The Sweetheart Read online

  “Puh-lease,” Cynthia says. “Freddy can bite it. I can’t believe I even went for this birdbrained idea of his. Besides, I’m getting sick of Bandstand. It’s soooooooo square. Those old geezers should take their heads out of the sand and pay attention to what the kids in this city are really listening to. I’ll tell you one thing, Leonie. It ain’t Eddie Fisher and Georgia Gibbs.”

  “What’s wrong with Georgia Gibbs?”

  “What’s wrong with . . . see? We should switch. You and Freddy can dance your hearts out to that razzmatazz.” She cocks her head; it seems a thought has come to her. She sits up, tenting her knees and wrapping her arms around them. “You really like Georgia Gibbs?”

  You shrug, self-conscious. You think Georgia Gibbs is the cat’s pajamas, but you are loath to admit it now. “I think she’s all right.”

  “She’s going to be on the show Wednesday. If you want to see her, you can be my guest. My way of making up for wasting your afternoon.”

  Your first impulse: disappointment. You certainly don’t think of the afternoon as wasted, and you don’t want Cynthia to, either. But slowly you begin to recognize the potential of what’s been laid out in front of you—Bandstand, Freddy, an up-close encounter with Georgia Gibbs, and, best of all, another afternoon with Cynthia—and you swell with delight. Maybe your initial optimism wasn’t misplaced; maybe this is a new beginning. You are young and still believe in such things. Just in case, you cover your bets and play it cool. “I don’t know. I may have plans.”

  “Oh, who are you kidding? The only time you ever leave this house is to go to school or buy groceries.”

  “That’s not true,” you say.

  “Geez, Leonie, lighten up.” Cynthia stands up, smooths out her skirt. “If you can’t go, you can’t go. I just thought—”

  “I can go,” you sputter, jumping to your feet. “I just remembered. My plans are for Thursday, not Wednesday.”

  “Then, it’s settled.” She has one hand on the doorknob already. “I’ll come get you from your last class. Dress like a good girl, no tight skirt or nothing. And thanks for trying to help me today, even though it was a lost cause.”

  You try to think of a way to entice her to stick around for a while, but you come up empty. You have nothing to bait a trap with, nothing to offer but your wide-yawning loneliness.

  “It was fun,” you venture.

  Cynthia laughs. “You got some weird idea of fun, Leonie, but okay,” she says, and is gone.

  • • •

  On Tuesday afternoon, the day before your visit to Bandstand, you rush home, climb out of your school clothes, and hide your embarrassing legs away in dungarees before you flip the dial to WFIL. The television—a Philco with a seventeen-inch picture tube and mahogany console—was an uncharacteristically imprudent purchase by your father last Christmas. It took nearly an hour of futzing with the rabbit ears to get a reasonably clear picture, which made you question the whole endeavor, but then your father patted your shoulder and said, “What do you say, Leonie? Maybe now you’ll come out of your room once in a while.” You stared at the screen, seeing nothing, only marveling that your father had not only wanted you closer but had done something about it.

  There is Cynthia, on the dance floor, under the lights. She is a peach: soft dark curls springing from her head, legs kicking out from her full skirt as she jitterbugs to Ray Anthony and His Orchestra. Together, she and Freddy, in his flat-front pants and preppy vest, are Cute with a capital C. The day will come when you will understand what Cynthia was talking about, how she could have all that she has and still feel unsatisfied, but at your tender stage, it is hard to believe. You would salivate with envy except that tomorrow, you’ll be out there, too. You prepare by grabbing the handle of the refrigerator and pretending you’re in front of the cameras, stepping up and sugar pushing with your own perfect complement. In this daydream version of yourself, you have an easy smile and a pair of manageable, just-right legs. Your whole life is made in the shade.

