THREE

A person only gets to move to New York City for the first time in her life once, Angela, and it’s a pretty big deal.

Perhaps this idea doesn’t hold any romance for you, since you are a born New Yorker. Maybe you take this splendid city of ours for granted. Or maybe you love it more than I do, in your own unimaginably intimate way. Without a doubt, you were lucky to be raised here. But you never got to move here—and for that, I am sorry for you. You missed one of life’s great experiences.

New York City in 1940!

There will never be another New York like that one. I’m not defaming all the New Yorks that came before 1940, or all the New Yorks that came after 1940. They all have their importance. But this is a city that gets born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time. So that city, that place—newly created for my eyes only—will never exist again. It is preserved forever in my memory like an orchid trapped in a paperweight. That city will always be my perfect New York.

You can have your perfect New York, and other people can have theirs—but that one will always be mine.

It wasn’t a long ride from Grand Central to the Lily Playhouse—we just cut straight across town—but our taxi took us through the heart of Manhattan, and that’s always the best way for a newcomer to feel the muscle of New York. I was all atingle to be in the city and I wanted to look at everything at once. But then I remembered my manners and tried for a spell to make conversation with Olive. Olive, however, wasn’t the sort of person who seemed to feel that the air needed to be constantly filled up with words, and her peculiar answers only brought me more questions—questions that I sensed she would be unwilling to further discuss.

“How long have you worked for my aunt?” I asked her.

“Since Moses was in nappies.”

I pondered that for a bit. “And what are your duties at the theater?”

“To catch things that are falling through midair, right before they hit the ground and shatter.”

We drove on for a while in silence, and I let that sink in.

I tried one more time: “What sort of show is playing at the theater tonight?”

“It’s a musical. It’s called Life with Mother .”

“Oh! I’ve heard of it.”

“No, you haven’t. You’re thinking of Life with Father . That was a play on Broadway last year. Ours is called Life with Mother . And ours is a musical.”

I wondered: Is that legal? Can you just take a title of a major Broadway hit like that, change a single word, and make it your own? (The answer to that question—at least in 1940, at the Lily Playhouse—was: sure.)

I asked, “But what if people buy tickets to your show by mistake, thinking that they’re going to see Life with Father ?”

Olive, flatly: “Yes. Wouldn’t that be unfortunate.”

I was starting to feel young and stupid and annoying, so I stopped talking. For the rest of the taxi ride, I got to just look out the window. It was plenty entertaining to watch the city go by. There were glories to see in all directions. It was late in the evening in midtown Manhattan on a fine summer night, so nothing can be better than that. It had just rained. The sky was purple and dramatic. I saw glimpses of mirrored skyscrapers, neon signs, and shining wet streets. People sprinted, bolted, strolled, and stumbled down the sidewalks. As we passed through Times Square, mountains of artificial lights spewed out their lava of white-hot news and instant advertising. Arcades and taxi-dance halls and movie palaces and cafeterias and theaters flashed by, bewitching my eyes.

We turned onto Forty-first Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. This was not a beautiful street back then, and it still isn’t beautiful today. At that time, it was mostly a tangle of fire escapes for the more important buildings that faced Fortieth and Forty-second Streets. But there in the middle of that unlovely block was the Lily Playhouse, my Aunt Peg’s theater—all lit up with a billboard that read Life with Mother .

I can still see it in my mind today. The Lily was a great big lump of a thing, crafted in a style that I know now is Art Nouveau, but which I recognized then only as heavy duty . And boy howdy, did that lobby go out of its way to prove to you that you’d arrived somewhere important. It was all gravity and darkness—rich woodwork, carved ceiling panels, bloodred ceramic tiles, and serious old Tiffany light fixtures. All over the walls were tobacco-stained paintings of bare-breasted nymphs cavorting with gangs of satyrs—and it sure looked like one of those nymphs was about to get herself in trouble in the family way, if she wasn’t careful. Other murals showed muscular men with heroic calves wrestling with sea monsters in a manner that looked more erotic than violent. (You got the sense that the muscular men didn’t want to win the battle, if you see my point.) Still other murals showed dryads struggling their way out of trees, tits first, while naiads splashed about in a river nearby, throwing water on each other’s naked torsos in a spirit that was very much whoopee! Thickly carved vines of grapes and wisteria (and lilies, of course!) climbed up every column. The effect was quite bordello. I loved it.

