January 1926
It’s gotten harder and harder for Helen and Doris to find time together. Helen understands. Doris’s affair with Milton consumes an ever-bigger part of her life. But Helen misses the sleepovers in Doris’s apartment—the brave attempts at homemade Italian food and the red wine from gallon jugs and Doris’s man-sized breakfasts that always confront Helen’s hangover the next morning.
And then yesterday, Friday, just before lunch, a uniformed messenger arrived on the set. Helen is finishing up her part in a small comedy: a humdrum vehicle called Watch Your Wife. It will be one of her last film roles in New York before she moves to California. She wishes the role could have been bigger, could have given her more momentum.
She hopes and mostly believes that her career will take off out west. There certainly isn’t much about New York that she’ll miss. Except Doris. Nowadays when she has to show emotion to the camera, she only has to think about leaving her friend forever and the tears spill out. Sometimes the other actors look at her disapprovingly; they think she’s overplaying it.
The messenger was in no hurry to leave the set. Eyes wide and mouth agape, he watched the shoot, waiting for the scene to end. Then, tentatively, maybe expecting to be scolded for intruding—not likely on the set of Watch Your Wife, but how would he know that?—he stepped forward and handed her an envelope with her name on it. Inside was a note in Doris’s strong and tall handwriting: Milton’s going out of town this afternoon. Come over!
They are talking in bed this morning as they always do. Helen is lying on her left side, listening to the rain hit the skylight, watching the rivulets that snake down the frosted glass and distort the embedded mesh of wires as they pass. She listens to Doris talk behind her. Sometimes she makes small comments in response. Mostly, though, she lies still and lets Doris’s musical voice wash over her like the water gliding by overhead.
This morning Doris seems lost in a reverie. She is talking about Dorothy Sills’ recent visit. She turns it over in her mind. It seems like she sometimes forgets that she is talking out loud. Helen listens.
“Milton said it was simply dreadful. He takes the ferry over to Hoboken to meet up with a little girl whom of course he hasn’t seen for a year and a half. She’s crying, aunt and uncle on his wife’s side are furious with him and refuse to leave him alone with her—as if he’s some sort of danger to his own daughter, for goodness sake!—and she’s wailing and begging him to come back to her and Gladys.”
This sounds like a pause. Helen waits an extra beat to be sure and then responds. “I still don’t get the idea of putting a ten-year-old girl on a train and sending her all the way across the country by herself. That’s the same train I take to Hollywood. It’s not easy, that’s for sure. I mean, you have to change halfway across, in Chicago or St. Louis, one or the other. And even if the railroad people are looking out for you, which they never do, really . . .”
“Exactly,” Doris interrupts, picking up her own line of thought again. “What was Gladys thinking? And she had already filed for divorce so she wasn’t exactly hoping to be reconciled. I bet her lawyer put her up to it. But what if something had happened to little Dorothy on the way out here? And remember that the poor thing had to go all the way back by herself, too. Simply awful. Anyway, she got home safe and sound so at least we don’t have that to worry about.”
“Thank goodness.”
“Which is not to say that Milton hasn’t been frantic about it. He truly loves that little girl and would do anything for her. Well, almost anything. I mean, he wouldn’t go back to Gladys. Even before he met me, I mean.”
“And now even more so.”
“But he’s a brooder, Helen. He gets all bottled up with his frustrations and his anger. I worry about his health. I honestly do. He’s worrying himself sick over this.”
This leads Doris to talking about her own attack of appendicitis seven months earlier. She nearly died. No one understood how serious her condition was until the dark poisoned thing inside her that had been doubling her over in pain actually burst and she had to be rushed to the hospital. “That’s when I first realized that he truly loved me,” she says. She pats Helen’s right hip lightly, absentmindedly. “He came to the hospital constantly around his shooting schedule. He paced up and down the halls, fretting about me, frantic to see me. And that was before anybody suspected that there was something going on between us. He was taking a big risk. For me, Helen. I’ll never forget that.”
“All because he loved you.”
“And that’s when I knew we had something special, that we were more than just an item.”
“Because he loves you. You are so lucky.”
“I know, yes, I know. First of all because I didn’t just up and die in that hospital! And he took such good care of me. And they even held up the filming of The Half-Way Girl until I recovered. I was sure they’d just dump me and start over with someone else but they didn’t.”
Helen remembers the title but not much more. “The Half-Way Girl. The one where they blew up a ship at the end? A real ship?”