  Seventy-five minutes later, this daydream ends, and you realize you’ve let your Bandstand fantasy take too much of your time. You have to rush to get dinner in the oven so you can finish your geometry homework and have a meal on the table before your father gets home. Shortly after you inherited the bedroom, you assumed this job without ceremony or complaint. It is, to your mind, a tedious chore, but also a fair exchange. The person who wins the bread deserves the small reward of a hot meal. Tonight, you’re making beer-braised beef brisket with potatoes, a real stomach-padding meal and Franz’s unequivocal favorite. This particular meal has purposes beyond nourishment: you haven’t told your father about Bandstand yet. Franz has strong and sometimes idiosyncratic notions about what people should and shouldn’t do, and you can’t begin to guess what side of the line Bandstand might be on, so you do everything you can to make sure he’s primed for leniency. Besides, you know tomorrow you won’t have enough time to get home from the studio and get dinner together, and though your father balks at leftovers, he never turns his nose up at a second helping of his favorite meal.

  You put the brisket in the oven and check the clock again. As you feared, you haven’t left yourself much time. You worry that you may have preempted all the goodwill you hoped to build by mistiming the meal. Sure enough, when your father gets home, washes his dye-stained hands, and kisses your forehead—a gesture that requires him to raise himself up on his toes—the table is empty.

  “Sorry,” you say. “Dinner’s going to be a little while longer.”

  Your father nods, but you feel guilty. This is the worst possible night for dinner to be late, and not just because of Bandstand. On Tuesday nights, the two of you like to eat early and get the dishes cleared away in time to watch Franz’s newsmagazine show See It Now, and then your favorite, I’ve Got a Secret, where panelists like Kitty Carlisle and troublemaker Henry Morgan (who works close to blue at a time when blue can get you blacklisted) try to guess the secrets of the celebrity contestants.

  “Why don’t we eat in front of the television tonight,” you offer. You smile brightly—maybe too brightly. He squints at you, suspicious. “Just this once,” you say. To slather it on even thicker, you take a can of beer from the fridge and twice plunge the church key into its flat top before holding it out to him. Franz angles his head to look at you sideways. It takes some effort to meet his gaze, keep your grip on the cold beer, and maintain your neutral expression, but somehow you manage to pull it off. You’re not going to blow it—not yet, anyway. Finally, he takes the beer from your hand.

  “Okay,” he says. “Just this once.” He heads to the living room, plops in his chair, and takes a long, steady pull from his beer before he turns on the television. In the privacy of the kitchen, you breathe a sigh of relief.

  • • •

  Half an hour later, dinner is ready. You hand your father his plate and take a seat on the couch, the television glowing in front of the both of you, a modern hearth.

  “This looks terrific,” Franz says.

  “I’m glad you think so,” you say. You have heard these words countless times, and yet they still send a ripple of sadness through you. You do not think of your mother often, but when you do, it is usually in a moment like this, when you are accepting a compliment that should be hers. You don’t have many memories of her; you were so young when she died. The most persistent one is from an afternoon some months before her death, when your father came home from the factory and surprised her with a hatbox. She sat up in bed to open it and pulled from its depths a brown felt hat trimmed with black grosgrain: a Musette, from Stetson’s Freedom Fashions line. She placed the hat on her head at a jaunty angle and admired herself in the vanity mirror. “Look at that,” she said. “I look like Betty Hutton.” Even at your young age, you understood that she was being ironic, and yet her words seemed true and always will.

  Perhaps it is this sadness that mak
es the possibility of another, much more trivial loss occur to you: what if your father says no? This had not crossed your mind before now; you had not imagined him denying you one afternoon of ordinary adolescence. What if, after this terrific meal, after all the terrific meals, he forbids you from going? You have never withheld anything from your father, but this is a risk you cannot take. It is in this moment that you decide you won’t tell him about your plans for tomorrow afternoon after all. Even on the off chance that he makes it home before you tomorrow evening and has to put his own foil-wrapped plate in the oven to warm, he wouldn’t begin to guess that it was the trivial pleasures of music and dance that took you away from home. From your favorite quiz show, you have developed this understanding of secrets: they are most easily kept when they run completely counter to expectations (Boris Karloff is afraid of mice) or are so obvious as to be invisible, as plain as the nose on your face (Desi Arnaz? He loves Lucy). Your secret, Leonie, will be both: a self-­conscious girl seeking a spotlight; a teenager acting like a teenager.

