I Could Go on Singing (23 page)

Jason Brown knew, before he reached his destination, that he would never forget the taxi ride to Middlesex Hospital. The message had been cryptic, and there had been no one else to take it. Lois, George and Ida had left for the theater a few moments before the call came in, and George had posted Jason in the lobby with stern orders to grab Jenny the moment she appeared, hustle her into a cab and bring her to the theater.

One of the hotel porters had led him to the proper phone. There was so much background noise he had not understood the man very well. “She has been asking for me?” he repeated blankly.

“I think you should get over here as soon as you can, sir.”

The others would not be at the theater yet. And the man had hung up. He decided he could call from the hospital, and from there he could give them some more definite information.

After the pleasant day it had begun to rain again, and the night streets were all sheen and glitter and confusion of lights in the heavy traffic. He sat forward on the seat trying to will the taxi into better speed. He had a sick sense of tragic inevitability, of grisly disaster. He had told the driver it was an emergency, and the man knew the way through the complex of hospital buildings to the entrance with a sign reading MIDDLESEX HOSPITAL; CASUALTY DEPARTMENT. The word had a wartime cadence to him, a sound of aid stations and morphine ampules. It made him think of the grittily apt title on one of Irwin Shaw’s short stories, “Walking Wounded.” And before whatever happened to her had happened, Jenny Bowman could have been so classified. And Lois. And himself.

The taxi pulled up behind a chauffeur-driven car, and Jason thrust money at the driver and hurried up the steps, catching
up to the man who had arrived in the other car just as they both reached the doorway. They went in together.

A tall young man in a white hospital coat came toward them, saying, “Oh, Mr. Donne. So glad you could come so quickly. Hope you don’t mind us getting on to you, but she was asking for you, wouldn’t see any other …”

“Are you talking about Miss Bowman?” Jason asked.

They both turned and gave him a cool and speculative look, the look that implies some social indiscretion.

“Mr. Brown?” the white-coated fellow said dubiously.

“Yes,” Jason said and held his hand out to Donne. “Jason Brown,” he said. “Jenny is my friend.” In spite of Donne’s hesitation before he took the offered hand, Jason liked the look of him. He had a look of quiet purpose, watchfulness, reliability. “Is she badly hurt?” Jason asked.

The man in the white coat looked amused. “That would not be my diagnosis,” he said.

“Where do you have her?” Donne asked.

“We’d have her in an open ward if I hadn’t recognized her, Mr. Donne. She insisted her name was Mudd. Miss Dreary Mudd I believe she said. I am a great admirer of hers, sir. We’re trying to keep the matter entirely confidential.”

“I appreciate that,” Donne said.

“A female person named Landor was trying to see her a bit ago, but I didn’t like the look of her and made excuses. Come along, please. We have her in a treatment room at the moment, off one of the main wards.”

They followed the hospital official along a corridor with benches on either side, lined with people awaiting treatment. They had to make way for a stretcher case being wheeled rapidly down the corridor. When they reached the treatment room, the official held the curtains aside. Jenny sat on a straight chair beside a stretcher. She was looking directly at the doorway. She wore a simple dark dress, and a froth of black fur stole. Her right ankle was taped and resting on a small metal stand. Her elbow was on the stretcher, her hand supporting her tousled head. She looked mild, thoughtful, bemused and quite tight.

“My dear friends,” she said. “My dear oldest best friends. I have a message and a warning for you. Never go to an exhibition of abstract art for the millions.”

The hospital official had gone. Jason stayed by the door. David Donne advanced toward her. “I won’t,” he said.

“And if you do, don’t drink the martinis.”

“Definitely not.” He touched her ankle with clever fingers.

“Ouch. They’re half gasoline, you know.”

“Did you get enough of them?”

“Enough to float Fire Island, darling. Does it show?”

“I was informed.”

“By some sneak. I met a sneak too. A young Lord something. Can I take you home? Oh yes, kind sir. But it was his home he had in mind, not mine. Nobody asked me. In the general uproar I got this.” She pointed at her foot.

“How did you get here?”

“A lovely lovely taxi man name of Gerald. He saw I was in need. They gave me coffee and fixed the ankle and, so help me, they want an autographed photograph for Cousin Marilyn. Which they will get. Isn’t it the end. You take a drink and end up with Dr. Kildare.” She made a face. “Chums, I feel wretched awful.”

