Chapter 21
“What’ll I Do?”
E
ddie woke up in his darkened room aware of two things: Lane was in bed with him and Lane was awake.
“Eddie?” Lane whispered.
Unable to form words, Eddie mumbled.
“I think I need to leave Epstein.”
Eddie heard and understood the words but still wasn’t all the way awake. He moved over to Lane’s side of the bed and touched Lane’s arm. “What? You said last night that it didn’t matter, that Epstein’s clubs were raided all the time.”
“They are. It’s not that. I just . . .” Lane shifted on the bed and turned toward Eddie. “Maybe this is crazy, but being with you has made me not want to be in the Mob anymore. And now everything is dangerous. My club got shut down and the cops know I’m queer. I paid off Officer Hardy, and I know his secrets, so I didn’t get arrested. But the next time I go into business, he could be less charitable, and then I wind up in jail for bootlegging and sodomy. Or worse. He’s volatile and dangerous. When it was just me to worry about, I wasn’t concerned, but now I’ve got you, and I don’t want to take those kinds of risks anymore.”
It was a lot to take in before everything was working correctly. Eddie took a deep breath and absorbed the fact that Lane had paid the cop not to arrest him. This wasn’t a game. He closed his eyes and thought about that, but then also about what else Lane had just said. Lane was part of the Mafia. Was there even any chance of leaving? Eddie couldn’t have Lane making changes that crazy on his account. Wouldn’t Lane be putting himself in danger if he just left? Eddie said, “I shouldn’t be the one determining how you live your life.”
Lane sat up. “No. Don’t you get it, Eddie?”
Lane slammed his palm on a pillow, and Eddie was definitely awake now, listening intently. And he, apparently, did not “get it.” “I don’t understand.”
“When Scott died, a part of
my
life ended, too. For six months, he was my whole world, and then he was gone, and I was left alone in New York with no one and nothing to care about. I needed to pay rent, though, so I reached out to my cousin John. There was a family rumor that he and his brother Tony were
la cosa nostra
, but I didn’t know for sure. My parents didn’t want anything to do with that part of my family. All I knew was that John had a thing going at the Fulton Fish Market and I thought he could get me a job. Turns out his operation at the fish market was smuggling in liquor from the rum runners parked off the coast. So he got me a job, all right. And then I was made. Do you know what that means?”
Eddie nodded. He’d heard the term before. If Lane was a made man, it meant he was family. Part of the Mob for life. Eddie’s head spun a little.
“So John got me a job working for Epstein, and I figured, I’ve got nothing left to lose. I liked the work well enough, but it was still the Mob. Then John was killed in some kind of dispute over a gambling operation downtown. I wasn’t involved, but I was too deep in to use the circumstance of his death to extract myself from the family. And that’s just it, Eddie. I’m family. My father’s family came here from Sicily. My dad moved to Chicago when he was very young and opted not to get involved in the business, but his brother Joseph stayed here, ran around with gangs in the Five Points and became a
caporegime
before he was killed. John was Joseph’s son.”
Eddie didn’t speak. He just listened.
“It’s dangerous, this life, and I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. Still, it was work and it kept a roof over my head. I proved my worth early on and have risen up the ranks. And all that time I thought, if someone shot me in the head tomorrow, what would it matter? But everything has changed now. I have you. I could get arrested. By rights, Hardy should have arrested me last night. You know what they do to fellas like me in jail?” Lane shivered. “Or, worse, someone could get it in his head that I’m nothing but a pervert and kill me tomorrow, but I don’t want to leave this earth yet. What I want is to quit this job and build a new life. With you.”
Eddie found that amazing, that Lane wanted him that way. It was tempting to just accept, but he put a hand on Lane’s waist and moved a little closer. “Can you do that? Can you just quit?”
Lane groaned and lay back down. “No, of course not. I’ve been in too long, I know too much. And Epstein, well. Epstein is not family, since he’s a Jew, but he’s in tight with the
caporegime
who is closest to the Boss. They’re all old friends. So Epstein has a lot of power. He knows all my secrets, too. It’s his money that has kept me out of jail. Epstein owns my soul. The whole Mafia does.” He turned to Eddie. “What the hell am I going to do?”
