The Wicked City
Beatriz Williams
The Jazz Age comes alive with a love story for the ages: a rugged Prohibition agent and a saucy flapper from one of Appalachia’s most notorious bootlegging families…Manhattan, present dayElla Hawthorne thinks she’s going crazy when she hears strange noises coming from the walls of her new apartment late at night. When she discovers that it used to be home to a speakeasy during the Jazz Age, she’s determined to discover the building’s secrets.Manhattan, 1924Geneva ‘Gin’ Kelly, a smart-mouthed, red-haired flapper, reluctantly agrees to help rugged Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson catch her stepfather, a notorious bootlegger. But the truth will shake Manhattan society to its foundations…
Copyright (#ulink_edd2d7d2-638d-572c-a0c9-3ec132d9756d)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the UK by Harper 2017
Copyright © Beatriz Williams
Cover design by TBC © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs ©
Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008132644
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008132651
Version: 2016-12-15
Dedication (#ulink_ac0540ac-d3ba-5ccb-9bb8-c10e19f92da9)
To New York City, you ambitious, resilient, breathtaking, wicked creature
Contents
Cover (#ud6f77fb3-3410-5346-a847-542034625d9e)
Title Page (#u2014f00e-4820-5862-a19b-e6f562885acb)
Copyright (#ud05670ed-c9ee-51fd-9435-b1001306f37a)
Dedication (#ucb7b0de9-9061-5b76-a53b-9e8b6603807b)
New York City, 1998 (#uf76b0285-eaa4-5ee8-933f-c2ffb151f417)
Act I (#u398a2409-fe8b-546c-9b65-995f995c95f5)
Chapter 1 (#uf9468cce-8527-5f9c-b98b-1262589ae1c8)
Chapter 2 (#uda7dd75b-4055-509c-a5fe-8f919cf84378)
Chapter 3 (#ue566d529-8fac-5de3-b743-60fc2e7139ed)
Chapter 4 (#ub57c8746-c398-51f1-acb4-32d9ca169193)
Chapter 5 (#u89dba1e5-1986-5363-8221-25b95d60b0b8)
Chapter 6 (#u6095adb5-20a2-5b4c-b47a-0def7450d5bf)
Chapter 7 (#u6a632f07-9584-526f-b711-df784264e0ab)
Chapter 8 (#ubbd53f64-2e45-5df7-af94-e1237c4195db)
Chapter 9 (#ud36aea5e-f032-5dd2-b0be-268cc5a7fae8)
Chapter 10 (#ue4f6104a-18d6-5e4a-821b-6ef03f360cd1)
Chapter 11 (#uc10dcb1d-ff2c-5a66-8196-84c4cc70818b)
Chapter 12 (#ue90d7d6c-b34e-5fd7-acfd-ac76b5acc312)
Chapter 13 (#u96e3879c-9c1a-5ea4-93f9-25904cc26a57)
Chapter 14 (#ua38c4187-0e8c-5ac6-ad07-60e3487cec50)
Chapter 15 (#u39311c7d-c76d-51bc-8b08-1f3c7e3c87d7)
Chapter 16 (#uf4f8fd66-5fd9-55d8-8cc4-5426e41ea38a)
New York City, 1998 (#u61fbb448-06c3-59e2-82bf-18af8be79a89)
Act II (#u5c15074b-a2ac-5eb9-802d-01f1c1ad9e36)
Chapter 1 (#u30168f2c-9cf5-5719-8bf7-6de2eab93cc7)
Chapter 2 (#u8b800a7c-a189-53ce-b8eb-d60708423023)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
New York City, 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
Act III (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
New York City, 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
Act IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
New York City, 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
Act V (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
New York City, 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
Encore (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Beatriz Williams (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
New York City, 1998 (#ulink_47221328-9060-53ec-80e7-08aac96cd434)
ELLA VISITED the laundry room for the first time at half past six on a Saturday morning at the beginning of March. Not that the timing really mattered, she decided later, when her life had taken on its new, extraordinary dimensions and she’d begun to consider the uncanny moment of that beginning. Certain things—let’s call them that, certain things—had a way of tracking you down and finding you, even when you thought you were just going to wash some clothes in a Greenwich Village basement.
She’d moved into the building a week ago, and the hamper in the corner of the bathroom seemed pitifully empty without all the bulk of Patrick’s things. Still, it was time. Standards must be upheld. You couldn’t keep laundry in a hamper for more than a week, whatever catastrophe had interrupted your life. Too seedy. Too regressive. Anyway, Ella’s mother was bound to call her up soon for the morning welfare check, and she would surely ask whether Ella had done her laundry yet, and Ella wanted to be able to say yes without lying. (Woman could smoke out a lie like a pair of shoes on sale at Bergdorf’s.)
She’d already gone out for a run in the damp charcoal streets, but she hadn’t showered yet. (Terrific thing about insomnia: you could do things like go running and do your laundry without having to confront your fellow tenants in a state of squalor.) As she descended the cold stairwell to the basement, she realized that its strange odor was actually the fug of her own sweat—salt and skin, not yet turning to stink. Her hair, badly in need of washing, whirled in a greasy knot at the back of her head, held from collapse by a denim scrunchie that had not been fashionable even during the heyday of scrunchies. Loose gray sweatpants, looser gray T-shirt emblazoned with her college logo—she’d peeled off her running clothes to fill out the wash load—and on her feet, the shearling L.L.Bean slippers Patrick always hated, because they were crummy and smelled like camping. Teeth furry. No bra.
She remembered all these details because of what occurred inside that laundry room the first time she entered. Six thirty in the morning, the first Saturday of March.
A STARTER MARRIAGE, HER MOTHER called it. Ella had never heard the term before.
“There was an article in the Style section just a month or two ago,” Mumma said. “It made me think of you.”
“But we only split up the week before last,” Ella said, staring at the cluster of U-Haul boxes in the center of her new bedroom.
“I never trusted him.”
“You could have fooled me.”
Mumma leaned back against a stack of towels and made one of those gestures with her right hand, like she was flicking out ash from a cigarette that no longer existed. An amputee with a phantom limb. “Oh, I liked him well enough. What wasn’t to like? I just didn’t trust him.”
“I didn’t realize there was a difference.”
“Well, there is. Anyway, it seems the term was coined by a fellow named Douglas … Douglas something-or-other, in some sort of novel he wrote about your generation.”
“Douglas Coupland?”
“Yes! Coupland. Douglas Coupland. Have you read it?”
“Generation X? Or else Shampoo Planet.”
“No, the first one.”
“Read them both in grad school. But I don’t remember anything about starter marriages.”
“It was in a footnote, apparently. I expect you missed it. You’re all in such a rush, your generation. You miss the details.”
“I might have read it and just forgotten.”
“You should take your time. The footnotes are the best part.”
Ella rose from the bed and picked up the X-Acto knife from the clutter on her chest of drawers. Her mother had a way of saying everything like a double entendre. The suggestive throatiness of the take your time. And footnotes. What were footnotes, in her mother’s secret vocabulary? Better not to know. For one thing, there was Daddy. “Starter marriage, Mumma? You were saying?”
“A first marriage, made for the wrong reasons, or because you didn’t have enough experience to judge the merchandise. Like a starter home or a starter car. You trade up.”
“You and Daddy didn’t have to trade up.”
“We were lucky. I was lucky. The point is, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you haven’t got kids, you just move on. Move on, move up.”
The X-Acto knife had one of those retractable blades, and Ella couldn’t seem to make it work. The edge came out halfway and stuck. “Look, could we not talk about moving on for another week or so? I haven’t even talked to a lawyer yet.”
“Why not? I gave you the number.”
“And the fact that you have a divorce lawyer on speed dial kind of stresses me out, by the way.”
“He’s not on speed dial, and he’s not a divorce lawyer. He’s a colleague of your father’s. He can give you advice, that’s all.” Ella’s mother uncrossed her legs and rose from the bed so gracefully, she might have been Odette. Or Odile. “God knows you won’t take it from me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? What about your wedding dress?”
“That was four years ago!”
“And was I right?”
Ella banged the bottom of the X-Acto knife on the toaster oven. “You were right about the dress. But you might have warned me about the groom.”
“Oh, darling.” Mumma plucked the knife from her fingers, flicked out the blade with a single nudge of her thumb, and sliced delicately along the seam of a box labeled SWEATERS, CASHMERE. “You wouldn’t have listened to that, either. You were in love.”
IN LOVE. ELLA COULD STILL remember what it felt like, falling in love. Being in love. She remembered it as a certain moment, the first really warm day of that year, a month or two after she met Patrick, when he was away on a business trip in Europe and she was alone for the first Saturday in weeks. She’d put on her favorite cotton sundress, which had lain squashed in her drawer since October and reminded her instantly of Granny’s house on Cumberland Island. The smell of summer. She’d gone outside into the innocent sunshine, bought an iced coffee, and walked by herself in Central Park, entering near the Museum of Natural History and making her way southeast, without any particular goal. As she strolled past the entwined couples drowsing in the Sheep Meadow, she’d gazed at them, for the first time, in benevolence instead of envy. She’d thought—actually spoke inside in her head, in conscious words that she still recalled exactly—I’m so happy, it’s the end of May and I’m in love, and the whole summer lies before us. An immaculate joy had quickened her feet along the asphalt paths, the conviction that the world was beautiful (she’d even sung, under her breath, a few bars of that song—And I think to myself, what a wonderful world—to which she ended up dancing with her father at her wedding, two years later) and that the rest of her life was just falling into its ordained pattern before her. The life she was meant to live, unfolding itself at last. Courtship, marriage, apartment. Exotic, self-indulgent vacations. Then kids, house in Connecticut, school runs and mom coffees. Less exotic, more wholesome vacations. Which shade of white to paint the trim in the dining room. Later that day, she had dinner with her sister and spilled out every detail, every silvery moonbeam over pasta and red wine at Isabella’s. And not once that entire love-struck Saturday did she suspect that Patrick was doing anything other than working—working really hard!—throughout his Saturday in Frankfurt. Thinking of her the whole time. Not once did the possibility of disloyalty enter her head. They were in love! Hadn’t he told her so, before he left on Tuesday? In between kisses. Naked in bed. Warm and secure. I’ve finally found you, he said, his actual words, while he held her face in his hands. What could be more certain than that?
Now she had to go back and recall all those old business trips, every late night at work, every client dinner, and wonder which ones he was lying about. A painfully detailed revision of history and memory.
And that was the worst part. Because she could still remember how wonderful it was to be in love with him.
BUT THAT WAS SIX YEARS ago. Now she had this too-light basket of laundry and this dark, chilly stairwell on Christopher Street, painted in gray and moist against her skin. Only blocks away from the sleek SoHo loft conversion she had shared with Patrick, which had its own washer and dryer and required no stair-climbing of any kind, except on the row of StairMasters in the residents’ gym: eternally occupied, unlike the building stairwells, because you weren’t climbing those steps to go anywhere. My God, of course not. Just to stay skinny. (Sorry, to keep fit.)
Of course, in the cold light of reason, Ella should have been the one to kick Patrick out. Damn it. He should have been the one cramming his belongings into a studio apartment in the Village—It’s charming, Mumma said last Sunday, picking her way between the boxes to peer out the window, into the asphalt garden out back—while Ella, crowned by a nimbus of moral superiority, enthroned herself on one of the egg chairs inside the two-thousand-square-foot loft on Prince Street.
He should have been the one bumping a laundry basket into a damp basement in search of a rumored laundry room, while she flicked her sweaty running clothes into the washing machine off the granite kitchen and sipped an espresso from the De’Longhi. (Not that Patrick would ever do his own laundry, even if he knew how; in his bachelor days, he sent it out for wash-and-fold.)
He should have been spending his weekend unpacking boxes and contemplating the miniature kitchen in the corner. The way you had to step around the toilet to exit the shower. The way you had to open said shower door and prop your foot on said toilet in order to shave your legs. (Not that Patrick shaved his legs, either; at least not since his brief but expensive flirtation with a carbon-framed racing bicycle.)
But she’d been too shocked and angry to consider her rights as the Wronged Wife, hadn’t she? No, wait. That wasn’t right, shocked and angry. Not visceral enough. She’d felt as if a loud steam whistle were blowing inside her skull. As if her insides were melting. As if her legs and arms had no nerves. And how could you think straight when your body was in such disarray?
So instead of waiting to confront Patrick, send Patrick to the doghouse as he deserved, she’d fled into the bedroom—trying not to look at the bed itself—and packed a few things into a gym bag and rushed to Aunt Viv and Uncle Paul’s apartment in Gramercy. Stammered an explanation she didn’t fully comprehend herself. Spent the next week in their guest room, searching the classifieds for no-fee apartments and fending off her friends’ sympathy and her parents’ advice. Fending off the manic trill of her cell phone every few hours, which she refused to answer.
And now here she stood, instead of Patrick, in a Christopher Street basement before a metal door labeled laundry, at six thirty in the morning.
Balancing the basket on her hip while she fumbled with the door handle.
Thinking, At least I’ve got the jump on everyone else, washing clothes this early on a Manhattan Saturday morning. The one time when the damn city actually does sleep.
But as the door cracked open, and Ella stuck in her shameful shearling-lined foot to push it out the rest of the way, a wondrous and unexpected noise met her ears.
The sound of four industrial washing machines and two industrial dryers, all churning in furious, metallic frenzy.
NOT ONLY THAT. EACH MACHINE bore a basket of laundry on top, claiming dibs, waiting to pounce at the end of the cycle. Ella’s eyes found the clock on the wall, just to make sure that she hadn’t somehow missed daylight savings time.
Nope. Six thirty-four.
She let the basket slide down to the concrete floor. Put her hands on her hips. “What the hell?” she wailed. “Who are you people?”
“Oh, hello,” said a male voice behind her, appallingly sunny. “You must be the new one.”
Ella turned so quickly, she kicked over the basket. Jogbra spilled out. Sweaty running shirt. Seven days’ worth of lace panties in various rainbow hues. (Patrick scorned boring underwear.) She bent down and scooped desperately. “Yes, I am. Four D. Moved in last weekend.”
A pair of legs strolled into view, clad in blue jeans and a battered pair of nylon Jesus sandals. “Geez, I’m sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you. Let me—”
“No! I’ve got it.” Ella scooped the last article back in the basket. Tried to find something innocuous to go on top. Something without lace. Something that wasn’t hot pink. Something that didn’t smell. She straightened at last and looked up. “I just wasn’t expecting … wasn’t expecting …”
The man laughed at her dangling sentence, as if he had no idea what had scattered her train of thought, no idea at all that he was young and dark-haired and wore a force field of tousled happiness that fried away the dampness in the basement air. “Not expecting all the washing machines full at this hour of the morning? Sorry about that, too. Just one of the quirks about life inside Eleven Christopher. I’m Hector, by the way. Top floor.” He held out his hand.
Ella transferred the basket to her opposite hip and grasped his palm. Firm, steady, brief. “Hector?” she said.
“My mom’s a classics professor. Was.”
“She’s retired?”
“No. Died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”
“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” He turned away and moved to the second washing machine, which had just finished a thunderous spin cycle and now sat in stupor. “Tell you what. Special deal for the newbie. You jump the queue and take over my machine, and I didn’t see a thing.”
“That would be so unscrupulous. What if I get caught?”
Hector tossed her a luminous grin. “In that case, I guess I’d just take the blame. Pull rank. I have seniority around here. Well, except Mrs. McDonald on the ground floor. She’s been here since the Second World War. Gets an automatic laundry pass.”
“Sounds like you all know each other.”
“We are kind of a tight crew, you might say.” He moved away with his basket of wet clothes. “All yours, Four D.”
“Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.”
“So, that was your cue, by the way.”
“My cue?”
“You’re supposed to tell me your name. Unless it really is Four D.”
“Oh! Sorry. I’m a little slow on weekends. It’s Ella? Ella Gilbert.”
“Nice to meet you, Ella Gilbert. Welcome to the neighborhood.” He set his palms on the edge of the folding table along the opposite wall and hoisted himself up. “Don’t mind me. Just waiting for that dryer to finish up.”
Ella looked at the two machines, clunking in hypnotic circles.
“So what if the owner doesn’t turn up in time? Is there a protocol?”
“Oh, you know. We just take the load out and fold it.”
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously.”
“We, as in the other tenants? You fold each other’s laundry around here?”
“Like I said. Tight crew.”
“I guess so.”
“Once you get to know everyone, I mean.”
