Red Riding Hood

When Sam was a young doctor making rounds, he would often think of his patients as their cases: the diabetic neuropathy, aortic aneurism, myocardial infarction, gunshot to the abdomen.

Sam had entered this room by mistake. New to the hospital, he had gotten lost on the floor and this private room was not on his rotation. He had heard a lot of hooting and music from the corridor that had nothing to do with the usual demeanor at Saint Agnes Hospital. The floral arrangements outside the door extended all the way to the nurses’ station, huge and strangely lavish. Saint Agnes was not a hospital for the rich.

Four tall young men were standing posed over the patient and, as they turned, in pairs, he saw each of them was exceptionally handsome. A flimsy looking girl in a thin dress perched on the bed stroking the patient’s legs and feet. They were big feet with gauze stirrups on the heels and remnants of silver polish on the toes. The patient, clearly dying, had white blond hair and skin drained of all color nestling in the magenta ruffles of her peignoir.

All of them turned and looked at Sam like he had intruded. He had been in the city two months but he had never seen any people like this before. They were like characters in an unfamiliar play and there was a frozen theatrical moment before the patient put out a languid hand, the hospital band covered by a bracelet, to indicate the short -haired pixyish girl at her feet.

“This is Tinkerbelle,” she said and continued with her introductions. They all seemed to have stage names too. Sam could not stop looking at her, lost in and bewildered by her great doomed beauty.

“I heard the music in the corridor,” he said.

“Oh really?” said one of the men “Belle needs her music.”

“Are you one of my doctors?” said the patient who must have been Belle as opposed to Tinkerbelle. Sam could not stop looking. For something to do, he picked up the patient’s hand, she had fever, and took her pulse which was faint and rapid.

A record album lay on the bed and she saw him looking at it.

“It’s from The Eddie Duchin Story with Kim Novack. I identified with Kim as a child. There was always something frozen about her. She had to squeeeeeeeze it all out. She was so scared and that’s the way I was all my life. Everyone always told me I was beautiful but I felt frozen, just like Kim. There was always something wrong with her, something…. slightly… unacceptable.”

They all laughed. The patient was obviously performing.

Two of the men were wrapping themselves in scarves getting ready to leave.

“Aren’t you going to look at my chart?’ Belle said to Sam.

A crucifix was draped to the railing of the bed which was not unusual here. He picked up her chart. It said Belle was William Doherty, a pre-op transsexual with esophageal cancer.

Belle was going on as though this were an interview for one of the fan magazines which were strewn all over the room.

“I also identified with the movie I Passed for White with James Franciscus. He married this girl and she had that secret inside her that only her maid knew…”

She was fading.

The two men who were leaving were taping glossy pictures of themselves in very brief bathing suits to the wall. Tinkerbelle kept massaging on the wasted legs as he left the room.

“Come any time, even if you aren’t one of my doctors,” Belle was saying. “Stardom is a house without shades.”

As the door clicked shut they were laughing again and someone had turned up the music.

Dr. Sam Perkins had never seen a transsexual before. There were few around in the open in those days and no transgenders in sight where he came from which was Davenport, Iowa. Or perhaps they were hidden in places he had never been. He knew, even seeing the large hands and feet, that he had never seen anyone so feminine or quite so beautiful. Belle had been wearing a little ruffled cap over the pale curls of her hair and two spots of red had flamed onto her cheeks when he lifted her hand.

 

Sam might never have gone back. Shut up in the hospital, he worked eighteen hour days and sometimes twenty and he would often fall asleep in a vacant bed or over dinner in the cafeteria slumped against the wall. He had no friends in the city yet and thought he never would have time for them if he did meet anyone.

Back home Sam had a mother who had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Worried about the types he might meet in this city, she warned him constantly about staying on the path. Since she had accepted Jesus as her savior and joined a group called the Souper Saints, she had given herself over to making giant kettles of soup and good works. She was no longer a florist.

Sam’s grandmother was not a believer. She was a big Dolly Parton fan and used to quote Dolly “If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.” His father was not in the picture any longer for any of them.

Sam found out Belle was an actress in Underground movies and quite well known in that world .Some of the Sisters would not go in her room because of AIDs which was just beginning then and it was impossible to explain to them the precautions– where they would apply and where, as with Belle, they were useless. A kind of nimbus of Catholic disapproval hovered over that room at the end of the corridor.

