My vocation is not that of a nurse or jailer, nanny or au pair, but during her periods of highest public acclaim, my duties have always included protecting Miss Kathie from herself. Oh, the overdoses I’ve foiled… the bogus land investment schemes I’ve stopped her from financing… the highly inappropriate men I’ve turned away from her door… all because the moment the world declares a person to be immortal, at that moment the person will strive to prove the world wrong. In the face of glowing press releases and reviews the most heralded women starve themselves or cut themselves or poison themselves. Or they find a man who’s happy to do that for them.

For this next scene we open with a beat of complete darkness. A black screen. For the audio bridge, once more we hear the ring of the doorbell. As the lights come up, we see the inside of the front door, and from within the foyer, we see the shadow of a figure fall on the window beside the door, the shape of someone standing on the stoop. In the bright crack of sunlight under the door we see the twin shadows of two feet shifting. The bell rings again, and I enter the shot, wearing the black dress, the maid’s bib-front apron and lacy white cap. The bell rings a third time, and I open the door.

The foyer stinks of paint. The entire house stinks of paint.

A figure stands in the open doorway, backlit and overexposed in the glare of daylight. Shot from a low angle, the silhouette of this looming, luminous visitor suggests an angel with wings folded along its sides and a halo flaring around the top of its head. In the next beat, the figure steps forward into the key light. Framed in the open doorway stands a woman wearing a white dress, a short white cape wrapped around her shoulders, white orthopedic shoes. Balanced on her head sits a starched white cap printed with a large red cross. In her arms, the woman cradles an infant swaddled in a white blanket.

This beaming woman in white, holding a pink baby, appears the mirror opposite of me: a woman dressed in black holding a bronze trophy wrapped in a soiled dust rag. A beat of ironic parallelism.

A few steps down the porch stands a second woman, a nun shrouded in a black habit and wimple, her arms cradling a babe as blond as a miniature Ingrid Bergman. Its skin as clear as a tiny Dorothy McGuire. What Walter Winchell calls a “little bundle of goy.”

On the sidewalk stands a third woman, wearing a tweed suit, her gloved fingers gripping the handle of a perambulator. Sleeping inside the pram, two more infants.

The nurse asks, “Is Katherine Kenton at home?”

Behind her, the nun says, “I’m from St. Elizabeth’s.”

From the sidewalk, the woman wearing tweed says, “I’m from the placement agency.”

At the curb, a second uniformed nurse steps out of a taxicab carrying a baby. From the corner, another nurse approaches with a baby in her arms. In deep focus, we see a second nun advancing on the town house, bearing yet another pink bundle.

From offscreen we hear the voice of Miss Kathie say, “You’ve arrived…” And in the reverse angle we see her descending the stairs from the second floor, a housepainter’s brush in one hand, dripping long, slow drops of pink paint from the bristles. Miss Kathie’s rolled back the cuffs of her shirt, a man’s white dress shirt, the breast pocket embroidered with O.D., the monogram for her fourth “was-band,” Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., all of the shirt spotted with pink paint. A bandanna tied to cover her hair, and pink paint smudged on the peak of one movie-star cheekbone.

The town house stinks of lacquer, choking and acrid as a gigantic manicure compared to the smell of talcum powder and sunlight on the doorstep.

Miss Kathie’s feet descend the last steps, trailed by drops of pink. Her blue denim dungarees, rolled halfway up to her knees, reveal white bobby socks sagging into scuffed penny loafers. She faces the nurse, her violet eyes twitching between the gurgling, pink orphan and the paintbrush in her own hand. “Here,” she says, “would you mind…?” And my Miss Kathie thrusts the brush, slopping with pink paint, into the nurse’s face.

The two women lean together, close, as if they were kissing each other’s cheeks, trading the swaddled bundle for the brush. The white uniform of the nurse, spotted with pink from touching Miss Kathie. The nurse left holding the gummy pink brush.

Her arms folded to hold the foundling, Miss Kathie steps back and turns to face the full-length mirror in the foyer. Her reflection that of Susan Hayward or Jennifer Jones in Saint Joan or The Song of Bernadette, a beaming Madonna and child as painted by Caravaggio or Rubens. With one hand, my Miss Kathie reaches to the nape of her own neck, looping a finger through the knot of the bandanna and pulling it free from her head. As the bandanna falls to the foyer floor, Miss Kathie shakes her hair, twisting her head from side to side until her auburn hair spreads, soft and wide as a veil, framing her shoulders, the white shirt stretched over her breasts, framing the tiny newborn.

“Such a pièce de résistance,” Miss Kathie says, rubbing noses with the little orphan. She says, “That’s the Italian word for… gemütlichkeit.”

Miss Kathie’s violet eyes spread, wide-open, bug-eyed as Ruby Keeler playing a virgin opposite Dick Powell under the direction of Busby Berkeley. Her long movie-star hands, her cheeks marred only by the pastel stigmata of pink paint. Her eyes clutching at the image in the foyer mirror, Miss Kathie turns three-quarters to the left, then the right, each time closing her eyelids halfway and nodding her head in a bow. She bows once more, facing the mirror full-on, her smile stretching her face free of wrinkles, her eyes glowing with tears. This, the exact same performance Miss Kathie gave last month when she accepted the lifetime tribute award from the Denver Independent Film Circle. These identical gestures and expressions.

A beat later, she unloads the infant, returning the bundle to the nurse, Miss Kathie shaking her head, wrinkling her movie-star nose and saying, “Let me think about it…”

As the nun mounts the porch steps, Miss Kathie thrusts two fingers into her own dungarees pocket and fishes out a card of white paper… She holds the sample shade of Honeyed Sunset to the cherub’s pink cheek, studying the card and the infant together. Shaking her head with a flat smile, she says, “Clashes.” Sighing, Miss Kathie says, “We’ve already painted the trim. Three coats.” She shrugs her movie-star shoulders and tells the nun, “You understand…”

The next newborn, Miss Kathie leans close to its drowsing face and sniffs. Using an atomizer, she spritzes the tender lips and skin with L’air du Temps and the tiny innocent begins to squall. Recoiling, Miss Kathie shakes her head, No.

Another gurgling newborn, Miss Kathie leans too close and the dangling hot ash drops off the tip of her cigarette, resulting in a flurry of tiny screams and flailing. The smell of urine and scorched cotton. As if a pressing iron had been left too long on a pillowcase soaked in ammonia.

Another foundling arrives barely a shade too pale for the new nursery drapes. Holding a fabric swatch beside the squirming bundle, Miss Kathie says, “It’s almost Perfect Persimmon but not quite Cherry Bomb…”

The doorbell rings all afternoon. All the day exhausted with “offspring shopping,” as Hedda Hopper calls it. “Bébé browsing,” in the semantics of Louella Parsons. A steady parade of secondhand urchins and unwanted kinder. A constant stream of arriving baby nurses, nuns and adoption agents, each one blushing and pop-eyed upon shaking the pink, paint-sticky hand of Miss Kathie. Each one babbling: Tweet, cluck, hoot… Raymond Massey. A quick-cut montage.

Bray, bark, buzz… James Mason.

Another nurse retreats, escaping down the street when Miss Kathie asks how difficult it might be to dye the hair and diet some pounds off of a particularly rotund cherub.