A Broadway story

My wife and I had lunch yesterday with an old friend of her family's, Harvey.

Harvey lives in the small Missouri town where he was born 96 years ago but winters here in Southwest Florida where, most days, he plays 18 holes. He is in amazing shape, both physically and mentally.

Following a fender bender, Harvey has become hesitant to drive long distances, so he hires someone to drive his mini-van from Missouri to Florida and back every winter. Over lunch he mentioned he has hired a driver to drive him across the state this week to visit an old friend, Lucy, who lives in Palm Beach. 

Lucy, Harvey explained, grew up in a nearby town that was even smaller than his hometown, which had a state teacher's college. When, in the late 1930s near the end of the Depression, it came time for Lucy to go to college, her parents asked Harvey's parents if Lucy could board with them. Harvey and Lucy, who are a year apart in age, lived under the same roof for three years until shortly after Pearl Harbor when Harvey enlisted.

Harvey said Lucy was bitten by the acting bug early on. Right after college, she took off for New York to find fame. But the only job she could find was as an usher in a Broadway theater. One of her duties, after the patrons exited, was to turn up the seats so the janitors could clean underneath them easily.

One evening Lucy found a diamond necklace that clearly belonged to a woman of means. She turned it in to the front office. The next day, the manager informed Lucy the woman had called the theater, desperate to know if her necklace had been found. When she learned Lucy had turned it in, the woman said she wanted to meet her and give her a reward.

“Oh no,” Lucy told the woman when she offered her a generous cash reward. “I was only doing what I was raised to do. All I could think about was how awful you must have felt losing something that valuable.”

The woman told Lucy that, if she wouldn’t take her money, she would find another way to repay her. She was as good as her word. Turns out she had connections on Broadway, and arranged for Lucy to audition for some bit parts … which led to bigger parts … which eventually led to supporting roles in a couple of B movies in Hollywood. It was in Hollywood that Lucy met a Broadway producer from an old New York family who had sold the rights to one of his plays. They married, adopted a daughter, and Lucy retired from acting.

Harvey and his wife stayed with Lucy and her husband whenever they visited New York. He said the couple lived in grand style. Lucy's husband went on to produce some of the most successful plays ever to appear on Broadway and in London's West End. Harvey and Lucy have stayed in touch over the years by phone and mail.

Lucy and her husband retired to Palm Beach twenty years ago and, a few years ago, her husband died. Harvey called her the other day and she invited him to come over to see her. Lucy told him she is losing her sight. Though she lives in a condo overlooking the ocean, she can no longer see it.  She told Harvey that the daughter she and her husband adopted, now in her late sixties, has turned out to be the greatest blessing imaginable and takes good care of her. And she told Harvey that, before her sight goes altogether, she wants to see her dear friend's face one more time. Harvey says he can’t wait to see her either.

The world is complicated. Actions have consequences, but things don't necessarily work out the way one expects. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people.

It was lovely to hear the story of a stage-struck girl who had no idea, that night nearly 75 years ago when she turned a rich woman's necklace in to the front office, that, sometimes, things can work out even better than you planned.