“I’ll take you straight to the show,” Olive said, checking her watch, “which is nearly over, thank God.”

She pushed open the big doors that led into the playhouse itself. I’m sorry to report that Olive Thompson entered her place of work with the demeanor of one who might rather not touch anything within it, but I myself was dazzled. The interior of the theater was really something quite stunning—a huge, golden-lit, fading old jewel box of a place. I took it all in—the sagging stage, the bad sight lines, the hefty crimson curtains, the cramped orchestra pit, the overgilded ceiling, the menacingly glittery chandelier that you could not look at without thinking, “Now, what if that thing should fall down . . . ?”

It was all grandiose, it was all crumbling. The Lily reminded me of Grandmother Morris—not only because my grandmother had loved gawdy old playhouses like this, but also because my grandmother had looked like this: old, overdone, and proud, and decked to the nines in out-of-date velvet.

We stood against the back wall, although there were plenty of seats to be had. In fact, there were not many more people in the audience than onstage, it appeared. I was not the only one who noticed this fact. Olive took a quick head count, wrote the number in a small notebook which she had pulled out of her pocket, and sighed.

As for what was going on up there on the stage, it was dizzying. This, indeed, had to be the end of the show, because there was a lot happening at once. At the back of the stage there was a kick line of about a dozen dancers—girls and boys—grinning madly as they flung their limbs up toward the dusty heavens. At center stage, a good-looking young man and a spirited young woman were tap-dancing as though to save their lives, while singing at full bellow about how everything was going to be just fine from now on, my baby, because you and me are in love ! On the left side of the stage was to be found a phalanx of showgirls, whose costumes and movements kept them just on the correct side of moral permissibility, but whose contribution to the story—whatever that story may have been—was unclear. Their task seemed to be to stand with their arms outstretched, slowly turning, so that you could take in the full Amazonian qualities of their figures from every angle, at your leisure. On the other side of the stage, a man dressed as a hobo was juggling bowling pins.

Even for a finale, it went on for an awfully long time. The orchestra banged forth, the kick line pounded away, the happy and breathless couple couldn’t believe how terrific their lives were about to get, the showgirls slowly displayed their figures, the juggler sweated and hurled—until suddenly, with a crash of every instrument at once, and a swirl of spotlights, and wild flinging up of everyone’s arms in the air at the same time, it ended!

Applause.

Not thunderous applause. More like a light drizzle of applause.

Olive didn’t clap. I clapped politely, though my clapping sounded lonely there at the back of the hall. The applause didn’t last long. The performers had to exit the stage in semisilence, which is never good. The audience filed past us dutifully, like workers heading home for the day—which is exactly what they were.

“Do you think they liked it?” I asked Olive.

“Who?”

“The audience.”

“The audience ?” Olive blinked, as though it had never occurred to her to wonder what an audience thought of a show. After a bit of consideration, she said, “You must understand, Vivian, that our audiences are neither full of excitement when they arrive at the Lily, nor overwhelmed with elation when they leave.”

From the way she said this, it sounded as though she approved of the arrangement, or at least had accepted it.

“Come,” she said. “Your aunt will be backstage.”

So backstage we went—straight into the busy, wanton clamor that always erupts in the wings at the end of a show. Everyone moving, everyone yelling, everyone smoking, everyone undressing. The dancers were lighting cigarettes for each other, and the showgirls were removing their headdresses. A few men in overalls were shuffling props around, but not in any way that would cause them to break a sweat. There was a lot of loud, overripe laughter, but that’s not because anything was particularly funny; it’s just because these were show-business people, and that’s how they always are.

And there was my Aunt Peg, so tall and sturdy, clipboard in hand. Her chestnut-and-gray hair was cut in an ill-considered short style that made her look somewhat like Eleanor Roosevelt, but with a better chin. Peg was wearing a long, salmon-colored twill skirt and what could have been a man’s oxford shirt. She also wore tall blue knee socks and beige moccasins. If that sounds like an unfashionable combination, it was. It was unfashionable then, it would be unfashionable today, and it will remain unfashionable until the sun explodes. Nobody has ever looked good in a salmon-colored twill skirt, a blue oxford shirt, knee socks, and moccasins.

