Peter looked surprised. “That’s easy. You read better than anyone else.”
Peggy shook her head in amazement. “I was so scared, my knees were all wobbly. I thought I was terrible.”
Peter grinned. “You sure were scared,” he conceded. “We could practically hear your teeth chattering. But you had the quality we were looking for.”
“But what about the other girls?” Peggy said. “The ones that Craig Claiborne worked with for a while.”
“They were almost right. Claiborne thought with a little help he could make them give a performance. But then you came along and you were perfect. And that was that!”
“I still can’t understand it,” Peggy marveled. “He cut me off so soon.”
“He didn’t have to hear any more.”
Peggy smiled. “That’s just what Amy said.”
“Well, she was right.” Peter reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of mimeographed papers. “Here,” he said, spreading them out over the coffee table, “this is an outline of the tour as far as we know it.”
Peggy leaned over the table and watched Peter check off each stopping place. “We open in Baltimore on the twelfth of next month. That’s just five weeks away. We move south to Washington, swing west for a series of performances through Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, up to Ohio, over to Indiana, and eventually to Chicago. It’s a rugged tour. A lot of one-night stands in theaters that haven’t been properly used since the days of vaudeville. Oscar Stalkey believes in bringing live theater to all parts of the country—even if it kills all his actors.”