Last Night at the Telegraph Club(5)
She made a cup of jasmine tea and took it to her bedroom, which wasn’t really a bedroom but an alcove off the living room behind pocket doors. She left them open for now. Her father had used the space as an office until Frankie had turned four, when Lily had argued her way out of sharing a room with her brothers. Now she had her own tiny hideaway, into which she had crammed her narrow bed, an old bureau with drawers that never closed properly, and several tall stacks of books that created a precarious nightstand for her bedside lamp. The small window in the wall above the foot of her bed was covered with a short curtain made of blue velvet, dotted with tiny sequins. Lily had sewn it herself in home economics class in junior high school. The stitches had begun unraveling almost as soon as she hung it up, but she still liked it. It reminded her of the science fiction novels she liked to read, with their covers depicting outer space.
While she waited for her father and brothers to go to bed, she went to brush her teeth and then puttered around her little room. She folded some laundry she had left on her bed; she shuffled through her notes from last year’s math class to see what could be discarded. All the while she was acutely aware of the piece of newspaper in her skirt pocket: the soft whispering sound it made when she knelt down to put away her clothes; the way its edges nudged against her hip when she sat on her bed.
It felt like hours before her father and brothers left the living room. When they were finally gone, Lily closed the pocket doors to her alcove and changed into her nightgown. She pulled out the newspaper ad and set it on top of the books that made her nightstand. She had folded it into a small square, but now it began to open of its own accord, parting like the wings of a butterfly.
Startled, she watched it until it stopped moving. Outside, the cable car rumbled as it came up nearby Powell Street, and the bell seemed to clang in time with the beating of her heart. She began to unstack one of the piles of books beside her bed, and pulled out Arthur C. Clarke’s The Exploration of Space, which had been a gift from Aunt Judy. She laid the book on her bed, then pushed her pillow against the wall and sat back against it, reaching at last for the ad.
She unfolded it carefully. There was Tommy Andrews gazing into the distance like a movie star, a halo of light around Tommy’s gleaming hair. TOMMY ANDREWS MALE IMPERSONATOR. Some time ago, she had seen an advertisement for a show at a different nightclub that read: JERRY BOUCHARD, WORLD’S FOREMOST MALE IMPERSONATOR! It had been accompanied by an illustration of a woman (her curves were apparent) in a top hat and tails, with the curls of her hair poufing out beneath her hat. The illustration had seemed wrong—comical, somehow. Not like this photo. Tommy was handsome, debonair. The photo wouldn’t be out of place on Shirley’s bedroom wall, alongside her pictures of Tab Hunter and Marlon Brando.
Once, Lily had torn an illustration of a moon colony out of Popular Science magazine (which her father sometimes purchased for Eddie) and taped it on the wall above her bureau. When Shirley had seen it, she had teased her for having a boy’s tastes, and after Shirley went home, Lily had taken it down. If she were exceptionally daring, she would cut away the words TOMMY ANDREWS MALE IMPERSONATOR from this ad and pin up the picture in the space left by the moon colony. She doubted that anyone—even Shirley—would realize that the photo was not of a man.
But she knew that she did not dare. She set the ad down on her bed and opened The Exploration of Space. Hidden between the pages were two other folded clippings. She had torn the first one out of an old Life magazine that had been left in a box outside the Chinese Hospital. It depicted a young Katharine Hepburn lounging in a chair, legs casually draped over one of the arms. She wore wide-legged trousers and a blazer and held a cigarette in one hand while gazing off to her left. There was a knowing confidence in her expression, a hint of masculine attitude in her shoulders.
Lily distinctly remembered coming across the photo while she was flipping through the magazine on the sidewalk. It had been September, and the sun had been bright on her head. She had stopped at the photo and stared at it until her hair began to burn from the heat, and then—before she could second-guess herself—she ripped it out of the magazine. Someone had been walking past at the time and Lily saw them look at her in surprise, but by then it was too late, and she pretended as if she hadn’t noticed their glance at all. She had quickly folded the page in two, slid it into her book bag, and dropped the magazine back in the box.
The other clipping was an article about two former Women Airforce Service Pilots who had opened their own airfield after the war. It included a small photo of them sitting close to each other, looking up at the sky. They were dressed in matching sunglasses, collared shirts, and trousers, and the woman on the right, who had tousled, short hair, protectively held the hand of the woman on the left. The short-haired woman worked as a mechanic; her companion was a flight instructor. They weren’t as dashing as Katharine Hepburn, but there was something compelling about their casual closeness.
The article had come from an issue of the magazine Flying that Lily found at the public library last spring while researching a report on the WASPs. She vividly remembered sneaking the magazine into the emptiest, farthest corner of the library and tearing the article out beneath the table as quietly as possible. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had needed to have the picture in a way she didn’t consciously understand. She’d surreptitiously left a nickel on the library’s circulation desk as if that might make up for her defacement of library property.