“The Door Between”: Come for (what you think is going to be) the fake relationship trope, stay for the disability rep.

“It shouldn’t be hard to be a good wife,” Anne said, smiling, “if you love your husband.”

“Oh, I love him all right or I wouldn’t have smashed my career for him.  I threw over five hundred a week for him knowing that old G-G, Hart’s father, was going to cut him out of his will.  But naturally,” her mouth twisted, trembled, “I didn’t expect the kind of break I got.  Hart’s clever and sweet, and he could have gone places if the accident hadn’t happened.  But now—”  She paused, took a cigarette from a platinum case and lighted it.  “Do you know what being a good wife means?”

Anne shook her head.  She was thinking about a boy twenty-four years old, unquestionably attractive if he had looked like the newspaper pictures she had seen, confined to his bed or a wheel chair for the rest of his life.

The new year’s malaise still lingers, but since posting about “The Clergyman and the Actress,” I’ve been on something of a Beulah Poynter binge.  In addition to purchasing five of her novels, I discovered that the Villanova Digital Library has seemingly every public domain issue of Mystery Magazine, which coincidentally includes some of her earliest pieces of fiction (some of which—despite the name—don’t actually qualify as mysteries, like not even a little, but are nevertheless incredibly interesting in their own way).  So she’s been on my mind.  And, perhaps inevitably, I found my thoughts wandering back to “The Door Between,” from the May 1942 issue of Sweetheart Stories (PDF of the story available here).  Previously I said the story was part of my BGSU haul, but it turns out I was wrong—I actually own the issue (purchased shortly before my BGSU visit), so I think what happened is that “The Clergyman and the Actress” inspired me to take a closer look at it, at which point I took photographs of it, but those photos happened to be right next to all the others in my camera roll, hence the confusion.  (So I guess I only picked up the one Beulah Poynter story from my library visit?  Must be.)  Anyway, “The Door Between” sticks in my head not only because it features a disabled hero, but because—despite the mad plot—it’s also quite genuinely sexy and fairly sophisticated on the emotional side of things.  And again, “emotional sophistication” is not something you typically associate with the pulps, so.  (FYI, trigger warning for some ableism, but—well, we’ll get into it.)

Our heroine is shopgirl Anne Manners, and in a twist that’s very “The Mad Masquerade” (a delightfully bananas story I never formally reviewed, but that you can find in the 1931 section of my Pulp Romance Guide), it turns out she’s a dead ringer for glamorous Venice Holden, former star of the stage.  Venice suddenly quit acting four months ago to elope with Hartley Frost, the young heir to the Frost fortune, and while the tabloids made a big to-do about the match at the time, they missed just how severe the couple’s immediate-post-marriage car accident was—Venice survived the crash just fine, but Hart fractured his hip and some vertebrae, and has consequently been confined to either his bed or a wheelchair ever since; he very well may never walk again.  Venice loves him, but being a caretaker is hard, especially as he’s become clingy and peevish since the accident.  All she wants is to go to her kid sister’s wedding that weekend, and was despairing about not being able to—until she saw Anne, that is.

Yes, again much like “The Mad Masquerade,” Venice is proposing a prince-and-the-pauper-esque switcheroo—all Anne has to do is impersonate her for twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six tops, which should be easy as Hart has a day nurse to tend to him, they have separate bedrooms, and he’s near-sighted to boot.  So just wear the right perfume and keep him from looking at her with his glasses on, and boom, job done.  Furthermore, Venice will pay Anne $100 for the harmless little deception.  Well, everybody has their price ($100 in 1942 equals about $1,900 today), so Anne reluctantly agrees to the plan.  And so the evening of truth comes, and it’s only after she and Venice have switched clothes and the other woman has left that Anne gets a reality check and starts to wonder what the fuck she’s gotten herself into, pretending to be some stranger’s wife.  Alas, it’s then that Hart calls for her, unable to sleep and wanting some company.  (“[Y]our light was on and I thought maybe you’d sit with me a little while,” he says.)

Anne obliges, and Hart ruminates about how that night is the four-month anniversary of their marriage—or at least, it would be, had the car accident not happened.  Yes, much to Anne’s shock, it turns out he and Venice are not actually married—the crash occurred right before the ceremony, not right after, as had been reported.  Hart is morose and self-flagellating about the whole situation (it’s never outright stated in so many words, but it can be assumed he’s been suffering a pretty bad bout of depression since the accident), culminating in him wishing he’d been legit killed, if only for Venice’s sake.  (“[W]hy do you cling to a wreck like me?” he asks her at one point.)  Anne is sympathetic, and when she goes to pick up the bedside lamp he inadvertently knocked over, he takes her hand and pulls her down next to him, “until her head rested upon the pillow and her cheek was against his.”  Anne is internally freaking out over the way he’s cuddling her so close (and internally freaking out over how much she likes it), while Hart laments the way she’s been keeping her physical distance.  “All the world believes [they] are man and wife,” after all, so is it really so bad for him to take her in his arms like this?  Suffice it to say, Anne is in way over her head, and then things go from bad to worse when Hart starts full-on kissing her.  It’s actually pretty steamy for the era, what with the two of them being unmarried, in pajamas, making out in his bed in the middle of the night.  (I mean, even in “Tonight You’re Mine!” when the hero lays the heroine down on a couch and they’re on the verge of tearing each other’s clothes off, he’s explicitly said to be kneeling beside her; here we don’t even have a token foot on the floor.)

