Liberace in Lawrenceville - Fall 2017

It was the day that Kennedy died, and Liberace was crying all the way
to the Holiday House—sequined star, at forty-four the fair-haired boy
adored by unloved mothers and daughters. There was no show: respect
for the dead President (none for that other Lee, felled by a glistening Ruby).

Liberace worked a shuttered dressing room, cleaning sparkling costumes
with Carbona, known to TV repairmen and huffers—fire-resistant and sweet
as antifreeze. He was used to the fumes, like the buzz of a crowd. Next night,
standing room only for “Birth of the Blues” on twinkling ivories. A dizzy Lee

cut the concert short, collapsing backstage in a slick of his own vomit. They rushed
him to St. Francis. He was there anyway, his failing kidneys fluttering like birds
in the saint’s hand. While doctors shook their heads, sad metronomes, he ordered breakfast at Tiffany’s—the glitter that never fades—for his family and friends.

He was dying. But in that red brick house of pain, he felt his childhood Catholic
faith saving him. A gliding nun in white prayed to St. Anthony for something lost:
his innocence, perhaps. She whispered his boyish name, Walter. No one ever
knew who she was. The stained crosses in nearby St. Mary’s Cemetery began

cheering for him, in the oily rain of Extreme Unction. O Pittsburgh of Miracles.
O City of Machines. O artificial kidney, alien angel huge as a refrigerator,
doing the magic trick. An engineer named Mateer irrigated the star in crude dialysis.
Mid-December, a ghostly Lee waved the Sisters goodbye from his Hollywood car.

Twenty years later, he played Heinz Hall, buoyed by a bevy of hair-sprayed heads, mauve and cerulean, like the clouds of Catholic Heaven. Showered praise and cash
on St. Francis Hospital, whose remodeled Lawrenceville lobby would bear his name
and his gleaming portrait, that all-American-by-way-of-Poland-and-Italy smile.

Gone today. In the darkening days of St. Francis and Liberace’s reputation,
the nuns would move his portrait to an obscure aisle. Where is he now—
buried in rubble, or rising like Las Vegas in the rainbow grid of pick-up sticks
that fronts Pittsburgh’s fresh Children’s Hospital, shining gaily in his joy?

Angele Ellis’s latest collection is Under the Kaufmann’s Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh, with photos by Rebecca Clever (Six Gallery Press). The author of four books, Angele’s work also has appeared in sixty publications and thirteen anthologies, including the forthcoming Unconditional Surrender (Low Ghost Press), and Nasty Woman & Bad Hombre (Lascaux Editions).