Sirens (6 page)

I woke in a cold sweat to the sound of a fire engine. The high-pitched wail echoed through the concrete canyons, tearing down the avenue and disappearing into the nighttime.

I lay in the bedroom and watched the play of lights from the street below as they moved across the ceiling. Flash and fade. Red, then white. My back itched with the memory of pain, and I rubbed the rough skin, an old habit. The fire engine was gone, into the night, into another fire, not my fire, but it was a long time before sleep crept over me again.

CHAPTER 7

Lou

One of the first things Danny took me to see after we’d become an item was Miss Liberty out on her little island. I’d seen the lights since I was small, that torch lit up at night like it was truly on fire, and how the Lady with the Lamp glowed across the water after Mr. Woodrow Wilson turned on the new lights in ’16, and how we four—Ma and Da and my brother and me—had watched it from the Battery when we were still one big happy family.

But I’d never been there, right up close, unless you count me riding in Ma’s belly from Ellis Island not that far away. My ma and da didn’t take us around much to see the sights, especially if it cost time or money.

I felt like a little kid when Danny said we should go and take a tour. I had to hold in my giddy feelings so as not to make Danny cross.

Danny had a thing about that statue. He explained to me about how
it had been made in France and carted all the way across the ocean and set up here, a gift to us Americans from the French people.

I was so excited I couldn’t help it. I opened up and said, laughing, “I think French champagne is the best gift the French people gave us.”

“This is America,” he said, his voice a razor. “I won’t have you speaking like an ignorant paddy just off the boat. You understand me, Louise?”

“Of course, Danny. I didn’t mean…”

He looked at me then, eyes to match his voice, and I shut up.

That was when I really learned about Danny’s sense of humor. And when I learned to keep my mouth shut, except when I was saying something he’d think was smart. Which was usually something he’d taught me. I tried hard to be a quick learner, but I did wish he liked to laugh more.

We took the tour, but I don’t remember much about what the guide said. I was busy watching Danny.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Right after that little excursion we walked the neighborhoods, and Danny gave me sacks of candy to hand out to the kiddos, while he glad-handed their das.

You know, he liked that Lady Liberty so much, but he couldn’t forget where he came from. He couldn’t forget his Irish roots. He was in America now, but he hadn’t been able to leave behind the feeling that he wasn’t good enough. And that made him both the most generous guy in town, and the most…well, I gotta say it: dangerous.

Yes, Detective, it’s true. Even though I would’ve walked through wet cement for Danny, that’s what he was. Dangerous.

CHAPTER 8

MAY 21, 1925

They were friends, and began rounding in there every noon for lunch.

—From “New York by Day” article on the writers composing the Round Table at the Algonquin,
The Miami News
, May 19, 1928

Jo

The following morning I had the apartment to myself. If my aunt and uncle had come home during the night and departed again before I stumbled out of bed, I’d heard nothing. I found a white rayon sheath in the closet, the least revealing article I discovered, though it was a skinny silhouette that just hit my knees. It was at least practical and suited to the unseasonable heat; happily, Melody was only a little bit shorter than me and not too much smaller through the hips.

The sun blazed through the open windows of the living room, and the cacophony of the city rose with the hours. After a lonely breakfast I wandered from empty room to empty room. The bookshelves were lined with books whose spines had never been cracked. The walls were white and hung with paintings that were modern, impressionistic, stark and linear. In the library were
dozens of small replicas of statues; most were modern but for one striding Egyptian prince, modern in his own offbeat way. I stared at the painting in the foyer for long time, thinking I’d seen it somewhere, but its soft blue squares were so abstract as to be both familiar and foreign at once. The few tables in the apartment were bare. The floors were polished to a high shine.

Rarely had I spent time alone in such a vast and new-minted place. It made me uneasy, this impersonal, empty luxury. I thought about my own home, with its scuffed floors and threadbare armchairs and scattered objects—the little vases Ma collected, the antimacassars, the folded newspapers left at the fireplace by Pops. I missed my ma, my quiet little room, and Felix, our mouser cat who mostly hissed in my general direction but sometimes acquiesced to a soft ear rub.

Here I stood in someone else’s clothes in someone else’s room, and new fears crept through me: fears that I would never find my dreams or my brother. Whatever Pops had gotten himself into he’d dragged me into it as well, and I’d have to find my own way out.

The only room in the apartment in which I felt comfortable was the windowless library off the foyer. Books lined all four walls, and the chairs were dark leather, the lighting just enough for reading. I settled in and opened one of the books and read until Melody roused around eleven, heading to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

She was a different person in the daylight hours, without her makeup and with her eyes like slits and her skinny frame wrapped in an oversize robe. I tried to hide my surprise, which reappeared when she emerged from her rooms an hour later, primped and wide-awake and put together. She peered in the library door, squinting.

“There you are. Hiding. It’s time we put you right,” she said as I
stood up, and then she looked down at my old black shoes. “Good grief. First order of business is new shoes. And for pity’s sake, take off those awful stockings before we leave the apartment.”

“I’m not a flapper,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, we can fix that,” she responded. “Come on.”

I heard Pops’s voice in my head berating flappers—and then I felt a tiny thrill of rebellion, so I let myself be led by Melody. She treated me to a shopping trip that changed me from top to bottom.

We started at the hair salon.

When the hairdresser took hold of my thick dark locks, she said, gleeful, “Snip, snip!” And with a few bold cuts she held twenty-four inches of my former glory in her hand. As she worked, shaping and thinning, she spun me away from the mirror. Melody nodded approval, and when the hairdresser spun me back so I could take a good look, I gasped.