To this, Ella made a noncommittal hunh—get to know everyone? What was this, college?—and studied the instructions on the lid of the washer. Realized she was supposed to add the soap first. Started to unload.
“What’s up? Something wrong with the washer?” Hector asked.
“Nothing, just … I guess you add the soap first on this model.”
“Ella, I hate to have to break this to you, but it really doesn’t matter. Soap first or soap after. Unless there’s a soap drawer, I guess, which there isn’t. Pretty basic machine.”
Ella stopped with her hand on a T-shirt. “But it says—”
“So break the rules. It’s okay. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I don’t know. The whole laundry room floods with soap?”
Hector laughs. “You are awesome, you know that? Go ahead. I dare you. Be bad.”
Ella overturned the basket into the drum, added half a cup of liquid Tide, and slammed the lid. “There. Are you happy?”
“I am. Felt good, didn’t it?”
“Maybe.” She turned and leaned her bottom against the washer, an act of supreme courage because it brought her back in direct communion with Hector’s face, which had the kind of fresh, animal beauty that made your eyes sting. She’d forgotten what that was like, instant attraction. Not that she hadn’t encountered beautiful men since meeting Patrick; this was New York, after all, colonized by the beautiful, the brilliant, the rich. Sometimes all three in one hazardous, electromagnetic package. But falling in love with Patrick had somehow, blessedly, immunized her against fascination for somebody else. She could appreciate a man’s gleaming charisma—she could say to herself, Well, that’s certainly a good-looking guy, nice style, great sense of humor—without feeling any meaningful desire to have sex with him, even in the abstract, even in fantasy. So it was strange and shameful and utterly unsettling that when she tried to meet Hector’s lupine gaze, she felt her skin heating up and her mind grasping for wit. Like some membrane had dissolved in her sensible, grown-up, married brain, unleashing an adolescent miasma. Wanting to say something sensible and thinking, Your eyes are the color of cappuccino, can I drink you?
“My mom was a rule-follower, too,” Hector said. “It’s okay. I get it. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed. You guys seriously fold each other’s laundry?”
“Sure. I mean, when we have to. Not just because. That would be weird.”
“What about—well, you know—”
He grinned again. “Unmentionables? If you feel that strongly, Queen Victoria, you can always take them up to your room and dry them on a chair arm. Me, I’ve got nothing to hide. Just tighty whities. Pretty boring stuff.”
“You do realize we’re in New York City, right? A rental building? We’re not even supposed to make eye contact in the hallway.”
Hector shrugged. He wore a fine-gauge V-neck sweater, charcoal gray, cashmere or merino, a bit shabby, exposing a triangle of white T-shirt at the neck. The sleeves were pushed halfway up his forearms. The blue jeans were likewise worn, but to an honest fade: not the awkward, fake threads of a pre-shredded pair. He had enviable olive skin, and maybe that was the key to his strange luminosity—this smooth, golden sheath of his that didn’t show a single line, not even in the fluorescent basement lighting. Just a shadow of stubble on his jaw. Because of course he rolled out of bed like that. Stretched, shook himself. Probably drank a shot of wheatgrass and did fifty naked pushups. “Just the way we operate around here,” he said. “Band of brothers. And sisters.”
“But folding laundry. Really? That’s—I don’t know, it’s so personal.”
“It’s just laundry. And we are kind of personal around here. Anyway, you can’t just dump your buddy’s clothes in a pile and leave the scene. That would be wrong.”
“Why wrong?”
“Do unto others, Ella. Who wants wrinkled T-shirts?”
“Then just do your laundry some other time. After work. What’s with everyone jamming up the laundry room at dawn on a Saturday? I feel like I’ve walked into some kind of cuckoo commune.”
“It’s not that bad, I swear.”
“Yeah, it is. It’s totally a commune. And I’ll bet you’re the mayor.”
“I don’t think communes have mayors, do they? I mean, by definition?”
“You’re dodging the question.”
“Sorry.” He hung his head a little. “Like I said, I have seniority, that’s all.”
“Seniority? You?”
He ran a hand through his hair, which was shaggy and dark and thick, contributing hugely to Ella’s overall impression of Hector as a handsome, unkempt wolfhound. “Is it that bad? I guess I should clean up my act a little more. That’s what happens when you don’t spend all day working for the Man.”
Ella threw up her hands. “Fine. Don’t tell me anything. I’ll just have to figure out all the house rules on my own. Or do my laundry on Monday nights after work.”
“Actually, no. You don’t want to do that. Nights are bad.”
“Bad? Bad how?”
Across the room, the first dryer switched off and let out a series of frantic beeps. Hector jumped from the table. “Oops! That’s me.”
“Should I give you a hand?”
“Naw, I’ve got it.”
“Are you sure? I’m feeling a disturbing need to contribute somehow.”
“Ah, see? Drinking the Kool-Aid already.”
Drinking something, that’s for sure, Ella thought. Realized—the horror!—she was staring at Hector’s backside as he bent to remove the clothes from the dryer. Like a teenager. And then she remembered, like an electric shock, Jesus, I’m married! The way she would sometimes have nightmares, early in her marriage, in which she was in bed with some faceless man, nobody in particular, having sex, and realized halfway through that she had a husband and she was cheating on him, and she would startle awake and stare, heart thumping, at Patrick’s sleeping shoulder and feel such a drenching, horrified guilt that she actually cried. As if she had genuinely, consciously, in real life committed the crime of adultery.
Except this wasn’t a dream. Hector was real. Hector and his pert backside, his unemployed, slacker hotness, stood a few yards away, had a name and a face, and now, in this altered landscape of her life, unexpected and unsought, she had no nearby husband to immunize her. No one to keep her safe from the wolfhounds of New York City.
She turned swiftly for the door. “Guess I’ll be going, then!”
“Wait! Hold on a second.”
Unless he wasn’t real. Unless he was an actor or something, installed here as an instance of charity, or maybe a test. Or occupational therapy. She wouldn’t put that kind of trick past her mother. She wouldn’t put anything at all past her sister, even though Joanie was supposed to be studying in Paris right now.
He certainly looked like an actor. If this happened in a movie—vigorous, raven-locked guy prowls into post-breakup laundry room and purrs all the right things—you would roll your eyes and say, Nice try. Or you would think it was some kind of porn.
“I can’t,” she said over her shoulder.
“Please?”
Ella paused, hand on knob. “You’re a big boy. Don’t beg.”
“Not begging. Just polite, like my mama taught me. So do you have a minute?”
“Not really. I’ve got a lot of unpacking to do.”
“Wow. The brush-off. Was it something I said?”
“No, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t say sorry. If I accidentally shot off some kind of sexist bullshit, just call me on it, okay? My bad.”
“No! It’s not that. I just—” I’m married, she finished in her head. Wronged, scorned, cheated upon, humiliated, separated: all those things. But also, technically, married. And I don’t know if you’re hitting on me or not. It’s only been five minutes. But I think I might have been hitting on you. Was I? And if I was, is that morally wrong or just really, really stupid? Or something else, something that would take a therapist to explain properly and at great length and expense.
“I mean, I don’t want to hold you up or anything. Just tell you about a few things. Rules of the road. In case I don’t see you around, over the next few days. And you end up bringing your laundry down here at night.”
“What do you mean? Are there rats or something?”
“Um, no. Not rats. I mean, there might be rats. Who knows? But probably not. No droppings or whatever.” Hector’s voice had turned a little uncertain, or maybe apologetic was a better word, and the change was so interesting that Ella now swiveled to face him. In doing so, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hung, inexplicably, above the folding table on which Hector’s problematic backside had recently been resting. The greasy hair. The flushed, bare face. The baggy T-shirt.
Jesus Christ, Ella, you fucking idiot. (She never swore aloud, but her inner monologue could flame along like a Tarantino movie, when she was angry enough.) What the hell were you thinking? Of course he’s not hitting on you. Unless someone’s paying him to do it. Unless he pities you.
She smiled gently. “You know what? I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude. Just got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
“No hard feelings. Moving’s stressful. Right up there with death and divorce, they say. I just wanted to say that it’s not Kool-Aid.”
“Sorry? What’s not Kool-Aid?”
“The whole thing.” He slammed the dryer door on his load of wet laundry and straightened. Turned to her. Folded his arms across his lean chest. He had a loping, tensile shape to him, in keeping with the wolfhound aspect. Patrick was more muscular, gym honed, though not quite as tall. “The Eleven Christopher thing. It’s not rats, either. It’s the speakeasy.”
“The speakeasy? You mean like a bar?”
“Like a bar, sure.” He pulled apart his arms and pointed his thumb to the wall, the one with the table and the mirror. Cinder blocks covered in gray paint. “Right there, in the basement. The other side of that wall. Starts up at night. You can hear the music and the voices. People laughing and having a good time. Sometimes you can actually feel the walls vibrate, you know, from the dancing and all that. And sometimes other stuff.”
“Wow. Really? I didn’t see a storefront or an entrance or anything.”
“Well, that’s kind of the point, with a speakeasy. You have to know it’s there.”
Hector fastened on her face as he said this. Giving her his full, charged attention. That friendly gaze had gone narrow, more serious, and instead of pressing the necessary buttons on the dryer he just folded his arms back across his chest and waited for her to reply. And she thought—or really, the thought arrived in her head, unsolicited—Why, he isn’t young at all, is he? His eyes, they’re antiques, they were born old and tanned and heavy. Where did you come from, little old soul? Except those were Ella’s mother’s words. Tucking her into bed, leaning in to kiss her forehead. The smell of Chanel. Where did you come from, little old soul?
She realized he was expecting a reply. She wasn’t sure what to say. Was she supposed to care about the bar next door? Were the residents upset? Was there some kind of petition he wanted her to sign? This was New York; if you couldn’t stand the constant interruption of the city around you, the sirens splitting your ears and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd vomiting outside your window at three in the morning, you packed up and left for the suburbs pretty fast. So what was the deal?
She asked, “Is the noise really bad? The super didn’t say anything. I mean, I’m a pretty sound sleeper. More importantly,” she went on, trying for a lighter note, “will they give us a house discount?”
The chuckle he returned seemed a little too nervous. Broke the strange earnestness between them. He turned to the dryer and pressed his thumb on one of the buttons. It was an old model; the buttons were large and stiff and stuck down when you pushed them. There was a click, a faint buzz of electric engagement, and then the drum began to turn, bang bang bang.
“House discount,” Hector said. “That’s a good one. But sorry, no can do.”
“Bummer. What is it, some kind of secret celebrity hangout?”
“Nope. I mean, no one we would know. It’s more of a—”
The door swung open, hitting Ella in the arm, and a small, dainty girl bounded through behind an old-fashioned wicker laundry basket. Her skin was fresh and peachy, and her hair was the color of organic honey.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”
Ella rubbed her arm. “Fine.”
“No, really. I should’ve looked first. I’m such a klutz!”
“I’m okay, really. Just leaving.”
“You’re the new girl, right?” She put her basket on her hip and stuck out her hand. “I’m Jen. Three C.”
“Hi, Jen. I’m Ella.”
Jen turned to Hector in a whip of honey hair. “Hello up there! Up to no good?”
He spread out his hands. “You know me. Sleep well?”
“All right.” She ruffled his forelock. “I heard you playing.”
“Just for you, babe.”
“Me and all the others. Wait, isn’t that machine done yet? Put my stuff on top, like, an hour ago.”
“My bad. Jumped ahead of you.”
“You what?”
“You snooze, you lose, right?”
Jen smacked him with the wicker basket. “You creep! That is like so wrong! We have a thing here in this building! Where’s the trust?”
“Ow!” Hector said, rubbing his shoulder. “All right! Mea culpa. Won’t happen again.”
Ella spoke up. “Actually, he’s covering for me. It was my laundry.”
“Your laundry?”
“But I put her up to it,” Hector said.
Jen shook her head in sorrow. “I just don’t know what to say. This is so disappointing.”
“I was just trying to be nice.”
“Look,” said Ella, “I’m sorry about the laundry. I owe you one, okay?”
“Oh, I’m not mad at you. It’s this one.” Jen jerked her thumb at Hector. “Watch out. He’s notorious. Definitely can’t be trusted with cute new tenants.”
Ella reached for the door handle. Her stomach hurt, like she’d just taken a fist. “Yeah, um. I’ll just be going now. Nice to meet you both.”
“Ella, wait—”
But Ella pretended not to hear him. Let the door close on notorious Hector and dainty Jen and the four busy washing machines and two busy dryers. The table where you folded your neighbors’ clothes and the wall separating you from some kind of weird, exclusive underground bar with no signage outside.
The mirror that said you were nobody’s cute new tenant. Just the kind of woman who couldn’t keep her husband safe in his own bed.
SATURDAY NIGHTS WERE THE WORST. You could keep yourself busy unpacking all day—and Ella did, until the last box was empty and broken down for recycling, until the last book was on the shelf and the last spoon in the drawer, and only the few pictures needed hanging—but once you opened the shrunken fridge and began to contemplate your few alluring options for dinner, you realized how much you took for granted in marriage.
Not that Ella hadn’t before found herself alone on a Saturday night. Sometimes Patrick was overseas—some Europe junket, or else paying calls on Asia—and sometimes he had client dinners. Sometimes out with the boys. (Anyway, that was the story, which she’d never doubted until now.) But these absences were infrequent enough that she actually—if she was honest with herself—relished the freedom. She might have had dinner with Joanie (at least until Joanie left for Paris) or her aunt and uncle (whom she adored) or even gone down to Washington to stay with her parents.
For the most part, though, she hung out with Patrick. Dinner, movie, TV. Sex. Usually sex. She took pride in keeping the electricity in her marriage. Her husband would never have to saw on the old chestnut that he wasn’t getting any at home now that Ella had a ring on her finger. Oh, no. She almost always said yes, even when she was tired or busy with work. Ella’s father looked eternally on her mother like she was Ginger and Mary Ann all rolled in one—Ella had caught them at it more than once, so embarrassing—and that was her model. That was the marriage she wanted to have. The kind everybody envied. She wanted the radiant, satisfied skin her mother had. The adoring gaze that followed her mother around the house.
Tonight, however, and for all the Saturday nights stretching into the imaginable future, there would be no sex. No cabernet and steak frites at the bistro around the corner. No twilight movie theater, laughing together at the same jokes, hands bumping in the popcorn. Just this half-empty fridge, this leftover baked ziti from the pizza place next to the subway stop. This TV set. These books. This studio apartment, the sprawling, affluent contents of her life compacted back into a single room, as if the past six years had never really occurred, as if they were just some play she had watched, some theme park she had visited, and now she was back in her rightful life.
This clock, ticking steadily into bedtime.
She ate the ziti and washed the dishes. She picked up a book she was supposed to read last year, for that book club she went to for a while, and poured herself a glass of wine. And another. Went to bed at eleven and stared at the dark ceiling. Somewhere in the building, somebody was playing a jazz CD, solo trumpet, Wynton Marsalis or something. Long and lonely and melancholy, rolling up and down the scale like it was reaching for something that didn’t exist.
And then she remembered. She’d left her laundry downstairs.
THE BUILDING WAS IRREDEEMABLY OLD-FASHIONED, even though the paint was fresh and the staircase sturdy, maybe because it seemed to have largely escaped any horrifying postwar renovations or—worse—ersatz period details added back later. When she’d inspected the place last week, Ella had liked that. She wanted something different from the sleek SoHo loft she had just escaped, which they had bought two years ago when Patrick got promoted to managing director and came home with his first really serious bonus, and whatever your preference for traditional design or new, you certainly couldn’t detect the handprints of some visionary, wall-demolishing architect on this place. She loved all the authentic, handmade moldings and the creaky floorboards, the quirky layout and the low-voltage lighting.
Of course, that was during the afternoon, when the winter sun had flooded softly through the old windows and turned the air gentle. Now, at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, Ella felt she was creeping downstairs through some kind of gothic novel. Or maybe that was the wine and the book—In Cold Blood, not the best choice for your lonely Saturday night—and the nocturnal melancholy of discovering your husband was having sex with other women. Or possibly the ziti, which sat unsteadily in Ella’s stomach, like it knew it wasn’t wanted.
And there was something else, something she’d noticed on her first visit. Something that had made her turn to the super and pull out her checkbook and say, I’ll take it. Something vibrant in the air, something that lived inside the walls. Her parents’ house had it. Her first apartment had had it. Her junior-year dorm had had it. The SoHo loft—gutted and cleared out and renovated to the studs from a derelict warehouse, everything old replaced by everything new—had not. Until now, turning the last corner of the stairwell, she hadn’t realized just how dead that apartment was. How she’d missed the company.