Her frumpy look was only thrown into starker relief by the fact that she was talking to two of the ravishingly beautiful showgirls from the play. Their stage makeup gave them a look of otherworldly glamour, and their hair was piled in glossy coils on the tops of their heads. They were wearing pink silk dressing gowns over their costumes, and they were the most overtly sexual visions of womanhood I had ever seen. One of the showgirls was a blonde—a platinum, actually—with a figure that would’ve made Jean Harlow gnash her teeth in jealous despair. The other was a sultry brunette whose exceptional beauty I’d noticed earlier, from the back of the theater. (Though I should not get any special credit for noticing how stunning this particular woman was; a Martian could have noticed it . . . from Mars .)

“Vivvie!” Peg shouted, and her grin lit up my world. “You made it, kiddo!”

Kiddo!

Nobody had ever called me kiddo, and for some reason it made me want to run into her arms and cry. It was also so encouraging to be told that I had made it— as though I’d accomplished something! In truth, I’d accomplished nothing more impressive than first getting kicked out of school, and then getting kicked out of my parents’ house, and finally getting lost in Grand Central Station. But her delight in seeing me was a balm. I felt so welcome. Not only welcome, but wanted .

“You’ve already met Olive, our resident zookeeper,” Peg said. “And this is Gladys, our dance captain—”

The platinum-haired girl grinned, snapped her gum at me, and said, “Howyadoin?”

“—and this is Celia Ray, one of our showgirls.”

Celia extended her sylphlike arm and said in a low voice, “A pleasure. Charmed to meet you.”

Celia’s voice was incredible. It wasn’t just the thick New York accent; it was the deep gravelly tone. She was a showgirl with the voice of Lucky Luciano.

“Have you eaten?” Peg asked me. “Are you starved?”

“No,” I said. “Not starved, I wouldn’t say. But I haven’t had proper dinner.”

“We’ll go out, then. Let’s go have a few gallons of drinks and catch up.”

Olive interjected, “Vivian’s luggage hasn’t been brought upstairs yet, Peg. Her suitcases are still in the lobby. She’s had a long day, and she’ll want to freshen up. What’s more, we should give notes to the cast.”

“The boys can bring her things upstairs,” Peg said. “She looks fresh enough to me. And the cast doesn’t need notes.”

“The cast always needs notes.”

“Tomorrow we can fix it” was Peg’s vague answer, which seemed to satisfy Olive not at all. “I don’t want to talk about business just now. I could murder a meal, and what’s worse I have a powerful thirst. Let’s just go out, can’t we?”

By now, it sounded like Peg was begging for Olive’s permission.

“Not tonight, Peg,” said Olive firmly. “It’s been too long a day. The girl needs to rest and settle in. Bernadette left a meat loaf upstairs. I can make sandwiches.”

Peg looked a little deflated, but cheered up again within the next minute.

“Upstairs, then!” she said. “Come, Vivvie! Let’s go!”

Here’s something I learned over time about my aunt: whenever she said “Let’s go!” she meant that whoever was in earshot was also invited. Peg always moved in a crowd, and she wasn’t picky about who was in the crowd, either.

So that’s why our gathering that night—held upstairs, in the living quarters of the Lily Playhouse—included not only me and Aunt Peg and her secretary, Olive, but also Gladys and Celia, the showgirls. A last-minute addition was a fey young man whom Peg collared as he was heading toward the stage door. I recognized him as a dancer in the show. Once I got up close to him, I could see that he looked about fourteen years old, and he also looked as if he could use a meal.

“Roland, join us upstairs for dinner,” Peg said.

He hesitated. “Aw, that’s all right, Peg.”

“Don’t worry, hon, we’ve got plenty of food. Bernadette made a big pile of meat loaf. There’s enough for everyone.”

When Olive looked as though she were going to protest something, Peg shushed her: “Oh, Olive, don’t play the governess. I can share my dinner with Roland here. He needs to put on some weight, and I need to lose some, so it works out. Anyway, we’re semisolvent right now. We can afford to feed a few more mouths.”

We headed to the back of the theater, where a wide staircase led to the upstairs of the Lily. As we climbed the stairs, I could not stop staring at those two showgirls. Celia and Gladys. I’d never seen such beauties. I’d been around theater girls back at boarding school, but this was different. The theater girls at Emma Willard tended to be the sort of females who never washed their hair, and always wore thick black leotards, and every single one of them thought she was Medea, at all times. I simply couldn’t bear them. But Gladys and Celia—this was a different category. This was a different species . I was mesmerized by their glamour, their accents, their makeup, the swing of their silk-wrapped rear ends. And as for Roland, he moved his body just the same way. He, too, was a fluid, swinging creature. How fast they all talked! And how alluringly they threw out abbreviated hints of gossip, like bits of bright confetti.

