The It Girl and Me

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoST. LOUIS, MISSOURI,

late November 1911

Since Paw had taught us how to work the still, we were able to keep it going while he was inside, and I learned to be like a spy, delivering shipments around the neighborhood under the blankets in my doll carriage. Maw walked with me like we were out for a stroll together, then counted the money I brought back from each house. It was the only thing that kept us out of the poorhouse. No one would suffer as long as I played the role of innocent little girl in blonde pigtails.

Paw was sentenced to a year in the St. Louis County Jail. He wrote us regularly, but one of his letters in early November was written by someone else. When she opened it, Maw wailed. “Oh no. Oh no, it cain’t be,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand as she gasped.

“Maw what is it?”

“It’s your paw,” she said in a strangled voice. “Some men jumped him in the jail. It’s his eye. They hurt his eye . . .”

Her voice faded off as she read the rest silently, then sat and sobbed at the kitchen table while I put my arm around her. We wouldn’t know anything more until the next letter arrived, and the waiting was awful.

Paw was finally able to write on his own and tell us he was all right, but the doctor had told him he had such a bad corneal concussion that his eye would never be the same. He had to wear an eye patch now, he said.

“‘Dont no if I’ll ever be abul to git a desent job agin, what with the theft and the eye,’” Maw read. “‘Love y’all, and caint wait to see you agin. Paw.’”

Life was hard in other ways too. At school I stuck out like an ornery mule among thoroughbreds on Derby Day. Maw hand-sewed dresses for Grace and me from some blue calico fabric she’d found at the general store on Olive Street. She’d even tie our hair in rags each night so we looked real nice. But our curls didn’t make any difference. The other girls pointed at us and laughed at the way we talked. Grace and I took to calling them the “Pink Pinafore Girls.” Their dresses were perfectly pressed, their high-buttoned patent leather shoes were lovely and shiny, and their curls were fat and sausagey, like Mary Pickford’s.

Blanche Miller was the worst. “You’re an acorn cracker!” she said one day in the schoolyard, giving me a shove into the dirt, where my dress ripped. A group of kids gathered, and they all laughed at me.

“Are not!” I said.

“Are too!”

Grace stepped in front of me, rolling up her sleeves and spoiling for a fight. She was a rebel and didn’t give a damn what those girls thought of her. The more they teased her, the more she reveled in her backwoods background. And she poured on her accent until it was as thick as sorghum syrup.

“You talk funny, and your dad’s a jailbird!” Blanche shouted for the benefit of the crowd.

Grace’s left jab to the nose left Blanche bawling and bleeding red all over the gray Missouri silt. Grace was suspended for a week, but when she came back Blanche kept her distance from both of us. Meanwhile, I absorbed every bit of Midwestern around me. I learned the correct pronunciation of words and repeated them over and over until I could do it with no trace of Kentucky. It wasn’t “thank,” it was “think.” And everyone in St. Louie said “before,” not “bee-fo-ur” with three syllables.

Thankfully for us, Paw got paroled after only a month. But Maw cried when she saw him wearing the eye patch.

“Don’t cry, Ida,” he said. When Grace and I were afraid to hug him, he leaned down close and said, “I’m a pirate now. See?” He waggled the patch at us, and from then on we weren’t afraid anymore.

But Paw’s record and his eye prevented him from getting any kind of real work. He kept the still running, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. Maw did her best to keep the family together, and I kept up the deliveries so we’d have money coming in. With the arrival of my baby brother Donald, we were able to keep up the baby buggy ruse, jamming bottles under the blankets wherever they would fit around his little body.

It didn’t happen often, but Maw would sometimes take us downtown to the Famous-Barr department store to see the decorations at Christmastime. More than any red-and-green displays or pictures of Santa Claus, what really stuck with me were the other little girls out shopping. More Pink Pinafores. Their mothers wore day suits that were elegantly cut, with elaborate hats to match, and I’d look down at the thin gingham dress and ratty coat I was wearing and seethe. I grew to despise St. Louie and everyone in it.

