The Chelsea Girls
Fiona Davis
PROLOGUE
New York City, March 1967
In the dead of night, during the dreary month of March, the Chelsea Hotel is a quiet place. The only sound that cuts through the silence is the squeal of a police siren, and that fades fast. Thick walls keep out the everyday noises of one’s neighbors: the muffled swears after walking into a bedpost with a bare foot, or the generous moans of lovemaking. The ghosts of the Chelsea hide in the cement-filled brick walls during the day, and glide out during the violet hours to keep watch. Over time, their number has accumulated, from the refined gentlewoman who left behind four diamond rings, to the puffy Welsh poet sinking from alcoholic stupor to coma. The musicians chant quietly with vaporous breath as the former owner hovers mutely by, wringing his hands with worry.
One more to come, very soon. If the woman had more courage, she might jump from the roof. That would be the faster method, instead of this slow slide into oblivion, where every so often a futile panic makes her want to call out, cry for help. But no one would hear, not here. The ghosts jeer at her and point, but she knows they’ll eventually welcome her into the fold. And once she’s gone, she, too, will keep watch over the residents, including her one true friend, who will sigh into her pillow as the apparition leans in close for an invisible kiss.
ACT ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Hazel
Naples, Italy, April 1945
She hated Maxine Mead, and Italy, on first sight.
When Hazel had first auditioned for the USO tour, back in New York, she’d imagined arriving abroad and gingerly stepping off a plane to a cheering group of GIs. The stage would be a grand opera house or something similarly picturesque, like what she’d seen in the newsreels of Marlene Dietrich and Bob Hope entertaining the troops. Hazel would be sure to call them men, not boys, as the USO Actors’ Handbook advised. After all, many of them had been fighting for four years now. They deserved respect as well as some wholesome entertainment, a respite from the fighting.
Upon boarding the Air Corps plane at LaGuardia Airport, Hazel was informed that she’d be replacing a member of an all-female acting troupe who’d come down with jaundice. Not until the noisy tin can of a cargo plane was aloft was she told her destination: Naples, Italy.
After a bumpy landing, Hazel lugged her two suitcases off the plane and stood on the tarmac, exhausted and confused, waiting for someone to tell her where to go, what to do next. The stifling heat was made worse by the fact that she’d been given the winter uniform, including wool stockings and thick winter panties. Every inch of her from the waist down itched as though she had ants crawling up her sweaty legs. Her uniform—a greenish-gray skirt, white blouse, long black tie, and garrison cap that she’d admired in the mirror back in New York—was now a stinking, wrinkled mess.
Finally, a soldier pulled up in a Jeep and called out her name. He tossed her suitcases in the back before helping her into the passenger seat.
They lurched off over a road battered by potholes, passing demolished apartment buildings and churches. Several women picked through a pile of garbage by the side of the road, stopping to stare at Hazel with dead eyes before turning back to their work. A group of ragged, emaciated children, one of whom sucked on his dirty fingers, watched the scavengers. Yet across the street, a tidy line of schoolboys walked past the desolation as if nothing were wrong. The air smelled of rotting vegetables; dust kicked into Hazel’s nose and made her sneeze. Early in the war, the newspapers had published aerial photos of the city that showed almost all of it up in smoke, annihilated by relentless bombing. While many of the inhabitants sought safety deep underground in the ancient Roman aqueducts and tunnels, at least twenty thousand people had been killed.
She tried to envision what it would be like if New York had been similarly decimated, she and her mother out with their shopping bags, stepping over chunks of concrete, going about their day. She couldn’t imagine it. “This is terrible. There’s hardly anything left,” she said.
The driver shrugged. “Naples was the most bombed site in Italy.”
“The residents rose up and resisted the Germans, right?” She tried to remember what she’d read in the papers. “Looks like they paid dearly for it.”
“Sure did.” He made a sharp left, off the main road. “They told me to take you directly to the stage.”
She would have thought they’d give her a moment or two to freshen up after her interminable trip. “Is the acting company rehearsing?”
“Nope. It’s a show.” He nodded at the men trudging along the side of the road in the same direction, smoking cigarettes. “This is your audience.” At the sound of a low rumble above them, every helmeted head snapped up, scouring the skies. But it was only thunder, from a slate-colored cloud to the west, far out over the sea. The helmets snapped back down.
A show. Good. She’d have a chance to watch the other actors. In New York, she’d been given the script for Blithe Spirit, which had been a big hit on Broadway four years earlier, along with instructions to learn the maid’s role, and she had managed to memorize some of the lines during the flight.
The lines were the easy part for Hazel, as she’d been a serial understudy for the past few years. Hazel’s hope, when she first auditioned for the USO, was to be able to break out of her understudy rut and finally act onstage in a real performance. This was her chance to try something new, so that when she returned to New York, she’d be taken seriously as a major actress, not just a backup to be called upon when the leading lady got the flu. Which, with Hazel’s bad luck, had never happened. She’d even established a reputation among producers: Hiring Hazel Ripley as an understudy guaranteed that your leading lady would never miss a show. Twenty plays now under her belt, without going on even once.