The Ladies of Garrison Gardens (19 page)

Chapter Forty

MRS. RAIN

2004

S
HE'D HAD AN INCIDENT.
That was what the infant doctor called it—a
minor incident
—which was a tidy if inadequate way to describe the terror of waking up at dawn to discover that your left side has stopped working during the night. Fortunately, her vocal cords were functioning and she had called for help, which brought Cherry running. Thank God for the child's sharp young ears and quick young mind.

Cherry had made the necessary phone calls, which resulted in an ambulance and a hospital room and the early morning appearance of the boy physician with a colleague versed in such problems as clots, embolisms, and strokes. This was followed by several frightening days of being
under observation
before the specialist declared that she could go home.

While she'd been gone, a sickroom had been set up for her in the sunroom on the first floor. It was her least favorite place in the house. She wanted to be in her own bedroom, where she'd lived with her ghosts for so many years. But her bed, her dresser, and her old wingback chair were now in the hated sunroom. She wanted the freedom to roam her own house at night, but Cherry now slept across the hall and those sharp young ears meant the girl would be up like a shot at the first creak of a floorboard.

The infant doctor had assured his dear Mrs. Rain that her new sleeping quarters were not permanent and her life would get back to normal as soon as he was sure the new medications were working. The pills were to be taken on a precise schedule; otherwise she could
stroke out
. That was not supposed to scare her. To ensure that she got the dosage right, she'd been given a string of seven little boxes, which were to be filled with the proper number of pills for each day of the week, thereby doing an end run around her suddenly dicey short-term memory. It was all very efficient and, the boy explained kindly, designed to help her maintain her independence. But the idea of counting up the piles of pills and dropping them into the tiny boxes with her arthritic fingers was too much. She turned the whole mess over to Cherry, who handed her the right medications twice a day. To hell with independence; she was too tired to fight for it.

Instead, she let herself drift into a new daydream that had rapidly became as comforting as her memories. In her fantasy, she was in Charles Valley, where she had contacted Laurel Selene McCready. Sometimes she pictured Ms. McCready as a small Irish brunette, like Gracie Allen; sometimes she was built more along the lines of Myrna Loy. They met in the field of wildflowers in front of Garrison Cottage—which Mrs. Rain could visualize because a picture of it had appeared in the
Charles Valley Gazette
some thirty years before.

Laurel Selene was standing in the sunlight with a smile of welcome. But as she came forward to shake hands, there was a little frown of curiosity creasing the spot between her eyebrows. So before Laurel Selene could ask a single question, Mrs. Rain said, “I have a story you need to hear.”

Then, in her beautiful daydream, they sat on the ground in front of the big log house, and as Mrs. Rain started to talk she could feel the tightness in her chest that had been there long before her incident loosening at last.

“Did you ever have a time in your life when it felt like things happened in a chain?” she asked Laurel Selene. “And when you look back on it, you realize that everything that happened—every single link—led to the next thing. And if you could have stopped it anywhere along the way, your whole life would have been different? I had a time like that. It started back in the summer of 1933.”

Chapter Forty-one

IVA CLAIRE

1933

I
NDIANA COULD GET HOT
in the middle of summer, and Iva Claire's hands were sweaty. The handle of the costume trunk was slipping out of her grasp.

“You okay?” Tassie panted.

“I need to change sides.”

They stopped to lower the big trunk down onto the sidewalk; they were both out of breath. “How much farther?” Tassie gasped.

“The clerk at the hotel said five blocks.”

“It feels like we've come five miles.”

“There's just two more to go. You ready? I want to get the costumes unpacked tonight.”

They changed sides, heaved up the trunk, and continued their trip down the Main Street of Washtabula, Indiana. Normally, they'd have hired a taxicab to carry the costume trunk to the theater. But the Sunshine Sisters were making half their normal pay for their three-week booking at the Egyptian Theater in Washtabula, so they had to save their pennies. Iva Claire wished they could have turned the gig down, but these days beggars couldn't be choosers, and like most vaudevillians they were beggars.

A lot had happened in the six years since Tassie had joined the act. For one thing, Tassie and Iva Claire had grown up. Tassie was nineteen now, and while she still wasn't classically pretty, she had fulfilled her early promise as a cute little trick with her big eyes and her small hourglass figure. At eighteen, Iva Claire had grown into her strong features; her tall body had slimmed down, her blue eyes had darkened, her complexion was creamy, and when she piled her stick-straight hair on top of her head, she was usually described as handsome.

A lot had happened to the Sunshine Sisters too. At first, they had worked steadily. Not on the Big Time—they were never headed for the Palace—but for most of 1927, 1928, and 1929 they had toured the country with an act that could be fairly described as a modest hit. They played decent theaters and earned enough to support themselves. For the first time that Iva Claire could remember, the checks from Georgia were used strictly for luxuries. And if she felt trapped in her life as a Sunshine Sister, Mama and Tassie were blissfully happy. Two out of three wasn't so bad.

But while the Sunshine Sisters were touring and growing up and getting their laughs, the world around them was changing. In 1927, Al Jolson sang in a moving picture called
The Jazz Singer
, and the talkies were born. At about the same time, RCA brought out a new line of Radiolas that ran on the electricity people had in their houses instead of big old-fashioned batteries. The new radios, as they were called, were compact and simple to use, and people were buying them as fast as RCA could make them. Now families could stay in their own homes and be entertained for free or go to movies for a lot less than it cost to see a live show. Vaudeville was hit hard. But what really did it in was a certain Thursday in October 1929.
WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG
was the way
Variety
described the day the stock market crashed.

