Angels All Over Town Page 5

  But it could not last. We had been raised by parents whose Catholic beliefs had not stopped until our father was ravaged by cancer, and parents with Catholic beliefs raise daughters with Catholic consciences. So what if we Believed Not? The guilt was there. You didn’t dally without love for long before guilt snuck up on you. It hulked overhead, waiting until you were at your weakest, and then it sent hallucinations that looked like your father to yell at you, shame you, tell you to pull yourself together. Cruising blithely along Ocean Drive, the September wind blowing warm whiffs of salt air, pine, and Margo’s cigarette smoke through the car, we didn’t speak, but we were all thinking the same thing. Our thought was a fourth person, sitting in the back seat. Una, Lily, and Margaret Cavan were past twenty-four. Time was moving on, pressing on, passing by. We had to get it together, pick up the pieces, fish or cut bait. It was time to get married.

  Chapter 3

  Dance class. Fourth floor of a converted factory building on Tenth Avenue in New York. Enormous black windows along two walls holding sepia-toned reflections of thirteen stretching bodies. Liver-colored linoleum floor. Garish fluorescent light illuminating the cavernous room. I look around, and I see: our instructor, a woman last seen on stage dancing the role of the Sylph; four women who have taken time off from avant-garde companies like the Lulie McLeod Ballet, Nancy Kramer Dancefest, and STRUT! to have babies; eight men and women, actors and actresses (three of whom I knew at Juilliard) who act, direct, or act and direct for experimental, dirt-poor theater companies; me. Una Rose Cavan. Soap Opera Actress Extraordinaire. I am the only person in the room who wears new, expensive, matching leotard and leg warmers. My leg warmers have gold threads in them. The neckline of my leotard plunges so that the beads of sweat between my full, pale breasts gleam in the harsh light.

  The camera is not kind. If I gain a pound in life, it looks like two on television. I must move with extreme grace, with perfect posture, as if I had a bowl of raspberries balanced on the crown of my head. Right on the crown. I must not spill one piece of fruit. I envision the bowl: it is blue-and-white Canton china, made in a dynasty so long ago that the bones of its maker have turned to dust and sunk to the center of the earth. If you try to dig to China, that is what you will find.

  Dance class helps me make the grace, the posture, the thinness possible. Plus it fills the hours between six and eight when I should be sitting at a cozy candlelit table, gazing into the eyes of a loved one.

  One of the people I knew at Juilliard is still my friend: Susan Russell. The other people I knew there have not exactly renounced me. Their replies to my inquiries about health, career, family, etc., however, could be described as “curt.” Susan has spent much of the last year and a half out of work, but next spring she will have the lead role in a wonderful new play at the Charles Place Theater. She will play the sister of a woman accused of witchcraft in Salem.

  Susan Russell: tall; skinny (always thinks she’s fat); gently frizzy brown hair; hazel eyes whose myopia she corrects by wearing untinted contacts; loves the idea of living on Nova Scotia; loves her husband, her parents, Princess Diana, and me. Beside my sisters, Susan Russell is my best friend in the old-schoolgirl sense of best friends. We tell each other everything, and we are envious when the other does better in the profession or has lunch with another woman. Susan dances beside me. She is five inches taller, she wears a black leotard with balls of gray fuzz all over it, and I can hear her breathe out but not in.

  Who would you say is doing better? S, who struggles daily, who waits and hopes for a great part or even a terrible part, who once every twelve months or so gets a part, only to have the play close after a short run, but not until she’s gotten good notices and given her husband a chance to tell her she’s the best? Or U, who was grabbed out of drama school by the producer of one of TV’s hottest soap operas just because she had the right pale, red-haired, vulnerable Irish looks, who must speak essentially the same melodramatic lines on each episode, who makes a veritable fortune for her troubles, who is recognized at least twice every waking hour on the streets, and who goes home alone? Think carefully before you answer.

  Susan and I showered side by side in the smelly locker room. I stared with unbridled envy at her long, thin rib cage. “Don’t look at me that way,” she said, turning her back to me. “I’m fat.”

  “You are not fat. Quit saying you are. Do you still throw up?”

  “Not often. Don’t talk about it.”

  “Okay. How is your part coming?”

  “Really great.” She squeezed water out of her hair, which started to fluff the second she stepped out of the shower. We dried ourselves on the threadbare pink towels supplied by the dance studio. “My character isn’t sure herself whether her sister is a witch. But she has to find out—not that it will make her feel different or change their relationship in the long run.”

  “Witches,” I said.

  “I know. Louis and I are going to Salem in October, just to walk around and get the feeling. I remember going there on a school vacation with my family. I wrote reports about it for the next three years.”

  “Places like that are haunted.”

  “I know. Just thinking about what they did to the women. Atrocities. Places like that make me feel as though the things could happen again, or that they’re still happening. As if there’s a secret society in Salem, meeting every Sabbath to talk over the witch list—who’s bad, who’s evil.”

  “I could never go to Germany,” I said.

  “I know. Germany would be the same. Betrayals and torture.”

  “Just like Monhegan. Only there, Jemmie Luddington was the witch and the tribunal.”

