by Marlowe Benn
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2020 by Margaret L. Benton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542044646 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542044642 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542007139 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542007135 (paperback)
Cover design by David Drummond
First edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION GUIDE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Paul Duveen was the whitest man Julia had ever seen. Stepping into his apartment on West Fifty-Fifth Street, she had no problem spotting him in the crowd. Ivory hair crested high above his doughy face, and eager teeth burst forth as he regaled an audience with some amusing or perhaps scabrous tale. Presiding over one of his infamous Thursday-evening salons, he wore an alabaster dressing gown and bleached pigskin house slippers. Apart from deep-set brown eyes, everything about him was incandescent. The man glowed.
Unseen hands bore away her Egyptian shawl as Julia lifted a martini from a passing tray. She raised it to salute her host across the room. Duveen—Pablo to his friends—returned the greeting through a fog of smoke. Perhaps he remembered last week’s invitation, perhaps not. His slurred shout made no distinction.
Julia sipped her drink—delicious, real gin—and gazed about the apartment. There was something daring and defiant going on here, a snub to all the parties in Manhattan and around the world lumbering along in the old, dead ways of before the war. All things boring and dreary had been swept away; even the walls were the color of tangerines. From across the room a bronze bust scowled beneath the coils of an abandoned silver boa. Above it hung an immense angular painting depicting shards of at least one, possibly two crimson nudes. Tipsy jazz hiccuped from a grand piano in the corner. The musician curled like a smitten lover over the keys, paying no attention whatsoever to the two women swaying to a private beat behind him. Everywhere, conversations bubbled and swirled.
Most remarkably, the party was mixed. A dozen or more Negroes mingled amid the throng of whites. The rumors were true, then. Julia had never been to a party where Negroes did more than disperse canapés and cocktails or sweeten the din with half-heard melodies. She could almost feel the rumble of polite society creaking asunder, of modernity muscling apart the old walls built to separate those fiercely regulated realms of us and them. Here and there, at the bolder edges of Manhattan society, those walls were cracking. People of all shades were squaring their shoulders and dancing through the breach. Not many, and not always safely, but each time, another brick wobbled.
The other guests looked pleased and even proud to be there. Julia felt a twinge of pride herself. She’d found her way to the still-rough edge of the growing century. After five years of living abroad in London, this was why she had returned to New York. This was where she wanted to belong. Here she hoped to make her mark.
She threaded her way through a quartet of noisy men expounding earnestly on Freud toward a massive glass-fronted bookcase. Even from across the room she’d recognized a gilded red spine that beckoned for a closer look. Like most modern young people, Julia indulged a number of minor vices. Hers included an impertinent curiosity about other people’s books. It might not be judged as indelicate as exploring others’ closets and cabinets, but it ought to be, because it was just as revealing.
She was right. It was a copy of the recent Bodley Head quarto edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. That Duveen owned this edition, which reproduced Aubrey Beardsley’s famously decadent illustrations, told her more about him than hours of polite conversation. It confirmed Duveen was one of those men who ventured well beyond the borders of social respectability. Julia knew the type (even shared its impulses from time to time) and also knew that what most repelled could most intrigue.
“Your frock is divine.” A low voice dripped like warm honey over her shoulder.
Startled, Julia steadied her grip on the Salome and turned to see a woman gazing down at her. About her age, she guessed: old enough to vote but not yet thirty. At least six feet tall, the stranger shimmered in a sea-green evening sheath. A matching turban framed her pale, symmetrical face. Long prisms of crystal beads hung from her ears. Beneath tapered brows her charcoaled hazel eyes, like the curve of her neatly painted lips, never wavered in their calm overture. Two realizations, and their dissonance, struck Julia with equal force: the woman was beautiful, and her gaze was guileless. By the age of three any female understood that such beauty was a powerful tool, to be wielded for profit and advantage. Yet Julia saw neither calculation nor naivete in this face, and her interest quickened.
“Not quite Vionnet?” the stranger asked, dipping her glance to Julia’s dress. “But divine all the same.”
Julia covered her second surprise with a smile. The pedigree of a woman’s wardrobe was as undiscussed as her age or weight. A year ago she might have rebuffed the inquiry, but tonight—if races could mingle at posh midtown parties, if a woman could travel about the city alone at night—it seemed absurd to demur over a less-than-couture frock. Not French, no.
Another of Julia’s vices was an occasional indulgence in exceptionally fine things. She enjoyed, as one of the family solicitors had put it, a lifetime of money. For a brief but agonized time last fall, it had nearly been otherwise, and she no longer took lightly her good fortune or the independence it gave her. Both subjects were still tender ones.
Fine clothing eased many pains. Tonight’s dress was a year old but a new favorite: rich yellow silk, embroidered with a thousand tiny pearls across a sheer bodice that rose almost to her throat. She seldom wore dresses with much décolletage, as, on her, low necklines had little to say. In back the dress dived eloquently toward her waist, and the skirt’s narrow drapery fell to just above her calves. With it she wore stockings clocked in the French fashion, caring not a jot that few Americans had yet embraced the style.
