The spell had even worked on Lorraine, hadn’t it? When they had been getting ready for the club together, Clara had pretended she had never seen kohl before. And then with the help of a few tips from Raine, Clara had suddenly metamorphosed from dowdy caterpillar into va-va-voom butterfly? Fat chance.
That night, Clara had carried herself like a real flapper, as if it were second nature. Her confidence couldn’t have come from just a slash of red lipstick. Where was the quaint country girl then?
Something was wrong with this picture, and Lorraine was determined to find out.
Clara’s room looked surprisingly normal—and boring. A few snoozy clothes carelessly strewn on the bed, a few jars of makeup out of place on the vanity. On her nightstand was a copy of Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Philosophers, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and Edith Hull’s The Sheik—saucy! And, over her bed, a poster for Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. Fairbanks—now, there was a man.
Lorraine pulled her eyes away from the poster. What was she even looking for? If Clara truly had been so savvy as to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, she certainly would know how to hide her tracks and burn the evidence.
The grandfather clock downstairs chimed ten o’clock. The Honor Society ceremony was sure to have ended, and the Carmodys would be arriving home any second. She had to work fast.
Nightstand first: vanilla body lotion, coconut cuticle oil, blemish cream, a playbill from the theater—boring, boring, boring.
On to the next: underwear. Lorraine felt no shame digging through Clara’s garters and her brassieres. Sometimes you had to stoop in order to rise. Probably too obvious a place to hide anything important—what did Lorraine have in her own underwear drawers? A pair of BVDs from the beautiful actor she had almost lost her virginity to; a napkin on which Marcus had once sketched a drawing.
There! In the back right corner, amid a sea of bland cream and beige, was a pair of lacy fire-engine-red panties. Jackpot. Lorraine extracted them carefully. And what came fluttering out? A photograph worth a trillion words.
A flapper with some handsome swell in a speakeasy somewhere.
No, wait—the flapper was Clara, with … Harris Brown. Lorraine gave a low whistle. Clara had been a full-on flapper. She was in a beaded headdress displaying a pixie bob, her vampish face tipped back in drunken revelry. He was kissing her neck, holding a cigarette. She was leaning across him, her bare legs splayed out across the booth. The table was littered with bottles of booze. On the back of the photo, written in tiny black lettering:
Times Square
September 1922
Oh! Clara wasn’t a rube from some little town in the middle of nowhere. She’d been to New York. She was a party girl—a flapper supreme. And judging from the looks of things, she’d had some sort of romantic tryst with Harris Brown. Country Clara was just an act—a good one, Lorraine admitted to herself, but an act nonetheless.
What would everyone think when they found out that Chicago’s newest, sweetest socialite was a boozer and a woman of the world? What would Mrs. Carmody think when she found out her niece was taking her for a sucker?
Lorraine knew that where you uncovered one lie, others were sure to be lurking: If anybody was down and dirty enough to tell Bastian about Gloria and the Green Mill, it was the vixen in this photograph. Lorraine did a little jig for joy. Clara thought she could outsmart Lorraine Dyer, leave Lorraine taking the blame for everything. Well, Clara’s show was finished.
What would Marcus think when he learned that the pure, virginal maiden he’d fallen for—a girl he’d originally meant to compromise—had seen more scandal than he would in his entire lifetime?
“Mademoiselle?” Claudine’s mouselike voice squeaked from the doorway.
Lorraine clasped her hands together in prayer, the photograph between them. “Je pense que Gloria gave le book to Clara, parce que I did not find it in sa chambre.” She pointed nervously to the stack of books on Clara’s nightstand. “Quel dommage!”
“Oui, dommage,” Claudine repeated, not budging from the door. “You know, my English, it is better than your French? You may speak in the English to me. I understand.”
Claudine escorted Lorraine all the way down the grand staircase to the front door. “Oh, and Claudine!” Lorraine exclaimed on the front step. “Don’t worry about telling Gloria I was here. I’d rather tell her myself, non? I mean, s’il vous plaît.”
