Don't Forget to Write: A Novel(55)



She smiled as the lights went down and a spotlight rose on the stage, just inches from us. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice boomed. “The 500 Club is proud to present to you tonight the Chairman of the Board, Old Blue Eyes himself, Mr. Frank Sinatra.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


By the time the show ended, my voice was hoarse from screaming along with every other woman—save Ada—in the house. He had come over and held my hand during “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and I was certain I would never wash that hand again.

But I never expected Ada to usher us backstage, where Frank Sinatra—FRANK SINATRA!—greeted her with a hug and a kiss, then, after she introduced me, he gave me the same.

“Is this a present for me?” he asked Ada.

“Watch it, Frankie,” Ada said, elbowing him playfully in the ribs. “This is my niece, Marilyn.”

“You sure you don’t want to make me a match? I’d be great entertainment at the holidays.”

Ada laughed, and I felt myself melting into an absolute puddle at the idea that Frank Sinatra was even joking about marrying me. Ada said she would let him get back to his fans, but before we left, he grabbed a photograph of himself from a stack of them and signed one to me. I clutched it with a shaking hand as we left the club and headed back toward the boardwalk.

“Same Atlantic City Freddy Goldman showed you?” Ada asked. I shook my head, my eyes as wide as the Ferris wheel on the pier. “You’re all right? I’m not catching you if you faint.”

“How—how do you know Frank Sinatra?”

“Darling, I’ve been coming here since Prohibition. I know everyone in this town. Not the tourists, of course. But the actual heart of it.” She looked pensive for a moment. “When your mother was here, she got to meet Bing Crosby.”

I turned to Ada in surprise. “Is there anyone you don’t know?”

“I don’t know most people. But if they’re regulars here, I’ve probably been introduced. I had much more of a social life when I was younger.”

I remembered the picture of Ada and my mother on the boardwalk, my mother’s exuberant kiss on Ada’s cheek, something held tight in her hand. “Did Mama get his autograph?”

“She did. I assume she still has it somewhere.”

We stopped for fudge and saltwater taffy on the way back to the car, but I felt like I was walking on air instead of the boards. No one was going to believe that Frank Sinatra kissed me on the cheek and asked if I was a present for him. I didn’t believe it.

At the car, Ada took off her stole, draping it carelessly in the backseat. I held on to mine. It was the first fur I’d owned, and I didn’t want it getting messed up in the wind from the convertible, no matter how hot it was. And it was still hot, in late July, even at night.

We tied our hair up, and Ada put the car into gear, reversed out of the parking spot, and pulled out into the street, taking the Black Horse Pike back to the Garden State.

“Thank you,” I said as we cruised along in the darkness, the pine barrens looming to our right, the barrier islands and sea to the left.

She said nothing, though whether she was lost in thought or just concentrating on the unlit road, I did not know.

“Ada?” I asked as we passed Ocean City.

“Hmm?”

“Why did my mother spend the summer with you?”

“I told you. That’s not my story to tell.”

“Except you called us ‘two peas in a stupid pod’ when you thought I might be . . . in trouble. Did she—” I swallowed. “Do I have a sibling I don’t know about?”

Ada was silent for a long moment, and I braced myself for the worst. “You do not,” she said eventually.

“Then what—”

“Give me a minute,” she said, still staring at the dark road. For a mile, she said nothing as I counted the road markers.

Then she began to talk. “It was 1932. She was eighteen years old. And she met a boy who she thought was going to marry her.” Ada glanced over at me. “It was not your father.”

“I assumed as much.”

“Your grandfather didn’t know. Your grandmother—my sister—called and explained the situation. I told her to send her down to me. When Rose arrived, she was terrified. The boy had vanished when she told him. And when she showed up at his house . . .” She shook her head. “He told his parents he had never met her.”

I took that in. Freddy’s response to the girl he got into trouble was horrendous, but compared to that . . . Then again, if I had agreed to have Freddy, he would have left her just as high and dry as my poor mother.

“I sat her down and told her she had about a month to decide what she wanted to do. The decision was hers to make. If she didn’t want to go on, well, we’d find someone to help. And if she did, she would stay with me until it was time, and we would find someone to adopt the baby.”

A shiver ran down my spine. You do not, she had said when I asked if I had another sibling. Oh, Mama.

“In the end, she didn’t have to decide—fate or her body took care of it for her.”

Neither of us spoke. I was trying to reconcile this with the mother I thought I knew. The one who spent her days lost in books, but who doted on her children beyond anything. When she held us, did she think of the baby that never was? Did my father know? I thought of her weeping at her own mother’s death, the woman who protected her honor and allowed her to go on to become my mother instead of some fallen woman, which, in 1932, she would have been.

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