The Seattle Repertory Playhouse, run by a kindly couple named Florence and Burton, became my refuge. The plays they put on were fancy, with lots of poetic lines—Shakespeare and Chekhov. But I watched every rehearsal and helped out at the box office before landing a couple of small parts as a reward for my industriousness, eventually winning bigger roles. The professional actors passing through, including Lavinia, regaled us with stories of New York City, and I decided then and there to head east after high school.
My father told me the choice was teaching or nursing. No way would he have a daughter in the theater, exposing herself to ridicule. One evening, my grandmother stole into my bedroom and sat beside me on the bed in the dark.
“You want to go to New York? Leave me behind?” She spoke in German, knowing my father wouldn’t understand us.
“I want to make something of myself. I love the theater.”
“What do you love about it?”
I considered the question before answering, nestling into her the way I’d done as a child. “I love the way the actors treat each other, the way a play comes to life. That there are all these moving parts to a show that are entirely separate at first: the actors, the scenery, the lights. Slowly, they all come together and become something bigger. And then, after the applause dies down, it disappears. It’s magical.”
She smelled like peppermint as she reached down and kissed me on the forehead. “Your mother loved watching plays when she was young. We’d go to the puppet shows and she’d insist on climbing behind the stage after the performance, to see how it was put together. She wanted to touch the strings.”
“That’s what I want, as well. I want to touch the strings.”
“Then you go.”
She gave me enough money to get across the country and I checked into the hotel that Lavinia had told me about, a safe haven for artists, for activists, for freedom: the Chelsea. Fifty years earlier, it had been at the center of the theater district, but the Broadway houses had since moved uptown to Times Square, leaving the Chelsea behind. The room I stayed in was tiny, with a balcony decorated with cast-iron sunflowers and a wonderful view overlooking Twenty-Third Street.
Lavinia took me under her wing and got me a job as an usher at one of the smaller theaters, as well as an agent. Eventually, I began getting roles in touring productions. Somehow, though, I could never break through to the big time and land a part on the Broadway stage. Even though I tease Hazel about her serial understudying, part of me is jealous she’s worked on the Great White Way. She got to watch Gene Kelly and Uta Hagen from the wings, had the chance to show up at opening-night parties and hobnob with the big-time critics, producers, and players. Better than singing your heart out in Cleveland for peanuts, then packing up and doing it all over again in another town, another state. To a bunch of nobodies.
It’s funny, but sometimes I feel more for Hazel than I have for anyone else in my life, and other times I want to strangle her. I suppose this is what it must be like to have a sister.
How tenuous the line is between friends and enemies in a world at war.
Hazel’s crying on her cot, inconsolable.
We went to Naples to do the broadcast, secretly hoping for a chance to say goodbye to Paul, to wish him well. Colonel Peterson looked up from his desk but didn’t rise, just pointed to the chairs and suggested we sit.
“There was a miscommunication,” he said. “We gave instructions to release the German boy to the British. Either they didn’t understand or they chose not to, but instead he was released into the general population of the jail.”
My stomach lurched at the thought. A German teenager among Italian convicts.
“What happened? Is he all right?” I asked.
No. He wasn’t.
As soon as the prisoners had been herded out into the courtyard for fresh air, two of them had dragged Paul over to a far corner, the colonel told us. One by one, the others drifted over to punch, kick, or stab Paul with whatever weapons they’d hidden from the guards. Never enough movement to draw attention in the crowded enclosure, but enough to brutalize. When they were called back into their cells, Paul lay crumpled in the dirt, breathing, but barely. He died on the way to the hospital.
We saved him from one mob, but he was torn apart by another.
Hazel hasn’t stopped crying since. She paused once in her tears to wonder out loud what was it all for, why we even bothered. I didn’t respond. Because I know that it wasn’t fruitless, it just wasn’t enough.
I thought of the war still raging, and of my grandmother back home, and vowed to not stop fighting.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hazel
August 1945
By August, the heat was unbearable, and news of atomic bombs being dropped on Japan only increased everyone’s anxiety. The crush of the unknown seemed to get worse every day, as the entire camp waited to find out where the next posting would be. Hazel was still haunted by the terrible fate of Paul, but she and Maxine didn’t discuss it, as if it were an infected wound, too raw to be exposed to the air. Silence was the only way to bear whatever came next in the war and not go mad.
Every so often, though, she’d look up and catch Maxine blinking rapidly, overcome by emotion, and Hazel would step in front of her, shielding her from the view of the other girls. Once, during a show, the line “All we have is our hands and a hole in God’s earth” stopped Hazel cold. She couldn’t remember what to say next, or why she was even standing onstage, but Maxine had picked up her cue and carried on with the play. As they crossed paths center stage, Maxine had laid a hand gently on Hazel’s arm. No words were necessary between them.
“Where do you think they’ll send us next?” Betty-Lou propped herself up on her cot, fanning her face with the script for tonight’s performance, a compilation of Hazel’s soldier tales. Colonel Peterson, entranced by her stories and looking for any way to keep the men entertained during the wait, had insisted that the acting troupe read them out loud, onstage. The girls were pleased, as it meant they didn’t have to memorize anything new, just stand center stage and speak.
“I wouldn’t mind being posted to a tropical locale,” said Verna as she added next week’s shows to the calendar with a black pen. “When you’re surrounded by palm trees, the heat doesn’t seem so bad. Maybe one of the Pacific Islands.”
“I’ve had enough.” Phyllis wore only her brassiere and panties, broken up by pink rolls of flesh. She’d stripped down as soon as they’d returned from breakfast, overcome by the flies and the sun. “I want to go home. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to offer comfort and distraction. What about our comfort and distraction?”
Hazel stopped scribbling in her notebook. “We haven’t had to go out and kill people. No one’s tried to shoot at us and kill us. Think of what these soldiers have been through.”
Betty-Lou moaned. “Hazel with her halo, always doing good. Give it another few months, you’ll be complaining like the rest of us.”
Hazel took the teasing with a good-natured smile. “Yes, I’ll be moaning with the rest of you wherever they send us next, I promise.”
“I just want to be somewhere that there’s orange juice. That’s what I miss most.” Phyllis sat up. “A fresh glass of cold orange juice.”
“With bits of pulp so you get the burst of flavor,” added Betty-Lou.
Verna cried out. “Stop, you’re making my mouth water. This is so cruel. When I go home, I’m going right back to Los Angeles, where you can have an orange tree in your own backyard.”
“What are you writing, Hazel?” Maxine asked. “I thought the latest script was final.”
Hazel placed a hand over the page, not that Maxine could read it from where she was hanging laundry on the makeshift clothesline, filling the tent with the smell of wet stockings and Shalimar.