Strings Attached

Twelve



Cape Cod, Massachusetts

August 1950



It was the last night of our summer. The cast and crew sat under the trees outside the rooming house, flopped on chairs and blankets in the grass. Those who smoked had lit up cigarettes to drive away the mosquitoes. It was midnight, and still eighty degrees.

I was wearing white shorts and a sleeveless top, a madras shirt that had started the summer with long sleeves that after a week I had cut off to make it easier to work. The cast was expected to pitch in, and I hammered and sawed for the set designer, sewed hems on costumes, and acted as an usher when I didn’t have to be onstage.

It was an outfit I wouldn’t have dared to wear back home, but I’d learned, this summer, that there was another world out there, where people wore as little as possible, said whatever they thought, and cursed cheerfully at the prospect of sixteen-hour days. Things made sense here because nobody cared — if you were hot, you chopped off your shirtsleeves; if you were tired, you drank a pot of coffee; if your heart was broken, you went out that night and sang the pieces of your heart out onstage. Easy.

I was the baby of the group. Nobody made a pass that summer; nobody offered me drinks or cigarettes. I was here because of Florence Foster. She was the one who’d made the long-distance call, who’d planned the audition, who’d called in favors. “It’s time for you to get out of Providence,” she’d said, “and get some real theatrical experience under your belt.”

She could have added and get away from that boyfriend, but she didn’t have to. Flo didn’t approve of Billy. She didn’t approve of boyfriends in general, but she’d seen me come to class with reddened eyes and no focus. She’d seen how I’d dress hurriedly, afraid to be late meeting him.

I couldn’t have marked how it happened, or when, and I didn’t love him less, but there was a pulling and a tearing now to our times together. There was an anger in him that would come out if I couldn’t see him, or if I had to work late, or if he saw me talking to a boy at school. He insisted on picking me up at the end of my shift at the Riverbank on Saturday nights, and after my Drama Club meetings. At first I was flattered and grateful, but sometimes I’d want to stay and joke with the waiters about my shift, or gossip with the other actors in the school play. Nobody asked me out for a soda anymore, or to run lines. They knew Billy would be coming.

When Billy wasn’t with me, he was with Jamie. They had a private world of photographs and drawings and talk of light and moments caught in time, truth captured in a frame. I didn’t share their language, but I loved to hear their talk wash over me. It was like a lullaby, making me feel safe and lucky that my brother was my boyfriend’s best friend.

Jamie and Billy had driven me to the Cape in June. It had been unseasonably chilly, and we’d had our last lunch together bundled up in sweatshirts and then had said our good-byes. I’d noticed how Billy looked over the other actors and saw how the light shut off in his eyes. But instead of being angry, he looked scared, and that melted my heart.

Jamie had given me a quick hug — he hated good-byes — and had gone back to the car while I’d kissed Billy good-bye.

“I love you, too,” I’d said, and was relieved when it made him smile. “The summer will go before you know it.”

“Are you nuts? I’m working for my father, remember? It’s going to be the longest summer in history. Especially without you.”

I’d walked him back to the car and had gone around to the passenger side to say good-bye to Jamie.

“Take care of him for me,” I’d told my brother. Jamie had nodded. Next to Billy’s dark handsomeness, Jamie’s fairness stood out. During the winters his paleness was odd, his strawberry hair freakish, his freckles standing out against his white skin, but in the summers his hair lightened to a shade close to blond, and his skin turned golden. If you saw the two of them walking down the street, you’d see heads turn at the two sides of a coin, the darkness and then the golden beauty of the two of them.

“Sure thing,” he’d told me. “Break a leg. And remember to keep some heads-up pennies around.”

At the end of the summer, the beginning of the summer seemed like a different life. Under a full moon I drank my ginger ale and tried not to think about home, where I’d be starting senior year. Because tonight, I was just one of the cast and crew, and there was a movie star in our midst.