  Before Edward R. Murrow can usher in the show in his distinctive way (“This . . . is See It Now.”) and before the two of you dig into your terrific-looking plates, you bow your heads, as you do every night, so that Franz can thank Almighty God for his job, this food, your health, and each other. You tack on a silent addendum: for tomorrow to give you a taste of the life you’ve been missing, a life that reunites you with Cynthia Riley, a life that more closely resembles hers.

  • • •

  The next afternoon, Cynthia, true to her word, rescues you from your last class of the day so that you can accompany her and Freddy to studio B, where there is already a line of kids at the door, all of them white: twelve-year-olds in too much makeup and their mother’s padded girdles, Catholic schoolgirls with sweaters over their uniforms so that only their Peter Pan collars are exposed. At the door, a short, stocky doorman sends a boy away for not wearing a tie. “How can I expect you to behave right when you don’t dress right?” he asks.

  When the three of you reach the door, bypassing the line, you hover in the background while Cynthia and Freddy flash their membership cards.

  “This is our friend Leonie,” says Cynthia.

  You are a steadfast rule follower. You’ve heeded Cynthia’s warning and worn a full skirt, and you ditched your chewing gum a block ago, per Freddy’s instructions. The doorman, a bulldog in uniform, still frowns with disapproval. “Your skirt seems a little short.”

  “It’s not,” you say, perhaps too quickly. “I’m a little tall.”

  “C’mon,” says Cynthia, hinting at a smile. Her smile is a weapon and she knows it. “Give her a break.”

  “I still say it’s too short, but for you, I can bend the rules.”

  Cynthia shifts her smile into full throttle. You can hardly believe it is this easy. If you’d been forced to rely on your own charm, you’d be headed home along with no-tie boy.

  The studio is surprisingly small, much smaller than it looks on television and not much bigger than your own row house. The live broadcast is shot by three cameras that have been strategically placed to make the dance floor look bigger, but from your behind-the-scenes vantage point, it seems they take up a good deal of space themselves. The seats for the audience are only pine bleachers, the record store merely a painted canvas. Bob Horn stands by his podium, a paper bib tucked into his collar, while a bored-looking woman applies powder to his already heavily made-up face. A few of the star couples mill about in pairs, holding hands.

  “Disappointing, isn’t it?” says Cynthia.

  Not exactly, you think. True, you can already sense there’s no way the day will live up to your hopes, but, you have to admit, your hopes were high. If nothing else, you suspect there’s something to be gained from the experience, some lesson that can be learned only from fly-on-the-wall observation. And you don’t want to appear ungrateful, so you say, “It’s terrific.”

  Freddy puts his hands in his pockets. “Want me to introduce you to Bob?”

  Before you can say yes, Cynthia rolls her eyes. “Why would she want to meet that old creep?”

  “He’s not a creep.”

  “Trust me, Leonie. You don’t want to meet him. One look at your jugs and he’ll be inviting you back to his dressing room for a sip of schnapps and one of his ‘dance lessons.’ ”

  You cross your arms reflexively. In the little time you’ve spent with Cynthia recently, there’s been an unusual number of unabashed references to your breasts. “Maybe I should just try to get a good seat.”

  “Sure thing, Leonie. You don’t want to get stuck in a corner for the big thrill of Miss Nibs in the flesh.” Cynthia uses her index fingers to draw a square in the air.

  Freddy lets out an exasperated huff. “Why do you have to be such a wet blanket?” He talks through gritted teeth and makes none of the wild hand gestures someone else in his position might; it seems he doesn’t want the audience to guess there might be trouble in Cynthia and Freddy town. “Bob’s a creep, the music’s square. What about me? I guess I’m a jerk, too, right?”

  “I don’t think you’re a jerk, Freddy,” says Cynthia. “I just think you take all of this a little too seriously.”

  You take a step backward, out of the crossfire. Maybe if you inch your way to the bleachers, they won’t notice your departure.

