Vixen

by Jillian Larkin

  Ignoring her, Bastian glowered at Jerome. “I’m her fiancé, colored boy. And where do you get off questioning me? You forget your place just because you can play a rag?”

  Jerome dropped his hand from Gloria’s back, took a step backward, and made fists.

  The audience reacted as if they were watching a boxing match: They collectively oooohed. “My bet’s on the piano player,” Lorraine overheard a girl say.

  Gloria turned to Jerome, who had stepped back, a strange look glazing his eyes. “Jerome, don’t! I can explain—”

  Still staring at Bastian, Jerome said, “You’re welcome to get her on out of here. I think all of us are sorry about the mistaken identity.” Even Lorraine could feel the flame in his gaze—hatred? betrayal? disappointment? Maybe all of those things. “Your fiancée should never set foot in this club again.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bastian responded, “you won’t ever see her back here.”

  Standing between the two men, Gloria seemed to shrink. Lorraine couldn’t bear it. She pushed through the crowd. “Gloria!” Lorraine called out as she reached the dance floor. “Glo!”

  Bastian was dragging her to the edge of the stage. “Come on,” he said furiously.

  “You’re hurting me!” Gloria cried.

  Lorraine climbed up and was at her side in a moment. “Let her go!” she said, pulling at Bastian’s fingers, trying to break his grip. “She’s coming home with me.”

  That was when she felt the slap.

  There was a burst of light as the palm connected with her cheek, and then a sharp sting, like a lit match against her skin.

  At first she thought it was Bastian who’d hit her. But as she recovered from the shock of it, holding her smarting cheek, she met Gloria’s boiling eyes.

  “How could you?” Gloria asked.

  “Glo?” Lorraine said, wildly confused. “No. It’s not—”

  All at once, the world around her—the roaring crowd and the blinding, dizzying stage lights; the music that was now blaring from the gramophone—didn’t matter. All Lorraine could see was Gloria, whose face said: You betrayed me, you ruined my life, you destroyed everything.

  Lorraine felt her knees begin to shake. “Gloria. I’m your best friend in the world. I would never—”

  “I will never speak to you again as long as I live,” Gloria said coolly.

  And then Gloria surprised both Lorraine and Bastian: she snapped her elbow back into Bastian’s gut, and he lost his grip. She ran, leaping from the stage and pushing her way across the dance floor, not stopping for anyone or anything.

  Lorraine tried to go after Gloria, but the crowd had already closed behind her. By the time she emerged at the other end of the club, Gloria had disappeared.

  It was pointless to chase her now. Lorraine spotted Marcus heading for the door. “Do you think we should follow her home?”

  He wouldn’t look at her. “I always knew you were screwy, but I had no idea you were a traitor.”

  The word stung like a cut doused in alcohol. “Marcus, I swear to God, it wasn’t me! I didn’t tell Bastian. You have to believe me.”

  “Why should I?” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stormed toward the door.

  Traitor. The image of her kiss with Bastian flashed through her mind. Traitor. She hadn’t told Gloria. Traitor.

  She felt a hand on her back.

  “Are you all right?”

  Carlito. The mobster who had been dealing with Bastian. His gray eyes, framed by short black lashes, seemed kinder than she remembered. “I’ll be fine,” she said. But she was lying to herself: She was never going to be fine again.

  “I saw what happened.” He fished out a handkerchief, filled it with a few ice cubes from his glass, and held it up to her red cheek. “That was one helluva hit you took up there.”

  “She’s my friend,” Lorraine said, the ice soothing her burning cheek. “This feels good. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. What a rotten business this can be. I had half a mind to have that guy thrown out. Did you see the way he gave me the high hat?”

  “I did. Talk about disrespectful,” she said, taking over the handkerchief-holding duty.

  The gangster blinked at her with interest. “My thoughts exactly. That’s what’s wrong with this world—not enough respect. Between strangers, between friends, between a man and a woman.” He squeezed her arm gently. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the back. Anything at all.”