There were even more flowers as the days passed—lots of lilies and tropical things that Sam had never seen in his mother’s shop. One of the cards on a tall glass vase of purple and orange Birds of Paradise said “David Bowie.” Another said “Come back Belle baby, Tennessee” A couple of older people in car coats caught him peering at the arrangements and he had to walk quickly away. Yet he was drawn. In that room was much he was missing as a young man, the dark lethal glamour of the city, the wild side where all of them walked. Haunting the corridors in his scrubs or the short white intern’s jacket with his name sewn on the breast pocket, Sam felt at once like a demi god and a jerk with bad feet and a stethoscope.

 

When he finally had a moment, he returned. Belle was having her hair colored. There was a rim of purple at her hairline and eyebrows and a towel over the magenta robe. A young man perched at the foot of her bed was feeding her yogurt. Another was fussing with her hair.

“This is Jean Pierre and Joshua,” she said. Her voice was weaker now “I hate to have you see me like this but, you know, I’m a bleach blond.”

Her head felt so heavy that she said she had to lean back. Jean Rene arranged some towels on her pillow. The drawer next to her bed was open on a kit bulging with makeup. There was a spray of orchids in a vase by a bottle labeled Pathology Specimen.

“Don’t worry, it’s ginger ale, this way they can store it in the refrigerator. They’re sending me home. Tinkerbelle brought me my beige suit. I gave her $14 to get it out of the cleaners. There’ll probably be photographers out front and I feel I should wear something light. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m never going to stop having a fever so I just put the thermometer in water when Sister isn’t looking.”

And then Belle got out of bed. She was Sam’s height and very thin and he put out an arm to help. She walked slowly to the sink dragging her ruffles and Jean Pierre rinsed out her hair and started to cut it

“Don’t cut it too short. She doesn’t look good in short hair,” said Joshua, the one who had fed her the yogurt.

The hospital guard stuck his head in the door looking surprised that the doctor was there and lingering.

“You here again?” he said to Jean Pierre.

Belle sat there very quietly, not bothering to look at what Jean Rene was doing. That, as much as her chart, told Sam how ill she was. Instead she looked down at a pale yellow stone, the size of an egg.

“It’s my topaz, the gift of a rich admirer. I wonder… should I tell you the whole torrid story?

“When I was going out for the operation, they put a turban on me and Joshua was crying and they took all my makeup off. At the last minute, I grabbed a black pencil and whipped it around my eyes. When I woke up in the recovery room, they were hitting me on the chest and I heard someone say ‘What’s this?’ and “This one’s dead.”

“Oh I don’t think so,” Sam said. “We don’t…”

“They couldn’t remove it. But I guess you know that. All the blonds leave young. I’ll be the next.”

Joshua walked over to a corner of the room. Sam knew he did not like him or maybe it was all doctors.

“Everyone comes here, all the silly fairies. Andy can’t come because of what happened. He can’t go to a hospital. All the nurses come in and recognize his picture and he calls. You know this disease can reverse itself…” Belle began to cry.

Joshua looked at Sam furiously.

“She told me there was something wrong with her heart…” he said. “It was diamond shaped because the tumor was so large it pushed her heart out of shape. One of you said it was a pinched nerve. She couldn’t walk half a block without having to lean on a car…”

“Enough! Time to rinse,” said Jean Pierre and, as Belle bent over the sink, Sam wished her God speed and, heavily disturbed, left the room. He knew, soon enough, she would return to Saint Agnes, the Sisters, and him.

 

Later Sam learned they had sent Belle home without the proper medication. She could not swallow for three days and lost her voice. The hospital would not readmit her. She had over twenty thousands dollars in bills that her Medicaid rejected when she wrote out forms with her stage name. Then the ambulance was there.

Over the weeks, there were many trips to and from Saint Agnes and Sam would look in on her each time. He would talk to Joshua in the halls and hear her story in pieces, how as a child she had often been mistaken for a girl, how her mother would take her to movies and she would relive them when she came home, for everyone she saw in the movies was her.

She would put blue food coloring in the bath and wrap her head in a towel and become Lana Turner in The Prodigal. He told about the reaction when she went out in drag for the first time, walking to the Massapequa railroad station in a dress and high heels because she did not have enough money for a cab. At fifteen she headed for Greenwich Village and went to the clubs calling herself Belle, liking older men, hustling, borrowing clothes and money from everyone.

It was as though Joshua was telling Sam a fairy story and they were in another world, the two of the leaning on the hospital walls, with the Sisters in habits as they were then, gliding past, giving them looks, thinking Sam was wasting time.

“Belle was going to Sister Marie of the Catacomb Chapel for help, wanting so much to be a she,” Joshua said as they passed. “She was unhappy for so many years, thrown out of apartments, alone on holidays, scared about sex.”

