Naked in the Promised Land (8 page)

To celebrate, my mother and I went downtown on Saturday and—at $3.50 for her, $1.50 for me—we took a Tanner Grey Line Bus Tour of movie star homes, Robert Mitchum, Greer Garson, Spencer Tracy, Anne Baxter, each more fantastic than the last. So there really were
palaces right here in Beverly Hills, California, just as in the movies, with great expanses of blue-green lawn and tall iron gates and uncountable gables and turrets. My mother and I devoured it all.

"When you become an actress," she said to me dreamily as our bus lumbered up and down the glittering streets of Beverly Hills and spewed exhaust fumes into the rarefied air, "which house do you want us to buy? We have to find a tutor for you, you know, because if you're making movies you can't go to school regular. Then we'll both have a maid, and we'll have a chauffeur," she said, recalling movies she'd seen about the rich, who always had a whole staff of servants, "and a man butler to answer the door and the telephone—and what else?"

"And I'll buy you the most beautiful winter coat in the world," I promised, remembering the shabby, thin jacket she'd worn every winter since we'd come to California.

"Why just one? I'll need a long white ermine, and a brown mink stole, and maybe a Persian lamb jacket," she enumerated with a sweet smile.

Did Irene have an ermine coat? I wondered. How splendid ermine would look beneath her spun-gold hair.

"I'd like you to sing for me before your acting lesson," Irene announced when I arrived for my next session with Sid. I chose "Again," and I wasn't nervous because I'd been singing all my life. She played a little introduction on the piano and then nodded for me to begin. For a few seconds she scrambled around the keyboard, trying to find my key. Then she realized there wasn't any. She shook her head, and I cut off my caterwaul, puzzled. "Lillian, you need to listen to how the music sounds and match your voice to it."

It was a revelation to me. I felt my skin prickle and beads of sweat form above my lip.

"We'd better start you on singing lessons." Singing lessons? My dreams were crumbling like a dried mudpie! My mother gave me the $1.50 a week gladly for my acting lessons, but she couldn't afford singing lessons.

"How about working in the office on Saturday mornings?" Irene
said, as though she'd read my despair, "and you can pay for all your lessons that way."

I would have worked in the morning and the evening and on Sunday—and the rest of the week too—just to be around her. "Oh, yes, that would be wonderful," I managed to gulp in a torrent of gratitude. "Oh, yes."

I loved Saturdays. I arrived before 8:00
A.M.
to open the studio for the little kids' ballet class (taught by a Bulgarian woman with stringy hair and b.o.). By nine, Irene came to take my place behind the desk. "Will you go to the cleaner's and pick up some things for me?" she'd ask, and I'd run to fetch Sid's pants or a dress or blouse of hers (which I'd furtively kiss through the clear wrapping). "Will you go over to the Elite and bring me back a cup of coffee?" she'd ask next. Whatever she needed I carried as though it were a sacred chalice through grimy streets, and my lips moved in fervent prayer. "Irene, oh Irene, Irene," were the only words.

She began teaching at ten o'clock, after the Bulgarian finished her Modern Dance for 12–'15-Year-Olds. I sat again in the gray metal chair, now warm from Irene's perfect bottom, and opened my nostrils wide to inhale Emir, her heady perfume that lingered in the purple Orlon cardigan she often left draped over the chair. Alone in the office, I ran my hands up and down the soft material. "Irene, oh Irene." I spoke it in my head.

I listened intently, entranced by every syllable, as she instructed a pimply, bespectacled girl at the piano, then a dark and very handsome young man who was a singer, then a class of six adolescent tap dancers. With the handsome singer—Tony Martinez, his name was—she laughed a lot, though it never seemed to me that his remarks were very witty. ("Can I take that one again?" Tony would say.
Ha, ha, tee hee hee,
they'd carry on.) What did he do to make her so happy?

Never did I permit dreamy passion to interfere with efficiency. "Hello, this is Theatre Arts Studio. May I help you?" I answered the phone in a low voice that sounded professional, as I'd heard Irene do. I collected money with aplomb. I wrote receipts with a secretarial flourish
that Fanny would have approved of. I greeted all comers with grace and verve.

For three years, there was nowhere in creation I would rather have been than behind the desk at Theatre Arts Studio, inhaling Emir and feeling soft Orlon between my fingers while I worked to pay for my lessons.

