Mr. B wouldn’t say who the guest was, just that someone big would be staying at the Starlight Lodge. The staffers kept making silly guesses—Nixon! Don Corleone! No, Marlon Brando!—which Mr. B answered with a slight smile and a dismissive nod. This went on for several days.
Finally, Shirley sashayed into the lobby one morning, waving the Pocono Record in the air and crowing, “Jolly Goode! He’s the mystery guest!”
“Shhhh ...” Mr. B scurried from behind the front desk. “No shouting in the Starlight lobby. Yes, it’s Mr. Goode. He’s doing two shows in April, Friday the fourteenth and Saturday the fifteenth. It’s a big booking, so keep your head about you—and your mouth shut tight, Shirley.”
“Yes, Mr. B.” Shirley smirked behind his back and slunk off to the side door marked Staff. After the door swung shut behind her, I heard her call out again, answered by a distant shriek.
Mr. B stomped back behind the desk and squared off a pile of registration cards, smacking the bottom edge of the stack on the counter. He handed to cards to me. “File, please. And don’t go squealing, Joanie. Word will get out soon enough.”
I took the stack and pushed through the opposite side door marked Office. Squeal? Mr. B knew I wasn’t a squealer. But I did want to call Ma to tell her the news. She’d flip: her comedy hero, coming here to the Starlight? The boy who’d grown up six blocks from her in Flatbush— not that they’d ever met. A TV and movie star, even in spite of all that weight? Sometimes I wondered if that’s why Ma was so ga-ga over Jolly, ’cause he looks like she does. Like Daddy did. Me, I went the other way, all bones and edges.
After I filed the reg cards, I stayed in the office to call home. “Oh, Ma, I know, I wish we could go. But I just checked the schedule and Mr. B already wrote me down for those nights. Yeah, both nights. The place will be bananas, and I guess he knows he can count on me.”
---
Everybody counts on me for something. Well, Ma, with Daddy gone all these years, counts on me for everything. Mr. B counts on me to get along with everyone, treat the guests right and get the work done. Even if it means missing Jolly’s show.
So, I stand behind that front desk and kill the guests with kindness, then run down to Maintenance to nicely tell the guys to hotfoot it to Room 226 and fix the toilet. Then it’s off to the dining room to untangle a waitress spat, winning each gal over in turn. Mr. B calls me “Johnny on the spot.” Or “Joanie on the spot” when he’s trying to be funny. But me, I feel like “Joanie stuck in the spot.”
Mornings, before my shift at the Lodge, I drop Ma off at Saints Peter & Paul for Mass, knowing that she’ll find a ride home from one of the other regulars. Then I merge on I-80 and squint into the sun as I drive in from the Valley. I turn onto that winding entry road to the Starlight, tucked into the pines, and drive up and up to that teal and gold and glass castle perched atop the ridge. I climb out of my Galaxie 500, lock it and check the handle. Before I push my way through the double doors of the one and only Starlight Lodge, I stop to look at the reason we’re here: the beauty of these mountains. Even I can recognize the glory, just as in their turn the Indians and settlers, the resort builders, the skiers and honeymooners all did: mound after lush green mound, dappled by streams, lit by the white-gold light of the Pennsylvania spring morning. All that beauty and yet, I wonder what’s the point. I’m forty-two, I live with my mother and I’m stuck right here in this spot. I turn, walk into the Starlight and punch in.
---
With just a week to go, Jolly’s visit was the talk of the Starlight staff. That, and our new uniforms: gold double-knit bell-bottoms and matching vest over a teal blouse, which made my figure look even flatter than usual. Shirley suggested a padded bra, but I rolled my eyes. “Suit yourself, Joanie,” she said.
At home, Jolly was all Ma talked about at supper, too.
“Oh, I never knew him, but my friend Millie’s younger brother was in his grade and said he was funny even back then, too. He was just Jimmy in those days, of course. The Jolly thing came later, I guess, when he started getting famous.”
“Where did you and Daddy see him?” I knew the answer, but I also knew Ma loved telling the story of leaving me with Aunt Deborah and spending an anniversary weekend in Manhattan, where she and Daddy saw a young Jimmy Goode perform in a nightclub. My mind wandered as she spoke and I tried to imagine having that kind of happy surprise: enjoying a special dinner and drinks with my husband, knowing my child was safe and happy with her aunt and cousins, and then being swept into gales of laughter by the nobody who turned into a star.
---
The Thursday before Jolly’s show, just as I was leaving, Mr. B told me to follow him into the office. He opened a desk drawer, pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.
“Two tickets for Saturday night. You and your mother, perhaps?”
I shook my head. “But you have me working.”
