Falling Stars (30 page)

"That's it!" Howard cried. "Lady Macbeth's planning of the murder of the king, She knows it all by heart."
Gerta returned to her needlework,
"Can we go now. Howard? Are you satisfied?"
"No. How did she get like this? How come I never read or heard anything about her? What's her name. Gerta, Berta? What?"
Gerta's head snapped up.
"No Gerta Berta. No!" she cried, her face in a
"Huh?" said Howard, stepping back quickly and turning to Cinnamon.
"Now you've done it. You've riled her up." "What did I do?"
"It's all right. Gerta," I told her and put my hand on her shoulder. "You're Gerta. You're all right now. You're safe. Don't worry."
She stared up at me. Her eves calmed and she returned to her needlework.
"What is goin' on?" Howard muttered. "Why did that disturb her?"
"Let's get out of here before we're discovered," Rose pleaded.
We started toward the door to the costume room. Howard lingered, watching Gerta work until Cinnamon gabbed his arm and turned him.
"All right," he said."I'll leave. But I want to know what this is all about."
"She was abused by her father, who called her Gerta Berta. if you have to know."
"Abused?" He looked back at her, his eyes arowing smaller. "You mean. sexually?"
"That's what we think. yes. Can we get out of here. please?"
Reluctantly, he joined us at the door. We gazed back at Gerta and then we closed the first door, stepped into the costume room and closed and relocked the second. As quietly as xre could, we trailed back through the room, closed the door behind us, shuddering at the squeaks, and then hurried down the stairway.
"Let's all go to sleep now," Cinnamon ordered
Howard stood there. thinking. I didn't like the way he was behaving and neither did the others.
"Howard?"
"What? Oh. yeah. Thanks. Good night." he said and went to his room. We watched him until he closed his door.
"He was fascinated and amazed. I think it was pathetic and sad:
^.
Rose said.
"Me, too." Ice agreed.
"He would have stayed up there for hours feeding her lines just for his own amusement," I said.
Cinnamon nodded.
"The only living thing more self-centered than our Howard Rockwell is an amoeba," she declared.
It brought some smiles, but we were all emotionally exhausted.
I was sure we all went to sleep that night with Gerta's dramatic recitations echoing in our thoughts and spinning webs of nightmares off the spindle of our dreams.
Over the next few days, we actually thought Howard was going to let it all go. He had seen Gerta and the strange arrangements she had. He was satisfied that he was now sharing our great secret. Cinnamon said he was very energized in drama class. As we had learned, they were preparing cuts from Shakespeare's
Othello,
Tennessee Williams
^.
The Glass Menagerie
, and Strindberg's
Miss Julie
, under the heading Woman and Romantic Disappointments. In vocal class Howard's voice actually carried above Ice's at times, and he was even more enthusiastic about our dance lessons.
The second Performance Night loomed in the very immediate future now. This one seemed to be more important. We were told that, because of the success of the first, more important managers, producers, and even performers were requesting seats. Howard lectured to us about it, saving some of it might just be good hype generated by Edmond Senetsky.
"It takes a great deal of experience to be able to distinguish between what is just good public relations and what is reality," he declared.
"But naturally you have an instinct for telling the difference. right. Howard?" Cinnamon asked him and he readily agreed.
All we could do was shake our heads and smile. He was so arrogant about it that he missed her sarcasm or refused to see it. If self-confidence was like money in the bank. Howard would have enough to loan out sufficient amounts to all of us. I thought, I'd certainly line up to make such a request. although I was enjoying Mr. Bergman's enthusiasm for my work more and more these days. I was going to play a more difficult piece for the second Performance Night, and so was Steven.
As the evening drew closer, our excitement built, especially for me because my parents were going to try to be here. Ice's father said he would come, too, but she had not yet heard from her mother. Cinnamon's father was feeling better, so he and her mother said they would attend. Only Rose remained in doubt about her mother and then, one afternoon, she received a post card with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the front of it. All it said was:
Dear Rose,
I got married in Las Vegas today. Wish me luck.
Mom
We all gathered in her room to console her. She wagged her head to shake off her tears and then declared with conviction, "I don't care. You are my only family now, and the theater is my only home."
No one spoke. but I felt that, despite our work and our talents, that would not be a good substitute for my family and home. Grease paint, costumes, props, and scenery were all part of the illusion. You could pretend to love someone on stage, embrace a family, have wonderful, close friends, but it wouldn't work when the curtain came down.