Things in Europe had been bad for a few years. The newspapers all carried headlines about the battles in France. In 1917, our president, Mr. Wilson, brought us into it to fight the Kaiser. A year after that, people started getting sick. Not just a cold or sneeze, but something real nasty. They called it The Grippe, the Spanish Lady, influenza, or just the flu. But whatever it was, it was killing people. People who’d been fit as fiddles at breakfast were dead by suppertime.

Seeing a market to be cornered, Paw stepped up production and told everyone his stump was medicinal. No one knew what caused the flu or what could cure it, but his “remedy” sounded as good as anything else. Business was booming. The problem was delivering to houses with Quarantine signs on the windows. You couldn’t collect a bill from a dead man.

When he wasn’t bottling, Paw had found extra work at Mr. Baker’s mortuary. No one could keep up with the demand for coffins, and no one cared who was building them. Paw saved every extra penny, praying every day he’d be alive to spend it when the nightmare ended. Assuming it ever would.

Finally, by Christmas, death began to relax its terrible hold on the country. But Paw’s restlessness took hold again. Needing another fresh start, he found us a new place to live in a different neighborhood on King’s Highway. But the girls at our new school were just as mean as the others had been. Grace was still my best friend. When the city built Christy Park only a few blocks away, Grace and I would go sit in the grass and braid each other’s hair and talk about getting away from St. Louie for good—to Chicago or New York.

Finally, after tenth grade, I’d had enough of bitchy girls. Even though my grades were good, I’d learned all I cared to about Shakespeare, algebra, and the Battle of Bunker Hill. I quit going. But I was still determined to be better than them—the future wives of shopkeepers, butchers, and bakers. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it, but someday I’d come back to St. Louie and I’d stay at the Planter’s Hotel. I’d wear the latest dresses from Paris and fancy heliotrope perfume. I’d order lobster bisque, saddle of lamb, fancy cheeses, and chocolate torte at the restaurant, and I’d laugh. I was going to be somebody.

In Paw’s mind, a move was always the solution to any problem. He was big on new beginnings and fresh starts. When he was young, it was Fredonia, Kentucky, to Dycusburg, then Dycusburg to Princeton, Princeton to Paducah, Paducah to St. Louie, and now onto even greener pastures. To Paw, that meant California.

“Even the movin’ picture studios have gone out west,” he said. “Beaches and sunshine and all the oranges we can eat!”

So once again we packed up our meager belongings. Using his new carpentry skills, Paw built crates for the still equipment out of sturdy pine boards from Mr. DePew’s lumberyard, carefully labeling it “furniture” so we could get it on the train.

“Folks found gold there once,” Paw said. “Maybe it’ll work for us. Every bootlegger in America is makin’ a killin’. Why not me?”

Union Station in St. Louie looked like a fancy castle with its turrets and stained glass windows. We were taking the AT&SF Navajo across the Southwest, and I was excited to see the painted desert and the canyons. Maw herded us all onto the train, where Grace and I sat around the lounge car or the observation car, flirting with the college boys on their way to the University of Arizona or UCLA. We let them buy us Coca-Colas or whisper sweet nothings, but with Maw and Paw only a compartment away that was as far as it went.

We’d sit with the family at the Harvey House restaurants in Emporia or Albuquerque or Barstow, wishing we had the money for chicken à la king or crab croquettes but settling for one chicken drumstick and a scoop of potato salad apiece. Paw wanted to save his flu earnings for California, so we made do.

We pulled into the La Grande Station in Los Angeles on August 8, 1923. I admired the fancy dome as we stood outside melting in the heat, waiting for a jitney bus. Paw stored our goods at a cartage and storage place not far from the depot, and we checked into a room at the Palm Hotel on 2nd Street until we could find a place to live.