“She just gets by on her looks!” Gladys was saying, about some girl or another.

“Not even on her looks!” Roland added. “Just on her legs !”

“Well, that ain’t enough!” said Gladys.

“For one more season it is,” said Celia. “ Maybe .”

“That boyfriend of hers don’t help matters.”

“ That lamebrain!”

“He keeps lapping up that champagne, though.”

“She should up and tell him!”

“He’s not exactly panting for it!”

“How long can a girl make a living as a movie usher?”

“Walking around with that nice-looking diamond, though.”

“She should try to think more reasonable.”

“She should get herself a butter-and-egg man.”

Who were these people that were being talked about? What was this life that was being suggested? And who was this poor girl being discussed in the stairwell? How was she ever going to advance past being a mere movie usher, if she didn’t start thinking more reasonable ? Who’d given her the diamond? Who was paying for all the champagne that was being lapped up? I cared about all these things! These things mattered! And what in the world was a butter-and-egg man?

I’d never been more desperate to know how a story ended, and this story didn’t even have a plot—it just had unnamed characters, hints of wild action, and a sense of looming crisis. My heart was racing with excitement—and yours would have been, too, if you were a frivolous nineteen-year-old girl like me, who’d never had a serious thought in her life.

We reached a dimly lit landing, and Peg unlocked a door and let us all in.

“Welcome home, kiddo,” Peg said.

“Home” in my Aunt Peg’s world consisted of the third and fourth floors of the Lily Playhouse. These were the living quarters. The second floor of the building—as I would find out later—was office space. The ground floor, of course, was the theater itself, which I’ve already described for you. But the third and fourth floors were home, and now we had arrived.

Peg did not have a talent for interior design, I could instantly see. Her taste (if you could call it that) ran toward heavy, outdated antiques, and mismatched chairs, and a lot of apparent confusion about what belonged where. I could see that Peg had the same sort of dark, unhappy paintings on her walls as my parents had (inherited from the same relatives, no doubt). It was all faded prints of horses and portraits of crusty old Quakers. There was a fair amount of familiar-looking old silver and china spread around the place as well—candlesticks and tea sets, and such—and some of it looked valuable, but who knew? None of it look used or loved. (There were ashtrays on every surface, though, and those certainly looked used and loved.)

I don’t want to say that the place was a hovel. It wasn’t dirty; it just wasn’t arranged . I caught a glance of a formal dining room—or, rather, what might have been a formal dining room in anyone else’s home, except that a Ping-Pong table had been placed right in the middle of the room. Even more curiously, the Ping-Pong table was directly situated beneath a low-hanging chandelier, which must have made it difficult to play a game.

We landed in a generously sized living room—a big enough space that it could be overstuffed with furniture while also containing a grand piano, which was jammed unceremoniously against the wall.

“Who needs something from the bottle and jug department?” asked Peg, heading to a bar in the corner. “Martinis? Anyone? Everyone?”

The resounding answer seemed to be: Yes! Everyone!

Well, almost everyone. Olive declined a drink and frowned as Peg poured the martinis. It looked as though Olive were calculating the price of each cocktail down to the halfpenny—which she probably was doing.

My aunt handed me my martini as casually as if she and I had been drinking together for ages. This was a delight. I felt quite adult. My parents drank (of course they drank; they were WASPs) but they never drank with me. I’d always had to execute my drinking on the sly. Not anymore, it seemed.

Cheers!

“Let me show you to your rooms,” Olive said.

Peg’s secretary led me down a rabbit warren and opened one of the doors. She told me, “This is your Uncle Billy’s apartment. Peg would like you to stay here for now.”

I was surprised. “Uncle Billy has an apartment here?”

Olive sighed. “It is a sign of your aunt’s enduring affection for her husband that she keeps these rooms for him, should he need a place to stay while passing through.”

I don’t think it was my imagination that Olive said the words “enduring affection” much the same way someone else might say “stubborn rash.”