“Made in Mayfair,” she confided, flinging yet more discretion out the window like a prewar corset. “More or less.”
Julia’s smile deepened as she qualified her frock’s provenance. She was sworn to secrecy but couldn’t wa
it to share the compliment with Christophine. Technically her maid and housekeeper, Christophine was infinitely more dear than that, less a lifelong employee than something between a sister and an aunt. And she was a blur of talent with needle and thread; she’d modified this very dress just yesterday to pass an idle afternoon. She’d adjusted the neckline, tapered the hem, and added a thin undulating trail of satin down one hip, which caught the light when Julia moved. The effect was subtle and surprising, and she adored it. How glorious that this stranger had noticed. Who was she?
The turbaned woman said her name so quietly that Julia had to watch her lips to catch the words: Eva Pruitt. They spoke of fashion lightly, as one did, plumbing each other’s interests and tastes. Talk soon spiraled into cries of “Yes!” about the latest marvels out of Paris and Milan. Julia began to itch with curiosity. Was this regal beauty simply another avid patron or something more? She finally had to ask: Was she a model or perhaps even a designer herself? To her surprise Eva Pruitt said she adored fine clothes and indulged when she could, but no, she had no connection to the fashion world. She was a writer.
Julia blinked. She took pride in her ability to spot writers in a crowd. They were usually as obvious as artists. She had seen at once that this party was full of writers, as Pablo had promised. It was only left to learn which carousing fellow might be the young Fitzgerald, and if indeed that was Dreiser slumped in the velvet armchair, lost in Scotch and all that melancholy. Was the remarkable Miss Millay about, perhaps in another room? But Eva Pruitt’s placid beauty had fooled Julia. She was nothing like the woman writers Julia knew in London, who were either fashionably unkempt in trousers and their lovers’ bowlers or unfashionably so—dowdy in indifferent hats and ancient frocks.
“You too?” Eva asked. She gazed at the Salome Julia cradled against her waist. Curiosity swam in her eyes. “One of yours?”
Julia could almost hear the great Wilde’s mirth at this confusion, but not, unfortunately, the witticism that would follow. She fumbled for some fraction of the cleverness the moment deserved, until she saw the gleam in Eva’s eyes. They shone droll and mysterious, as if she had laid a tarot card on the table and it was Julia’s turn to interpret it. Perhaps there was no confusion, only a riddle. Some kind of merry enigma beckoned from Eva’s sphinxlike smile.
Julia felt her calves tense for balance, as if she’d been buffeted by a sudden thrilling gust. Had she found, so quickly, her first author? Or rather, had this extraordinary woman found her?
Like most restless females prowling most parties’ smoky rooms, Julia was on the hunt. Her quarry, however, was not men but writers, preferably poets. She was a printer, proprietor of a small press devoted to finely printed limited editions. Few in New York knew of her private Capriole Press, but that would soon change. Once she was settled, she would announce herself with a suitable splash.
Julia wavered. She might be hunting for prospective authors, but writers were forever hunting for publishers. It was a subtle game. Tempted as she was to declare herself, she needed to know more about Eva Pruitt, and any other writers she might yet discover tonight, before showing her hand. Better to hold her cards close for a little while longer.
Julia shook her head. No, not a writer. “But I know someone who fancies a go at detective stories.” She intended to feign a glance about, as if Willard Wright, the sole (thus far) author she knew in New York, lurked somewhere amid the room’s stew of chatter, but found she could not drag her eyes from the flawless face watching her in return.
“Everyone’s a writer these days,” Eva said. “Pablo collects us.” She eyed Julia as if she were the more exotic creature. (She was not.)
Julia asked what kinds of things she wrote.
Eva smiled. In a soft, conspiratorial lilt, she said she’d recently completed her first novel. Like every other writer in the room, Eva said, she was hoping to catch a publisher’s eye. Pablo had been sweet about it; he’d promised to put in a good word for her with his friend Arthur Goldsmith. That Arthur Goldsmith, her gaze confirmed. The eminent publisher. She lifted her hand to show two crossed fingers.
Julia mirrored the crossed fingers and dropped her voice to an equally private register. She asked Eva what her book was about.
Shifting her gaze to the open door of the bookcase between them, Eva began to describe her novel in slow, thoughtful spurts. It was drawn, she said, from her experiences working at Carlotta’s—a cabaret, she explained when she realized Julia did not recognize the name. With each languid sentence, an entrancing voice emerged. Deep, fluid, and unhurried, it bore the scar of a long-escaped accent, something southern. Its music expanded to enfold the two women and shield them from the room’s commotion. They edged closer and closer, until they were touching, arm to arm, turning a wall of bare shoulders to the party. Once or twice someone brushed the back of Julia’s dress, and indistinct voices rose and fell nearby, but she ignored them, mesmerized by the remarkable woman so close she could smell the faint lemon scent of her flawless skin. She could count the seven diamonds that anchored each of Eva Pruitt’s earrings.
