Was (20 page)

And I can see her point of view, Ethel told herself. She was the one who did all the work, after all. It was her singing, her voice that earned the money. Why should she support her old ma? Parents are there to support the kids, not the other way around. If she is prepared to see her old ma living in a Santa Monica bungalow on sixty dollars a week, what can I say? I can’t prove to her that love and respect might indicate what the law cannot enforce. Maybe she has no love and respect.

Her hands stopped applying makeup. They sank to her lap. Face it, Ethel. Your daughter hates you. Everything’s gone wrong for her, and she needs someone to blame. So old Ethel has to carry the can again. I have been carrying that can all my life. It might be nice if somebody else did, for a change.

And it was a mistake to go and sue my own daughter. It was undignified. It was a public squabble. I was the loser, in every way. People know about stage mothers, or think they do. What they don’t know, they can make up for themselves. Suing my own daughter for support.

Ethel shook her head at herself. What would my mother have said? she thought. Well, Mother, Ethel thought, remembering her mother’s face, I’m afraid we live in a colder world. Life was hard in your day, but other people made up for it. These days, it’s just the reverse; we have our cars and our Frigidaires, but we don’t have each other.

Ethel sighed and looked back into the mirror. Now. A bit of color on the cheeks. Her hands rattled through the assortment of compacts and lipsticks and old dried tubes of greasepaint. Her mind was not attending. The containers turned over and over in a jumble.

Suing was so messy. And vengeful too. All right, I was angry. I was appalled and angry and I really did need some help and I couldn’t believe after all I’d done for her that she would treat me this way. Just cast me off, like I was a piece of stale meat. A dog or a cat would have had better treatment from her.

Another part of Ethel intervened, broke off the thought.

She isn’t the same girl, Ethel told herself, she isn’t my little girl anymore. My little girl is dead. Instead, there is some fat, shambling woman who can’t control her hands. Someone who is, for want of a better word, a junkie.

People warned me. They told me Hollywood kills. They didn’t say how, and I didn’t see how it could reach right into someone and destroy her, how it could take everything and leave a desert.

She became a horrible person. My little baby, my sweet little Frances. She grew up so selfish, so mean. On another planet. My lawyer shows up to serve a writ and she bounces up to him and says, “Come and hear me sing.” Takes him by the hand! Like he was a family friend. Like we were all still a family. She just did not understand what she had done. Those lies she told about me, those viperish lies. I read about myself in the paper, she tells reporters how awful I was. When all I ever did was try to help her, try to protect her, to get her away from what I knew was coming. It would be Grand Rapids all over again, only with my little girls old enough to understand.

Ethel Gilmore thought of Frank Gumm. She thought of the sweep of her life.

She no longer hated him. She thought of him infrequently now that she had remarried and divorced again. When she thought of him at all, it was with a kind of understanding. It must have been awful for him, too. I suppose he wanted to become normal, poor man, and couldn’t. And I have to suppose that he loved me a little bit. I guess he loved playing piano with me. Like he loved playing a husband and father.

She dimly saw the little theater in which they had met. A memory of hands on keys. A memory of him leading the audience in song. “Follow the Bouncing Ball.” Gosh, that was a long time ago. With me young and pretty with long hair wrapped around my head and thinking the world was foursquare and simple. I thought you fell in love like walking into some kind of mist, and something happened in the mist that you couldn’t quite see or feel. I’d hardly even heard of what Frank Gumm was.

Pretty little lady with the pretty little hands, that’s what Frank Gumm would call me when we were on stage together. I’d stand up and give a little smile; he’d take my hand; we’d bow. What a con artist. Both of us.

And everyone knew. Everyone in Grand Rapids, then everyone in Lancaster. I had to walk down the street and feel people’s eyes on my face. What a world he pushed me into.

The pretty little lady cut her hair and became modern. The things I found myself doing because of Frank Gumm. I nearly didn’t have Frances. I can remember driving to see Marcus, Marcus our friend, our doctor. It was like being in a dream, my husband driving the car beside me, looking like such a man, being so gallant and soft-spoken. I couldn’t put it together. It didn’t make sense. A husband and wife driving off like dirty strangers to kill their child, as if they were two kids who had been caught.

