The Diviners
“What is it, doll?” Sam asked.
“I know where he’ll strike next,” Evie said, already grabbing for her coat and hat.
“Where are we headed?”
“The Globe Theatre!” Evie yelled.
“What’s at the Globe?” Jericho asked.
“The Ziegfeld revue,” Sam said and ran after Evie.
LITTLE BETTY SUE BOWERS
Theta was six when she made her debut in the Peoria, Illinois, musical emporium as Little Betty Sue Bowers in a pinafore dress of red, white, and blue, and silver tap shoes that sparkled under the lights. She sang and danced to “God Bless America” while her overbearing foster mother stood in the wings, mouthing every word. The audience was charmed. “The Ringleted Rascal,” they called her, and “Betty Baby Doll.” Soon she was playing the Orpheum Circuit throughout the Midwest. Theta hated vaudeville, hated the hours of work, the drafty backstage rooms, the leering “uncles” who invited her to sit on their laps. Crisscrossing the country, all those little towns and their dying music halls. Every night Mrs. Bowers would set her hair on rollers and smack Theta on the rear with the hairbrush, saying, “Don’t you ruin it.” Theta had been too terrified to sleep, afraid she’d muss those curls and get another, much harder smack come morning. She’d never been to school. Never had a birthday party or a real friend.
By the time Theta was fourteen, it was clear she was no longer the Ringleted Rascal. She was developing a woman’s body and face, with long, shapely legs and a pout of a mouth. She was too old to play the adorable little girl and too young to play the more risqué acts. Theta was on her way to being unemployable. They’d just signed on for a monthlong run at the Palace in Kansas City when Theta met a handsome soda jerk named Roy. She eloped with him two weeks later. That had proven to be an even bigger mistake than staying with Mrs. Bowers. At first, Roy had made her feel protected. But Roy soon became obsessed with her—what she wore, where she went, whom she saw. Once, he’d even locked her in the bathroom all night while he went out with his boys. Theta had picked the lock and crawled out of a second-story window to get away. Roy hadn’t liked that. He hadn’t liked that at all.
The next morning, with her eye swollen and bruised and her lip split open, she’d tried going home. She stood on the front porch of the boardinghouse with her small plaid felt suitcase. Her tears stung her raw mouth. “Please, Mama. I’m sorry,” she’d pleaded.
“You made your bed, you lie in it, Betty Sue,” Mrs. Bowers had said and shut the door.
Theta had tried to be what she thought a good wife should be, but every little thing seemed to set Roy off: Her stockings were crooked. The toast was too brown. Her long hair, thick as broom bristles, wasn’t put up like a proper lady’s, making her look “like some kinda Indian squaw!” The house wasn’t tidy enough. If she didn’t get a good cut of meat from the butcher, she was a terrible housekeeper. If she did get a good steak, well, then she must have been flirting. The sting of the hairbrush was nothing compared to the smack of Roy’s hand. Nights were the worst. She would grit her teeth and stare at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over. Once, she tried to get a part in a sketch at the Palace, but Roy forbade it, and anyway, pictures were the new fashion. The vaudeville theaters and music halls were being refitted as grand movie palaces. The days of vaudeville were coming to an end. Sometimes, when Roy was away at work and the heat from the diner below would rise up through the linoleum, baking the apartment in an afternoon haze, Theta would strip down to her slip, roll back the carpets, and dance to the radio, imagining she was Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris. In these fantasies, it was not the imagined love and adulation of the audience, the collective desire, that fueled her. Rather, it was the sense of absolute freedom, of dancing because she could, dancing because she enjoyed the dancing and not because she was expected to do it.
“Why you gotta be such a mean old Daddy?” she’d sing along in her husky voice, the fingers of one hand splayed across the slim curve of her belly. With the other, she’d reach higher and higher, as if she might, at any moment, pluck a star from the heavens or punch a hole in the sky and make her escape. It was during one of those sultry, stifling afternoons on the prairie that Theta lost herself to this smallest of escapes, singing along to the radio (“Love me sweet, honey, like you ought to do”) and reveling in the gyrations of her body so completely—her limbs, her hips, hers, hers, hers only—that she didn’t hear Roy’s key in the lock.