Entr'acte (20 page)

“I’m the only person who can finger him, and this guy is going to kill me if he can,” Connie said.

Amelia came out of the back bedroom then and barked once at Connie. The little dog began chasing her tail, frantically spinning in a circle, but both women ignored it. Finally, Joyce’s pet sat down with a sigh, looking from Connie to Joyce and back again, its head on its front paws.

“Now tell me about Eddie,” Joyce pressed on. “What’s the story with him?”

“It’s the same story with all of them. They want to help but as soon as you accept their help, they think they own you,” the blonde answered, almost diffidently. “Eddie knows people, if you catch my drift. People who can be very helpful to a girl’s career, but they expect you to show…gratitude, if you catch my drift. I gave him the air, but he didn’t like that much. I also poured him a last cup of coffee…”

“I heard,” Joyce said dryly. “The thing we have to do now is get you out of here, out of town. I have a very strong feeling, a…a…premonition,” she said haltingly, “that unless we do something quickly, you could be in great danger. Let’s even say mortal danger. Okay? So the thing is, we have to intercede in whatever was supposed to happen, make a clean departure from it, break the pattern…” Joyce knew she was babbling, but she was wrestling with some heavy issues here. It filled her with sadness to 181

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think that she has been given this incredible opportunity to meet her relative, only to be powerless to save her from her fate.
I don’t
even know if I want to save her, callous as that sounds
, Joyce thought, looking at her gamine relative.
If she is supposed to die in 1939 and
doesn’t what havoc will that wreak on the future, MY future?”

Connie was looking at her, an amused smile on her lips.

“You’re a hoot, sweetie. You know that? But you’re a looker too.”

Joyce felt Connie’s eyes scan her up and down, appraisingly. “I bet you could fit into my things. I sure as heck can’t pack it all up and haul it back to Maine. There aren’t many occasions to wear silk, let alone rhinestones, up there. I’ll grow old picking spuds and hearing people whispering behind my back, calling me high-fallutin’ and all, just because I had dreams.”

She took Joyce back into her room, and starting pulling outfits out of her closet, holding them, appraisingly, on hangers in front of Joyce. Soon there were several dresses on the bed for Joyce to try on, and both women undressed down to their slips and kicked off their shoes. Connie’s clothes, as Joyce already knew, fit her but not perfectly. Anything that had been tailored for her great-aunt was no good on her. “At least you have boobs,” Connie chortled once, over an Empire-waisted evening gown. “My sister couldn’t hold this thing up.” A long ash from the end of the Lucky Strike in Connie’s lips fell onto the fabric, but was quickly brushed away.

“A lot of my dresses have burn holes in the front, because of my

“shelf,” the blonde said.

When Joyce looked puzzled, Connie gestured to indicate what she meant: cigarette ashes fall onto her ample bosom and collect there. “If I’m not careful they’ll burn right through, or some

‘gentlemen’ will take the opportunity to be gallant and brush them away, squeezing the merchandise in the process,” the showgirl said. “Every palooka around wants to light my cigarette and then grab me. It’s s routine; they must teach them as babies.”

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Connie was funny, high-spirited, full of life, and with a ribald sense of humor even more risque than her sister’s. Joyce decided that she liked,
loved,
her great-aunt and wanted desperately to save her. But every time she tried to bring the conversation back around to the situation they faced, Connie brushed her off. She was having too much fun playing dress-up. The hat boxes were pulled out next, and Connie took out a rounded blue serge cap with a piece of lace fixed to it. It had been a flapper’s hat, in style more than 10 years earlier. “I got it for a part I was playing and I kept it because I liked it,” she said. “I call it my ‘potty hat’ because it looks like an upside-down chamber pot. We still have those in Maine, you know.”

Joyce put the potty hat on her head and heard herself say, “We only got indoor plumbing in Waldoboro in the mid-50s, and we still have an outhouse at Sebago.”

Connie whirled around, a question forming on her face, but the conversation was interrupted by the two men who suddenly burst into the room.

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Bart and Maurice were speechless at first, then they both started laughing. “What kind of hen party did we interrupt here?”

Bart asked. Before anyone could answer, he went up to the blonde woman, grabbed her hand and began pumping it enthusiastically. “You must be Connie. Boy, am I glad to see you,” he said.