Jeffrey Toland had been Spencer Tracy’s little brother and Carole Lombard’s husband. He’d kissed Bette Davis. He’d been a cowboy, a judge, a gangster, a song-and-dance man, a sailor who died in the Pacific. And now he sat on a wooden Adirondack chair — the best chair, the one that didn’t wobble — drinking beer with everybody else. It was the first time he’d joined us. As the star, he didn’t room with the rest of us but stayed in a guest cottage on an estate. All that summer he’d left immediately after the show to go to restaurants and parties, driving a blue convertible loaned by another wealthy family that then got to decorate its dinner parties and lobster bakes with his Hollywood presence. When you’ve seen someone’s head blown up to the size of a movie screen, seen him kissing legends — well, it didn’t matter that you’d also seen him hungover in an undershirt. He still had glamour.

We lived in a rooming house with flimsy screen doors that let in black flies and mosquitoes with the size and accuracy of dive-bombers. There was a faint smell of mildew, spiders in the bathroom, and mice in the kitchen.

It had been the best summer of my life.

I was accepted. It didn’t matter that I got the smallest parts or was stuck in the chorus. I got to be onstage, dancing in the musicals. I got to run lines with the ingenue in the early mornings, grabbing a Dixie cup of coffee and complaining with the others about the lack of sleep.

The last show had gone well, and there was a bouncy, boisterous atmosphere that night. Some nights were golden, not a missed cue, not a word wrong, and the audience was in a mood to be amused. Jeff Toland had proved that he was still a star, throwing himself into the songs with the abandon of the twenty-five-year-old he was supposed to be playing.

I had been a part of that energy that night, and it felt like the biggest luxury to indulge my exhaustion and yet not go to bed. There would be no rehearsal tomorrow, no set building, no rushed breakfasts and skipped lunches and quick swims in the ocean. There was only packing up and heading home. Underneath the jokes, there was tension, too. The Korean War had started in June and the young men were worried about being drafted. We were all heading into an uncertain fall.

But a movie star was working hard to make us forget it. Because of Jeff, everything was heightened — we laughed more, we listened harder, we told our best stories, and suddenly the cast forgot moments of jealousy or irritation and complimented each other. Jeff lolled in his chair, a slight, amused smile on his face, telling anecdotes about directors and stars and his early days on Broadway while we crowded close, everyone flushed and beautiful that night from the lights of the candles and the cigarettes.

Suddenly, the chatter fell silent, and Jeff’s head dropped back. “Look at that big fat moon,” he said. “I love a big fat moon.”

We all dutifully tipped our heads back. Someone sang out “Some enchanted evening” in an exaggerated basso, like Ezio Pinza on Broadway.

Jeff Toland looked down and held out his hand to me. I took it and we rose together and began to dance. The singing turned from a clownish operatic parody to a sweet lush melody, as all the voices joined in. Jeff played to the crowd, twirling me out occasionally, showing me off.

He looked into my eyes and winked. I caught his mood and I saw what he wanted me to do, act like lovers. We danced close and dreamy, perfectly in step, exaggerating the romance for the crowd.

When the song ended, he didn’t just stop dancing, he unfurled me, then gave me a mock bow as the group burst into applause. I grabbed the cuffs of my shorts and pretended to curtsy, and everyone laughed.

Jeff said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next Broadway star.”

Everyone applauded. It was a joke, but a generous one, and I curtsied again.

This was as magic as real life ever got.

Then I stopped smiling because I saw a dark figure standing by the trunk of the big elm tree — Billy.

He stared at me for just a moment. Then he turned his back and walked away.



I looked for Billy for an hour, by the theater, by the beach. I didn’t sleep much, thinking that he’d come to me. The doors of the rooming house weren’t locked; he could walk right in.

I finally fell asleep as the wind picked up, curling around my bare toes in bed and leading me to pull up the cotton cover. For the first time, I could smell the end of summer.

The next morning I waited in my room while I heard doors slamming and taxis pulling up. I had said my good-byes last night. A sense of dread filled me, and I wondered if I’d see him this morning.

This summer had been one of missing Billy. There was only one phone in the rooming house, and we were rarely there to answer it. Messages were supposed to be written down and put on the table in the front hall, but often people forgot or didn’t bother. It was a summer of rushed letters, quick postcards, a few phone calls in which I shouted my “I miss you” while checking my watch. He always managed to call just when I was due down at the theater.

I packed my one suitcase with my shorts and dresses, silly presents for Da and Jamie and Muddie, everything crammed in so that I had to sit on the suitcase to close it. It was an old one of Da’s, the one we’d used so many years ago on our summer tours of county fairs, and one of the latches wouldn’t latch. I pinched my finger wrestling it shut.

