Strings Attached

Thirty-five



Providence, Rhode Island

December 1950



We really hadn’t expected anyone to show up at the funeral. But people came, people I hadn’t seen in years, people who I’d never met, Delia’s old bosses, Mr. Loge and Mr. Rosemont, and their wives. Helen Rosemont hugged me and told me how after her son had been lost in the war Delia had stopped in every day on her way to work to bring her the newspaper. Peter Arnot had said she’d given him a lecture when she caught him lounging on Wickenden Street, telling him if he didn’t use his brains he was stupid, and now he was the first in his family to go to college. Story after story, not so much of her incredible kindness, because it wasn’t that, it was that she said her piece and moved on, but it was a choice piece. Or she noticed if someone needed an extra hand. Flowers came from Long Island, too, from the library where she worked, from a neighbor, from the man who ran the bookstore, from a man down the street because Delia walked his dog for him.

Was she trying to make up for her secret life? Did it matter? We didn’t discuss it any more than we discussed how she’d died, how she’d taken the bullet meant for me.

I didn’t know if Nate had tricked us, if he’d wanted one last revenge. We didn’t know if it had just been a mistake. Nate was in seclusion somewhere and scheduled to testify in New York.

Everyone was back in their houses. Everyone had breakfast in the morning and dinner at night. The moon rose, and the stars came out, and the milkman delivered the milk in the morning. And Billy and Delia were dead.



The day after Delia’s funeral, an envelope arrived at the house on Hope and Transit addressed to me. It was large and thick, and whoever had sent it had taped the back shut.

I put it on the kitchen table. The family sat and stared at it.

“Delia’s handwriting,” Da said.

“Postmarked the day she died,” Jamie said.

I slit it open with a knife. Photos tumbled out, pictures of men laughing, holding cigarettes, men leaning forward in conversation, a man leaving a car, cars pulled up into a driveway, their license plates visible. Nate Benedict, walking down a snowy driveway, smiling at the boy who held the camera.



Da didn’t have a TV, so we went down to the bar on Wickenden to watch the hearings in New York. Thirty million Americans watched, too. Movie theaters in New York showed them, and people dropped in and out during the day, whenever they could. Every television, it seemed, was tuned in. When Frank Costello testified, he wouldn’t let them show his face, so the cameras focused on his hands. They never stopped moving, and people watched, fascinated, hearing the voice and seeing the nervous hands. That was enough to tell a story.

Virginia Hill came in her mink stole and picture hat and told the committee that sure, she got presents and cash from men, and what of it? On the way out, she slugged a woman reporter.

Nate invoked the Fifth Amendment twenty-seven times, plus attorney-client privilege. He wasn’t a crook, he said, just an honest attorney. And he had no personal knowledge of Miss Delia Corrigan, who lost her life so tragically on Atwells Avenue.

Billy stayed a hero.

The day after Nate’s testimony, I called the number on the card the man had given me outside the apartment in New York. I realized now that it hadn’t been about the Greeleys; he was trying to warn me about Nate. He told me what to do, and so I took the trolley downtown and personally delivered the photographs to the office of the FBI.



Time passed, but not enough. Muddie fed me soup and pudding and her terrible stews, Jamie took me to the movies, Da bought me records, and I was grateful for every scrap of their caring, even though it didn’t quiet the howl of grief inside me. I couldn’t imagine going back to school, and Da didn’t suggest it. I visited Madame Flo, but I didn’t take a class. I couldn’t even walk into the diner on South Main without seeing Billy at the table, his head bent over his books. Every day I would decide to look for a job, and every day, I would walk the streets instead. I couldn’t find a way to return to my life. I couldn’t find my way anywhere good, and panic was beginning to alternate with grief.

When you learn to sing, you learn to keep a reserve of breath in your lungs. It’s there when you need it, at the end of a phrase, to hold the note strong and clear. Did I still have a reserve somewhere deep inside? Would I ever find it?

An evening came when Da looked at me across the kitchen table and shook his head sadly.

“It’s time, darlin',” he said. That night, he took my suitcase out of the closet, and left it in my room.



The second time I left Providence for New York City, my family took me to the station. Da hugged me, and Muddie did, too. When Jamie hugged me, I whispered, “Come live in New York, I need you there.” When I pulled away, he nodded.

“First I have to finish high school,” he said. “One of us should get a decent education.”

“You’ll get settled in your new place?” Da said.

“Daisy will be waiting for me. She’s says the residential hotel is a safe place — lots of dancers and actresses live there. All girls,” I added, smiling. “No men after ten o’clock.”

“No men, period, is more like it,” Da said. “A nice boy now and then, maybe.”

I climbed on the train and found my seat. They walked along the platform until they found me, and they waved until I was out of sight.

