“Are you Catholic?” she asked him as he handed her the glass.
He laughed. “I look it, don’t I? Sono italiano.”
“My mother would like you then.” She took a large gulp of the liquid and wiped her mouth.
“Is she that easy to please?”
“That hard to please, you mean.”
He put one arm around her stomach to keep her from falling off his knee. She could feel his hardness under her dress. “And what about you?” he asked. “Are you easy to please?”
Bess laughed. “Sometimes.” The champagne was going to her head, and she felt light with alcohol and flattery. Too late, she wondered what kinds of men she would have been able to attract if she hadn’t been so eager to marry Harry.
She leaned back against the sailor and lay her head on his shoulder. He bent over, pushing the hair out of her face, and kissed her hard on the mouth.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Harry, still seated at his far table, staring at her. Evatima was gone, and he was wearing a look of such incredulous horror that she felt as if she had been struck in the gut.
He stood up, almost mechanically, and made his way to the door. She scrambled off the sailor’s lap and followed him outside. She found him sitting on the sidewalk, his face in his hands, crying.
“Harry,” she said. “It was nothing. It was a mistake.”
“How could you?”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “Darling, please don’t be mad. It was just a kiss.”
“I need you to leave,” he said, lifting his head.
Bess looked at him, startled. “Leave? What do you mean?”
“I want you to go to your sister’s. I’ll take you to the train station.”
“That’s ridiculous. You were flirting, too, to make me jealous. What about your promises?”
“You betrayed me, Bess. You swore you never would, and you did.”
She felt as if she were on the edge of hysteria. “If I go to my sister’s, will you come find me?”
Harry stood up. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave—all those people inside are there for us.” She watched him walk away, his gait stiff and unnatural. She was terrified, but also inflamed by the alcohol, and by the memory of his flirtations with Evatima. She ran after him. “Fine,” she cried. “If this is what you want, I’ll go! You’ll regret it!”
They didn’t speak on the walk. The last train to Grand Street left at ten. Harry bought her ticket and stood with her on the platform until the train pulled in. “Good-bye, Mr. Houdini,” she said when the doors opened, trying to maintain her dignity.
Harry looked at her coldly. “Good-bye. I’ll wire your sister to tell her you’re coming.”
Bess’s knees trembled as she climbed the steps onto the train. She half expected Harry to come running after her, but when she looked out the window he was still standing there, his face unforgiving in the blue moonlight. She wondered what she would say to Stella, when just a week before she had so brazenly declared herself willing to give up everything for a man who was now abandoning her.
She sat shaken, as if in a dream, during the thirty-minute ride. How did one go about getting a divorce? she wondered. And how would she arrange one if Harry was leaving in two days for the circus? She felt herself choking back tears, imagining him doing the act without her. Just a short time ago he had proclaimed her extraordinary, and she had believed him. But then he had cast her off just as quickly, and she was a fool. By the time the train pulled into the station she was sobbing quietly, much to the horror of her seatmate, an elderly woman clasping a heavy brocade handbag.
Bess looked around for her own case and realized, alarmed, that she hadn’t brought one—all she had was her little purse with powder and a few coins. When she saw her sister’s tall figure standing on the platform, waiting for her, she knew it was true—Harry had wired her after all, and he wasn’t coming back for her. She took the steps two at a time and threw herself into Stella’s arms.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I was wrong about Harry.”
Stella stroked her hair. “He’s a brute. You’ve been badly abused, Bess.”
“But I loved him—I love him.”
“I know. But you can live with me now. And Fred will give him a good thrashing if he ever sees him again.”
Stella took her home and made her drink a glass of whiskey. Then she put her to sleep in the big bedroom, with its crisp embroidered sheets, and she and Fred took the little bed. Fred was livid about Harry; Bess could hear him storming around the kitchen.
At two in the morning, she awoke to the sound of someone knocking loudly on the front door. She could hear Fred stumbling out of bed, and then she heard voices in the foyer, and Stella whispering, and she knew Harry had come back for her. Bess flew to the door in her sister’s nightgown and threw her arms around his neck. Harry kissed the top of her head over and over.
“See, darling,” he said. “I told you I would send you away, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t fly after you and bring you back.”
Chapter 4
THE FRIDAY BOYS
May 1929
Bess stood in the hall outside Gladys’s apartment, holding a blue beaded dress wrapped in paper. Gladys answered the door herself; her Irish girl, Colleen, had the night off.
She reached out to touch the fabric of the dress and then felt Bess’s own apricot crepe dress. “I don’t know about this. It seems very flimsy. Can you see through it?”
“There was always a bit of the harem in that covering up your arms and legs business, don’t you think?”
Gladys was only one size larger than Bess, and the dress slipped on her easily, even though she still wore the thick ribbed corset of the old decade. Bess zipped the dress and then lifted her sister-in-law’s hair and dropped it back onto her shoulders. “You should cut this, you know. No one wears their hair long anymore.” She had bobbed her own hair years ago, bleaching it when it started to gray, to a hue so blond it appeared almost white. “I’m not saying Eton crop or anything dramatic like that. Just a little shorter.”
Gladys shook her head. She was beautiful with her dark, draping hair and soft eyes. “My mother always loved my hair long.”
“Well, let’s get creative then. We can pin it and make it look short.” Bess gathered her sister-in-law’s hair together. “You know what I was thinking on my way over here? Do you remember how they used to arrest women on Fifth Avenue for smoking?”
Gladys smiled. “That was years ago, wasn’t it? I can’t believe they used to do that. But it’s not much different from Prohibition, I suppose. Trying to enforce morality.”
“At least they arrest both men and women now,” Bess said.