Later that evening. I decided that before I went to bed, I would visit Rose once again to see if I could cheer her. Just as
I
stepped out into the hallway, I heard a loud creak and looked at the stairway that led up to the costume room. Howard Rockwell stopped midway. He looked very guiltv
,
shifting his eyes to avoid my shocked gaze.
"Where were you?" I asked.
"Costume room," he said quickly.
Much too quickly, I thought. "Why?"
"I wanted to check on my costume for Performance Night. Who do you think you are, crossexamining me like this, anyway?" he added and hurried down and to his room. I waited until his door was closed and then I hurried across the hall to Cinnamon's room instead of Rose's. I knocked and went in.
She was in bed, reading her script.
"What's
wrong?" she asked. sitting up after taking one look at my face.
"I just found Howard coming down the stairs. I think he might have gone into Gerta's apartment."
"What? Why do you think that?"
"Just the way he looked... very guilty." She threw off her covers.
"I'm not positive," I added, seeing how enraged she was becoming. "He did claim he was checking his costume for the second Performance Night."
"Is that what he told you? It's a downright lie. He knows his costume was sent out to be cleaned and pressed."
She shoved her feet into her slippers and practically lunged for her robe on the way out of the room. The look on her face frightened me. She seemed capable of bludgeoning him to death. I hoped I wasn't making a mountain out of a molehill.
"C'mon," she said.
"Where?"
"We'll go up to see Gerta and learn if he was there without us or not."
"Should we get Ice and Rose?"
"No," she said firmly. "It'll be quicker and less chance of being discovered."
We moved quietly to the stairs, but they creaked just as they had under Howard's feet. No one came out of his or her room, and moments later. we were in the costume room. We could see where the dresses were moved to permit someone to open the door. Cinnamon looked at me knowingly. turned the key, and continued. My heart was beating like a hailstorm against a window.
The lights were out in the living room, but there was some dim illumination coming from Gerta's bedroom, We walked quietly to the door and looked in to see her lying in bed, wearing the wig that had the long, gold pigtails.
She turned to us.
"Hi. Gerta, how are you?" Cinnamon asked her. Gerta's face began to crumble.
"I was bad again."" she said. "I was Gerta Berta."
Cinnamon hurried to her bedside. I followed.
"What do you mean. Gerta?"
"Daddy was here," she said. "I was bad,"
"Daddy wasn't here," Cinnamon insisted, but she shook her head.
"Yes, he was. He said he wanted to stop the nightmares. He was right here," she added, patting the large fluffy pillow beside her.
Cinnamon looked at me. I shook my head. "What is she saying?"
"Howard," Cinnamon replied.
"What do you mean?"
Cinnamon's eyes grew dark.
"He came up here and did some role-playing with her. He must have been coming up here. Who knows how many times?"
I shook my head.
"What..."
"Can't you see? She's naked under the blanket," Cinnamon pointed out. Her face was so full of rage, I thought her eyes might explode. The muscles in her cheeks and jaw were taut enough to outline the bone.
The realization struck me like a punch in my stomach. "That's horrible," I said.
She nodded.
"Horrible's too soft a word for it."
"Please tell me a story," Gerta said. "Tell me something nice. Tell me a happy story."
Cinnamon looked at her and then muttered to me. "I'm flat out of happy endings."
"Let me,"
I
said, moving past her to take Gerta's hand and sit on the bed.
"Let me tell you the story of the little princess who got lost," I began.
Cinnamon smiled but her thoughts clearly went back to Howard Rockwell. She stepped aside to wait for me to finish, fuming so intensely. I could almost feel the heat of her anger across the room.
Gerta's eyes closed finally and I stood up. Cinnamon and I moved silently out of the apartment and through the costume room, locking the door behind us, and then went down the stairs, neither of us saving a word. Disgust and horror made us mute.
"What are we going to do?" I asked her when we reached the bottom of the stairs.
She glared at Howard's closed door. "Bring down the curtain," she vowed.
"How?"
"Get some sleep. We're all going to need it," she replied and went to her room.
Get some sleep?
I thought.
She might as well have asked me to build a house or fly to the moon.

If someone had asked me, after the first few weeks at the Senetsky School of Performing Arts, who among the four of you girls do you believe could most easily toss it all away. I think I would have chosen myself. I played the violin with love. but I was always torn between home and the places I knew my musical career would take me. I wasn't sure if I wanted to make all those sacrifices. I wasn't sure if I really was as ambitious as the others. Personal glory didn't seem as important to me. Going home would not be a defeat and a punishment.