  “I’m just trying to be professional,” says Freddy.

  “Good.” Cynthia’s all-charm smile comes back, fully powered. “You heard him, Leonie. If no one else asks you to dance, Freddy will, because he’s a professional.”

  Freddy is obviously horrified by the idea, but he has boxed himself in. “Sure I will,” he says obligingly. “I bet I won’t have to, though. Someone will ask you to dance. I’m sure of it.”

  The two take their places with the other dancers by Bob’s podium, leaving you to take a seat. A man wearing headphones quiets the audience. The lights on the bleachers dim while the dance floor brightens under the spotlights, and “Leap Frog,” the show’s theme song, signals the start of the program.

  Seventy-five minutes is a long time to sit and watch other people dance, even when you’re well rehearsed in that particular activity. By the time they get to “Bunny Hop,” a novelty song that cues the teenage heartthrobs to take one another by the hips and wind around the confined dance floor in a series of bounces, your restlessness has grown to a full squirm. When Georgia Gibbs appears from backstage—the petite, big-voiced singer looking like her own little party in a strapless dress, her hair pulled back tight and secured with a flower—and launches into her mournful, vibrato-filled version of “Autumn Leaves,” all the dancers pair up, lean into one another, and sway their little hearts out. You try to content yourself with swaying alone, in the dark, but even that, it seems, is too much. Someone behind you whispers, “Give it a rest, Stretch. Some of us are trying to watch.” You freeze and try to make yourself as small as possible—and then, it gets worse.

  The show breaks for commercial, and the room, spectators and dancers alike, quickly separates into cliques, all thoroughly engrossed in conversations. You have no one. You stare out at the dance floor, first at Freddy, who stands, hands in pockets, at the podium, chatting up a storm with Bob Horn and another boy, and then at Cynthia. She is at the center of an animated girl-gaggle, laughing and rolling her eyes. At one point, she looks up into the stands, and so you wave—Here I am—because who else could she be looking for? She sees you, you are certain of it, but she doesn’t come over. She doesn’t even bother to return your wave. Instead, she gives you an embarrassed little smile, wiggles her eyebrows, and then says something to the other girls that results in hearty laughter, perhaps not at your expense but it might as well be. You’ve done the one thing you’ve managed to avoid for years—made the opening gesture—and, just as you feared, it’s fallen flat.

  And you thought this experience would have somet
hing to teach you. What have you learned that you didn’t already know? Some people are stars, and some people are spectators, and the general consensus is that you, dear girl, are the latter. You wish the show were over so you could just go home, where everyone seems to think you belong.

  • • •

  Toward the end, when it comes time for the popular Rate-a-Record spot, Bob Horn summons three people from the bleachers to his podium to offer their opinion on a new Essex 45: Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man, Crazy.” It’s an adventurous choice for the show, as close to the burgeoning genre of rock ’n’ roll (too loud, too fast, too black) as they’ve dared to go. Before the record begins to spin, Cynthia drops Freddy’s hands, leaving him open-mouthed on the dance floor as she trots over to the bleachers to fetch a new dance partner, settling quickly on the rangy, easily accessible boy sitting in front of you.

  “Now this is more like it,” she says to you. “Freddy’s coming for you, so get loose, Mother Goose.”

  You have no interest in dancing anymore—you don’t want anyone’s pity—but you don’t see how you have any choice. Sure enough, Freddy represses his scowl, takes your hand, and leads you onto the dance floor.

  “Let’s keep it simple,” he says. “Just follow me.”

  When the song begins to play, you try to oblige, but it’s an effort. You’re not an experienced dancer, but you can hold your own. The problem is that Freddy’s lead isn’t clear, a side effect of having one consistent dance partner, and the turns are awkward and sloppy because of your height. As a result, you step on his feet twice in the first minute. When you do it a third time, he doesn’t bother to stifle his groan. Instead, he dances the two of you over to Cynthia and her partner and stage-whispers to the considerably taller guy, “Hey, fella. I think you’re more this girl’s height. Why don’t we switch?”