Belle wore her hair in a long black flip then and she wore a black dress because it meant she was always dressed up and ready for the night. She had long black gloves and went around with others like her and they were known as the Bat Pack.

“Will she live?” Joshua said only once, gripping hard at Sam’s stiff white coat. Sam shook his head.

He told none of this story to his mother, only said he had a patient that he liked and she might pray for her along with all the other Souper Saints.

 

When Belle returned for the last time, her voice had lowered. She had tubes up her arms and an oxygen mask. She was wearing a scarf and dark glasses, her voice was slurred and the Billy Doherty inside her had started to come out. Her parents were there and a fashionable lady.

“It was hard enough to get him back in here,” Mr. Doherty said as though Sam was at fault. He looked down at his sweater covered with lint balls.

“Three to five are the best times here, the freaks come after five,” Belle said.

“I brought you a scarf,” said Sam. He had gone to Bloomingdale’s to buy it on his day off.

“Why, doctor, you just wait. I’m going to wear this someday in a magazine!” said Belle in her new lower voice. Her mother was unwrapping her turban to put it on. Short black hair covered her head.

“Maxime here,” she said, indicating the woman, “came out to my house to rub bone marrow on my head so my hair would not fall out. She brought me this dress. I should go and change. Immediately!”

On the chart, Sam saw her condition was listed as poor. At the foot of her bed the card said “William Doherty AKA Belle Star”. The makeup kit was back in the open drawer as it had been each time.

“This is Mrs. Star,” Belle said waving at the short woman in a mink hat with rhinestones around the rim of her glasses. “My mother.”

“Belle tells me you are here all the time,” said Mrs. Doherty. “You have been very kind. She wants you to have her journals once I get them copied.”

As the friends appeared in twos, Belle would say “I remember…” and “Tell about when…” and her eyes would go back to the television as she kept flipping the control looking for some random glamour.

 

Sam only went to one funeral for any of his patients while he was in New York. In what was known to many of the attendees as “the Judy Garland room” of Frank E. Campbell, Belle lay in a pale blue satin lined coffin. Though her father had wanted her to be buried in a suit, Belle was wearing a white sequin dress swelling up over large breasts. Her white blond wig and makeup were done by Jean Pierre. Her long fingers were folded around the topaz the size of an egg.

The first set of funeral cards had said “May Jesus have mercy upon the soul of William M. Doherty” and the date. Then a boy in black spoke to the funeral home and there were cards that said “May Jesus have mercy on the soul of Belle Star.” And so it continued even after death, the war for the soul and body of Belle, dead at 27. Or maybe 29.

The battle had erupted into a final fight between her family and friends over the eulogies, the pronouns, the style of the thing until finally a robotic priest referred to Belle as “this person”. In her death was seen all the early deaths of the Underground children who became instant stars and had nothing to fall back on. Inside them all, Sam later understood, was the pull to the traditional which was then impossible. Belle had wanted a husband and a little house. Tinkerbelle collected her wedding china for someday.

The drag queens, who had flung themselves about and made scenes at the viewing, now sat there in suits alongside people in car coats who looked like those Sam knew from home. He was near Tinkerbelle who wore a black pantsuit and a black derby hat with a veil and sobbed the whole time. He could not stay long. Some years later, he read that Tinkerbelle jumped from a window to her death.

For thirty years Sam did not look at Belle’s journals. Half deliberately he lost them and then, one year, during a long Sunday afternoon, with his wife and sons at a movie he did not want to see, he began to search and found them.

 

He learned that Belle had been very poor, with the invisible poverty hidden within the glamour of the Underground stars. She sold herself, borrowed clothes and jewelry and could not pay her rent or food bills. She only had one or two very good dresses. She would call friends up and ask them to do her hair and after a few times, they would hang up on her.

“The wolf was at the door!” she wrote and drew a little picture of a wolf and a doorway.

She told of the little black hormone pills and how thrilled she was with the “thumbful of flesh” she grew as breasts.

One of the entries was “The Mask of the Actor” in which she wrote “So many times in life one must put on an act…As a child I learned to don the mask when the occasion called for it.(Later, I learned to don the wig.) …I had to be it, had to have it, had to live it myself.”

Sam laughed then, sitting alone in his den in New Jersey and then he rubbed his eyes. He lived in a small town in the kind of house he knew Belle had imagined in one of her Simple Life fantasies. Only she had added herself in an organdy apron running from the doorway to the white picket fence where, standing on tiptoe, eyes closed, she would kiss her man long and hard, just like the girls in the movies.