Bright Young Things (5 page)

“Curfew is at ten,” she admonished. “There is no drinking, no smoking, and no men allowed at the Washborne.” Then she turned on the stairs and focused her gaze on Letty‧s blue eyes. “No exceptions.”

“Oh, we don‧t do any of that,” Letty replied quickly.

For a moment they lingered on the second-floor landing in silence, until the housemother cleared her throat and continued. “You say that now, but I know girls like you—you come here pretending one thing, and then you do another.”

The harshness of the housemother‧s tone, and the intensity with which she continued leading them down the hall, made Letty tremble. She supposed all the Washborne girls had impeccable manners and followed the house rules scrupulously—but of course, she only believed that because she was new.

At just that moment, though she could not have known it, a young divorcee named Lilly whispered to her parrot, Lulu (whose presence in her room was absolutely prohibited by the rules of the Washborne), while her artificially black hair sat in curlers. On the third floor, two girls who had spent their day in the typing pool of an advertising firm made themselves pretty in anticipation of being taken out by two gentlemen from the accounting department. One wore a lemon yellow beaded dress, and the other wore black satin; they were going to a far-off land called Harlem and intended to dance the Charleston, and if they returned home by curfew, it would not be by choice.

“Here we are,” the housemother announced, opening a door onto a small room with one window, two wire-frame beds, and a single bureau with an old cracked mirror hanging over it. The walls had once been pink, but they had since faded and chipped to a shade less identifiable.

Cordelia went in first and looked around. She twirled back toward the housemother, raised her chin as though she had been expecting better, and made her voice rather neutral and cool. “It will do,” she announced.

“I should think so.” The housemother regarded them haughtily.

Letty slipped past her into the room and sat down on the nearest bed. When she put her weight on the mattress, it let out a croak that almost made her jump up in fright. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice.

The housemother did not acknowledge her thanks. She only puffed her chest a little, and said, “Remember, curfew at ten. And don‧t try anything funny. I can smell bad behavior a mile away.”

As the housemother withdrew, Letty gulped and nodded. The door clicked closed, and Cordelia stuck her tongue out at the place where the old lady had been. Her eyes popped, theatrical and silly. Once Letty saw that her friend could make fun of the situation, she began to feel not quite as intimidated by her new surroundings. Then Cordelia threw herself down, next to her friend on the first bed, and they both let their laughter out.

Eventually Cordelia and Letty‧s giggles subsided, and they put their clothes away, shook out the blankets on the bed, and opened the window, which looked down into a dismal airshaft. On the floor above them, someone walked across the room in high heels.

Just as they were beginning to wonder what else they could do with themselves, there came a knock at the door, and before either Letty or Cordelia could say anything, a girl with bobbed brass-colored hair popped her head in the room.

“Oh, hello, new girls,” she said. Her lips were painted with cardinal red lipstick, and her eyes shone as she assessed them. She looked like a magazine illustration of what they called “flappers.”

“Hello,” the new girls replied in unison, although Letty‧s voice was quieter than her friend‧s.

“Well.” The girl rested her hand on her hip and issued a saucy wink. “Are you coming out with us or not?”

So Cordelia and Letty used what they had to do what girls on all four floors of the Washborne Residence for Young Women were doing—blackening eyelashes and winnowing brows—with fewer resources, but also with that anticipation of a first night in the big city that always brings a special hue to feminine cheeks. They had each brought two pairs of stockings and all the dresses and skirts they owned—which is to say, not many. But when they paused in front of the warped old mirror on the second-floor hall, Letty saw what she had often seen before the country dances in Union: two girls who were unlike the others. The taller one, with her wide lips and strong, sun-touched face, setting off the best features of her petite friend: those large blue eyes which overwhelmed her dot of a nose and button of a mouth, and the pale skin made dramatic by her nearly black hair.

When it was time to go, Letty still felt flutters of trepidation over what it meant to go out into a city at night. But she could not be so nervous—for after all she had Cordelia, whose every gesture was full of ready excitement, to follow.