David saw the coffee and poured some. “Bit more coffee, Jen?”

“I couldn’t get any more down if you pumped it into a vein. I’m full to the brim. Fed up to here. Fed with the whole goddamned world.”

“Just see if you can wedge a bit more coffee down, dear.”

She looked up at him. “Have you come to take me home?”

David looked inquiringly at Jason. Jason said, “We’ve come to take you to the theater.”

With no trace of alcohol or confusion she said flatly, “Oh no you haven’t. Nobody gets me near that place ever ever again.”

“I imagine they’re waiting for you,” Donne said.

“Tell good old George to give the money back. Tell them Jenny closed to mixed reviews.”

“It’s a sellout,” Jason said.

“Bully for me!”

“They’ll be sitting and waiting for you, Jenny. All of them.”

She leaned forward to scowl at him, her eyes slightly unfocused. “Don’t
wheedle
me, for God’s sake! Let them wait. They want too much and I can’t give it. Not any more. Everybody’s always wanted too much of me. You and you and George and Ida and Lois and Herm and Sid Wegler and Aunty Beth and five thousand other people until there’s nothing left to give. Nothing. I can’t be spread so thin. I don’t want to be rolled out like a pastry so everybody can have a nice big bite. I’m me. My own me. I belong to me, and
from now on I do whatever I damn well please with myself and no questions, buddy.” She got up and took a hesitant limping step, and another, and then seemed to find she could walk reasonably well. “It isn’t worth it,” she said in a different voice. “It isn’t worth all the deaths I have to die.”

“You have a show to do this evening,” Donne said firmly, “and Mr. Brown and I are going to see that you make it.”

She spun around to face them. “Ha! Do you think you can
make
me sing? Does George? You can get me there, but do
you
think you can make me sing, David?”

“No. I can’t do that.”

“I sing because I want to, not because anyone wants or makes me.”

“So hang onto that,” Donne said.

“I hang on good. I’ve hung onto every bit of rubbish in my life. And I’ve thrown all the good parts away. You know me, David. I’m the girl that saves the wrappings off the candy bars and starves to death. Why do I have to be the one to do that? Who elected me?”

She stood close to him. “All I know is that you’re going to be very late,” he said.

“I don’t care,” she said and sat again in the chair.

David Donne knelt beside her and put his arm around her. “Darling,” he said, “I don’t give a damn who you let down, but you’re not going to let yourself down.”

Jason suddenly realized that in their intensified awareness of each other they had forgotten his presence.

Jenny put her hand over her eyes and said, “It’s so very long since I heard you call me that.”

David Donne gently pulled her hand away. “Look at me. Listen to me.”

They looked at each other in silence, and Jason could feel the awareness and the significance of it. He sidled toward the doorway curtains.

“Don’t say anything you don’t mean,” Jenny said in a low voice. “If you say something and don’t mean it, I’ll die right here, this minute.”

“I want to help you, Jenny.”

“Who can help me? He didn’t want to stay with me. He didn’t want to come away with me. He was trying not to hurt me. But I could tell. Oh David, it was such a terrible time of revelation of … of how much I’ve lost.…”

“Help me now, Jenny. Help us both.”

In a small wry sour voice she said, “Of course you did love me and still do and always have.”

“And you’ve always known that.”

“Then
why
?
Why
!” she said wildly.

“Right people at the wrong time. And too strong, each of us. Then making the only bargain we could …”

Jason slipped through the curtains. He looked into the busy ward, saw the hurry of nurses and orderlies. He waited there. The hospital sounds obscured the sounds of the voices behind the curtain. Suddenly David Donne appeared beside him. “Mr. Brown, you might tell the theater she’ll be along.”

“Can she make it?”

“I don’t know. She can try. That’s what’s most important for her. She’s willing to try now. I have a car here. I’ll take her in. Will you come along?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Jenny came through the curtains. She had fixed her hair and freshened her lipstick, but she looked white and listless. “Ready,” she said in a toneless voice.

They went back toward the entrance. The man in the white coat appeared. Jason quickly gave him the theater number and the dressing room extension, and asked him to give the message to George Kogan. He went out and hurried down the steps as David Donne was helping Jenny into the car. He went around and got in beside the chauffeur.

