Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 34

Jack got to the paper early and checked his messages, but there was nothing from Millie. He went to the library to sign out a couple of the photos that he wanted to show Mrs. Catherwood. Millie's office door was closed, and it didn't look like she was in yet.

He met up with Kelly, the photographer. Her graying hair and lined face suggested she must be around 50, yet her voice, personality and fashion sense made her seem like a girl in her mid-20s. Jack would have been attracted to her if his heart were not already taken. He did not know what would happen with Millie now that his secret had been revealed, but he was certain he could never love anyone else.

Kelly had signed out one of the staff cars, and they went on the one-hour drive to Irvington, easily chatting about work and events in the news.

Irvington was a quaint little college town, and the street where Mrs. Catherwood lived was shaded with trees that canopied over the narrow brick lane. They were met on the porch by Mrs. Catherwood‘s granddaughter, Amy, with whom Jack had spoken on the phone.

Amy led the way inside and introduced them to Mrs. Catherwood, who looked every bit her 94 years of age. Like most people who know they are going to be photographed for a newspaper article, she had done herself up for the occasion with rouge and red lipstick. Amy sat next to her on the couch and spoke loudly so that she could hear. "These are the folks from the newspaper, Granny, remember? They want to hear all about the Pembroke Theater."

Jack turned on his tape recorder and hoped for the best. He initially feared that an interview subject in her 90s might not be able to provide much, but he was quickly glad to realize he had been wrong. Mrs. Catherwood launched into her story without further prompting required.

"I grew up in Brayton, and my folks took us kids to the Pembroke almost every Saturday for the vaudeville show. I loved everything about it. There were singers and jugglers and animal acts of all kinds, but I mostly loved the dancers, and I decided I wanted to be one when I grew up. I was pretty good at remembering what the dancers did and started imitating them at home in our living room. Mama took me to a couple of talent shows."

As Mrs. Catherwood spoke, Kelly moved quietly around the room, taking pictures.

"They were ready to sign me up when I was 15 or 16," Mrs. Catherwood went on, "but Mama didn't want me traveling with the shows until I was 18, so I had to wait. But as soon as I was old enough, I went on my first circuit tour with a group of other girls. We'd start out with some fancy ballet dancing, but one of the girls would always have taps under her toe slippers, and suddenly in the middle of the ballet she'd be tap dancing. That was the joke, and it always got a laugh. We usually went on fourth or fifth, which was good. In vaudeville, you didn't want to be in the first spot or the last spot. That was when the audience was coming in or changing, so it was always a dumb act, not meaning stupid, but non-speaking like acrobats or animals. You didn't really want the second turn either, unless you were new and just wanting any position they gave you. But the best acts were in the middle or near the end. So if there were 10 turns, the top act would be ninth."

Jack let the interview go on for 30 or 40 minutes, making sure Mrs Catherwoid got to tell her full story, and then handed Amy the group photo. "This is dated 1924," he said. "According to the caption, you're second from left. And next to you on the far left is my grandmother, Louisa Ancshutz, but you might remember her as Louise Mayfair." Amy showed it to her grandmother, who immediately recognized it.

"Oh, my yes," she said wistfully. "I do remember Louise. Is she still with you or has she passed?"

"She died when I was a child," Jack said, "and I never even knew she'd been in vaudeville until the other day." As he said this, Jack realized his tape was almost full and began rooting around in his bag for another one.

"Louise was what we used to call a pistol," Mrs. Catherwood went on. "Full of energy, always laughing and making jokes."

"Are you sure . . . we're talking about the same person?" Jack could not help but ask. "Louisa Anschutz? Married to Walter Mayfair?"

Mrs. Catherwood squinted at him as if to see him more clearly. "Was your mother born in 1929, just before the Crash?"

"Yes, in August. Her name was Bessie Mayfair, but she's gone now too."

"And she said her daddy was Walter Mayfair?"

"He died in a train accident before she was born, but yes. I have her birth certificate."

"Oh dear."

"Um, why do you say that?" Finding another tape, Jack quickly swapped it in and hit the record button.