It was almost spring. The branches were fuzzy, as if you needed glasses to see, but you knew it was really the buds of the leaves ready to poke their way out into the world. One day those edges would be sharp and clear and startlingly green.

As the train picked up speed, I thought of Billy. This time, I thought of him as a boy, standing at the front of a subway car, watching the rushing tracks. On the night he died, did he see the light of the oncoming train coming toward him? That brilliant light, that flash, and then everything changed.

There were accidents in life, collisions, damage, and some happened through no fault of your own and some happened because you invited them. I had barely escaped the wreckage. Maybe I’d be haunted by Delia’s death for the rest of my life. Maybe I’d never get over Billy.

I’d been thrown clear of the wreck. I was alive.

The train pulled into Pennsylvania Station and I walked up the stairs into that great vaulting space. People rushed by with places to get to. I was in the middle of it, and I stopped, closed my eyes, and let my tears fall. I listened to the footsteps until I could swear I’d picked up the rhythm of a dance — triple-time steps, shuffles, and shim shams. My heart lifted for the first time since Billy died. Just a flicker, just a quarter note of a moment, not enough to hang on to, but still, I had felt it.

I was a girl crying in the middle of a crowd, and nobody noticed. Maybe there was something awful about that, but there was something good, too. I would dry my own tears. I opened my eyes and kept on walking.

Things can fall from the sky, it’s true, anything can, from radiation to salvation, a bomb raining fire, packages of food into outstretched hands in a desperate city.

Or on an ordinary day, nothing sinister. Nothing noble. Just balloons.



Acknowledgments



I hereby acknowledge that without the editorial guidance of David Levithan on this book I would have been facedown in the clam chowder. Most profound thanks to him for taking his red pencil and stabbing it right at the story’s heart. I am grateful to everyone at Scholastic who worked on this book, and those who were kind enough to read it. Special thanks to Becky “Bex” Amsel, who is so tolerant of my crazy, even when I make her miss trains. And thank you to the gifted and gorgeous book designer Elizabeth Parisi, whose vision I trust.

Thank you to Molly Friedrich, the agent who doesn’t do lunch, for being a champion of writers and readers. Thank you, too, to Lucy Carson for the thoughtful reading of this manuscript.

Research for this book was a treat. I lost myself in the pleasures of a Manhattan we’ve lost. For a taste of it, pick up E. B. White’s Here Is New York. I watched movies for ambience (All About Eve, of course, and Sweet Smell of Success) and haunted used bookstores for autobiographies of actors and dancers who began in the nightclubs and theaters of the early fifties. Ethan Mordden, wherever you are, thank you for all your brilliant books on Broadway musicals — you bring every era alive. And of course there are the treasures on YouTube. If you want to see dancing, take a look at Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon in “Who’s Got the Pain.” Or Carol Haney in “Steam Heat.” I’m sure Kit was at least half as good.

Thank you to John Sefakis, president of Dancers Over Forty, who got me in touch with the lovely Norma Doggett Bezwick, who started on Broadway in 1947, danced the choreography of Jack Cole and Michael Kidd, and was willing to talk to me about it. And thank you to my theater friends, John Bedford Lloyd, Anne Twomey, Larry Hirschhorn, and that walking Broadway encyclopedia, Mark McCauslin, for sharing tales, bringing books, and sending me down some fascinating paths.

Mary Cantwell’s memoir, American Girl, was a wonderful trip back in time to the Rhode Island of the thirties and forties. Thanks also to the Rhode Island Historical Society for answering my questions and for access to their library.

A shoutout goes to Ethan Marcotullio, who knows how to tell a girl he loves her with style, even in kindergarten.

Any mistakes in history or geography are my own. I admit to fudging one historical event for the sake of my own chronology — the citywide air-raid drill took place a year later, in 1951. The horrifying Thanksgiving Long Island Railroad train wreck is an actual event. I did not exaggerate the way the threat of the Bomb permeated American life in 1950, nor the chill of the blacklist on teachers in 1950s New York.

I offer here inadequate thanks for the patience of friends, family, and random acquaintances who listened as I anguished and languished for way too long over this manuscript. Thank you to Julie Downing, Katherine Tillotson, and Elizabeth Partridge for their daily unflagging support. Thanks especially to Betsy for her keen editorial advice early on, when I wanted to throw the proposal into any random river. Thank you to my dear Donna Tauscher, for everything she is in my life. And to Jane Mason, for saying over and over that I could do it. Thank you to fellow author and Clue hunter Peter Lerangis for one particular pep talk that helped.

I borrowed names, but not characters, from my Irish great-aunts and-uncles. Thanks be to the dear departed— the original Muddie, who never wrote a book but should have, and my beloved grandmother Kathleen, called Kit, with her collection of red dresses — her “slashers” — that she wore to every party. Thanks to my parents, who threw the parties.

There are no words for what Cleo Watson and Neil Watson bring to my life. I just know they hold me up.