  Susan looked at me, deciding whether to speak, then did. “I saw John, by the way. Louis and I took my mother to Achilles House last weekend.”

  “I don’t want to know, but you’d better tell me.” I slipped on my jeans and started buttoning my yellow cotton shirt. I moved slowly, with great deliberation, but hearing John’s name took my breath away. I felt as if I might never get it back.

  “He’s the same. Dark suit, Gucci loafers, perfect manicure. He’s moving into Manhattan.”

  I snorted. “What a joke. He was always talking about ‘land values,’ and the quality you could get in Brooklyn Heights for half the price.” I thought then about my father and his real estate deals, of how the men in my life always seemed to be unduly concerned with the price of property. “Where in Manhattan?”

  “TriBeCa.”

  “God, TriBeCa. He’s about ten years behind the times. What an asshole! He doesn’t even have any imagination about it. I’ve heard about these row houses in Harlem with unbelievable original detail that you can buy for a song—why doesn’t he buy one of those? Then he could be in the vanguard.”

  “Una, he was really embarrassed to see us. He asked all about you.”

  “What did you tell him? That I have Hodgkin’s disease, I hope.”

  “No, I told him that you are perfectly wonderful. Doing A-OK. Aren’t you?”

  “No.” I tied my shoelaces. I felt like total shit. Three minutes of conversation about John Luddington could reduce me to a shivering, furious, vengeful wraith. I wanted to spread black batwings and fly to Brooklyn Heights before he had a chance to hide in TriBeCa. I wanted to clutch his pate in my teeth, fly him far, far out over the Atlantic, and drop him into the murky deep.

  “He’s alone, by the way.”

  “What do you mean, ‘he’s alone’?”

  “I mean, he’s not seeing anyone else. He made that very clear. He repeated it three times.”

  “Of course he’s not seeing anyone. That’s the whole point—Jemmie wanted me to think that within three weeks he’d be cruising the bars on West Street, but I knew what was happening. She’s ruining him for anyone. She couldn’t bear to see him with me or anyone else.”

  “Well, anyway, he’s the same,” Susan said quickly. “What do you think of Lady Di’s new hairstyle?”

  “I like
it.” The mention of Lady Di melted my black heart a little. I still remembered how young, how innocent she had been when she married Charles. She had reminded me of Lily and Margaret.

  “How’s the show?” she asked me.

  I shrugged. Usually it helped to talk to Susan, but I envied her new part in Hester’s Sister. I had visions of her taking it to Broadway, where she would become an overnight sensation and wind up playing parts like Lady Macbeth, Mary Tyrone, Hedda Gabler, Amanda Wingfield, Joan of Arc, even Lady Di when the time came. “The show is fine.”

  She watched me shrewdly. She had soft features that molded to any character she tried to play. “You’re in a rut. But this should help—Louis and I are having a party—a small party,” she amended, glimpsing my expression, “on Saturday night. You are coming.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.”

  It was settled.

  I sat in my dressing room at Soundstage 3 and prepared to go before the cameras. My face was made up with snowy powder covering my cheeks and violet crescents beneath my eyes. Delilah was on the lam. I wore a snorkel coat, one of those bottle-green nylon jackets with orange lining and a ratty fur-trimmed hood that unpopular boys wore in high school, the sort of boys who belonged to audiovisual club or played sousaphone in the band. Today a blizzard would trap Delilah in a cabin deep in the Michigan woods, and she would be “rescued” by a fur trapper with murder in his heart.

  “Paler, hon,” our director, Art Panella, was saying to the makeup woman, Abby Schwartz. “She’s been freezing in the elements for eighteen hours, for heaven’s sakes,” he said. “She’s lost all her color.”

  “Art, wouldn’t my face be red, not white?” I asked, thinking of the way my nose had flamed the last time I went skiing.

  “Una, try to think of the effect: you’re going to be surrounded by the whitest snow we can make, and night’s coming on. We’re gonna turn on the blue lights.”

  “Whatever you think.” I stared into my blue eyes and didn’t cough when a puff of white powder went down my throat. Art left the room. On the set he called directions to Leonard, our lighting man. “I want a bluish cast on the snow,” he was saying. “Think winter in the north woods.” The studio lights were already heating up. A trickle of sweat ran behind my ear. I sat straighter in my padded seat, stared into my own eyes, and spun back seven years.

  I was a senior at Juilliard. I was playing Gina in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. My parents, Lily, and Margo had come from Connecticut to see me perform. My auburn hair was swept up into a French twist, and I wore an old-fashioned long dress of pale green silk. It pinched at my waist and flared slightly, and when I walked it swished against my legs. I remember standing in the wings, having the bold, naive thought “I was born for this.” Overhead lights blazed, and although the audience was invisible in the dark, I could sense their expectancy. My cue came, and I flew onstage.

