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practice.” In fact, the wound was even worse than originally reported. The slug had severed Warner’s spinal cord, paralyzing him below the waist.
    About a fortnight later the invalid returned, permanently bound to a wheelchair. Almost every day Mrs. Erickson wheeled her son up and down the block, moving very slowly as she passed the Hunt house. The children were told to ignore her but Cleo kept peeking out and crying. Mrs. Erickson’s gesture was only the beginning. A lawsuit got under way, accusing Fred Hunt of Eighth Street, Celoron, New York, of negligence in the wounding and paralysis of the eight-year-old victim. The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked for $5,000 plus court costs and insisted that the sum was, if anything, too low to cover Warner’s medical expenses. (In this they were correct; the boy lived for six more years and needed care for the rest of his short life.) In any case, the sum represented more than Fred Hunt’s savings. He declared bankruptcy. The only asset left was the house, and he deeded that to his daughters. The plaintiffs sued once more, claiming that Hunt’s maneuver was “fraudulent, designed to delay and defraud his creditors.” Again the court agreed. The sheriff foreclosed on the house. Over the course of a year Fred Hunt lost everything. He was sixty-two, and, as Lucille observed, with the two court judgments “the heart went out of him.” Without a cent, bereft of a job and a place to call his own, he became totally dependent on DeDe. Distant relatives allowed him to board at their upstate farm, where he subsisted on a diet of their main crop: strawberries. This meant strawberries for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Lucille, Freddy, DeDe, and Ed moved into a bleak ground-floor apartment on East Fifth Street in Jamestown, and Lucille was transferred to Jamestown High School. There she was an unhappy stranger, outside of the cliques and clubs that had enlivened her days in Celoron. Lola abandoned any plans to reopen her beauty parlor and enrolled in a nursing program far from Jamestown. Cleo went to live with her father, George Mandicos. The family would never be whole again.
    After the “the Breakup,” as DeDe bitterly called it, long-dormant urges reawakened in Lucille. Upstate again came to represent mediocrity, and Broadway the main chance. No matter how devoted she was to Johnny, or how sorry she felt for Fred Hunt, she had to test herself in New York City, to prove John Murray Anderson wrong. To that end she would often leave school for a week or more without bothering to get permission from any authority other than DeDe. On the bus she would practice her locution and work out a plan of attack. Once in Manhattan she would head to a cheap rooming house on Columbus Circle, buy a copy of
Variety,
read the notices for open calls, and go to the auditions. Nineteen twenty-eight was not a bad time to be looking in the musical theater. In those flush times audiences paid top prices to see the
Ziegfeld Follies,
Earl Carroll’s
Vanities,
and whatever musicals the Shuberts were presenting in their theaters. All of these shows employed chorus lines made up of girls in feathers and furs. The trouble was, producers wanted dancers with experience, and Lucille was as green as the lawns of Jamestown.
    After a few weeks of total frustration, she presented them with an audacious new persona. Instead of encountering Lucille Ball of upstate New York, they saw a fresh-faced newcomer, “Diane Belmont” of Butte, Montana. (The surname was taken from a racetrack just outside New York City, and the locale was a bow to the place where Had and Desirée had once been young and happy.) To get her story straight, Lucille had written to the Montana chamber of commerce asking for literature. Poring over the booklets and brochures, she committed statistics to memory, in case producers inquired about her background. They rarely did, and once in a great while Miss Belmont from Butte actually landed in the third