  Lorraine felt exhausted. “Really, I’m fine.” She held out the handkerchief.

  “Keep it,” he said, folding it into her hand. “The next time I see you, I don’t want to see a mark on that beautiful face of yours.”

  When he walked away, Lorraine unfolded the handkerchief. A monogrammed M was sewn into the corner. She lifted it to her nose and breathed in a masculine cologne.

  She sniffled.

  She had never felt so alone before, so irreversibly alone. And then she sniffed: Smoke.

  She looked down. At her feet was Marcus’s cigarette, smoldering, its orange spark slowly fading yet still aglow. She covered it with the toe of her shoe, then ground and ground it into the sticky floor until it was no more than an ashy corpse, its light burned out for good.

  GLORIA

  This was what Gloria remembered: stepping into the spotlight and seeing a crystalline image of her future, where she was meant to be—next to a piano, in front of an audience, a song streaming from her soul. It felt more like home than the house she’d grown up in. Onstage, she could actually move people in the moments it took to sing a ballad. That was more than a society wife could do in a lifetime.

  But the spotlight had been turned away.

  Part of her knew that the truth would have come out eventually. Pictures of her and Bastian were all over the society papers and gossip columns. How long could she have pretended to be a small-town singer? But she’d never thought it would happen so quickly. Life had teased her with a taste of freedom and then cruelly snatched it away, leaving her empty-handed. And alone.

  All the girls at Laurelton Prep heard one version or another of the story.

  Gloria had gone back to school on Monday—the only place she was allowed to go now, because her mother had grounded her for just shy of forever. Gloria was surprised to discover that she’d achieved a kind of tawdry celebrity. Girls laughed and whispered behind cupped hands when she passed in the hallways, and quieted when she came into a classroom.

  During her midday history class, she noticed something being passed back and forth between girls. Gloria, from her seat in the third row of desks, leaned over and snatched it from the grubby hands of Malinda Banks, a junior with the sad hint of a mustache.

  “Hey!” Malinda said, but Gloria didn’t pay her any attention. It was a page from the Chicago Daily Journal. The gossip column “The Chatterbox.” Right at the top of the page, Gloria spotted her own name in boldface type:

  Chicago sweetheart Gloria Carmody was caught without her pretenses—and without her engagement ring—performing the other night at an undisclosed location. Under the name Gloria Carson, the 17-year-old was discovered by her fiancé, Harvard graduate Sebastian Grey, fronting an all-colored band. “He ripped her right off the stage,” reports an anonymous source who witnessed the performance. “It was so embarrassing. For both of them.”

  “Gloria has always been a loose cannon,” says a friend of the Carmody family. “You wouldn’t guess it by looking at her, but she has a hidden life. I’ve heard that this isn’t the only colored band she’s performed with.” What other secrets is the young chanteuse withholding? Better find out, Sebastian, before it’s too late.

  In other news, Elizabeth Downing was spotted in Hyde Park last—

  “Honestly,” Gloria said, looking up from the page. It was only after every head had turned to stare that she realized she’d spoken out loud.

  “Yes?” Miss Trimbal, the history teacher, asked. “Did you say something, Gloria?”


  “All I did was sing. Is that such a crime?” Gloria glared at Malinda, then at every girl in the room.

  “It’s not that you sing,” called a voice from the back—Anna Desmond, that greasy-haired cow—“but whom you sing with. And that you lie about it. Because everyone knows there’d be only one reason to lie about singing love songs with a colored man—”

  “That’s quite enough, class,” Miss Trimbal said, ringing the tiny bell she kept on her desk. “I will remind you not to air your dirty laundry in public. Doing so only makes the sinner feel self-important and—”

  That was when Gloria had gathered her books and stood up.

  “Gloria Carmody, where do you think you’re going?” Miss Trimbal asked, but Gloria knew that any answer was beside the point.

  She stormed out of the room and into the bathroom down the hall, where she locked herself in one of the stalls and began to cry. The worst part? She couldn’t even go to Lorraine for comfort. They hadn’t spoken since that night at the Green Mill.