I carried it down the stairs. When I walked into the kitchen, one of the actresses was still there, a girl with the improbable name of Daisy Meadows. Out of the company, she was the one I watched the closest. She wasn’t the prettiest of the actresses but she had an arresting face, startlingly clear blue eyes with dark lashes, and thick black hair that curled in the humidity and couldn’t be tamed with a comb. Every performance of hers was slightly different— not enough to throw off her fellow actors, but enough to shade the performance. She lived in New York and studied with Stella Adler, who I now knew was one of the best acting teachers anywhere. Daisy was part of a world I couldn’t imagine — late nights in Greenwich Village jazz clubs, hard study with tough teachers, a tribe of actors searching for truth in a gesture.

She greeted me by raising her coffee cup. She was still dressed in her nightgown. “Looks like we’re the holdouts,” she said. “Everybody left for New York already. I’m taking off in a bit to crash in on my parents. Need a ride, honey? I can drop you in Providence.”

“Maybe.”

Daisy shrugged her shoulders.

I heard the sound of a car, and I went to the kitchen door and peered out. Billy got out of the car. “I might have a ride.”

Daisy took a sip of coffee and watched as Billy stood uncertainly, looking at the house. Dressed in a white shirt and khakis, tanned and lean, he made me catch my breath.

“Catnip,” she purred. “Is he an actor?”

“No, he goes to Brown.”

“College boy. Lucky you.” I swung open the screen door and stepped out. “I came to surprise you last night,” he said. “I saw you dancing.”

“I know. It was Jeff Toland,” I said. “You should have stayed. We were just dancing.”

“Just dancing. Is that what you call it? I couldn’t slip a piece of paper between the two of you.”

“We were just putting on a show for the others.”

“Some show.”

I took a few steps closer. He wasn’t angry, I saw, just hurt and confused.

“What’s been going on this summer, Kit? Is this why I can’t call you, can’t come up?”

“You could have come up anytime,” I said.

“Why would I, when I couldn’t see you? I thought I’d surprise you last night —”

“It was our last night, we had a party —”

“— and I was standing there, watching you, and I thought, this is how it is. I’m right here. She’s right there. And I can’t have her, I can’t get to her.” He shook his head. “Listen, anytime you want me to walk away, I’ll go. I can do it. I can walk away.”

“I don’t! I just want you to trust me.” I spread out my arms. “I want you to understand this — the theater, what I’m doing. It doesn’t matter to you!”

“That’s not true.” He reached into the car and took out an envelope. He handed it to me. “I made you a present.”

It was full of photographs of me, duplicates of a shot he’d taken last spring. He’d set up the shot with lights, just like a professional. In it I looked fresh and dreamy-eyed, because I was looking through the lens right at him.

“Head shots,” he said. “For you to take around to auditions. I do take you seriously.”

I looked down at the pictures. They showed a girl who looked like me, just happier.

“One of the things I love about you,” he said, “is that you really don’t know how beautiful you are.”

He took a step toward me, and I was in his arms.

He held me against him. Slowly, our breaths came together. There were nights in his car that I felt this way, so close, heartbeat to heartbeat. “If we could just be together. Really together,” he said. “If I could just have all of you. If I could just bury myself inside you.”

His words were like an electric shock. I felt something drumming inside me. Our mouths crashed together. Hunger, and then falling. Falling. That’s what it felt like as we kissed, and we just held on.

I knew what he meant. There was a certain distance between us, and wasn’t it because he had to pull away? But something always held me back, Delia’s face rising in my mind, and Da’s, disappointment and shame, and that was stronger than desire, stronger than need. It wasn’t so much what the Church had taught me, but what I’d seen around me in Fox Point: girls pregnant, their lives over, every dream now swirling in the dirty wash water, spiraling down the drain. My mother had died because of babies. That made it easier to be good.

I stepped away, breathing hard, conscious of the windows, of Daisy maybe looking out, or the landlady. “I’ll get my suitcase. Let’s get out of here.”

“I’ll get your suitcase.” He smiled, still holding me in the circle of his arms. He reached down to nuzzle my neck, and his breath sent me trembling again.

