Entr'acte (21 page)

“So what happens, then?” Connie asked. It was almost as if she was a child back in Maine, listening to a bedtime story while rain pelted the tin roof above her room. She didn’t question any of the rather stunning news she’d just been given.

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“In the late fall sometime, the body of a woman who everyone
thinks
looks like you—” Bart raised a hand to keep Connie from interrupting—“will be fished out of the river,
having been there for
some time.
From what Joyce tells me everyone just accepts that it is you, and a few years after that Muriel comes back and has you declared legally dead.”

Connie took a dainty sip of coffee, and asks quietly if Joyce knows what will happen.

It was Bart who answered. “You are a free agent, Connie,” he said. “It’s your life and you are in uncharted territory. The only history you have is the one you make for yourself from here on.”

The slim blonde had another question: “Is my sister happy in her life?”

Bart nodded at Joyce, who deftly fielded that one. “Muriel enjoys the heck out of her life and makes everyone around her have a good time too. She goes home and marries Joe Waszielewski (at this news both women burst into a fit of giggles while Bart and Maurice looked on impassively) and they have one kid—my father. He and my mother have one kid, me.”

Connie wanted to know more. “What does Muriel do with her life? How is she now….” she stumbles, searching for the right words…”where you are from?”

Joyce explained about the dance studio and the endless recitals, with Muriel riding herd on a generation of Sugar Plum Fairies, princesses and the occasional male who wanted to learn to dance. She gently added, softly, “Muriel died about a week ago, having lived a full, happy life, ready to move on and still full of fire. It was in May, 2007.”

“Sorry I missed the funeral….,” Connie muttered. And then, brightening, “I should have at least sent flowers, huh? That would have gotten them talking!” Joyce reached across the table and squeezed her great-aunt’s hand.

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FRANK JULIANO

The coffee pot and their emotions similarly drained, the foursome made their way outside and entered the fairgrounds, past the “egg and the needle,” as the giant Trylon and Perisphere—the symbols of the fair—had derisively come to be known.

They waited in line for two hours to get into “The World of Tomorrow” pavilion, but there were no answers to be had to their particular plight. It did spark a huddle between Bart and Maurice that continued over frosty steins in the German beer garden. “Do you happen to remember the winning horses in the next 60

Kentucky Derbies?” Bart asked.

“No man, I don’t,” the black man answered, “But I can tell you this: you are going to love your Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s.

They are going to win it all in 1955. They’ll beat the Yankees in the World Series.”

Maurice let Bart bask in that news for awhile before delivering the coda. “The whole team will up and move to Los Angeles in 1957, and the Giants will go to San Francisco a year later.”

Maurice went on to say that the Dodgers were his favorite team too, or at least second to his beloved Mets that restored National League baseball to New York in 1962. “The Dodgers and Branch Rickey broke the color barrier after the war,” he went on, while the women studied their nails, bored. “A lot of brothers are in the majors now, but Jackie Robinson led the way right after the war.”

Connie wanted to know how this “new Great War” as she called it would come out, and was cheered to hear that the United States would prevail, after four long years.

Joyce and Maurice exchanged a series of facial signals to work out wordlessly what needed to be said and which details could wait for the journalists to report. The decision was to outline the Nazis’ evil Reich under Hitler, without dwelling on the 192

ENTR’ACTE

atrocities—anyone following the news even casually in the summer of 1939 knew that Jews in Europe were being scapegoated and victimized. Likewise they mentioned the Japanese and their war in the Pacific, that drew the U.S. in after an attack on a naval base.

Pearl Harbor and the date that will live in infamy may have been history to Maurice and Joyce, but they realized that Connie and Bart needed to experience their lives as events unfolded.

Both instinctively wanted to protect their friends without distorting their futures.

The bizarre day just sputtered along. Joyce and Connie found that they actually had little to say to each other, and Connie still showed by the flash in her blue eyes and the wary expression she wore all day that she didn’t completely trust the people she was with or what they were telling her.

Once, when a boisterous family involved in their own conversation walked directly toward them, Bart tried to guide Connie out of harm’s way, only to get her purse over his head.

There was only a half-hearted, muttered “Sorry,” when the situation became obvious. Other fairgoers shook their heads and wagged their fingers in disgust at Connie and Maurice, who they assumed were a couple. When the “tsk-tsk” ing continued, the two defiantly wrapped their arms around each other. That nearly sent one bigoted dowager into apoplexy.

The bright summer sun was casting deep shadows by 7 p.m., when the four, footsore and weary, settled on a bench in an area behind some food vendors’ stalls. They were discussing what to eat for supper—there was an international array of choices though Bart at least seemed to have little familiarity with anything not involving a steak and a potato.

They watched columns of black smoke puff up from behind the canopies over the food stalls; Joyce and Maurice idly staring as 193

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the smoke seemed to coalesce at the end of the row. One side of the street was made of the white tenting material of the stalls, the other by a high wooden fence with “Post No Bills” stamped on it, interspersed with handbills for various entertainment venues and a prizefight card.

