“Buy a flower, sir?” she asked Francis.
“Why not? How much?”
“Just a quarter.”
“Give us one.”
He fished a quarter out of his pants and pinned the gardenia on Helen’s lapel with a pin the girl handed him. “It’s been a while since I bought you flowers,” he said. “You gonna sing up there for us, you gotta put on the dog a little.”
Helen leaned over and kissed Francis on the mouth, which always made him blush when she did it in public. She was always a first-rate heller between the sheets, when there was sheets, when there was somethin’ to do between them.
“Francis always bought me flowers,” she said. “He’d get money and first thing he’d do was buy me a dozen roses, or a white orchid even. He didn’t care what he did with the money as long as I got my flowers first. You did that for me, didn’t you, Fran?”
“Sure did,” said Francis, but he could not remember buying an orchid, didn’t know what orchids looked like.
“We were lovebirds,” Helen said to Oscar, who was smiling at the spectacle of bum love at his bar. “We had a beautiful apartment up on Hamilton Street. We had all the dishes anybody’d ever need. We had a sofa and a big bed and sheets and pillowcases. There wasn’t anything we didn’t have, isn’t that right, Fran?”
“That’s right,” Francis said, trying to remember the place.
“We had flowerpots full of geraniums that we kept alive all winter long. Francis loved geraniums. And we had an icebox crammed full of food. We ate so well, both of us had to go on a diet. That was such a wonderful time.”
“When was that?” Pee Wee asked. “I didn’t know you ever stayed anyplace that long.”
“What long?”
“I don’t know. Months musta been if you had an apartment.”
“I was here awhile, six weeks maybe, once.”
“Oh we had it much longer than that,” Helen said.
“Helen knows,” Francis said. “She remembers. I can’t call one day different from another.”
“It was the drink,” Helen said. “Francis wouldn’t stop drinking and then we couldn’t pay the rent and we had to give up our pillowcases and our dishes. It was Haviland china, the very best you could buy. When you buy, buy the best, my father taught me. We had solid mahogany chairs and my beautiful upright piano my brother had been keeping. He didn’t want to give it up, it was so nice, but it was mine. Paderewski played on it once when he was in Albany in nineteen-oh-nine. I sang all my songs on it.”
“She played pretty fancy piano,” Francis said. “That’s no joke. Why don’t you sing us a song, Helen?”
“Oh I guess I will.”
“What’s your pleasure?” Oscar asked.
“I don’t know. ‘In the Good Old Summertime,’ maybe.”
“Right time to sing it,” Francis said, “now that we’re freezin’ our ass out there.”
“On second thought,” said Helen, “I want to sing one for Francis for buying me that flower. Does your friend know ‘He’s Me Pal,’ or ‘My Man’?”
“You hear that, Joe?”
“I hear,” said Joe the piano man, and he played a few bars of the chorus of “He’s Me Pal” as Helen smiled and stood and walked to the stage with an aplomb and grace befitting her reentry into the world of music, the world she should never have left, oh why ever did you leave it, Helen? She climbed the three steps to the platform, drawn upward by familiar chords that now seemed to her to have always evoked joy, chords not from this one song but from an era of songs, thirty, forty years of songs that celebrated the splendors of love, and loyalty, and friendship, and family, and country, and the natural world. Frivolous Sal was a wild sort of devil, but wasn’t she dead on the level too? Mary was a great pal, heaven-sent on Christmas morning, and love lingers on for her. The new-mown hay, the silvery moon, the home fires burning, these were sanctuaries of Helen’s spirit, songs whose like she had sung from her earliest days, songs that endured for her as long as the classics she had committed to memory so indelibly in her youth, for they spoke to her, not abstractly of the aesthetic peaks of the art she had once hoped to master, but directly, simply, about the everyday currency of the heart and soul. The pale moon will shine on the twining of our hearts. My heart is stolen, lover dear, so please don’t let us part. Oh love, sweet love, oh burning love-the songs told her-you are mine, I am yours, forever and a day. You spoiled the girl I used to be, my hope has gone away. Send me away with a smile, but remember: you’re turning off the sunshine of my life.
Love.
A flood tide of pity rose in Helen’s breast. Francis, oh sad man, was her last great love, but he wasn’t her only one. Helen has had a lifetime of sadnesses with her lovers. Her first true love kept her in his fierce embrace for years, but then he loosened that embrace and let her slide down and down until the hope within her died. Hopeless Helen, that’s who she was when she met Francis. And as she stepped up to the microphone on the stage of The Gilded Cage, hearing the piano behind her, Helen was a living explosion of unbearable memory and indomitable joy.
And she wasn’t a bit nervous either, thank you, for she was a professional who had never let the public intimidate her when she sang in a church, or at musicales, or at weddings, or at Woolworth’s when she sold song sheets, or even on the radio with that audience all over the city every night. Oscar Reo, you’re not the only one who sang for Americans over the airwaves. Helen had her day and she isn’t a bit nervous.
But she is… all right, yes, she is… a girl enveloped by private confusion, for she feels the rising ofjoy and sorrow simultaneously and she cannot say whether one or the other will take her over during the next few moments.
“What’s Helen’s last name?” Oscar asked.
“Archer,” Francis said. “Helen Archer.”
“Hey,” said Rudy, “how come you told me she didn’t have a last name?”
“Because it don’t matter what anybody tells you,” Francis said. “Now shut up and listen.”
“A real old-time trouper now,” said Oscar into the bar mike, “will give us a song or two for your pleasure, lovely Miss Helen Archer.”
And then Helen, still wearing that black rag of a coat rather than expose the even more tattered blouse and skirt that she wore beneath it, standing on her spindle legs with her tumorous belly butting the metal stand of the microphone and giving her the look of a woman five months pregnant, casting boldly before the audience this image of womanly disaster and fully aware of the dimensions of this image, Helen then tugged stylishly at her beret, adjusting it forward over one eye. She gripped the microphone with a sureness that postponed her disaster, at least until the end of this tune, and sang then “He’s Me Pal,” a ditty really, short and snappy, sang it with exuberance and wit, with a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes, a twist of the wrist that suggested the proud virtues. Sure, he’s dead tough, she sang, but his love ain’t no bluff. Wouldn’t he share his last dollar with her? Hey, no millionaire will ever grab Helen. She’d rather have her pal with his fifteen a week. Oh Francis, if you only made just fifteen a week.
If you only.
The applause was full and long and gave Helen strength to begin “My Man,” Fanny Brice’s wonderful torch, and Helen Morgan’s too. Two Helens. Oh Helen, you were on the radio, but where did it take you? What fate was it that kept you from the great heights that were yours by right of talent and education? You were born to be a star, so many said it. But it was others who went on to the heights and you were left behind to grow bitter. How you learned to envy those who rose when you did not, those who never deserved it, had no talent, no training. There was Carla, from high school, who could not even carry a tune but who made a movie with Eddie Cantor, and there was Edna, ever so briefly from Woolworth’s, who sang in a Broadway show by Cole Porter because she learned how to wiggle her fanny. But ah, sweetness was Helen’s, for Carla went off a cliff in an automobile, and Edna sliced her wrists and bled her life away in her lover’s bathtub, and Helen laughed last. Helen is singing on a stage this very minute and just listen to the voice she’s left with after all her troubles. Look at those well-dressed people out there hanging on her every note.