“Palladium, Hodson,” Donne said crisply. “And quickly, please.”

The man was expert. He swung the car through the traffic with a hypnotic rhythm that made it all seem quite leisurely, catching the signals, gliding toward holes that opened up in the traffic pattern and closed again once they were through. Jason could hear them murmur to each other in the back seat, but he could not distinguish the words. Once he looked back for a moment and saw them sitting close, saw the moving lights on her small pallid face, on the shadowy hollows of her eyes.

Jason had thought it would be at least eight thirty before they could reach the theater, but it was just eight fifteen when he directed the driver into the lane and down to the stage door.

The stage door attendant said, with enormous relief, “Miss Bowman!”

She went along the corridor. Donne stopped Jason with a
touch on his arm. “I can’t stay,” he said. “But I’ll be back by the time it’s over. Watch over her, Brown.”

“Yes.…”

The grave face twisted in a sudden spasm. “My God, the things we do to her! The things we ask of her!”

“You better stay until we’re sure she can do it.”

“I can do that. Of course. And … I shall be around a bit. Just until she’s all right again. As all right as she can be.”

Jason ran and caught up with Jenny at the mouth of the dressing room corridor. George Kogan was with her. Jason could hear the cadence clapping in the background, that universal signal of impatience and irritation.

George’s face was like a stone. “… little ray of hope when I got the message. But look at you! There are twenty-five hundred people out there who paid money to see Jenny Bowman and you are going to disappoint all those people. Now that might not mean anything to you any more, but I still have a certain reverence for audiences, and it means a great deal to me. And if now it doesn’t mean anything to you any more, then I am profoundly and genuinely sorry for you, Jenny.”

She made a frail sound of despair and fled from him. George turned on Jason, accusingly. “What the hell made you think I could let her go on? She’s sick and she’s drunk and she’s lame and she’s crying. It would take an hour to straighten her out, and they won’t wait that long. I’ve got to go out there and tell them that our Jenny is …”

At that moment the cadence clapping changed into a great bursting roar of welcome. George froze. His eyes went wide. “My God, has she …” He turned and raced through the backstage jungle to the corner of the stage, with Jason following him.

Jenny was out of reach, limping across the stage to the standing mike, wearing her street clothes, hair tousled, looking like a guilty, untidy urchin.

“Lights down!” George bawled over the uproar. “Get a spot on her. Get the walk-around mike ready.” He turned to Jason and made a face. “Catastrophe. Disaster.”

Jenny reached the mike. She clicked it with a fingernail. She wobbled slightly and looked owlishly at the audience as the stage and house lights went down and the spot caught her. “Hi!” she said. She slipped the fur off and held it up and stared at it. “You like this thing?” The audience did not
know how to react or what to make of her. The scattered laughter sounded nervous.

“Once upon a time maybe it was a big black happy rabbit …” She tossed it behind her into the darkness. “Oh well. Does anybody want to forgive me for being late?”

There was answering applause, shouts of forgiveness.

“Good!” she said. “I love you.” She gestured toward the wings with her thumb. “Nobody back there is ready to forgive me yet.” She looked at the orchestra. “And Larry there looks dreadfully confused. He didn’t get to play the overture. That always baffles him. Frankly, I’ve had a helluva time, and now it’s time to go to work. We haven’t got much organization, but we’ve got a lot of songs.”

There was a shock wave of applause, and people began to yell individual requests. George gripped Jason’s arm hard. “By God, she’s got them! Somehow, she’s got them.”

“I’ll sing ’em all!” Jenny yelled. “I’ll sing every one! I’ll stay all night! I don’t think I ever want to go home!”

As applause continued she went and talked to Larry. The spot followed her. Someone handed her the walk-around mike out of the darkness. She gave the downbeat and the band gave her the opening to “Hello, Bluebird.” Jason recognized the skill behind that selection. It was one where she could use her tipsiness to maximum effect, utilizing it and conquering it at the same time. At first her timing was off, just slightly. But then it improved and strengthened and Jason sensed George Kogan relaxing, sighing. Jason turned and saw Ida and Gabe and Lois Marney. He turned just in time to see David Donne turn and leave.