So maybe it wasn’t fear that she felt, reaching for the laundry room door. Maybe it wasn’t dread of the unknown, or of Hector’s strange warning about rats and noise from the bar and vibrating walls.
Maybe it was anticipation.
She opened the door.
ACT I (#ulink_bdd6b6be-6984-549c-8468-b7855b54dcf9)
We Meet
(and it’s a doozy)
NEW YORK CITY 1924
1 (#ulink_0ff73ed2-ba9f-5e78-bc9e-d67e7c9b244c)
THERE’S THIS joint on Christopher Street, a joint I’d know like the beat of my own heart, if I happened to have one. They used to call it the Christopher Club, and now it’s just Christopher’s. When you enter through a door in the basement of the grocery next door, you first smell the rotting vegetables and the cat piss, but never worry: all that stink clears up when the cigarettes and the liquor engulf you. And the music. The best jazz south of Ninety-Sixth Street. The bass player’s a good friend of mine. Bruno. I don’t know his last name; nobody does. We don’t deal in surnames unless absolutely necessary.
Now, I don’t inhabit the place every evening—I’m a working girl, you know, and I need my beauty sleep—but as I happen to live on the other side of said grocery, in a tiny room at the back of the fourth floor, I like to drop in from time to time, friendly-like, for a drink and a dance and a smoke and a gossip. As I’m doing now. Right there at the corner table—no, the other corner, next to the music—wearing a black dress and crimson lips and a head of strawberry hair. (The hair’s natural, the lips aren’t.) And that darling rosy-scrubbed black-and-white fellow I’m flirting with, the one who’s taken the trouble to dress like a gentleman? That’s Billy Marshall, my latest. A Princeton boy. You know the type. He’s reading me this poem he’s written in my honor—a real sweetie pie, my Billy-boy—but I’m afraid I’m not listening. A man’s just walked through the door like a prizefighter looking for a prize, the kind of fellow who demands your immediate attention. Square shoulders, bony jaw. Plain gray suit, sharp felt hat. You know the type.
The thing is, you don’t see him around a joint like this, a joint in the Village, long wooden bar and no chandelier, starving artists and starving artists’ models, queers and poets, Jews and Negroes, swank babies like Billy-boy descending southward in search of local color. We haven’t seen a gray suit around here since that stockbroker last year who lost his way back to the IRT station from a Bedford Street brothel on the down-low, if you know what I mean. Where he got the password, God knows. Anyway, this particular suit is cold sober, overcoat over his arm, nose as monochrome as the rest of him. Wouldn’t know a good time if it kissed him on the kisser and unbuttoned his starched white shirt.
Right away, I give the eyebrows to the owner, the man behind the bar—we call him Christopher, nobody knows his real name—and he gives the eyebrows right back, only more in the nature of a question mark. I flick the gaze back to the newcomer. Christopher makes this tiny nod and strolls down the bar, directly in the fellow’s line of sight, and braces two hands on the edge of the counter, like the knots of a terribly thick rope.
“Darling,” says Billy, “are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening, sweetie. Go on.”
By now, the stranger has reached the bar, along a line right down the center of Christopher’s wingspan. He sets one foot on the rail and one elbow on the counter and he asks for something, I can’t hear what. Over the rim of his shoulder, Christopher’s eyebrows glide upward.
“You don’t like it.”
“I adore it! I think it’s awfully clever. And those rhymes. Why, you could have Bruno here set it to music.”
“It’s a sonnet, Gin, an English sonnet. Not a music-hall song.”
“You can make a lot of bread from a music-hall song.”
“Who cares about money?” He seizes my hand on the table. “I care about you, darling. I care about taking you away from all this.”
“And what if I like all this just fine? It sure beats the place I grew up in. Why, a joint like this is paradise compared to back home.”
“You’re too fine and good to be sitting here in this lousy dump. You deserve a better life, out in the country, where you don’t have to lift a finger, where you don’t have to spend eight hours a day in slavery to some lecherous banker, where you don’t have to think about anything so crass as—”
“You know something, Billy-boy? I generally find that people who say they don’t care about money are the exact same people who’ve never had to earn any.”
“You’re right. You’re quite right. And that’s what I want for—”
“Cherub,” I say kindly, returning his hand, “will you excuse me a moment? It seems my company is required at the bar.”
2 (#ulink_7e011961-f133-5429-b188-5bc3a13bd551)
NOW, BEFORE you go forming any ill opinions of me, let me assure you I’ve never taken a cold dime from Billy the Kid. A drink or two, maybe, but no kale. I don’t allow any gentleman to pay for the privilege of my company. I’ve seen too many girls get into hot water that way, and anyway Billy’s such a dear fellow. We met several weeks ago at some uptown party or another—I think Julie Schuyler introduced us, she’s a friend of mine, if you can call it that—and he looked at me and I looked at him, and he had this lovely sheepish clean-eared handsomeness, this scrubbed jaw and pink cheek and full lower lip, this brown eye just waiting for a match to set it smoldering. Lean, straight shoulders and new skin, his shirtfront as white and flat as pure marble, his head tilted forward and his mouth cracked open, his pink tongue fumbling for a greeting. I said, Hello there, I’m Gin, and he said, I’m Billy, and I said, Pleased to meet you, Billy the Kid, emphasis on the pleased, and he just blushed into his blond, curling hair and I fell in love. I took his hand and we danced a bit, and then we went out into the cold Manhattan morning and kissed right there on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-First Street, while the frozen branches of Central Park scratched against the nearby wind, and his lips were exactly as soft and warm as I feared. Later, he asked me if my name was really Gin, and I said no, it was Geneva, but people called me Ginger because of my hair, and Ginger became Gin. His face showed relief. I guess he was afraid I might be a drunk.
3 (#ulink_afdafa4c-02d0-5703-b91f-d95bfb79b972)
UNLIKE BILLY—THAT tall, slender sapling, full of promise—the stranger at the bar is a live oak. Limbs thick, neck like a trunk. Ears planted on each side of his head. His shorn golden-brown hair puts me in mind of a pelt. Next to his elbow, atop the plain black overcoat, his hat contains the perfect curves of a Fifth Avenue haberdashery, the kind that charges you a mint and sends you out a gentleman. Next to his other elbow sits a glass of sweet milk, straight up.
“Evening, Gin.” Christopher nods to the stranger. “Fellow was asking for you.”
I point to the milk. “Make it two, will you?”
Christopher turns away, and I hold out my hand. “Ginger Kelly. I couldn’t help admiring your shoulders. Do you swing from trees?”
“Not since I was ten.” (Voice like a bass drum, beaten by a knotted rope.)
“Crush coconuts between your bare palms?”
“That depends on what you mean by coconuts.” He takes my hand. “Oliver Anson.”
“What a civilized-sounding name. Irish?”
“English.”
“My mistake.”
The milk lands on the counter. Christopher adds a look that asks whether I require any assistance, and I return a look that says, Keep an eye on Billy for me, will you? I lift my glass. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
Clink.
Drink.
The band starts a new piece, drawling, full of blues. Bruno’s bass thrums up and down. The milk is ice-cold and creamy and pure on the tongue, the taste of childhood, and as I study Anson’s face over the rim of the glass, I consider the contrast between his genteel clothes and his rocky, tanned face. His eyes, so dark a blue they are almost without color at all. I can usually take down the measure of a man at first glance—it’s a talent of mine, the way some folks can whip up a soufflé or paint someone’s face—but this one isn’t adding up. A cop doesn’t have the dough to dress like that. A gangster doesn’t have the taste. Anyway, he’s young. Not as young as Billy, but younger than I thought. The few lines on his face are new and kind of faint, as if sketched by a needle. I set down the milk.
“Tell me something, Mr. Anson. Just how did you come to know my name and whereabouts?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might. A girl making her way in the big city can’t be too careful.”
“I quite agree.”
“And you can’t trust a living soul, I’ve found. Always some do-gooder skulking around, you know, the vice patrol, looking to catch a girl out on the town for the crime of having a good time.”
“You think I’m some kind of bull?”
“Now, what kind of question is that? We’re just standing here, drinking our milk like good little boys and girls. Nothing wrong with that.”
He glances at Billy and back again. “Is he yours?”
“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. I don’t believe that’s any of your business.”
“I think he’s about to make it my business.”
So Billy storms up, flushed to the temples, neck pink against his white collar, and inserts himself between me and Anson. Demands to know what the devil he thinks he’s doing. They’re the exact same height, maybe six feet and a hair of the dog, but I believe Billy weighs about half as much. Anson replies to this perfectly legitimate question with the polite tolerance you might lay on a stale doughnut. Says something about having a private word with me.
“Well, you can’t have a private word with her.”
“Can’t I?”
“No. Miss Kelly has nothing to do with you, nothing at all. She’s here with me, do you understand? Minding our own business.”
“I see.” Mr. Anson finishes his milk, lays a dollar bill on the counter. Collects his hat and his overcoat. Nods to me in such a way that you could almost call it a bow. “A pleasure, Miss Kelly.”
“All mine, Mr. Anson.”
He walks away, leaving that whole dollar bill unchanged on the counter, straight up the steps and out the door, and Billy turns to me, all bright and crackly with triumph, the dear young thing.
“Well! I sure as hell showed him, didn’t I?”
4 (#ulink_36d58332-b42c-5980-8aef-eb19da848891)
THE POWDER room at the back of Christopher’s isn’t much to speak of, and I’ve seen a crapper or two in my time. I mean, it’s a basement of a basement. What are you going to do? There’s about enough room to swing a cat, if you’re the kind of damned brute who swings cats, and your cat belongs to a pygmy tribe. The tiles are black and white, the mirror’s chipped, the sink bears the stains of a thousand furtive cigarettes. The toilet’s liable to flush you down whole, if you’re not careful. In the corner, there’s a narrow ventilation shaft—I use the term loosely—leading to the stinking back garden of the next-door grocery, and I am presently contemplating said shaft as a means of possible escape. Not from poor Billy—whose bravery in the face of Tarzan has just about melted down the sides of that place in my chest where the heart’s supposed to lie—but from the nearby army of New York’s finest, who, I feel certain, await only a flicker of Tarzan’s eyelashes to storm the building in thunderbolts of moral righteousness.
Now, if I stand on the toilet, the pig might just fly. I’ve got the figure for it, thanks to poverty and cigarettes. On the other hand, who wants to die in a ventilation shaft?
You may be surprised to hear this, but when I first arrived on Manhattan Island two years ago, wearing my heart on my sleeve and ten additional pounds around my hips, I had never once sipped the nectar of juniper nor breathed the leaf of tobacco. It’s true! My dear mother had scraped and saved to send me to a nice Catholic school fifty miles away, and I’ll be damned if those nuns didn’t have their wicked way with me. A year of college didn’t improve matters, what with the Wagnerian dorm mother and the scarcity of men. So there I stood in the middle of Pennsylvania Station, in a hat and a sweet pink coat, clutching the tiny valise that contained my all, just like every starlet who’s ever set foot in her land of dreams, and I thought I had made a terrible mistake, that I would never belong in this sea of stink and vice, this hive of determined bees lining their cells with honey. And then I tasted the honey, honey, and I started to understand what New York City was all about. Hallelujah. I started to glimpse my place in the hive, how each tiny insect contributed her mite of pollen, how grand it was to live in a hive like this at all, even if your cell measured one inch square and lacked proper ventilation, even if you had to pawn your favorite shoes each month to pay the milkman for a quart of milk, even if—well, you get the idea. The point of Manhattan is that you occupy a cell in the hive at all. That you belong. That you have your seat at the Christopher Club bar, and that seat, if you’re clever, can propel you from a typing pool downtown to a swank party uptown to the front of a camera in a tatty Village studio, so any man with a nickel in his pocket can admire the tilt of your tits.
And I’ll be damned if I’m ready to give up my seat just yet.
I set one foot on the lid of the toilet. Brace my hand on the wall. Hoist my bones upward and upward to the hole in the ceiling, fill my lungs with the reek of sewage, and then, of course, comes the exact second the boots clamor down the hallway and the door flies open, and the powder room fills with gentlemen of blue suits and billy clubs, unamused by my predicament.
5 (#ulink_ed920d81-ad94-52c5-a4ce-cc33e08f7952)
ABOUT THOSE nuns.
Maybe I was a little unfair, a moment ago. There’s nothing like a good convent education, as I often tell my gentleman friends, and even my lady ones. Your knuckles may suffer and your knees may burn, but the poetry and the multiplication tables are yours for eternity. Along with the guilt, but who doesn’t need a little shame from time to time, to keep her on the straight and narrow? Anyway, there was this one sister, Sister Esme, who loved me best, and to prove it she rapped my knuckles the hardest and sent me to penance the longest. When I turned seventeen, she called me into her office—about as inviting as an Assyrian tomb—and gave me a beautiful Bible, in which she had painstakingly marked all the passages she thought relevant to my character, such as it was. You can imagine. She told me that of all the girls who had filtered through her classroom, I was the most unruly, the smartest-mouthed, the least tractable, the most irreligious and argumentative, and she fully expected to hear great things from me. She also said (assuming a terribly serious mien) that she had one single piece of advice for me, which was this: I owed confession only to God. Not to my fellow man, not to my instructors, not even to my parents (this accompanied by a significant slant to the eyebrows). And most especially (her voice grew passionate) not to any person, howsoever persuasive, howsoever threatening, belonging to the judiciary branch of the government, whether local, state, or federal. My conscience belonged to my Maker, and to Him alone. Did I understand?
Well, naturally I didn’t. Lord Almighty, I was only seventeen! I had so little experience of the world outside the walls of that school. But—in the usual way of childhood advice—Sister Esme’s words return to me with new meaning as I slouch upon a metal bench in my cell at the Sixth Precinct, cheek by miserable jowl with the other female patrons of the Christopher Club that January midnight.
Now, I don’t mean to startle you, but I’ve never landed in the pokey until tonight, though you might say the visit’s overdue. I guess the place is about what I expected. We’re a tawdry lot, sunk into nervy, silent boredom. Dotty’s chewing her nails; Muriel’s worrying a loop of sequins on her sleeve, such as it is. One girl, gaunt and ravishing, leans cross-armed against the damp concrete wall, staring right through the bars to the tomato-faced policeman on the chair outside. She’s too beautiful for him, and he knows it. Looks everywhere but her. I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her around. She’s wearing a shimmering silver dress, ending in a fringe, and her arms are white and bare and cold. Someone once told me she was Christopher’s girl, and I guess it might be true. Nobody ever bothers her for a smoke and a dance, for example. She sits by herself most nights at the end of the bar, staying up past bedtime, sipping cocktail after cocktail, trailing a never-ending cigarette from her never-ending fingers, disguising the color of her eyes behind ribbons of smoldering kohl. The kohl’s now smudged, but the smolder remains. Liable to ignite the poor cop’s tomato head any second. She gave her name as Millicent Merriwether—I pay close attention to these details, see—but then none of us told the booking rookie our genuine monikers. Where’s the fun in that? And I’ll be damned if this vamp is a Millie.
There’s a clock on the wall, above Tomato-Head’s cap. A damned slow clock, if you ask me. For the past half an hour, I’ve amused myself in priming my nerves for every twitch of the minute hand, moving us sixty seconds farther into the morning, and each time I’m early. Each time I teeter on the brink, unable to breathe, thinking, Now! and Now! and Now! until finally the stinking hand moves. As amusements go, it’s a real gas. Millie the Vamp turns her head and regards me from the corner of one pitying eye. I shrug and resume my study. By the time three o’clock jumps on my spinal cord without any kind of notice from our hosts, without any sign at all that anyone’s left alive in the rest of the Sixth Precinct station house, I’ve had it. I call out to Tomato-Head.
“I don’t guess a girl could bum a cigarette, if she asks nicely?”
He makes this startling movement. Clutches his cap. Turns from tomato to raspberry.
“No? I guess rules are rules.” I lift my hands and stretch, an act that creates an interesting effect on my décolletage, don’t you know. “I don’t mean to be a nuisance, officer, but I do have a breakfast appointment I’d rather not miss. And this fellow happens to prefer me scrubbed up and smiling, if you know what I mean.”
Tomato-Head looks to the ceiling for relief.
“Now, don’t be embarrassed. We’re just a mess of girls, here, the nicest girls in the world. It’s a shame, the way they turn honest girls into criminals these days, don’t you think?”