“I have you working, Joanie, to be available to Mr. Goode. Who else could I rely on? Shirley? Pffff. No, it’s you who will represent the Starlight Lodge to Jolly and his staff. Whatever he needs. And he won’t need you while he’s up on stage, right?”
---
Ma was thrilled, and before we sat down for supper that evening she called the rectory. One of the Fathers would drive her to the Starlight Saturday night. I’d already be there working, so she would ride home with me.
Friday was a long day; I was there from ten a.m. all the way through the first show. I made sure that Jolly’s room was spic and span and stocked with his favorite snacks and drinks as spelled out in his contract. Late afternoon, he and his people pulled up in front of the Starlight, one Cadillac and two Buicks. I watched as Jolly climbed out of the Caddy, surprisingly agile for a big man. Mr. B greeted Jolly at the door and said we would escort him to his room, the Starlight’s largest. As they walked past the front desk, Mr. B gestured to me and told Jolly,
“If you need anything, call the desk and Joanie will take care of it. Joanie on the spot!”
“Joanie! A pleasure!” Jolly bowed and came up grinning. I smiled and blushed, and the group disappeared around the corner.
No calls for Joanie came that evening. I watched the fans flow into the Starlight, waited through the show, then watched the audience flow back out and the lobby quiet down. Mr. B said I could leave one hour after the show ended; he’d handle any overnight requests.
Saturday was much the same, with me staying close to the front desk, but with no word from Jolly by dinnertime, I started to relax. Ma would be dropped off at seven-thirty, the show would start at eight, and Ma and I would be on our way home by eleven.
Then, around seven, the phone at the desk rang and it was Jolly himself. “Joanie, is this you? I was getting dressed and, well, I ripped my pants. Split ’em right in the back. Can you help me?”
“Of course, Mr. Goode. I’ll be right there.” I started down the hall to fetch the sewing kit from Housekeeping. “Look out for Ma,” I told Mr. B over my shoulder. “She’ll be here soon.” I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t the calm, quiet Jolly Goode who answered his door in a white bathrobe, JG embroidered over the heart.
“The pants are on the bed. Split seams. Bane of fat men everywhere.” As he walked to the room’s bar to pour himself a cocktail, his thick leather slippers, beaded in blue and teal shimmery stones, caught my eye. “Anything to drink, Joanie?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Goode. I’m working.”
“That never stopped me.” He winked, eased himself down into one upholstered chair and gestured for me to sit in the other.
I got right to work, pinning the material together and squinting while I threaded the needle.
“Enough light for you, dear? Whatever you do, don’t lose track of any pins, please. They terrify me.” The ice clinked in his glass.
“More light would be better. I notice a difference in my eyes, now that I’m getting older.”
“You’re hardly old!” He clicked on the lamp between us. “Not like me. I’m like a tree, except you count the ex-wives, not the rings.” I laughed and he continued. “I went through three wives. It wasn’t pretty. You may have heard.”
His expression was a little wistful and this time I didn’t laugh. His bad behavior was legendary. “Well, I’m just one shy of you. Ex-fiances, in my case.”
“Why, you’re a heartbreaker!” he said. His impish smile was back, along with his trademark raised eyebrow. “I can only assume they weren’t good enough for you.”
“That’s not what they thought.” I looked back down to my work, but kept going, reassured by how easy it was to talk to Jolly. “Fred was the first. I was thirty-three, which I thought was old, but it seems young now. I thought we’d spend our lives together, but surprise! I found out Fred was cheating—and cheating and cheating.” I shook my head. “That life was not for me.” I glanced at Jolly, who was nodding, eyes closed. “When I told my mother that Fred had a roving eye, she said, well, a lot of men like to look around. I said, Ma, his eye wasn’t the only part of him that roved.”
At that, Jolly burst into laughter.
I shrugged. “Well, you go on. After Fred, I landed this job, kept going to church with Ma, dated from time to time. Anyway, four years ago, Rod proposed. And that was a surprise, because mostly we just played cards with friends. No romance, is what I’m saying. Which, after Fred, was almost a little comforting. I thought, we’ll just be kind to each other and that won’t be so bad. But then, before we’d even set a date, Rod told me I was too boring for him.”
“How can that be? You’re a lovely person.” Jolly stood to get another drink and said over his shoulder, “Why didn’t I marry someone like you?”
“Oh. Well.” I didn’t know what to say, so I focused on my stitching.
“I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just that most people are so phony. At least the people I meet.”
“You don’t meet normal people, do you?” I pulled the last knot tight and snipped the thread. “All done, Mr. Goode.”
Just then we heard a knock on the door. “Twenty minutes, Jimmy.”