Sitting in Marcus’s office. Trying to find a way to tell him, a way to begin to ask him. We both sat grinning and coughing. We didn’t even know what to call it. An abortion.

Frank kept smiling. His whole life was a smiling lie. I was the one who had to say it in the end, I was the one who always had to do everything.

“What my husband means, Marcus, is that I am with child and we don’t want it and we were wondering if there was some way in which we don’t have to have it.”

Marcus paused and looked back and forth between our faces. Frank’s fat, sweaty face all queasy and cheesy and I hated him then. It was all starting to come out in his face. He was becoming a weaselly little man.

Poor Marcus, what was he to say? “Um. There are some ways, yes, but none of them anything I’d like to associate with you two. Do you mind telling me the reason?”

I still can’t remember what we said. Two children is enough. Can’t afford three. Can’t afford the time. It must have sounded pretty feeble. How could I say, My husband is a sodomite and I can’t bear him, the idea of where his hands have been or the thing that is growing inside me, that he put inside me. I wanted it gone.

Baby sensed that, somehow. She must have. She must have felt it inside me, no child couldn’t. Maybe she half remembers that Mommy wanted to kill her.

But only because I thought she would kill me, inside. Me, Ethel Milne, wanting to do that to my own child. I’d been pushed into a nightmare. What my husband was. The lies we told. And that was only halfway through, halfway through our strange dance. Me and Frank.

We named her after both of us, Frances Ethel. She was supposed to hold us together, and she did. There was something special about Frances. But it all got too much for Grand Rapids. The women came to tea and asked me about Frank’s friends. One of them even called them boyfriends, and my little girls could hear, and I wanted to die.

Running away somehow kept us together too. All the way across America, going West and working on the stage.

That drive across the whole darn country. That little town with the cockroaches. They had a one-hundred-seater in a town of five hundred. We knew then that vaudeville was dead.

And Frances’s Spanish trousers all in a tangle, not able to get them on. Poor little thing all naked in the wings and Janie, Jinny, singing the chorus over and over, waiting for her to make her entrance. Frank fighting to get her dressed so she could go on. And Baby Frances just smiled, grinning. She knew it was happening and thought it was funny. Everything was held up for Frances. That was all she cared about even then, being in the center. That little impish grin.

Well, imps grow up to be demons. Ethel saw the impish face, transmogrified into something medieval, a monkeylike, vengeful face. Gargoyle. Judy Gargoyle.

So where is the goodness in my life? Where is the joy? Where has it all gone?

Don’t think about it, Ethel. There’s more to you than that. Things go wrong, but they can’t touch what you are inside. They can’t touch what you once were. Or where you were from. They can’t touch home.

Ethel Milne Gumm Gilmore remembered her first life.

I used to play tennis in a long skirt that went all the way down to the ground. Mutton sleeves, tiny waist. You had to play so that you didn’t sweat too much. You couldn’t play to win; you didn’t give it everything you had. You were supposed to break everything off. We’d play tennis, the girls of Superior, Minnesota, and we’d laugh. We’d all get together Sunday afternoons after church, around the piano, the whole crowd, boys and girls in a group chaperoning each other. A date like they have nowadays would have caused a scandal.

Chasteness seemed so sensible in those days. Foursquare. No nonsense. Everything dirty seemed a continent away. Real people got married and were happy and if there were problems they’d solve them. We had a girl who did the scrubbing, and an old fat woman who did the laundry, and some tough skinny old bird who polished the house. All we had to learn was how to be beautiful. Taste and refinement. You learned how to speak properly and sit up straight. There were knives and forks and flowers on the table and laughter in the front hall. You cooked special dishes for church socials.

And the clubs. I would be the president of one and the secretary of another. Superior Chapter of the Order of the Rainbow. Young Ladies’ Music Society. What were we going to do? We were going to make a good world by setting an example. By living well, we lived for everyone.