“Oh, shut your flapper, Gin,” Dotty says crossly. “It ain’t his fault.”
“No, of course not. Poor little dear. He’s just doing his job. Why, I’ll bet he’s seen the inside of a juice joint or two himself, when he’s not on duty. He doesn’t look like teetotal to me, no sir. He looks like the kind of fellow who enjoys a nice time on the town, likes to make a little whoopee—”
“Says you.”
“Don’t you think? A friendly-faced cop like that? I’ll bet he’s on our side.”
“Him?”
“Sure. Because why? Because it’s the first time the joint’s been raided, isn’t it? And Christopher’s been around since the start of the Dark Ages. So—”
“Oh, give it up.”
“So I say there’s a rat. A rat in the house. Somebody squealed, didn’t they? Hmm, officer?”
Tomato-Head chews his lips and looks ashamed.
“You see? Someone ratted Christopher out. I’ll bet it’s someone on the inside, too. I’ll bet—”
Millie turns so fast, her fringed hem takes a minute to catch up. “Be quiet, Ginger, for God’s sake. You don’t know a thing.”
In all the excitement, my legs have come uncrossed. I sit back against the wall and lift the right pole back over the left. Slide my arms back together over my cold chest. Bounce my shoe a little. Bounce, bounce. “Seems I’m right, then. The question is who.”
She narrows her eyes until they just about disappear between the charcoal rims. Turns away and says, into thin air, “No. The question is whom.”
“La-de-da. Someone’s got an education.”
“So do you, Ginger. I’m just not ashamed to show it.”
There’s the littlest emphasis on the word Ginger, which those of you born with fire in your hair will recognize. I consider the back of Millie’s neck, and the exact tender spot I’d stick a needle, if she were one of those voodoo dolls they sell in seedy little Harlem shops. Behind my shoulders, the wall is cold and rough and damp, and the air smells of mildew. Our guard yanks a packet of cheap cigarettes from his breast pocket and starts a smoke. The brief illumination of the match scorches my eyes. Three oh four. Ticktock. As the familiar scent of tobacco drifts across my teeth, the eyelids start to droop. The vision of Millie’s pale, smooth neck starts to blur. Not ashamed to show it, Ginger. Not ashamed, Ginger. Ginger. GINGER!
An elbow cracks my ribs.
“Ginger! Jesus! Wake up, will you?”
I straighten off somebody’s shoulder. Adjust my jaw. Blink my eyes. Test my bones for doneness. You know how it is.
“Ginger Kelly?” A man’s voice, a man from Brooklyn or someplace.
“I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“Tell that to the judge,” Brooklyn replies, and the next thing I know the keys jingle-jangle, the cell clangs open, the handcuffs go snap around my wrists, and let me tell you, when a girl hears that much metal rattling around in her neighborhood, she’d better start sending up every prayer the nuns ever taught her, sister, because the devil’s at the door and the Lord don’t care.
6 (#ulink_bfacee73-5100-5b23-b1c5-838b9c4c09b1)
MY THOUGHTS turn to Billy as this uniformed meathead drags me down the corridor, past this cell and that cell, contents murky and unknown. I wonder where they put the poor boy, whether they let him off because he’s a Marshall, whether he’s frantic about me now. Of course he is. That’s the kind of fellow he is. Dear Billy-boy. I guess I shouldn’t feel this kind of regret; after all, I didn’t exactly lead him blindfolded down the path of debauchery. Debauchery found him before I did. That first kiss wasn’t his first, and he knew one end of a martini glass from the other. Still. But for me, he might have spent the evening in the convivial atmosphere of his eating club, idly debating such innocent matters as the blackballing of unsuitable freshers and the prospects of the Tiger baseball team for the season upcoming, instead of getting himself arrested for consumption of Gin.
But no lovesick voice wails my name—either real or assumed—as I stumble past the cages of the Sixth Precinct station house, and when we reach the stairs at the end of the corridor I conclude I’m simply sola, perduta, abbandonata. The old story. The stairs lead rightward up to the booking desk, but Officer Brooklyn turns left instead, opening a metal door with a metal key, and the sharp garbage breath of a late January alleyway strikes my nose like a billy club.
“Say! What’s the big idea?” I demand, but Brooklyn takes no notice, just tightens his paw around my bare upper arm and hauls me up the steps to alley level, where a black sedan rattles and coughs next to the sidewalk, rear door open, exhaust clouding the atmosphere in a great gasoline fog.
And you’ll forgive me for hoping that the dear, familiar head of my Billy-boy will pop free from the smoke of that backseat—the final death of my native optimism is still some weeks away—but there’s only room for two on the leather bench, and Brooklyn, pushing me inside, clambers in right behind me. Go, he grunts, and the tires squeal and the car lurches from the curb, and my forehead hits the front seat, and nobody says Sorry or even You all right? Nobody offers me a cigarette or an overcoat. We just zigzag down the frozen, bitter streets of the Village, straightening out at Fourteenth Street, while my teeth chatter and my brain aches, and a thousand smart remarks rise to my lips. I bite them all back, of course, because for one thing I can tell Officer Brooklyn hasn’t got the intellect to appreciate them, and for another—well, anyway. I merely observe aloud that we seem to be headed to the Hudson River piers—obvious enough—and Brooklyn grunts something or other that might mean Yes or else Shut your yap, and silence reoccupies the cab, except for the hum of the engine and the steam of our breath. I sit back and make myself small against the cold. When we slam to a stop outside a rusty tenement at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, I permit myself a tick of triumph. You can hear the shouts of the stevedores, the busy clang of ocean liners obtaining coal and stores. If I’m not mistaken, those three black-tipped funnels over there, finding the moon above the triangular tips of the Chelsea docks, belong to the great RMS Majestic herself. Bound for England tomorrow morning. Lucky bitch.
But for now. The tenement. That’s my real concern, because Officer Brooklyn is opening the door and dragging me across the seat to the crumbling sidewalk outside, and those sallow brick walls aren’t looking any more inviting on second glance. An old saloon occupies the ground floor, windows all boarded up, and a few piles of hardened gray slush decorate the flagstones outside. My pretty shoes slide right out from under me. I don’t think Brooklyn even notices; he just carries my weight on the slab of his right arm as I glissade across the granite. Behind us sounds the imperative whistle-chug of a New York Central steam engine, hauling freight up the middle of Tenth Avenue. He doesn’t notice that, either. Just bangs on the door next to the boarded-up saloon until it opens.
“Oh, no,” I say. “Not on your life.”
Brooklyn turns his head at last. He’s not a pretty fellow, our Brooklyn, all jaw and no forehead, eyes like a pair of walnuts begging for a nutcracker. Shoulders about to burst from a plain uniform-type navy overcoat. The raw color of his nose and cheeks suggests either excessive cold or excessive whiskey, though you can’t rule out both. Or even possibly some kind of emotion. Those walnut eyes goggle almost out of his skull, and who can blame him? I’m about half his size, a third his weight. My hands are cuffed at the back, and I can’t feel my toes.
“I bite, you know,” I add.
Brooklyn shakes his head and pulls me through the doorway. A sign flashes by, one of those brass plaques, sort of tarnished, but you don’t stop to read plaques when someone’s hauling you into a tenement to commit the Lord only knows what foul crimes on your person. Your mind spins, your stomach lurches. Your eyes fasten instead on inconsequential details, like the rough woolen texture of Brooklyn’s sleeve, and the overlapping pattern of scuffs on his brown shoes, and the worn-out sway in the center of each step, right where your foot goes, and the cold, moldy smell of the joint. You think, Damn it, this might be my last sight on earth, why can’t I find something beautiful? As if it matters. And all those taxis and fancy private automobiles will be lining up in the dawn smoke, one by one, to disgorge humanity onto the gangplanks of the goddamned Majestic, and no one will notice the item in the newspapers the next day, about a woman found dead in a Tenth Avenue tenement: some kind of prostitute, the detectives believe, and from the state of the corpse she must have put up a good fight.
Because I will, by God. Put up a good fight. I’m putting up a fight right now, kicking and biting, deboning my limbs such that I slither momentarily from the shelf of Brooklyn’s arm, only to be scooped up again and hauled into oblivion. But there’s nothing to bite except wool and glove, nothing to kick that actually notices it’s been kicked. We swing around the landing and up another flight, and I’m breathless now, panting and jabbering, while the stained walls slide past, the color of misery, lurid bare electric bulbs, linoleum hallway, door thrown open by muscular hand, Gin thrown inside, toe catching on edge of Oriental rug, crash splat. Voice like a hurricane. “What the devil, Bulow? She’s not a sack of grain.”
“She’s a damned hellcat. Bit my cheek.”
“I expect you deserved it.”
Have you ever donned a narrow dress and metal handcuffs, laid yourself out flat on a beery Oriental rug, and then tried to rise? Well. It’s not as easy as it sounds, believe me. All the dignity of an eel on a hook. Still. I’ve just about got my knees under me when a pair of hands clamps around the joints of my shoulders and lifts me straight into the air and back down on my feet. Spins me around, demands a key from Brooklyn. Brooklyn delivers, though his face suggests he’d rather swallow it whole. Seems he’s right, I did bite his cheek. What do you know. Fresh, new blood trickles to his jaw. The handcuffs loosen. Brooklyn steps back and folds his arms across his three-foot chest. I hate to boast, but he does look sort of mauled. Nasty scratch on the side of his neck. I stretch my wrists and wriggle my nerveless fingers and turn to face his boss, whose face bears down on mine like a mountainside. Not that I’m the kind of girl who backs down from mountains. Not me.
I tap his chin with a schoolmarm finger.
“Tarzan. I had a hunch you were up to no good.”
7 (#ulink_046257ac-0cd2-55dc-8a14-3b16c913eff6)
THE FIRST thing Tarzan does is return to his desk and press some kind of button. Then he rests one haunch on the desk, folds his hands together, and asks me if I want coffee. I say why not. Door opens, feminine voice makes inquiry. Coffee for Miss Kelly, please. Door closes. No word from Brooklyn; maybe he’s gone.
Tarzan gestures stage left. “Please sit down, Miss Kelly. I expect you’re exhausted.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather stand.”
“You’re certain?”
“Quite. Is this your office? I love what you’ve done with the place. All those padded armchairs and old masters. And that thrilling modern wallpaper! Or have you got a leak?”
“It’s a place of employment, not a parlor.”
“Oh, employment! I’m glad you mentioned it. What exactly is your line of work, Mr. Tarzan?”
“My name is Anson.”
“Mr. Anson.”
“And my job, put simply, is to intercept the illegal transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors.”
“Lord Almighty. You’re a Revenue agent.”
He shrugs.
“Well, that’s a relief. I can confidently say that you’ve got the wrong girl, Agent Anson. I’m more in the consumption line, if you know what I mean. Transportation and sale is not my concern.”
“Not at the moment, maybe,” he says, “but it will be.”
“Now, see. That’s just exactly what I didn’t want you to say.”
“Your choice, of course. But I do hope you’ll help us. Good, here’s the coffee.”
Thank the Lord for the pause that ensues. Allows me to haul in my breath, corral the runaway gallop of my heartbeat. Wipe my palms on my sequins while everyone’s turned to the poor young secretary in the navy suit and cream blouse who carries in the coffee on an old enamel tray, the kind your parents might have brought out to entertain callers in a more civilized age. As it turns out, Brooklyn hasn’t left the room after all. He’s taken a chair near the door, a poor spindly thing that shudders under his weight. (The chair, I mean, not the door.) I take my cup—cream, one lump—and carry it to the seat I refused earlier, which looks as if it were bought cheap from the shuttered saloon downstairs.
“Are you cold, Miss Kelly?” Anson asks as the door closes behind the minion.
“Not at all.”
“You look blue.”
“I’m just mad.”
He removes his jacket, walks around behind me, swings the old thing over my shoulders. I consider shrugging it off, just on principle, but a jacket like that trumps any principle you care to possess. Wholesome silk lining, sensuous warmth, scent of shaving soap. Is there anything more delicious than a gentleman’s wool coat cloaked around your shoulders? Even when the gentleman’s not yours.
“Why are you angry?” he asks, returning to the desk.
“Let me count the ways.”
He casts a cool look in Brooklyn’s direction. “I apologize for my methods.”
“As you should. I’m bruised all over. I’d show you where, if I weren’t a lady.”
“But aside from the physical harm—”
“Oh, aside from little old that—”
“I had no choice. I couldn’t just ask you to come of your own free will. You wouldn’t have agreed, for one thing, and frankly I needed a little of what the financiers call leverage.”
“Leverage?”
He places a thumb next to the corner of his mouth and brushes away an imaginary something-or-other. “Mr. Marshall.”
“Billy! What have you done with Billy?”
“He’s not in any danger. Not at the moment, anyway.”
“You’ve got no right. He’s as innocent as a lamb.”
“A lamb. And you, Miss Kelly? Are you innocent as a lamb?”
“I have the feeling you already know the answer to that. I’m as innocent as the next girl, I guess.”
Anson gives the ceiling some mature consideration.
“Now, see here, Mr. Anson. We both know you’ve got no business persecuting a working girl like me for taking a sip or two of this and that. I’m not the crook. It’s those gangsters out there on the Lincoln Highway in the middle of the night, it’s that hillbilly with a dozen stills blowing off the roof of his barn—”
Snap go the fingers of Anson’s right hand. “Is that so, Miss Kelly? Hillbillies? What do you know about hillbillies?”
I could swear the lightbulb flickers in its socket above my head. But maybe it’s just the lightbulb going off inside my head, the Jesus Mary, Gin, you dumb cluck! hollering up from my unconscious mind: the part of your head that does all your best thinking, everybody says. Too late now. Outside the window, New York lies nice and quiet, the dark night speckled with various pinpricks of human activity, of people not giving a damn what happens here in this room at this particular hour of the twenty-four. A few feet away, Anson’s granite face stares and stares, no expression whatsoever, calm as you please.
Just a word. But what a word. Hillbillies, Miss Kelly. What do you know about hillbillies?
“Nothing,” I lie.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nope.”
“Because you sounded, just now, like a woman who knows something.”
“I’m a working girl, Mr. Anson. A New York working girl. I get my news like everyone else. The morning paper. You can learn a lot about the world from the morning paper, but it doesn’t mean you know one single mite more than the next girl.”
Anson shifts position, leaning back against the desk, both hands curled around the edge. It’s the kind of angle that displays the girth of his quadriceps to their absolute maximus, such that you imagine they might rip free from all that civilized wool and sock you in the stomach. Absent a coat, his shirtsleeves show up like snow in the gray, dark room. I would say there’s something colorless about him altogether, like he’s put on a mask of ice: that good, thick Adirondack ice they haul down from those lakes upstate. You could pick and pick and never draw blood. A fine pair, we are. The coffee cup sits untouched on his left side, sending up steam.
“But every New York working girl comes from somewhere, doesn’t she, Miss Kelly?” He lifts one hand away from the desk and gestures to the window. “Nobody’s born here.”
“That’s not true. A lot of girls are born here.”
“Not you. You’re a country girl, aren’t you? The far end of Maryland, isn’t that right? Small town called River Junction, I believe.”
At this point, the edges of the room go a little dark. I’d like to take a sip of coffee—poor thing’s getting cold, sitting there in my lap like that—but I’m afraid my hand will tremble. So I just clench the handle with my right thumb and forefinger, while I clench the saucer with the left. Sew my lips into a smile. Focus my vision on the tip of Anson’s oversized nose. The cleft at the tip of his damned chin, chipped from ice.
He moves. Picks up his coffee with a steady hand. Sips, savors. Savors what, I don’t know. It’s just black coffee, nothing else. You have to be a brute to drink coffee like that, a brute as bitter as the brew you’re swallowing.
“Tell me, Miss Kelly,” he says, setting down the cup in the saucer and resuming his pose against the desk, legs crossed at the ankles, not a care in the world, “when was the last time you saw your stepfather?”
8 (#ulink_db07a0b4-9b47-54bc-a563-fc7c6716b91d)
AS IT so happens, I can name the exact hour I last saw my stepfather, though I’m not going to inform Special Agent Oliver Anson of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of that fact. I’m not going to inform Anson of anything, see, because the word informer, where I come from, carries about the same ugly weight of blasphemy as the word for a man who engages in a certain intimate act with his nearest maternal relation, from time to time. (Yes, that word.) So what I’m about to say remains right here betwixt you and me, understand? Nobody likes a rat.