I put a hand on his chest and pushed him lightly. “It’s in the kitchen. And I left my sweater in the theater last night. I’ll be back in a second.”

I cut through the backyard and down the hill to the theater, the short walk I’d made all summer, in all stages of exhaustion and exhilaration. I was glad to get away for a few moments, glad to feel my heartbeat settle into a more comfortable rhythm. The stage door was open and a few workers were already there, striking the last set. I waved at them and found my sweater, forgotten in a dressing room.

I stood in the wings for a moment. This stage felt like home to me, such a difference from how nervous I’d been when I’d arrived.

I jumped off the stage, walked down the aisle, past the seats, back into the lobby. To my surprise, I saw Jeff Toland there, dressed in a light summer suit and tie.

“Come to say a last good-bye?” he asked.

I held up the sweater. “I left something behind.”

“Accidentally on purpose, maybe.” He smiled. “I like to say a last good-bye, too.” He leaned against the wall, regarding me. “How old are you, eighteen?”

“Almost.”

He smiled slightly, the smile that had made Judy Garland and June Allyson fall for him in the movies. “Think you’ll stick with it?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“No matter what the boyfriend says?” I felt my face redden.

“Yes, I saw him last night. We all did. He was jealous.

Welcome to the theater, baby doll. They always end up jealous.”

“No,” I said. “He wants me to act, to go to New York. He wants what I want.”

“C’mon, I have to go meet my ride. Heading to New York. You?”

“Home. Providence, Rhode Island.”

“Providence, Rhode Island,” he repeated, as though it were a joke.

He opened the door into the bright morning sun. “Maybe I’ll catch you there sometime. I’m in a play this fall and there’ll be tryouts in Boston. Come and see me?”

“I’ll try.”

He leaned over and kissed my cheek. It lasted about half a beat too long — not enough time for me to pull away, but enough time for me to know it was lingering.

“Thanks for the dance, Providence,” he said when it was done.

Billy was out front, and he’d seen the kiss. Jeff looked off balance for only a moment. He smiled at Billy, a practiced, flashing grin, and waggled his fingers in a wave. Then he ambled away, hands in his pockets.

Billy’s face was a mask, set and still.

I tried to smile, and started toward him, knowing the first words out of my mouth would have to be explanation. I really did leave my sweater. I had no idea Jeff would be there. It all sounded so… weak. I knew what it looked like — that I had made up an excuse to say good-bye to Jeff.

“Hey, I —” I started, but he turned away abruptly.

I watched, my mouth still open, as he jumped back in the car and slammed the door. The motor roared to life. He stepped on the gas and I watched him fishtail out of the parking lot. I stood, watching the car disappear down the road, too stunned to cry.

Daisy pulled up as I was still standing there wondering what to do. My purse had been in the car, my suitcase, everything except the sweater in my hand.

She tipped her sunglasses down. Even in the middle of my misery, I reminded myself to remember that gesture. She looked so racy and confident.

“Looks like you need a ride after all.”

“Thanks.” I tossed my sweater in the backseat. Daisy headed down the Cape highway, driving fast and expertly, talking the whole time. I let the talk go on. I was thankful not to think.

We were almost at the bridge when I saw something pink suddenly fly by the window. I turned back and saw the scrap of fabric stuck on a bush. Another white blur — a shirt — flew by.

“Son of a gun,” Daisy said. “What’s going on?”

Clothes were flying out of the window of a car up ahead. A multicolored skirt. A pair of blue shorts. A white bra.

They were my clothes. Up ahead, Billy must have been grabbing items from my suitcase and tossing them out the window. I stared as my sleeveless madras shirt got impaled on a bush. A sneaker flew out and bounced on the shoulder.

“Somebody’s going to need a new wardrobe,” Daisy said.

She hadn’t recognized my clothes. I was grateful. I watched it all, the wardrobe I’d saved up for in my job at the luncheonette, the soda I’d wiped up, the rolls I’d sliced, the coffee I’d slopped into cups. Getting up to open the place at six. Soaking in a tub to get the grease out of my hair and off my skin. All those days and nights. Out the window.

He’d known it, too. He’d known how hard I’d worked. Now something else was flying by, too. Paper, ripped into pieces.

I knew what they were. My head shots. Little pieces of me, all over the road.