Everybody Loves Somebody (3 page)

Although Boylston Simms didn’t come right out and ask her to leave, Ruth figured she’d better find somewhere else to stay.
She made her way to the station and boarded the train for Manhattan. It was dark by the time she arrived on the Upper West
Side, where a friend of her cousin’s was supposed to be residing. But the friend had long since moved from the address. With
nine dollars and sixty cents in her purse and her suitcase in hand, Ruth walked around the neighborhood until she found a
vacancy in a boardinghouse on 103rd Street. She slept that night for a solid fourteen hours. She dreamed she ordered a pancake
breakfast in a fancy hotel dining room and was served a platter of fried birds. She dreamed she had a newborn baby girl with
a marvelous crop of silver hair.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, she walked along the mall in Central Park. A man who introduced himself as Fitz Greene Halleck sat down beside her on a
bench by the esplanade and offered to row her around in a party boat. She refused. He bought her an ice cream, which she accepted.
After a long conversation he told her that he worked as a stage manager, and he asked her to audition for a musical. He wrote
down the Lower East Side address where the auditions would be held the following Monday and then politely bade good-bye. She
wondered if a man as easy to be rid of as Fitz Greene Halleck was really as untrustworthy as he seemed. She decided not to
audition for Fitz Greene Halleck’s play but instead to investigate other theaters.

On Monday she went through the
Variety
ads. On Tuesday she auditioned at the Princess Theater for a small show called
Nobody’s Perfect
. In this show, announced the director to the group of auditioners, imperfection would be a virtue. Ruth danced with a strong
partner who led her easily through unfamiliar steps. Still, she must have distinguished herself as adequately imperfect, for
she was given a chorus part in the show and was on salary by the following week.

She lasted all the way to the first dress rehearsal, two months later. In the final weeks she became friendly with Sam Amwit,
a song plugger from Harms Music who was helping the actors learn the tunes. He played his own tunes on the piano during a
take-five, and everyone in the chorus thought his music was better than the music in the show. When the cast returned to continue
rehearsing, Sam Amwit’s last song was still playing in Ruth’s mind, and when the chorus moved to the right, she moved to the
left and tripped over another actress’s foot.

Apparently, her stumble was only the most noticeable of many awkward moves—Ruth’s imperfection was of a different nature from
the imperfections of the other cast members. The director let her continue with the rehearsal, but afterward he told her not
to return. In a note she hastily scribbled, Ruth asked Sam to come see her soon and gave him her address. A few days later
she received an apologetic letter from Sam explaining that he was engaged to a woman from Virginia.

Nobody’s Perfect
flopped, Ruth was pleased to hear. She went to other auditions and eventually landed a part in a girl-and-music show at Margot’s,
a cabaret on East Fifty-second Street. She danced in a chorus line for an entire month there. Certain male customers returned
night after night to see certain dancers; claims were implicit, though relationships were usually limited to postperformance
lap-sitting and a few shared drinks. Ruth sat on the lap of an older man named Wallace. She drank gin spritzes and taught
him the songs Sam Amwit had taught her.

Her brother Frank came to see one of her shows and waited around afterward to talk to her. Luckily, Wallace wasn’t in the
audience that day. But Frank didn’t approve of either the show or the establishment. He told her to quit, insisting that if
their parents found out what she was doing they’d drag her back to New Jersey. She refused to quit without another job lined
up, and Frank promised to find something for her.

She asked about Boylston Simms. Frank said that he had fallen in love with an upstate girl and was working for a newspaper
in Albany. What about the finches? Boylston Simms had bought two new finches for his grandmother, who believed them to be
the same birds she’d left in his care.

Frank returned to the cabaret three days later to inform his sister that he’d found her a place at the Biltmore as a receptionist,
a classy job with an unclassy salary. She worked there straight through Christmas and New Year’s, worked ten, sometimes twelve
hours a day in order to earn enough money to buy silk stockings and silk blouses to wear to work. On her breaks she smoked
Chesterfield cigarettes and chewed Wrigley’s Spearmint, often at the same time. She had the use of a stove in the boardinghouse
and liked to prepare simple dinners of sandwiches and canned soup with some of the other girls. Once every two months she
went home to New Jersey for the weekend.

