I Found Him Dead!. Gale Gallegher
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and dirty. For most of our neighbors it was a struggle to pay the rent. Yet the women kept their kids. In and out of marriage, they kept them.
“If your child was placed for adoption, with your consent, through legal channels . . .” I was trying to be impartial, “you forfeited all right to her. Agencies will not reveal names of adopting parents. And after fourteen years . . .”
“I realize all that. I was resigned to it. It was my loss. I’m not proud of my personal history, Miss Gallagher.”
I offered her a cigarette. She took it. I held the match for her, then lit my own.
“So many things have happened,” she said. “A whole set of things, and all at once. For one, I—I’m to be married next month . . . to Geoffrey Wilton.”
“Geoffrey Wilton.” The name sounded a buzzer in my mind. “I seem to remember something recently—in Time magazine.”
“He formed a new theatrical producing company. He’s an engineer by profession, and made plane parts during the war.” Shadows of anxiety clouded her eyes. “I haven’t told him about my daughter. It wasn’t only that I was ashamed, but it’s been so long that I considered it a closed book. Sometimes I feel as if it all happened to someone else.”
“So whatever your reasons for reopening this thing, you can’t tell him about the girl now.”
“How could I explain at this late date? I’ve known him two years. I . . . we . . . love each other.”
“Does he know you were married? Or—were you?”
She nodded quickly, almost eagerly defensive. To the world Dawn Ferris was an adult woman, a successful actress, but within herself a frightened child, the fear more fully revealed as she began talking rapidly.
“I married Eddie Wells in Topeka in 1931. I was twenty and doing a single in roadhouses. We teamed up, Eddie and Ethel Wells.” She smiled, brightly reminiscent for the moment. “We made a fairly good double, and got some bookings on the five-a-day. But vaudeville was dying and things went very badly for us. Soon I realized it wasn’t merely the times. It was also Eddie.” She hesitated, then added softly, “He was emotionally unstable.”
I would have bet she didn’t know that phrase in 1931. “Unstable—in what way?”
She continued carefully, as though putting certain thoughts into words for the first time. “He wanted everything he saw, like a greedy child. Always chasing a rainbow—in the next town. He was completely dishonest. I don’t mean that he was a thief—Eddie didn’t have the courage to steal. He knew every angle to beat a board bill, promote a loan, or dodge a creditor. He was constantly in debt, constantly in trouble.”
Eddie Wells sounded like the subject of most of my searches—the skip tracer’s delight. I let Dawn continue, though the first quick brightness vanished. She went on with a visible effort, her mouth pinched at the corners, making little lines in her neck that showed her age.
“Then I was going to have a baby. I stayed in the act as long as possible. Eddie couldn’t get bookings as a single on the road, but he thought things might be better in New York. We hitchhiked east.” She looked at me with that quick level trick she had. “Do you remember the depression, Miss Gallagher?”
I shook my head. That was after Dad died. I was tucked in a convent school all through those years.
“Then you don’t know fear,” Dawn Ferris said flatly. “Now, with money in the bank, I can’t really believe that anyone in this city could starve, but we almost did.” The truth of it was in her eyes. “We lived in a miserable furnished room and were always behind in the rent. It was years before I could hear footsteps on stairs without shivering. There was never enough to eat—frequently nothing at all. The baby was almost due and I’d had no medical care. Eddie disappeared and had been gone for two weeks. I wasn’t sure he’d ever come back. . . .”
Watching her closely, I was trying to vision this sophisticated, perfectly groomed creature as the starving wife of a no-good chiseler. She realized the contrast, filled in the picture.
“I was very young and really inexperienced. I was hungry and desperately frightened when a girl in the house told me about Dr. Wurber.”
Famous last words! How many Dr. Wurbers there had to be in the world!
“He had a private nursing home in the West Sixties. He placed babies with only wealthy or prominent families, especially those who wanted infants in a hurry without too much red tape. The baby had to be legitimate and healthy.”
She shivered slightly, remembering. “Dr. Wurber was a horrible little man, but he said he would keep me at the hospital for that last month, feed me—which was so terribly important—deliver the baby, and give me two hundred dollars.”
The old traffic in lives.
“What did I have to give her?” She went on. “Birth in a charity ward—and after that, what? We were broke, homeless. I had no people. This way she’d be taken care of. She’d have wealth, security; and a family to love her.”
I tried to keep my emotions out of this. I was getting as bad as Patsy. “You had to have your husband’s consent.”
“I got that. Dr. Wurber found Eddie—strange how he could do it so quickly. He was a singing waiter in a beer garden out near Freeport. He went very sentimental when the doctor approached him. He actually cried, but he agreed to sign the papers—if I’d split the two hundred with him. I did.”
The lines of her scarlet lips were tight. “Dr. Wurber said the baby was a girl, but I never saw her. He assured me it was easier that way. I never saw Eddie again, either.”
I walked to the window, looked down at the taxis and busses crawling on the street below. You still haven’t any answers, Gale, my girl, I told myself. She hasn’t yet said what she came here to say. She’s dodging, trying to get away—from something. I could hear it in this carefully edited version of her life, see it in the nervous motions of her hands as she took a handkerchief from the large purse on her lap.
“I never saw him again, but Eddie kept track of me. I don’t know how; but then he was always amazingly efficient when he chose to be. At first I went into burlesque. It was the only job open.” Her mouth curved, disdainful of her memories. “For one season I was billed as the gun moll of a notorious gangster. I changed my name twice, but somehow Eddie always knew, and let me know it. He asked for money—small amounts, then.”
“Did you send him any money?”
“No, never. I answered only one of his letters. That was in 1937, after I got my big break in radio. I was in Chicago when somebody discovered my speaking voice. I studied drama, landed my first good radio parts. As soon as I could afford it, I got a divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was his next letter that I answered. I told him I was free and asked him to leave me alone. I did get fewer letters, but the demands were bigger. In 1942 I came to New York under contract for the two big spots I have now. I didn’t hear from Eddie again. I thought I was really free.”
How many times have I heard that line! I thought I was free. I thought I could put the past behind me. Only you never can. You and the past are one.
“And now Eddie,” I said, “has decided to return.”
“I had a letter from him last Monday.” She fumbled in the smoothly expensive purse, handed me a dog-eared envelope, with a Grand Central, New York, post-office cancelation. The envelope was addressed in an old-fashioned, flowery script, to Dawn Ferris, care of the broadcasting company.
“That his handwriting?” I asked.
She nodded. “Eddie has very little formal education. He told me he learned that shaded script from a calling-card writer in a carnival. He likes showy things and considers himself an elegant dresser. His shoes might have no soles, but the uppers would be shined, and probably yellow.”
I got the general idea as I opened the