'Nobody knows,' said the Kid. 'He died three years ago.'
The Kid looked like she was going to cry. So, thought Millie, she went back home on the weekend and it stirred things up. Poor kid.
Millie took time out from the makeup. 'Sounds like your daddy was a nice man.'
'The nicest. He had a temper on him though. He was Irish, through and through. He'd just turn on people, say they weren't treating his girls right. Then he'd go and let half the town into the show for free. If they were poor or anything. So we always had a full house. People would come over and we'd sing. All of us.'
'Sounds like fun.'
'Thing is that I remember hating Lancaster. I remember thinking it was a really nasty, small-minded place. But when I was there, I started remembering all kinds of good things about it.'
'Like what?' Millie asked, over her shoulder. Getting out the old Panchro-and her little white stick.
'Oh, like going swimming with Muggsie. We used to run around the old sheds a lot, just playing like kids do. Me and Muggsie and the Gilmores. We had a lot of friends there. People were really very nice to us. We'd go to parties and I'd just hop up onto pianos and sing. There was this place opened up called the Jazz Cafe, and they asked us in to sing there. And people kept coming to the shows at the theater. They never got tired of the shows, and they must have seen us every week.' The Kid managed to laugh again. 'To tell you the truth we probably weren't all that good. For years and years, the only thing I knew about singing was that you had to be loud.'
'Oh, every place is a mixture of good and bad,' said Millie. 'I got pretty mixed memories of Missouri. Everybody gets into everybody else's business all the time.'
'They sure do,' agreed the Kid. She went silent, perplexed, hugging herself. Millie took advantage of the stillness to get the white stick and draw two quick lines over the bags under the eyes. You had to be quick. All these stars got such frail vanity.
'Okay, now. Hold still, Judy. I'm going to do your eyes.' Millie smoothed even darker brown, No. 30, across the whole of the eyelid and then up to the natural eyebrow. It was a good design, this makeup. It made her eyes look bigger in her face, like a real little girl's, by darkening everything to the eyebrow and putting on these absolutely enormous eyelashes. Millie had thought it would look phony. Instead, the eyelashes seemed to match the Kid's own huge dark eyes. And then you didn't put a thing on the lower lid at all, except for the slightest bit of mascara.
The huge dark eyes were looking at her, and the Kid was saying something.
'That's what I can't figure,' said the Kid. 'I just don't understand. They were so nice, and then they drove my daddy out.'
'Drove him out. What you mean?'
Millie leaned over and painted in eyebrows lightly with a brush. You had to be careful with eyebrows. Too much, too little, both showed up bad.
'After we started to get big. They drove my daddy out of town, took away the lease from his movie theater, shoved him out, and a year later he was dead.'
Millie was silent. She was not sure this was the truth.
'Why would people do that to him?' the Kid asked, her voice rising.
'I don't know. If you were starting to get successful, maybe they were jealous.'
'He was such a nice man. They killed him, Ma. One year later he was dead!'
Okay. Millie stopped, put down the brush. She knelt down so that she and the Kid were face-to-face. 'What did he die of, Judy?'
'Spinal meningitis,' the Kid admitted.
'That's not Lancaster's fault.'
'They still drove him out,' she said, picking at the arm of the chair. 'The town drove him out, and my mother had left him for all those men.'
Millie stood up. Don't want to hear about that.
'I've talked to your mother,' Millie said carefully. 'She seems to be a nice lady.' Millie used the tip of the brush to sketch individual eyebrow hairs.
'Seems,' said the Kid.
'I met a lot of kids' mothers,' said Millie. She meant the mothers of child actors. 'Most of them were real pushy. Yours wasn't.'
'She's just better at it.' The Kid's mouth went firm, drawn tightly inward. 'You better hurry up with the makeup.'
Okay, Kid, end of conversation.
'She just sat in the limousine,' said the Kid.
Okay, not the end of conversation. 'Who?'
'My mother. We got driven out to Lancaster in a studio limousine.' The Kid said it in an imitation English accent, to make it sound snotty. 'We drove up in a limousine to Muggsie's house, and my mother sat in it outside so I wouldn't stay too long. I mean, she could have gone to see the Gilmores or somebody, but she didn't. She said she didn't want to get dusty.'
Does sound pretty snotty to me, thought Millie.
'She thinks limousines are the best thing in the world. She thinks it's real great driving all day. Every weekend, I'd have to leave Daddy and go with her all the way to Los Angeles. To take lessons or go to auditions. If it was schooltime, Janie and Jinny would stay behind. And I'd have to sit in the car alone with her. For hours and hours
