The Biograph Girl Read online

  “Great, just great, Sister,” Richard says. “This is my lover, Rex Rousseau.”

  Sister Jean turns and clasps Rex’s hand warmly, meeting his gaze. “Wonderful to meet you, Mr. Rousseau,” says Sister Jean. “Welcome to St. Mary’s.”

  Jean notes the sudden awkwardness in the young man’s eyes. She’s seen it before. At St. Vincent’s, before she came here, many of the homeless were men with AIDS or women who turned tricks for a living. “What must a nun think of me?” one man had asked, averting his eyes, needle tracks scarring his arms.

  “I’m not sure,” Jean had replied. “I know that I think you’re all right. And so does God.”

  “Good to meet you, too, Sister,” says Rex Rousseau. Could that possibly be his real name? Jean thinks it sounds like the stage name for a porn star. He smiles at her with all the hesitancy of a young boy in front of his fourth grade teacher. She’s seen that look before, too. All these grown people with intimidating memories of Catholic school.

  “Is Flo here yet?” Richard asks.

  “Oh, yes,” Jean says. “With bells on.” She gestures for them to enter the day room.

  “Wow,” says Rex. “What a difference.” He looks around at the bright colors of the walls, the exotic theater posters with their lions and clowns and magicians and one-legged acrobats.

  “It was Flo’s idea,” Jean tells him. “She got the board to agree that the color scheme in here was not to be messed with.”

  “And you went along with her,” Richard says, laughing.

  “You better believe it. I knew what was good for me.”

  “You know, Sister,” Richard tells her, “if the nuns back at St. Thomas à Becket Academy had been as cool as you, I would’ve had a much better time in grade school. I tried to redecorate the chapel once in Partridge Family psychedelia and was told I was a heretic.”

  “So was Jesus.” Jean winks at him. “People forget that. And I’m sure He would’ve loved The Partridge Family.”

  They all laugh.

  She loved dispelling the stereotype of the uptight nun. She hadn’t even gone to Catholic school. She was a public school kid in the little mill town of Putnam, Connecticut, in the hills of the industrial northeast. In those days, she’d had nary a thought about nuns or priests or even Jesus, despite her nominal Catholicism. That is, until her junior year in high school, when her life suddenly changed.

  That was the year of Jean’s Great Transformation. She had shocked her parents by telling them she wanted to enter the convent. They weren’t particularly religious; her mother, in fact, had cried for days after her announcement. Her father had been born a Presbyterian and had never bothered to officially convert, despite the fact that he attended midnight Mass every Christmas Eve with Jean and her mother. That was the extent of their churchgoing. Jean was sent to catechism class when she was a girl, and she’d been confirmed, but there was never much talk about God or the Pope or sin in her house.

  They were decent, hardworking folk, but Jean remembers few expressions of love from her parents. The first fifteen years of her life now seemed to her to have been one long stretch of careful neutrality. Watching television shows like Family Affair or The Brady Bunch had made Jean feel oddly alien, as if family were a concept she couldn’t quite grasp.

  Then came the day when her world was broken open wide by a four-foot-seven-inch nun. She had come to speak to Jean’s social studies class. Her name was Anne Drew—Sister Anne Drew. At first, Jean had thought she meant “Andrew”—the way nuns used to take men’s names. “No, no,” Sister Anne had laughed. “I don’t go in for all that sexist stuff.”

  She wore no veil, and the day she came to their class, she was wearing work boots and khakis. “I apologize for not getting a little more dressed,” she told the students, “but I’ve just come from an emergency. A family in inner-city Hartford was burned out of their house last night—it was probably arson—and we were there trying to pick through the rubble to find the little girl’s doll.”

  Jean was captivated by her. She listened intently to Anne Drew’s description of her work with the poor. She ran a homeless shelter in Hartford. This was back in the early 70s before the problem was made even worse under Reagan. She lived on her own, in a small apartment partially paid for by the order. Anne was maybe forty then, a little older than Jean is now. She was short—at fifteen, Jean was already taller than she was—with close-cropped, prematurely gray hair framing an unlined, youthful face.