Eddie didn’t know much about how the Mob operated, but he knew that Lane was in trouble either way—his life was in danger whether he left or stayed.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I don’t want to lose you, either.”
They lay together in silence for a long time. Eddie turned over ideas in his head—they could leave the city, they could find a way to go underground—and most of those ideas ended with his never being able to work in the theater again. He wasn’t sure if that was something he was willing to sacrifice just yet. Not while there was a sliver of hope he could still dance on a stage.
“You can hide out here for as long as you need to,” Eddie suggested.
Lane pulled Eddie into his arms. “Thank you. That only buys me a little bit of time, though. Plenty of people have seen me coming and going from this building. I bet most of the staff here knows we’re . . . sweethearts.”
Eddie laughed despite himself. The notion of them being “sweethearts” struck him as absurd. But Lane was right. If he stayed at the Knickerbocker, it was only a matter of time before Epstein found him. “Maybe that will buy us enough time to figure out what to do.”
Lane sighed. “I’ll have to go home eventually. I don’t know that I’m any safer here, but thank you for the offer.”
Lane buried his face in Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie wanted to comfort him but wasn’t sure how. He decided to try doing something he knew Lane would like: he lifted Lane’s chin and kissed him.
Lane let out a breath but opened his mouth to accept the kiss. Their lips slid together with ease and familiarity. Eddie put his hands on Lane’s back and felt the tension there ease a little. Lane pulled away slightly and said, “I love you so much.”
Which Eddie knew deep in his heart. He knew that’s what all this was about. “I love you, too.”
Lane collapsed back into Eddie’s arms and laid his head on Eddie’s chest. “All of this is so crazy. How has this become my life?”
Eddie couldn’t answer that question any better than he could answer how he’d gone from being the rabbi’s son, the next great hope for the community, to dancing on Broadway, to teaching men in a queer speakeasy how to dance.
He wondered how much any of it mattered. He still held out hope he could get another job on Broadway, but maybe Lane meant more. Maybe keeping Lane safe—which probably meant leaving New York or at least going into hiding—was more important than Eddie’s career dreams.
“You’ll hate me,” Lane said.
“What?”
“I can hear you thinking. And if you’re thinking that you’ll leave the city with me and give up your career, then you’re crazy. I won’t let you do that. I won’t do that to you. You’d end up hating me for killing your dream. We can find another way.”
“But if we can’t—”
Lane held his fingers to Eddie’s lips. “We’ll find another way. You have so many years of success before you, Eddie. I can see you being a big name on a marquee. You’ll dance and be wonderful, and I want to be there to see it.”
“If only all things were possible.”
Lane lifted his head and smiled down at Eddie. “With you, sometimes I think they are.”
Marian knew that theater attendance was down; it was bad enough lately that she could see the empty seats when she walked out to do her performance each night. She knew in her gut that firing Eddie had been a mistake. While she was good, she was better with Eddie. The empty seats confirmed it.
She’d been weighing the idea of going to Jimmy and trying again to talk him into re-hiring Eddie when rumor started moving through the New York theater community that Eddie was auditioning all over town. He’d landed a part in a musical revue that had closed two weeks later, but otherwise hadn’t made a big splash except by reputation.
Because the whole theater community was also saying Eddie was queer.
The rumor was that he’d gotten caught up in a raid at a seedy club and that he was into some pretty depraved things. That he was carrying on a lurid affair with another man. Marian knew a lot of it was nonsense—there was Lane and the Marigold, of course, but there was nothing unseemly about Eddie’s relationship as far as Marian could tell. She wondered how much of a role Jimmy had played in spreading those particular rumors.