Claudine blinked. “As you wish, mademoiselle. Gloria, she doesn’t listen to me when I speak to her anyway.”
As soon as the door shut behind her, Lorraine peeled the photograph off her sticky palm and slipped it into her purse.
The temperature had dropped significantly, and a November wind sliced through the night air. The moon was full and fat and orange, and as she walked the few blocks home, Lorraine felt the first hint of winter rattling in her bones. Yet there was a strange heat boiling within her: the picture of Clara in her black-fringed purse.
Her encounter with Bastian tonight had left him—not Lorraine this time—the hurt one. Her visit to the Carmodys’ had left Lorraine—not Clara this time—with the upper hand.
And so with each step toward home, Lorraine made her plans and swore on the harvest moon: She would never be anyone’s fool again.
GLORIA
It was lunchtime at Laurelton Prep, and Gloria was sitting by herself, picking at a chicken croquette. She wished she’d joined geriatric Miss Tucker in the home ec room, learning how to sew a button, instead of forcing herself to endure the dining hall: the tables around her, packed with gossiping, chewing girls, now seemed unbearable.
Over the past two weeks, she had made a habit of hiding out in the library during her lunch period, a much-needed forty-three-minute respite from the unending cattiness of her fellow students. Today the library was closed for some reason, and because of the rule that kept students on school grounds during lunch, Gloria’d had no other option.
She was trying to read but for the past ten minutes had been stuck on the same line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles.
Every line sent her mind spinning off with thoughts of Jerome. She spent her days thinking about him. Obsessing over him. How she hadn’t seen him since that night at his apartment, a week before. How the longer she was apart from him, the more she doubted what had transpired there: Had those words—that she wanted him—really come out of her own mouth? Had they really, finally kissed? A kiss that was so perfect and so pure that even now the memory of it made her weak.
If only tonight, at seven-thirty sharp, wasn’t the engagement party that her mother had been planning since the day Gloria met Bastian.
Gloria felt something hit the back of her head, followed by obnoxious snickering. She froze. Don’t stoop to their level and turn around, she told herself. Keep your eyes on your book. But then she felt it again.
Spitballs.
Gloria turned, her cheeks warming, to face her nemeses: Anna Thomas, Stella Marks, and Amelia Stone. Those braided, brunette prom-trotters were out to make Gloria’s life a living hell. She was in no mood for this today.
Gloria extracted the two gooey white wads of paper from her bob. “I think you lost something,” she said, flinging the spitballs back at them.
“Oh no, those are yours to keep,” said Stella, her thin lip curling up and revealing the gap between her front teeth. “But speaking of losing, I think I saw your dignity sitting in the lost and found? You might want to consider picking it up.”
The girls broke into another round of laughter.
“I guess you aren’t going to audition for the school musical anymore?” Amelia asked.
“Of course I am,” Gloria retorted, though she knew she probably wouldn’t. All through high school, it had been her dream to star in the musical, open to seniors only. This year Laurelton was putting on Rogers and Hart’s Poor Little Ritz Girl. But if she couldn’t have Jerome at the piano, she didn’t want to sing at all. Still, she wasn’t about to tell
the girls that. “Why wouldn’t I audition?”
“Well, there aren’t any roles for colored boys,” Anna said, with a slurp of her milk. “Since we know how much you love them.”
This was just too much. Gloria closed her book. “You’re right,” she said, her face growing hotter by the second, “I do love them.”
She stormed out of the dining hall and down the corridor, away from all those wretched girls. She couldn’t stay in this school another second.
But there’d be no getting out of the engagement party tonight. She had already successfully apologized to her mother, convincing her it had all just been a common case of cold feet. And she had apologized to Bastian, reassuring him that she would never sing in that “den of sin” again. One sickeningly phony “I’m so sorry” after another.