"When Louise and I first went out on the circuit, some of us girls were already married, but our husbands had regular jobs back home. Single girls like Louise would always get propositioned by the male performers, so she started telling people she had a husband back home. She had already started using the name Mayfair as a stage name because her real name was too hard for people to spell — I remember she chose it because it was the name of a nicer-than-usual hotel we stayed at once — and she started telling people that it was her married name, and it worked. Most of the men respected that. Not all, but most. And one night while we were sharing some bathtub gin, we girls started telling stories about who this Mr. Mayfair was. We decided he was a big-shot businessman from New York, and he traveled a lot. That's why nobody ever met him."

"Are you saying Walter Mayfair was . . . made up?"

"Good old Walter, we would say. He was a real sport, but yes, he was all made up. Louise said she never wanted a real husband because if she had a husband, she'd end up having children, and if she had children, she wouldn't have the choice to make her own exit when bad times came around again."

"But if Walter Mayfair-- wait, what do you mean make her own exit?"

"She showed me the pills. Mercury-something, but you could buy all kinds of poison at the drug store in those days."

"Poison? To commit suicide? Why?"

"Do you know anything about her family — her parents and brothers?"

Jack searched his memory. I know they came through Ellis Island in 1909 when my grandmother was eight years old, but I don't think she had any brothers. She was an only child."

"They had only been here a handful of years when her daddy died in a factory accident when Louise was a teenager. Then the influenza came and took her mother and one of her brothers. Then the war came and her other brother died in the trenches of France. Another young man died there too — a fella that Louise knew from high school and had just got engaged to before he shipped out."

Jack now remembered the photograph of his grandmother with her parents — and two young boys that Jack's mother had been told were just cousins.

"When I met her in 1920, she was 19 and had nobody left, and yet she was as chipper and upbeat as anyone I ever met. I was 18 and we were both picked for an all-girl dance act, and before you know it, we were traveling with a vaudeville circuit from city to city. There were six gals in our act, and of course we became quite close, sharing hotel rooms. We did that act for four seasons, and Louise was the heart of our group. When one of the girls had a birthday or was feeling homesick, Louise would gin up a little party or suggest some clever new step for the act. She's the one who came up with the tap dance bit."

"She sounds like such a . . . happy person," Jack said. "But then, why would she be so prepared to kill herself?"

"I don't remember how she put it -- it's been a few years -- but after all that loss and hardship, she had been all ready to take her own life and had just bought those pills when she was walking by the Pembroke Theatre. But just then, a talent scout came up to her out of the blue and asked her if she could dance. She had done a little ballet in high school and knew the popular dances and he offered her a job on the spot because we were one dancer short when a girl quit. We got paid pretty well in vaudeville, and the work just wasn't that hard. Once you had a good 10-minute act, you just did that same thing over and over, and on the big time circuits, you only had to perform twice a night, and the rest of the time was a pretty good party.

"Louise said she was going to ride those crazy unexpected good times while they lasted, and when those good times came to an end — which she knew they would — she would just take her pills then because she had decided she was just not going to go through bad times again. She would exit when she decided to exit. That's why she didn't want to have a husband or children that she'd have to live for. When she wanted male companionship, she got it from married men — one in particular. It started when they were doing an act together."

"Bertie Blaine?" Jack asked, handing the second photo to Amy, who showed it to her grandmother.

Mrs. Catherwood chuckled. "That's him alright. And let me tell you, Louise did all the work in that act, even though he got top billing. They pretended like they were at a fancy party -- him holding an extra-large martini glass and her smoking a cigarette in a long holder. He was the straight man and would ask Louise a simple question like 'what did you do today?' and she would wave her cigarette around while she gave a long, funny answer."

"Oh my god, it was her act," Jack said, mostly to himself. "Talking to Bertie was her vaudeville act!"

"It was a good act," Mrs. Catherwood said, "and more challenging than most. In vaudeville, once you put together a solid 10 minutes, you never had to change it because you were traveling to other cities on the circuit. But Bertie and Louise didn't travel. They only performed at the Pembroke, and so they needed new material -- and Louise wrote all of it. Bertie didn't have a lick of talent his own self, but he owned the theater, so he could be on stage if he wanted to."

"Wait. Owned the theater? Do you mean—"

"Blaine was his stage name," she said, tapping on the picture. "This here is Bert McQueen."

"Bert McQueen?" Jack exclaimed. "The same Albert McQueen who owned the automobile dealership and flew a hot air balloon?"