Well, thank you, Aunt Peg, because Billy’s apartment was wonderful. It didn’t have the clutter of the other rooms I’d seen—not at all. No, this place had style . There was a small sitting room with a fireplace and a fine, black-lacquered desk, upon which sat a typewriter. Then there was the bedroom, with its windows facing Forty-first Street, and its handsome double bed made of chrome and dark wood. On the floor was an immaculate white rug. I had never before stood on a white rug. Just off the bedroom was a good-sized dressing room with a large chrome mirror on the wall, and a glossy wardrobe containing not one item of clothing whatsoever. In the corner of the dressing room was a small sink. The place was spotless.

“You don’t have your own bath, unfortunately,” said Olive, as the men in overalls were depositing my trunks and sewing machine in the dressing room. “There is a common bath across the hall. You’ll be sharing that with Celia, as she is staying at the Lily, just for now. Mr. Herbert and Benjamin live in the other wing. They share their own bath.”

I didn’t know who Mr. Herbert and Benjamin were, but I figured I’d soon enough be finding out.

“Billy won’t be needing his apartment, Olive?”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“Are you very sure? If he should ever need these rooms, of course, I can go somewhere else. What I’m saying is that I don’t need anything so nice as all this. . . .”

I was lying. I needed and wanted this little apartment with all my heart, and had already laid claim to it in my imagination. This is where I would become a person of significance, I decided.

“Your uncle hasn’t been to New York City in over four years, Vivian,” Olive said, eyeballing me in that way she had—that unsettling way of making you feel as though she were watching your thoughts like a newsreel. “I trust that you can bunk down here with a certain sense of security.”

Oh, bliss!

I unpacked a few essentials, splashed some water on my face, powdered my nose, and combed my hair. Then it was back to the clutter and chatter of the big, overstuffed living room. Back to Peg’s world, with all its novelty and noise.

Olive went to the kitchen and brought out a small meat loaf, served on a plate of dismal lettuce. Just as she had intuited earlier, this was not going to be enough of a meal for everyone in the room. Shortly, however, she reappeared with some cold cuts and bread. She also scared up half a chicken carcass, a plate of pickles, and some containers of cold Chinese food. I noticed that somebody had opened a window and turned on a small fan, which helped to eliminate the stuffy summer heat not in the least.

“You kids eat,” Peg said. “Take all you need.”

Gladys and Roland lit into the meat loaf like a couple of farmhands. I helped myself to some of the chop suey. Celia didn’t eat anything, but sat quietly on one of the couches, handling her martini glass and cigarette with more panache than anything I’d ever seen.

“How was the beginning of the show tonight?” Olive asked. “I only caught the end.”

“Well, it fell short of King Lear, ” said Peg. “But only just.”

Olive’s frown deepened. “Why? What happened?”

“Nothing happened per se,” said Peg. “It’s just a lackluster show, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over. It’s always been lackluster. Nobody in the audience seemed unduly harmed by it. They all left the theater with the use of their legs. Anyway, we’re changing the show next week, so it doesn’t matter.”

“And the box office receipts? For the early show?”

“The less we speak of such matters the better,” said Peg.

“But what was the take, Peg?”

“Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to, Olive.”

“Well, I will need to know. We can’t keep having crowds like tonight.”

“Oh, how I love that you call it a crowd! By actual count, there were forty-seven people at the early show this evening.”

“Peg! That’s not enough !”

“Don’t grieve, Olive. Things always get slower in the summer, remember. Anyway, we get the audiences we get. If we wanted to draw larger crowds, we would put on baseball games instead of plays. Or we would invest in air-conditioning. Let’s just turn our attention now toward getting the South Seas act ready for next week. We can get the dancers rehearsing tomorrow morning, and they can be up and running by Tuesday.”

“Not tomorrow morning,” said Olive. “I’ve rented the stage out to a children’s dance class.”

“Good for you. Resourceful as ever, old girl. Tomorrow afternoon, then.”

“Not tomorrow afternoon. I’ve rented the stage out for a swimming class.”

This caught Peg up short. “A swimming class? Come again?”

“It’s a program that the city is offering. They’ll be teaching children from the neighborhood how to swim.”

“To swim ? Will they be flooding our stage, Olive?”

“Of course not. It’s called dry swimming. They teach the classes without water.”

“Do you mean to tell me that they will teach swimming as a theoretical concept ?”

“More or less so. Just the basics. They use chairs. The city is paying for it.”

“How about this, Olive. How about you tell Gladys when you haven’t rented our stage out to a children’s dance class, or to a dry swimming school, and then she can call a rehearsal to begin working on the dances for the South Seas act?”

