by Marlowe Benn
Glennis began to shake. “What are you saying? Julia? Alice?”
“She’s suggesting that whoever wrote those evil notes may have made good on the threats,” Alice said. “It would explain Naomi’s sudden illness.”
“You mean she was poisoned?”
Julia steadied her friend’s hands, cold as rubber. “It’s a possibility. Maybe slim but we can’t ignore it.”
“He’s a fiend!” Glennis stiffened. “And I’m next!”
Alice recoiled, unprepared for Glennis’s abrupt leap into melodrama. Julia tried to reassure her with a quick look begging forbearance, but beyond that all she could do was embrace her friend with the usual tutting and shushing and lead Glennis back through the Union’s front office in a clumsy waltz of apologies. They bumped against a table where a typewriting machine sat unattended—long enough to give Julia a close look at the crisp pica font, unlike that of the threatening notes, on a stack of prepared envelopes—and stumbled out to the street.
They were back in a taxi before Glennis spoke with any coherence. “I know it, Julia. I’m next unless we stop him. We have to get at her file again.”
“Do you honestly imagine your brother would let me anywhere near his study after the goose chase I led him on last time? You’ll have to be on your own for returning that note.”
“Not that. You don’t understand. For the proof. He’d keep the receipt. He keeps everything.”
Julia sighed, weary of Glennis’s Machiavellian mind. If only it could be so simple. Not even Chester would file a receipt for poison in his private folder labeled Naomi.
CHAPTER 15
“To new friends,” Russell Coates said, raising his glass, “and endless evenings.”
Julia dipped her nose into a halo of Cointreau. If only this one wouldn’t end. It had begun at a fourth floor Village walk-up, where a party of Colophon Club bibliophiles was already in full flow. They were greeted by a fellow named Maurice Firuski. Wearing a white whale lapel pin and holding a martini in each hand, he nodded in lieu of a handshake.
“Ask him anything about Herman Melville,” Russell said. “Or better yet, don’t.”
“And whatever you do, don’t mention T. S. Eliot,” added the young woman who had opened the door. She was striking in a forthright, unfussy way, with thick dark hair. Her dress was shapeless and office gray, the sleeves rolled halfway up her arms to expose fine wrists and a purple beaded bracelet. Her remark launched Firuski’s tale (abbreviated by demand) of having been approached by Eliot about issuing a fine edition of The Waste Land—a coup to raise any publisher’s pulse—from his Dunster House Press. But before Firuski could pounce, Horace Liveright got there first. And everyone knew the glow that cachet still gave the crafty old publisher. Another guest named Austen Hurd, who worked for Liveright, gave a riotous account of the firm’s indecent celebrating. This prompted Russell to mention Capriole, Julia to beam, and someone to pour more martinis.
Yes, she did happen to have Wednesday with her—produced from its flannel wrapper—and yes, Gill’s work was a stunner. And Virginia Woolf no less—brilliant! The partiers commiserated about the problem of authors, especially living ones. Among typophiles as she was, Julia could admit that the artistry of fine printing—illustrations, typography, papers, inks, bindings—was what interested her, though of course one needed a text with shoulders sturdy enough to support (and docile enough to accept) the fancy dress. Most printers fell back upon familiar mainstays whose authors wouldn’t kick up a fuss. Dead, if possible. (Norwegian folktales or one’s lover’s poems, for starters. Julia was as guilty as any of them.) Much as Julia and most bibliophiles tired of fine editions of Mrs. Browning’s sonnets or favorite Psalms, they could forgive any old-hat text if the edition itself sparkled with some fresh wit, beauty, or mastery.
