The Chelsea Girls(16)
Each room at the Chelsea remembers the people who’ve passed within its walls, as if the names and dates have been etched on the grubby doorframes. This one had held the bloated poet who trod over discarded candy wrappers and dirty shirts, rolling himself onto the bed with a groan as the springs of the mattress answered with high-pitched creaks. He took a swig of whatever sat on the bedside table, coughing and retching, then another to swill away the taste of his own bile.
His girl, assistant, lover, slept quietly beside him, and he didn’t blame her; he was the cause of her exhaustion. But he was wide-awake: The hallucinations returned, frightening him, the swirls of phantoms circling closer and closer. A gentlewoman stretched out her hand, her rings glistening like tears, while the long-dead painters studied the scene as they would a pietà. The hum of musicians grew louder, the vibrations flowing through plaster and stone. The poet had sighed and let go and drifted up, joining the others.
Years later, the room would prepare to swallow one more soul. Already, the breaths of the woman on the bed were becoming increasingly jagged.
The poet joined hands with his fellow wraiths, and together they waited.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hazel
New York City, May 1950
All right, everyone. We’re live in thirty seconds. Hazel, this will be your big moment.”
Jack Singleton, the director of the hit radio program Cavalcade of America, looked her way. Hazel returned a solemn nod.
They recorded in the NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center every Friday, an 8:00 P.M. show followed by another one for the West Coast at 11:00. In the weeks Hazel was called in to work, she was able to watch great actors and writers in action, big names like Robert Sherwood and Mickey Rooney. Even Cary Grant, once.
She huddled with four of her fellow actors around one microphone, script in hand. Each episode brought to life a historical event, with the emphasis on inspiration and uplift. This evening’s reenacted how the death of a tubercular cow led to the pasteurization of milk and saved millions of lives. Not a topic Hazel had ever imagined being dramatized, but why not?
The ON AIR sign lit up and the announcer launched into the DuPont slogan, “Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry,” before offering up an introduction to this week’s episode.
The actors straightened, at the ready.
The director nodded and the first section of dialogue between the cow’s owner and a veterinarian began, the actor Melvyn Douglas speaking with a clipped authority as the owner.
The director raised his eyebrows at Hazel, lifted his finger, and right on cue Hazel moved closer into the mic and took a deep breath.
“Moo.”
She mooed like a cow a few times more, before joining the others with general barnyard noises.
The director nodded his approval.
The highlight of her week. Acting like a cow.
When she’d first come home from the war, her mother had welcomed her back, eager to hear about her travels abroad. But once Hazel had run through all the stories she could muster, they fell into old habits. Her mother had made lists of theater producers Hazel ought to see, shows she should audition for, just as she’d done with Hazel’s father and brother, when the last thing Hazel wanted to do was put on makeup and high heels and beg for an audition. The work seemed trivial, after what she’d done in Naples. After what she’d seen. She’d eventually been offered the job at the radio show, although the work was intermittent at best, and far from challenging.
The past few years, she’d continued to work on the play she’d started in Italy after learning of Paul’s brutal murder. The main characters—a young Italian man hiding a German who’d turned against his homeland, and the German himself—had haunted her nightmares since the events in the plaza in Naples, and she’d put it down on the page in the hopes she could tame the violent memories that spooled in her head. Still, something was wrong with it, but she was too nervous to show it to anyone else and get advice. The setting—an Italian village in the countryside—limited her enormously. What did she really know about small-town Calabria? Not much beyond the scenery. She kept at it, though, trying to make it come to life.
After the radio program wrapped, everyone clapping one another on the back and offering congratulations as if they’d won the World Series, Hazel grabbed her coat and handbag and headed for the door. In spite of the odd subject matter, she’d been inspired by some of the dialogue, and couldn’t wait to get home to tweak her own work accordingly.
She never played anything grander than a voice in the crowd, but with each broadcast, she learned something new about structure or timing. Hazel absorbed these lessons as if she were an apprentice instead of an extra, lingering behind the director as he gave notes to the leads or brainstormed with the writer to come up with a better ending.
She stepped outside into the warm spring evening. The streetlamps threw down shimmering ribbons of gold on the wet pavement and sidewalks. The walk uptown, even at this late hour, was safe and quiet.
At home, Ruth sat alone, hunched over, nursing a cold tea and a grudge at their linoleum table. Without Ben to divert their mother’s attention, Hazel received the full onslaught of pressure to perform. She’d considered finding her own place, even walked by the Chelsea Hotel a number of times and gazed up at the balconies, wondering which room Maxine had stayed in.