Siren Queen(26)
On Wednesdays we were meant to educate ourselves, taking advantage of the various tutors and facilities that Wolfe Studios provided. Greta largely used the time to doze in our sitting room, and for my part, I drifted fretfully from fencing lessons with the cast of Robin Hood to comportment for the cadre of girls who were earmarked—quite literally, with a pearl earring—for the period dramas. There were so many options that I felt unraveled. So many ways to improve meant that I was lacking in all of them, and I dropped weight at an alarming rate as I spun from ballroom dance to makeup lessons.
“No,” Greta said one morning, as I looked over the mimeographed schedule we had been given. “The only thing you are learning today is to like my cooking.”
She was clever. She didn’t make me any of the rich and creamy foods that she remembered from Sodermalm. If she had, I would have been sick and likely wasted away to one of the thin ghosts that haunted Lot C, rattling in their skins and lit from within with a yellow-green hunger. Instead she made me broth and kroppkakor, dumplings filled with potatoes, onions, and pork. They awakened my appetite, and then she could give me salted raw salmon, dark bread with herring and mustard sauce, and even rice pudding and ham. My mother’s cooking had been indifferent, but under Greta’s direction, I grew sleek, my angularity smoothed away and my hollows filled out.
On Thursday, singly, in pairs, and in large and mistrusting circles, we read for the casting directors, everything from dusty Westerns to Regency romances. To my growing anxiety, they never knew what to do with me, scowling whenever they opened my file and saw the restrictions that Oberlin Wolfe himself had noted there.
“I don’t see what we’re meant to do with you,” said one man. I remember how his pomaded hair gleamed like the back of a cockroach. “What are you for?”
I didn’t say anything, but instead I put my response in my glare. Isn’t finding that out your job?
It was particularly bad when I got close. One Thursday, they were seriously considering me for a walk-on bit in a Western, someone needed to cry out a warning before she was shot from the street. The casting director wavered over the matter, and then shook his head, giving the part to one of the nodders that lined the back of the casting rooms instead.
Abigail McKinnon had been white with slick black hair, my height and my build—we could have shared clothes if anything had remained in her that cared about clothes. The nodder that was left after Abigail got pregnant and refused to give up her baby got more work than I did.
* * *
Have you ever seen a movie where a part was simply filled? There’s no life or wit to the person spilling the drink, or running from the riders, or smiling in the crowd scene, but they’re there and you don’t notice until much later how stiff they were, how awkwardly they moved.
The nodders were too expensive or too dangerous to make in great numbers, or something like that, because I don’t doubt that otherwise Wolfe would have made for himself a kingdom of them. Even after what was lit up in them had been extinguished, they still took direction, even if they did it clumsily and badly.
Greta had no better luck than I did for all that Wolfe Studios had sent a scout after her. She said her lines with a drawl that was just short of insolent, and she seemed to move as if she were underwater. I heard one casting director wonder aloud whether Greta had been allowed to keep taking her morphine long after she should have stopped. But Greta wasn’t drugged, she was grieved, and then grief became her trademark when they cast her in The Belles of St. Desmond.
Except for one incandescent shot, where Greta turns to Brandt Hiller and tells him she doesn’t care for men of his kind, The Belles didn’t last. It disappeared, lost to fire or fortune or sabotage, but for a year or so after it premiered, it was enormous. Women went about slurring their words as if they were drunk on sloe gin, an ugly imitation of Greta’s husky accent, and men let their hats droop down over one eye in imitation of Brandt Hiller. It spawned a series of imitations, all darkly lit and gloomy, none of them with even the transient grace of the original. The vogue would end when the war broke out, and Wolfe Studios would turn to bright musicals and war propaganda, but that Thursday, we didn’t know that.
When Greta returned to the apartment that night, I was a stew of jealousy and resentment and guilt. It’s hard to resent someone when you’re eating the potato dumplings they left you, but I tried. She didn’t deserve it, however, and I resolved to do my best and to put on a glad face when she returned.
Then she opened the door, and all feigned gladness fled to make way for shock.
Greta stumbled in as if she had found our rooms by accident, her fair hair falling like a sheaf of fanned newspaper across her brow. There were two red spots of color high on her cheeks, and her eyes were too bright and glassy. She looked like a hunted animal. I locked the door and checked it twice before I turned back to her.
She had perched herself on the tall stool in the kitchen, her bare feet tucked primly underneath her and a tall glass of akvavit in her hand. It was strictly contraband, purchased from a sly Japanese girl who seemed to come and go as she pleased, and I glanced at the door again.
“Greta…”
“It is terrible,” she said in her round and rolling voice. “I have fallen in love.”
She tipped the glass back, and when it came back down, there were enormous diamond tears running down her face.