“Monday afternoon,” said Olive.

“Monday afternoon, Gladys!” Peg called over to the showgirl. “Did you hear that? Can you gather everyone together for Monday afternoon?”

“I don’t like rehearsing in the mornings, anyhow,” said Gladys, although I wasn’t sure this constituted a firm reply.

“It shouldn’t be hard, Gladdie,” said Peg. “It’s just a scratch revue. Throw something together, the way you do.”

“I want to be in the South Seas show!” said Roland.

“Everyone wants to be in the South Seas show,” said Peg. “The kids love performing in these exotic international dramas, Vivvie. They love the costumes. This year alone, we’ve had an Indian show, a Chinese maiden story, and a Spanish dancer story. We tried an Eskimo romance last year, but it was no good. The costumes weren’t very becoming, to say the least. Fur, you know. Heavy. And the songs were not our best. We ended up rhyming ‘nice’ with ‘ice’ so many times, it made your head ache.”

“You can play one of the hula girls in the South Seas show, Roland!” Gladys said, and laughed.

“I sure am pretty enough for it!” he said, and struck a pose.

“You sure are,” agreed Gladys. “And you’re so tiny, one of these days you’re just gonna float away. I always gotta be careful not to put you right next to me on the stage. Standing next to you, I look like a great big cow.”

“That could be because you’ve gained weight lately, Gladys,” observed Olive. “You need to monitor what you eat, or soon you won’t fit into your costumes at all.”

“What a person eats doesn’t have anything to do with her figure!” Gladys protested, as she reached for another piece of meat loaf. “I read it in a magazine. What matters is how much coffee you drink.”

“You drink too much booze, ” Roland cried out. “You can’t hold your liquor!”

“I surely cannot hold my liquor!” Gladys agreed. “Everybody knows that about me. But I’ll tell you another thing—I wouldn’t have as big a sex life as I have, if I could hold my liquor!”

“Boot me your lipstick, Celia,” said Gladys to the other showgirl, who silently pulled out a tube from the pocket of her silk robe and handed it over. Gladys painted her lips with the most violent shade of red I’d ever seen, and then kissed Roland hard on both his cheeks, leaving big, bright imprints.

“There, Roland. Now you are the prettiest girl in the room!”

Roland didn’t appear to mind the teasing. He had a face just like a porcelain doll, and to my expert eye, it looked as though he tweezed his brows. I was shocked that he didn’t even try to act male. When he spoke, he waved his hands around like a debutante. He didn’t even wipe off the lipstick from his cheeks! It’s almost as though he wanted to look like a female! (Forgive my naïveté, Angela, but I hadn’t been around a lot of homosexuals at that point in my life. Not male ones, anyhow. Now lesbians, on the other hand— those I’d seen. I did spend a year at Vassar, after all. Even I wasn’t that oblivious.)

Peg turned her attention to me. “Now! Vivian Louise Morris! What do you want to do with yourself while you’re here in New York City?”

What did I want to do with myself? I wanted to do this ! I wanted to drink martinis with showgirls, and listen to Broadway business talk, and eavesdrop on the gossip of boys who looked like girls! I wanted to hear about people’s big sex lives!

But I couldn’t say any of that. So what I said, brilliantly, was: “I’d like to look around a bit! Take things in!”

Everyone was looking at me now. Waiting for something more, maybe? Waiting for what ?

“I don’t know my way around New York City, is my primary obstacle,” I said, sounding like an ass.

Aunt Peg responded to this inanity by grabbing a paper napkin off the table, and sketching upon it a quick map of Manhattan. I do wish I had managed to preserve that map, Angela. It was the most charming map of the city I would ever see: a big crooked carrot of an island, with a dark rectangle in the middle representing Central Park; vague wavy lines representing the Hudson and East Rivers; a dollar sign down at the bottom of the island, representing Wall Street; a musical note up at the top of the island, representing Harlem, and a bright star right in the middle, representing right where we were: Times Square. Center of the world! Bingo!

“There,” she said. “Now you know your way around. You can’t get lost here, kiddo. Just follow the street signs. It’s all numbered, couldn’t be easier. Just remember: Manhattan is an island. People forget that. Walk far enough in any direction, and you’ll run into water. If you hit a river, turn around and go in the other direction. You’ll learn your way around. Dumber people than you have figured out this city.”

“Even Gladys figured it out,” said Roland.

