Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel (30 page)

My new friend Mr. Cecil is a famous hat designer here and is the costume designer for the theater. He’s tall and skinny and has dyed blond hair and is the funniest person I have ever met There are ten young boys that work with him at his hat salon and everyone calls them the Cecilettes. They are a riot. We go out drinking together after the show. Mr. Cecil doesn’t usually like girls, but I am an exception. He thinks I am pretty and he is going to help me dress better and fix my hair. It nearly killed me when he plucked my eyebrows, but I look a lot better.

A lot of people don’t like him, but he is a real tragic figure. When his best friend, who was a hairdresser at Gamble’s Department Store, wanted to go to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, Mr. Cecil worked for three weeks and designed him a great Snow White costume before he put him on the Greyhound bus. He hasn’t heard from him since, and that was five years ago this February. Every year he goes to New Orleans to look for him. After losing my best friend, I know just how he feels.

I also like Professor Teasley, our director, a lot. He has long white hair and a daughter who is a professional actress in Chicago. The money to build the theater came from his mother, Mrs. Nanny C. Teasley, who is very rich and a little deaf. On opening nights, which is when she comes to the theater, everyone has to scream their lines. She always wears a long black dress and carries a black cane with a solid gold top on it, but you have to be careful, because she likes to hit people in the knee with it Mr. Cecil and I went out to her house the other day. She is having an evening of culture in her front yard for the John Birch Society consisting of a dance and a poetry reading, and she wants him to design the costumes for her and me to run the spotlight. We don’t know when it will be. Mrs. Teasley says the dance is about moon goddesses and we will have to wait for a full moon.

Her house is a big white plantation, right on the water. She
showed me the medal she got from the Hattiesburg VFW in 1943, for single-handedly shooting down two enemy planes over the Mississippi Bay. Unfortunately they were both United States weather planes from Pensacola, Florida, but because the pilots hadn’t been killed and she thought they were the enemy, they gave her the medal anyway. Besides, Mr. Cecil says she donates a lot of money to the VFW.

As a hobby she raises crabs. When I saw all those crabs running around, I asked her if she ever got pinched. She said yes, but if you love crabs like she does, they can pinch you and pinch you and you don’t feel a thing.

The next play we are doing at the theater is
The Crucible
which is about witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Mr. Cecil is sick about it, the costumes are so dull. Since they don’t need a spotlight for that play, I am working the light board downstairs.

I took Mr. Cecil over to Jonnie’s bar to meet Daddy and Jimmy Snow and you should have heard what stupid Jimmy Snow said. I told Jimmy Snow that Mr. Cecil was a friend of mine and if he didn’t like him to shut up. What if Mr. Cecil is unusually graceful for a man? He’s a lot nicer than any of Jimmy’s friends and a much better dresser and besides that, he knows all the best people in town.

Yesterday Mr. Cecil took me over to meet a friend of his who is a sculptress and comes from a very rich family, but has been disowned. Her name is Paris Knights. She’s beautiful and uses a black cigarette holder and wears army pants with pearls.
She also takes snuff and cusses like a sailor. Paris is very sophisticated if you ask me.

You should see her sculptures. I know what they are, I’m not dumb, hundreds of men’s things of all sizes. The reason she got disowned was because she donated one to the Hattiesburg Museum of Art to be auctioned off at a big Beaux Arts Ball. One of the women on the committee thought she recognized her husband’s thing and threw a martini in Paris’s face and caused a big upset. Paris said the resemblance was just wishful thinking on that woman’s part.

Mr. Cecil told me that when she lived in New York, she had an affair with Marlon Brando. I wonder if one of those things is Marlon Brando’s.

While we were there, Paris served us some wine and a French cheese called Camembert. It is the first foreign food I’ve ever had except Mrs. Romeo’s Italian food and some Chinese food at Joy Pong’s Restaurant.