5

BY THE TIME THEY STEPPED DOWN ONTO THE STREET with Norma, the brass-haired girl, and three others, the night had already begun to swing. They could hear laughter bubbling up from half-cracked car windows or from invisible gatherings on rooftops, and Letty, arm in arm with her best friend, began to see that the hilarity might have less to do with her own backwardness, and more with something very gay in the atmosphere. The girls glided forward, their eyes gemlike and sparkling.

“Where are we going?” Cordelia called out to Norma, who twirled and walked backward for a few strides, as though she needed to look them over before giving a full answer.

At that time of year, in that particular town, they might have knocked on any number of doors and stumbled into a party in progress. Speakeasies of every imaginable variety lined the streets; speakeasies for the right kind of people and speakeasies for the wrong. There were private clubs, where rich men kept their own store of illegal liquor; sordid clip joints for suckers; places to watch a water ballet while sipping juleps; rooms done up in the style of Louis XV; basement spots with dark red walls where no one said much and a lone trumpet wailed mournfully from a shadowy corner, expressing for all those people just what it looked like inside their souls. But the newest girls to alight in Manhattan could not possibly have known yet how pregnant with possibility every closed door should appear to them.

“To Seventh Heaven, of course,” Norma said at last, and pointed straight ahead, to the speakeasy most Washborne girls experience first, perhaps because of its proximity but also because it was, in May of 1929, the place everyone wanted to be.

Letty followed Norma‧s gaze and saw a stone structure with a bell tower several stories high at the front and arched stained glass windows along the sides of the main building. “The church?” she asked, incredulous.

“Well, I suppose drink is a kind of religion for some,” Cordelia quipped.

Norma‧s reply was no more than a silvery laugh. Soon enough the big church with the bell tower was looming over them. The street was quiet, and there was no sign that the building housed a nightclub. But then Norma knocked against the wooden door exactly four times, and it popped open.

“We‧re here for the wedding,” she informed the slick-haired man whose head appeared in the doorway.

“Which wedding?”

“The Murphy wedding,” Norma replied, with supreme confidence. After the passing of a few seconds, Letty realized there was no wedding, and that this must be some kind of password. It reminded her of her younger sister Laura, and how she would sometimes hide behind the sheets hanging on the clothesline and demand to hear the magic word before showing herself again. But before Letty could get lost in melancholy thoughts, the girls were being swept inside the archway.

People were out walking along the sidewalks at that hour, but even so, Letty felt as though they had stepped in from some quiet graveyard; for inside the old church on Seventh Avenue were a hundred people to look at and a thousand things to see. They stood for a minute on the homely stone floor of the entry, taking in the busy spectacle of what had once been a house of worship. Most of the pews had been removed, and the open space under the high ceiling was now occupied by round tables and people in shimmering clothes. Cigarette girls, dressed in outfits that some women might have been shy to bathe in, trotted across the floor, offering colorful packages from trays strapped to their narrow torsos. Waiters in black suits dodged them, ferrying full cocktails as though gravity were just some fiction they did not personally subscribe to. On every table in the room sat glasses of all shapes, stuffed with festive green leaves and bright straws. A ten-piece band played on the altar.

“Oh,” said Letty, realizing that her mouth had been open for some time.

“Five of us,” Norma said to a small man in a tuxedo, brushing past a crowd of people loitering in the entryway, with the rest of the girls following close behind.

The crowd, which was mostly male, made grumbling noises, but the man in the tuxedo must have known Norma already, because he whisked the girls through the room to two round tables near the bar. Letty didn‧t know where a girl learned to talk that way, but she was relieved Norma could do it for all of them. Before they had settled in, a waiter appeared demanding to know what they would drink. Letty hadn‧t the faintest idea—she had never taken a drink in her life.

“Beers for all of us,” Norma said brightly. When he was gone, she leaned in toward Letty and said, “Don‧t worry, doll, we‧ll get something more exciting once we meet some fellows to buy them for us.”

“So this is a speakeasy,” Cordelia whispered reverently on Letty‧s other side.

