by Marlowe Benn
“Christophine. I’ll be over soon to settle my affairs and pack up our household. I’m staying on here just long enough to find us a flat. I’m at the Seville, so you can reach me there if you need to.” Julia scribbled down the address and tucked it into Glennis’s handbag. “Don’t be glum. I’m doing what feels right for me. New York might be an amusing place to live after all.”
“I know what’s happened. You must have won that judgment business with your brother. Is that it? Did your inheritance come through?”
Julia smiled.
“Well, no wonder. You have all that money—”
“Not so much really. But enough.”
“All that money and no bossy brother to parcel it out like some bloody reward for keeping mum about what a tosser he is. Holy Joe, I’d go for that too if I could get it.”
A porter met them as they emerged from the clearing area. Glennis handed him her case and her papers, and they followed him up the gangplank and along a maze of corridors to the cabin. It was a pleasant space, with a starboard porthole. On the table waited a dozen red roses. Julia quickly found and removed the card. Another of David’s grand gestures, obviously arranged before her telegram had arrived. “Look,” she said brightly, “David wishes you a pleasant voyage.”
Glennis made a sour face. “So this is your cabin.” She looked around as if it were a soiled hand-me-down dress. “How could you do this to me? Now the crossing will be a big bore, and I’ll have to stay with Archie’s mother. She’s a monster. She thinks I’m some damp flapper. She’ll put the kibosh on everything.”
“Stay at my flat,” Julia said. “Christophine will help with anything you need.” She wrote the address on another slip of paper and tucked it down beside the first, silently reminding herself to cable Christophine to clear the new paper shipments off the guest room bed.
A steward arrived with a silver ice bucket. He made space for it beside the roses and deftly opened the champagne. He glanced at a note protruding from his cuff. “Compliments of Mr. Adair, miss,” he said to Glennis. He fetched a second glass from the trolley in the corridor.
“To fiancés,” Julia suggested, toasting her friend. “May Archie make you very, very happy.”
The answering smile was a very, very poor thing.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” Glennis said, plopping into a barrel-backed chair. “I thought we were friends. I want us to be married ladies together. Can’t you change your mind?”
“We’re different, Glennis. I’m simply not the marrying sort, as I told you. I like my life the way it is.”
“We’re different, all right. You have your own money, all of it, free and clear.” Glennis fidgeted with her ring. “I’d give Archie back this pokey thing in a heartbeat if I didn’t need him to get Chester’s mitts off mine. It’s so flipping unfair.”
“Glennis, listen. You don’t have to marry Archie or anyone. Now that Chester needs to keep you quiet, he’ll make sure you have plenty of funds to live on. Maybe not forever but for a few years at least. You can follow your own path too, decide for yourself if and when you marry. Lots of women do these days. You went to college. There must be things you’d like to do, hobbies or charities or work of some kind.”
Glennis’s eyebrows spurted up. “You mean like a job?”
“I mean whatever you’d find worthwhile, interesting. You could explore, take a class, try something new.” Julia remembered the pleasure of her first printing and binding courses at Camberwell. Might Glennis experience the same novice’s thrill? She tried to imagine Glennis squinting over a composing stick or scoring sheets with a folding bone, but the picture wouldn’t form. No, they were different in that way as well.
Glennis sat back with a loud ooof. She took a gulp of champagne, pinched her lips to stifle the fizzy burn, and thought for several seconds. “Independence sounds all fine and jolly, but it only works when you’re strong and clever like you. I’m stupid and silly and not even pretty. All I’m good at is shopping and going to parties—but not by myself. Archie may not be much of a wow, but at least I’d have him. I’d rather marry the old poke than have all the tra-la freedom in the world and be alone.”
Julia set aside her glass and slid forward until her kneecaps rested against Glennis’s. “Listen to me. You have a stout heart. You are fun and funny, and your laugh can outsparkle any diamond. You don’t need glamour and posh long legs. You know right from wrong and say so, which puts you forever at the front of my book. Think what friends we’ve become this past month. You’ll make oodles of new friends in London, once they see what a good person you are. Believe me. You are.”
