Book, Divided Loyalties, Stephanie Waxman

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Divided Loyalties | i

Divided Loyalties

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Divided Loyalties | iii

Divided Loyalties A novel by Stephanie Waxman

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright Š2010 Stephanie Waxman All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Marco Press, 11600 Washington Place, Suite 201, Los Angeles, California 90066. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010902571 ISBN: 0-9709092-3-3 978-0-9709092-3-7 Cover concept by Stephanie Waxman Book and cover design by Beth Escott Newcomer/Escott Associates

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The Legacy of Jill Fullbright | v

In memory of my parents For my children and grandchildren

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The Legacy of Jill Fullbright | 1

New York 1936

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The Legacy of Jill Fullbright | 3

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

In the books are listed the names of kings.

Did the kings heave up the building blocks?

Question of a Literary Worker Bertolt Brecht

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The Legacy of Jill Fullbright | 5

1 The September day was hot and muggy. Men slumped on stoops, smoking. Women sat at open windows, fanning themselves. People sagged in bread lines. Even the children skipping rope seemed barely able to lift their feet off the pavement. Jill’s underarms were damp and she could feel her spit curls drooping against her cheeks. A man was selling roasted potatoes off a pushcart and the aroma made Jill’s mouth water. All she’d had for breakfast was a cup of coffee, but if she spent her only nickel on a potato instead of a bus ride, she’d have to hoof it all the way uptown in this sweltering heat.

A thin woman with hollow eyes and a couple of raggedy kids at her feet held out an empty cup. “Lady, please?” She was no older than Jill, yet here she was with two kids and so poor she had to beg. Jill reached into her pocketbook for her nickel just as the bus rolled up. The doors gasped open and she climbed aboard.

The bus was stuffy and crowded, but in the back she found an empty seat with a crumpled copy of yesterday’s paper. She didn’t care that Governor Landon was running against Roosevelt and she didn’t give a hoot that someone somewhere was trying to organize steelworkers into a union. She quickly flipped to the

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6 | Stephanie Waxman theater section and devoured the article about Helen Hayes, who was appearing in Victoria Regina at the Broadhurst Theater.

What she wouldn’t give to see Helen Hayes!

A heavyset woman smelling of sausages plopped down next to her, her fleshy thighs pressing against Jill. Jill noticed how she was wheezing with the effort of having made it up the steps and down the aisle. She noticed how delicately she opened her pocketbook, how tattered the Bible was that she took from it. She even noticed which verse the woman began to read (Job 12:15) and wondered what kind of burdens she was carrying. It was Jill’s job to notice things about people.

She folded the newspaper and thought about the audition.

Nurses, nurses. She searched her meager experience to find something that would help her land the part of Nurse McGinty on the new radio soap opera. Then she remembered the weary face of the nurse who had appeared in that bleak corridor to tell them about her mother. What was her name? She had asked if they wanted a cup of coffee. Jill wanted that coffee so badly, any way of delaying the news, which she had already read on Nurse O’Hara’s face. O’Hara! That was it. Nurse O’Hara would be her model for Nurse McGinty. They were both Irish. That was a good sign.

The elevator in Loew’s State Building was mercifully cool.

In the ladies’ room she tucked in her blouse and tried to remember not to lift her arms so the wet spots wouldn’t show.

She noticed her slip peeping out below the hem of her borrowed skirt and rolled it over at the waist. She straightened her seams, applied fresh lipstick, and then surveyed the whole picture. She was not pretty by conventional standards—her nose was too narrow, her lips too full. But her eyes were large and her hair

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Divided Loyalties | 7 was so black it made her skin look translucent. Her mother always said her hair was her best feature.

She prayed it would be a blind audition so that the producer and director would only hear her. That way, it would be her voice that counted. If they saw that she was only twenty-one, she’d never get a shot at Nurse McGinty.

Three men were in the engineer’s booth staring at her through the plate glass.

Oh, brother, she thought. Okay, she told herself, act older.

“Good morning, Miss…?”

“Fullbright,” she said, leaning into the microphone with her most mature voice, looking directly at the man who addressed her. He was a large man and spoke in a too-loud voice. She supposed he was the director.

“Miss Fullbright, you’ll be reading the speech on page five.

Nurse McGinty is telling a man that his wife just died on the operating table.” He sat down and jotted something in a notebook. One of the other men, no doubt the engineer, was fiddling with dials. The one in wire-rimmed glasses—the producer?— was paging through the script. They all wore gray suits. She wondered which one had the power to hire her.

She took a minute to look over the speech. Her stomach growled and she wondered if the mike picked it up.

She tried to concentrate on her mother’s nurse—the starched white collar and three-cornered hat, the clipboard under her arm. Jill could practically taste the hospital food she ate. She thought of the compassion on Nurse O’Hara’s tired face. Then she took a breath and began.

When she was done, she was directed to a hallway where several other Nurse McGintys sat on folding metal chairs. Not

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8 | Stephanie Waxman one looked younger than thirty. Jill sighed and sank onto a chair.

She chipped away at her nail polish, thinking of all the other ways she could’ve read the scene. “That is not positive thinking,” she could hear her mother say. Millicent Fullbright was a big believer in the power of positive thinking. So, out of respect for her mother, Jill reviewed the success she’d had since she stepped off that Greyhound bus wide-eyed and eager less than a year ago.

Her father had been opposed to her going to New York.

