about me, this must be something terrible. I hurried to her as sudden thoughts of every possible horrible thing that could happen flooded my brain: Junior, George, Erwin, my father.
“What is it?” I asked, taking her hand in mine.
“It’s your aunt May. She died.”
“No,” I gasped. “That’s impossible.”
“We just found out yesterday morning.”
I found it hard to catch my breath, a terrible ache in my heart. She’d helped me so much, given her kindness so freely. We had kept in touch too little since I’d left Rockville more than two years ago, with the exception of the occasional letter and her declined invitation to the wedding. At the time, I remembered wishing she could attend, wishing she could meet Archie. I knew she would have been happy at the thought of me getting married.
“But she was so young,” I said, trying to comprehend it.
“I know. She had a heart condition that we knew of most of her life, so I suppose it was inevitable at some point. The doctor had warned her. But she’d seemed fine. Even though we knew about her condition, it seemed to come out of nowhere.”
“I didn’t know about it,” I said hopelessly, as if it would make some kind of difference now.
We’d been through such a tremendous seven and a half months together, it was hard to fathom. But the truth was that since leaving my aunt in Rockville, my thoughts had been elsewhere, caught up in the excitement of my glamorous new life, pushing away the thoughts of my pregnancy, the baby, what had become of her, not allowing myself to think back to that time. I had no idea what Aunt May’s days had been like after I left.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” my mother whispered.
“Mother, I’m so sorry.” I felt terribly guilty to think that my mother had been forced to track me down, probably calling the New Amsterdam Theatre and getting the runaround before finding me here, all while she’d just learned of her only sister’s death.
I should have gone to see them as soon as I returned to the city.
