Looking for a Love Story (26 page)

New Palton, New York
1919

No matter how hard she tried, Ellie couldn’t keep her eyes off the clock on the wall. It had been exactly an hour and eight minutes since Joe had knocked on her door to tell her Benny was gone. At first she’d been sure that there would be another knock on the door and she’d open it to find Benny standing there. Her brain knew what had happened; she’d refused to do what Benny wanted, and he’d walked. But her heart hadn’t believed it. He was the first man she’d loved. He’d given her roses and brought bright colors into a life that had been so gray. They had been a beautiful couple; people saw them and said they were made for each other. There was no way, argued her heart, that he would throw all that away. He’d come back.

But he hadn’t. She and Joe had been sitting in the hotel room for an hour and—she checked the clock—nine and a half minutes
now, and there’d been no knock on the door. Ellie’s heart felt like it had started to bleed.

“We’ll have to find time to get married while we’re on the road.” Joe broke the silence in his matter-of-fact way. “I don’t think we should wait until we finish the tour, because by then it’ll be too close to the baby’s birth.” He was being practical, making plans. And that was good. You couldn’t feel your heart bleeding—not as much anyway—when you were making plans. “We’re playing split weeks on the next two jumps,” Joe went on, “so there won’t be time to get a license. But we have a full week in New Haven. I think it would be best if we did it there.” He paused. “If that’s all right. I mean, if you’re sure this is what you want.”

No, this is not what I want. I’m too young to give up on love, I’m only sixteen!

But there had been no knock on the door—and no Benny.

“Yes,” she said. “I think we should get married in New Haven.”

“Good,” Joe said. He started to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go over to the theater.”

Then she remembered. “We have to cancel the act.” He nodded. “Isn’t there something else we can do? Could we find a replacement for Benny?”

“Even if we could find someone way out here to stand in, Benny and I did a lot of physical gags. Timing is everything when you’re doing knockaround. It would take days to rehearse a new guy, and we don’t have them.”

“Could we cut all the knockaround?”

“And fill with what? The management is expecting a fifteen-minute routine.”

“So …” She trailed off, and they both looked away. This was going to be a big blow for them. Big-time acts could get away with
canceling; sometimes a headliner would walk because he’d gotten a better offer or because he didn’t like his dressing room. But a small-time act like Masters, George, and Doran—which was now just Masters, with Ellie doing a walkover—was expected to be reliable. A small-timer played through high fevers and exhaustion; he went onstage and gave his all when his child was deathly ill or a family member was being buried. That was the code of the small-time: They worked harder and longer and more gratefully than the stars. And a small-time performer who canceled in the middle of a run, leaving the management scrambling to fill his slot, would earn himself a big black mark. News of his default would spread across the show-business grapevine, and people would be reluctant to book him because he couldn’t be trusted.

“Joe, I’m so sorry,” Ellie said. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t—”

“It’s Benny’s fault, all of it,” he snapped. He headed for the door. “I’m going to tell the stage manager right now. Get it over with.”

It wasn’t fair. She and Benny had made this mess and now Joe was the person everyone in the business would remember as the no-show.

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

He shook his head. “If I bring you with me, I’ll look like I’m too scared to face the music by myself.”

“Why don’t you wait until tomorrow? The theater is dark tonight, and the stage manager might not even be there.”

“The house manager, or someone else, will be. I have to give them as much advance notice as I can, so they can find a disappointment act to replace us.”

After he was gone, she prowled around the room. Finally, to distract herself, she picked up a newspaper and sat in a chair to read it.

And then it hit her. She ran out into the hallway with the newspaper
in her hands. “Joe!” she called out. But of course he was gone. The elevator was on the ground floor, so she took the stairs down to the lobby two at a time. Joe wasn’t in the lobby.

“You missed him. He left about ten minutes ago,” said the desk clerk. So she raced out of the hotel.

IN THE BASEMENT
of the theater, Joe prepared to knock on the door of the tiny cubbyhole that served as the stage manager’s office. He’d never had to explain himself to a theater management before; he’d never been fined for lateness, or for using racy blue jokes in his act, or for breaking any of the rules that governed backstage conduct. Joe was used to being on good terms with the people who paid his weekly salary; that had always been a big source of pride to him. Until now. Damn Benny! But there was nothing to be done.

“Joe!”

He heard Ellie’s voice behind him and whirled around. She was out of breath, and clearly she had been running to find him. She’d probably come to back him up—even though he’d said he didn’t want her to. He let out an exasperated sigh. He’d meant it when he told her he didn’t blame her for what had happened. But he had wanted her to let him do what had to be done without getting in the way.

“Ellie, I asked you to stay in the room.”

But she waved a newspaper in his face and gasped out, “You’re going to do a single!”

CHAPTER 26

“Have you lost your mind?” Joe demanded. But she was just trying to help, so he made himself add, more patiently, “I know you mean well, but—”

“You ad-lib monologues all the time,” she broke in. “Every time you read the newspaper, you find something to make jokes about. And it’s not just me who thinks you’re funny. Everyone says so.”