I looked older. Heart-shaped face with blue eyes. Dark hair that now formed pleasing angles to frame my face. I sat up and lifted both my palms against the blunt-cut ends, feeling as if a weight that had tied me down had been lifted.

I wondered what Moira would think, what the other girls would say. I wondered if I might see them again next fall and whether they’d treat me differently, whether the boys might notice me for the first time. I smiled at that thought, then promptly shot it down. Modern was fine. Turning into some silly, moony flapper swooning over boys was not.

Still, I couldn’t help it; I was happy with the bob. Thrilled, in fact.

As if to echo my reaction, the hairdresser said, “Honey, I’d swear
I was looking at the next big moving-picture star.” She smiled, shook her head. “Just dreamy.”

“It sure is a change,” Melody said.

It was a change, all right. I was shedding some old skin that I’d outgrown without knowing it.

I touched my hair again. One of Teddy’s favorite things to say about me had to do with my stubborn determination. Tenacity, he said; I had it in spades. Like the ornery mule he’d had to buck around that summer out at Great-Aunt Elizabeth’s, or maybe like old Aunt Lizzy herself, whom Teddy claimed I took after. When I wanted a thing done, Teddy said, that was the end of it.

Although that tenacity fought with niggling doubt. Hair was just hair, right? Or in this case was hair a link in a long chain? A long chain leading me to foolish thinking and foolish behavior? I bet Teddy would approve. Even if Pops would give me the business.

Well, too bad. I put that thought straight out of my mind.

Melody took me to Macy’s next. Shoes first—sweet, pale little pumps with straps—and flesh-colored stockings, of real silk, rolled up above my knees. I already had the closet full of her cast-off dresses. After buying me a soft green cloche, a pair of gloves, and what she called “the right clutch,” she plunked me down at the cosmetics counter, where, over my feeble protests, a salesgirl painted my cheeks and colored my lips and eyelids. Melody held up the hand mirror, and again I was taken aback, but I did kind of like what I saw, even as my cheeks grew pinker all on their own. Good thing Pops wasn’t here; when the salesgirl and Mel weren’t looking, I wiped off the worst of it.

We left the store with a bag of cosmetics, and Melody dropped me back at the apartment in the midafternoon before she went off on some private errand.

So silent and so white, this space. I thought again about my home, my room with its flowered wallpaper, my chenille bedspread, Pops’s creaky old chair, Ma’s rhubarb pie, the landscapes cut from magazines and hung in Pops’s homemade frames, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Ellie in their finery in the round portrait over the fireplace. There was nothing homey here, nothing but still, clean newness. And me, plunked down in the middle of it, already a changeling, and wondering what was to happen next.

I buried my queasiness in a cup of tea and a plate of fresh biscuits smothered in butter and made by my aunt’s capable cook.

But I didn’t linger indoors for long, and decided not to wait until Melody returned. The day was warm like a promise, and New York beckoned. Teddy and I had walked the streets together enough that I knew where I was and felt at home. In the late afternoon I ventured out, my new shoes surprisingly comfortable.

I made my way back down to Herald Square to Macy’s again. This time I paused to survey the fashions arrayed behind the glass windows. The mannequins gestured at each other accusingly, their pouty lips shiny with brilliant carmine, the long strands of pearls draping their necks iridescent in the glaring hot window lights. I wandered back to Fifth Avenue and headed uptown, passing the library, where I waved to the lions like a kid, the way I had when Teddy had brought me there so many years before. Autos rumbled
down the avenue; horse-drawn carters hauled empty, clattering milk bottles for cleaning; boys, their voices singsong and unintelligible, hawked the evening papers.

I walked west across Forty-fourth. The setting sun washed down the street, and I lifted my hand to my forehead and squinted against the glare. As I passed a set of heavy doors, they burst open and a group of men and women tumbled onto the sidewalk, all laughing and chattering, surrounding me in such a swell of enthusiasm and banter that I froze.

“Oh, pardon me!” The man who’d almost trod on my shiny new toes lifted his hat in apology. The book tucked in the crook of his arm tumbled toward me, and I caught it; as I handed it back to him I saw the cover:
Fanny, Herself.

“I’ve read that,” I blurted.

He paused. “Really? You mean it? You’ve read it?”

“Yes, of course.” The warmth crept into my cheeks. It had been a favorite with Moira and me when we’d discovered it in the library. The heroine, Fanny, was a girl with a gift for drawing—why, I spent many nights rereading passages, savoring her search for freedom and success and imagining myself in her shoes, but with a pen substituting for a paintbrush.

He looked me up and down. “So did you like it?”

“I…yes, I did.”

He turned to his companions. “Hey, Ed, listen to this. This lovely young thing has read your book.”

The woman behind him said, “Really? One of the few,” and she laughed as she was tugged on up the street.

“She liked it, Ed!” he called. He shrugged. “Oh well, they’re off.
So, then, must I be, darling.” He tipped his hat to me and made a little bow. “Cheers!”

And they were gone, leaving me in their wake.

The doorman stood a few feet away, his hands behind his back. “You know who you were just talking to, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“That was the membership of the Round Table.”

“The Algonquin Round Table? Oh, my stars!” I gaped up at the awning. The Algonquin Hotel. Of course. Everyone knew about the Round Table at the Algonquin, set up in the back of the dining room. Since shortly after the war it had become the gathering place of New York literary types. Playwrights, novelists, journalists—they came together to talk about books, politics, and art. Early on the management had encouraged them, given them a reserved table, no doubt eyeballing a grand publicity ploy as well as the steady luncheon check.