Ice wanted to succeed for her father even more than she wanted it for herself. During the times she and I were alone, she often spoke of him with deep affection, and made it clear to me that she believed she was his hope, the only thing that brought sunshine to his days and filled his heart with dreams anymore. She told me about his own longing to be a successful musician and how he had been forced to give up his pursuit. Like so many people, she said, he had to surrender his ambitions in order to provide for his family and himself. He moved through life now as if he were a shadow of a person, doing most things simply to survive, but the one thing that he didn't do out of any necessity was to get behind her
development as a singer.

"I'm his future, his justification for all his terrible sacrifices," she said. "I will succeed."
She said it with such vehemence and intensity, she made my heart skip beats. I thought the look an her face was wonderful. and I thought it was all there in her voice, in the way she made the audience freeze in awe of her talent.
Rose had came here at what she hoped was to be the end of a trail of betrayals. She had loved her own father very much and she talked often about the way he had made her feel special, but she also admitted she had sensed something very insubstantial about him, something so carefree and irresponsible that he was more like a little boy. His adulterous affair had left her and her mother destitute as well as in shock and disbelief. Her mother, however, looked at it as a betrayal only of her, as if Rose wouldn't suffer anywhere near as much.
When Evan's aunt, Charlotte Alden Curtis, the sister of her father's lover, came to them for help with Evan, making them feel they had to bear the responsibility of what her father had done, she readily accepted the consequences. Slowly, Charlotte corrupted Rose's mother, deliberately setting her up with a womanizer just to enjoy some sick revenge. Ironically, however, all this brought Rose closer to her handicapped brother, and together they found a way for her to develop her dancing talent and defeat Charlotte's revenge. A child of betrayals. Rose could never betray Evan's efforts, for he saw his own validation in her successes.
Cinnamon was most puzzling from the beginning. There was always a sharpness, an underlying bitterness behind every look and word. She seemed to be able to touch a deeper, darker world and draw upon it to strengthen herself. Ghosts, spirits, shadows fertilized and enriched her view of life, rather than frightened her. Despite her distaste for Howard Rockwell, she enjoyed being on stage, even if it had to be with him. Watching her perform. I felt she didn't memorize lines and pretend to be someone, but instead permitted and enjoyed having that new persona possess her, just the way she claimed the spirits that lived in her home had possessed her. The theater was really her world, far more than Howard Rockwell would ever appreciate or ever know.
Nevertheless, what Cinnamon proposed, even though she knew what impact that proposal could have on her own future, truly surprised me. It wasn't until lunch hour that she and I were able to relate to Ice and Rose what we had discovered the night before. They were both as sickened and disgusted about it as we were.
"The fact is." Cinnamon pointed out. "I don't know who we should blame more for all this, our sick Howard Rockwell or Madame Senetsky, whose need to protect her image and reputation far outweighs her own daughter's needs."
"It amazes me how indifferent and aloof some parents can be toward their own children." Rose said, her own life clearly an example. "When that umbilical cord is cut, it's cut. It's almost as if they feel they've done their duty in just giving birth, fulfilled some responsibility to the species or something, and then go on to travel the Selfish Highway, terrified that we'll somehow cause them to lose one moment's pleasure."
"Whatever." Cinnamon said, impatient to tell us what she wanted us to do. "I have a plan. and I'll need everyone's cooperation."
When she described it to us, we were all speechless. We tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant.
"You'll take the most blame," I pointed out to her. She shrugged it off.
"I admire Madame Senetsky for her
accomplishments, of course. but I ask myself. would I like to be her?" She smiled and shook her head. "I have no problem with that answer, and I'd bet everything
I
have and will have that none of you do either. However, if anyone here would rather not be a part of this.
I
certainly understand."
"I'll help," I said without hesitation.
"Of course I'll help," Rose said.
"Me, too." Ice added.
"Look at it this way," Cinnamon said. "We'll be like producers and directors."
"What will we call this major production of ours?" Rose asked. Cinnamon thought a moment.
"How about 'Falling Curtain'?"
No one laughed. If anything, it made us all pause and give it some deep thought.
Falling curtain.
It was too true, too descriptive, and too much of a prophecy to belittle or ignore.