She wasn’t thinking straight. It must be the guilt. “Ellie, you know better than this. There’s a big difference between fooling around for the heck of it, to get a couple of laughs, and performing in a theater.”

“Why?”

“It takes months to come up with a good monologue. You have to write it and then work out the kinks. Get the timing and delivery just right.”

“I’m not talking about a
regular
monologue. This is a whole new kind of act. Every day we’ll get the local newspaper wherever we are and you’ll find the stories that you think are funny. Then you’ll write a routine around them, and you’ll perform it that night onstage.”

“You want me to write a new act every day? And rehearse it? That’s impossible.”

“People won’t expect perfect delivery and timing. Your monologue will go over because it’s about their town and what’s happening in it that day. And you have a way about you onstage. You’re not showy like—” She barely stopped herself from saying Benny’s name. “You’re different from most performers. You’re the fellow who lives down the block, an ordinary Joe. I think if you just walk out onstage and start talking about everyday things, it’ll go over.”

He’d thought about doing a single for so long, and he’d been afraid of it. To be out onstage alone without a partner to fall back on—without even a prop to play with or some music to fill in the silence if your jokes died—that was the toughest kind of act there was.

That’s why the good monologuists, like Jack Benny, are stars
, said a mad voice in the back of his head.
If you could do it, you’d be one too
.

But what Ellie was suggesting—a totally new act every night—that was suicide. No one could carry it off.

But what if you could?
whispered the mad voice.

“Just try it!” Ellie was pleading. “It’s better than canceling. What do you have to lose?”

My pride. I’ve never bombed before. But she thinks I can do it
.

“I’ll write the material with you,” Ellie said. “It’ll be easier if there are two of us.” He thought about the lines of dialogue she’d added to their act, and how they always got a laugh. But that was a
far cry from filling fifteen or twenty minutes every single day. It was crazy even to consider it.

But her lines are funny
.

“How am I going to remember that much new material? It’s too much memorizing for anyone.”

“It doesn’t have to be word perfect. It’s only you up there, so you’re not feeding a partner cues. And I’ll sit out in the house every night and be your stooge. If you start to go dry, just look to where I’m sitting and I’ll heckle you and ask you questions that will get you back on track.” She paused. “And the good thing about that is, I won’t be onstage. If I’m sitting in the house like a member of the audience, it won’t matter when the baby starts to show.”

That was the first time she’d mentioned her pregnancy since she’d told him about it. The prospect of working on this crazy idea had made her forget how unhappy she was. That was good.

And there was always the chance that he could make it work. If he could, it would be a whole new kind of act—with humor that was local and fresh each night. He didn’t know anyone else who was doing that. Plus, if he didn’t have a new act by tomorrow he’d be crawling away from his contract with his tail between his legs. Wouldn’t it be better to fail by trying something bold and daring? He pulled himself up tall. “How many newspapers do they have here in New Palton?” he asked.

The town boasted two, morning and afternoon. Joe and Ellie worked for the rest of the day, combing through every article for funny tidbits, and by evening he had his first monologue. He stood in the middle of the room and read the material through. When he had finished, one look at Ellie’s face told him all he needed to know.

“I’ll go to the stage manager in the morning and cancel,” he said.

“No. It’s going to work. Just make it sound like you just thought of it. You’re working too hard to make it perfect.”

When Joe went to bed that night he didn’t sleep. Throughout his professional life he’d believed in careful preparation followed by thorough rehearsal that left nothing to chance. But now he was getting ready to go on the stage with a monologue he’d thrown together in a few hours, and no one but a sixteen-year-old girl in the house to bail him out if he went dry. As he ran his words over and over in his head he wondered if anyone had actually ever died of flop sweat. But the next morning Ellie greeted him with a smile.

“You’re going to knock them dead,” she told him.

He was never really sure how he got to the theater that day; he assumed he had walked there with Ellie, but he couldn’t remember checking in or climbing the stairs to the dressing room. Ellie seemed to be all over the place, giving the stage crew orders about the new lighting they wanted and ordering Joe to tone down his makeup and leave his flashy white suit on the hook. “Work in the sweater and pants you’re wearing,” she told him. “Remember, you’re not an entertainer, you’re the neighbor next door. Just another ordinary Joe. Wear your street clothes.”

Finally they heard the orchestra in the pit start playing. “I’m going to go sit in the house,” she said. “I’ll be in the third row, second seat from the aisle if you need me.” Then she grabbed his hands. “You’ll be fine,” she said. And he realized that her hands were as icy as his own. She was scared too.

JOE ONLY LOOKED
at Ellie twice during the act. And it wasn’t because he needed prompting. Some internal comic clock had told him the audience needed to hear another voice, so he turned to her for heckling. That same clock paced him as surely through his material as if he’d been doing a single all his life. Being onstage by
himself felt as comfortable as wearing a favorite pair of old shoes. He knew the house was sensing his enjoyment and they liked him for it.

Meanwhile, a part of his brain was keeping track of what material was working and what wasn’t.
They don’t like jokes about working people
, he noted.
They laugh when I poke fun at anyone who is rich or in charge. They want to hear me take on the bigwigs
.