Doris laughs. “Yes. Very dramatic. Very silly. There was a madman chasing me around the ship, and then someone let the leopard out of its cage—no one ever explained why there was a leopard on board or why it got let out—and then the ship caught fire, and then after I was rescued by the hero and we were floating away to safety on a raft, the ship blew up, I assume killing the madman along with the poor leopard. Very dumb. But I memorized a line from my favorite review. Do you want to hear it?”
“Of course.” Helen rolls halfway over to face her friend.
“From the Los Angeles Express. The reviewer wrote, ‘There is a spectacular touch to the fire at sea, although the fire burns a seemingly long time before the dynamite aboard hears of it and decides to demolish the vessel.’ Brilliant!”
They both giggle and clap. “O.K., now I have a serious confession to make,” Helen says, growing mock-solemn. “I never saw that one.”
“Oh, dear,” Doris responds with a long face. “What are friends for if not to see the terrible movies their friends are in?”
“I think I was driving a car onto a roof at the time. So explain it. What is a halfway girl?”
Doris sits up and crosses her legs Indian-style, shoving the folds of her nightgown down between them. “O.K.,” she says. “My character was named Poppy La Rue. Stupid name, right? She is an innocent chorus girl—“
“Uh huh,” Helen interrupts, snickering. “Innocent chorus girl.”
“—who finds herself stranded in darkest Shanghai and forced to work in a bar on infamous Malay Street. They call her a hostess and you just know that if she stays there much longer things are going to turn out badly for her. Anyway, at one point, Poppy explains to the hero, who’s down and out and unshaven but still surprisingly energetic and attractive, what a ‘halfway girl’ is. I remember that line.”
“Wait—how was there a line?” There couldn’t have been much of a script. “Did you actually have to memorize lines?”
“No, no. This one made it onto a title card. It just stuck in my brain.”
“Ah. Got it.”
Doris strikes an insipid pose, putting her hands palms together alongside her left ear. “’I’m not a bad girl,’ Poppy says, ‘not a good girl, just a halfway girl, half good impulses, half bad impulses.’ Actually, Poppy did look pretty much like a bad girl for the first half of the movie. Her dress kept falling off her left shoulder and she drank like a fish and she chain-smoked. Halfway through she shaped up and started looking more like a good girl. But then towards the end, out on the high seas, she was generally soaking wet. Which as we know can make even a good girl look like a bad girl.”
“Maybe,” Helen muses, “maybe she was unhappy because she wasn’t one thing or another. Because she was only a halfway girl. Maybe if she had been all bad or all good she would have been happier.”
And I know all about that, Helen says to herself.
Doris calls her in to breakfast. Today Helen is not hung over, not too badly, and she is actually looking forward to one of Doris’s big meals. Walking into the tiny kitchen, she puzzles over the heavy white bathrobes hanging off the backs of the two kitchen chairs. They don’t usually wear robes around the apartment except when the heat is off and the wind is blowing in through the leaky windows, which today it isn’t thank goodness. She sits down and almost immediately a grand piled plate of food touches down in front of her. Doris makes more trips to the table, pouring coffee and orange juice.
“Doris, what’s this?” Helen points at a small grey puddle off to one side of the plate. The puddle is half obscured by scrambled eggs and overlying strips of bacon.
“Those are grits, of course, Helen. I made them especially for you, for your birthday, which I happen to remember is tomorrow. All southern girls like grits. Although I have to say those grits don’t look very appetizing.”
“Uhm, they don’t look like any grits I’ve ever seen. And you didn’t have to make me a birthday present. But I love you for making that effort, and I’m going to eat them up right now.” Gamely, she reaches for her fork.
“No, no, no, wait,” Doris exclaims, putting a restraining hand on Helen’s arm. “First I want to propose a toast.” She goes the refrigerator, pulls out a small bottle of champagne and puts it on the table next to the orange juice. Then she takes two champagne flutes out of the tiny china cabinet. “Yuk,” she says, inspecting them. “Hold on a sec. Sorry. Now your breakfast is getting cold.” She washes and dries them quickly, puts them on the table, and sets to work on the champagne cork.
“Isn’t it a little early, Doris?” For you, Helen thinks. Not for me.