Julia followed little of the melodic drawl. A small effervescence tickled her pulse. She’d met few strangers of interest since returning to New York last month. Here was a woman who intrigued her, not only a writer but a woman apparently blessed with that rarest of combinations: natural elegance, sensuous beauty, and artistic talent.
At the prospect of such an acquaintance, Julia’s spirits began to stretch, her muscles to hum. She felt a shift in her bones, a turning forward toward the new and unknown, toward what mattered. She had work to do yet that evening—she’d come to explore the literary landscape—but to make a new friend too would be a jolly sweet bonus.
A squeal turned their heads. A small man stood on a nearby chair, bouncing on flexed knees as he chanted a poem in a sunlit Jamaican accent. Black curls frothed about his ears, and rouge blazed on his cheeks and lips. His feet were enormous, clad without socks in dusty Cuban sandals. He reminded Julia of the more entertaining bohemians who occasionally held court at the London gallery she’d once known well. With a second squeal Duveen folded the fellow into a one-armed bear hug. He set him on the floor and two-stepped with him off toward the piano, his martini trailing gin across the carpet.
Before Julia could ask Eva more about her novel, a black sleeve, taut and swift as an arrow, thrust abruptly into view between them. Two Negro men in evening clothes joined them. Eva went quiet. She introduced them as Jerome Crockett and Logan Lanier. Poets, she said. Fine poets both. “Very fine.”
Lanier, who looked no older than a schoolboy with smooth, plump cheeks, shook Julia’s hand with polite church manners. His friend, however, fixed her with a wary eye. Crockett was as tall as Eva, but alert posture and a crisp white collar propelled his chin an inch above hers. Close-cut hair covered his head like sculpted black lather. From his lapel smirked a small gold pin bearing three Greek letters: Phi Beta Kappa. A scholar, then. When he dipped his head in mute greeting, Julia stole a peek at his shoes: the room’s lights sparkled back at her in their impeccable shine. She’d half expected to see spats. Had a silver-tipped cane been checked at the door?
Lanier demurred at Eva’s praise. He confessed he was as yet only a humble student of poetry. “Jerome is the true talent in the room,” he said of his older and more somber friend. “Have you heard what they say, Miss Kydd? That one of his poems is like a semester at Yale?”
“No more than a week,” Crockett said. “Even at NYU.”
Lanier clutched his heart in mock injury.
“Jerome won the Gardiner Prize last month,” Eva said.
Crockett’s mouth trembled on the brink of a smile before regaining its gravitas.
“Miss Kydd has a friend who writes detective stories,” Eva told the men. “You know, puzzlers. Like Conan Doyle.”
Crockett’s jaw twitched.
“You know. Sherlock Holmes.” Eva’s face bloomed in a wide smile. “You know!” She straightened
his tie with an affectionate cluck and, her profile gleaming like a bright cameo against his dark cheek, kissed him warmly on the mouth.
He breathed something into her ear, slid an arm around her waist, and solemnly asked Julia to excuse them. Eva brushed Julia’s hand and murmured something as they moved away, but Julia was too stunned to catch her words. Watching the couple recede into the party, she felt another jolt of shock travel her spine.
Were Eva Pruitt and Jerome Crockett lovers?
A white woman and a Negro man?
As she watched Crockett’s dark thumb idly circle the nub of Eva’s hip, Julia’s shock changed to fear. Were they mad? To share a dance floor or mingle over martinis was bold enough, but open intimacy? This was America. Negroes were swung from trees for less.
CHAPTER 2
“Are you a book fancier, Miss Kydd?” Logan Lanier asked. He nodded to the Salome still pressed into the folds of Julia’s skirt.
Julia reshelved the book and latched the case’s door. In truth she was a keen lover of books, though as with many bibliophiles, her enthusiasm exceeded a simple pleasure in reading. The clandestine childhood hours she’d spent in her father’s library—his collections of Aldines, printed Horae, the daunting Baskervilles, the anvil-like Kelmscotts, with pages as ornate as Persian rugs—had kindled in her a passion for the textures, colors, and heft of books’ bodies, a love quite unrelated to their contents.
Not waiting for an answer, Lanier’s round face bobbed above his prim white collar. He said he longed to own books, beautiful ones, as much as to write them. Especially modern poetry firsts, when he could afford them. Did she know of Cuala? Julia didn’t much care for the rustic design nostalgia of the Cuala Press—a small handcraft operation run by Yeats’s sisters in Ireland—but yes, she said, she knew it. As a young bookbinding student at Camberwell, she’d once made a portfolio to house a friend’s collection of Cuala broadsides.
Another fellow materialized out of the party. He greeted Lanier and turned to Julia. “I know you,” he said. “The girl with the new press! Julia, right? We met at a Colophon chili-and-poker night. Russell Coates brought you. I thought you went back to London.” He extended a hand and introduced himself as Austen Hurd. “Just Austen. No mister for me.”