The Chelsea Girls(13)
We whooped and hugged each other. I asked him what happens next.
“He can’t go back to Germany, nor stay here. We’ll have him released to the British forces, and taken to England.”
Paul will be safe. That’s what counts. While I’d love to see him again and say goodbye, wish him well, at least we know he’ll be safe.
I know why Hazel got so tied up with Paul, even if they don’t share the same language: She sees her dead brother in him. We don’t speak about that, of course. For me, it’s also personal.
I was out with my grandmother, when I was fifteen. We were shopping downtown, and I was proudly wearing grown-up shoes with a heel for the first time. I tripped over my own feet, splattered down on the sidewalk. My grandmother shrieked, then rattled off a scolding about picking up my feet when I walked, that I should stop scuffling along like a mule.
But in her frustration, she’d spoken German.
Before long, we were surrounded by angry men. I began crying, and they thought it was because I was afraid of a German stranger who’d pushed me. My grandmother stepped away from me, fear-stricken at having revealed herself, her nationality. A few men spat at her, called her a Kraut.
The injustice enraged me, and my teenaged embarrassment of drawing attention to myself faded fast. “Nein. Sie ist meine Gro?mutter.”
The crowd grew silent. I repeated the words, in English. “She’s my grandmother.”
Of course, that was the wrong thing to say, as it only incensed them further. Then a woman stepped into the crowd, a woman with a deep voice like thunder and the stature of Cleopatra, and mouths dropped. That was how I met Lavinia Smarts. I’d fallen on my face right in front of the theater where the actress was playing Lady Macbeth, and she took our hands and led us inside, to safety. Just as I’d saved Paul. I’m still not sure how I had the nerve to get into the driver’s seat of the Jeep and slice through the crowd, but it was like an invisible line connected me to those boys. I remembered Lavinia’s determined expression as she plucked me and my grandmother from danger, bringing justice to the world, and I couldn’t let her down.
The Seattle Repertory Playhouse, run by a kindly couple named Florence and Burton, became my refuge. The plays they put on were fancy, with lots of poetic lines—Shakespeare and Chekhov. But I watched every rehearsal and helped out at the box office before landing a couple of small parts as a reward for my industriousness, eventually winning bigger roles. The professional actors passing through, including Lavinia, regaled us with stories of New York City, and I decided then and there to head east after high school.
My father told me the choice was teaching or nursing. No way would he have a daughter in the theater, exposing herself to ridicule. One evening, my grandmother stole into my bedroom and sat beside me on the bed in the dark.
“You want to go to New York? Leave me behind?” She spoke in German, knowing my father wouldn’t understand us.
“I want to make something of myself. I love the theater.”
“What do you love about it?”
I considered the question before answering, nestling into her the way I’d done as a child. “I love the way the actors treat each other, the way a play comes to life. That there are all these moving parts to a show that are entirely separate at first: the actors, the scenery, the lights. Slowly, they all come together and become something bigger. And then, after the applause dies down, it disappears. It’s magical.”
She smelled like peppermint as she reached down and kissed me on the forehead. “Your mother loved watching plays when she was young. We’d go to the puppet shows and she’d insist on climbing behind the stage after the performance, to see how it was put together. She wanted to touch the strings.”
“That’s what I want, as well. I want to touch the strings.”
“Then you go.”
She gave me enough money to get across the country and I checked into the hotel that Lavinia had told me about, a safe haven for artists, for activists, for freedom: the Chelsea. Fifty years earlier, it had been at the center of the theater district, but the Broadway houses had since moved uptown to Times Square, leaving the Chelsea behind. The room I stayed in was tiny, with a balcony decorated with cast-iron sunflowers and a wonderful view overlooking Twenty-Third Street.
Lavinia took me under her wing and got me a job as an usher at one of the smaller theaters, as well as an agent. Eventually, I began getting roles in touring productions. Somehow, though, I could never break through to the big time and land a part on the Broadway stage. Even though I tease Hazel about her serial understudying, part of me is jealous she’s worked on the Great White Way. She got to watch Gene Kelly and Uta Hagen from the wings, had the chance to show up at opening-night parties and hobnob with the big-time critics, producers, and players. Better than singing your heart out in Cleveland for peanuts, then packing up and doing it all over again in another town, another state. To a bunch of nobodies.
It’s funny, but sometimes I feel more for Hazel than I have for anyone else in my life, and other times I want to strangle her. I suppose this is what it must be like to have a sister.
How tenuous the line is between friends and enemies in a world at war.
* * *
Hazel’s crying on her cot, inconsolable.
We went to Naples to do the broadcast, secretly hoping for a chance to say goodbye to Paul, to wish him well. Colonel Peterson looked up from his desk but didn’t rise, just pointed to the chairs and suggested we sit.