“No, no. It’s never too early for a Saturday morning mimosa.” Doris takes the wire basket off the bottle carefully, and then puts her napkin over the cork and begins twisting it slowly. Out from beneath the napkin comes a crisp pop. She holds up the bottle uncovered and a tiny vapor cloud heavier than air emerges from its neck and rolls like fog down toward the table. “What do you put in the glass first—the juice or the champagne? I don’t remember.”
“Doesn’t matter, I think.”
“O.K., then, champagne first, then juice.” The bubbles rush to the very tops of the flutes and spill over. She adds the juice. “Oooh. Nice color, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Nice. So what are we toasting?”
“A toast,” Doris says mock theatrically, raising her glass high in front of her, “to girls who commit themselves to something with all their hearts and ignore all the obstacles that the world throws up in front of them—things like leopards and fires and exploding ships and guys on rafts who are extremely handsome but dumb as tree stumps. To girls who happen upon other girls just like themselves and help them just like we help each other. To girls who eat terrible grits without complaining. To girls who aren’t halfway girls.”
Helen raises her glass. “Yes. Especially that last one. Let’s drink to that. To girls who aren’t halfway girls.”
They down the fizzy concoction in a few quick gulps and Doris refills their glasses.
They have finished their breakfasts and the champagne has gone straight to Helen’s head.
There’s a knock on the door. “Ah—the second half of your birthday present,” Doris says, smiling. She gets to her feet unsteadily and pulls on her robe. “Here, put your robe on and come with me.”
Doris goes to the door, cracks it wide enough to see who’s there, and then lets it swing open. “Oh hi, Ed. Good to see you again! And you must be Ed’s assistant. Do come in.”
Two men make their way into the small vestibule, dripping wet and struggling with heavy burdens of cases and bags. The first one, Ed, looks familiar to Helen.
“Helen,” Doris confirms, “I think you know Mr. Hesser. He tells me he’s taken your picture a couple of times. He’s in from the Coast for a few days. Ed, you remember my friend Helen Worthing.”
“Of course. Good to see you again, Miss Worthing.” He flashes an engaging smile at her as he slides his dripping raincoat off. Not seeing an obvious place for it, he sets it gently down on the floor. Then he looks back at Helen. “My goodness! Look at you. Still too beautiful for your own good. And this is Charlie, who’s going to help me set up.”
Charlie edges the rest of the way in. He grunts and snuffles like a large bear cub. He nods at the two women and also lowers his raincoat to the floor.
“Doris,” Helen says, “I’m confused. Set up what?”
“Ed is going to take a picture of the two of us. Before you go away. So we can always remember our time together.”
“And unfortunately, Miss Kenyon,” Hesser says, “I’m afraid it’s gotta be an indoor shot. It’s raining cats and dogs outdoors.”
“We’re fine with that. Helen, how should we pose? Any ideas?”
She hesitates. “Yes, but . . . but I don’t want to embarrass you.”
“Helen, you won’t.”
“Well then, I would like to have our picture taken in bed, just like we were, with you talking and me just listening.”
Doris laughs. “Perfect! Especially because in this dinky apartment there aren’t a lot of other choices. Gentlemen, this way, and Helen, you should probably wait here while I get them started. Not enough room in there for everybody all at once.” The two men follow her down the hall, bumping and clanking.
Helen walks over to the small mirror on the wall near the door. Oh god. She tries primping to no avail.
“Helen, relax. You look fine.” Doris has come up behind her and encircled her waist with her arms.
“Ugh. I do not. I have to fix my hair and my eyes and my lipstick. Anything that’s going to show above the sheets. For this picture I sure don’t want to be the halfway beautiful girl. I want to be the all-the-way beautiful girl. So you’ll always remember me that way.”
“The bathroom’s all yours. They’ll be a while setting up the lights.”
“What about you? Aren’t you going to get fancy?”
“Nope.” Doris squeezes Helen’s waist a little tighter and then slides up just a little higher. “I’m going the other way. I’m going to be the all-the-way plain girl.” They both look at her reflection in the mirror. “The girl who snores and drools and looks just like this when you wake up next to her. Frumpy and unkempt. That way, you’ll never forget who that other girl in the picture is. You’ll say to yourself, Oh, I remember her—that’s Frumpy Kenyon.”
“Frumpy Kenyon,” Helen laughs. “Ha. That’ll be the day. Here—let go of me so I can stop looking at myself in the mirror and hug you back.”
She turns. They hug long and hard.
“So no halfway girls here,” Helen says.