  Everyone at school acted so high and mighty, but it soon became clear to Gloria that they all wanted a piece of her story: They wanted to know whether she was involved with the Mob and whether she’d witnessed any killings; whether she could pull strings and get them into the Green Mill; and one girl asked her straight out whether she was “knocked up with that colored boy’s bastard,” and Gloria had slapped a person for the second time in her life.

  Gloria had never realized how much she depended on Lorraine to survive an average day. Between in-class note passing, lunch, after-school shopping, and nightly chats, the girls had been in constant communication.

  Luckily, Lorraine didn’t show up for school on Monday or Tuesday, so Gloria hadn’t had to deal with her. But when she set foot in homeroom on Wednesday, a textbook clutched to her chest, Lorraine was there in her wrinkled uniform and heavy makeup, looking haggard and hungover, as if she’d been on a bender for days. A cross between a chorus girl and a corpse.

  Gloria had the urge to smack Lorraine’s face with the book she was holding.

  Instead, she avoided her.

  Gloria’s entire life was a mess. Her irate mother’s most optimistic prediction was that Bastian would forgive her for the sake of the “greater plan.” Gloria could have her old life back and never speak again of singing, or carousing, or standing at the front of a band of black musicians as if she were no better than your average harlot.

  “What does that even mean?” Gloria had snapped. “What’s an ‘average’ harlot, Mother?” They were in the dining room, eating an overspiced meat loaf. Clara watched from across the table, speechless.

  “Do not sass me,” her mother had said. “You know full well what I mean.”

  “Right,” Gloria answered. “That I should aim to be an above-average harlot. A superior harlot!”

  “Gloria! To your room this instant!”

  She’d gone upstairs without dinner that night. Again. She’d flopped across her bed, as she had each of the nights since her Green Mill debut (if you could even call it that), and listened to Bessie Smith sing “Downhearted Blues” over and over.

  She felt an actual pang in her chest at the thought of never seeing Jerome again. Or leaving him with the indelible image of her as a fraud, as the rich little white faker he’d pegged her as from the start. A daddy’s girl. Except that her father wasn’t even in the picture, just wreaking havoc on their lives from a distance.

  She had to do something—anything—soon, or she knew that pang would eventually consume her. She just didn’t know what she could possibly to do to redeem herself.

  So in the meantime, she went over to the record player and moved the needle back to the beginning of “Downhearted Blues.”

  Gloria was on her bed, staring at the beige ceiling, when Clara popped her head around the cracked-open door. “Glo, you-know-who just telephoned for you.”

  Lorraine had been incessantly calling the house, but Gloria refused to speak to her. Raine had even sent over a series of telegrams that had said “I’m sorry,” “Please forgive me,” and “Did you get my first telegram saying that I’m sorry?” but Gloria had thrown them in the garbage. She was in no mood to read a bunch of self-justifying excuses and tiresome apologies. After all the years they had been best friends, after everything they had been through together, how could Raine have ratted her out? She had always been a little crazy, that much was true, but never in a cruel way.

  And now Gloria was grounded, getting ripped apart by the papers, while Lorraine was free as a bird. How was that fair?

  “I hope you told her the usual,” Gloria said, hugging one of her frilly pink pillows to her chest. “As in, ‘Don’t call this house again, you bitch.’ ”

  “I left out the bitch part, but otherwise, yes,” Clara said, gliding into the room. She was wearing a floral silk robe that Gloria had never seen before—it looked European, with bold red poppies covering the black silk.

  “Where’d you get that robe?” Gloria asked.

  Clara froze for a split second. Then she wrapped the robe even tighter around herself. “It was a gift.” She went to the record player and stopped the song midchorus. “Someone needs to put you out of your misery.”

  Gloria threw the pillow to the floor. “Good luck trying. I’d rather just wallow.”

  “Trust me, I wasn’t volunteering for the job. Although I’ll bet I know the one person who could get it done.”

  Gloria looked at her cousin suspiciously.

