Read Online All the Stars in the Heavens by Adriana Trigiani - Free Book Online Page B

something more, but he didn’t. Loretta pulled back and busied herself watching the crew add some snow around a park bench. Spencer Tracy shifted toward her again.
    â€œI saw Midnight Mary ,” he said softly.
    Following his cue, Loretta leaned in and whispered in his ear, “How did I do?”
    â€œYou killed every bum in the picture.”
    â€œIt was in the script.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do to me?” he teased.
    â€œDid you read the script?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œI save you in the end.”
    â€œTough job. Are you up for it?”
    â€œYou’ll soon find out. We’re starting with scene one. Where’s your tuxedo?”
    â€œThey’re pressing it.”
    â€œWe start at seven.”
    â€œI’ll be ready.”
    He stood next to her, rocking back and forth on his feet and up on his toes. She didn’t know what else to say, and he said nothing. She half smiled, looking straight ahead, thinking, Something is wrong with this poor man. He had to be the most socially awkward actor she had ever met.
    Spencer must have sensed her feelings, because he turned and walked away, leaving her standing alone. She watched the oddball as he wove back through the crew, unrecognized.
    â€œHe looks like my uncle,” the wardrobe assistant commented. “I’m all Irish on my mother’s side.”
    â€œMr. Tracy is as Irish as a boiled potato.” LaWanda shrugged. “But there’s something about him, don’t you think?”
    â€œOh, yeah. Something,” Loretta said. She was too polite to say what she was really thinking.

    â€œOkay, Sis, this is where you work.”
    A production assistant, pencil-thin with a mustache to match, showed Alda the mail room, a dusty, ramshackle closet with a broken-down worktable and a few metal folding chairs placed around it.
    â€œYou sit there and you answer the mail.” He put boxes on the worktable along with a stack of envelopes. “You can read ’em or not. If one of ’em makes you cry, you put it to the side for Miss Young. She enjoys a weepie. She likes to peruse a few here and there, but don’t crush her with a bunch. Everybody, everybody that writes in gets a photograph. Columbia front office orders. The audience pays our salaries when they buy tickets, don’t forget it.”
    â€œI won’t,” Alda promised. She looked at the windows, closed shut. The production assistant read her mind and opened them.
    â€œIt’s hot in here.”
    â€œThank you,” Alda said.
    He hoisted an oversize burlap bag full of mail onto the table. “Miss Young is popular.”
    â€œThat is a lot of mail.” Alda wondered how she could possibly answer all the letters.
    â€œThere’s thirteen more bags where this one came from.”
    Alda opened the box on the table. A black-and-white photograph of her boss in a voile dress, with a matching umbrella shading her from the sun, was duplicated in a stack in the hundreds.
    â€œHere’s Miss Young’s autograph stamp.” The young man showed Alda how to stamp Loretta’s signature on the photograph. “Easy peasy. Can you handle it? Stamp the photo, mail it to the return address. Write neatly. The boys in the front office don’t like returns. Costs them money.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    The assistant left, leaving Alda alone with the bundles of letters. She opened the first one, with the return address Red Lodge, Montana. Alda began to read the story of a young woman whose husband had left her with three young children. She came upon the sentence “If you could please send me five dollars, it would go a long way to help.”
    Alda placed the paper off to the side, creating a stack for charity, and opened another. She took a deep breath, slipped off the shoes that Polly Ann Young had handed down to her, and settled in to read. This one made her laugh. It was from a man who had invented