Their eyes roved across the spectacle, darting from women with bare shoulders draping themselves over men in sharp suits, to girls not so much better dressed than themselves, wearing no jewels but sparkling with laughter at whatever jokes their escorts told. Even so, Letty felt a little self-conscious about her red cotton dress with the square collar—it was cinched at her natural waist, unlike nearly every other dress in the room. When she‧d worn it to country dances, she used to think it was pretty. Cordelia was wearing the white dress she had married John in, and Letty couldn‧t help wondering if her old friend hadn‧t been thinking more of a place like this than of him when she had stitched its low waist and high, scalloped hem.

“Five beers,” the waiter announced, plunking them down on the table.

Letty contemplated the tall glass in front of her, the bubbles rising up through the pretty amber liquid, before lifting it to her lips. The first sip was sour in her mouth, and she swallowed it quickly so that she wouldn‧t have to taste it any longer. Then everything in the room around her became a little too vivid, and she found that the only thing that might steady her was another sip. But she must have made some kind of noise, of disgust or surprise, because over her shoulder, a male voice commented: “Five bucks says her friends have to carry her out of here.”

The white skin of Letty‧s cheeks grew pink, and she cast her eyes down at her toes.

Beside her, Cordelia felt that old fury, familiar from when the Haubstadts would accuse Letty of being too scrawny to do as many chores as the rest of them, or when other girls in Union would call Letty‧s legs skinny. She swiveled in her chair and saw a man not much older than she was, with a great square jaw and light hair darkened with the grease that held it back from his face. He leaned against the black lacquered bar that curved below a wall of stained glass windows with a superior air that made Cordelia bristle. His eyes were brown and unkind and spaced wide apart under a low brow. The strong arc of his shoulders reminded her of a snake coiled, loaded with ready aggression.

“What makes you an expert?” Cordelia said, coolly but loud enough that he wouldn‧t miss it.

The man smirked and lit a cigarette. “You‧ll find out.”

“Doubt I‧ll care much, if in fact I ever do,” she drawled. Then she picked up her beer and drank it in one long, theatrical gulp. The bitter liquid fizzed in her belly and up in her head, but she placed the glass back on the table so that it made a decided thud, and raised one controlled eyebrow at the man who‧d mocked Letty.

Disgustedly he turned to the bar, so that his back faced the girls. His friend, who had been standing close by and wore a similar dark-colored suit, but whose slouching posture and unfocused gaze made him appear far drunker, came toward them, leering at Letty. “Hey, little lady,” the man slurred. “Come on, and I‧ll show you we didn‧t mean no harm.”

Then he practically lifted Letty up from her seat and danced her across the floor, up toward the band, where Cordelia could just glimpse him knocking into couples and causing a scene. She wanted to go help her friend—after all, it was her fault they‧d drawn that fellow‧s attention—but she was afraid that if she stood up, everyone would see how unsteady she was after downing her drink like that. Norma and the other girls were involved in a conversation with a table of sailors and were no longer paying attention to their new friends. Anyway, the dance didn‧t last long—one of the cigarette girls cut in, and began dancing Letty to safety, away from the man who‧d accosted her. The girl was wearing a cream jumper, and her dark hair was marcelled into wide waves. She was a good deal taller than Letty, her long legs accentuated by the heeled shoes she wore. Cordelia decided she looked like a good sort, and she closed her eyes, willing the dizziness away.

From over her other shoulder she heard a faint chuckle, and turned to see who was milking a laugh out of the two girls from Ohio now. She tried to put on a prideful expression—but she soon realized that it was going to be impossible to maintain. The boy who had laughed was sitting at a table just behind her, and though his body was facing away, he had twisted his torso around to look at her. His coppery hair was parted and combed from the side, and he had an angular quality to his face, as though a sculptor had carved out slabs from either side of a strong nose. One of his legs was crossed over the other in an easy, careless way that suggested he had never known worry or want. His deep blue suit fit his long limbs somewhat loosely; from the chest of his mauve dress shirt, he produced a gold object that, cupping his hands, he used to light a cigarette.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” he answered, his moody green eyes flicking up to hers.

