“I have something for you,” said Lavinia. She reached for an envelope on a side table, but her shaky hand couldn’t grasp it.
Hazel picked it up and took the chair opposite. “What is it?”
“Open it up.”
Inside were two tickets to the Tony Awards, to be held at the Shubert Theatre in two days’ time. The note inside explained they were a gift from Jeffrey Hubert, a former student of Lavinia’s who’d recently mounted a revival of Wartime Sonata to some acclaim at a claustrophobic downtown theater. While Hazel had granted the rights for the production, she’d avoided most of the rehearsals and sat through only one performance, her words too dear and painful to hear spoken out loud. The production had a small budget and a bare-bones set, and Hazel had kept her expectations low.
“How nice,” she said. “That Jeffrey is a lovely boy. Too bad I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are. I insist.” Lavinia pounded her closed fist on one knee. “You deserve to get some kudos already, kiddo. Look at that article in The New York Times, you’re on the rise.”
In a way, Lavinia was right. To Hazel’s surprise, the play had sold out and been extended, twice. Soon after the glowing reviews appeared, Hazel and the director had been interviewed for a feature in The New York Times, where Hazel spoke with bitter honesty about her experiences during the McCarthy era. When the reporter inquired about her current relationship with the famous movie star Maxine Mead, Hazel had hedged, mumbling something about how actors were always falling out of touch, that it was the nature of the business.
She examined the two tickets. “It’s out of the question. There’s no way I could sit in the audience and watch playwrights and actors accept awards, knowing that I’d been snubbed, cast out. Knowing that if I’d begun my career in the late 1950s, after McCarthy was censured and the blacklist drifted into oblivion, I would have had a clear shot at a career as a playwright.”
“Oh, stop with the self-righteous pity. You were caught in bed with the enemy, let’s not forget.” Hazel began to protest, but Lavinia cut her off. “I know, I know, true love and all that. In any event, what happened happened, the good and the bad. I would go myself if I wasn’t stuck in this wheelchair. Before you know it, you’ll be like me, an invalid, and wish you’d said yes more than you’d said no.”
“You’re far from an invalid.”
Lavinia’s voice dropped to a lower register, one that she used only when she was dead serious. “Please, Hazel. Jeffrey insists and he’ll be quite upset with me if you don’t.”
Up in her room, Hazel put the envelope with the tickets on the mantel of her fireplace. She couldn’t decide anything right now, first she had to deal with this ridiculous move. She started by blindly sorting through her clothes, tossing them into a suitcase. The dress she’d worn to the opening of Wartime Sonata on Broadway, the old winter coat she should’ve replaced a few years ago, the inside of the pockets reduced to shreds, but still couldn’t afford to throw out. She stopped and poured a glass of wine to steady her nerves. Hazel spent too much time alone these days, which meant that she could get lost in her head if she weren’t careful, the memories churning past like thunderclouds.
A knock on the door interrupted her bleak thoughts.
“Who is it?”
These days, it wasn’t smart to open your door without checking first—drug dealers roamed the hallways, and every so often someone went out in a body bag, from either an overdose or a murder—but the peephole to Hazel’s door had been painted over years ago.
A muffled voice responded.
“Who? I can’t hear you.”
The familiar voice, louder, echoed in her ears.
“Hazel, open up. It’s me. It’s Charlie. Charlie Butterfield.”
Hazel opened the door. Charlie stepped back as she did so, as if a gust of wind had blown him off-balance.
She put a hand to her hair, suddenly aware of how different she must look to him. In the past decade, she’d let it grow long, like the hippie girls who paraded through the halls in cutoff shorts and see-through tunics. Well, perhaps not quite as hippie as all that. But her formerly blond locks were now streaked with gray and her face, she knew, showed evidence of the hardship of her middle years.
Like many men with boyish features, Charlie didn’t seem to have aged much in the almost two decades they’d been apart. Just a few speckles of peppery gray along the temples and some lines at the corners of his eyes, but that was it.
“Charlie.”
He looked past her to the scattering of clothes and suitcases on the floor. “You going somewhere?”
She stepped back, surveying the mess. “You could say that.”
“I was hoping we could talk. Can we talk? I don’t want to intrude, but I have something important to tell you.”
She studied him, uncertain. After all this time, what did they really have to say to each other? She didn’t want to bother explaining her decisions. Nor did she want to hear his.
Charlie must have sensed her reluctance. “Look, I don’t have to come inside. Is that diner down the street still around? Can we go there and I’ll buy you a coffee or something?”
She could use a coffee. Her stomach growled. She was starving as well. Back when they were lovers, they’d order grilled cheese at the diner after their romps in bed. Back when.
“Fine. Give me a minute.” She left him standing out in the hallway as she gathered her purse and coat, smoothing her hair in the mirror by the front door. This unexpected reunion hadn’t sent her spiraling into confusion the way she might have expected it to. Then again, she’d dated men in the intervening years, even fallen in love a couple of times, although nothing lasted more than a year, usually because she got bored or annoyed. Life had moved on.
The elevator descended slowly, stopping on the fourth floor to pick up a shaggy, deep-voiced kid—Stanley had mentioned he was some Canadian poet/rock star—and a rough-looking woman he called Janis who wore a blue fur coat that looked like it’d been run over by a truck. They barely noticed Hazel and Charlie, murmuring gravelly whispers to each other as the car descended.
Embarrassed, Hazel stared straight ahead.
Out in the street, Charlie let out a breath. “Wow. The hotel’s really changed since I was there last.”
Her defenses kicked in. Only the residents had the right to disparage the place. “Not really. It’s still full of artistic types, it’s just that the mediums have changed. Films are different, songs are different. So the people who live in the Chelsea reflect that. Classical composers have been replaced by rockers, compositional painters by pop artists. Who knows what it’ll be like in another twenty years?”
“You sound like you don’t mind it.”
“The entire city is different. You can’t expect your little piece of the pie to stay the same.”
They made it to the diner and she slid into a booth, happy to have the table between them. They both ordered coffee and grilled cheese.
Charlie placed his napkin in his lap, not looking up. “My father was eventually sued, did you hear about that?”
She had. In 1962, a radio show host named John Henry Faulk had won $3.5 million in a libel suit against Laurence Butterfield and Vincent Hartnett, for damage done to his name and career during the blacklist. In a strange twist, Charlie’s father had died the night before the judgment was announced.
“I had heard. I’m sorry you lost your father.” And she was. Having lost her own, she knew how disorienting it was to lose a parent. Even one as pigheaded as Laurence Butterfield.
“I’m glad Faulk got his day in court and won. After everything my father did.”