She stroked her friend’s semi-engaged hand. “In six days you’ll start an exciting new life. I’ll make sure David invites you to his best parties, and by the time I join you in a month or so, you may even have a new beau, if you put your mind to it. You are a very good flirter.”
Glennis smiled. She was.
“You can show me around the new clubs there just like you did here. And if Archie’s still the ticket, well, then we’ll shop for your trousseau.”
Glennis’s smile bloomed.
“And I’ll dance at your wedding.” It was a cliché, but Julia meant it. Of course she would. The freedom that meant so much to her had always terrified Glennis, and perhaps it always would. Even to Julia’s ears her fine words of choice and independence had rung a bit hollow, given how close she too had come to marrying for convenience. Independence was a luxury, she now understood, secured with a steady income more than principled resolve. But money enabled other choices too, and Glennis’s stretched out before her, including the married life she craved. Did she know how fortunate she was? How fortunate they both were?
Glennis refilled their glasses and hoisted hers high. “To trousseaus and weddings. And babies and parties and having a date for the rest of my life.”
Julia drank to her friend’s vision of bliss, however rosy. They settled back to enjoy the champagne, listening to the traffic in the corridor. Julia thought about Naomi and Alice and the countless other women whose fortunes, and choices, were far more circumscribed. In time she believed Glennis would think of them too.
A blast from the ship’s horn warned visitors it was time to leave. Julia set down her glass and allowed herself a moment’s fond regard of the roses. He was a lovely man. She would miss him. But he needed a wife. It was important for his business, for the way he liked to live. Thank goodness she would never have to be that idle woman squandering her days in Devon and Provence. Yes, David would be taken aback by her decision, possibly even wounded briefly, but Julia didn’t doubt someone else, Lila French or maybe Sarah Wynchell, would make him the contented, absent wife he wished for. She expected word of it by year’s end, spring at the latest.
They walked arm in arm back to the gangplank. “I will be happy for you,” Julia said, “whether you marry Archie or someone else or nobody. All that matters is that you decide what’s best, Glennis. I decide for me. You decide for you. But we’re friends, always, no matter what.”
On the deck they embraced. Glennis clamped her arms around Julia with her usual gusto, though this time it evoked the bond of their extraordinary past month together rather than a bruising determination to drag Julia along into her future. But when Glennis stepped back and seized her hands, Julia braced for another last entreaty.
Instead a fierce clasp crumpled her fingers. “No matter what,” Glennis repeated firmly.
Julia turned to look up when she reached the pier. Glennis was leaning against the railing. She began to wave, arm sweeping like a matador’s. Julia returned the wave and threw her friend a kiss. “Six days!” she mouthed. She sprang apart her fingertips to demonstrate the merest poof of time until Glennis’s future could begin to unfold. Another bone-rattling blast sent people streaming down the gangplank. Other voyagers pressed against the railing, jostling Glennis, eager for the exuberant ritual of final farewells amid camera flashes and hurrahs.
/> Glennis would not be budged. She stood in her place, feet apart, face determined. With both palms she flung back a mighty kiss of her own across the roiling water.
CHAPTER 29
The next morning Julia arrived unannounced at the reception room of Feeney, Churchman, Kessler, and Rousch. She carried an envelope under her arm, a thin sheaf of Amy Lowell poems just received from Maurice Firuski over croissants in the café across the street. Eager as she was to read them, her long list of errands for the day demanded attention first. Miss Baxter eyed her skeptically when she refused to state her business. But when she put through word that Julia was waiting, Jack catapulted from his closet at the end of the hall.
“I thought you were on your way to Southampton. What’s happened?”
With the office door firmly closed behind them, Julia explained the change of plan. He kindly said nothing of her jilted beau.
“I’d like your help,” she said. “I’ve decided to stay. Yes, in New York. Manhattan. Philip may think I’ve gone balmy, but I’m not consulting him. I rather like this city, what I’ve seen of it, and surely it’s big enough for both of us. I’m ready for a change. I’d like to give it a go and see what happens.” Now that she had a bona fide brother, even an unrelated one, she was keen to repay his vexations. She was in considerable arrears.