S
HE MET PLENTY OF MEN
in her job—fancy young men who would lay it on thick and windy old men who would yammer at her while she was trying to add
up a bill. One middle-aged Greek man invited her to lunch in the Biltmore’s restaurant. She ate roast beef and mashed potatoes
and then with a giggle declined his offer to see his penthouse room. A retired jeweler who lived in the hotel gave her a tip
of five dollars one day, and she went out and got herself a puffy Nestle wave. At work the next day the reception manager
told her to brush her hair properly or else to leave and not come back. So she left. That was that. It was a cold, drizzly
March morning and she was out on the street.

She spent the next couple of hours at the nearest el station, standing close to the potbellied stove and trying to figure
out where to go next. She decided to go to her brother’s apartment. That same day he helped her find a job at the Roxy theater,
a movie palace where Frank was an usher and wore a uniform with polished buttons. Ruth worked as a ticket taker for three
months and saw
The Crowd
seventeen times.

She left the Roxy for better pay at the Rivoli, the Rivoli for the Rialto. She grew older and more confident. She wrote to
Vitagraph for autographed pictures of Mae Marsh and Norma Talmadge. She dated a man who looked just like Buddy Rogers and
after she’d spent the night with him a couple of times she asked him to marry her, but he confessed that he was already engaged.

Why were all the men she’d ever known always already engaged? A month passed, and then another month. One day Ruth thought
anything was possible, and the next day she realized her fate had been sealed when she wasn’t looking. All the men in the
world were always and already engaged.

She slept with any man who would have her. A medical student, a policeman, and her boss at the Rialto, who had no patience
for contemporary picture shows and quoted Mary Pickford as evidence: “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick
on the Venus de Milo.” She wondered when she’d fall in love. She told her boss she loved him, just to try out the sentence,
and he told her he was—

“Not already engaged!” she interrupted.

“No. Already married.”

She quit her job at the Rialto. She worked as a secretary for a stockbroker. She worked as a waitress. One by one her friends
in the rooming house on 103rd Street moved away, so Ruth decided to move too. She rented a studio apartment for herself on
Jane Street. She quit her waitressing job and found a ten-dollar-a week position at Woolworth’s, which is where she met Mr.
Freddie Harvey the Third.

S
ITTING ON THE SODA-FOUNTAIN COUNTER
one day after work, she was arguing with another Woolworth girl, Mary Beth, about the virtue of tattoos, though really she
was arguing with herself, trying to persuade her more practical side that she might benefit from a tattoo and with it attract
the kind of man who, for every
why not?
that can’t be answered, goes ahead and takes a risk. She settled upon her right buttock as a prime location and was idly
considering the possibility of a pink rose when she heard Mr. Freddie’s voice.

“Pour me a cup of coffee,” he ordered, adding, “pumpkin,” not out of affection but because after a full month he still didn’t
know Ruth’s name, though they’d had plenty of brief exchanges, mostly concerning the topic of the cash register and Ruth’s
tendency to come out a few pennies short at the end of the day.

So that was the first time Mr. Freddie showed up where he wasn’t supposed to be. Ruth waited for him to fire her for sitting
on the counter. But he simply eased himself onto a stool and spun to the left while he waited for his coffee. Coffee? Mr.
Freddie had asked for coffee—and how about a piece of pie? Mary Beth crept off to finish restocking shelves, and Ruth cut
a piece of pie for her boss, stale cherry pie stiff with tapioca, the crust streaked with hard-baked lard. She stepped back
from the counter and watched him eat.

What a remarkable transformation Mr. Freddie accomplished in those few minutes. Up until then he’d cut a ridiculous figure;
all the girls thought so—he fancied himself a bantam cock in the henhouse when in fact he was too scrawny to be of interest
and too much of the dandy to be trusted. Everything about him was made up, and the girls enjoyed mocking this amateur trouper
behind his back.