Eddy St. John (I later found out his real name was Edward Fromberg) walked through the door one Saturday morning. "I have a singing lesson with Mrs. Sandman at twelve o'clock," he said, his voice fluttering up and down. He took the chair closest to me and flipped through the stack of sheet music he'd brought with him. I could see that the one that crowned the pile had a picture of a sequin-gowned Marlene Dietrich on the cover sheet. "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have," it was called. I watched him as he studied the music. He had the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on anyone, and his hair was a coppery color I'd never seen before. He moved his head in time to the music in his mind, and he waved a long, slim hand, totally without self-consciousness. His lithe shoulders swayed.

He looked up to see me watching. "I just love Dietrich songs, don't you?" He flashed me a disarming smile.

"Let's try something else for a change. How about 'On Top of Old Smokey'?" Irene threw out to Eddy from time to time over the next months.

"Not my style," he'd rebut. "Let's do 'The Man That Got Away.'"

"How about 'The Tennessee Waltz'?" she'd suggest.

"How about 'Stormy Weather'?" he'd insist. He was only three years older than I, but what self-possession! Maybe he didn't know that Irene Sandman was a goddess.

Eventually she gathered several of us together into a troupe that performed at homes for the aged, Hadassah luncheons, mental hospitals, and other such places. Eddy was the star, dressed all in black, with a fedora tipped just above his eyes, singing dramatic, breathy torch songs. He had an expressive high tenor that he could make husky and intimate
à la Dietrich or heartbreakingly plaintive like Judy Garland. There were also the Starlets, two twelve-year-old girls with matching fat brown Shirley Temple curls, who sang in harmony while they shook silver-dusted maracas. And there was a fourteen-year-old with her seven-year-old sister, both dressed in powder blue leotards, with dark blue stuffed-cloth tails attached to their pant seats. They did a monkey act, balancing acrobatically all over each other.

And there was me, Lillian Foster, Mistress of Ceremonies, introducing each act with the energetic, smiling spiel that I'd rehearsed with Irene. "And now Theatre Arts Studio is
dee
-lighted to present the
fab
-u-lous (or mag-
nif
-icent or a-
stound
-ing)..." Irene said that a Mistress of Ceremonies needed a gown, so my mother gave me ten dollars and I went to Brooklyn Avenue to buy one—pink satin, strapless and backless, with pink netting over the skirt. When it was time for my monologues, I quickly slipped into the Hadassah kitchens or rest home bathrooms and changed to adolescent-girl clothes. I acted Rachel Hoffman as well as another piece that Sid wrote for me about a French orphan who is adopted by a kindly couple
("zz-zz-zz,
" he instructed me whenever I forgot and sounded a
th),
and I did a monologue that he pieced together from Lillian Hellman's play
The Children's Hour.
I was a twelve-year-old named Mary who fabricates an accusation against two women, her teachers. "Unnatural!" I was supposed to yell in a disgusted voice.

"We have a show to do next Sunday!" I would come home with the gift of the news, and it seemed like a wonder tonic for my mother. Eight of us squeezed into the Sandmans' green Ford, and Irene drove us to our shows. Even if it was a spell-time, my mother's anguish was suspended for a while. Whenever I came out onstage, I could see her in the front row, her head cocked birdlike at me in rapt attention. I worried a lot that Irene might mind that my mother came with us, but she never said a word. I made sure my mother always wore lipstick and a New York dress.

Irene follows me everywhere. Into Fanny's house. To my classes at Hollenbeck Junior High School. In the street I look for her car, and I imagine I see it constantly. She is with me when I walk arm-in-arm with my mother down Wabash Avenue. At school I tell the girls with whom I'm friendly that I'll be en
tertaining at an opening of a Thrifty Drugstore in Bellflower. "Irene Sandman is our director," I say. I just want to hear myself pronouncing her name.

Mr. Bergman and Rae come again to take us to Ocean Park Beach. I leave my mother sitting with them on a boardwalk bench, and I walk down near the green water, where I can write her name in the sand—
IRENE SANDMAN IRENE SANDMAN IRENE SANDMAN
.
The ocean comes up to wash it away, and I write it again and leave it there. Maybe she'll happen by before the ocean comes again. She'll find it and wonder who is so in love with her.