“How can I help?”
“I need an agent to find me a suitable home. I’m fairly particular about what I’ll need, which we can discuss later. There are a few other matters as well.”
He pulled a notepad from his desk drawer and uncapped his pen.
The tip of his tongue crept to his upper lip. “Julia,” he said, “I must ask you something first. Willard Wright pesters me every time I see him. He wants to know the story behind Naomi Rankin’s death. He’s still got this cracked idea of writing detective stories, and he’s hungry for material. Would you mind if I told him what you learned? I can hardly creep in and out of my building without him haranguing me about it.”
Alarm shrilled Julia’s answer. “Absolutely not. Never. Impossible. You’re sworn to secrecy, Jack.”
He looked miserable. “He won’t stop hounding me. I suppose I could just insist there was nothing suspicious after all. He’ll rant a blue streak, but eventually he’ll have to accept it.”
“A completely justified fib. The Rankins’ privacy doesn’t concern me, but others would be hurt if the story came to light.”
He looked both relieved and ashamed. Why he let that odious Wright fellow torment him Julia couldn’t imagine.
“I’ll need your managerial talents,” she said. “With my new accounts. I’d like to establish an endowment—an anonymous endowment, Jack, that’s very important—to boost the wages of the women who work at the Empire State Equal Rights Union. Find out whatever Chester Rankin’s bank pays its office employees and set the Union’s wages fifty percent higher. Please do whatever you must to ensure the women have no inkling where the money has come from.” The money would be welcome, she was sure, allowing Alice to devote more of Naomi’s funds to Union programs.
Jack wrote steadily as she spoke. He looked up, expression sober but eloquent.
“What?”
He shook his head and slid the pad, lined with neatly jotted notes, to one side, uncovering the pile of recently opened mail he’d been reviewing when she’d interrupted. “I seem to recall Miss Baxter speaking highly of an estate agent her brother recently hired.” He pushed his chair away from the desk. “I’ll go see if she can recall the fellow’s name.”
It was practically laid out for Julia to see. The top sheet of Jack’s morning mail was a handwritten note dated simply Saturday. It was signed with a flamboyant P. She listened for the sound of returning footsteps, heard none, and bent closer to read.
Feeling benevolent this morning, it said.
Old Lillian’s largesse has addled my brain. If my fair sister should ask you to direct a portion of her new wealth to some charitable purpose—as I have a suspicion she might—please slap another ten thousand on it from Lillian’s accounts. Strictly secret, promise me. I rather applaud the youngster’s pluck, you know, even if she is so dashed exasperating.
Julia read it again, more slowly. How many more facets to Philip’s character had she not yet seen? How many more surprises might yet lie ahead? It was a dizzying prospect; she hoped for no more than one per day.
“George Aronson.”
Julia jumped. Jack leaned in the open doorway, arms folded, and repeated the name. “The estate agent. I’ll telephone him this afternoon and set up an appointment for tomorrow, if that suits your schedule.”
She straightened and shook her head at the very idea of having a schedule. “Anytime tomorrow would suit.” She wrote on his notepad the hotel address and telephone number where she could be reached.
He capped his pen. “Very well. I’ll telephone later today. Anything else?”
“Just one more thing.” She gathered up her gloves and handbag. “Would you happen to know how I might go about registering to vote?”
AFTERWORD
Although this is a work of fiction, and I have occasionally sacrificed strict historical accuracy for the purposes of my story, several minor characters are versions of real men and women, colorful players on the extraordinary cultural and political stage that was Manhattan in the 1920s.
Willard Huntington Wright was an erudite, often acerbic art critic who enjoyed a modest reputation in elite cultural circles. In 1925, at the age of thirty-seven, his health collapsed. He was forced to spend several months in solitude, recovering strength and sobriety. To endure the deprivation, he pursued the most lucrative enterprise he could manage, writing crime fiction for the readers he generally disdained, women and “the masses.” Using the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine, he created Philo Vance, the first American amateur sleuth to truly ignite bestseller lists. Wright’s first two novels—The Benson Murder Case and The Canary Murder Case—were hugely popular, their plots drawn from recent headline coverage of sensational Manhattan crimes. Other volumes quickly followed to meet the demand.
