WLT (29 page)

What turned up that spring was an actress from Milwaukee. Maria Antonio had black black hair and milk white skin and deep dark eyes, and looked like Donna LaDonna, the Girl of Studio B, must have looked in her bloom. Maria had been hired to play Corinne Archer on
Love's Old Sweet Song,
Forrest Hollister's first love's daughter who brings the lonely millionaire the news that Lally pines for him in Palm Springs. Then she became Doc Winegar's niece Dotty on
The Best Is Yet to Be,
the one who comes in from Chicago and breaks Bud's heart:

Frank met her in the hallway one morning at nine o'clock. He was bounding up the back stairs two steps at a time with Roy Jr.'s mail, and saw her on the third floor, landing, sitting on the concrete floor next to a bucket. “Don't mind me,” she whimpered, “I'm only dying.” He asked if he could help, and she said, “No. Please go. I have never thrown up with anyone except members of my immediate family.” He asked what was wrong. She said, “I don't think I'm pregnant,” and then looked up and grinned, to show it was a joke. The smile seemed to jar her insides, and she leaned her head over the pail and vomited three times. He put his hand on her shoulder, to show that he wasn't disgusted and that he supported her in this difficult moment. She cleared her throat and spat,
phthoo.
“That's the first time I've thrown up since I was six years old,” she said thoughtfully.

Then she looked up. “Why, you're Frank White!” she said. “I know about you. You're the one who slugged Little Becky.” She stood up. “Well done.” Frank picked up the pail. “I'll take care of this,” he said. “I hope you're feeling better. There's a couch in the Women's Bureau if you'd like—”

“Bye,” she said. He studied her as she went through the door and down the hall. How perfectly she walked. A green plaid skirt.

For days, he kept running into her. He had worked at WLT for six months and never laid eyes on her and now every day, two or three times a day, there she was, black hair, big smile, and all.

They went to lunch at the Pot Pie. He learned that she was twenty and had had many boyfriends.
How many?
Lots. She said, “I like older men. They can sit and talk about themselves without demanding that you show complete interest. How old are you?” Frank told her, “Twenty.” She seemed to recognize this as a lie, and to be touched by it. She put her hand on his knee. “That's nice,” she said. His knee began to swell. He walked with a limp the rest of the afternoon.

He learned that she lived in two rooms upstairs in an old lady's house on Willow Street, by Loring Park, and that the old lady was deaf as a stone. “We used to dance up there at two in the morning.”

“Who's we?”

“I used to have a roommate, named Jean.”

“Gene?”

“Yes. Jean. She was my best friend for months but she smoked like a chimney. I tried hiding her cigarettes and it threw her into such a panic, she ripped her best jacket looking through the pockets. She smoked enough for two people, so I asked her to cut out my share, and she moved out in a huff. I tell you. You get no gratitude for trying to be a good influence on people.”

The next day, he brought her a pot of weak tea with sugar and lemons before the show, and she had him massage her neck muscles to relax her. That afternoon, he was in the Green Room, reading a story in the paper about Milton Berle, when she sat down beside him. He said, “Did you know that more people see Milton Berle's television program in one night than have seen
Hamlet
in the past three-hundred-and-fifty years?” She said, “Who's your favorite movie star?”

“Katharine Hepburn.” It was the correct answer, he could tell from Maria's face. “Me too,” she said. “Katharine Hepburn is just exactly like how I remember my older sister when I was little. Tall and leggy and striding along and not letting anyone put one past her. When she got married, I came home from her wedding dance and bawled half the night. We shared a bedroom for all those years. I wore all her old clothes. I used her perfume. I tried to talk like her. At night we'd lie in bed and talk about how we'd go to Chicago someday and share an apartment and have jobs and go to swank nightclubs and meet men. That's where my imagination stopped: meeting men. I couldn't imagine who they'd be or why we'd want them. She married a sweet guy. They moved to Cincinatti and had two kids and then that was it for her. She gave up being interested in things. She became
dull
. I suppose he must've liked her that way. I think dullness is evil, I really do. I'm afraid of Minneapolis. I don't want to
be
like them.” And then, as if she had said too much, she stood up, said goodbye, and strode out the door.

They went to a movie, about a detective who nabs a German spy in a small town in New Hampshire. When a vicious dog, fangs bared, suddenly tensed for the leap onto the detective's back, Maria squeezed against him.

He walked her home and then they walked around the park, the moon shining on the quiet pond, the empty tennis courts, the horseshoe pits with their upright posts reminding him of what he was all too aware of. “You're my lucky horseshoe,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “Frank, do you think I should change my name to Anderson?”

“Why give up a great name like Antonio?”

“People think Italian girls are loose.”

Are you?
he thought. “I'll tell you a secret. My real name is Francis With. It sounded so wispy. I changed it for good luck.”

But the good luck was her. She wove her fingers into his and looked him deeply in the eye. “I want to know you,” she said.
Well, okay, that can be arranged.
She turned her face up to be kissed, and he kissed her on the lips and felt a flick of her tongue. “Again,” she said, so he kissed her again.

They ate lunch together in his little office, sandwiches that he made the night before. He stood in the control room during her shows. The massages moved into the shoulder region and along the spine and under the wings. When he moved forward, along the rib cage, she pressed her arms to her sides, but glanced back and smiled, as if to say, “Not now, but soon.”