How can I make her say "Wow!" again, the way she did when she first heard me do Rachel Hoffman? "Wow!" I hear her voice in the dark in my bed at night, and I kiss my pillow as though it were her skin.

Has anyone ever felt this way? What is this? Everything but Irene has gone out of my head. How bizarre I feel, as though something is wrong. I go to the Malabar Public Library for more psychology books because I've never heard anyone talk about such a thing. "Crush," it's called. I have an "adolescent crush" on a woman. "Very common," the books say.

But one book with a brand-new cover,
Attaining Womanhood: A Doctor Talks to Girls About Sex,
by Dr. George W. Corner, says something else. I don't understand all the words, but I understand enough to be petrified. "There are a few women who develop a deep-seated and even permanent need to be sexually attracted only by members of their own sex. This condition may apparently be an inborn trait; in other circumstances it is believed to be set up as a result of unfortunate circumstances in youth.
" What circumstances could be more unfortunate than mine?
And then his sentences get even more alarming. "The thought of it is disagreeable to people who do not have such impulses, but the person so affected must be regarded not as sinful but as the victim of a disturbed temperament.
" I am the victim of a disturbed temperament.

"A girl should avoid a woman who exhibits lavish fondness toward her," Dr. Corner concludes, "or who insists on constant companionship, or indulges in intimate fondling.
" What bliss I would feel if Irene were such a woman,
I think; the irony is not lost on me, though I am in tears.

To whom could I talk about this? Who would help me understand? Not my mother. I took the buses to Rae's apartment.

"What happened?" She paled at the sight of me.

I threw myself face down on her bed. "I'm in love with Irene Sandman," I wept.

"Oy! You scared me so much. I thought you were sick," my aunt cried. Then, "What do you mean you're 'in love'? She's a lady. How can you be in love?"

"That's just the problem," I moaned.

"Don't talk foolish," Rae said. "There's no such thing. A girl can't be in love with a lady. Wait, you'll meet a nice boy soon, and you'll see what 'in love' means."

One afternoon I arrived early for my acting lesson. Theatre Arts Studio was dark, but the front door was open just a crack, as though someone had forgotten to close it.

"Do you take me for a goddamn idiot? Do you think I don't know what's going on?" It was Sid's voice, loud and angry, coming from the big room.

"Oh, for God's sake, he's only twenty years old," Irene shouted back. "I'm not interested in babies." I smelled her perfume even at the door.

"I don't give a damn what you say. Your lipstick was smeared all over your face, your blouse was open—what am I supposed to think?" Sid yelled. "You be careful, damn you, or we'll lose this place!"

"What about Silvia, you bastard?" she screamed at him. "Do you think I've forgotten Chicago?"

I backed out on tiptoe. Who were they fighting about? That handsome Mexican boy she gave singing lessons to! I walked around the block, dazed, images of Irene and the boy floating before my eyes. What had she done with him? Her blouse open, her lipstick smeared all over her face. Tyrone Power kissing Maureen O'Hara in
The Black Swan.
Had he forced her? What had they done together?

When I returned to the studio, the light was on and Irene was no longer there. Sid was sitting on the bench in the big room, staring at nothing. He jumped up when he saw me and put on a business face. "Let's hear that Linda Loman monologue first," he said.

I watched for Tony Martinez the next Saturday; I was sure he was the one. What did a person need to look like for Irene to let them smear her lipstick and open her blouse? I wrote receipts and answered the phone, but on my lips I felt her creamy skin where I'd pulled her blouse open—though my lips, confusingly, were Tony Martinez's.

But he didn't show up for his lesson. I paged through the appointment book. No, he hadn't been shifted to another time. When I checked the ledger the following Saturday, a red line had been drawn through
Tony Martinez.

Eddy invited me to come over to his house and listen to records after we'd worked together in the troupe for a few months. I really liked him, but not in the way my aunt meant. I was sure he didn't like me that way either.

He led me to his bedroom at the back of his family's sprawling house. "Have you ever heard of 'lip sync'?" he asked, plopping me into an overstuffed chair. "Watch!" On a phonograph that sat in a scratched wooden cabinet Eddy put a 33 1/3 record of the Andrews Sisters singing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" and sped it up to 45. He performed a hectic charleston all around my chair, moving his hips and lips at racing speed—the Andrews Sisters as spastic chipmunks.