Chapter 6
Six
Captain’s nose had swelled and acquired a purplish hue. He sat in his chair, hands on his thighs, eyes closed, like an immense toad contemplating a return to the swamp, where life had treated him better than it did here.
Prolonged and vigorous applause, filtering through the walls, sounded like rolling thunder rumbling into the city from far out at sea. After both shows the previous night, Buddy Beamer received a standing ovation. And now a third.
As the applause faded, the band launched into a lively number with an accelerating tempo intended to encourage the customers to vacate the premises so that the waiters and busboys could clear the tables and dress them for the nine o’clock seating.
Doors slammed, and the hallway grew quiet, and Captain opened his eyes. For some reason that could not have been innocent, he tried to start a conversation with Loretta. She would not respond.
After a while, the distant music of a lone piano meant Blue Mood was open for the second seating. When the band launched into mellow dance music, we knew that it was half past nine. Franklin had been gone for more than an hour, but it seemed much longer.
Captain rose from his chair, and Loretta raised her pistol, and Captain said, “Relax. I’m just going to the bar to have a couple of beers.
Your husband expects to find you here. There’s nowhere on the property where you can hide and hope to intercept him.
I’ll have a word with the guards so they won’t let you leave with my girl by either the front or back doors. You got it?”
“Yes.”
When he had gone, Loretta and I took turns using the half bath that adjoined the dressing room.
I removed my gloves because she had already seen my hands when I was onstage.
After washing up, I put the gloves on once more.
I’d be going out into the world, where it was safest to conceal everything below my neck.
Dixie cups were stacked beside the sink, and we drank some water as we sat side by side on the rectangular vanity bench.
Without Captain to overhear, Loretta told me where we would go first when we left Blue Mood, who we would see and for what purpose. I was amazed that already she had laid out a plan of action and was prepared to follow it as soon as I was free of Captain.
“When that’s been done, where then?” I asked.
She was surprised, for she assumed that I understood what she and Franklin intended. “Why, of course you’ll come to live with us. We’ll adopt you. You’ll be one of ours, as much a part of the family as our three children—Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry.”
Such a grace seemed impossibly fantastic. My voice was unsteady when I said, “Adopt? But how? No birth certificate. No real name, only what Captain called me. The way I look, what I am, how—”
“Those are not worries you need to have,” she said, smoothing my hair with one hand.
“We have the best of attorneys and a lot of friends in what might be called ‘high places.’ Franklin will handle it all. By tomorrow afternoon, we’ll be home, and you can meet the three hellions who will be your sisters and brother.
In a month or two, your last name will legally be the same as theirs. ”
I said, “But why? Why would you do this?”
Continuing to smooth my hair with one hand, she said, “Anyone who would harm or abandon a child—‘it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ Every child deserves to be loved, sweetheart. It’s a hard world, and there’s not much any of us can undertake to make it right.
But now and then there’s a little thing that we can do. Now and then like this.”
As she finished speaking, I did something that, in the interest of holding on to hope and sanity, I had not done in years. I wept. The “little thing” to her was everything to me. Such is the world.
My tears had long dried by the time Captain returned from the bar at a quarter till midnight.
His movements were slightly too slow and clearly calculated, which is a strategy many tosspots embrace in an attempt to appear sober.
He returned to his chair and fixed us with a menacing stare.
Promptly at midnight, the band played a brassy fanfare. The floor show was about to begin.
Captain said, “I told management my star is too sick to go on. They weren’t happy. These are people you want to keep happy. When you take her out of here, if anyone stops you, say you’re taking her to a hospital. She’s got a fever and been throwing up. Got that?”
“Yes,” Loretta said.
He cocked his head and studied her. “You don’t have to like me.”
“I don’t.”
“I mean—–to pass the time with a little conversation, you don’t have to like me.”
“I loathe you. I despise you. I’m disgusted by you.”
He nodded solemnly. “That’s your privilege. Truth is, I don’t like you much, either. But I’m not so high and mighty that I won’t talk with you.”
At twenty minutes past midnight, when I would otherwise have been stepping out of the upright coffin nearly naked and abashed, to the gasps and little cries of revulsion from the audience, the dressing room door opened and Franklin returned, carrying a valise.
Everyone stood. Franklin put the valise on the vanity and opened it.
Captain came forward to examine the contents.
Convinced everything was jake, he closed the valise and carried it to the door.
Copious beer had loosened the flesh of his face and benumbed the muscles.
I expected him to dredge from the dark treacle in his pitchman heart an insincere, absurdly sentimental goodbye.
Instead, he said, “Franklin and Loretta. You each spoke the other’s name just once.
You have a lot of money in these lean times, but you’re no industrialist like Henry Ford.
I ask myself what business is growing when so much else is shrinking.
With so many Dicks and Janes eager to escape their troubles, rivers of coins are flowing into movie theaters.
They say Greta Garbo was making five thousand bucks a week in the silents and now much more.
You two have ‘showbiz’ polish. I don’t know your last name, but I have contacts.
I could find you in three days. Do what you want with this twisted little freak.
Just leave me alone, forget I ever existed, and I’ll return the favor.
” As laughter and applause for Buddy Beamer swelled in the showroom, Captain stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.
Judge not lest you be judged. I had forgiven my mother.
I had forgiven all the goggling marks who passed through the Museum of the Strange.
I had forgiven the leering, laughing drunks in all those speakeasies.
I now forgave Buddy Beamer. However, I still could not forgive Captain Forest Farnam.
I wished him dead and asked God to forgive me for doing so.