“Don himself is from Indiana.”
“Don studied music at Juilliard.”
“That was his ticket out. This is yours. Eleanor, your voice is special.”
Eleanor’s love of theater was a flame inside her—she guarded it, and no matter who was cruel to her, no matter how dull her life, the music and lyrics brought joy. Only Pat knew just how deeply she loved it, and not even he would understand how humiliated she would be if her talent was ever put to the test and found lacking. She’d lose herself. An audition in New York was a gamble, risking everything she had.
“Please. Eleanor, how much can a train ticket be?”
A lot; she’d looked it up many times. Eleanor handled her family’s sales to the market and butcher shop. She knew what things cost, the days of work involved. A train ticket to New York was more than her family could spare, even with her parents’ support.
“Eleanor, listen.” Pat removed his glasses and set them down. She could see the lines on his face as he ran a hand over the scruff on his jaw. “It would break my heart to know that your only friend is an old man in a music shop.”
She kept her eyes on the record. “I have Rosie.”
“You are an artist,” he said. “You need that in your life. Without it, you’ll shrivel up.”
“You’re being silly.” But his words flustered her. Pat was a person who was invited to other families’ Thanksgivings. As far as Eleanor knew, he might be one of those who, as Rosie said, “preferred the company of men,” but this was something Eleanor scarcely understood. Their friendship was based on a shared love. In all the years she’d come to discuss musicals with Pat, she’d never encountered anyone else doing the same. Sometimes when Eleanor thought of him and his little house, filled with the records and reviews he couldn’t fit into the shop, she felt desolate, and then afraid. She looked at the shop, his life’s work, and for the first time saw it as a desperate grip on a part of him that he needed to survive.
Pat offered her the article and squeezed her hand. “Eleanor, you have a chance. Go.”
Her throat had gone tight. But she folded the article and put it in her pocketbook.
* * *
Thoughts of the audition tipped life on its side; suddenly everything looked temporary. What if she never had to feed pigs or chickens again? Never had to hide her practicing? Spent Fridays with composers and singers instead of at the movies? But then she thought of the open call. All those girls wanted what she wanted. Eleanor thought of them as slender and clear-skinned, trained in ballet and acting, bred like racehorses. They would have years of coaching. How many girls in there had grown up with shit under their fingernails?
Was even one of them self-taught? Did they stay up all night with the record turned low, listening again and again to a perfectly enunciated syllable? Hold their breath and let it out as slowly as possible, keeping track of the seconds they’d added to their lung capacity? Did even one stand among the hay in her family’s barn and attempt to focus her voice until it buzzed high in the center of her face, along her nose and forehead, because she had an instinct for resonance?
Of course not. They’d been trained—while Eleanor had earned her voice, slowly, with daily practice and careful study. But no one would see that. It was such luck, those young girls who were plucked for Broadway. And they all had whatever constituted “good legs.” Eleanor’s legs were fine, but served mostly to get her from the barn to the slaughterhouse, where she held the runts while her father slit their throats.
Who would be able to see past her Midwestern blandness when there was a knockout raised overlooking the lights of Broadway, ready to step onstage? When, for God’s sake, there was a girl who had already seen a Broadway show?
It was too much. Traveling to New York only to watch her dream go to some sink-bleached blonde? Worse, to watch Don Mannheim make that decision himself? No, thank you.
* * *
Eight minutes after Rosie was due, a horn blared from the driveway. Eleanor plucked the curtain back from the window and groaned when she saw a pale blue Studebaker.
Rosie opened the door and wiggled out of the front seat, turning back to make a face at the driver. Eleanor’s stomach knotted. She heard Rosie’s enhanced laughter and pictured her: wide grin, back arched to best highlight her assets, a piece of hair between her fingers, maybe even tickling her mouth. New Yorkers weren’t the only girls who could act.
Eleanor opened the door before Rosie knocked. “You brought a boy.”
Rosie dropped her perky stance. She was, as usual, coiffed and made up, her short, curvy body dressed in a matching two-piece set she’d sewn herself. Rosie checked her hair in the mirror. She never left the house without putting on her face. “I ran into John Plutz at the drugstore. I was buying Daddy his Bromo and got embarrassed, so I gave a rambling explanation.” She shrugged. “I think he thought it was cute. Who am I to say no?”
Rosie was usually fun, but sometimes she was aggravating.
“I didn’t want a boy around on my birthday.” Boys did not like Eleanor. Most made this clear by ignoring her, but some couldn’t handle that she was more interested in something they did not understand, and punished her for it with cruel words said to her face or behind her back. She would rather have pretended they didn’t exist, but Rosie refused to accept this.
“Don’t worry.” Rosie reached in her purse and uncapped her lipstick, before handing it to Eleanor. They’d both worn Cherries in the Snow since ninth grade. “I brought two boys.”
* * *
John drove with his hand on the bottom of the wheel, the other hand on Rosie’s knee, and chomped on his words like they might run away. “Twenty-one? Wow.”
All these boys had been making noise in the background at school for sixteen years and now, after they graduated, the ones who hadn’t married or gone to college endlessly reminded you why. Eleanor’s date, Steve Macdonald, planted a wet kiss on her cheek as she slid into the back seat. The only memory she had of Steve was from three years earlier, when he’d knocked over a rack in Pat’s store accidentally-on-purpose. Eleanor made sure he noticed her wipe the saliva with her thumb.
“So, I don’t know what you ladies did all day, but Steve and I have been working at the mill and we’re starved. Mind if we swing by Hersh’s?”
“We’ll miss the movie,” Eleanor said. “Auntie Mame plays at eight. After that it’s The Fly.”
“Well, I couldn’t sit through a movie without dinner!”
Eleanor wondered why John’s appetite was her problem. “I don’t want to see The Fly.”