But she would never, for the life of her, apologize to—
“Gloria!” Lorraine was standing in the hallway, right in front of her locker.
Gloria tensed up. “May I please get to my locker?”
Lorraine looked like a haggard scarecrow, her cheeks gaunt, dark purple shadows beneath her eyes. “Please, will you just listen to me, so I can explain that I never—”
“There’s nothing to explain!” Gloria snapped.
“But if you’ll just let me talk to you, before your party tonight—”
“My party?” Gloria glared in disbelief. “I hope to God you know better than to show up to my party tonight. For your own sake,” she said, reaching behind Lorraine’s back. “Now, please get out of my way.” She shoved Lorraine hard to the right.
Gloria grabbed her coat, slammed her locker shut, and charged down the hallway and out of the building, not caring whether the headmistress or anyone else saw her break the school rule. She didn’t stop until she had hopped into a taxi and was speeding uptown toward the only person she wanted, needed, to see right now.
She was chilled to the bone when she stepped out onto North Broadway. The night before, there had been a brief rain, and then the temperature had plummeted, coating the streets in slick sheets of treacherous ice.
Gloria didn’t realize how nervous she was until the taxi rolled up in front of the club. She knew he would be there—Friday-afternoon rehearsals were mandatory—but she hadn’t been back to the Green Mill since that fateful night when Bastian had exposed her as a liar, a sham, a spoiled brat playing dress-up.
And now she had returned. She took a deep breath and knocked on the unmarked entrance.
The familiar slit slid open, revealing a brown eye. “It’s Gloria, the—the ex-torch?”
“What do you want?”
“I … I’ve come to see”—she was about to say Jerome, then realized that might not be such a good idea—“to see about something I left in the club. The last night I sang here?”
The Eye squinted at her for a second; then its owner said gruffly, “Don’t go anywhere.”
The slit closed. Which gave her just enough time to remove her engagement ring. Taking it off had once been the first step of her costume change—when she was in the throes of rehearsals. Now, sliding it off and tucking it into her school satchel, she felt like the fake that she always had been.
The door opened, and Gloria stepped into the familiar darkness.
The music was a magnetic force, pulling her toward it. She stood quietly in a back corner, enraptured, soaking in the sound that had been filtering through her dreams at night. Jerome’s body swayed with the slinky syncopated rhythms, his eyes closed, as if the notes transported him to a place unknown to anyone but him. She could watch him play forever.
His eyes flickered open and he caught sight of her.
At first she couldn’t tell whether he was smiling at her or it was a trick of the light. But no, he was smiling at her. The band wasn’t yet dressed for tonight’s performance; they looked as if they’d just stepped in off the street. Jerome and the bass player were wearing tweed caps, and everyone wore khaki pants or dungarees and wrinkled linen shirts that looked as if they’d been slept in.
The song ended. Jerome stood up from the piano bench and was about to step off the stage when the bass player stopped him and whispered something in his ear. Jerome looked back at Gloria, but this time, the smile was gone.
Gloria hung back. Suddenly she felt awkward, standing there still in the gray and white of her school uniform. She didn’t belong here. And then it dawned on her: She had no place. She didn’t belong anywhere. Not here, not in school, not back on Astor Street. Nowhere.
Jerome came over, his hands casually tucked into his trouser pockets. “Hey,” he greeted her coolly. No kiss, no touch. “I’m surprised to see you.”
“I know I should have told you, but—”
“Surprised,” he continued, cutting her off, “because I thought your big party was tonight. I saw it in the paper.”
Gloria felt her body go cold. “It is,” she said flatly. “But I wanted to see you. If that’s all right. I can leave if you—”
“No.” He took a step closer, and she could see something in his dark eyes, like a secret unsaid between the two of them. Then he whispered, “I’ve missed you.”
Gloria barely had time to let this sink in—even though his words were exactly what she needed to hear—because Evan, the trumpet player, stomped over.