I’d been enchanted during the cab ride, and now I gazed out the window of the hotel. The houses looked like little Spanish villas, and the scenery was stunning—mountains and fragrant orange groves. When the morning fog burned away, you could even see the ocean far off in the distance. Bougainvillea spilled over rock walls, and neat rows of vincas bloomed outside cottages with red tile roofs.

Paw found us a house to rent on Gower Street. No one here knew about his record, so he got a job at the Vernon Lumber Company because the owner assumed he was a vet, and Paw never corrected him. After a few months, he bought a Model A with his flu money and from the other business he worked out back.

Maw settled in, hanging drapes, planting flowers, and learning which markets had the best vegetables. Donald started fifth grade. Grace and I both went looking for jobs.

I took the streetcar downtown every day, following leads from want ads, but the answer was always no. I didn’t know typewriting or steno, and it looked like I’d end up being a dish wrestler at some hash palace. I liked the cafeteria at the Leighton Arcade on Broadway between 5th and 6th, and sometimes I stopped in for a bite. One afternoon I ordered lunch, trying to summon up the gumption to ask the manager for a job.

As I finished my turkey sandwich, a lady in a cerulean suit with a fur collar sat down next to me at the lunch counter. Her hair was jet-black, threaded with a smart white blaze in front and tucked under a baby-blue hat. And she wore Mon Boudoir perfume, applied with a delicate touch.

She ordered a Waldorf salad and a cup of tea. “Good book?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” I said. I closed the cover on my copy of Alice Adams and set it down next to my plate, on top of the want ads page full of circled jobs.

“I read The Magnificent Ambersons a few years ago. That was Tarkington too,” she said.

“I haven’t read that one yet,” I said.

“I’m Viola Murphy,” she said, smiling and extending her hand.

“Daisy DeBoe,” I said, shaking it.

“Nice to meet you, Daisy.”

She handed me her card, with navy printing on classy pebbled cream card stock. “Viola Murphy—Vi’s Harper Method Beauty Shop: Harper Method Graduate,” it said, along with an address downtown.

“What’s the Harper Method?” I asked. I’d seen the name in the paper, but it meant nothing to me.

“It’s a way of making ladies feel pampered and beautiful,” she said.

“But what is it?”

“Years ago, a woman named Martha Matilda Harper created her own hair tonic and founded a company to sell it. She began franchising her shops years ago, and I got in during the Great War.”

“How about that?” I said, impressed. “A lady with her own company. I like doing hair. I used to play with my sister Grace’s hair when we were younger—braiding it, curling it, making topknots and such. Maw wouldn’t let me color it, though. She said only harlots colored their hair.”

“She did? What did you say to that?” She paused over a forkful of apple and walnut.

“I said that Jesus was friends with Mary Magdalene.”

Smiling, she stirred sugar into her tea. “Sounds like you told her.”

“Not really,” I said. “She slapped me and told me not to talk back.”

Vi laughed out loud.

“Could you teach someone else how to do this Harper Method stuff?” I asked, genuinely curious now.

She pointed at the newspaper page full of circled ads. “If you need a job, I’d be happy to show you some hairdressing.”

“You would?”

“Of course. I was new in town once too.” She gave me a little nudge and a wink.

“I’d be mighty grateful,” I told her, taking a bite of my dill pickle spear.

“You’ve got my card,” she said when she finished. She daintily wiped her lips with her napkin. “Why don’t you come by the shop tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do?”

“Thank you. I’d like that, Miss Murphy.”

“Honey, you’re making me feel old. Please call me Vi,” she said.

She gave me a little wave on her way out. I sat and stared at the card and imagined the possibilities. With the extra money, I wouldn’t have to ask Maw and Paw every time I wanted a new dress or a new hat.

Vi’s was on Broadway, between 4th and 5th. It was an easy ride on the Red Car line. The next day I showed up at the shop, and she showed me the ropes. She taught me how to shampoo and cut hair (“Bobs are all the rage, you know!”) and how to apply the hair products she ordered from the Harper Method Founder’s Shop in Rochester, New York. I settled in, got a few regular customers, and before I knew it, I was a hairdresser.