The dark-haired woman was named Beatrice, or Paul, she said with a moue of mystery. She turned out to be a year younger than Julia but already in charge of the American Type Founders library in New Jersey. Julia began to tell her about Stanley Morison’s scheme of reviving historical fonts for Monotype in London, but Bea (the third name given to her in as many minutes, this one by her taciturn and febrile husband, Frederique Warde, who never left his chair beside the liquor cabinet) already knew about it, having met Morison during his American visit last spring. It was soon clear that Mrs. Warde was the most knowledgeable bookman in the room. She talked of Updike and Rogers, Goudy and Rollins, and a type-and-lettering man named Bill Dwiggins whose work might outshine them all. As if they’d been friends for years, Bea and Julia began to trade the usual book-hound gossip, much of it merrily apochryphal: of misspelled vanity watermarks, of the binder who boxed up the trimmed deckles as per his client’s instructions to save them, of the deluxe edition of Song of Solomon moldering in a Boston warehouse for want of a codpiece and wind-arranged tresses.
When time came for the evening’s customary chili bean stew, kitchen-brewed beers, and poker, Russell and Julia said their goodbyes and headed downtown for a dinner of oriental delicacies. Overlooking mists of oil and steam, they perched on stools amid swirling sounds they did not understand and dishes too fantastical to recognize. Julia tasted a broth threaded with curd and citrus zest, a skewered red creature with limbs so strange it might have come from the moon, and morsels resembling nothing so much as insects from the alleyway. Some bites stung the corners of her mouth, others dissolved into a disconcerting jelly, and some yielded numbing flavors of anise, lemon, or coriander.
From there they taxied far uptown to a club where a turbaned Negro woman of immense girth, each breast the size of a wrestler’s thigh, mewled one double entendre song after another. When a small orchestra at the back of the stage struck up in the new jazz style, Russell and Julia were sucked forward with the crowd onto the dance floor, then pinned in place by the gyrating crush. Julia’s temples ached in the alchemy of sweat, gin, talc, hair cream, perfume, and smoke, mostly of the illicit variety. And yet how lovely, some dizzy part of her mind thought, that a random assortment of strangers, white and colored, whether in fur coats or patched coveralls, could share such intimate camaraderie. In London one took care to party, as to live and shop and work, within one’s narrow slice of peers. Adventuring up or down the social tiers was a gamble; it could wreak wild amusement or intense mortification. Here mingling sweat and caresses among complete strangers was part of the excitement. This was what those bored Talbot Leaguers milling about the Winterjay apartment so restlessly sought but didn’t dare pursue. Here lay the possibility of genuine clashing—clashing of minds and words and eyes and mouths and bodies that could destroy everything and reinvent anything. Here, beyond all borders of race and class, one risked new knowledge, new realizations. Thrilling. Terrifying.
As a thin yellow light from the stage warned that another show was about to begin, Russell and Julia wriggled free and moved on again through the moonless night, arriving at another dark cabaret back downtown, one of the city’s countless refuges where a word and a bill ushered one into a cave of crowded privacy and expensive liquor. They paused to greet three men who nodded at them from a table near the empty stage. One of them was Willard Wright. He seized Julia’s hand, stroking it with an unctuous familiarity slicked by alcohol.
“We’re recovering from the philharmonic,” he said. “The Franck D Minor, God help us. Frightfully sentimental, but what can one do in these mawkish times?”
His companions were a fat, dour-faced man Russell introduced as Henry Mencken and Paul Duveen, a large blowsy fellow with bulging teeth and white-blond hair. Both, he said, were bookmen of a fairly serious stripe. Their interest in Julia grew on learning she was a fine printer and proprietor of a new English private press, but before it could harden into the usual eye-glinting collectors’ avarice, Russell made their excuses and led her farther into the shadowed club. They slid onto a velvet banquette.
Throughout the evening they had spoken of books, of London, of the Volstead nuisance, and of books again.
Julia was happy, distracted. How blithely she’d once enjoyed such carefree hours. Stripped of their certainty now, or soon to be, she understood with fresh empathy how Glennis lived. In her new circumstances Julia too should now be humming with alert schemes. She too should be on the lookout for a prosperous husband. What about Russell? Should she set her cap for him, muscling Glennis aside in that pitiful old spectacle of rivaling misses?
The thought was repellent. Not Russell as a lover (no, as a husband—business before pleasure now) but the cynicism, the scheming. She pushed it away, at least for the short time remaining before her twenty-fifth birthday ended her Kydd income forever. Enjoy this. Here were pleasures to savor. Cointreau, Russell, the unfolding wonders of this new Manhattan. Absorb delight while she could.