When Dotty returned to Chicago, having put a tremor in Bud's voice and glamored up the poky people of Green Corners, Maria moved to
Friendly Neighbor
where Dad felt a young actress might settle Marjery down. She was taking to whooping it up during commercial breaks—lighting a smoke and rolling her eyes and saying, “Boy, this bra itches,” or “I wonder what folks would say if they knew Little Becky's on the rag.” Dad had to ask Faith what that meant.

Worse yet, Marjery suffered from the giggles. The word “cheese” set her off once and once Dad said, “Hunger makes the beans taste better,” and she almost blew a gasket. Faith clapped a hand over the girl's mouth and hauled her out of the studio—Dad was reminiscing about his late mother at the moment, and had just mentioned how hard she had had it with six children during a drought: hardly the time for Little Becky to shriek and guffaw—so they improvised for a few minutes, until Marjery got control of herself and came back into the studio, and her next line was “Pass the beans, Dad,” and she dropped to the floor by the microphone, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face contorted in ugly helpless laughter. All because she remembered the lines:

So Patsy had to remember never to put beans in another
Friendly Neighbor
script, which she added to a long list of forbidden Becky words, such as “chicken,” “crabs,” “prunes,” “turkey,” “spaghetti,” “meatballs,” and “pickle.”

The next day, Dad, still thinking of his mother's sad life, remarked, “Well, everyone is the judge of their own luck,” and Becky fell down foaming at the mouth again.

So Maria came into the story as beautiful Delores DuCharme, whose car broke down south of Elmville, near Round Lake, en route to Detroit. It was a sunny day and birds sang as she walked along and over the hill and saw Dad and Tiny in the skiff, fishing, about the same moment they spotted her.

They brought her home for lunch, naturally, it being lunchtime, and she sat down with Dad and Jo and Becky and Frank, Tiny having excused himself (“I'se gots to go do sumpin' 'bout the Widda's terminites, boss. Dey's get-tin' just fierce oveh dere”), and Jo gave Delores a bowl of tomato rice soup and a toasted cheese sandwich. “Sure is nice to have Frank back,” said Dad. (Frank had been gone for six months, prospecting in Alaska, because Randolph Cleveland, who had been Frank for all those years, had upped and gone to Chicago, and the new Frank, Dale Snelling, Faith's husband, who had been playing gangsters and foreigners since the demise of
Sunnyvale
, didn't sound much like the old one. Six months, Patsy thought, should be long enough for the folks to forget.) “Thanks,” said Dale. “So what do you do, Miss DuCharme?”

She was a dancer, she said, looking for work in a roadhouse near the Motor City and also looking for her boyfriend Bo, who'd gone there to seek employment in the manufacturing industry.

“What kind of dancer?” asked Becky.

“Hush, eat your lunch,” said Jo.

“Exotic,” said Delores.

The actors looked up.
What did she say?
They checked the script.

It said “exotic” all right.

On the fourth floor, Ray, rising from his chair to go upstairs for a nap, heard “exotic” and sat down again.

“Oh, that's interesting,” said Dad. “My late mother loved to dance, but there wasn't much exotic about the polka, I guess. Not if you're from Windom.”

“I dance on tabletops in smoky bars full of truck drivers who like to reach up and stick dollar bills in my clothes,” said Delores, hesitantly.

“In your pockets?” asked Dale. “They put money in your pockets?”

“Sort of. And they like to put money up here. And down there.”

WLT performers were strictly cold readers, one and all. The notion of rehearsals was foreign to them. It was a matter of pride to stroll into the studio in time to pour a cup of coffee, drink it, pick up the script, glance at it, and when the red light went on, do what the words said to do. You answered the door, you pulled the trigger, you leaped from the ledge, you walked to the mailbox or to the gallows or to the kitchen—you wept, you thundered, you murmured, you gasped, whatever it said, and when the light went off, you chucked the script into a wastebasket and got the hell out.

And now, drifting down the stream of dialogue that had suddenly become a rapids, the cast backpedalled, reading slowly . . . with long pauses . . . trying to read ahead. “My late mother used to earn money dancing, but only in polka contests there in Windom. She won $25 once,” said Dad, saying each word separately as his eye scanned to the bottom of the page and the top of the next.
When would he need to abandon script and maybe tell a story about his mother—“Speaking of my mother reminds me of the time . . .” But what time did it remind him of? What mother stories had he told recently? And would Maria know enough to abandon script too? or when he finished the mother story would she pick up again with men stuffing dollar bills in her pants?

“Sometimes you get $200 a night dancing on tables.”

“Gosh,” said Little Becky. “You get that much just to dance?”

“You can if you dance like men like to see you dance. You do the hootchi-koo and a little this and a little that and then you go sit with them for a few minutes. Have a drink. Talk. Hold their hand. Then maybe if they're nice—”

Dad swallowed. And then Tiny came back. “Misteh Dad, I'se finished wid dem terminites an' I'se wondrin' if'n you got sump'n fer me to do here. Uddawise I'll jes' mosey back to th' Lake.”

It was Wilmer, Dad's brother, trying to be helpful and offer them an escape. The actors looked up.
What did he say?
There stood Wilmer—without a script.
Wilmer is winging it.
Maria looked to Dad. But Faith spoke first. “Maybe you could take a look at my—at my—clematis, Tiny.”