A breeze perhaps stirred up by the smoke began to blow trash—food wrappers, napkins and paper cups—along the fence line.

Joyce and Maurice looked at each other, their eyes growing wider. Then Maurice stood up, took off the white busboy’s jacket he’d been wearing all day and started to run toward the smoke, as the wind picked up and, improbably, it began to rain at the end of the narrow path.

“Where are you going?” Connie stood up and shouted.

“To the front of the bus!” Maurice yelled back.

She didn’t understand his meaning, but there was no mistaking the hood who stepped out from behind the Belgian waffle stand, the steel barrel of his revolver waving menacingly. Eddie—the three of them recognized their nemesis right off—had a duffel bag flung over his shoulder, like a sailor about to board ship.

For a brief moment it looked like Connie going to die anyway, in the midst of fairgoers who had already seen fire eaters and bearded Indian mystics levitating and were too jaded and tired to care about what looked like another sideshow act.

But Eddie was stumped—he actually scratched his head with the muzzle of his gun while he tried to figure out which of the two women was the one who jilted him. Had Connie dyed her hair?

He wouldn’t put it past her. Just then the duffel bag that had been increasingly squirmy and unstable on Eddie’s shoulder burst open, and Amelia jumped out and ran to Joyce, delighted to see her mistress.

As the gears slowly turned in the hood’s cranium, processing 194

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this new information, a black arm from behind her grabbed Connie and pulled her away.

“Are you STUPID girl?” It was Maurice. “Or are you that rare thing, a REAL BLONDE?” Not waiting for an answer, he dragged her into the enveloping mist.

That made things a bit simpler for Eddie, who leveled the barrel of his gun at Joyce, still unsure of his prey but no longer caring. Bart jumped between them, motioning with his arm held behind him that Joyce should go too—to
wherever.

Joyce reluctantly backed up, the cold rain and wind wrapping her in a wet embrace. She was still able to see Bart uncork a vicious uppercut, catching Eddie under the chin and laying him out flat on the pavement. The gun clattered uselessly into a storm drain.

A crowd gathered but as soon as Eddie opened his eyes he knew he’d been made to look foolish yet again. Employing his time-tested strategy, he got up and ran away. Bart accepted some good natured slaps on the back from the men in the crowd, and some furtive smiles from their dates, as he took made his way back to the fair’s Midway.

He hadn’t gotten far when he felt another tap on his shoulder.

He turned around expecting to see another glad-hander. It was Joyce. She moothed her skirt, and started into an awkward speech.

Bart waved her off. “I know,” he said, his emotions choking off his words. “You’ve got to go. Bye, Future Girl. Don’t forget me.” And he turned his back and started to walk away again. This time it was a nip at his heel that stopped him. Amelia had grabbed hold of his pant cuff, intuitively aware that this was something Joyce wanted brought back to her, like a ball or a stick.

“I came back because my dog wanted to,” Joyce said shyly. She had her head tilted up for a kiss.

“Women!” Bart snorted as he scooped Joyce up in his arms.

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Reprise

Connie felt herself tumble over something hard—several things—evenly spaced apart. With each roll a blunted object pushed into her side, just below her ribs. She came to rest against a low concrete wall, and though there were people milling all around her, Connie sensed that they were standing and yelling about something that had nothing to do with her.

Those strong arms reached down for her again, set her on her feet and then gently pushed her into a chair. Connie glanced around, trying to get her bearings. She had just recognized Maurice sitting next to her in another hard, wooden, blue-painted chair when a crack like the report of a gun sent her to the ground again.

Maurice stifled a giggle as he picked up Connie yet again.

“Nothing to worry ’bout,” he said. “That’s just Carlos Delgado.

He does that sometimes.”

“Not often enough,” the man behind them chimed in. Connie looked out across the expanse of grass and dirt to a brightly lit billboard. It was an ad for the 2007 All-Star Game, to be played in San Francisco.

“This Delgado guy can’t be too bad,” Connie elbowed 196

ENTR’ACTE

Maurice. “Says there he’s a star. That means what it always means.

The best.”

And then, a moment later, trying to get comfortable in her grandstand seat, Connie spoke to Maurice again. “Hey sport, will you buy a girl a beer?”

* * * *

So after she spent a few nights in a “hotel for ladies” near Grand Central, Joyce and Bart went downtown to City Hall, where an unctuous clerk put them through bureaucratic hell. One thing that momentarily stumped the couple was the bride’s birth date.

Joyce did some quick math in her head, and actually came up with the wrong year: she had made herself 18.

No matter, a justice of the peace pronounced them man and wife in no time flat. There was no one to stand up for them—

Joyce had decided to studiously avoid Muriel so as not to risk any repercussions of her appearance out of time.

The wedding dinner was nice, though. Just Joyce and Bart, Remy and his girlfriend Francine, The other couple paid for the meal and drinks. It was at El Morocco.

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