There was such a thing as progress. You learned about it. People talked about it; they believe in it. We talked about science and morality as if the two were the same thing. Light bulbs, motion pictures, flying machines, all the products of rationality. And rationality was always clean, calm, sensible. Enlightened. We thought mutton sleeves and laugher were a sign of rationality. Progress meant men who shaved and didn’t drink in secret. We thought there was no need for secrets and that most people didn’t have them. We thought passion was something sweet and orderly, smiling fresh-scrubbed behind glasses. Poetry was progress. Learning Tennyson by heart and singing simple songs. I was ever so daring, working in a theater. Lizzie, I can still see Lizzie, going all red. “Ethel!” she said. Brave, she thought, singing in public and risking approbation.

“I see nothing wrong in singing harmless songs and bringing harmless pleasure,” I said. I felt ever so modern with white cotton up to my chin and my wrists and ankles hidden well away and a little watch hanging from my waist.

“You’ll be smoking a pipe next,” Lizzie said. Flushed face, bright spectacles.

How, Ethel wondered, how did I end up here? Half a century later? Airplanes in the sky and me driving a motorcar as if it were a bicycle. Me. I’m not some old divorced lady who works as a clerk. I’m some fat old lady called Ethel who nobody has to listen to or take care of. They all think that I’ve done nothing with my life. They take it for granted that there is nothing more to me than fat arms and cheap dresses and well-applied, scented powder. They think that I’ve done nothing but wash diapers and follow my husband around and grow fat. Fat and deserted when my children left me, with nothing to do but make ends meet. If only they knew.

Knew that I could once walk into a theater, any theater, and put people at their ease and get real work out of them. I knew how to do it. I treated it as a business proposition. And I knew my babies were good. And I knew darn well that when the second storm broke, where people found out what Frank Gumm was a second time, when we had to flee in shame again, I was darn well certain that I and my babies were going to be able to cope on our own, without him, without Frank Gumm to pull us down into the mud again.

I was ready for the next time they rode him out of town on a rail. I saw it coming. I saw those boys, hanging around the movie house. They blackmailed him into giving them free tickets. They sat in the front row, next to my babies, their faces, their smirks, joking about fat old Frank so that everyone could hear, everyone could know. His poor wife, everyone would say. His poor wife. Mind you, she puts up with it. What goes on behind that smiling mask of her face?

The men of the town would come sidling up to me, sideways.

Oh, they’d heard about Frank Gumm, and I suppose they’d heard about me too. They’d come up to me, talking without moving their lips, hardly bothering with pleasantries. “Come on, honey, you’re a married woman. You know what it’s about.”

They knew I needed love. They needed something other than their wives. Adultery, to call it by its proper name. I took lovers. Me, Ethel Milne, took men who didn’t always shave, who had secrets, who cheated each other in business deals. Who cheated me. Who treated me like a business deal.

There was Billy. Young, burly, blond. Oh, what a difference, to be really wanted. That look in his eyes. And the way I opened up to him. Opened up in that deserted shed, back of town. He was a barber. No. A barber’s boy. Hah. Frank and I had the same taste in men.

What a world, after Superior, Minnesota. Where was the bright and coming world of flight and public railways then? When you were fending off a strong young man who you wanted just as badly as he wanted you. Fending him off in a shed in Lancaster, California. The two of us had dust in our hair, and the place smelled of chicken manure. Why was I fending him off? He was angry; I was angry.

Suddenly, that shriek of laughter, outside, the laughter of children exploring, and me leaping away, pulling my head back from Billy’s chest.

And there was Frances, my Baby, looking at Mommy playing with strange men in a shed. Thank goodness our clothes were in place and we hadn’t been doing anything. Her dark eyes scowling with a question. Where is Daddy? Why aren’t you with him? Who is that man?

Brats, Billy muttered. He called my Baby a brat and I knew. It wasn’t love he felt or he couldn’t have called Frances that. He should have knelt down and reassured her and showed me that he could love her too. But she had interrupted, interrupted his sport, another man’s brat who got in the way. His face was young and sullen, handsome, but soft too, and I suddenly saw how his face would go as he aged. He wouldn’t look that different from Frank. He would be gone, chasing younger women. Women younger than me, younger than himself. I saw that we had no possible real life together, even as secret husband and wife. So I left him, left beautiful, blond, young Billy. After that I would drive into Los Angeles alone and find my men in Los Angeles.