And yet. Why concede her independence was doomed? The ruling had gone against her, but Philip’s impulsive wager offered her a lifeline, however tenuous. She’d interrupted his breakfast on the library terrace Tuesday morning to declare as much. “You haven’t impoverished me quite yet, you know,” she’d said from the open French door. “You proposed a wager last weekend, and I accepted. As far as I’m concerned, it still stands. I intend to learn the truth about Naomi Rankin’s death, and if I’m right about it, you agree to forfeit your claims to my money.” It came out rather well: clear, calm, resolute. Best of all was Philip’s stunned face.
But he recovered instantly, lifting his coffee cup in an assenting salute. “Brava,” he’d said without, for once, a hint of guile.
Before her head could drift away on the fumes of the Club Noir, Julia leaned into the pungency of Russell’s shaving balm and hazarded the night’s most vital conversation. “Tell me about Naomi Rankin.”
He drew back. Something clouded his eyes. “A curious request.”
“The more I learn, the more I wish I’d known her. You said you were friends once. I’d like to hear more, if you wouldn’t mind.”
He sank back into the cushions, pulling Julia’s shoulders with him. “All right.” He took a long pensive breath. “Naomi was a bit like you. Not one to giggle and flirt and pretend she didn’t understand. Even as a girl she spoke her mind. I remember once she refused to go to church because girls couldn’t be altar boys. Her father finally picked her up one Sunday and literally carried her into the service, but when the music stopped, she yelled at the top of her lungs about how Saint Stephen’s wasn’t fair to girls. Old Alford nearly knocked her head off right there. Soon after that they shipped her to a school in Connecticut, and I only saw her at holidays. We were about twelve or thirteen then.”
“A rebel.”
“Mmmm.” His eyes closed. “She felt girls’ things were less fun, less important, less dangerous, less everything, than what boys were allowed to do. And generally she was right.”
“Proud of her skinned knees and scraped knuckles? My mother had a bit of that in her. She once tried to teach me to smoke a cigar. I desperately wanted to like it but threw up instead.”
The corners of Russell’s mouth stirred.
“What about after you grew up?” Julia asked. “Were you still friends?”
He held a swallow of brandy in his mouth and stroked the length of her bare arm, shoulder to elbow to hand. “Oh yes.”
He paused on the small knob of her wrist. She rolled her palm to slide her fingers through his. Why hadn’t she guessed before? Glennis hadn’t, she felt certain. “You were lovers?”
He carried her arm over the table to rest across his lap. “For a time. But in absolute secrecy. It seems comical now. Maddening at the time.”
“Why secret? I wouldn’t think she’d mind those old scruples.”
“She didn’t care two sausages about propriety. But she was becoming more involved in her politics, and I think I embarrassed her.”
“Why? Did you oppose her?”
“I thought she was utterly right. It was a national disgrace women weren’t allowed to vote. But beliefs were never enough for her. She needed action. As the movement gathered steam, it completely absorbed her. She’d have thrown herself in front of Wilson’s train if she thought it would change his mind.”
He filled his lungs and slowly released the air. “I couldn’t understand that. She said I was becoming a typical male—that was an epithet—too lodged in my ways to see my own privileges. Clubby years at Yale and then law school, the waiting partnership with my father, the notion that politics happened between gentlemen in clubs or boardrooms or during country weekends. And she was right. In that world, shouting in the street was vulgar, bad form—womanish.”
Vulgar: a denouncement always wielded by the strong against the weak, by the rich against the poor. Julia recalled the images of Naomi Rankin standing tall and fierce beneath a placard, the White House an anemic thing behind her. And Naomi’s face, alive in laughter with her friend, arms cradling each other’s waists, hair streaming loose. “Did you talk about marriage?”
Where did that come from? Was her mind already snaking toward the marriage snare at the end of every romantic story? Worse, was she prying into his past to pursue her own imminent interests? Before she could withdraw the intrusive question, he stroked her arm and said, “I did, sometimes, but Naomi wouldn’t consider it. She called marriage legalized slavery. And then as things heated up in Washington, we saw each other less and less. When we did, we didn’t talk much, if you understand. There was passion, certainly, but then she’d be off again to a march or a rally. I began to feel like her guilty secret, her vice. I was her partner in sin but not in life.