  After the performance, people came backstage to kiss the actors and tell us how fine we were. My father gave me a slightly wilted bouquet of long-stemmed red roses that he had held on his lap throughout the performance. My mother gave me a leatherbound edition of The Wild Duck. Lily and Margo begged me to tell them everything I knew about the actor who had played Gregers. Into this Cavan family scene enter Chance Schutz, six feet two inches of Prussian will and demeanor. He wore a suit so dark and tailored, so obviously full of silk threads that, although I had never seen a custom-made suit or been to London, I immediately thought “Savile Row.” His silver hair was impeccable, his gray eyes gleamed out of dark sockets like a wolf’s, and his ageless face was that of a man thirty or sixty. He stood in our midst and stared at me. Later Margo told me: “He drank you with his eyes.” He took my hand in a painfully firm handshake.

  “I want you for Delilah,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I produce Beyond the Bridge, and I will create a character for you. Very vulnerable, just right for you. Come, let’s talk.”

  My father chuckled and stepped forward. His suit, although not custom-made, was of the finest wool and fit his lean body perfectly. His curly light-brown hair was merely bordered with silver, and he figured that that gave him the edge. He shook Chance Schutz’s hand.

  “Sorry, but not tonight. Una’s got her family in town.”

  My head filled with blood and I thought I would explode or pass out from embarrassment. It was so typical of my father to take charge of his daughters, even when one was standing at the crossroads of her career.

  Chance engaged my eyes and said, “I shall call you.” He handed me his business card and walked away.

  My father, fuming, pulled out his cigarettes. “That bastard, what does he think he’s up to?”

  “Excuse me, sir, but you can’t smoke in the theater,” said one of the stagehands.

  My father herded all of us into a taxi and directed the driver to Le Perigord. Lily, Margo, and I sat on the pink banquette while my parents faced us in chairs. My father could not forget Chance Schutz. “When I think of that guy, what a lot of gall—telling Una he’d call her. That puke. You know what’s on his mind, don’t you?”

  “James, he wants to offer her a part,” my mother said, looking past me as she spoke. My mother, during those years, had a difficult time focusing on anyone.

  “A part, yes, but on a soap opera! What a lot of cheap trash. Una’s a trained stage actress. She could be another Katharine Cornell. You stay away from that troublemaker, Una.”

  “Television is a perfectly viable medium,” I said loftily, the way I said almost everything that year.

  “Sure, television’s okay. Television’s fine. But not a soap opera. I’d be ashamed to tell people my daughter was on a soap opera. That would really make me sick.” My father sipped his seltzer water. He almost never drank when the family was together.

  “Una would be great in soap operas,” Lily said.

  “Don’t let me hear you say that,” my father warned sternly.

  Because it was a celebration, my father ordered for everyone: rack of lamb, baby green beans, and Pommard. I can remember every bite I took. Lily and Margo kept finishing their water because they liked the looks of the young waiter who came to refill their glasses.

  Later I drove with them in a cab back to the Westbury. In the lobby my father and I said goodbye. He hugged me, and I smelled his characteristic odor of wool, sweat, and stale cigarettes. “Sweetheart, you know I only want you to be happy,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “That’s why it’s important that you don’t talk to that jerk. You don’t really want to be on soap operas, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean, you didn’t go to the finest drama school in the nation in order to spend the rest of your life crying over this or that. You’re the best damn actress I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank you, Dad,” I said, and I meant it.

  He kissed me and gave me money for a cab. When I arrived at my apartment on West Seventy-fourth Street, I didn’t wait for Chance Schutz to call me. I found his card and called him.

  “Ah, hello, Miss Cavan. Family obligations all squared away?” he said the instant he heard me speak.

  His quick recognition shocked and flattered me. “How did you know it was me?”

  “You have a distinctive, may I say, lilt to your voice. Very pretty. A very pretty voice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are calling about my offer, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful. I am prepared to offer you a part on Beyond the Bridge. A part that will lead to a starring role.”

  I held the smooth black receiver and listened to this man promise to change my life. He was going to make me a star. Adrenaline stung my veins. “A starring role?” I repeated dully.

  Chance Schutz laughed. “You think about it. It’s a bit much to consider all at once. You come by my office and I will give you more details. You come by tomorrow
, how’s that?”

  I had dance, singing, and playwriting classes the next day, but I told him of course I’d be there. He took me to lunch at the Russian Tea Room. I ate blini with Malassol caviar and listened to his ideas. He had seen me act in previous Juilliard productions and had snuck into several rehearsals. For the part of Delilah Grant, he wanted a new actress, one who had my “chiseled features” and a gentle way about her. Delilah was to be a victim; she would be misunderstood by her stepmother and sisters, taken advantage of by the men in her life, and frequently placed in mortal danger. But as her character expanded she would find reservoirs of inner strength. She would turn the tables, and in five years Chance Schutz saw Delilah becoming one of the show’s two main characters.

  He didn’t need to tell me that Rachel Moore, Kurtz Drago, Corey Levinson, and Cecile Van Vliet had stepped from Beyond the Bridge into major stage and screen roles. Yes, it was a soap opera, but its scope was greater than that of most soaps. It demanded more of the actors; its plot lines were not as contrived as other soap plot lines. “Truthfully, Beyond has the most artistic integrity of any soap opera today,” Chance told me that afternoon. “We strive for something one usually finds in film or even theater. We are not pap.”