"Bert McQueen owned a lot of things, including that balloon, but what he loved most was the theater, and he wanted to be part of it. And he loved Louise and didn't want her to travel with the circuits quite so much, so they came up with that act that they only did at the Pembroke. Of course, Bertie was already married, and his wife came from money, plus he was Catholic. When Louise got pregnant, she wanted to go to an abortionist. It was illegal then, but heck, so was alcohol. You could still do it. But Bertie didn't want her to on account of his religion, and he sent her to a place in New York where they did things discreetly, and she had her baby and came back to Brayton. By then, he had gotten her a fake marriage license with that swell Walter fella, and Bertie promised to take care of her and Bessie forever and a day. But that was the summer of 1929, and a few months later, everything went to hell in a handbasket.

"Bertie lost all his money in the stock market crash, and he lost all his cars to the bank, but he still had his building. He kept his business going, but instead of selling fancy cars to rich folks, he was selling old Model Ts and other cheap dependable cars. Most folks were out of work, but a lot of them decided to travel somewhere else where they had family or thought there might be jobs, and they needed a dependable car to get there. Some folks did have jobs, but they needed a car or truck to do that job.

"The only other thing Bertie still owned was that balloon, and he used it to promote his business. He'd fly it wherever the wind was blowing — trailing a banner advertisement for ‘cheap & reliable used cars' or something like that. Louise would follow him in a truck so she could pick him up wherever the wind took him, and they did that three or four times before the accident. A storm came up unexpected, and the balloon was struck by lightning and fell like a rock. Louise drove as close as she could and then ran through the corn fields in the rain to get to him, but he was dead."

There was a long pause and then Mrs Catherwoid said, "It was the talkies that really did us in, even before the Depression hit. We could compete with silent movies, but talking pictures killed vaudeville. But it was fun while it lasted."

Mrs. Catherwood was clearly getting tired, and Amy signaled them that it was time to wrap up, so they did.

On the ride back to Brayton, Jack told Kelly about Bertie the parakeet. "The words she said made no sense; they weren't jokes or anything. But now that I know this, it makes sense. We knew it was one side of a conversation, of course, but the cadence of it and the way she emoted those nonsensical words was like a performance."

"That's wild," Kelly said. "Tragic, of course, but it sounds like her whole life was rough except that one little window of the 1920s, so it was kind of a gift that when her mind went, that she went back to that one moment."

"That's a good point," Jack said. "It was the only time I saw her when she seemed happy."

They rode in silence for a while and then Kelly said, "You and Millie make a cute couple."

Jack didn't know how to reply because maybe they weren't even a couple anymore. He managed to say, "She's pretty special."

"She and I don't get to talk much anymore because of our schedules," Kelly said, "but five or six years ago we both worked nights, usually getting off at 1 a.m., and some nights a group of us would go out to a bar afterwards. Once in a while, news would break right on deadline, and they'd hold the presses to cover the story. I remember one time it was a plane crash, and we ended up working until about three. By then, the bars were closed, so Millie invited us to her house and we sat on her porch the rest of the night drinking beer and talking quietly so as not to disturb her neighbors. And then it was starting to get light, and we saw the paper boy coming down the block on his bike, tossing a paper on every sidewalk. When he got to her house, Millie stood up and started applauding and cheering him, and the rest of us joined her, giving him a standing ovation. That poor kid probably thought we were making fun of him, but we were totally sincere."

When they got back to the paper about 2 o'clock. Jack checked his messages, but there was nothing from Millie. He returned the photos he had borrowed to the library and saw no sign of her. It had been a long day already, so Jack told his editor he'd start transcribing the interview at home and left the building. He had brought his Walkman with him, so he popped the second tape in and put on his headphones for the walk back to the Roosevelt building.

He had realized halfway through the interview that the first tape was running out, and the only backup he had brought was one that he had already recorded music on. Now, he wanted to make sure the last part of the interview -— which was mostly about his grandmother -— had actually been recorded.

Fortunately, it had been, and as he walked across the Square, he listened to the end. After a few seconds of scratching, the tape went back to the middle of You Can't Always Get What You Want, which somehow seemed appropriate. He was in anguish over his apparent loss of Millie, but mourning a romantic breakup seemed petty compared to all his grandmother had been through. By the time he reached the Roosevelt building, the song had changed, and Mick Jagger was calling out "Angie," yet it sounded like a backup singer was singing "Johnny." Something red caught Jack's eye, and when he looked up at the window, he saw a reflection of Millie running up behind him.