“Kid, come back here. Come back.”
Joe went back.
Wylie grabbed him by the shoulders. “That was Tony, kid. Munson’s signed. It’s in the bag and the string’s tied. A thirteen-week try-out.”
Joe had often tried to imagine what this moment would be like. His first contract; his first show. Now that the moment had come, he could not rise to what the moment demanded. He was thinking of Lucille.
“We go on the air Monday week. Rehearsals start to-morrow. All day. We’ll give them a show, kid, that’ll rock the town.”
Gone was the black depression. Wylie’s eyes blazed with excitement. He began to laugh as though Lucille Borden did not exist.
But Joe knew better. Somebody had once told him that Wylie took care of his people. Lucille was one of Wylie’s people, and, spontaneously, his hand had gone into his pocket for her. Another page was filled in the boy’s book of understanding and experience. Day after day you witnessed contradictions. You marveled at outbursts of temperament, mercurial and erratic. You watched an old trouper stride along Royal Street owning the world because he had two dollars. You soared in the clouds and you plunged down into the depths. You were in show business.
CHAPTER 8
Joe Carlin thought he knew the harsh exactitude of Vic Wylie’s demands. Hadn’t he already rehearsed for Wylie? But those rehearsals had been for the Sue Davis show at a time when it might never reach a sponsor audition. This was the prelude to a Sue Davis show actually going on the air. In the past Wylie had been an unremitting slave driver. Now he became a sarcastic, sneering, insulting monster. Each hour he seemed to find words that made the last hour’s ordeal seem tame.
“After a season with Vic,” Stella Joyce fluttered, “your skin is gone. You turn to leather.”