The hour was dawn. End of August, nineteen hundred and twenty. Hot as the dickens. Yours truly was up early, gathering the eggs from the miserable henhouse out back, while the sunlight crept down the mountainside and the warm mist coated the grass. In another week, I was supposed to be heading back to college, and by God I should have been counting down the seconds. Not that I especially loved college and the sneering razor-nosed girls who inhabited the joint, oh no. You see, by the time of that burning August of 1920, River Junction had taken on all the aspects of an earthly perdition for me. That’s why I woke up early—not because the eggs needed gathering, although they did, but because nobody else was up. You could stand there in the middle of the chicken coop and watch the creeping of the sun, the stir of the mist, the slow, deliberate greening of the landscape, and your only company was the hens. The birds whistling good morning from the branches of a nearby birch. The damp earth smelling of loam and chicken shit. You know the feeling. Your feet planted firm in the center of all Creation.
Until he turned up, anyway.
He. Him. My mother’s husband. Name of Dennis, but everybody calls him Duke. Duke Kelly. The dear soul was so kind as to bequeath me his surname when he married my mother, and I do believe he’s been aiming to collect the debt in installments ever since.
Now, first and foremost, you have to understand that everybody in River Junction loves Duke. Loves him! He’s not the mayor, but he’s the next closest thing: the mayor’s best pal. Friendly fellow, every brick of him mortared with charm. Dresses in clean, neat clothes; brushes back his dark, curling mane with just the right dollop of peppermint hair oil. You’d like him too, if you happened to be stopping in River Junction for a cup of coffee at the depot café, and he happened to be sitting at the next table drinking his own cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette he’d rolled himself right then. He would strike up a conversation with you, ask you where you were headed, tell you that’s a right nice-looking car you got out there, or else if your car’s a jalopy, remark on your right nice-looking wife. Offer you a cigarette and a light. If you needed directions, say, he would sit down with you and your map and show you the exact best route to your destination, where to pick up a couple gallons of gas if you need them, and you would leave town thinking that River Junction was an awful nice place, nice people, that’s what’s grand about America, don’t you think, small towns like River Junction and the folks who live there. Salt of the earth. And I’m not saying you’d be wrong.
So I was standing in the chicken coop, as I said, basket of eggs hooked over my elbow, armpits a little damp already even though the sun hadn’t yet touched us, there in the holler of two mountains that constitutes the geographic boundaries of River Junction. I heard the soft tread of footsteps on wet grass, the wiry squeak of the chicken coop door. My stomach fell.
“Hello there, Geneva Rose,” he said. “You’s up awful early this morning.”
“Eggs wanted gathering.”
“That so?”
“Every morning.”
“You need a hand, maybe?”
“No, thanks.”
“Lemme give you a hand.”
“I said no thanks. I like to stand out by myself, in the morning.”
“Well, now. That ain’t too friendly, honey.”
I shrugged.
“Why don’t you just turn about and look at me, Geneva Rose? Turn about and say good morning to your old daddy.”
“You ain’t my daddy,” I said, but I turned around anyway, kind of slow, so I might fix my face in just the right expression as I went. Stiff and stony, so he couldn’t see what I was thinking. Couldn’t tell the revulsion coiling around my guts at the sight of his shining hair, his smooth, tanned skin, his blue eyes like the color of summer. His full lips stretched in a smile, just wide enough that you could see the tips of his teeth, golden with tobacco, right upper incisor chipped at the corner from a fall out the saloon door four years back. Or that was the story, anyway. I never was there when it happened.
“You ain’t got no call to speak to me like that, Geneva Rose Kelly. When I reared you up like you was my own. Sent you off to school like your mama wanted. Never asked no questions. Never treated you no different.”
Well, I could dissect the falsehoods in that speech one by one, the way they taught me in college: how to disassemble somebody’s argument like you might disassemble a chicken for frying. Not that any of the other girls at college had ever fried a chicken, my goodness no, let alone plucked it and pieced it and dipped it in flour. But I didn’t pick those words apart. Not out loud. Dear reader, I am no idiot.
“And I appreciate that kindness, Duke. I really do. But I’m not your daughter, and that’s a fact. And I never was any good at pretending things that aren’t true.”
“Just listen to you, baby girl. Sounding like some kind-a lady. Like one-a them grammar books or something. You learn to talk that way at college? You set to thinking you’re too good for your old daddy?”
“Course not.”
“Because that’s how it sounds to me, Geneva Rose.”
“Well, that ain’t how it is.”
“Now, that’s better.” He nodded and reached for my cheek. “That’s more like my baby girl. You was but two years old when I laid eyes on you. When your mama come back home from New York City. Prettiest baby I ever seen.”
I turned my head away. Took a step back. The smell of his hair oil stung my nostrils. The smell of his shaving soap. He wore a blue checked shirt, same color as his eyes, tucked into dungarees held high by plain black suspenders. Sweat already beading at his temples. Lips red and damp.
“Don’t you go a-larking off, baby girl,” he crooned. “Ain’t nobody up around here excepting you and me. Your mama’s still abed.”
“She won’t be long.”
“Sure she will, sugar. She don’t rise herself up till noon sometimes. Just a-drinking and a-staring at the ceiling, your mama.”
His breath smelled like cigarettes. Wee dram of brown skee, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. Liquid courage, to use another word for it, which maybe explained what he was doing there in that chicken coop, in the thick August dawn while my mother slept in her bed, one week less a day before I should have been leaving for my second year of college.
“Baby girl,” he said. “Don’t you be shy, now. I’ll treat you right. You know I will. I treat everybody right that treats me right.”
“I think you best be fixing to get back inside that house, Duke Kelly,” I said. Edging to the right. Clear line for the frail wire-screen door of the coop. The patch of sun on the opposite slope was falling fast now. The air turning to a foggy gold. “You best fix to get back inside before somebody sees you out here.”
“Who’s a-going-a see us? Ain’t nobody up. Not on a hot old morning like this-un.”
I kept on staring at his nose without looking, imagining some kind of shade between our two faces, I guess, some kind of blind, so I wouldn’t be giving myself away. Another rightward step.
“Johnnie’s up, I reckon. Johnnie’s always up early.”
“Johnnie don’t know from nothing. Now just you stop yourself a-moving about like that, Geneva Rose. Let me get a look at you. See how you filled out this summer. Almost a woman grown now, ain’t you? Just almost.”
So I froze up, and you would, too, if you’d heard his voice like that, like the purr of an African cat, chilling your young bones from the inside out, worrying down your spine. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who hears that bass snarl of malice in Duke Kelly’s voice. Everybody else just thinks he’s a real nice fellow. Anyway, I froze up, paralysis of fear, muscles all stuck in their joints, such that I didn’t even flinch when Duke’s big hand came to rest on the collar of my dress.
“That’s better,” he said. “That’s my good baby girl.”
I waited and waited while that hand crawled all over my bosom, pinching and squeezing. While that voice crawled over my ears. I waited until he came in close with his mouth open, panting hot on my face, cheeks smudged red, and then I drove my fist into his stomach hard as I could, knocking his rank skee breath right from his belly, and then I ran. Ran straight through the door of that chicken coop, ripping the wire, ripping my skin, and then I did a stupid thing. See, I should have gone into the house, where Mama and the boys lay asleep, where Johnnie sat eating his porridge at the kitchen table, spoon by spoon with a drop of molasses, but I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran for the creek instead, dumb bunny as I was back then, ran for the creek and the old fishing hole where we used to spend our summer afternoons, me and the boys, when I was home from school. Of course, the creek was screened by willows and thick with skeeters, and nobody came down there at that time of day, nobody at all, and you couldn’t hear nobody talking or screaming from down there, either, on account of the trees and the way the creek makes a holler betwixt two sloping banks, see, into which all these sounds find themselves trapped like crawdads at the bottom of a wooden barrel.
So why did I make for the creek? God knows. Just a young, dumb bunny as I was back then. Not thinking straight.
9 (#ulink_1023f05b-7ade-54d8-bd16-2ff7f8e155b4)
ANYWAY. I’M nobody’s bunny any longer. What I tell that nice special revenue agent is this: “I’m afraid I don’t recollect exactly, Mr. Anson. Why do you ask?”
“You’ve had no relations at all with your family since you left River Junction in the summer of 1920?”
“Say. That’s a personal question.”
He shrugs those shoulders of his. Checks his wristwatch. Sips coffee, sighs, turns his head to the window as if to make certain that Manhattan still exists out there, rattling and shouting and drinking and fornicating. A delicate glow passes across the bridge of that hefty nose. Headlights of some nocturnal automobile.
“Have all night, do you?” I say.
“If necessary.”
“My goodness. Is old Duke so important as that?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you give me a hint?”
He turns back to me. “Do I need to give you a hint? You seem like a clever woman, Miss Kelly. I’m sure you’ve already guessed the nature of my interest in your stepfather.”
“I haven’t laid eyes on River Junction in nearly three and a half years, Mr. Anson. If my stepfather’s set himself up in a little business since then, taking advantage of the difference between what one half of the country wants and what the other half doesn’t want them to get, why, I don’t know a thing about it.”
Anson places his cup and saucer back on the desk and walks across the few yards of thready Oriental carpet to where I sit in my chair, all folded shut like a clam at low tide. The silk lining over my shoulders responds with an electric ripple. Or maybe that’s the nerves underneath. Each button of Anson’s plain waistcoat is done right up, not a stitch loose, not a single flaw in the weave of fine gray wool, and the reason I can report these details is because he’s come to rest about a foot away, not even that. I do expect I can tell you the brand of starch stiffening the cuffs of his sleeves. From this angle, his head looks like a prehistoric skull, all bone.
He sinks to one knee, right there next to my chair, and lays his right forearm over his thigh. His eyes are larger than I thought, more charcoal than blue, the color of winter.
“Not a little business, Miss Kelly. Your stepfather has built a network of distilleries across Allegany County and beyond, and nobody will say a word against him. I don’t know if they love the man or if they’re plain scared, or if they’re on the take.”
“All three, I do expect.”
“In two years, the Bureau hasn’t been able to make a dent in his business, not a single arrest. A few months ago, two of our best men disappeared out there.”
“My condolences. What’s the world coming to, when a Prohi can’t just take a little lettuce in his back pocket and keep his blood on the inside?”
“My agents don’t accept bribes, Miss Kelly.”
“You don’t say? Because a little birdie tells me they’d be the first.”
“They’re good men with families. Wives and children.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have a wife and children, Mr. Anson?”
A slow blink, like a reptile. “That’s a personal question, Miss Kelly.”
“Oh, I see! I’m the one who’s supposed to spill all the beans in this room, isn’t that right, while you get to keep your beans to yourself. Seems you’ve got a nice little racket of your own, Anson. A nice little racket.”
He breathes in slow, regular drafts from a pair of gargantuan lungs. Fresh coffee on his breath and nothing else, not tobacco nor liquor nor money, just good clean virtue.
“You see? It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? There was this painter I used to sleep with, when I first came to New York. A real wisenheimer. He taught me about a lot of things. He taught me all about perspective. How you can change the essence of an object, the soul of it, you can change this thing entirely just by looking on it some different way. But you know what? I’ll bet you already knew that. Something tells me you know a lot about art, don’t you, Mr. Anson? Expensive art, the kind they hang in museums and fancy Fifth Avenue apartments. You know from perspective, I’ll bet.”
“I understand the concept.”
“You think you’re the good guy, don’t you, Mr. Anson? You think you’re some kind of honest-to-goodness knight, riding into River Junction on your fine white charger to do away with that dastardly villain with the twirling mustache. Cover yourself with medals. Laurels on your head, damsels on your arm. I wonder what you’d say if you knew how it looks from where I’m sitting.”
“So tell me.”
I turn a little on my hip on that chair, so we’re face-to-face, terribly intimate, the way you turn to your lover in bed. Prop my elbow on the back of the chair. Drape one leg over the other. His knee’s no more than an inch from my own.
“Why, you look exactly the same, you and my stepfather. You take me by surprise. Haul me to your lair. Corner me where I can’t strike back. Hold someone dear over my head, just to make sure I play along. You and Duke, you just want to get a little something out of me, whether I like it or not, and you don’t ever mean to pay me back for my trouble.”
Well, if I was hoping to get a little flicker out of him, some sign of impact, forget it. You might as well chip emotion from a glacier. Just those wintry eyes, staring at me. Those fingers hanging downward from his thigh, thick and knobbled. Scar on his chin. On his forehead. Lashes black and plentiful. The room throbs around us, the city throbs around the room. A block or two away, the boats skate silently across the Hudson River, hauling in booze, hauling in contraband everything in an unstoppable swarm, like the skeeters back home, too small and quick and clever for you to swat.
Without warning, the fingers flex. A few quick strikes, like the twitches of a dying man.
“I have neither wife nor children, Miss Kelly,” he says. “Your turn.”
“All right. Here’s my turn: Duke Kelly’s a cold-blooded bastard, and I’ll turn myself in at the nearest precinct before I trundle back to River Junction like some poor sucker and help you catch him.”
“I see. And what if you’re not the poor sucker heading for jail?”
“Then I don’t give a damn either way.”
“Are you sure about that? Isn’t there someone in this town you care about?” He leans forward an inch or two and says, low and slow, “Someone even now enjoying the hospitality of the New York City Police Department.”
“You mean Billy.”
He doesn’t answer that. Why should he? Just returns my stare. Exchanges my breath for his. I’ll say one thing: he’s got a handsome set of eyelashes, the only soft thing about him. So light at the tips, I want to dust them with my pinky finger, ever so gently. For some reason, this idea soothes the pulse at the base of my neck, the one that has a nervous tendency to gallop off like a runaway horse at the mention of my stepfather’s name. The ringing clears from my eardrums. Thoughts fall back into place. Bright, crisp, useful little thoughts.
“Now, Mr. Anson. We both know you can’t make a thing stick to my Billy-boy. Don’t you know what family he belongs to? The Marshalls?”
There is a slight pause. “I have an idea.”
“Pillars of society. Patrons of every charity between here and Albany. Pals with every pol at every poker table in town. All Billy has to do is make a telephone call to dear old Pater and he’s a free man. Why, I’ll bet you a bottle of genuine Dewar’s he’s a free man already. Trundling on back to Princeton, New Jersey, this minute, in the backseat of Pater’s Packard limousine. What do you say to that?”
Anson shoots straight to the ceiling. Plants his hands on his hips. Ignites the nerves behind his eyeballs. Parts his lips like he’s got a lot to say to that, sister, and none of it good.
But the seconds tick on, one after another, and nothing comes out from between those two poised lips. Just the furious whir of second thoughts in the tumblers of his brain. Then the slow unstiffening of the muscles of his face, not what you’d call movement, not even a change of expression—he hasn’t got any of those, remember?—but a kind of deflation, a loosening of the skin. Maybe his shoulders sink a little, I don’t know. But the eyes stay bright.
“I guess I’d say you’re probably right about that.”
“So you got nothing.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“In fact, I do believe this entire hullaballoo constitutes nothing more than a bluff on your part, doesn’t it, Mr. Anson? Be honest, now. Just a noisy show to try and scare a poor working girl who’s done nothing worse tonight than order herself a glass of honest sweet milk from the wrong establishment.”
Long, lazy pause. Like the ocean holding its breath before the turn of the tide. And then. So quiet, it’s almost a whisper:
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
I rise slowly, untangling my legs as I go, allowing my skirt to fall back into place and my limbs to lengthen. I cross my hands behind my back and keep on rising, right up to my tiptoes, so my nose nearly brushes the brute end of Mr. Anson’s chin.
“Why, if I wanted to raise a big stink, I could take this whole affair straight to the top, couldn’t I? I could show off all my bruises. Weep and wring my little old hands. If Billy were to hear of this, for example …” I shrug my shoulders, such that Mr. Anson’s silk-lined jacked slides across my skin.
He stares down his nose and mutters, “Good old Billy.”
“Yes. So what do you say we come to a little arrangement, Mr. Anson? A little proposal of my own.”
“What kind of arrangement, Miss Kelly?”
“So simple, even an honest fellow like you can understand it. It’s like this. You take me home this minute, and I promise not to give Billy Marshall your name.”
10 (#ulink_b01f0f44-55eb-5ee1-808b-bf6974ea004e)
ANSON DRIVES me back to Christopher Street himself. He doesn’t say much, just busies himself with the matter of negotiating the narrow, cold streets, the patches of slush and garbage. The buildings are tense and shuttered, as if laid under siege. The brakes squeal faintly in front of the Italian grocery.