Probably it shouldn’t have mattered. Marian knew full well that many people who worked in the theater were queer. She may have been baffled by why, but she knew it to be true just the same. But perhaps there was a difference between knowing the actor or stagehand you were talking to was very likely queer and seeing tangible evidence of it. There was a difference between knowing many people on Broadway were queer and the more vocal rumors connected to Eddie now, presented as if they were evidence that there was something deeply, disturbingly wrong with him.
She walked down the hall to Jimmy’s office. He was there, looking at a book that she thought was maybe a ledger. That could have been a good sign for Marian’s cause; it could mean that, if Jimmy really was losing money, perhaps he would be more amenable to suggestion.
Because it wasn’t just that the seats in the theater were getting harder to fill. Walter Winchell and a number of theater columnists had written some scathing things about Jimmy, criticizing him for firing Eddie Cotton and for how poorly the Doozies was managed. The quality of acts had never been as good as the
Scandals
, the spectacle had never been as awesome as it was at the
Follies
, but Cotton and France, at least according to the papers, had always been the act to see, made the price of the ticket worth it. Marian had always been proud of that fact.
Still, the bad press might have been enough to make the Shuberts decide not to allow Jimmy back the next year.
She wondered as she stood in the doorway of Jimmy’s office if she had let all that praise from Jimmy go to her head. Walter Rhodes, too, had told her many times that he thought she did really great things with the songs he’d written for her—there were three of them in her act now, although “My Heart Is Full” was still the crowd-pleaser—and now she wondered if she was actually good or if she’d just fallen victim to Jimmy’s machinations.
She grew increasingly angry as she stood in that doorway. Jimmy barely noticed she was there. She cleared her throat.
“Just a minute, Martha,” he said, calling out the name of his secretary. “Let me just finish crunching these numbers. I’ll be right with you.”
“Jimmy,” Marian said.
He dropped his pen and looked up. “Oh, hello, dear. What is it? I’m very busy.”
She wished she had a newspaper with her so that she could offer up evidence. She wanted to scream at him for the mistake he’d made. He’d done in his own production when he’d fired Eddie, and for what? For Marian to get extra attention that she didn’t want? To get rid of the queer dancer in his show?
A copy of the
Evening Telegraph
was sitting on the guest chair in Jimmy’s office. Marian snatched it up and flipped to Walter Winchell’s column. She lucked out—Winchell had written about the waning fortunes of the Doozies in his column that very day.
“Have you seen this?” she asked. She showed Jimmy the article then she quickly scanned it herself.
“Yes, I saw it,” Jimmy spat. “I’m aware of what Mr. Winchell thinks of my production, and I may just sue him for libel.”
“Nothing he says here is untrue,” Marian said. “Revenue
is
down. Don’t lie to me and tell me that’s not the case. I can see all the empty seats each night with my own eyes.”
“We’ve had a little trouble selling tickets lately, it’s true.” Jimmy looked forlornly down at the ledger on his desk. “I think what I need is to pull in a really spectacular act, something that will attract people’s attention, something that sizzles and sparkles, something that will really knock the pants off Mr. Ziegfeld.”
Marian dropped the paper back on the chair. “What about a Cotton and France reunion?”
Jimmy shook his head. “What? Are you crazy? No. It’s out of the question.”
Marian pointed to the paper. “You know what’s crazy, Jimmy? The way you ignore everything the press says. Winchell has been saying for weeks that it was a mistake to fire Eddie Cotton, that Eddie was half the reason anyone came to this theater.”
“You’re the other half!”
“Look. I appreciate the opportunity you gave me, Jimmy. I really do. It’s like all of my dreams came true and I will always be grateful.”
“But?” Jimmy stood up slowly and walked around his desk.
“But I’m not enough to carry the whole damn show. The songs are great and I love singing them, but they’re not enough to pull people in, to hold their attention. I was better with Eddie. I was always better when I had someone to perform with, and I never had chemistry with another dancer the way I did with Eddie.”
Jimmy balked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with him instead of me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You know as well as I do that—” She stopped, realizing what she was saying. “Well, anyway. The rapport you have with someone on the stage is not the same as the rapport you have off the stage. Eddie and I were great together on stage. I never wanted him in any other way.”