“It’s a relief to talk about this, you know, now that she’s dead. It was all a long time ago, and much has happened since then. I still prefer the Rankins not know, as they’re my golden goose these days. Chester declared war on Naomi almost the day their father died, and he’d have me shot for treason if he knew I’d”—he kissed the tip of Julia’s nose—“fraternized.”
“The secret must have been hard to keep, working for the family like that. I can’t speak for the rest of them, but I’m certain Glennis has no idea.”
“Glennis has no idea of anything much of the time, bless her.” Russell smiled. “No, she’s a good kid. She was quite young when Naomi and I were most, what, involved, so she wouldn’t have noticed anything. No one did. And of course we were still good friends. No one thought twice when we turned up together. With a passel of her friends, often as not, for chaperones. But it was clear our lives were going in different directions. My old dad began to nag me about marrying, starting a family. He’s impatient for grandsons—even though, as you see, I still haven’t obliged him.”
Julia freed her arm to raise her glass. “A modern man,” she said. “A kindred spirit.”
“Modern,” he repeated without her gloss of humor.
“What about recently? Did you see her much in the last year or so?”
“Some. After Chester forced her to move into that miserable apartment, she occasionally needed to escape from living in his shadow, so to speak. We’d head out to the country for a drive. She said it cleared her head. We’d have a few drinks, talk a little.”
“And?”
He gave a short, harsh laugh. “And not much else. I admit I hoped she might want to rekindle things, but it didn’t seem so.” His face clouded. “There wasn’t much chance to find out. Her flatmate, that Clintock woman, was like a jealous mother hen, jibing at me every chance she could. I don’t know if it was me in particular she didn’t like or men in general. I hate to say it, but she’s the sort of crabbed creature who gives Vivian Winterjay’s ideas some credence. Clintock can’t hold a candle to Naomi as a woman.”
“Her death must have come as a terrible shock.”
“You can’t imagine. And then when Chester said it was suicide . . .” Russell scrubbed his fingertips across his chin. “All he cared about was keeping it quiet and disposing of her body. You were there. I was simply the lawyer, an errand boy, nothing more.” He put down his glass. “Enough of that. I want to h
ear about you. Your plans. What made you leave New York? What brought you back? Your life, your childhood. Who you are and who you hope to become. I want to hear whatever you’ll tell me.”
Julia hated such moments. Anything she cared to say rang hollow and banal. “It’s a dreary story. When I was thirteen, my mother was killed by a motorcar in Stockholm.”
Russell sucked in breath. “How devastating. Were you close?”
“We were.”
Julia knew that expectant gaze. But how could she explain? Lena grew more beguiling and more elusive each year, glimpsed in the flickering kaleidoscope of Julia’s memory: the glowing tip of her pencil-thin cigar on the balcony late at night, her penchant for trousers, her efforts to teach Julia and Christophine to ride a bicycle. Lena at the piano in the dark, drifting from Scriabin to Chopin to Satie. Her huge vases of lilies and roses, damask dressing gowns worn until dinner, colorful canvases on spattered easels, beds heaped with mismatched pillows. Lena had filled the space she was allowed to live in. It was shadowed, beyond society’s gaze, but not solitary. Like Milo, she too had special friends. Julia knew well about locked doors and long excursions to the park. And yet, despite all Julia would never know about her mother, she’d never doubted that she’d been her mother’s one ferocious love.
“And your father?” Russell asked, a quiet tap to dispel her reverie.
“My father had died years before, so my older half brother Philip—”
“I met him the other night. Interesting fellow.”
“—was made my guardian. We hardly knew each other. He packed me off to boarding schools, and I seldom saw him again for any length of time until a few weeks ago. When I turned eighteen and he gave me more say in spending my money, I decided to put an ocean between myself and those years. I left for Europe as soon as the war was over and it was safe to travel, with no plans other than to live where and as I saw fit.”