“Gosh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “I remember now, she
“She did use hypnosis sometimes,” I agreed.
“There was some trial, wasn't there?” Donny's voice went thoughtful as he searched his memory. “She'd helped some girl come up with a memory, and the cops were making a stink, saying she was turning the courtroom into a vaudeville stage.”
“Really?” I said doubtfully. Flo chimed in.
“Wasn't that the girl claiming she had been assaulted? Mummy wouldn't let me see the papers, but I snuck them out of the trash. Yeah, they were saying the only reason she was making the charge was because she wanted to be an actress and thought it would get her noticed. Like the Fatty Arbuckle case, only that was later. And this girl didn't die.”
“She was a dancer—chorus line, not ballet,” Donny added, for my sake, “and told everyone she'd been knocked cold during the attack, and forgot the details. And your doctor friend helped her remember them—only the police said it was all hooey, that she'd just helped the girl come up with a story for why she hadn't made the charges when the attack happened instead of waiting nearly a year.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I told them. “Dr Ginzberg used hypnosis to help me put together what happened during the accident—I'd sort of . . .” My voice trailed off as I was hit hard by what I was about to say. With an effort, I finished the thought: “I'd pushed it away, even the parts I could eventually remember. So yes, she was probably accustomed to working with helping people retrieve their repressed memories.”
I found myself smiling, a little sadly, at this last. A patient invariably feels that the intense relationship she forms with her psychiatrist is entirely unique and essentially personal; it is always a jolt to realise that it is also one of a score such relationships the psychiatrist holds simultaneously: a part of the job.
Donny lit a match, his handsome face coming brightly into view then fading into a mere outline in the glow of the cigarette. “Didn't they think one of her loonies went nuts in the office and killed her? I don't remember ever hearing who it was—the papers are never as good in following up a story as they are in telling you in the first place, are they?”
“It was never solved,” I said. Both of them went quiet at this reminder that we were speaking of a friend, not an anonymous victim. Then Flo stirred.
“What happened with the girl's case?”
“I think it was dropped,” Donny answered. “Yes, there was some hokum about the man having the doctor killed, but wouldn't he have knocked off the girl instead?”
“Wonder what happened to her?”
“She went back to work. Used to be one of the dancers at the Tiger, in fact.”
“The Blue Tiger, where we were Friday? Is she still there?”
“She wouldn't be, no—she'd be too old even for the chorus now.”
“Billy's no spring chicken,” Flo commented, in what sounded like an objection.
Billy? I thought, then: Ah. Belinda Birdsong, the saucy chanteuse.
Donny gave a snort, and said, “Billy was old when he was in short pants.”
Hmm. Another Billy, then. Unless this was another of the slang turns my American contemporaries used, where a girl was “old man” and a man “young thing.”
Flo giggled. “Don't be absurd, Donny. Billy never wore short pants; he was born in a skirt.”
“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “Are you saying that Belinda Birdsong is a man?”
My two companions flew into gales of laughter, making me realise that I'd sounded like someone too ancient, or too naive, to have imagined such a thing as a man acting as a woman. “No, honestly,” I protested, “I've seen men impersonating women before, but a person can usually tell. Are you sure?”
This set them off again, into the sort of choking noises that can only come from a risque joke. “Oh, yes,” Donny got out at last. “No mistake.”
“Do you care to tell me why?”
The cool edge to my question reminded him of his manners. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn't mean to . . . That is to say, yes, I'm sure Belinda's a man, 'cause I saw his, er, fittings one evening. I was walking by his dressing-room when someone threw open the door at a . . . revealing moment.”
“I see.”
“As did I. Gave me quite a trauma, I tell you, seeing the, er, lengths the boy would go to to conceal—” A slapping noise came out of the darkness as Flo chastised him, and I made haste to move the subject on a step.
“I'm impressed. Their throat usually gives them away, the Adam's apple, you know, and a degree of exaggeration in their manners. He's very natural.”
“They all are.”
“What, you mean the others on the stage were all men, as well?”
“Not the chorus line, but the three other singers, yes.”
I'd never even suspected it. Alcohol, of course, was partly to blame for my lack of perception, and the room's thick, smokey air, but on reflection, I decided that the reason I had failed to notice was that, in England, such acts as I had seen were generally in small and seedy cabarets, not in a glittering palace the size of a warehouse with a big, slick jazz band to accompany its internationally known singer.
“Well, fancy that,” I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody assuring us that “It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo',” some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.
Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.
Chapter Nineteen
Tuesday was a day of leisure, an unlooked-for holiday from care, during which we at last eased into the attitudes appropriate to a summer house. The weather cooperated in the venture, with a slight high fog to keep the sun from waking us too early, then burning off to present us a day worthy of the Riviera. Flo and Donny appeared, yawning and tousled, to exclaim in appreciation of the sparkle off the lake. Flo turned on her heel and went back to don her bathing costume, and while Donny was studying the potential contained in the cupboards, she trotted down the lawn and to the end of the dock where she stood, pulling on her red bathing cap, before launching herself off the end into the water.
Donny produced griddle-cakes (apologising all the while for the lack of some spice or other that his mother used and which, he claimed, defined the dish) until we were groaning, and we then merrily abandoned the mess in favour of reading in the lawn-chairs.
They had both brought novels, although at the moment both were buried in other things. Flo was reading one of the
“It's