Ruth, however, didn’t laugh at Mr. Freddie that day. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t fired her, and she stared at him from
beneath the smoky blue of her eyelids. Unexpectedly, she found herself growing interested in him. Maybe it was because she
suspected that there was more to him than she’d thought. Or maybe she was just ready to believe that she’d finally met a man
who would treat her fairly. Whatever the cause, Ruth was no longer simply one of the girls in Mr. Freddie’s eyes by the time
he finished his pie.

“Call it favoritism, sweetheart, but I’m going to do something special for you,” he said with a wink, brushing crumbs from
his mustache with his knuckles. “I can tell you’re deserving.”

How did Mr. Freddie know she was deserving? Ruth must have had neediness written all over her—a whole set of tattoos that
only the manager could see. Clever man. The draw by the end of their conversation was his implied knowledge of her. As she
watched him walk away from the counter she became aware of a new curiosity, the kind that once in a while would take her by
surprise—when she was deep inside a tedious novel, say, and the plot abruptly thickened. She didn’t trust Mr. Freddie and
because of this she wanted to be intimate with him, to circumvent his evasions and find out who he really was.

Life went on after that conversation, routine continued to dominate the days, and Ruth worked the register for an extra five
cents an hour. But within the routine the challenge of Mr. Freddie grew. He learned her name. He’d wander out from the back
office to chat with her about the weather. He’d join her at the counter during her lunch break. He’d tell his war stories,
which all seemed contradictory versions of a single story about a U boat sunk off the coast of Ireland. Ruth would hardly
listen, having long since concluded that all his testimonials were lies, or at least exaggerations. What she liked better
than his puffery were those promises, those delicious representations of the future, about how she would get her promotion,
and Mr. Freddie’s mysterious investment in an outfit on Long Island would begin to pay off. The accumulation of profit seemed
a much more certain thing than the adventures of his past, and Ruth liked the man all the more because of his contagious optimism.
So she hung with him, as the other girls noticed, and in doing so became the store outcast, having contracted, in their opinion,
the disease that was the boss.

What began for Ruth as curiosity became, in part, defiance. She was Freddie’s girl, though how she made that leap to the possessive
she’d never know for certain. It was one of the few hypotheticals in her life that ever came true. One morning she woke up
in her room on Jane Street, and her first thought was of Freddie’s smooth-as-silk hands caressing her, even though at that
point she had never met the manager outside the confines of the store.

Freddie’s girl she became—in her eyes and in the eyes of her coworkers. Yet as far as she could tell, Mr. Freddie had no opinion
about the matter. Or at least that’s what he seemed to want her to believe. Yet as time went on she became convinced that
the enigma of Freddie the Third would be irresistible once he let her know who he was.

He kept her believing that they were guaranteed a happy future together right through most of their first night out on the
town, when Ruth in her boa and heels and Freddie in his Panama were a head-turning smash. She enjoyed the admiration of strangers.
But even more than that, she enjoyed watching Freddie in action, handing out five-dollar tips and ordering oysters and rib
eye and champagne. Somehow, after a series of taxis and nightclubs, they ended up in a back street south of Linden Boulevard,
in a pleasure palace hideaway, where Ruth was willing to throw caution to the wind.
Throw caution to the wind
. A lovely phrase, she thought with a giggle as she stepped out of her dress, having already been assured by Freddie that
there was nothing to fear.

“What’s so funny, precious?”

“You are, Freddie!”

Her opinion had been influenced by innumerable glasses of champagne, and right then Freddie the Third was about as amusing
as they come, pretending to be Mr. Debonair when in fact he was an awkward dancer who didn’t know the next step. What fun
Ruth had stripping for him, all the while thinking that she had finally found the true Freddie—a meek little understudy who
preferred hiding in the wings.

She’d never known a man to be afraid of her. No sooner was she stark naked, her remaining stocking flung across the cracked
lacquered bureau, than Freddie started stuttering about how he hoped she was having a good time. She assured him that the
good time was just beginning, and she grabbed him by the collar and pulled him onto the bed.