When Paris asked me if I believed in free love, I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes. She’s had affairs with all kinds of men, including Orientals. She thinks I am at the age where I should be experiencing life. To tell you the truth,
I
think I’d better wait. I haven’t even gone to bed with an American man yet. She’s looking for an apprentice to help her in her studio, but I don’t feel like handling those sculptures of hers. Maybe Catholic school has made me a prude.

Daddy has a new girlfriend. This one is the worst yet. Jimmy Snow said she couldn’t help being so ugly, but she could at least stay home. I think she just wants free drinks.

Tootie, Helen and Dolores are secretaries that work at the theater. Since they all want husbands, I took them over to Daddy’s bar, hoping one of them would like Daddy so he would quit running around with that ugly woman. They didn’t like Daddy, but they thought Jimmy Snow was the cutest thing they had ever seen. Jimmy’s so shy he wouldn’t even talk to them. Tootie did the bunny hop all night and couldn’t go to work the next day she had so many blisters.

I wish Daddy’s bar looked better. The walls are all fake wood and stuffed blowfish and a fishnet hang from the ceiling.

Mr. Cecil and I are writing a funny sketch for the cast party. He plays a witch and I interview him at home just like the TV show
Person to Person
.

He’s mad at Mrs. Teasley. She called us up at the last minute to say there was going to be a full moon and the costumes for the dancers were only half finished. It really didn’t matter because it wasn’t a full moon after all, and I missed half of the dancers with my spotlight. Nobody told me they were going to use hoops and balls. You should have seen those girls, they were jumping and leaping all over the yard. One girl stepped on some dog stuff and screamed and stopped dancing, but Mrs. Teasley hit her with her cane and made her go back. At the end of the evening everybody read a poem they had written. Mrs. Teasley’s was the best.

We did our sketch at the cast party for
The Crucible
and it went over great. Professor Teasley said I could be in the next play, it’s called
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Mr. Cecil advised me to hold out for a big part. I want the lead, the one Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie, so I am practicing my diction. All you can hear backstage is people saying “Pepsi-Cola, Pepsi-Cola.” I am screaming at least an hour a day to strip my vocal cords so I will have a low voice. Since Jimmy Snow sleeps all afternoon, I have to sneak into the theater through the ladies’ room window and scream there. It must be working because I am hoarse all the time. If the reviews are good, I’ll bet Kay Bob Benson’s mother reads them. She was always bragging about how she read the Hattiesburg
Press Register
. I got a funny letter from Grandma Pettibone. She isn’t speaking to Aunt Bess since she gave her a party for her sixty-fifth birthday and Aunt Bess got drunk and went up and asked Grandma’s preacher if he knew where she could get some birth control pills.

Professor Teasley assigned the parts in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
today. He says there are no small parts, just small actresses. I think he is dead wrong! Playing the part of a colored maid with only one line, “Storm’s a-coming,” is a small part no matter what. I have already bought Daddy and Jimmy Snow tickets for opening
night. I should have waited. I had more lines as Mother Goose. According to Mr. Cecil, stars start out with small roles. When I asked him to name one, he thought a long time and then said Ann Sothern, but I think he is lying.

There is a scene in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
where the head maid and the other servants bring in a birthday cake and everybody sings “Happy Birthday” to Big Daddy. I hadn’t thought about it before, but on opening night it seemed perfectly reasonable to me a maid would sing along with the family. After all, I was a house maid, not a field hand! At intermission Professor Teasley flew backstage and demanded I get out of my costume because I was no longer in the play. He said I ruined opening night, that maids don’t sing “Happy Birthday” and throw kisses and scream, “I love you, Big Daddy.” Evidently I was the only one the audience heard. I was just trying to be loud for his deaf mother, that’s all. What is the matter with improvising? All the people at the Actors Studio in New York do it. Paris Knights, who was there, thought it gave the play an interesting twist and made it look like Big Daddy was having a hot affair with one of the colored maids. Thank God, Daddy and Jimmy Snow didn’t show up!