“Watch it, sunshine,” said Gladys. “I was born here.”

“Thank you!” I said, pocketing the napkin. “And if you need anything done around the theater, I would be happy to help out.”

“You’d like to help?” Peg seemed surprised to hear it. Clearly, she had not expected much of me. Christ, what had my parents told her? “You can help Olive in the office, if you go for that sort of thing. Office work, and such.”

Olive blanched at this suggestion, and I’m afraid I might have done the same. I didn’t want to work for Olive any more than she wanted me working for her.

“Or you can work in the box office,” Peg went on. “You can sell tickets. You’re not musical, are you? I’d be surprised if you were. Nobody in our family is musical.”

“I can sew,” I said.

I must’ve said it quietly, because nobody seemed to register that I’d spoken.

Olive said, “Peg, why don’t you have Vivian enroll at the Katharine Gibbs School, where she can learn how to type?”

Peg, Gladys, and Celia all groaned as one.

“Olive is always trying to get us girls to enroll at Katharine Gibbs so we can learn how to type,” Gladys explained. She shuddered in dramatic horror, as though learning how to type were something akin to busting up rocks in a prisoner-of-war camp.

“Katharine Gibbs turns out employable young women,” Olive said. “A young woman ought to be employable.”

“I can’t type, and I’m employable!” Gladys said. “Heck, I’m already employed! I’m employed by you !”

Olive said, “A showgirl is never quite employed, Gladys. A showgirl is a person who may—at times— be in possession of a job. It’s not the same thing. Yours is not a reliable field of work. A secretary, by contrast, can always find employment.”

“I’m not just a showgirl,” said Gladys, with miffed pride. “I’m a dance captain . A dance captain can always find employment. Anyhow, if I run out of money, I’ll just get married.”

“Never learn to type, kiddo,” Peg said to me. “And if you do learn to type, never tell anybody that you can type, or they’ll make you do it forever. Never learn shorthand, either. It’ll be the death of you. Once they put a steno pad in a woman’s hand, it never comes out.”

Suddenly the gorgeous creature on the other side of the room spoke, for the first time since we’d come upstairs. “You said you can sew?” Celia asked.

Once again, that low, throaty voice took me by surprise. Also, she had her eyes on me now, which I found a bit intimidating. I don’t want to overuse the word “smoldering” when I talk about Celia, but there’s no way around it: she was the kind of woman who smoldered even when she wasn’t intentionally trying to smolder. Holding that smoldering gaze was uncomfortable for me, so I just nodded, and said in the safer direction of Peg, “Yes. I can sew. Grandmother Morris taught me how.”

“What sort of stuff do you make?” Celia asked.

“Well, I made this dress.”

Gladys screamed, “ You made that dress? ”

Both Gladys and Roland rushed at me the way girls always rushed at me when they found out that I’d made my own dress. In a flash, the two of them were picking at my outfit, like two gorgeous little monkeys.

“You did this ?” Gladys said.

“Even the trim ?” Roland asked.

I wanted to say, “This is nothing!”—because truly, compared to what I could do, this little frock, cunning though it appeared, was nothing. But I didn’t want to sound cocky. So instead I said, “I make everything I wear.”

Celia spoke again, from across the room: “Can you make costumes?”

“I suppose so. It would depend on the costume, but I’m sure I could.”

The showgirl stood up and asked, “Could you make something like this?” She let her robe drop to the floor, revealing the costume beneath it.

(I know that sounds dramatic, to say that she “let her robe drop,” but Celia was the kind of girl who didn’t just take her clothes off like any other mortal woman; she always let them drop .)

Her figure was astonishing, but as for the costume, it was basic—a little two-piece metallic number, something like a bathing suit. It was the sort of thing that was designed to look better from fifty feet away than up close. It had tight, high-waisted shorts decorated in splashy sequins, and a bra that was decked out in a gaudy arrangement of beads and feathers. It looked good on her, but that’s only because a hospital gown would have looked good on her. I thought it could have fit her better, to be honest. The shoulder straps were all wrong.

“I could make that,” I said. “The beading would take me awhile, but that’s just busywork. The rest of it is straightforward.” Then I had a flash of inspiration, like a flare shot up in a night sky: “Say, if you have a costume director, maybe I could work with her? I could be her assistant!”

Laughter burst out across the room.

“A costume director !” Gladys said. “What do you think this is, Paramount Pictures? You think we got Edith Head hiding down there in the basement?”