  Anne Drew had stood in front of the class and asked for volunteers. Jean’s hand was the first to go up. When her classmates all faded away after one or two visits to the shelter, Jean continued trekking on down to Hartford. She cooked soup—always without beef stock, because Anne was a vegetarian—and served it in large plastic bowls to the drug addicts and hookers who came to their doors.

  “It’s who Jesus walked among,” Jean argued to her parents when they became concerned about her activities, about her twice-weekly visits to the shelter and the occasional overnight stay on the weekends. When Jean announced she wanted to leave Putnam and enroll in a Catholic convent school run by the Sisters of Mercy in upstate New York, her mother had wailed, “We’ll never have grandchildren!” But eventually her parents came around, and Jean—barely seventeen—went off to become a nun.

  Her studies were an inspiration. The order paid for her training as a nurse, as well as providing a spiritual base she’d never found at home. She discovered God in her deepest thoughts and in the faces of the people she worked with. The sisters were ecstatic to have her. Their ranks were diminishing; it was rare that a young girl, on her own initiative, chose to enter the convent. They became her family, awed by her youthful idealism to make a difference. As part of her novitiate, she accompanied Anne and some other sisters to Central America, helping the poor and displaced in El Salvador, even venturing into Nicaragua.

  “You inspire us all,” one old nun in her eighties told Jean upon her return. During her whole time in novitiate, Jean never once met a sister who was cross or cruel. She couldn’t understand reactions like the one she’d seen in Richard Sheehan or so many others.

  At least—not then. Later, she came to understand better how rigid even the most compassionate people can become.

  Even someone as sainted to her as Anne Drew.

  “There she is,” Richard says, pointing across the room.

  Jean blinks back to the present. Flo’s seated against the far wall in a large orange pseudoleather armchair. She’s smoking, of course, gripping that long cigarette holder with fingers capped with her signature scarlet. She’s wearing a bright green silk dress, and her pure white hair is tied up in large bows of green velvet. Her lips are a shocking shade of violet.

  “Well, if it isn’t my entourage,” she says in that raspy, ancient rattle of hers, grinning widely, opening her arms as if to embrace them.

  “Hello, Flo,” Richard says warmly. “I can call you Flo, can’t I?”

  “You can call me anything you like except late for dinner,” she tells him. They all laugh.

  Anita presents her with the flowers. Flo receives them gratefully, her eyes growing wide. She cradles them in her lap.

  There’s an opened box of Samoas on the table near her chair. Flo gestures to it. “Have a cookie,” she offers. “Because of me, Gertie’s daughter took first place.”

  “Hey, congratulations,” Richard says, helping himself to one. He gently presses Rex forward. “Flo, this is Rex Rousseau,” he says.

  Rex steps forward and bows his head quickly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Bridgewood,” he says.

  “Rex Rousseau?” she quizzes. “You must be an actor, too, with a handle like that.”

  “I am,” Rex says, and Jean smiles to note he’s blushing.

  “What kind of parts do you play?” Flo asks.

  “Well, I’ve done a few things, here and there—”

  Richard nudges him with his elbow. “You’re not gonna tell her about Dennis Does Dalla
s?”

  Rex gives him an angry look, but Flo doesn’t miss the reference. “Blue movies, eh?” she says. “I knew a few of those kind in my day.”

  Rex sighs. “I’m through with that. I’m doing a one-man show on the Barrymores that’s received some good notices.”

  “Which Barrymores?”

  “All of them.”

  “You play all of them?” Flo blinks. “Even Ethel?”

  Rex smiles. “Especially Ethel.”

  Flo nods. “I think I’m beginning to get the drift here. Such a sharp dresser, too. Come here closer and let me see your necktie.”

  Rex steps forward. Flo reaches out with her gnarled hand and inspects the satin fabric between her fingers. She looks up at him, round blue eyes and furrowed brow. “You married?” she asks abruptly.

  “Flo—” Jean warns.

  Richard grins. “Yes, actually, Flo, he is”—he pauses—“to me.”