“We gotta wrap this up before they start getting ready for tonight,” Evan said to Jerome, without so much as a glance toward Gloria.
“Hey, Evan,” she said. “You sounded really good up there just now.”
Evan rocked back on his heels. “Why is she here?” he said to Jerome.
“Beats me,” Jerome said, crossing his arms. “But I’m thinking the same question.”
“I lost one of my grandmother’s earrings that night,” Gloria explained, touching her bare earlobe. It was the truth: She hadn’t realized it until she got home, after she’d managed to stop crying and look in the mirror at her distorted face. “It was my good-luck charm,” she added, which was also true. Until now.
“Yeah, well, good luck finding it.” Evan smirked, then lightly punched Jerome’s arm. “Remember, first set’s early tonight—Carlito’s trouble boys are coming for dinner. Be here at seven.”
“Got it.” Jerome tipped his tweed newsboy cap as Evan walked out of the club. Jerome eyed the stage, where the bass player and drummer were still dawdling. “This way,” he said to Gloria.
She followed Jerome to the stage. “Hey, Chuck. Hey, Tommy,” she said sweetly.
“Hey,” they both mumbled back.
“Gloria lost her earring,” Jerome explained. “So we’re just gonna take a quick peek backstage, see if she dropped it back there. All right?”
Chuck raised his eyebrows.
“Come on,” Jerome said to her, walking to the backstage door.
Gloria hung her head as she passed the stage, embarrassed. She knew she owed them all an apology—and an explanation—but this was not the time or place.
Jerome held the door open, and Gloria, eyes still fixed on the floor, stepped into the pitch-black, narrow hallway. The door slammed behind them. For a split second, she was reminded of her first voice lesson with Jerome. The first time they had ever been alone. The first time Jerome had ever touched her—
Something touched her waist, and she jumped, gasping loudly.
“Shhhhh,” came Jerome’s voice, at a rock-bottom register, as she realized it was his hand. Then both hands, pushing her gently against the wall. She wrapped her arms around him, clutching the broad muscles of his back. His body radiated a soothing warmth, and Gloria felt something expand deep within her.
She felt his lips, gentle against her cheek. She couldn’t stop herself from meeting his lips with her own.
She broke off at last and whispered, “What are we doing?” She opened her eyes and tried to make out his face in the dark.
“Looking for your earring,” he said, tugging at her earlobe with his teeth.
Gloria squirmed, letting him
linger there for a second longer before taking hold of his biceps and pushing him back. “I’m serious,” she said. “What are we doing, Jerome?”
It was all too much for her, these extremes. To go from her prep school dining hall to this—when she didn’t even know what this was—and then off to the engagement party tonight. And Jerome, from cold to hot in the snap of a finger.
Jerome sighed in frustration. She felt his body next to her, leaning against the brick wall. “What would you say if I took you on a date? A hot date.”
“Now?” She couldn’t tell whether he was serious or kidding.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you home before you turn back into a pumpkin.”
“Are you sure this is all right with you?” he asked, holding her numb fingers.
Gloria gazed out at the frozen pond filled with skaters. “I—I—” she stuttered, unable to get the words out of her mouth. “What happened to the ‘hot’ part of the date?”
“Pond froze up early this year. We ain’t even had a proper snow yet.”
When Jerome had whisked her away from the Green Mill, Gloria hadn’t been imagining anything in particular for their date. But an ice-skating rink had been the furthest thing from her mind. Not that she minded, of course—the important thing was that they were spending time together. After three weeks apart, she was finally in his presence, in his arms. It didn’t matter what they did.
She checked her watch, making sure she could return home in time to play the role of dutiful daughter and soon-to-be-wife. It was early yet—not quite four.
“No, is it all right with you that … you know what I mean.” Jerome lifted her cupped hands to his lips and filled them with his warm breath.
She paused, her eyes still glued to the frozen pond. “I haven’t skated in years.”
Vixen Page 23