Anne manages to extricate herself, and—shaken by the experience—retreats to Venice’s bedroom.  In the morning, Hart calls for her and drops another bombshell—his dad will be visiting that evening.  Dad initially disinherited Hart when he ran off with Venice, disapproving of the relationship, but softened a bit after Hart was paralyzed, and has since been providing them with an allowance.  Anyway, Hart is in unusually good spirits, because if Dad is visiting, that must mean he’s ready to formally forgive Hart and accept Venice as his daughter-in-law.  Reeling once more, Anne goes out for a walk to try to clear her head, only to be shocked yet again when some rando comes up and puts his arm around her, mistaking her for you-know-who.  He’s giving off major side piece vibes, and furthermore—once he realizes his mistake—reveals that he knows all about the doppelganger deception, and Anne begins to get the sneaking suspicion that Venice isn’t quite as angelic and devoted as she painted herself out to be.  Upon her return to the house, an offer to take Hart out for a walk of his own only adds to this (“Only last week I recall you saying that you’d rather be caught dead than pushing a wheel chair,” he says, surprised); one gets the impression that the reason he’s been such an invalid these past few months is perhaps less because of his pride, and more because of Venice’s—her not wanting to be seen with a “cripple,” as it were.

Well, the walk, short as it is, seems to do Hart’s mental health a world of good (it’s implied to be his first time out of the house since the crash), but then they have to deal with Dad.  Hart assumed he came to bury the hatchet, but actually Dad has been busy with some detectives—he found out the two of them were never properly married, and then goes on to present evidence that Venice is nothing more than a gold-digger with a slew of men on the side.  Hart denies it (“Maybe the money does count, but she wouldn’t doublecross me like that.  Not when I’m down!”), but Anne, knowing better and ultimately feeling sorry that such a sweet guy fell for such a schemer, acts the part she was hired to play and says some pretty heinously offensive things to him, hoping—for his sake—that it’ll drive him into falling out of love with the other woman.  Instead, it makes Hart angry enough that he manages to pull himself to his feet for a moment, grabbing her shoulders as if to physically stop her ableist tirade.  Anne does indeed go silent in shock/shame, and Hart mutters “Good Lord!” before letting her go.  As we will soon find out, it seems he’s finally realized that the woman who’s been tending to him these past twenty-four hours or so isn’t the same one he almost married, after all.

Dad is like, “Omg, son, you’re going to be able to walk again!” as if this is the most important matter at hand, but Hart just slumps back down into his wheelchair and is like, “Omfg, I need to talk to her alone.”  Dad reluctantly leaves, and it’s then that Hart demands to know what’s going on—the woman in front of him may look like Venice, but she clearly isn’t, and furthermore Venice doesn’t even have a sister, so that wedding story is bullshit.  Anne comes clean about the ruse, relaying everything to the best of her knowledge, along with the way Venice was going to pay her, but admits she doesn’t want the money anymore.  All she wants is to GTFO, but Hart—not wanting to lose face with his father any more than he already has—effectively blackmails her into staying, threatening to bring her up on impostor charges if she tries to leave before Venice returns.  And so, Anne is unfortunately stuck for the time being, with the sexual tension created by last night’s make-out session—a physical display of passion and affection that Hart had been starved for ever since his accident—still hovering between them.

 

The most interesting aspect of “The Door Between” is, by far, its depiction of disability.  It’s unusual to find a physically disabled main character in romance even today, to say nothing of the state of the genre back in the 1940s.  (And Now Tomorrow comes to mind, with its deaf heroine, but that was Real Literature™, not the pulps, and even that ended with—spoiler alert—the character in question getting her hearing back.)  And while it’s true there’s a lot of pity thrown Hart’s way, and while it’s (in many ways disappointingly) implied he’s going to make a full recovery, unlike And Now Tomorrow, we never actually see that recovery.  I mean, sure, Hart says at the end that he’ll be walking in a month, “as fit as ever”—and to be fair, finally having a supportive romantic partner and being in healthier place, emotionally, likely will give him the motivation to exercise his body in ways he maybe wasn’t doing before—but when you consider the physical pain he appeared to still be in earlier in the story, and the state of medicine at the time, exactly how accurate is that prediction of his?  Maybe he will indeed get to the point where he can walk again, but will he be able to do it without any pain, or without the assistance of a cane (for instance)?  How easily will he tire?  Will he still sometimes find himself having to rely on a wheelchair, simply because he doesn’t have the spoons?  Despite lip service to the contrary, Poynter leaves things ambiguous enough at the end, such that you could in fact read Hart as being permanently affected by his accident if you so chose.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Hart didn’t lose the use of his legs through a so-called “sexy” injury—something Poynter easily could have written in if she had so desired, considering it was 1942 and the United States had officially entered World War II (and, unsurprisingly, armed service heroes were hella popular in the wartime romance pulps; one even appears on the issue’s cover).  But no, it wasn’t heroically fighting Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan that did Hart in—it was just a run-of-the-mill car accident.  And for all the of-its-time ableism the story arguably has, Anne is still clearly depicted as being attracted to him, not to whatever ability to walk he may or may not possess.  One of the things I find particularly fascinating is the language that surrounds Hart, the actual word choices associated with him:  He’s at once described as “pale” and “fragile,” with “thin white hand[s],” etc.—adjectives and phrases that really play into his disability and present him as the kind of poor, pitiable figure you’d expect from a story written 80+ years ago.  But then his fingers when he grabs Anne’s hand or his arms when he holds her are invariably described as strong, which in turn plays into his status as a stereotypically virile male love interest.  It’s a strange, contradictory mix, but I’ve read enough of Poynter’s work now to know that she wasn’t a fool, so I suspect these choices were deliberate on her part—an attempt to walk the fine line of audience expectation, rather than a case of mere inconsistent characterization.