Maurice looked both women up and down appreciatively, and let out a low, long whistle. “I was right,” he said to Joyce. “It really is hard to tell you two apart; you really have to look. You could pass for sisters, but she’s your…” ignoring Joyce’s frantic hand signals, “…great-aunt.”

Connie’s reaction was not what any of them expected. She began to scream, blood-curdling yells that hurt their ears and brought corresponding shouts from down the hall to “pipe down in there, ye goddamn banshee…” As Bart made a grab for Connie’s thin wrists, she picked up some records off the table, and began hurling them—Frisbee style, only such a thing didn’t exist yet—at her visitors. Maurice ducked, and a heavy 78 rpm record made of wax and shellac flew past him and shattered against the doorjamb. Another one, a Harry James jazz disc, 184

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caught Joyce above her left eyebrow, opening a cut that bled down her cheek. Connie dove head-first into her closet then, and as the three looked on, she began flinging her hat boxes out into the room.

Finally, she came out meekly and sat on the bed. She folded her hands in her lap and crossed her ankles. “I bought a gun to protect myself and now I can’t find it,” the distraught woman muttered. “I swear I can’t keep track of anything.” Maurice glanced at Joyce; she patted her purse to indicate the weapon was tucked safely inside.

“So, you’re here to kill me,” Connie said in a sad and defeated tone. “Can I at least know you sent you? Was it Eddie or that butcher, Stevens in Jersey?” Joyce started to interject, but Connie cut her off. “And you,” she waved a finger at her grand-niece,

“what are you supposed to do honey, pass yourself off as me?

Well Muriel will be able to tell; we do not look like sisters. Can you even sing and dance? ‘Because I can.”

Joyce started to speak again, but Connie waved her silent. “Are you good in bed, honey? ’Cause I am,” she said defiantly. “Men who knew me will know the difference.”

“Way too much information here,” Maurice muttered. Joyce blushed beet red and Bart seemed fascinated with the pattern in the hooked rug on the floor.

When no one spoke for a full minute—it seemed much longer—Connie piped up again. “Well if you’re going to do it, make it quick. My sister will be home soon.” And then a look of fresh terror spread over her face. “Or are you going to deep six her too?” She looked pleadingly at each face in turn. “Honest, Muriel don’t—doesn’t—know anything about any of this.”

This was all too much for Joyce. She sat down next to Connie on the bed and took her hand. “We’re all here to help you, but what we’ve got to tell you is not going to be easy to believe. We 185

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have to get out of here and to some place safe, and we have to do it quickly. OK?” Joyce’s tone left little room for debate, and Connie just nodded.

“Who is this jamoke?” Connie asked, pointing at Bart.

“My boyfriend,” Joyce blurted, without pausing for thought.

A smile passed from face to face; everyone knew it was true.

“And this Negro?” the blonde pressed on.

“He’s Maurice, a friend of mine and in the same fix as me,”

Joyce said. “Although,” she said, nodding to Maurice, “I thought you decided you’d be happier back in this day and age?”

“I miss my brother Martin, Dr. MLK,” the black man said ruefully. “I’m no good at scraping and bowing, and the next person who calls me ‘boy’ is getting his—or her—white ass kicked.”

“OK, then,” said Bart. “Where does that leave us? I ran into Maurice downstairs and after we had our little testosterone flare-up we came up with a plan, more of an idea really. We should go to the World’s Fair.”

“Right!,” Connie chimed in enthusiastically. “”Cause the place is lousy with cops, and there are people galivanting all over, day and night. No one would DARE mess with us.” She paused for breath and added softly, “I still wish I hadn’t lost my gun though.”

“Actually,” Maurice said to Joyce, “since neither of us has been able to find the worm hole again, I thought this exhibit out there, The World of Tomorrow, might be worth a shot. At least we might learn something.”

The four were heading out the door, Joyce with three of Connie’s proffered dresses in a satchel, when they heard Muriel coming up the stairs. She was singing “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”

“I don’t want to face the music,” Connie almost giggled. The small group went back into Connie’s bedroom, opened the 186

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window and climbed onto the metal fire escape. They were clattering onto the sidewalk when Muriel opened her apartment door, still singing.