The cynical yet brilliant Philo Vance was soon famous for dazzling pedantry and solving crimes through psychological rather than forensic clues. There’s no evidence that Wright modeled Vance and his devoted scribe Van Dine on real men of his acquaintance, but I have taken the liberty of imagining as much. I suspect such actual men, once freed from the distortion of Wright’s misanthropic wit, might have had a wealth of interesting qualities Wright would scorn. Because he gave Vance a personal life nearly devoid of women, I felt compelled to ensure a female of extraordinary mettle in the life of the “real” Vance I imagined. An estranged half sister, perhaps. Or not a sister at all.
Although Wright’s novels are set in Manhattan between the wars, they offer few glimpses into the fabled cultural energy of those decades. Vance’s arcane tastes in book collecting, for example, bear little trace of the era’s enthusiasm for private presses and fine bookmaking. Maurice Firuski’s Dunster House imprint was a minor player in a thriving transatlantic market for beautiful limited editions of the sort produced by Julia’s Capriole Press. Both Beatrice Warde and her enigmatic husband, though they separated in 1925, became significant players in the era’s typographic renaissance, and by her death in 1970, Warde was hailed as the century’s “first lady” of typography. I suspect she and Julia Kydd would be natural friends, given their kindred interests.
Rarer still in Wright’s novels are glimpses of contemporary social and political turmoil. I’ve taken a different approach. Margaret Sanger, with her Clinical Research Bureau, staffed by Dr. Dorothy Bocker, was a well-known pioneer in the struggle for safe and legal birth control and women’s health care. Similarly, although the Empire State Equal Rights Union is fictional, Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party were instrumental in gaining voting rights for women. They were opposed by, among others, Alice Hay Wadsworth (wife of James W. Wadsworth, New York senator from 1914 to 1926), presiden
t of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. The association published the Woman Patriot until 1932.
Finally, I’ve given Naomi Rankin political ambitions that were lofty but not unreachable. In 1932 Hattie Wyatt Caraway, a Democrat from Arkansas, became the first woman elected to the US Senate. Naomi’s other great dream—an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, assuring full gender equality under the law—remains unrealized to this day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any first novel owes much to many, and mine is no exception. I’m grateful to the friends who’ve read evolving versions over the years, particularly my sister, Laura Bjornson, Emily Chamberlain, and Kathleen Thorne. Special thanks to Ellen Gruber Garvey, whose astute remarks breathed life into a draft I’d nearly declared dead, and to Susie Rennels for the insightful conversations that helped push the book to its final iteration.
Thanks to Claire Hicks, Lindsay Guzzardo, the late Sally Robison, Harriet Alexander, Cameron Snow, Nan Wooldridge, Abra Bennett, Babs Brownell, Suellen Cunningham, and Pat Speidel for early listening, reading, and encouragement. I’m also grateful to Woodleigh Marx Hubbard and Mickey Molnaire, who patiently plowed with me through assorted false starts and plot gaffes, and to LT Treviño Yoson and fellow writers Ruby Hansen Murray and Joyce Simons for advice, commiseration, and camaraderie.
I’m deeply grateful to my agent, Amanda Jain, for her enthusiastic skill in finding a good home for this book. I feel fortunate that her efforts led me to Lake Union Publishing. My editor Chris Werner, developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin, Nicole Pomeroy, Haleigh Rucinski, Miranda Dunning, and the rest of the talented team have been nothing short of sterling.
Finally, I thank my husband, Paul Benton, for anchoring the essential “everything else” of my life, and my late father, Peter Beckman, for introducing me early on to the pleasures of good fiction. I may have groaned through every poem he intoned on car trips and every literary allusion he sprinkled over family dinners, but he gave me a deep love for language and the worlds it can create. This book is the result, and it’s dedicated to his memory.