The air was thick with fast music and chatter, and every atom of her body was suddenly full of a ticking boldness. All that day had been a process of transformation. What fun it would be to meet someone as her new self, she thought, just after she had. And how lucky that he happened to be someone who looked just like the personification of everything bright and urbane she‧d been seeking when she left home. “I hope you weren‧t laughing at me.”

“Not you—that man,” he answered, gesturing at the fellow with the broad shoulders who‧d first insulted Letty.

“Oh.” A smile played at the edges of Cordelia‧s lips. “But I don‧t find him interesting at all.”

“I like the way you shot him down. Anyway, don‧t I know you?” He pushed back his chair so that he could more fully face her. “Are you some kind of actress or something?”

Cordelia made a scoffing noise and tried not to glance down self-consciously at her homely white dress. White, she had noticed while glancing around, was not a color to wear to a nightclub. But the taxi driver had asked them a similar question—perhaps that was a line all pretty girls in New York heard sooner or later.

“An aviatrix?” His voice was what she would imagine an educated man‧s voice was like, especially when he used words she‧d never heard before.

“What‧s that?”

“I‧ve got it … You‧re a moral crusader, here to shame us for our law-breaking, bourbon-drinking ways!”

“Lord,
no.”

“Three strikes.” He shrugged and sighed. “Excuse me, I‧ve been very rude, you have no drink. Can I get you one?”

Cordelia pretended to waver a moment and then gave a little nod. He gestured to a passing waiter, who seemed to require no more than a flourish of a pinkie finger to take the order. Sitting so close to this boy, the backs of their chairs almost touching, it was obvious how alike in size and presence they were. Then she became exquisitely aware of how near their hands, idling on the backs of their chairs, had crept.

“Cigarette?”

“No, thank you.”

“Don‧t smoke?” He turned down the corners of his mouth.

“No …” She rolled her eyes upward. “I don‧t smoke or not smoke as a rule … only it sounds like a lot of distraction just now.”

“Ah.” A ghostly white spiraled up from between his index and middle fingers, where he rested his cigarette, and for a moment it obscured her view of him. “This much I am sure of: I haven‧t met you before, because a girl like you I surely would have done everything in my power to keep on knowing.”

“You do say pretty things, don‧t you?” she replied, leaning away from him and narrowing her eyes, as though he were not to be trusted. And perhaps he wasn‧t to be trusted. In this city, how was she to know? But talking to him was thrilling, and she wanted to go on doing so regardless of the consequences.

“So—you take offense at the innocent suggestion of moral crusading …” He paused, contemplating her. It was a long, searching look, as though he could see the pulsing of her heart or somehow read the transmissions of her thoughts. “Perhaps your living is robbing banks or holding up unlucky pharmacists and the like?”

A wry smile spread across Cordelia‧s face. “That would take some style—committing crimes by daylight and then spending your nights in a busy joint like this.”

“True. But, in my humble opinion, style is one thing you‧ve got plenty of.”

The flattery almost overwhelmed her. And it had come so quickly. She couldn‧t help but think, briefly, of John, who was always so gentle but could never quite keep up with her. Resting her cheek against her palm, she let her eyes drift across the room, taking in the movement all around and the glint of the table candles reflecting on white teeth when people laughed.

“Oh, dear,” he said. “Compliments make you sad, don‧t they?”

She pushed the image of John from her mind—she didn‧t see any logic in dwelling on those she‧d left behind—and smiled wide. “Now what kind of girl doesn‧t like compliments?”

“I hope you like old-fashioneds, too.”

“Is that what the waiter is bringing us?” she asked. “I‧ve never had one.”

“How unfortunate!” he replied. “Rest assured: They are delicious. If you find I‧m in error, we‧ll see to it that you get something that truly pleases you. The bartender is a friend.”

Both her eyebrows rose. “You have a lot of friends, don‧t you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“It‧s the way you carry yourself.” She paused, considering, and took a breath of smoky air. Everyone around them was jittery and excitable and chatting at high speed, and she was amazed to realize that, despite the crowded room, she had perhaps never had a conversation that felt quite so private as this one. “And also the fact that you don‧t mind sitting alone amongst all these people.”