Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (8 page)

“Sir, it is a pleasure to meet you.” She clutched her sweating glass with both hands. Soon it would start to drip, and the drips would
appear on her silk dress, and Elsa would be convinced that she’d ruined her first impression.

“Have you ever thought about acting?” Irving said, staring at her steadily through the tinted panes of his glasses. He was warm too; Elsa could tell. There were beads of sweat clinging to his hairline, tiny perfect drops.

Elsa shifted on her heels. The actors nearby were pretending not to listen. Off in the distance, she heard Gordon shouting into another man’s ear. They were drunk already; she could see it from across the room. Louis Gardner was at the party too, she guessed, walking through, the two producers creating waves and wakes wherever they went, like twin tropical storms. Elsa said, “My parents have a small theater in Wisconsin. It’s all I’ve ever known.” She wanted to tell him about the first time she walked on a stage, how she could hear everyone in the audience breathing, and how it meant that she could be anyone she wanted, instead of just herself. Elsa answered his question. “I think about it all the time.”

Irving took in this information and nodded. “I bet you were the prettiest girl in town.”

Elsa laughed, but Irving stared at her so directly that Elsa began to color. She quieted down as quickly as possible. Even after her death, Hildy was always the most beautiful girl in Door County. Elsa couldn’t imagine a time when that would no longer be the case. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Green, but thank you for the compliment.”

He nodded. “Here’s what you should do. Do you mind if I tell you?” Irving didn’t wait for her to respond. “Have the baby. Take a few months, lose thirty pounds. Not so much that you lose the milkmaid look, though. It’s your trademark—Miss Wisconsin, all sweetness and light. And Elsa Pitts isn’t gonna cut it, is it?” Irving looked at her hard. Elsa blushed. He stared for so long that Elsa began to
sweat even more. She reflexively put her hands around her belly, as if to protect the child from whatever was to come. Then Irving snapped his fingers so loudly that it echoed through the room, over all the chatting and flirting. Elsa was surprised that such a sharp, loud noise could come out of such a small person. “Laura Lamont,” he said. “You want it? It’s yours. Come see me when you’re ready.” And then Irving walked away, leaving his full glass teetering on a bale of hay. Elsa watched as he walked into the crowd and was immediately swallowed up by actors calling out his name. Louis Gardner was in the crowd too, as short as Irving but twice as stout, with white hair and a slight stoop. Elsa saw Irving speak to Louis, saw her name come out of his mouth. Both men were looking at her for a brief moment, and then Irving gripped Louis on the arm and vanished farther into the fray.

Gordon scampered over to Elsa’s side less than a minute later—the news had rippled through the party like fire in a dry field.

“What did he say?” Gordon asked, nearly panting with excitement. “He liked that last scene I did, with the horse, didn’t he? I
knew
he was going to like that.”

Elsa took a sip of her drink. Her husband’s hairline was receding more and more quickly every day, and when he pointed his face toward the ground, Elsa saw the soft brown peaks, higher than they’d ever been. There was music playing—a band off in the opposite corner. Elsa heard a fiddle. Inside, the baby moved, shoving an elbow into her side.

“Mr. Green? He was very nice,” Elsa said. She sounded like her mother, as cool tempered as if she’d been hypnotized. “He gave me a new name.” She laughed at the idea of it, but of course it happened all the time. It was the easiest way to shed one’s skin: by losing one’s undesirable, ordinary name, which had been given by silly parents
without a thought to the future. She’s already lost one name and gained another, less attractive moniker. Why not do it again?

“He did what?” Gordon came so close that his mouth was almost touching Elsa’s ear. The pretend friendliness in his voice was gone—Elsa could see it now. Gordon had wanted his boss to like his wife, of course, but he hadn’t wanted this.

“He told me to lose some weight.” She shouldn’t have been so flip. Elsa held her dress against the bottom of her belly again, feeling the entire circumference of her body, as massive and sturdy as a Roman column. She wanted to remind Gordon that when they met, they were both actors in a play, and that she hadn’t always been someone’s mother.

“Oh,” Gordon said, clearly relieved. “He is tough. I told you that, didn’t I? He’s tough.”

“He sure was.” Elsa set her drink down, and shook her head when the bartender asked her whether she’d like another, though she could think of nothing she wanted more. “The baby’s really moving around,” she said. “I think I’d better go home.”

Gordon nodded solemnly, and did his best to look concerned as he walked her to the door. At the entrance to the lot, girls with tap shoes clicked by on their way to convince the assembled that there were no problems left in the world that the movies couldn’t fix, as though they needed encouragement. Gardner Brothers understood more than the other studios that glamour was the order of the day: the illusion of happiness, of opulence, of tap-dancing girls in top hats and lipstick.

Elsa thanked the neighbors for watching Clara. She scooped her daughter’s sleeping body up and held it to her breasts, the only available space above her belly. Clara’s head was sticky, as it often was in the night, as though all the energy she had accumulated during the day could not be contained by her small body, and was seeping out
her pores. Elsa let her lips run back and forth over Clara’s faint eyebrows as she carried her home.
Laura Lamont
, Elsa thought that night as she turned over in her sleep,
Laura Lamont.
The bed was full of bodies present and future: Elsa and Clara, Laura Lamont and Clara’s younger sister. There were so many people yet to arrive. Elsa kicked all the covers to the floor; their combined body heat was more than enough to keep her warm.