“What have you done with Christopher?” I ask.
“Christopher?”
I jerk my head. “The owner.”
Anson’s thumbs meet at the top of the steering wheel. “I expect he’ll have to go up in front of a judge. Pay a fine.”
“And what about me? Do I have to see a judge?”
“No. You’re free. For now, anyway.”
I look over his shoulder, through the window. It’s begun to snow: the minute, tender flakes at the vanguard. “You know he’ll be back in business tomorrow night. A week at the most.”
“I know that. It’s not him I’m concerned with.”
“You can’t stop any of it. You’ll die trying.”
“Maybe I will.”
“A fellow wants a drink, he’s going to have it.”
Anson lifts his hands from the wheel and sets the brake. Reaches inside the pocket of his overcoat and produces a calling card.
“You’ll telephone me if you change your mind?”
“If I change my mind? Why, sure.”
“Take the card, then.”
“I don’t need to.” I tap my forehead.
“Now, that’s funny. An hour ago you could scarcely remember your own name. Now you’ve got a photographic memory.”
“When I need it.”
He presses the card into my hand. “Take it anyway. In case someone knocks you on the head and gives you a spell of amnesia.”
“Does that happen often in your line of work?”
“All the time.”
I pinch the wee board between my two fingers and study it again. The plain Roman letters. Oliver Anson. Exchange and number. By the time I’m finished, Anson’s opened the door of the automobile and strode around the hood to let me out.
“Thanks. I can find my way from here.”
“I’m escorting you inside, Miss Kelly.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Statistically speaking, it’s the most dangerous time of night.”
“No kidding? Then I guess I must be statistically dead by now.”
He shuts the car door behind me and straightens. His gaze falls on my chin, which sticks right out there into the Manhattan night, at an angle those nuns used to abhor.
“All right. Good night, Miss Kelly. Thank you for your time.”
“Don’t mention it.”
My shoes slip and clatter on the paving stones. The headlights flare against the glitter of my dress, against the tiny whir of snowflakes. I reach the sidewalk and the door. Pull out my latchkey, like any modern, independent girl in New York City. The snow coats the stoop like a layer of dust, and mine are the first footprints. The knob turns, and I remember something.
“Anson! Your jacket.”
“Keep it.”
I shrug the garment from my shoulders and trip back down across the sidewalk to where Anson stands next to the driver’s-side door, in his overcoat and a plaid muffler, probably cashmere wool, like the girls at college used to wear, only sleeker. Hat pulled down low over that slanting forehead. The car’s parked right in the middle of two street lamps, nice and dark, so I can’t see his face all that well.
I say, “No, you take it. Or else you’ll be coming back for it, won’t you? And that wouldn’t do at all.”
He takes the jacket and folds it over his arm, while the snow stings my bare skin and lands in my hair. And you know something? For a single crazy instant, I imagine myself asking him upstairs. You know. For a cup of coffee or something. Chase away the winter.
Anson nods, like he’s imagining the same thing. His hand reaches out to land on my shoulder, and the leather feels wet on my skin, cold: the fresh, sweet meltwater of New York snowflakes.
“Now get inside before you freeze to death.”
11 (#ulink_a745d2e1-3d18-51b1-8a65-9189c4319d59)
I SUPPOSE YOU imagine, after a night like that, I’d be looking forward to a long winter’s nap in my own clean bed. And I am. I might sleep all February, if you let me.
But I can’t, you see. Because in the first place, I’m shortly due at a typing pool in the underwriting department of Sterling Bates & Company on the corner of Wall and Broad, come snow or come revenue agents; and second of all, the light’s shining forth from underneath my door.
And it turns out, Special Agent Anson was wrong, after all.
12 (#ulink_79544c83-4aa2-5a8b-a0e0-2e2f088753e9)
DARLING!”
“Billy! Wh—” (Word ends in oomph against the lapels of Billy’s dinner jacket.)
“Darling. I’ve been worried sick.” (Into my hair.) “Where have you been? I telephoned the precinct, I telephoned everyone I could think of—”
“You telephoned what?” (Extracting self from lapels.)
“Dearest love.” He takes my face between his hands and kisses my mouth. His breath smells of cigarettes and Scotch whiskey and anxiety. “Did they hurt you? If anyone hurt you—”
“Nobody hurt me.”
“That agent. The agent who called in the raid.”
“What about him?”
“He didn’t try anything, did he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Billy holds me out at arm’s length—which is to say, about the length of the entire room—and examines my eyes for truth. “But you were away all night.”
“That sometimes happens in a police raid.”
“You look exhausted.”
“Of course I’m exhausted. I’ve just spent the night in jail. And you’re supposed to be in New Jersey by now. Don’t you have some lecture or something tomorrow? Some professor requiring your presence?”
He blinks. Exhibits a sort of disheveled aspect altogether, collar loose and tie undone, hair spiking madly into his forehead. Waistcoat all unbuttoned. A fine few lines have grown in around the corners of his eyes, pointing out the reckless black throb of the pupils. “My God. Lectures? Who gives a damn about college?”
“Why, your parents, I’ll bet. For one thing.”
“My parents?”
“Yes. Those. The ones picking up the check for the whole racket, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Ginger. Darling. How can you possibly think I’d leave you to rot in some stinking jail while I—I—slink back to college like some damned little rat and listen to some damned little professor—as if that matters, next to you—”
“Of course it matters! I’m just some dame you know in the city, you silly boy. I can take care of myself.”
“You shouldn’t have to. You wouldn’t, if you would just allow me—”
“Billy.” I stroke his cheeks a little, the way you might stroke a Labrador puppy to calm him down. How I worship those cheeks. He’s got the loveliest bones up there, high and sturdy and dusted with pink on most occasions, as now. Hasn’t got much beard to speak of—shaves but once a day—and the skin’s as tender as any velvet, curving deliciously downward to his jaw and his plump raspberry mouth, presently pursed with worry. The room is cold, and he’s so warm. Scintillating with distress. “How awfully touching. You sweet, dear thing. But you have a future, remember? A nice, bright, shining future. And futures like yours require a college education.”
“I don’t want any kind of future that doesn’t have you in it, Gin. That’s the kind of shining future for me.”
“Oh, Billy. Go home, sweetie. Go home and get some sleep.”
“It’s too late to go home.” He kisses me again, more softly. Hands sliding down my shoulders to the small of my back. Voice running lower, like an engine changing gears. “Hudson ferries’ve been in port for hours. And I don’t want to sleep.”
“I mean uptown. Your parents’ place.”
“They’ll ask too many questions if I turn up now. Four o’clock in the morning. And I’ll wake up the baby.”
“You know, for such a tender sprout, you’re awfully persuasive, Billy-boy.”
“My uncle’s a lawyer, remember?”
“Is he a good one?”
Billy laughs into the hollow behind my ear. “Not really.”
“What about you? Do you want to be a lawyer?”
“I don’t care what I am, Gin darling. Not right now. I’m just so glad to see you. Glad you’re safe and free. Let’s not go down to that club anymore, all right? Let’s find a place somewhere, place of our own—”
“Now, Billy.”
“Aw, I mean it this time. You don’t know what it’s like, riding that stinking ferry back to New Jersey, knowing what kind of stew I’m leaving you in. I can’t stand it any longer.” (He’s unbuttoning my dress by now, nimble long aristocratic fingers, touching the base of my spine in the way that makes me shiver and forget things.) “Wherever you like, Gin. Upstate or down south or Timbucktoo. We can get married and raise a bunch of kids.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“And what are we going to live on, Billy-boy? Moonshine?”
“I’ll find something.”
The dress is history. He picks me up and sort of crashes backward down on the bed. The mattress heaves and settles. Releases the musty lavender smell of old sheets. Dear Billy-boy. Bones like a sapling. Sweet lips kissing the sense right out of my skin. The night unwinds and spills around us. The snowflakes hurl against the window. I’ve got no more fight in me. I kick off my shoes and loop my arms around his safe, warm neck and say all right, whatever you like, sweetie pie. Take me away.
And he does.
13 (#ulink_7d782ce1-ea6c-51ec-be43-8524e76a3dd5)
A WORD ABOUT the few square feet of bedroom I call home.
I’m sure you’ve heard about those nice, respectable, wallpapered boardinghouses for professional young ladies. The ones uptown, where anxious matrons keep watch over fragile female reputations, and gentleman callers are to be kept strictly downstairs.
This isn’t one of those boardinghouses, I’m afraid. Although the landlady does her best, she really does! Mealtimes regular and nourishing, visiting hours established if not enforced. Sheets changed once a week, and possibly even washed during that interval, though certainly not ironed. But the hard truth is you can’t attract the same kind of boarder on Christopher Street as you can on, say, East Sixty-Ninth Street, and a boardinghouse is only as respectable as the boarders it contains, wouldn’t you say? I suppose the speakeasy next door doesn’t exactly elevate the tone, either. Anyway, to preserve appearances, Billy always climbs up the fire escape and enters through a window I keep unlatched (nothing to steal, after all), and he tips Mrs. Washington a dollar a visit because he’s a gentleman. I believe he enjoys the adventure.
He certainly doesn’t enjoy the furniture. Have you ever tried to entertain a lover on a single bed? Fosters intimacy, I’ll say that.
14 (#ulink_28b3feb4-c7f0-506f-8da2-fdedef259b73)
I MENTION ALL this because I don’t want you to misunderstand when I describe how, upon waking later that morning, I find myself enjoined in a lovers’ knot of baroque configuration: pinned to the sheets by Billy Marshall’s heavy right thigh across the two of mine, my mouth encompassed by his shoulder, our limbs snarled together. His damp lips dangle along my ear, and his hair shadows my eyes in a kind of brilliantine curtain. The tempo of his respiration suggests utmost satisfaction. (As well it should.) The tempo of mine suggests—well, otherwise.
I heave Billy’s body aside and sit straight up, gasping for air, gasping for freedom. The air’s dark but not black, and the illumination behind the thin calico curtain warns of a snow-streaked dawn. Next to my hip, Billy continues in exquisite slumber, embracing my shingle of a pillow. The familiar dimensions settle around me: walls, window, chair, washstand, bureau. Not much space between them. I reach for my kimono from the hook on the wall and slither over Billy’s corpse to stand on the cold floor. It’s bare. I have a horror of dirt.
We did not take long to express our physical longing, Billy and I, in the pit of a New York winter’s night. Short and brisk and effective. My nerves still course from the aftermath, and when I peer at my watch, laid out on the bureau in a perfect vertical line next to Billy’s silk top hat, I discover there’s a good reason for that: I have slept only two hours. Dear Miss Atkins at Sterling Bates will expect me at my typewriter at nine o’clock, mind sharp and fingers swift. I cast another gaze at Billy. White skin glowing in the gray sunrise. Mouth parted and smiling at the corner.
I wrap myself in the kimono and lift the extra blanket from the foot of the bed. If I’m lucky, I’ll wake again before Billy does, so he doesn’t catch me in the old paisley armchair, all by myself.
15 (#ulink_1a54dab1-3e4e-52f9-b741-a30aca74cc2e)
BUT WHEN my eyes open again, the bed contains no Billy. No strewn clothes, no shining silk top hat perched on the bureau, no handmade leather shoes tumbled on the floor. No sign of life whatsoever.
16 (#ulink_0dbdc4b1-5d01-5f59-8ca1-ab6acd6ad62f)
HE’S LEFT a note. He’s a gentleman, after all. I won’t quote it here; it’s too intimate. To summarize: he had hoped, after such a night between us, after such a declaration on his part, after such kisses and so on and so forth. You get the general idea. And I have disappointed him. I have kept my soul to myself, while taking all of his. He is going back to New Jersey, and wishes my future happiness with all his heart. Billy likes to feel things, you see. He likes to feel them deeply, to experience life at its absolute rippingest, to italicize every thought and emotion that rises inside him. After some consideration—that is to say, gnashing of teeth and rending of hair and scribbling of yet more midnight letters—he’ll be back for more. And I’ll snatch him in my arms and whisper my thanks to the Lord. In the meantime, I’m due at the corner of Wall and Broad in twenty minutes.
I expect you’re disappointed. A typing pool. You figured I was employed in some more extravagant capacity, didn’t you? Something glamorous and immoral. And it’s true, I do have a small but picturesque sideline in the immoral. Immorality pays so much better. (About which, more later.) But my mama’s example rusts before me as a cautionary tale, and since Sterling Bates had the goodness to hire me two years ago, as a pink-coated college dropout with eight nimble fingers and a pair of opposable thumbs, I find I can’t quite let poor Miss Atkins down. So many girls let her down. Anyway, who can resist the allure of a regular paycheck?
My room contains no closet, properly speaking. I keep my dresses and suits on the hooks on the wall, neatly pressed, and my shirts folded in order in the second drawer of the bureau. Stockings and girdles and brassieres up top. I wash myself with the water from the pitcher and apply my navy suit, my white shirt, my dark stockings and sensible shoes. My small, neat hat over my shining hair. No cosmetics, not even a smear of lip rouge. Company orders. Banks. They’ve awfully conservative.
Downstairs, Mrs. Washington has laid out breakfast. Some of the other girls are there, Betty and Jane and Betty the Second, drinking coffee and spooning porridge. Nobody speaks. The newspaper hasn’t been touched. The room contains its usual atmosphere of java and drugstore perfume. I pour myself a cup of coffee and spread a layer of jam over a slice of cold toasted bread. Pick up the paper and take in the headlines. Izzy and Moe led a raid the other night, fancy joint up on Fifty-Second Street. Eighty-six arrested, including forty-one ladies. (The paper drops the term ladies with conspicuous irony.) No mention of doings on Christopher Street, but I suppose Special Agent Anson charged in and ordered his milk well after deadline for the early morning edition. Anyway, I haven’t got time to read past page one. I stuff the crust in my mouth, gulp the last of the coffee, blow a good-bye kiss in the direction of my sisters (I’m getting the silent treatment these days because of Billy, and I can’t say I blame them), and as I whirl around the corner, thrusting arms in coat sleeves, fingers in mittens, I run smack into Mrs. Washington herself, wiping her hands on an apron.
“Oh! Miss Kelly. There you are at last.”
“Mrs. Washington. Can’t stop. Late for work!”
“But, Miss Kelly—”
“I’ll be back at six!”
“—telegram?”
Halt. Hand on doorknob. Skin prickling beneath muffler. Mouth going dry. I think, That door surely does want painting, doesn’t it?
“Telegram?” I repeat.
“Arrived last night. Put it under your door. Didn’t you see? Western Union.”
“When?”
“Oh, about eight o’clock or so. I hope it’s not bad—”
Well, I brush right past Mrs. Washington’s hopes and on up the stairs, first flight second flight third flight, panting, fumbling for latchkey in pocket, there it is, jiggle jiggle, door squeaks open.
Floor’s bare. Of course. I would have noticed a damned yellow Western Union envelope on my nice clean floor, wouldn’t I? Even enrobed by loveydovey. So Billy must have picked it up for me and put it somewhere. Forgotten to mention that fact, in the heat of things. Dear Billy-boy. Never would open the envelope and peek inside, because he’s a gentleman. The snow’s turned to sleet, clicking hurriedly against the window glass. The room’s in perfect order, every last meager object occupying its ordained place. Where would Billy put a Western Union envelope not intended for his own eyes? The bureau.
But no splash of yellow interrupts the nice clean surface of my battered thirdhand bureau. Just the mirror and the hairbrush and the vanity tray. Washstand is likewise pristine. Heart goes thump thump, pushing aside my ribs. Hand clenches mittens. Where the devil, Billy? Where the devil did you put that telegram? Darling, love-struck Billy, consumed by worry, all of twenty years old and not thinking straight. Books lined up in rigid order on the wall shelf. Bed all made, flat as a millpond. Above my head, someone thumps across the attic floor and slams a door shut, and the furniture rattles gently.
Rattles. Gently.
Thump thump thump goes my neighbor down the stairs, around the corner of the landing, down the next flight. The washbowl clinks its porcelain clink. The way it does in the pit of a New York winter’s night, when you are expressing your carnal need for another human being, no matter how regardful you are of the walls and furniture and sleeping boarders.
I sink to my hands and knees, and there it is, wedged upright between the wall and the bureau. A thin yellow envelope. Yank bureau away from the wall a couple inches, stick arm in gap. Miss Geneva Kelly, 11 Christopher Street, New York City. And I am correct about Billy Marshall’s principles. The glue’s undisturbed.
