Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman Page B

her years at Vassar. “He hardly has one to keep.”
    â€œHe thinks you’d make a better lead.”
    â€œHe’s right, of course,” Vincent says, shrugging her shoulders. “And I appreciate his loyalty. I know he keeps it up to flatter you. But I’m plenty busy writing my Aria . Speaking of—Hold your C for me at the end of that first line.”
    Norma does as told, then Vincent hits a complementary note. They’re supposed to be Furies or, as Vincent says, the Erinyes, and her idea is to make otherworldly sounds. “We’re brutal avengers,”she reminds Norma. “The melody should be haunting and rise to a sort of onslaught. I want beautiful but frenzied.”
    â€œTry G,” Norma says, gently correcting her sister. “Like this.”
    â€œAnd E major for Mum,” Vincent says, unleashing a note that becomes a cloud of breath in the air.
    â€œMum will have to be offstage left,” Norma says, thinking of Cora’s tendency to jockey for a role onstage. She looks up at the wan sky, then into the golden insides of a café with a green awning. She imagines a steaming hot cup of coffee and a pastry, but there’s no money for pastries, just a big lunch at Polly Holladay’s.
    Her pace, and then Vincent’s, quickens, probably because they’re talking about Cora. She’s the one topic capable of dividing them, and they both tend to get anxious when she comes up. Taking a longer stride causes the backs of Norma’s shoes to rub against her heels and she winces. Vincent had called her to New York in a letter, saying, “We’ll open our oysters together.” But Cora had come too.
    â€œWe can’t just put Mum on the shelf,” Vincent says, dodging a lamppost. “You know that.”
    Norma nods, though she’s ready to be young and free in the city, and Vincent’s extreme loyalty to their mother baffles her.
    â€œWe’ll all be offstage,” Vincent says. “Heard but not seen.”
    â€œFine,” Norma says, not wanting to fight.
    At night, in their cramped apartment, Cora peers over her small spectacles and refuses to drift out of young conversation like most women her age. “I, too, slept around if it suited me,” she announced one evening at dinner, a candlelit meal over a rickety table that included one of Vincent’s literary suitors, a kind but unathletic man who couldn’t hide his shock. “Why shouldn’t my girls do the same?” Cora continued, nonchalant.
    Norma was embarrassed, but not surprised, while Vincent laughed heartily and poured her mother another glass of wine.
    Vincent is the sun they orbit now, not quite a mother figure but a revered one. One night, when they’d been drinking, she asked Norma to sweep the kitchen.
    â€œI always clean the kitchen.”
    â€œOh don’t be revisionist. We all cleaned the kitchen growing up.”
    â€œWho do you think kept house when you went off to Vassar?”
    â€œTell me,” Vincent said, pausing in the doorway, owning every inch of her five-foot frame. “What kind of ride is it, on my coattails? Is it good?”
    In the morning, Vincent groveled, but Norma waved her off. We’re all hustlers, she thought. I may have come into the theateron Vincent’s coattails, but I’ve stayed because I’m damn good at what I do.
    Norma has held a gun, silhouetted onstage, lights dark. She’s been a mermaid, then a barmaid, in Djuna Barnes’s Kurzy of the Sea , taken direction from Eugene O’Neill, when he’s sober enough to give it. She’s delivered a monologue in a subterranean city of the future in a costume shaped like a pyramid, a halo over her head dangling from a well-bent wire. She’s been the highlight of a bad production, a critic writing, “Even Norma Millay’s superb acting couldn’t save this show . . .”
    And Charlie—Charlie has