  She sniffs. “That’s what I thought. I mean, if you’re playing Ethel Barrymore, you must be a pansy.” She lets go of Richard’s tie.

  Jean looks over at Richard and Rex to see if they’re offended. They’re clearly not. “Pansy” isn’t a pejorative for Flo; it’s merely a descriptive, what they used to say back in the days of gas lamps and streetcars.

  “And you, missy,” Flo says to Anita. “Did you get that part?”

  Anita shakes her head. “No. Guess I was too late.” She smirks. “Or too old.”

  “I’d argue with you and tell you that you’re still a chick, ’cause you are,” Flo says, “but I know how those casting agents think. Twenty-four, out the door.”

  They all laugh again.

  “So how d’ya want to begin?” Flo asks.

  Jean smiles. She hasn’t seen Flo so revved up since the talent show she’d organized last winter. She’d spent weeks on it, interviewing residents and lining up all the acts. Anybody who still had it together sang a little song or did a little dance. Flo, of course, whistled and brought the day room down with cheers.

  “Well,” Richard is saying, “I was thinking we’d just have a conversation. With your permission, I’ll set up my tape recorder.”

  “Let me see that thing.”

  He hands it to her. She narrows her eyes and studies it, turning it over in her hands. “So small. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Oh, it works,” Richard assures her. She hands it back to him and he switches it on. “Do I have your permission to tape record this interview?” he asks.

  “Yes, you most certainly do,” she replies.

  He smiles, hitting the STOP button and then REWIND. The tape hums for a second, then clicks. He hits PLAY.

  “Do I have your permission to tape record this interview?”

  “Yes, you most certainly do.”

  Rex laughs. “What do you think of that?” he asks. “Hearing your voice?”

  Flo eyes him. “Young man, I’m not so much a relic I’ve never been tape-recorded before.”

  Jean sees Rex blush again. Oh, poor man, she thinks. Don’t tangle with Flo.

  “Still,” Flo muses, “with a rasp like that, I’d never have made it in talking pictures.”

  They laugh. Jean notices a look pass between the three visitors.

  “Well, let’s just start at the beginning and see where we go,” Richard suggests, setting the tape recorder on the table in front of Flo. They all take seats in a semicircle around her.

  Jean watches Flo carefully. The old woman has put out her cigarette and folded her hands in her lap. She seems pleased by the attention, but still on her guard, like an owl perched on a branch.

  “You said you were born in Canada,” Richard says. “What town?”

  “Hamilton,” Flo replies.

  Jean notices another look pass around from Richard to Anita to Rex.

  “Hamilton,” Richard repeats. “What was Hamilton like a century ago?”

  “Not sure I know. We left when I was still quite young. We lived in many places—here in Buffalo for a while, then out west. My mother was an actress, you see, and we were on the road a great deal. She was one of the best of her time.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Charlotte Dunn.” Jean detects just the slightest pause between the first and last names.

  “Was that her stage name?” Richard asks.

  “No, that was her real—you know, back in those days, names were changed so easily and often. It was so different then. I remember once, when we were playing in San Francisco—” She pauses, looking around at the group. “Have any of you ever been to San Francisco?”

  They all had. “Well,” Flo sniffs, “you don’t remember it before the earthquake. I don’t imagine many do anymore. How sad. How very, very sad indeed.”

  And so she goes on to describe San Francisco before the great cataclysm: the charming, pastel-colored houses, the tinkling streetcars, the hills and winding streets and palm trees and everywhere the magnificent views of ocean, sky, and land. And then she describes New York at the turn of the century, and Philadelphia, and Chicago.…

  Jean observes the skill with which Flo deflects any question that pries too much into the particulars of her long life. She’s always done that, ever since Jean has known her. She’ll talk about her days on the stage, but never about specific shows, precise years. It was always a colorful panorama of places and names and lively anecdotes—about the smoke-spewing papier-mâché volcano she’d once made, about the old actor who’d dropped dead on the stage while playing King Lear, about the fires she’d escaped—barely with her life ….