T
he signs of labor were clear and sharp. Though Clara had been born at home with the help of a local midwife, just like Elsa and her two sisters, Gardner Brothers had their own doctors—indeed, their own
hospital
—on the lot itself, and they insisted. Elsa didn’t like the idea of hospitals. They were at once too clean and too full of illness. When Gordon wheeled her into the waiting room, all Elsa could hear were men lighting cigarettes and chatting as though they were at a cocktail party. Their wives had been taken away, as she would soon be taken away. Elsa’s mother would have been appalled. The taller doctor took the wheelchair from Gordon and told him to wait in the lounge. Elsa’s contractions were already only three minutes apart, and they had little time to waste on good-byes. She felt Gordon’s tentative mouth on her face and was glad that she was going alone.

The Gardner Brothers’ doctors had names, Drs. Ames and Crowley, though Elsa thought of them only as instruments of Louis Gardner and Irving Green. If they could have sucked the extra thirty pounds off her body at the same time, they would have. Dr. Ames was the tall one, stretched out and slender, with thick, dark-framed glasses.

“Mrs. Pitts,” he began, helping her shift into the hospital bed. “I understand you gave birth to your last baby at home?”

Elsa nodded, trying to ignore the giant motions happening inside her body. She would have screamed if she didn’t think everyone in the entire hospital could have heard her. The Emersons were quiet people. Even here, in the hospital, Elsa wanted to be nothing but a polite patient, the kind of woman the doctors would recall later as having been a dream to deal with. “That’s right,” she said, so wanting to agree with what was going on.

“Well, then I think you’re going to like this,” Dr. Ames said. He had a large needle in his right hand. “For the pain.”

They had both signed forms, Gordon and Elsa, agreeing to the treatment prescribed. Elsa had never taken more than an aspirin in her life, and she felt woozy as soon as the metal point went into her arm. “Gordon…” she said, though Gordon was through many doors and walls, and even if he’d been sitting right beside her, he couldn’t have done a thing.

The doctors were right—whereas with Clara there had been pain, Elsa felt none. Dr. Ames took a seat on a low stool at the foot of her bed. The room was cool, with all the metal surfaces ringing like tiny bells whenever someone hit them by accident. The rails on the side of her bed, the sanitized instruments ready to be used. Elsa thought of her childhood doctor, who would come to the house with his big black bag. Hildy would always tease Elsa by playing with the doctor’s stethoscope, putting it against her heart and then Elsa’s. “Mine is louder,” Hildy always said. “I can’t hear yours at all. You must be dead.” And then Elsa was in Hildy’s bed, with all those pillows and dolls and pieces of fabric that Hildy had stolen from their mother’s sewing basket all strewn around. Strips of lace waved from the ceiling. And then she was back in the hospital room, strapped down to the bed by her neck. She looked around, wanting to be reassured. Her parents were standing at the foot of the bed, and it was Josephine who sat on the stool before her. Why hadn’t Elsa seen her there before?
Josephine looked serious, as usual, with concentration that bordered on the absurd.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Elsa said, her voice loud now that it was just her family present.

Josephine didn’t answer. She reached toward Elsa’s body, her hands extending under the sheet that hung from Elsa’s knees. Hildy’s room looked different now; how long had she been away from home? Elsa couldn’t remember; the room itself seemed as foggy as her brain, as though the winter storms had broken through the window, and there was a layer of snow covering everything. Even her body was dusted with it, thin and white as a sheet. Elsa tried to reach down and brush it off but found that she couldn’t move her arms. Her parents were standing on either side, holding her arms down on the bed.

“Mom! Dad!” Elsa said. She was glad to see them. A baby cried somewhere in the room—Clara. It was Clara. Elsa felt tears come to her eyes as she thought of her daughter, her sweet little girl. Her father would enjoy Clara’s company. This summer they would go, whether or not Gardner Brothers approved. She would tell Gordon that it was not a request, it was an order. Elsa felt so tired. She opened and closed her eyes and watched Hildy’s room disappear.

The doctors were gone, and a nurse was wheeling by, pushing a cart down the hall. Elsa thought about calling out. Her head felt thick and heavy, the way it did when she drank too much, a fly trying to swim through honey. If only the world could be quiet and clear, the way Green Bay looked on a calm summer day. When the nurse came back, she would wheel in the baby, another girl. Gordon had insisted the next daughter be named after his mother, and so she was. Florence Isabelle Pitts was as dark as her sister was light, with a large tuft of dark brown hair. She was larger than Clara had been at birth, a smidge over eight pounds. The first time Elsa got to hold Florence in
her arms, she was two days old, and they were on their way home. Gordon, who’d been sent off almost immediately after Elsa was wheeled in, waited by the door of the waiting room, a lit cigar in his mouth and a bunch of flowers in hand. When Elsa saw him, both she and the baby began to cry, out of something like relief. The air around Gordon smelled of a lit match, and hope.

A
fter Florence was born, Elsa made herself a promise—she would do just what Irving Green had told her, and fast. Gordon bristled at first, but then decided that it was better for him to have a wife with a shapely figure, and let it go.

There were exercise classes at the studio: dance, tap, calisthenics. Elsa dropped the girls off with on-lot child care and went five times a week at nine. At first, Clara cried when Elsa left the day-care room, accustomed as she was to their long days at home together, but after a short while she got used to the women there, and the other children, and quite enjoyed it. There were blocks to stack and letters of the alphabet to learn. Florence was too small to mind being passed around, only three months old, and cooed happily no matter who was looking after her. Though she loved her daughters enormously, Elsa never felt quite as free as she did the moment after dropping them off and walking out the door. Her arms nearly floated up, away from her body, suddenly so unencumbered. That the services were free was the fresh whipped cream and berries on top.