For the smallest instant, I just sit there, back against the wall, legs splayed. Envelope pinched between my fingers. Black ink staring back. My name. The large Roman capitals WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM. As if I didn’t know.
But no little black stars. Nobody’s dead. That’s something, isn’t it?
I stick my index finger in the crease and rip.
1924 JAN 31 PM 6 41
MISS GENEVA KELLY
11 CHRISTOPHER STREET NEW YORK CITY
MAMA SICK STOP ASKING FOR YOU STOP COME HOME EARLIEST STOP LOVE JOHNNIE
New York City, 1998 (#ulink_f7d5581d-ed8e-5d76-9d29-f2b2d315f9f9)
ELLA ALWAYS hated how, when you went to a cocktail party in Manhattan, or met someone over drinks or dinner or brunch with friends, the first question was always: So what do you do?
Meaning, your job.
She understood why, of course. New York was the city of dreams; it was where you went to chase those dreams, if you wanted them badly enough. In New York, of all places, your career defined you; people understood you on the basis of what you did for a living. If your dream was money, you worked on Wall Street. (Ella had yet to meet any investment banker who pursued his career because of a single-minded childhood desire to help companies meet their capital needs.) If your dream was also money, but you weren’t so good with numbers, you worked for a law firm. If your dream was money and you were okay at numbers but were only willing to work eighty hours a week instead of a hundred, you went into management consulting. If your dream was … well, come to think of it, Ella had yet to meet anyone in New York whose dream wasn’t money. But they were there. She saw them in restaurants and at Starbucks and on street corners. The actors and singers and writers and dancers and musicians and models. Whose dreams were also money, but in service to some other, more complicated dream.
As for Ella. She wasn’t sure why she came to New York, really. She always dreaded that question—What do you do?—because the answer was so boring. I’m an accountant. Cue the eyes shifting around the room, seeking an opportunity elsewhere. The dull, automatic Uh-huh as she explained that she was actually a forensic accountant, parachuting from dead company to dead company, dissecting the carcass to figure out what had gone wrong and who was to blame. Which was kind of like solving a complicated murder mystery, except with numbers. But by then, her new acquaintance wasn’t really listening. The word accountant turned a switch in people’s brains, so that anything else you said just made a garbled Blah bla-bla-blah in the air, like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
Whatever. Why did Ella come to New York? She came to New York because she got a job offer after college from a large Manhattan accounting firm, with health insurance and a 401(k) and a starting salary generous enough to afford her very own tiny walk-up apartment on the Upper West Side, close to the park, not too many crack vials on the stairs outside and—most importantly—no roommate to ask her how her day went and eat all her leftover ziti in the fridge. End of story. End of dream.
Of course, once she met Patrick, she thought she knew what had brought her to Manhattan. Fate! She was fated to meet Patrick there, fated to fall in love with him. She’d been so close to taking a job with that firm in Boston—and really, Boston was a better fit for her, felt more like home to her—and she hadn’t. So she was meant to be a New Yorker. Meant to be Patrick’s wife. Her dream was love.
THANK GOD, THEN, SHE HAD a backup dream. Her job. Sure, she’d veered off the partner track long ago, once she realized that making partner basically meant spending all your time trying to win new business and manage client expectations. But she liked what she did. In the first place, every few months, she got assigned to a new carcass, and if Tolstoy had been a forensic accountant, he would have said that thriving companies were all alike, but each company failed in its own way. Usually because somebody was doing something illegal.
This was especially true in the financial services industry, in which Ella had ended up specializing, partly because she worked from the New York office and partly because she ended up knowing Wall Street so intimately: the inevitable result of marrying someone who worked there. So many scoundrels, so much greedy ingenuity. (That was the second reason she liked her job. Matching wits against all those greedy, scoundrelly minds.) So she looked forward to being called into a partner’s office at the start of a new gig. You never knew where you might get sent, or why.
Today in particular. She’d been on the beach for four weeks now, waiting for a new assignment. Doing routine internal business—PowerPoint slides for business pitches, interviewing college students, that kind of thing—that left far too much of her intellect free to wallow in the forensic analysis of her failed marriage. She preferred numbers. So orderly, so incapable of deceit. She stared at the family photo on the credenza behind Travis’s desk—kind of artsy, black and white, silver Tiffany frame, smiling wife and clean-cut twin boys of maybe five or six years, wearing white polo shirts and chinos—and wondered, for the first time, if Travis had ever cheated on them.
Until three weeks ago, she would have said no. Of course not. Travis was a solid, decent guy, not the cheating type at all. Never made a pass at her. Never treated the PAs with anything other than professional courtesy. Profoundly boring middle-aged haircut. But then, three weeks ago, she would have said the same thing about Patrick. Earnest, romantic. Loved his mom. They’d been trying for a baby for almost a year, a baby Patrick really wanted. And then—
“—get in a taxi now?”
“I’m sorry. Lost my train of thought. Taxi where?”
“Is everything okay, Ella?”
“Sure! Fine. Just need another cup of coffee, I think.”
Travis stared at her and spoke slowly, patiently, like he probably spoke to his twins when they weren’t paying attention. That was the kind of guy he was. Never lost his cool. Just like Patrick. “To Wall Street, Ella. Corner of Broad. You’ll be working right at the bank’s headquarters this time.”
“Oh. Right.” Ella knew better than to ask which bank. Instead, she glanced down at the spiral-bound briefing book on her lap, which lay unopened, navy blue cover flat over an inch-thick stack of white paper, held shut by two remarkably tensile, white-rimmed thumbs.
The title seared her eyeballs.
STERLING BATES INC.
MUNICIPAL BOND DEPARTMENT
“Ella? Everything okay?”
“Fine!”
“There’s no issue here, is there? Conflict of interest? Because this is a sensitive project, like I said. Some big names involved. And the whole thing could blow up on us, depending on what we find, which is why we want you on the team. We need our best people, and we need them at their best. We can’t afford a single mistake on this. Got to have your head in the game. Are we clear, here?”
Ella laid her left hand flat on the surface of the briefing book, obscuring the cutout white rectangle of black block text.
“Absolutely clear,” she said.
ELLA’S CELL PHONE VIBRATED AT a quarter to midnight, while she lay flat on the folding table in the laundry room, listening to the sounds from the other side of the wall.
She picked up the phone and looked at the caller ID. Set it down again. The table buzzed beneath her back, at soothing, regular intervals, before lapsing back into stillness. Immediately after it stopped, Ella felt the familiar twinge of guilt. Imagined Patrick flipping his own phone closed, staring despondently at the reclaimed-wood floor in the living room or the tight, golden sisal weave in the bedroom. Or, just as easily, the industrial carpet in his twenty-ninth-floor office at Sterling Bates.
He called every day, sometimes twice. He also e-mailed, not as frequently. Most of those messages sat unopened in her inbox, but not all. Last week, the morning after she met Hector and Jen and came down to the laundry room in the middle of the night, she had such a terrible insomnia hangover at work, she actually forgot she was separated from her husband, forgot what had happened the last time she saw him, and clicked on his name. Automatic response. Started reading before she could help herself.
I AM SO SORRY. I’ll keep saying it, over and over, until you believe me. If you could just see what a wreck I am right now. I know I have a problem. I’m getting help now. I just want to see you and try to explain and apologize. I swear to God it will never, ever happen again. I love you. I love our marriage. You are the most important thing in my world. Please—
She’d clicked away to a spreadsheet. Looked down at her keyboard and tried to breathe. Sipped some coffee while her heartbeat rippled her silk blouse and her head ached and her stomach swam.
Do not reply, she’d told herself. Do not reply.
She’d sent back the flower deliveries that arrived daily at Aunt Viv’s apartment, each one more fragrant and costly than the last. She’d filed the cards and notes in the circular. She’d let her cell phone vibrate into voice mail. She’d restrained her mouse from clicking on any one of the e-mails, until now. She hadn’t even told him her new address. She knew better. There wasn’t an argument Patrick couldn’t win, a deal he couldn’t close. All he needed was a foot in the door.
The phone buzzed again. This time she turned it off entirely and concentrated instead on the music drifting through the walls, a jazz tune of exuberant syncopation, in which a trumpet and a bass and a clarinet chased each other in dizzying circles, making her think—God knew why—of forest animals. That was it. Scurrying up and down trees. This was real jazz, not the junk they played in tourist traps. Sound, bluesy, inventive jazz, and the patrons knew it. They laughed and chattered and danced—Hector was right, the vibration of heels sometimes rattled the floor—and while Ella couldn’t distinguish any particular voice, she was starting to feel like she knew them, these people, communing by night in a Greenwich Village basement. Hiding from the rest of the world, experiencing this elemental music in the shared marrow of their bones.
The first night, she had listened for maybe an hour, standing the whole time, not moving a muscle for fear she might lose. Like the sound would dissolve if she reached out to touch it, or even to approach the gray cinder-block wall that separated her from them. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the table, and the sight of her own mesmerization startled her. Eyes soft and lips round. If the image were of anyone else, she’d have said it was the look of someone in love. When she turned at last and climbed the stairs, five long prewar flights back to her apartment, she went to bed and fell right asleep to the pensive, delicate notes of a piano.
And she knew that she hadn’t chosen this apartment, after all. The apartment had chosen her.
THE MUSIC NEXT DOOR WAS already having its effect. Her brain settled into a comfortable trance; she wasn’t ready for sleep yet, but she was close. The images shifting in and out of focus behind her eyes, the scenes and ideas, they weren’t the frightful thoughts about Patrick—about Patrick and other women—about her vast, unfamiliar future—about the once-sturdy milestones now scattered about that future like bowling pins—but about other things. People she didn’t know. A champagne bottle tottering on a sofa, next to a man’s black tuxedo leg. Another man, playing a nimble clarinet, except he’s not a stranger, he’s someone you know, and you’re trying to tell him something. Now driving a narrow, tree-bordered highway while a sunset burns behind you. (Somehow Ella knew that Manhattan lay between her and that sunset, though she couldn’t say why.) Sitting down for a drink at a bar, where you know the bartender; you’re commiserating about something. The colors, the colors are so beautiful. A rich, red-streaked mahogany. Gold something. The taste of salt.
Time to go to bed now, Ella. You’ve had your fill. Jazz and conversation. She lifted her head and rose to her elbows, groggy, jostling the cell phone so that it crashed to the floor. She leaned over the edge of the table and reached to the floor, but the phone lay just beyond the tips of her fingers, and for some reason she didn’t want to get down from the table altogether, which was the logical solution, but to snag the phone from her current position, and while she was attempting this awkward maneuver, some woman next door started to scream bloody murder. The music broke up. Ella, startled, fell right off the table to the gray linoleum floor.
For several seconds, she didn’t do anything. Just listened in shock to the sound of that screaming woman, the long, excruciating rip of vocal cords, the bang of furniture turning over. Or was that a gunshot? A man shouted something terse, and the screaming stopped.
Ella rose on her hands and knees. Her heartbeat crashed in her ears; her arms shook. Somewhere in her chest, a gash opened up, as if someone had taken a knife and sliced right down the center of her sternum.
She braced her hands on the table and staggered to her feet. Spots broke out before her eyes, and she realized she wasn’t breathing, that her terror and the downright physical pain assaulting her had frozen her rib cage. Breathe, she whispered. Forced her lungs to act. The cavity inside to expand—painfully—and contract.
On the other side of the wall, silence had fallen. Not a sound, not a note. She thought, I have to call the police. She picked up her phone, which was blank and dark, and pressed the power button.
The light came on. She flipped it open. No bars. No bars, when there had been three or four a moment ago.
Go upstairs, she thought. Go see if anyone needs help.
She turned around, still clutching her phone, waiting for it to find a signal, and ran for the laundry room door. Up the dark staircase, around the corner, down the dim hallway to the front door. She flung the door open and ran down the steps to the wet sidewalk. The drizzle fell softly on her hair and nose and hands; the smell of rotting garbage lay in the air, though the sanitation pickup had come yesterday and the pavement was clear. She wrapped her fingers around the railing that surrounded the basement next door. Not a sound, not a light, not a single sign that anyone lived there, let alone ran an exclusive jazz club into the small morning hours.
“Hello?” she called. “Anyone there?”
No reply. Ella became conscious of all the windows stacked up around her, the curious New York eyes behind them. On the other side of the street, a pair of men walked briskly, heads bent under the drizzle. Probably glancing her way and thinking she was some kind of crazy, some kind of loony, out this late in her bathrobe and slippers, maybe locked herself out, maybe tossed out by her jealous boyfriend. A taxi turned the corner of Bedford and crawled down the street, between the rows of parked cars.
She tried again, a little more loudly. “Does someone need help? Can I call the police?”
Ella knew she was dancing along a fine, narrow line. Seven or eight million people crammed into one city with any number of wackos and crack-heads, you had to look out for each other. On the other hand, you also had to know when to mind your own business and walk on, walk on. Let people take care of their own. Let the secrets stay secret, the hidden stay hidden. Lest you find your own business ripped open and exposed to the world.
The taxi’s headlights flashed by. The street lay quiet around her. She turned away from the railing and went back up the steps, and that was when she realized that the two strangers were right about one thing.
She’d run straight out of the building without her key.
“CAN I MAKE YOU A cup of coffee or something?” Hector asked as they climbed the stairs.
Ella opened her mouth to decline. “Sure,” she heard herself say. “I mean, no. It’s so late.”
“No worries.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up, buzzing you like that.”
“Like I said, no worries. I wasn’t asleep.”
“It was such a stupid thing to do.”
Hector stopped, forcing her to turn around on the narrow stairs and look at him. “Ella, has anyone ever told you that you apologize too much? It’s no big deal. Everyone gets locked out sometime. You buzz your neighbor. Your neighbor lets you in. It’s the code. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now,” he said, prodding her in the small of her back, “you get on up there. I’m going to make coffee. You can join me or not.”
She resumed climbing. “Okay.”
“Okay, you’ll join me?”
“No point wasting good coffee.”
“I also have a bottle of good Kentucky bourbon, if that works better for you.”
“Do I look like I could use a shot of bourbon?”
He chuckled behind her. “Ella, you don’t take a shot of bourbon. You drink it from a glass, nice and slow. With or without ice. You take your time and savor it.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“And yes, by the way. You do look like you could use a glass of bourbon. Didn’t I warn you about going down to that laundry room at night?”
“Yes.”
“And did you listen?”
“Obviously not.”
They’d reached the last landing, on the fifth floor. Ella hadn’t been up this far; she’d glanced, over her shoulder, just before she fit the key in her lock. Just out of curiosity, of course, and not because she was hoping for a glimpse of Hector leaving his apartment, Hector entering his apartment, beautiful Hector taking a pizza delivery in his boxer shorts. But she’d never climbed that last flight of stairs. Nothing up there but Hector’s pad. He didn’t even have a letter after his apartment number; it was just apt 5 on the list of buttons in the vestibule.
His door lay at the end of a short hall, where the stairwell met the wall. He slipped past her and reached inside his pocket. A furious scratching started up on the other side of the door, like something was trying to dig a hole.
“Do you have a dog?” Ella asked.
“That would be Nellie. Vicious attack animal. Watch out.”
Hector opened the door, and a brown-and-white blur shot through the crack and hurled itself into his legs, licking and whimpering, making small, delighted yaps like the bark of a seal. “Nellie! Nellie, babe. There you are. Who’s a good girl? Whoa, take it easy, babe, only been away five minutes, you big numbskull. Down, Nellie. Mind your manners. Look, we got a guest.”
The dog turned—a King Charles spaniel, Ella saw—and unleashed another fusillade on Ella’s knees.
“Get down, Nellie. Jeez. I’m sorry, it’s like she loves everybody. Hope you’re a dog person.”
Ella bent down and stroked Nellie’s long ears, like a pair of brown corn-silk tassels. Angled her face so that the desperate kisses landed just to the left of her mouth, instead of square on the lips. “I totally am a dog person,” she said. “Nellie as in Nell Gwyn?”
“Very good, Sherlock. You’re the only one who’s picked that up.”
“I love history. Kind of funny, actually. My full name’s Eleanor, too. How old is she?”
“Four.” He crouched down next to Ella and put his hand on the spaniel’s wriggling back. “She was my mom’s dog. We got her a puppy to cheer her up, before her final round of chemo.”
“So you’re a very special dog, aren’t you, Nellie?” Ella watched her twist about and return to Hector, calmer now, snuggling her nose into the corner of his elbow.
