The way she sang that night, it was as though she were challenging the audience, person by person. It was as if she were demanding: And you’ve never been hurt? And you’ve never had your heart broken? And you’ve never taken a risk for love?
By the end, she had them weeping—while she stood dry-eyed in their ovations.
To this day, I have never seen a mightier woman.
—
I knocked on the dressing-room door with a hand that felt, itself, like a piece of wood.
“Come in,” she said.
My head had a cottony feel. My ears were stuffed up and numbed. My mouth tasted like cigarette-flavored cornmeal. My eyes were dry and sore—both from lack of sleep and from crying. I had not eaten for twenty-four hours and I couldn’t imagine ever eating again. I was still wearing the same dress I’d worn to the Stork Club. My hair, I’d left unattended all day. (I hadn’t been able to confront a mirror.) My legs felt curiously unattached to the rest of my body; I didn’t understand how my legs knew how to walk. For a minute there, they didn’t. Then I pushed myself into the room like a person jumping off a cliff into the cold ocean below.
Edna was standing in front of her dressing-room mirror, haloed in its blazing lights. Her arms were folded, her posture relaxed. She’d been waiting for me. She was still in her costume—the showstopping evening gown I’d made for her finale so many months ago. Shimmering blue silk and rhinestones.
I stood before her, head bowed. I was a good foot taller than this woman—but at that moment, I was a rodent at her feet.
“Why don’t you speak first?” she said.
Well, I hadn’t exactly prepared any remarks. . . .
But her invitation was not really an invitation; it was a command. So I opened my mouth and began pouring out ragged, hapless, directionless sentences. Mine was a liturgy of excuses, contained within a flood of pathetic apologies. There were pleas to be forgiven. There were grasping offerings to make things better. But there was also cowardliness and denial. (“It was just the one time, Edna!”) And I’m very sorry to report that—at some point in my messy speech—I quoted Arthur Watson as having said of his wife, “She likes them young.”
I spun through all the stupid words I had, and Edna let me twist without interrupting or responding. Finally, I stuttered to a stop, coughing up my last bit of verbal trash. Then I stood silent once more, sickly under her blinkless gaze.
At last Edna said in a disturbingly mild tone, “The thing that you don’t understand about yourself, Vivian, is that you’re not an interesting person. You are pretty, yes—but that’s only because you are young. The prettiness will soon fade. But you will never be an interesting person. I’m telling you this, Vivian, because I believe you’ve been laboring under the misconception that you are interesting, or that your life has significance. But you are not, and it doesn’t. I once thought you had the potential to become an interesting person, but I was incorrect. Your Aunt Peg is an interesting person. Olive Thompson is an interesting person. I am an interesting person. But you are not an interesting person. Do you understand me?”
I nodded.
“What you are, Vivian, is a type of person. To be more specific, you are a type of woman. A tediously common type of a woman. Do you think I’ve not encountered your type before? Your sort will always be slinking around, playing your boring and vulgar little games, causing your boring and vulgar little problems. You are the type of woman who cannot be a friend to another woman, Vivian, because you will always be playing with toys that are not your own. A woman of your type often believes she is a person of significance because she can make trouble and spoil things for others. But she is neither important nor interesting.”
I opened my mouth to talk, ready to spurt out some more disconnected garbage, but Edna put up her hand. “You may want to consider preserving whatever dignity you have remaining to you, my dear, by not speaking anymore.”
The fact that she said this with a trace of a smile—even with the slightest hint of fondness—is what destroyed me.
“There’s something else you should know, Vivian. Your friend Celia spent so much time with you because she thought you were an aristocrat—but you’re not one. And you spent so much time with Celia because you thought she was a star—but she’s not one. She will never be a star, just as you will never be an aristocrat. The two of you are just a pair of dreadfully average girls. Types of girls. There are a million more just like you.”
I felt my heart collapsing down to its smallest possible dimension—until it became a crumpled cube of foil, crushed in her dainty fist.
“Would you like to know what you must do now, Vivian, in order to stop being a type of person—and become, instead, a real person?”
I must have nodded.
“Then I shall tell you. There is nothing you can do. No matter how hard you may try to gain substance throughout your life, it will never work. You will never be anything, Vivian. You will never be a person of the slightest significance.”
She smiled tenderly.
“And unless I miss my bet,” she concluded, “you’ll probably be going back home to your parents very soon now. Back to where you belong. Won’t you, darling?”
TWENTY-ONE
I spent the next hour in a small telephone booth in the back corner of a nearby all-night drugstore, trying to reach my brother.
I was berserk with distress.
I could have called Walter from the phone at the Lily, but I didn’t want anyone hearing me, and I was too ashamed to show my face around the playhouse, anyhow. So out to the drugstore I ran.
I had in my possession a general phone number for Walter’s OCS barracks on the Upper West Side. He’d given it to me in case of an emergency. Well, this was an emergency. But it was also eleven o’clock at night and nobody was picking up the phone. This didn’t deter me. I kept dropping my nickel into the slot, and listening to the phone ring endlessly on the other end. I would let the phone ring twenty-five times, then hang up and start over again with the same phone number and the same nickel. Sobbing and hiccupping all the while.
It became hypnotic—dialing, counting the rings, hanging up, hearing the nickel drop, putting the nickel back in the slot, dialing, counting the rings, hanging up. Sobbing, wailing.
Then suddenly there was a voice on the other end. A furious voice. “WHAT?!” someone was shouting in my ear. “Goddamn WHAT?!”
I almost dropped the phone. I’d fallen into such a trance, I’d forgotten what telephones are for.
“I need to talk to Walter Morris,” I said, when I recovered my senses. “Please, sir. It’s a family emergency.”
The man on the other end sputtered out a litany of curses (“You Christless, piss-soaked eight ball!”), as well as the expected lecture about do you have any idea what time it is? But his anger was no match for my desperation. I was doing an excellent rendition of a hysterical relative—which, in point of fact, is exactly what I was. My sobs easily overpowered this stranger’s outrage. His shouts about protocol meant nothing to me. Eventually he must’ve realized that his rules were no match for my mayhem, and he went searching for my brother.