  But try to pin her down, as Richard—as skilled a journalist as he might be—was trying to do, and you’d get nowhere. Flo would wax nostalgical for Lillian Russell or Eddie Foy, but ask if she’d ever worked with them, and she’d just smile enigmatically. Jean had learned to leave her with her memories. It was enough that she shared what she did.

  And yet she admits to herself that she had hoped Flo would be a little more straightforward with Richard Sheehan. She’s long been curious to know just how many of Flo’s stories were true, to find out just who this woman is—or was. “A former vaudeville actress,” her predecessor at St. Mary’s, old Sister Michael, had told her when she retired. And that’s still about all Jean knew.

  Oh, Flo had admitted to being married—twice, Jean thought, because she’d used different names. Harry was one. Harry she spoke of occasionally, with some fondness. The other might have been Carl. Or Charles. There were no children, at least none that Jean knew about. There had been a brother, Jean thought—but wasn’t sure. In Flo’s records, next to the line marked family, there was one word: None.

  “I don’t count family by blood,” Flo had once told her.

  “Oh, no?” Jean asked. “How do you count it?”

  “By time spent together. By sharing the chores. By taking drives. By being there.”

  Jean had looked over at her. The glow in Flo’s eyes had made Jean feel honored to be in the same room with her, with this ancient noble lady. Flo was one of the wise old women Anne Drew had told her she’d meet as she went out into the world. “Old women are the wisest creatures on earth,” Anne had told her. “Except maybe for old cats.”

  Flo certainly had a feline edge to her, Jean thought. A sly, knowing sense about her every move, her every word. Jean adored her. Had from the moment she first arrived at St. Mary’s when Flo was one of the first to greet her. “Ah, a baby chick,” Flo had said derisively, apprising her appearance. “But then again,” she reconsidered, “maybe we could use a little hot young blood around here.”

  In those trying first months, it had been Flo who sustained Jean. Among all the residents and staff, it was only Flo who won Jean’s trust. With Flo, she sought refuge on those cold February nights when the wind whistled through the eaves of the great old house and the snow piled up outside. Jean had been very blue last winter: Victor had died, and the memories of St. Vincent’s were crashing in around her. That had been h
er life’s work, what she had always wanted to do, why she’d entered religious life. Making a difference, helping the sick and the hungry and the destitute. Sometimes now she walked down the great staircase of St. Mary’s and felt physically sickened by the opulence, the glittery chandelier and stately marble. They had sent her here to punish her, to imprison her, to keep her safely away from her temptations. At such times, when she felt down and heavy in her heart, sometimes even prayer wasn’t enough. She’d make a pot of tea and sit with Flo, listening to the old wise woman tell her tales.

  As she was now.

  “But you were Baby Flo, the Child Wonder Whistler,” Richard persists.

  “I was,” Flo says with a smile.

  He smiles in return. “You know what’s interesting, Flo? I’ve found a record of another child actress who was also known by that name.” He withdraws the photocopies from his inside jacket pocket.

  Flo’s eyes are suddenly on alert. “That’s not possible,” she says. “I was the only one.”

  “Well, it says here—and I’m wondering if you know something about this—” Richard lifts the paper to read. Jean sees Flo’s fingers lace together in her lap. “There was an actress by the name of Florence Lawrence. Did you know her?”

  A beat. “Of course,” Flo says. “Everyone knew her.”

  “Well, when she was a child, she was also known as Baby Flo, the Child Wonder Whistler. Later, she became known all over the world as The Biograph Girl, the very first movie star.”

  There’s no reaction from Flo.

  Richard continues, although there’s the slightest quaver now to his voice. “And, Flo, the strangest thing is—well, she was also from Hamilton and”—he laughs nervously—“if she were alive today, she’d be one hundred and six.”

  A sudden, awkward silence descends over the group. Jean looks over at Flo. She sits there impassively, hands clasped in her lap. The others are all intently looking at her. Anita Murawski is literally sitting at the edge of her seat. Jean feels suddenly alarmed, as if she’s made some horrible mistake letting these people in, as if they’ve just sprung something terrible on Flo that she didn’t want to hear.