“Very special.” He straightened and pushed the door fully open. “After you. Yeah, you, too, Nellie. Come on. Don’t give me the puppy eyes, babe. We both know you already had your walk. Shoo. In you go. Show Ella inside. Atta girl.”
The first thing Ella noticed inside Hector’s apartment was the piano, a full-size grand Steinway that stood before the row of three windows overlooking the street. The lid was closed, and a thick plaid blanket covered the entirety of the case. A brass instrument lay on the lid’s edge. Ella stepped closer and saw it was a trumpet.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re a musician.”
“Guilty. Hope it doesn’t bother you. I try to keep it muted late at night, but luckily the other residents actually like hearing my stuff, for some strange reason.”
Ella turned. Hector was already in the kitchen area, opening a cabinet door while Nellie circled his feet. He was wearing a short-sleeved gray T-shirt and sweatpants, his dark hair strewn carelessly back from his face, looking like a canine early in the era of domestication. “Wait. Is that you? Playing at night?”
“Damn. Is it bothering you?”
“No, not at all. You’re amazing. I thought it was—well, coming from downstairs.”
Hector set down a bottle, half-full of amber liquid, and a bag of coffee. “What’ll it be, Ella? Uppers or downers?”
She crossed her arms. “So I have to confess something. I’ve never drunk bourbon before.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“Then I kind of think you should give it a try. Not that I’m pushing you in any one direction. You probably have to go to work in a few hours, right?”
“True. But I’m really, really not looking forward to it. So …?”
“So … bourbon?”
“What the hell.”
“Atta girl.” He unscrewed the lid and walked toward her. “First, you have to smell it.”
“Like wine?”
“Naw. Nothing so snobby as that.” He stopped before her and tilted the neck of the bottle in her direction. The room was lit by a pair of antique wall sconces—probably original, to the building if not to the room itself—and the glow turned his olive skin an even deeper shade of gold. The two lights appeared as small white dots in his pupils. “Just breathe it in. For your own enjoyment. Preview of coming attractions.”
She leaned forward and sniffed delicately at the opening. “Holy cow. How strong is that?”
“Eighty proof, I guess. But it’s the flavor you’re going for. Bourbon has this distinctive smell. Made mostly from corn mash, instead of rye or barley, like your typical Scotch malt.”
“It’s kind of spicy? Warm?”
Hector tilted the bottle back toward his own nose, right where hers had been, and breathed deep. “Ahh. Almost as good as drinking it. Ice or no ice?”
“Which do you recommend?”
“I like it without. Room temperature. You really get the flavor that way. But if you like your drinks cold …” He walked back to the corner of the room that formed the kitchen and pulled two lowball glasses from an open shelf. It was a funny kind of kitchen, neither modern nor traditional. Simple wooden surfaces and shelves, unadorned cabinets. Almost homemade looking, except everything fit together in perfect lines. A single pendant lamp hung from the ceiling, which must have been at least nine or ten feet high.
“No,” Ella said slowly. “I think I’ll try it warm.”
“Awesome. Hang tight.” He crouched a few inches as he poured, staring carefully at the bourbon as it streamed into each glass. The pendant cast a pair of sharp, thick shadows under his cheekbones, which were maybe a little too high and wide, now that she thought about it, throwing his face out of the fine proportion required for textbook beauty. But Ella admired them anyway. In a completely nonsexual way, of course. Hector straightened, set down the bottle, and lifted a glass in each hand. “Ready?”
Ella moved closer to the counter and reached over to take her glass from Hector’s fingers. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Cheers.”
“Cheers. Now, hold on, there, Silver. Sip slow. Just a taste to start. You won’t like it at first. You have to give it time. Kind of like getting acquainted with someone complicated.”
Ella set her lips on the edge of the glass and brought the bourbon forward, until it touched the tip of her tongue.
“That’s right,” Hector said, watching her closely. “What do you think?”
“It’s—it’s great.”
“Liar.”
She laughed and tried again. “Okay. It’s like being hit by a club.”
“That’s more like it.” Hector took a drink and turned around to lean back against the counter, palming the glass and swishing the liquid gently along the sides.
“Nice kitchen, by the way.”
“You like it? I actually put it in myself.”
“No. Way.”
“Way.”
“You’re a carpenter?”
“I’m a musician, Ella. Actually a composer, which is even worse. So I had to find another trade to keep me solvent, right? Didn’t want to sponge off my parents all my life.”
“You know what? I don’t think I’ve ever met a carpenter in New York. Not one who lives in Manhattan, anyway.”
“I made a deal with the landlord when I took the place. I do all the carpentry-type fix-it stuff around here, and I get a deal on the rent. So what do you think? Feeling better now?”
“Much.”
“You were pretty freaked out, there, for a minute.”
“Yes, Hector. I was pretty freaked out by the screaming woman in the basement next door.”
“Fair enough. But it’s all good now, right? We went back down, didn’t hear anything. If someone was really in trouble, you’d be hearing something, trust me. Plus, Nellie would go nuts, right? Dogs are sensitive to all that stuff. Smarter than we are.”
“I guess so.”
“That’s why the other tenants don’t mind me playing at night,” he said. “Drowns out anything from downstairs.”
“Like screaming?”
He shrugged. “Some weird shit goes down sometimes.”
“I don’t understand. Why don’t the police get involved?”
“Who knows? Maybe the owner has an arrangement. Look, it’s New York, right? We cater to every taste in this town. As long as it’s consensual, you can have your letch as long as I have mine.”
“I don’t know. That screaming didn’t sound consensual to me.”
Hector shrugged. “Look, my bedroom window overlooks the back. If I see anyone bleeding or hiding a body, I’ll call the police. Is it getting any better? The bourbon?”
Ella looked down at her glass, which was less full than she thought it would be. “Actually, it kind of is. Like drinking fire, but in a good way.” She pushed off from the counter and wandered back to the piano. Nellie, who had settled into an alert, silken pile at Hector’s feet, leapt up to follow. Her claws scrabbled like jacks on the wooden floor.
“You like music, then?” Hector called after her.
“Love music. My grandmother’s a cellist. She taught me how to play the piano first, then she let me play her instrument.”
“No kidding? You can play the cello?”
“Played it all the way through college. But I was never going to be as good as her. I mean, I loved it. I was a passionate player, you know? I just couldn’t get my fingers to move like hers.”
“You want to jam a little?”
“Jam? Right now?”
“Sure.” Hector moved past her and set his glass on the piano lid. “No cello, but I’ve got a string bass you can try.”
“You mean, like, jazz?”
“If you like. Jazz, whatever. I can do pretty much anything.” He flipped open the keyboard cover and stood there, washed by the yellow street lamp outside, bare arms lean and poised, head turned a little to one side. His fingers started to run along the keys, awakening a ripple of delicate sound that went straight to Ella’s belly. He nodded to the corner. “Bass is over there.”
Ella took a deep breath and swallowed down the rest of the bourbon. Her throat burned, her brain gasped for air.
“How about some Beethoven?” she said.
AN HOUR AND ANOTHER COUPLE of glasses of bourbon later, they were sitting side by side on the piano bench, thigh by thigh, playing Gershwin. Laughing. Ella had discarded her bathrobe, and her bare arm moved next to his bare arm. Muscles plucking in rhythm. Nellie lay curled under the bench, snoring softly in the rests between measures.
“See, the thing about Gershwin, which I love,” Hector said, “is that he isn’t one or the other. He’s deep, so deep. I mean, the notes are, like, revolutionary. But he’s talking about you and me. He isn’t afraid to connect at an emotional level.”
“He’s not trying to show off to the academy,” Ella agreed. “He writes for his audience. He wants to move you.”
“He gets you right here.” Hector makes a quick fist and presses it to his chest, almost without missing a note. “Lyrical. But complicated and unexpected, right? And it’s so effortless, you don’t realize how genius it is until you take it apart.”
Ella made a last arpeggio and lifted her hands away. “I once acted in a school production of Porgy and Bess, believe it or not.”
“No kidding. Who did you play?”
“Bess. We only had one African-American girl in my class, and she hated singing. It was kind of weird, but it worked.”
“Awesome.” He closed his eyes and flowed into “Summertime.” “You must have lived in some serious white-bread suburb.”
“Yeah. Grew up in Arlington. My dad’s a lawyer.”
“And your mom?”
“Law professor. And she models, believe it or not. Just for fun, and I guess to keep her ego stroked. Not that it needs stroking. She’s like this glamorous fiftysomething who looks good in everything.”
“Ha. I love your mom. My girlfriend’s a model.”
Ella, in the act of swallowing the very last drop of bourbon, started to cough. “Wow. Nice.”
Hector laughed. “It’s not like that. What do I look like, some kind of smarmy modelizer? Hanging out in clubs?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Naw, I don’t have the bank for it. They’re expensive, those girls. Also kind of young. No, she’s a hand model, actually.”
“A hand model.”
“You know, like Nivea advertisements. Gloves and jewelry. Especially jewelry. She’s in that Tiffany engagement ring ad on the subway right now.”
“Wait, I’ve seen those. The big solitaire? She’s pulling a ribbon?”
“That’s the one.”
“Seriously? Those are her hands?”
“Wild, huh? She had, like, a six a.m. call for that one. So she doesn’t stay over often. I wouldn’t get any work done.”
“Hmmm.”
“I mean, Ella, if you would get your mind out of the gutter”—he bumped his gray jersey shoulder against hers—“that she has to be in bed at ten o’clock with her oven mitts on. And that’s exactly when my brain starts making music.”
“Oh. That’s a pain.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we thought that one through very well. What about you? What’s your story?” He shifted abruptly into something else, kind of jaunty. Ella didn’t recognize the tune. “What twist of fate brought you here to Eleven Christopher?”
“Oh, you know.” Ella stared at her bare, ringless fingers. “Just needed a new place to live, that’s all. Look, I should really get going. I do need to be at work tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, yeah? Doing what?”
“I’m an accountant,” she said, and this time remembered to add quickly, “a forensic accountant.”
“Forensics, huh? You get to find out where all the dead bodies are buried?”
“Pretty much. And where they hid the money first.”
“Well, that is some seriously cool shit. You’re like Sherlock Holmes.”
“I keep a pipe and a deerstalker in my desk drawer.”
“Don’t forget the opium.”
“Cheaper than therapy, I always say.”
He chuckled and moved into another tune, gentle and tickling, which Ella didn’t recognize. “So do you like what you do?”
“Most of the time.” She paused. “Actually, it kind of sucks right now. I just got assigned to the same company as my ex. So I kept expecting to see him in the lobby or the elevator.”
“Man. Stressful. Big company?”
“Pretty big. Luckily, it’s not his department or anything. I’ll just deal.”
“Be strong, like you are.”
The words took a strange shape inside her ears. Ella had never thought of herself as particularly strong. Her mother was strong. Her sister was strong. Her father had a quiet, unshakable strength that awed her. But Ella? She only felt strong from the inside of a piece of music. Or a spreadsheet.
“Yeah, wish me luck.” She rose from the piano bench and manufactured a gigantic stretch. “Thanks for the bourbon.”
Hector rose, too, in the middle of a measure, and closed the keyboard. The sudden absence of music made the room grow huge. Made the space between the furniture yawn, made the air turn thick.
“Nerves all settled?” he asked, looking at her seriously. Like a doctor. His breath smelled of bourbon.
She held up her hand, palm down. “Do you see me shaking?”
“Cool as a cucumber, Sherlock. Good news. Off you go, then. Get your beauty sleep.” He held his arm to the side. “Want a bottle of water or something to take down with you?”
“No, I’m good.” The room swam a little around her. “Actually, maybe the water’s a good idea.”
Hector went to the fridge while she threw on her bathrobe and went to the door. He handed her the bottle of water and asked if she wanted him to walk her down.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I’m fine.”
“I know you are. You are as fine as they come. I mean that.”
“Thanks. I guess it’s good night, then.”
“Good night, Ella. And if you need anything, just let me know, okay? If there’s any weird stuff downstairs. I’m the house doctor.”
“The mayor, you mean?”
“Ha. Touché.” He raised his fist, and Ella bumped his knuckles. “Watch those stairs. And take some aspirin.”
“Will do.” She turned to leave. Took a few careful steps down the hallway and stopped. “Wait a second, Hector.”
“What’s up?”
Ella stared at the ecru wall, on which the light overhead made a strange, lurid pattern. Or maybe not. Maybe the pattern was just the bourbon smoking her eyeballs. She licked her lips. “So. I had fun tonight.”
“Yeah. Me too. Knew you were kindred, under that suit you wear out the door in the morning.”
“Kindred?”
“You know. Certain people. You can just sit down at a piano together and play.”
“Right.” She blinked hard. “Also. I kind of lied to you back there.”
He didn’t reply.
Ella gathered her breath. Didn’t turn around; that would be too much. Anyway, the floor was already unsteady beneath her. Kindred. “Not exactly lied, I guess,” she continued. “About why I moved here, I mean. I just didn’t tell you the truth.”
“The whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“Sort of.”
“Big deal or small deal?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s a big deal to me.”
“Well, I guess we all have secrets, right?”
Ella turned after all. Gripped the stair railing for balance. Hector stood tall in the doorway, sturdy and wiry and remarkably still. His face was heavy with fatigue. Nellie had wandered over and now stared in sleepy curiosity from between his legs. Yawning, showing off a set of small, sharp teeth. Hector braced one hand on the door frame and waited for her.
“So it’s like this,” she said. “I left my husband three weeks ago because I caught him having sex with a prostitute.”
ACT II (#ulink_ab306f65-9dfe-5721-b414-9decfb957ed9)
We Come to an
Understanding
(of sorts)
RIVER JUNCTION, MARYLAND 1924
1 (#ulink_bb2f4b0a-05ea-5d58-af69-eba6bddf48bf)
NOW THE B&O branch line into River Junction runs a passenger train but once a day, and even so I find myself in possession of a carriage nearly empty, except for a middle-aged woman in widow’s weeds who stares through the window the entire journey, though a book lies open in her lap.
I don’t blame the folks who aren’t present. Why should you travel into the frigid crook between two godforsaken mountains in the middle of far western Maryland in the middle of winter, unless you have urgent business calling you there? No reason at all. Like the widow, I observe the passing drifts of snow, the pastures all tucked under smooth white blankets, the gray horizon bleeding into the gray sky, the mounting hills and the small, broken-down houses huddled between them, and I cannot raise the slightest whiff of longing. Just a sick weight growing in my stomach, fed by the rattle of wheels and sight of the smoke trailing from all those lonely chimneys. The smell of burning Pennsylvania anthracite.
2 (#ulink_863075d5-ff12-5b3b-9f83-a857adf79cab)
THE LAST time I saw my mother, she lay in bed. She spent a lot of time in bed, my mother, with one thing or another. Nine and a half months after marrying Duke Kelly, she heaved out ten pounds of Johnnie from between her narrow hips, and she never really was the same after that. Not that Duke seemed to care much about Mama’s state of health, I guess, because she went on to whelp three more boys, one after another, like a crumbling sausage factory that somehow continues to churn out sausages, and then twin girls who died a month later, and then—well, I lost track by then, because I was mostly at the convent, getting an education. All I know is that she kept falling sick, which is the name we give to a miscarriage out here in the country, and lastly had another girl the year I started college. That’s Patsy. She’ll be rising five years old now, if she’s made it this far. My baby sister. Anyhow. The last time I saw Mama, she was sitting up in bed, nursing wee Patsy, and when I told her I was quitting college and running off to New York City right that very morning, she didn’t even look up. Didn’t even meet my eye. Just brushed back a bit of limp hair from her temple and told me not to be getting myself in trouble, and I thought, You’re one to talk, not in a sour vein but rather a pitying one. I asked if I could hold Patsy and say good-bye, and she said no, baby’s nursing, so I just leaned over and kissed Patsy’s velvet crown and then Mama’s temple, and breathed in the scent of milk and skin. And I said I’ll be going now, and funny thing, when I straightened up my eyes I found the window, and right through the middle of that dirty square marched Duke himself, doing something to the buttons of his trousers, and I turned away so Mama wouldn’t see my face. And you may be sure I departed the premises directly that minute, carrying my little carpetbag in one hand and my coat in the other, running out the front door so he wouldn’t spot me. Heat rising from the grass. Train whistle crying down the tracks. Sent my address two weeks later not to Mama but to Johnnie, because Duke always opens Mama’s mail but doesn’t give much damn about any business of Johnnie’s.
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