  The girls weren’t enemies, but they hadn’t crossed over into “friends” territory yet. True, Gloria hadn’t been the most welcoming of relatives, but … No, the truth was that Gloria had been terrible. She had plotted to get rid of Clara before she’d even arrived. Then, once Clara had shown up, Gloria had either been rude or had ignored her cousin completely.

  Looking at Clara now, Gloria regretted her actions. Was it too late to make amends? Even Marcus liked Clara, and he was the world’s harshest critic when it came to girls. So what if her cousin lived on a farm? It didn’t make her a bad person. It might even be nice to have a relative her own age who was also a friend, especially now that Lorraine had shown her true colors.

  “If you say Sebastian, you are officially banned from my room,” Gloria said, attempting a joke.

  “I have no problem with that,” Clara said, eyeing the volcanic disaster that was Gloria’s bedroom. Every surface was covered with piles of dirty clothes, books, old coffee cups, bowls of melted ice cream with cigarette butts floating in the dregs. “You might want to let Claudine in here one of these days, if she doesn’t faint first.”

  “You’re right,” Gloria said. She hadn’t let the maid in for nearly a week, but living in squalor really wasn’t helping ease the situation. “So, who are you talking about?”

  “J.J.,” Clara said. “Would you like me to spell out what each J stands for?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” Gloria said, her stomach somersaulting. “What about him?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Gloria said.

  “Oh, honey, I’m not as stupid as you think.” Clara picked up a hairbrush from the floor, sat on the bed beside Gloria, and began to brush her unwashed, matted hair. “You have a rock from a man who looks like Bastian Grey—a man every girl and her mother are lusting after—yet you’re locked up in your room looking like hell, playing a Bessie Smith song over and over? Can you get any more classically lovesick than that?”

  “What would you know about it?” Gloria asked defensively. “Did some farmer steal one of your sheep or something?”

  As soon as she said it, Gloria started laughing. Then Clara laughed, too. “I know this is shocking, but even where I come from, there is such a thing as falling for the wrong person.”

  “In Pennsylvania?”

  Clara put down the brush. “Listen, it’s about time I told you: I didn’t move to Chicago just to help plan your
wedding. I needed to get away from someone, from my own past—so that I could start fresh. Someone I was in love with but never should have been.” She closed her eyes. “I’m no more of an expert on the subject than any other girl. But this much I know: Love is worth everything. If you really love someone, you’ll have no regrets. Even if it turns out badly.”

  “But how do you know?” Gloria asked. “How do you know if it’s love? How do you know if it’s anything at all?”

  “All you have to know is whether you’re willing to find out.” Clara took Gloria’s hand. “Or whether you’re ready to give up on it.”

  “No.” Gloria thought of Jerome, of his hands around her waist during that first voice lesson. Of him teaching her how to sing, how to feel. “I’m not ready to give up. Not yet.”

  “The only time I’ve seen you look truly alive was when you were up there with him, performing together. It was pretty magical.”

  The tears came like a hot spring then, from a place inside Gloria that Jerome had shown her. “I need to find out whether Jerome and I are meant to be. Otherwise, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Clara asked, gently wiping Gloria’s wet cheeks, her eyebrows arched with a hint of mischief. “Your mother won’t be home for another few hours.”

  Gloria did something she had never done before: She took the bus. By herself. At night. To Bronzeville.

  She’d never even set foot in Bronzeville. But she figured if she was going to take the biggest risk of her life, she couldn’t do it in a cowardly fashion. She couldn’t ask someone to drive her. She had to go by herself and show up at Jerome’s door and be willing to bare her soul. Otherwise, there was no point in going at all.

  She’d “dressed down” for the bus—an old cloche hat, a plain long-sleeved white blouse, a skirt that was dark and modest—but hadn’t dressed down enough: None of the women were wearing heels, and most wore demure skirts that reached to midcalf. Like the men on the bus, they wore sensible shoes, shoes for walking and working. They were coming home from work, Gloria realized.