China Dolls (32 page)

Joe

He could have called. In fact, he could have called at any point during the last week and a half. That he hadn’t told me just how twisted up he was inside.

O
N 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.

A
FTER
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 painful:

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.

A
LOHA
, B
OYS
!
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.

Then Charlie fired me. I couldn’t believe it, not after he’d come to my house with soup, put my name in lights, and was raking in plenty of cabbage
I
had earned for him.

“You’re giving me the bounce?” I asked. When he nodded, I tried to defend myself. “You know I didn’t do anything, Charlie. I’d never hurt Ruby.”

He jutted his chin.

I went on. “It could have been someone in the audience or from one of the other clubs. It could have been Irene. Or Bessie. The ones who talk the loudest are the guiltiest.”

“You’re causing too much trouble,” Charlie said.

“But I’m a hit! Who are you going to get to replace me? First Ruby. Now—”

“Esther’s going to do her girl-in-the-gilded-cage act.”

“Are you kidding? Maybe
she—
”

He cut me off. “You’re a doll, Grace, but I’m tired of all the name-calling and bellyaching. You’ve made me a lot of money, but I have a business to run. I can’t afford to have bad blood spill out to the front of the house. I can’t risk queering all my hard work.”

“
Your
hard work—”

“You’ll land just fine, because there are plenty of other clubs in Chinatown …”

I walked out of the Forbidden City with my tail between my legs and a big guilty sign on my back. And there wasn’t one goddamn thing I could do about it. I wrote to Joe, and he called me right away from the pay phone on the base. He was livid, but it didn’t scare me because his anger was on my behalf. He was defending me. Soon his words became more comforting. “You’ll get through this, Grace. You’re a resilient woman, and you’re going to come out of this stronger than ever.” He was so convincing that even I, who’d been feeling pretty darned sorry for myself, believed him.

Max Field didn’t let me down either. “Charlie Low’s shortsightedness will be Chinatown’s gain,” he said. “We’ll make him sorry he ever let you go. You watch. When he comes begging with hat in hand, we’re going to sock him one good.”

Max booked me two weeks here, four weeks there. Maybe I was resilient, like Joe said, because I’d finish a run at Andy Wong’s Sky
Room and open at Eddie Pond’s Kubla Khan the next night. I did six weeks with the Lim Sisters, who joined me at the Lion’s Den. They’d refashioned themselves once again. They’d discarded their martini headdresses and now dressed in modified military uniforms and sang from the Andrews Sisters’ repertoire: “Strip Polka,” “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree,” and “Here Comes the Navy.” I played with the Merry Mahjongs at the Club Shanghai, and even ran into Li Tei Ming at a one-nighter at the Club Mandalay. I did my Oriental Danseuse routine and my fame grew. I could walk into a department store without Ruby at my side, and the salesladies recognized me right away.

A
LL THROUGH THE
summer, Joe sent letters to me from Minter Field—sometimes once a week, sometimes more. His missives still had lots of technical information. He’d just finished his advanced pilot’s training in the 650-horsepower AT-6, which had retractable landing gear. “I don’t know yet what assignment I’ll be given—transport, bomber, or cargo plane—but I’m still hoping for a fighter,” he wrote. “Those are the most dangerous and exciting for a guy like me.” As the weeks passed, he stopped mentioning Ruby. The tone of his letters changed, too, as he peppered me with questions: Did I have a five-year plan for my life? What did I want to do after the war? Should he become a lawyer or follow his heart and become a commercial air pilot like he’d always dreamed? I couldn’t imagine that he and Ruby had ever had a single communication like the ones he and I had regularly.

Since that first phone call, he’d gotten into the habit of buzzing me every Sunday morning as well. I’d be as sleepy as all get-out, having been at the club until just before dawn, but he’d be bright and chipper, having just come back from mess hall, chapel, or an early-morning training flight. We talked about nothing, really. Would I ever think about attending a college class? He thought I might enjoy American history or drawing. “Or you could take kinesiology,” he suggested. “It might come in handy if you ever want to teach dance.” Soon we were even able to talk about Treasure Island, and it was as though
Ruby had never existed. We searched for and found only good memories, because that’s all that mattered. “I’ll never forget the nylon stockings you gave me,” I told him. “What I wouldn’t do for a pair of those now.” He liked to remember how we used to swing-dance together. “I’ve always enjoyed dancing with you,” he said. “We sure know how to cut a rug.” And it was true. We’d always made a great couple on the dance floor.

J
UST BEFORE
T
HANKSGIVING
, an envelope arrived with a return address I didn’t recognize. Inside was a letter from Ruby:

Grace!

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. I wanted to forget myself, forget everything. I have not been a good friend. I hope you’ll forgive me
.

I’m in an internment camp in Utah. The other night after dinner, they showed
Aloha, Boys!
What a surprise! But I’m happy for you, Grace. You looked great
.

There’s a lot I could say, but I’ll boil it down to this. I’m stuck in a sandpit. No one has come to our aid. Not the Red Cross, Salvation Army, nor the ACLU. Maybe you can do something to get me out of here now that you’re a big star
.

Help!

Ruby

When I showed the letter to Helen, she said she’d received something similar: “Everyone at the club got a note from Ruby, and some of the customers too.”

“I should write her …”

“Why? What can you or any of us possibly do for Ruby?” Helen asked. “No one wants to get in trouble, but
you
should be especially careful. Either you housed a Jap or you turned her in. Better to toss the letter and keep out of that mess.”