ON THE APPOINTED day, I got dressed, fixed my hair, and put on makeup-enough to cover the last bit of yellow from the bruise on my jaw yet still subtle for day and somber for the occasion. I grabbed a taxi to Foster’s, the same place Joe had taken me after the incident on Treasure Island. I didn’t know how to feel about that. Was this part of a pattern or did he want to confine his mistakes to one place by turning Foster’s into his confessional?
A waiter pointed to a corner table. Joe stood when I approached, literally with hat in hand, looking about as hangdog as a man can look. He didn’t hug me or give me a peck on the cheek as he usually did. Maybe he was afraid of how I’d react. He didn’t even give me a chance to say hello before he started with his apologies.
“Can we sit?” I asked, interrupting him.
That jarred him and he appeared even more ashamed, if such a thing were possible. He came around the table, pulled out the chair for me, and gently pushed it in after I sat down. Once seated across from me, he stared straight into my eyes. That was the kind of man he was. He’d done something wrong, and he would take responsibility for it.
“I’ve gotten in fights before, but I’ve never hit a girl,” he said. “I’m a heel, and I’m very sorry that you had to take the brunt of my anger.” He hung his head. “But honestly, if I saw Ruby again, I can’t say what I’d do. I hate myself for that.”
“Joe, I don’t want to talk about Ruby. I want to talk about being hit-”
When he started to apologize again, I put up a hand to stop him.
“We’ve been friends a long time,” I said, “but there are things you don’t know about me. If you can be honest with me, then I should be honest with you. But, Joe, this is hard-”
“Just tell me. Whatever you have to say, I can take.”
This time I was the one who stared him straight in the eyes. “My father used to beat me. I ran away from home because of the things he did to me.”
“Oh, God, Grace,” he said, shocked and even more horrified by what he’d done to me. “You must have looked at me like I was your dad.”
“You’re nothing like him, but that doesn’t mean your temper doesn’t scare me. So I’m only going to say this once. What happened on Treasure Island and what happened in Hollywood were partly my fault. I jumped in front of you when you were angry. I understand that. But I won’t do it again. I can’t do it again. And I can’t be around someone who would ever hit me ever again.”
“If I even thought something like that could happen, then I’d stay away,” he said.
“Promise?”
“You have my absolute word.”
With that, I reached across the table and put my hand over his. We sat connected, yet in silence, for a long while.
AFTER I RECOVERED, I replaced Ruby as the headliner at the Forbidden City. Charlie billed me as “The Oriental Danseuse featured in the soon-to-be-released motion picture Aloha, Boys!” Customers were entranced by my new fake scarlet fingernails. Reporters wrote about their grace and expressiveness. When asked how they got that way, I cracked, “Exercise!” Readers ate it up. Customers did too. The dressing room filled with bouquets. Charlie paid me a ton of money, and I was able to afford Ruby’s apartment on my own, but I let Ida stay because I was lonely, and she made me laugh. One of Ida’s aunts had taken her to see Oklahoma! back in high school. Ida loved to twirl around the apartment singing “I Cain’t Say No.” I called her I Do Annie instead of Ado Annie. We both got a kick out of the silliness. Ida was earning her label as a Victory Girl the old-fashioned way-by latching on to Marines and martinis with equal enthusiasm. She toned it down when Ray came to town, but he was mistrustful, cagey, and menacing nevertheless.
Just as bad luck sometimes masquerades as good luck, good luck can also masquerade as bad luck. My big break had come at the expense of my best friend, so someone started the rumor that I’d reported Ruby. I became a bull’s-eye for target practice, but definitely.
“You always wanted to be the top performer,” Bessie, the eldest of the Lim Sisters, sniped.
“You’re the one who glued on Ruby’s patch,” Esther pointed out. “You must have hated her for that.”
Once I walked into the dressing room and heard Helen confiding to a cluster of ponies: “Grace would do anything to be a star. They say she tricked Ruby into taking her to Hollywood.”
“You know it wasn’t like that!” I exclaimed.
“I’m just repeating what I heard,” Helen admitted, more than a little embarrassed.
“I’m still shocked, Helen, that you’d get caught up in gossip.”
“You’re right, and I’m sorry,” she said, but the damage had been done. I could see on the faces of the other ponies that none of them believed me.
The only person who truly came to my defense was Ida.
“That’s because you live with Grace in her fancy apartment,” one of the newer ponies jibed.
Actually, Ida, who’d never been my biggest fan, had seen me every day and knew how devastated I was by what had happened to Ruby. Either that, or she was a better performer than I imagined. Still, the other girls tormented me, but the last straw was Irene.
“You’re the only one of us who goes to Western Union once a month,” she said, wily as a rat.
“I send money to my mother,” I explained.
“Sure you do.”
I lost control. “Stop it! Stop it, all of you!” The others took my outburst as proof of my guilt. After I regained my composure, I asked, “How do I know one of you didn’t do it?”
But the allegations against me continued and were impossible to fight. I was known to go to Western Union; Ruby and I had traveled to Hollywood together and only I had come back; I got the big break, not Ruby. I became a headliner, and my friends dropped me like a hot rock. They stopped asking me to parties, for drinks, or to go out after the show for scrambled eggs. And still no one knew what had become of Ruby. She was constantly on my mind, though. And Joe’s too, with his memories of her still painfuclass="underline"
Grace, even now when I think about Ruby- How could she have lied to me like that? If she’d jilted me with another guy, maybe that would have been easier to take. Now I play things in my head again and again. The level of deceit, and for so long. And what does it say about me that I couldn’t tell? Maybe she was right. I saw what I wanted to see.
I didn’t bother him with my troubles. Instead I tried to distract him, writing newsy items I hoped would amuse him:
The War Production Board has ordered all of California’s wine grapes to be made into raisins for the troops. When you and your friends eat them, you can think of our sacrifice!
And:
A Navy blimp spotted an enemy submarine outside the Golden Gate Bridge today. Dropped depth charges; sank a whale.
I wanted every smile I gave him to lessen his heartbreak.
ALOHA, BOYS! WAS released. Here’s a Hollywood truism: even a bad movie with a mediocre performance can sell a song, a new fashion, or a novelty dance. Almost overnight, everyone wanted me to perform the routine I’d made up on the spur of the moment. I had wanted to be the new Eleanor Powell-the Chinese Eleanor Powell-with all her finesse and charm. Instead, I became famous for a Siamese, Hawaiian… Aw, what the heck. Let’s just call it what it was: an Oriental mishmash. It was not at all what I’d had in mind for myself, not when Eleanor Powell, Ginger Rogers, or even Ann Miller was the ideal.
But no matter how popular I was or how many boys asked me to sign photographs for them, the suspicions about me wouldn’t go away. I could have been back in Plain City, with people whispering about me in the dressing room, avoiding me when I walked backstage, ignoring me if I asked a question or said someone looked nice that day. Eventually, the animosity started to overflow into the audience.