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It took nearly three hours for the little group to make its way to the fairgrounds, in Flushing Meadows, Queens. They had boarded the subway at 4th Street, took it across the Queensboro Bridge and transferred onto the BMT Flushing Line, which had added a special World’s Fair stop at Willet’s Point Boulevard. On the way Maurice and Bart good-naturedly argued about whose New York City neighborhood was better. Bart had grown up in Dyker Heights, a predominately Italian section of Brooklyn. “I was the only Irish kid in my Confirmation class at St. Bernadette’s Church on 13th Avenue,” he said. “My best friend since I was 5, Anthony DeVito, used to teach me Italian words to say to the nuns. Apparently
putana
is a very bad thing to call a nun,” he said ruefully, rubbing his knuckles at the memory.

“Man, even I know that word,” Maurice said. “I grew up in Bayside, Queens, right near the Throg’s Neck Bridge, which, ah, won’t be built until 1961. I went to Townsend Harris High School in Flushing, though, not far from where the World’s Fair was…is…now and in ’64. “It’s probably the best public high school in New York; I even went most days, when the Mets weren’t playing at home.”

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“So, you can tell the future and stuff?” Connie wanted to know. “What’s my future?”

“You’re going to go home to Maine and shit out a bunch of kids, all of them as wild as you,” Maurice told her, holding the subway route map up to his face like Karnak the Magnificent.

Connie pouted at this, and Joyce took the opportunity to begin her task. “Actually, Connie, I want you to promise me that you’ll stay away from Maine, forever.”

“Why can’t she just take a train home?” Maurice wanted to know.

“What’s the big deal? They know her there. That’s more than we can say about our situation,” he said, nodding pointedly to Joyce.

“Well, for one thing, you can’t take a train into or out of Maine unless you are a pine log or a potato,” she replied. “At least that is true in my time and I’m pretty sure it’s true now. But the biggest reason is that Connie is not SUPPOSED to go back, or she would have and we’d know it.” Three of them nodded sagely; Connie crushed the butt of her Lucky Strike against a Chase and Sanborn coffee ad on the wall of the subway car, and said in a low, firm, barely controlled voice: “You all are going to tell me what the HELL is going on, RIGHT NOW, or I am going to shed myself of the lot of you and take my chances with the crazies out there.”

She pointed dramatically out the window, where brightly-lit white-tiled station walls flashed by as the train hurtled on; but everybody caught her meaning.

The subway lurched to a halt moments later, the doors glided open and the exchanging of sweaty bodies between the car and the platform interrupted their showdown. Bart gallantly offered Joyce his elbow and grabbed Connie’s slim wrist with his other hand, leading both women gently but firmly through the exit gate, up the dirty steps and into the sunlight. Maurice was a pace behind, muttering under his breath about the existential mess they were in.

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On the curb, Bart glanced around quickly, spied a gleaming chrome diner that looked right out of an Edward Hopper painting, and led both woman across the street toward it, nodding to Maurice to make sure he got the plan. Once settled into a booth, Bart ordered four coffees, told the waitress to leave the pot and to leave them alone, slipping a $5 bill across the table. She picked up the bill, wadded it up into a ball and put it into her apron pocket. “You got it, ’Mac,” she said, snapping her gum and striding off happily.

“I’m going to do this, if none of you mind,” Bart said.

Everyone just nodded, Joyce taking note with pride of her boyfriend’s take-charge style and his ability to rise to meet a crisis.

“Connie, Joyce here is your grand-niece. She is Muriel’s granddaughter. Joyce’s father is Muriel’s son. He was born in 1956. Let me give you some more family history,” he continued on briskly. That was apparently fine with Connie, who just stared at Bart, her heavy cup poised midway between her lips and the saucer. “Muriel is not going to make it on Broadway; in fact she is going to go back to Maine later this year, because she will be convinced that you are dead.”

Her blue eyes moving from Bart to Joyce, sitting next to him, Connie asked almost too-reasonably, “So, when and how do I die?”

“Well…and I think this is something we all can agree on now…is that you don’t. Or at least not in the present circumstances,” the musician continued. “Growing up, Joyce was told by your sister that you were last seen alive on June 4, but that was YESTERDAY, and here you are, alive and well.”