So it isn’t perfect, and in some ways hasn’t aged especially well.  But at the same time, there’s a complexity to Hart’s depiction—and Anne’s interactions with him—that makes me think this is actually pretty damn good representation for the time in which it was published, and in that respect, perhaps worth a look.  On top of that, it’s also just a successful little romance, with a good conflict between the two leads, a good grovel on Hart’s part (when he comes to apologize for acting like a dick to Anne), and some genuinely sexy bits, to boot.

 

Random end thoughts:

• The summary blurb in the table of contents gets the heroine’s name wrong, calling her “Penny” instead of “Anne.”  (Penny is in fact Anne’s department store co-worker.)  In addition to that, said blurb curiously makes absolutely no mention of Hart’s disability (“If Penny had know[n] the truth, she would never have masqueraded as Hart’s wife”).  I’m reminded of The Outlaw and the Lady, a 2001 Western romance by Lorraine Heath—it notably features a blind heroine, but you’d similarly never know this from the cover copy.  (Should I be disappointed that physical disability in a main character was still being downplayed by promotional text almost sixty years after “The Door Between”?  Probably.)
• On that note, while the story has two very nice illustrations (artist unfortunately unknown), they also downplay Hart’s disability.  His glasses make no appearance in either, and while he’s technically sitting in his wheelchair in the second, you’d never guess it without reading the story, due to the way it’s so out-of-frame and abstracted.
• Continuing with the illustrations, Anne is shown in them with your typical 1940s’ hairstyle, but she doesn’t actually get it cut and curled this way until the very end (as a way to visually distinguish herself from Venice, who she now firmly dislikes).  For the majority of the story, her hair is unusually long and straight for the era.
• In a shout-out to one of my favorite podcasts, all I could think of when I came across the character of Venice Holden was Venice Fowler (1:26:08).  (Frankly the best Fowler of Sweet Valley, and also just as much of a bitch as this story’s Venice. 😂)
• At the end of the story, Anne once again ends up in Hart’s arms and they kiss.  The blocking’s not entirely clear, but Hart is in his wheelchair and he’s said to be holding her “close,” so I’m choosing to believe she’s sitting in his lap.  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
• Between this story, “The Mad Masquerade,” and “Girl Alone,” I’m starting to think that I could get a good “doppelganger switcheroo” anthology together one of these days.  (Suddenly, the fact that there are so many look-a-likes in previously-mentioned Sweet Valley makes a whole lot more sense, if you consider that series to be some sort of modern descendant of the pulp tradition which, let’s be real, it totally is, pfft.)
• Another story in the issue, “Paging Mrs. Steele” by Dorothy Cheney Quinan, effectively starts out with the exact same premise as the 1940 film, Arise, My Love—with the hero about to be executed by firing squad, but ultimately rescued by a woman he’s never met, who’s claiming to be his wife.  (It’s kind of downhill from there, but maybe I’ll get around to photographing and sharing it one of these days all the same.  In the meantime, if you’re interested, maybe just watch/rewatch Arise, My Love?  Claudette Colbert is a gem, and Ray Milland has a bathtub scene.)
• In addition to fiction, one of the staples of the romance pulps was poetry.  Most of the poems are pretty forgettable, but every now and then one catches my eye.  “Love—1942,” by Anobel Armour is one such example, as it’s a surprisingly poignant little look at how the US’s entry into the war affected romantic relationships.

 

And now, while the story does have two nice illustrations as I mentioned, I’m actually going to end with a little decorative page-filler from the last page (artist again unfortunately unknown).  It has nothing to do with the story, but I just love the style—the way the figures themselves are silhouetted, but their clothes aren’t.

<3

Tagged: 1940s, beulah poynter, double love, love pulps, pulp, romance, short stories, the door between