Last Dance with Valentino. Daisy Waugh

with the effort of having shaken himself loose at last. ‘It is board. And a nice job, too. Twelve dollars a week. Better than you’ll get anywhere else. With days off. Two days a month off! Do you want it, young lady? No or yes?’

      She laughed. ‘Do I want it?’ She held out a hand to us, and I can picture her face now, the relief in her eyes, even while she was trying to hide it.

      ‘You have family?’

      ‘Back in Ireland. I’m here on my own.’

      ‘Good. Like the rest of us, then.’ He glanced at me, rather shyly, I think. Perhaps, even, with a whisper of a smile. ‘Welcome to America, young lady. You have your papers?’

      She nodded. ‘I was only waiting for a ride to take me to the city.’

      ‘Well, come along, then. Follow me. Hurry now. We can tell ourselves about names and everything else like that in the motor-car. Only we must hurry.’

      He drove us at breakneck speed. It was all so new to me and yet, at the time, I was too wrapped in my miserable thoughts to take much notice. I suppose, before long, we had left Manhattan – I remember nothing of it, only the three of us tearing over a long, straight, impeccably smooth road to Long Island; a road that Mr Hademak was pleased to tell us had been built by a rich man as a car-racing track – until, after however many deaths, the racing drivers had refused to use it any more. He had cackled as he told us this, shaken his head at their eccentricity, and proceeded to drive faster along that dangerous road than I had – or have – ever travelled. Mr Hademak spent most of the journey shouting at us over the din of the engine. It made the veins stick out on his neck.

      ‘Well well well . . . it is quite a household you ladies are coming to. Miss Doyle – I don’t know what you may know of it already?’

      ‘Almost nothing,’ I replied bitterly.

      ‘Quite a household,’ he continued blithely. ‘We have some quite colourful individuals who come our way. Oh, yes, we are quite the entertainers at The Box – as our little house is called. You will be most amused!’

      Amused? It seemed unlikely. Amused? To have travelled so far, so full of fear and hope, only to be abandoned? To have arrived in that mythical new city at last, only to be whisked away from it? Actually, at that moment, I felt not so much amused, but as if a great wave of self-pity were enveloping me and, I’m ashamed to admit, tears were already stinging. I’m not sure I had ever felt so lonesome in my life.

      Fortunately, neither Mr Hademak nor the Irish girl – Madeleine – seemed to notice.

      ‘First, we have the master of the house,’ he announced, as the car flew on, swerving aimlessly from one side of the road to the other. Mr Hademak, bolt upright at the wheel, smiled secretly to himself, and I wondered if, after so many trouble-free days at sea, I might finally be travel sick. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said, ‘and the master is truly quite some gentleman . . . And then we haf the little boy, of course – Jack Junior. Little Jack! Oh, but you will adore him! Quite the little man, he is! He is quite the little master! We all simply adore him. All the servants, and his papa and his mama too. He’s everybody’s favourite! Every single body in our happy little big house just so simply adores him—’

      Suddenly Madeleine, the Irish girl, gave a loud and derisive snort. I stared at her. Last she’d spoken, she’d been telling us, with eyes lowered and trembling lip, how she’d come to America alone because her husband had been killed in the French trenches (later she told me she’d never been married: she’d been found in bed with the priest and hounded out of town). She seemed to have forgotten her grief quickly enough. She glanced at me and rolled her eyes, and it goes to show what sort of a hysterical mind I was in, because the next thing, with tears of self-pity still pricking my eyeballs, I was shaking with quiet giggles.

      ‘But you mustn’t think our life is only about the Little Man,’ Mr Hademak continued cheerfully. ‘Also we are quite the fashionable gathering. Though sometimes, when Madame is in the city, we are just the two of us: Father and Little Man. And then sometimes it is Mother and Little Man, when Mr de Saulles is in town. And then we have Madame and her amusing friends. Or Mr de Saulles and his amusing friends. Or Mr and Mrs de Saulles and their amusing friends. Yes, yes – it is all most amusing . . . We have counts and countesses of Europe. And Mr de Saulles sometimes brings along his Broadway – connections. And how lively they are! And even some of the stars from the pictures! No, no, not quite Miss Mary Pickford! Not quite yet! But we have an English duke. An English duke! And we have so many others. Dancers. Politicians . . . You might have read about them all quite often. In the yellow papers. Yess . . . ’ It was Mr Hademak’s turn to laugh helplessly. He rocked on his bony backside, this way, then that.

      ‘Sometimes,’ he continued finally, ‘I wonder if I know more about these fashionable individuals than they even quite know themselves . . . We are quite the fast set at The Box, you will discover. Oh, you will be most amused.’

      ‘And if you’ll excuse me for asking,’ interjected Madeleine, suddenly, ‘only I’m wondering – what’s the mistress like?’

      –Ha. And if I had known the answer to that – would I have stopped the car?

      Would I have thrown myself out onto that racing drivers’ rejected MotorParkway right there and then, hitched a lift with whatever vehicle came along, hauled my father from his delightful lunch at Sherry’s, and taken whatever employment anyone offered me? Perhaps.

      She destroyed my father – what there was left of him to destroy. And she haunts me still – there’s barely a day goes by I don’t think of her, of the part I played or didn’t play, of what I saw and said, and didn’t see and should have said . . .

      On the other hand, without her, I would never have befriended Rudy. Or ever have travelled to Hollywood. Nor Rudy either. Imagine that! Then who would the readers of Photoplay be drooling over at nights? Perhaps, in spite of everything, I should be grateful to her. Well, and maybe I am, but I hope she burns in any case – if not at Sing Sing, then in Hell when she finally gets there.

      – – –

      ‘What’s the mistress like?’ asked Madeleine.

      And I swear Mr Hademak blushed.

      Dear God – three in the morning already, and still too damn hot to sleep! I have been writing all night so my arm is swollen. And my head is burning and my eyeballs ache . . . but I can’t stop. Not yet. Not until I reach the moment where Rudy and I are there in the garden, and we are standing in silence together, listening to the music, and I am wondering about Papa, and where he is, and worrying a little about his newest infatuation, but not as much as I ordinarily would because how can I when Mr Guglielmi – Rudy – is standing so very close beside me? And I don’t believe I have ever glimpsed a more handsome, more dazzling man in all my life.

      And then he turns to me and he says, ‘It’s beautiful music, isn’t it?’ And his voice – his Italian accent was much stronger then but his voice was the same: that low, dark, beautiful voice. I can feel it through me. I didn’t recognise the music. I’m not sure that I had even fully noticed it was playing. And he smiled at me, and I thought how sad he must have looked before because the smile had such an effect, as if his face had been illuminated by a thousand million electric light bulbs, and he said, ‘Do you like to dance, Jenny?’

       You made me love you . . . I didn’t want to do it . . . You made me want you . . . And all the time you knew it

      Rodolfo Guglielmi was a professional dancer then: a dancer-for-hire. When the papers wrote about him – because of the divorce – they called him a lot of hateful names, and of course they still do. And of course he was no angel then. He is a long way from being an