Jolly turned quickly, caught the toe of one slipper on a bureau and spilled his drink down the front of his robe. “Damn!” He looked down. “Well, at least I didn’t ruin my slippers.” He held out one foot, touching the toe to the floor like a lithe model. “I love these things. So soft, and my mother’s favorite colors.”
“They’re lovely.” I stood up and held out the slacks, draped across my arm. “I’ll take your robe and have it laundered, Mr. Goode. It’ll be back in your room before you are.”
He changed in the bathroom, and emerged in a suit and turtleneck. “Thank you, dear Joanie,” he said, giving me that mock bow again.
I slipped out of the room, bathrobe and sewing kit in hand, not quite believing that I’d been chatting like old friends with the famous Jolly Goode.
---
I delivered the bathrobe and sewing kit to Housekeeping with strict instructions to have the robe ready by ten o’clock, then hurried to the front desk. Mr. B told me he’d already escorted Ma to her seat—“second row, Joanie”—so I quickly used the ladies room and joined Ma in the Starlight theater.
She grabbed my arm. “Mr. B said you were with Jolly!”
“Ma, you won’t believe it. I sewed his pants and we talked! He was so nice. I even made him laugh.”
“No!”
“Yes, and he told me he should have married someone like me. Like me, Ma!”
“Oh, he’s just how I thought he would be, never mind the gossip. And you, Joanie. Always so kind.”
The lights flickered and the crowd stirred and quickly settled into a hush. The emcee walked on stage and introduced Jolly, and the star was off and running with routines about Hollywood, tales about growing up poor, jokes about his ex-wives, a humorless Nixon, the pandas from China. And then, Jolly said he wanted to get serious for a minute.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you meet someone who reminds you about who you are. Who you really are. I had that experience today, and I won’t embarrass her by saying her name, but there is a lovely lady right here at the Starlight Lodge who knows how to take care of people. Who doesn’t pretend to be someone she’s not. The kind of woman I should have married.” He paused for the audience to chuckle, then he looked right at Ma and me, and blew a kiss. Ma squeezed my hand, while I froze, wanting the moment to last. But the audience applauded, and Jolly quickly moved on to another ex-wife story.
Once the final applause died down and the lights came up, Ma looked at me with the biggest smile I’d seen in a long time. “Oh, Joanie. Wow, honey. Daddy would have been thrilled for his little girl.”
“He really is something, isn’t he?”
In the lobby, Mr. B told me Jolly wanted me to have a drink with him and his friends in Dazzle, the Starlight lounge.
“Go!” Ma said. “I’ll wait right here.”
I stopped into the ladies room again to touch up my makeup and hair. My silver-blonde hair, styled in a Mary Tyler Moore flip, brushed against my jawline, and my green eyes shone in the florescent light. It wasn’t just my uniform, I realized: I, myself, looked like the Starlight’s teal, gold and glass. I laughed and wondered if Jolly would think that was funny, too.
I took the shortcut through the kitchen. In the service hall, just around the corner from Dazzle, I heard Jolly’s voice and paused to gather myself.
“––a lovely girl, absolutely. Did a great job sewing my pants. What I didn’t tell the audience was that she was boring—scrawny and plain, too!” Men’s voices broke into laughter, and for the second time that evening, I froze, stunned.
“Not the next former Mrs. Goode, eh, Jimmy?” called out another voice.
I turned away, but I heard the laughter. I heard enough. I knew who Jolly really was.
Back in the lobby, I told Ma and Mr. B that I had changed my mind, that I wasn’t the Hollywood type, I didn’t want to keep Ma waiting, I needed to run Jolly’s bathrobe back to his room. I grabbed the master key from behind the front desk and picked up the laundered robe and the sewing kit from Housekeeping.
In Jolly’s room, I laid that huge sweet-smelling bathrobe out on the bed. I even crooked one arm and tucked the empty sleeve into the pocket. Then I bent down and picked up Jolly’s sparkling, buttery-soft slippers and held them up to the light for a moment, appraising their glistening beauty. Setting them down on the bed, I opened the sewing kit, slipped on a thimble and swiftly buried a needle in the sole of each slipper, angled so they wouldn’t poke through right away.
---
Driving home in the Galaxie, I was glad that Ma kept up the chatter, because I had nothing to say. “I simply can’t believe what Jolly said about you. He really is jolly good! We’ll call Aunt Deborah after Mass in the morning. She won’t believe it!”
And so, the story of the night I sewed Jolly Goode’s pants was born. The next day Ma would call her sister, pushing the phone into my hand so I could testify to the kindness of the great Jolly Goode. I would leave out the part where I got surprised, the kind of surprise you really should have expected all along, the kind you feel when you finally understand that being nice only carries you so far. The kind of surprise you might feel when the force of hundreds of pounds of your own flesh drives a hidden needle into the tender sole of your unsuspecting foot.