The Impersonator Read Online Free PDF Page A

Quartette. I filled in for an usher at one theater and sold tickets at another to pay my room. A roper hired me to give some sex appeal to his cowboy routine, but he figured on going into burlesque and I figured I’d be wearing nothing but a holster, so we parted ways. I worked one-night stands on the “death trail”—five shows a day—with a Polish ethnic act until they finally gave up and went home to Cleveland. I went with them to audition for a job as a song plugger selling sheet music, but they didn’t think I looked the part.
    Late July found me sick from bad chili, sweltering in a fifty-cent Akron hotel with seven clams to my name. The bed was set in four pans of oxalic acid, which kept the ants from getting into the sheets but did nothing to discourage the fleas that were already safely tucked in. The god-awful flocked wallpaper on the ceiling was losing its battle with gravity, curling at the seams. With every step in the room above, a delicate shower of dried flour paste snowed down on my sheets.
    I was not finished with vaudeville, but vaudeville was finished with me. Even small-time spots I’d gone for had bombed. At every kiddie audition, I had lost to a kid. Why hire a woman to play a girl when they could hire the real thing and pay her less? I was not Mary Pickford after all. The same talents that had seemed so precocious in a ten-year-old turned out to be stunningly average in an adult. It dawned on me that, but for the kindness of the Darlings, I’d have washed up years ago.
    Jack-of-all-trades, I had called myself. There was another side to that coin: master of none.
    My self-confidence shattered, I examined the options. If not vaudeville, what? How could I make a living? I knew nothing beyond the stage. I had no idea how the civilian world worked. No one would hire me as an office clerk or a telephone operator or a shopgirl with the taint of vaudeville on my skin. Performers are toasted and admired as long as they are onstage. Offstage, we are not respectable, like gypsies or immigrants.
    I had no money, no prospects, and no family to turn to for help. The only world I knew had turned its back on me. I felt so sick and alone I wanted to die.
    Come on, Baby, don’t give up. I heard my mother’s voice in my head as I often did, as clear as if she were standing beside my pillow. We’ve been here before. Remember Cincinnati and that awful stage manager? Remember that winter in Albany? You’ve been through worse than this. Think about what you’ve got going for you. There’s always another job just around the corner .
    In point of fact, there was a job for the asking directly across the street. An inner voice forced me to the window where I looked through the grimy glass at the brothel that faced my hotel. A man walked out and paused to light a cigarette. Curtains moved in an upstairs window. Another man went in. There had been a brothel a few blocks down from my hotel in Toledo. There had been a brothel on the corner near my rooming house in Cleveland. And now, here was a brothel across the street. Suddenly, I saw what was happening, and my heart raced. They were getting closer. How much longer before they reached me?
    Panic squeezed my chest. “No!” I said aloud.
    An attack of chills drove me to dig my winter coat out of my trunk. Shivering in the summer heat, I slipped my arms into the sleeves and my hands into the pockets. In the right pocket, my fingers closed around a business card. Oliver Beckett must have placed it there without my knowledge back in March.
    An omen? I’d once helped fleece gullible people at séances. Was that so different from helping to con a wealthy family out of their money by playing the role of an heiress? Another town, another name, another role. It was just a job, and for once, a well-paying one. No one gets hurt; no one is left destitute. I glanced down at Oliver’s card and saw in my mind the photograph of the poor little rich girl who looked like me, and I