Initially, most of the entertainers Iva Claire knew shrugged off Black Thursday. “It's not like I ever had any money to invest,” she heard, in dressing rooms and greenrooms. No one understood that life had changed for good.

They caught on when theaters started closing around the country. Shows in New York went dark by the dozens, road shows were canceled, permanent stock companies went under, and work dried up. The Sunshine Sisters got occasional gigs, mostly on weekends, always for increasingly smaller paychecks. Every once in a while they were booked as the entertainment at marathon dances, going on to perform during the fifteen-minute rest periods when the exhausted contestants were off the floor. But even that humiliating work became less and less frequent until, once again, the money from Iva Claire's father was the only thing keeping them going. Then, without warning, he had skipped their last check. Mama refused to write to remind him. She insisted that they should wait and see if he sent it on his own. After five months, the check still hadn't come and their finances went from surviving to desperate. By the time the booking at Indiana's fly-by-night Egyptian Theater came up, there was no way they could turn it down.

Iva Claire adjusted her grip on the trunk handle. She already had a nice set of blisters on one hand.

“I think it's that building at end of the block,” she gasped, indicating a white stone and brick monstrosity with a marquee jutting out over the sidewalk. Tassie nodded, too winded to speak.

There were several reasons why Iva Claire would have liked to turn down the booking in Washtabula. The Sunshine Sisters had been booked as a solo, which meant the theater was a cheap operation that was only offering the audience one act; plus, the theater management had changed hands twice in the last six months, which did not bode well.

But the main reason Iva Claire wished they could have stayed home was Mama. After a lifetime of touring, traveling seemed to exhaust Mama now. Everything did. When they were back in New York, she still read
Variety
from cover to cover, but there were days when she couldn't get out of bed until it was too late to make the rounds. And right now, instead of running over to the theater to look it over, she was lying down in their hotel room, so tired she couldn't catch her breath. In spite of the heat, Iva Claire shivered. If something really was wrong with Mama . . .

Don't think about that
, said the voice she'd been trusting since childhood.

The marquee was a few feet ahead of them. They lugged the trunk up to an impressive front door with glass panes and wrought-iron curlicues. There was a large padlock and chain threaded through the wrought iron. The big marquee was blank. Tassie and Iva Claire dropped the trunk and stood on either side of it, staring at the theater in disbelief.

“It's closed,” Tassie said.

I knew it,
Iva Claire thought.
I had a feeling about this job
.

“I'm going around to the stage door,” Tassie said. “There's got to be an explanation.”

“There is. The Egyptian is out of business.”

“They can't do that. We came all this way. We have a contract.”

Tassie wouldn't believe what had happened until she went into the pharmacy next door, and the boy behind the soda fountain confirmed their worst fears.

“The management was leasing it,” she reported back to Iva Claire. “They went belly up about a week ago.”

Which meant that the Sunshine Sisters wouldn't be reimbursed for their train tickets back to New York. How were they going to get home? Silently, they picked up the trunk and began the long walk back to their hotel.

The Normandy Hotel was not the kind of place where the Sunshine Sisters usually stayed. Mama said it was one step up from a flophouse, which was an exaggeration although not a big one. But it was cheap. And now they couldn't even afford to stay there. There was no way out; Iva Claire was going to have to write to her father. It would be humiliating, but she'd remind him that they hadn't received their last check. If he knew they were stranded, he'd send the money; she was sure of that.

Then, when they were back in New York, she and Mama would have a talk. They couldn't go on like this. Vaudeville was dead and it was time to quit. Mama would scream and yell, but in the end she'd have to accept reality. Somehow, in spite of the Depression, Iva Claire would have to find a civilian job. It would be boring and awful and she'd have to keep herself from thinking about how much better she could have done if she'd had a high school or—dream of dreams—a college diploma, but that was reality too. Tassie could stay with them for as long as she wanted. Of course, if they didn't have an act anymore, she might move on. The leather handle slipped a little in Iva Claire's hand. She looked over at Tassie, her dress streaked with sweat and street dirt as she struggled to hang on to her side of the trunk.
What will Mama and I do without her? She's the only friend I've ever had
.

Don't think about that.

“You need a rest?” Tassie asked.

“No. Do you?”

Tassie shook her head. They continued on to the Normandy to break the news to Mama that the Sunshine Sisters were all washed up in Washtabula.

The desk clerk at the hotel saw them coming and hurried over. For a moment, Iva Claire hoped he was going to help them carry their trunk upstairs; he'd been very taken with Tassie when they checked in. But the clerk wasn't smiling and he ignored the heavy trunk.

“Your ma had a bad turn while you were out,” he said breathlessly. “I called the doctor for her. They come and took her to the hospital.”

They spent money they didn't have on a taxicab and Tassie prayed with tears running down her cheeks. Iva Claire was numb. All she could think of was the time six years ago when she'd gone to meet her father. She'd wanted to leave Mama then. Now she bargained with God.
I'll never complain about her again. Just let her be all right, and I'll take care of her for the rest of my life.

When they got to the hospital, Mama had already been admitted. She'd had a heart attack.