“The girls are responsible for their own costumes,” Peg explained. “If we don’t have anything that will work for them in our costume closet—and we never do—they have to provide their own outfits. It costs them, but that’s just how things have always been done. Where’d you get yours, Celia?”

“I bought it off a girl. You remember Evelyn, at El Morocco? She got married, moved to Texas. She gave me a whole trunk of costumes. Lucky for me.”

“Sure, lucky for you,” sniffed Roland. “Lucky you didn’t get the clap.”

“Aw, give it a rest, Roland,” said Gladys. “Evelyn was a good kid. You’re just jealous because she married a cowboy .”

“If you’d like to help the kids out with their costumes, Vivian, I’m sure everyone would appreciate it,” said Peg.

“Could you make me a South Seas outfit?” Gladys asked me. “Like a Hawaiian hula girl?”

That was like asking a master chef if he could make porridge.

“Sure,” I said. “I could make you one tomorrow.”

“Could you make me a hula outfit?” asked Roland.

“I don’t have a budget for new costumes,” Olive warned. “We haven’t discussed this.”

“Oh, Olive,” Peg sighed. “You are every inch the vicar’s wife. Let the kids have their fun.”

I couldn’t help but observe that Celia had kept her gaze on me since we started talking about sewing. Being in her line of vision felt both terrifying and thrilling.

“You know something?” she said, after studying me more closely. “You’re pretty.”

Now, to be fair, people usually noticed this fact about me sooner. But who could blame Celia for having paid me so little attention up until this point, when she was in possession of that face and that body?

“Tell you the truth,” she said, smiling for the first time that night, “you kinda look like me.”

Let me be clear, Angela: I didn’t.

Celia Ray was a goddess; I was an adolescent. But in the sketchiest of terms, I suppose I could see that she had a point: we were both tall brunettes with ivory skin and wide-set brown eyes. We could have passed for cousins, if not sisters—and decidedly not twins. Certainly our figures had nothing in common. She was a peach; I was a stick. Still, I was flattered. To this day, though, I believe that the only reason Celia Ray ever took notice of me at all was because we looked a tiny bit alike, and that drew her attention. For Celia, vain as she was, looking at me must have been like looking in a (very foggy, very distant) mirror—and Celia never met a mirror she didn’t love.

“You and me should dress up alike sometime and go out on the town,” Celia said, in that low Bronx growl that was also a purr. “We could get ourselves into some real good trouble.”

Well, I didn’t even know what to say to that . I just sat there, gaping like the Emma Willard schoolgirl I so recently had been.

As for my Aunt Peg—my legal guardian, at this point, please remember—she heard this illicit-sounding invite and said, “Say, girls, that sounds fun.”

Peg was over at the bar again mixing up another batch of martinis, but at that point, Olive put a stop to things. The fearsome secretary of the Lily Playhouse stood up, clapped her hands, and announced, “Enough! If Peg stays up any later, she will not be the better for it in the morning.”

“Darn it, Olive, I’ll give you a poke in the eye!” Peg said.

“To bed, Peg,” said the imperturbable Olive, tugging down her girdle for emphasis. “ Now .”

The room scattered. We all said our good nights.

I made my way to my apartment ( my apartment! ) and unpacked a bit more. I couldn’t really focus on the task, though. I was in a buzz of nervous joy.

Peg came by to check on me as I was hanging up my dresses in the wardrobe.

“You’re comfortable here?” she asked, looking around at Billy’s immaculate apartment.

“I like it so much here. It’s lovely.”

“Yes. Billy would accept nothing less.”

“May I ask you something, Peg?”

“Certainly.”

“What about the fire?”

“Which fire, kiddo?”

“Olive said there was a small fire at the theater today. I wondered if everything is all right.”

“Oh, that! It was just some old sets that accidentally got ignited behind the building. I have friends in the fire department, so we were fine. Boy, was that today ? By golly, I’d forgotten about it already.” Peg rubbed her eyes. “Oh, well, kiddo. You will soon enough find out that life at the Lily Playhouse is nothing but a series of small fires. Now off to sleep or Olive will have you detained by the authorities.”

So off to sleep I went—the first time I would ever sleep in New York City, and the first (but decidedly not the last) time I would ever sleep in a man’s bed.

I do not recall who cleaned up the dinner mess.

It was probably Olive.