I am back doing lights for the next play and does it stink! It is an original written by some woman in Jackson named Mrs. Mamie Kole Stafford, called
I Heard a Cry of Despair from the Bougainvillaea
. The play takes place in Macon, Georgia, on the hottest day of the year. Here’s page 1:

Oh, brother.

The story concerns a spinster who is afraid of inheriting a bad case of menopause that had caused her mother to go mad.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was reviewed in the Hattiesburg
Press Register
, but I wasn’t mentioned. The reviewer did say that Mrs. Nanny C. Teasley, the director’s mother, was heard to laugh out loud several times during dramatic parts of the play.

Today after school I went over to Daddy’s bar and there sat Pickle’s brother, Lem Watkins. He’s been in the Army for eight months and is about ready to go to Germany for two years. When he heard Daddy was running a bar in Hattiesburg, he decided to look me up. We sat there and had a few beers and he told me what had happened. He thought I should know it wasn’t Mustard Smoot that had gotten Pickle pregnant.

Pickle had been home alone, ironing some clothes one Saturday afternoon, when her daddy came in from one of his speaking trips for the White Citizens’ Council and began screaming at her and accusing her of having sex with Mustard. He started hitting her and calling her names, then he dragged her into the back room and raped her. When Lem got home and found her all beaten up and bleeding, he got a gun and went after his father
to kill him, but he never found him. They told Mrs. Watkins what had happened, but she wouldn’t believe it and said that if it was true, Pickle had caused it. When Pickle discovered she was pregnant, Mustard married her. Lem said he had to leave home because he knew if he ever saw his father again, he would kill him for sure. He started to cry and made me swear never to let Pickle know he had told me, because she was so ashamed. The last thing he had heard was that his bastard father was home again, saying grace every night.

All this time I was only thinking of myself and how Pickle had deserted me. She must have been going through hell all by herself. What kind of friend was I that she couldn’t tell me? I guess I had talked too much about us leaving and going to New York and she was afraid she would disappoint me. I don’t hate Mr. Watkins. What I feel for him is deeper. Why does somebody like that go on living and somebody like my mother, who never hurt anyone, die? I’m going to see Pickle tomorrow.

I took a bus to Magnolia Springs and got off in front of the bakery. I asked all over town if anybody knew where Pickle was. The woman at the drugstore said she heard she was working at the potato shed. When I got there, some old country woman told me a girl named Pickle Smoot was working in Shed No. 3. As I was walking over, I remembered how Pickle and I always joked about the people that worked at the potato shed.

I saw her before she saw me. She was separating potatoes and my heart was pounding so hard I almost didn’t have the nerve to go up to her. I said “Pickle?” She looked at me for a long time
and then, as if seeing me was the most natural thing in the world, she said, “Hey, girl, what are you doing down here?” I told her I was just back for a day and thought I’d look her up to say hello.

She told me to wait a minute so she could let some man know she was going to take a break. When I asked how she was, she said, “Just as fine as kind,” and that Mustard was farming for his daddy and she had a wonderful little boy named Lemuel. I explained all about the theater I was in, but the whole time I was talking I kept looking at her. She seemed old and tired, and her eyes weren’t Pickle’s eyes at all.

Pretty soon we just stood there and didn’t have anything more to say. Finally, she said, “Well, I better get back to work,” and then she asked, “Hey, girl, are you still gonna be an old maid?”

“I guess so.”

“Well you ought to give married life a chance sometime.”

Just as she was leaving, I asked, “Pickle, do you ever take any more pictures?”

She looked at me sorta funny. “Pictures?”

“You know, photographs, like you used to?”

“Oh, yeah. That was so long ago, I had forgotten. Write me a letter sometime, ya hear.”

I walked back to town and got on the bus. The whole way home I was looking out the window. I don’t think there is anything in the world sadder than dead things along the side of the road. Do you?

Mr. Cecil is back from his yearly trip to New Orleans. He didn’t find his friend this time either. He’s about to give up hope. He ought to contact the Missing Persons Bureau like they did for my Granddaddy Pettibone when he disappeared