When Millicent died, Jill postponed her plans, enrolling instead in the Lamont School of Music and Drama. Even though the classes were good and she was improving her craft, she missed her mother terribly. Her own grief was doubled when she was around her father who used the bottle to deal with his sorrow. She ached to get on with her life. One day, she walked out of Elocution and made straight for the Denver bus terminal, where she purchased a one-way ticket to her destiny. Though it was hard for him to let her go, Russell finally gave her his blessing along with a hundred dollars, which Jill sewed into the lining of her only coat.

She had good luck finding a room in a boarding house called the City Federation Hotel for Women, practically on the Hudson, for ten dollars a week, which included meals that tasted like sawdust. She managed to land a few parts—a gangster’s moll in Junior G-Men, the Virgin Mary on the Ave Maria Hour. She played a maid in two episodes of Your Unseen Friend, and one day she even stood next to Orson Welles in the elevator.

But being a radio actress wasn’t exactly a steady job. Three nights a week she worked as an usherette at the Paramount Theater in a navy-blue uniform that smelled like the girls who wore it the rest of the week. Saturdays, she modeled for an art

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Divided Loyalties | 9 class, earning a dollar an hour. She could get two dollars if she’d take off her clothes, but she’d sooner sell apples on the street.

Her real dream was to be on Broadway. She tried out for a walk-on in the crowd scene in The Eternal Road but didn’t make it. Her spirits really sank that day. Turned down for just a walkon. She definitely would’ve been cast in an O’Neill play if she had only agreed to the indecent terms set forth by its producer, a squat man with a nasal voice who tried to put his tongue in her ear. As she tore out of his shabby office, she heard him yell, “You’ll never get cast with that attitude, Miss Fullbright!” Jill rushed back to the boarding house to tell Gloria, another aspiring actress. Gloria shrugged and said, “What’s the big deal? You should’ve let him fool around, at least enough to get the part.”

So here she was, sitting in a room with older, more experienced actresses, clinging to her virtue and looking forward to a lunch of Saltines smeared with catsup at the counter of some coffee shop.

The director came out. All the actresses glanced up like a nest full of hungry birds. “Jill Fullbright?”

She looked at him, hope seeping out of every pore.

“Congratulations.”

Jill held back the urge to throw her arms around him. She followed him into a cluttered office, where he spoke quickly as he searched through piles of papers. “Nurse McGinty will be featured in thirteen episodes at twenty-five dollars an episode.”

She could quit her other jobs! Her empty stomach did a somersault.

“She’ll contract TB and be treated by Dr. Malone. She and Dr. Malone will fall in love and Nurse McGinty will die. The nurse who replaces her will also fall in love with Dr. Malone,

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10 | Stephanie Waxman but he won’t be in love with her and she’ll make him feel guilty about Nurse McGinty’s death.” Without waiting to hear her response, he handed her the script and thrust some papers at her to sign. “Rehearsal is tomorrow at ten,” he said, meeting her eyes for the first time and offering a smile.

Too excited to wait for the elevator, she ran down all eleven flights. When she reached street level, breathless and giddy, she remembered how hungry she was and dashed into the Walgreens drugstore across the way. Drawing a breath, she recognized the man with the wire-rimmed glasses from the engineer’s booth hunched over a cup of coffee at the counter. She was not a forward girl where it concerned men, but she wasn’t shy either. She went right up to him, smiling, and stuck out her hand. “Nurse McGinty.”

He gave her a blank look. Then a slow dawning smoothed his face into a warm smile. He shook her hand, removed his hat from the stool next to him and said, “Please, join me. May I buy you a cup of coffee? A sandwich? You must be hungry. I’m sorry we kept you all waiting so long. That’s the trouble with this business. There’s very little regard for the actor’s time.”

It was his treat so she ordered roast beef, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, and chocolate pudding. He was a talkative fellow and gave Jill an earful about the inner workings of the show. His name was Martin Levy, and he was the writer.

“Nabisco wants each episode to center on the doctors and nurses, but I’m fighting for other hospital workers to be major characters, too. The wages of the people who empty bedpans and mop the floors are appalling. I mean, how’s a man supposed to support a family on twelve dollars a week?”

He wasn’t much to look at, not very tall, a pale complexion.

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Divided Loyalties | 11 He seemed to be in his late twenties, but his hair was already thinning. There was a faint musty smell about him, as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. Still, there was something that drew her in, a quiet kind of intensity in his green eyes.

She flew up the stairs of the City Federation Hotel. Her roommate, Louise, was sitting cross-legged on her bed, staring into a compact, drawing on eyebrows.

“I got it!” Jill cried.

“Darlin’…” Louise said with an accent that conjured up mint juleps. Whenever Jill was around her she found herself speaking in that same drawl, and she knew that if she ever had to portray someone from the South, she’d have no trouble.

She ran across the hall and knocked hard. “Thirteen episodes!” she shouted. “Bring a glass!”

“Hooray! I’ll be right over,” Gloria yelled back.

Jill returned to her room and reached into a drawer. She found the bottle of sherry among a jumble of slips, girdles, and brassieres.

Rudy Vallee, Louise’s canary, was chirping away as usual in the corner, but for once his noise didn’t bother Jill. Rudy Vallee was a nervous little bird, no bigger than a child’s fist, and despite how pretty he was with his pale-yellow coat of feathers ending in a white tail, his jittery motion, bobbing head, and constant chirping drove Jill crazy. But today she poked her finger in his cage and said, “Sing for me, Rudy Vallee! Sing a song for Nurse McGinty!”

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