Megan Bergman - Almost Famous Women - Stories

Ruby tries to get there. And she does, just not in time to stop Tiny from smashing her trumpet into the man’s face, flinging it backward, connecting again. Ruby gets there only in time to grab the trumpet before Tiny goes for his face a third time. Ruby knows once Tiny starts she won’t stop, and if she doesn’t stop—

What happens to women like us? Ruby thinks. Her back is sore. She’s been sitting in the same position on the cement floor for a while, holding Tiny’s head in her lap. She has a busted lip and a cut above her eye, and all they’ve given her to stop the bleeding is a dirty-looking rag.

Tiny sits up gingerly, touches her lip with her fingers. “Two girls like us,” she says, cracking a smile. “We can make it on our own.”

Not in this world, Ruby thinks, but she’s not in the mood to disagree. “We sure can, sugar,” she says, sighing. “Grab your horn and let’s try.”

“We’re going to do better than try. I can pack a joint.”

“Well, grab your horn.”

“Are you driving?”

“Find me a car,” Ruby says, clasping her knees as if she’s going to rise up and go somewhere. “Find me a car and I’ll take you anywhere. Let’s go to Chicago.”

“I don’t want to go to Chicago. I want to go to Memphis.”

“Memphis then.”

“Where’s my horn, anyway?”

Ruby shrugs her shoulders and stands up. She doesn’t know. The naked bulb hanging from the ceiling of the jail cell flicks on and off.

“Anybody got a cigarette?” Ruby asks through the bars.

The guard does, but he’s eating a chicken sandwich. Ruby can smell it and she’s starving, really starving. He throws one cigarette, and then another at her.

“But ain’t nobody got a light,” Tiny says, cigarette already in her mouth. “Not for us.”

“Sing for it,” the guard says, laughing. “Give me a torch song.”

“Not for you, baby,” Tiny says. “Not for you.”

She gets up and flops down on the single cot in the cell. There isn’t any room for Ruby.

Got what I wished for, Ruby thinks, leaning against the cinder-block wall, which is strangely cool against her back. I’m finally alone with my girl. Got her all to myself.

Ruby closes her eyes and begins to drift away, the cigarette falling from her lips. It’s been a long time since she’s slept, a long time since she’s fallen asleep without the roar of the road underneath her.

Robert de Montesquiou once said of the painter Romaine Brooks that she was a “thief of souls”—perhaps this thieving is what happens when an artist uses a real subject as inspiration. The stories in this collection are born of fascination with real women whose remarkable lives were reduced to footnotes. Many of these women came to light only because of intrepid biographers like Carol Loeb Shloss, Joan Schenkar, Kate Summerscale, and Meryle Secrest, who sourced photographs, letters, and interviews before they were lost to time.

I’ve never been comfortable with writing historical fiction, though I love reading it. When forming these stories, I kept with me Henry James’s notion that all novelists need freedom, and I gave myself permission to experiment, and to be honest about my inspiration. These were stories I wanted to unlock from my imagination after a decade of reading and research. I wanted to talk about these women; I daydreamed about their choices as I was building my own life, one that seemed tame in comparison. I did not want to romanticize these women or dwell in glittering places; I’m more interested in my characters’ difficult choices, or those that were made for them. I’m fascinated by risk taking and the way people orbit fame. I wanted to explore the price paid for living dangerously, such as undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in women who served in World War I.

Suffice it to say, the world has not always been kind to its unusual women — though I did not intend these stories to serve as cautionary tales.

While I absorbed facts about these women’s lives, I did not stay inside the lines; each of these stories is unequivocally a work of fiction. The women at the heart of my stories lived. And in my imagined events I have drawn upon their real lives and personalities and involved a few of their famous friends and lovers. I have, however, placed them in events and surrounded them with characters of my own creation. I’m indebted to the following resources for planting the seeds that became stories:

The Pretty, Grown-Together Children: I heard a whisper or two about the Hilton twins while living in North Carolina, then came across an entry about them on RoadsideAmerica.com.

The Siege at Whale Cay: I devoured Kate Summerscale’s incredible, must-read biography of Joe, The Queen of Whale Cay . Further research has led me to the exceptional Time Life photoshoot of Joe and Whale Cay, as well as videos of Joe’s races, which can be found at http://www.britishpathe.com/search/query/carstairs. I also found inspiration, though not philosophical agreement, in Helen Zenna Smith’s novel about the female war experience, Not So Quiet …

Norma Millay’s Film Noir Period: A friend turned me on to Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty , and like many young women I was perhaps, at first, fascinated more by her biography than by her work. When I was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts at Steepletop in 2007, I became acquainted with the wild stories about Edna’s sister Norma, and found myself returning to her in my imagination, particularly the fact that she was an actress in her own right, with the renowned Provincetown Players, and inhabited her sister’s estate for decades. Norma was a true force, and it was her presence I felt so keenly at Steepletop. Other resources include Cheryl Black’s The Women of Provincetown , Daniel Mark Epstein’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed , Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poetry , and her Collected Letters edited by Allan Ross MacDougall.

Romaine Remains: I came across this haunted, unusual figure in many books about Paris: Wild Heart by Suzanne Rodriguez, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noel Riley Fitch, but most important, Meryle Secrest’s (out of print) biography of Romaine, Between Me and Life , titled after Romaine’s sentiment that her dead mother stood between her and living happily. I have framed prints of Romaine’s line drawings, which I cut from Whitney Chadwick’s catalog of Romaine’s work, Amazons in the Drawing Room . Chadwick points out an element of Romaine’s work that made a deep impression on me — the unusual depiction of “heroic femininity.”

Hazel Eaton and the Wall of Death: Let me be intellectually honest here — Internet rabbit hole.

The Autobiography of Allegra Byron: I first heard of Allegra when I studied at Oxford for a summer, and also read Benita Eisler’s Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame . Furthermore, Dolly Wilde’s fascination with Byron and her similarities to his daughter are pointed out in Oscaria , the privately printed book of remembrances about Dolly. Both girls were given over to convents at an early age, which was not particularly unusual at the time but could not have been a welcome experience. Allegra’s story took off in my head years later, after I had children of my own, and could get more inside the head of a toddler.

Expression Theory: I saw a stunning photograph of Lucia Joyce in a hand-sewn costume, which led me to Carol Loeb Shloss’s biography, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake . I found myself curious about the moment family members decided Lucia was deeply troubled; throwing the chair took on significance.