“Let’s try not to get arrested tonight. At least promise me that.”
An hour later they were made up with rouge and lipstick, stepping out of the taxicab onto Forty-Ninth Street. They entered a crowd of strangers who were weaving their way down the sidewalk.
Gladys hung on Bess’s elbow. “I can’t remember the last time I went to a party,” she said. “It’s exciting.”
Bess pushed open the door to the tearoom. “They’re much different now. Very slick. All kinds of debauchery.”
There was an illicit sort of caution about public drunkenness. But there was a thrill, too, in going into the back room of a Long Acre pharmacy for “smoke”—water with fuel alcohol—and sneaking from one tawdry speakeasy to another, their walls papered with lithographs of nude women.
She led Gladys into the lounge, where someone was playing the piano raucously at the end of the room.
Gladys tightened her grip on Bess’s arm. “Don’t leave me.”
It wasn’t late—only nine o’clock—but it was a cool evening, and that always made people want to get out of their own apartments and go somewhere else. There were at least fifty people inside already—the whole place fit only about a hundred, and tightly. Someone had
brought a roulette board, and a crowd was calling out bets.
On Fridays, when the lunches and sodas and teas had been cleared away and the liquor cabinet was unlocked, Bess let Oscar, the parrot, out of his cage to play, which signaled the start of the night. She had acquired him from an exotic birds dealer in Harlem, and he was the star of the place, really. He walked with such muscular control that he was sometimes mistaken for a sophisticated automaton. Now, Oscar was strutting through the middle of the room with enviable precision, showing off his party-red feathers.
“Good day, good day, good day,” he called in his shrill voice, craning his neck to see the figures looming over him.
Stella came in, short of breath, sporting a new straight-silhouetted dress of copper crepe de chine. Fred had recently come into money after a favorable oil investment, and she had embraced her newfound wealth and status as eagerly as she had once embraced motherhood. She started when she saw Oscar gazing at her in the entryway, then laughed, dropping her purse on a table. “Do you have any booze? I’ve just come from dinner with Fred’s friends and I’m bored out of my mind.” She threw herself onto the sofa in the lounge and began flipping through the thick, glossy pages of a recent edition of McClure’s that was lying on the console table.
Bess loved Stella’s briskness, and she embraced the chaos her sister brought. They were their best selves at parties. She thought about all the lonely Sunday hours she had spent meditating on Harry’s photograph, wishing he would appear. Sometimes she thought she heard voices, but they turned out to be only men shouting on the street below. Once, when she was especially exhausted, she thought she had seen her name written in steam on the bathroom mirror. But when she woke up it was no longer there, and she couldn’t remember if she had dreamed it or imagined it, and it never appeared again. Something similar had happened to her years before, when she and Harry had been trying to contact Mrs. Weiss’s spirit. She had stumbled, blurry-eyed, into the bathroom in the middle of the night to find a bloom of thin white lines feathered across the mirror. She wasn’t sure what it meant, and when she’d turned on the light they had gone.
“I have something to confess to you,” Stella said, pulling Bess away from Gladys and onto the couch with her. “But you can’t be cross with me. Do you promise?”
“What is it?”
Stella hesitated. “Please don’t be upset.”
“For God’s sake, I won’t—now tell me!”
She took a breath. “Fred and I—we’re having another baby.”
Bess looked at her, confused; Stella was four years older than she was. She had three children, already grown. “But—that’s impossible.”
Stella pressed her hands together in her lap. “Of course I’m not pregnant. But Abby—she’s gotten herself into a situation, you see. And she was supposed to go off to Europe in the fall. She doesn’t want the baby.”
Abby was Stella’s youngest daughter; she was seventeen, and unmarried. She’d thrown herself into the Broadway scene, recklessly, and gotten lost in the lights.
“Well that’s— I’m not sure what to say. It’s wonderful, in a way. Isn’t it?”
“Is it? I’m rather concerned I’m too old to be raising a baby.”
“Nonsense.”
“I didn’t want to tell you. I was worried it might upset you.”
Bess shook her head, reaching to adjust the garnet-studded brooch she had pinned into her hair. She was aware that Stella had always spoken of children cautiously around her. “I’m happy for you. Really. You’ll enjoy it.”
Stella smiled, relieved.
“How is Fred reacting?”
“He’s furious of course; you know Fred. He’s been storming all over the house day and night since Abby saw the doctor. But I think he’s excited about it, too. He always did love babies. But it’s still early yet, of course. And Abby might change her mind and decide she wants it after all. That does tend to happen.” Her eye caught one of the other magazines on the table. “Is this The Delineator? I haven’t read this in years; I thought it’d gone out of print.” She picked it up. “Where did you find this?”
Bess shrugged. “Gladys brought it over the other day. She said that girl who helps her—you know, Colleen—bought it uptown. There’s apparently an article in there about Harry.”
She turned to see a group of loud, smooth-faced men crowding the doorway. The “boys,” as she called them—the young, rowdy magician set—had arrived. They always came in for drinks after their Friday shows. At first she’d kept the place open mainly for them, but then word got around and soon there were just as many women, too, each hoping to end the night pie-eyed with a man on her arm. They came in their best rayon dresses, trimmed with velvet, their tiny beaded chain-strapped purses hanging from their elbows. Bess watched them with a kind of removed clarity, their bodies lit by the old familiar glamour of the city—all the beautiful, ordinary people milling about, bearing the heightened sense that they mattered, that they were living in an age that mattered.
Niall Robbins was her favorite of the boys. He was a strange character; three years earlier, he’d been a reckless, handsome playboy, the son of a wealthy stockbroker. Then, for a year or so, he’d become pious and, just as suddenly, went back to the parties and declared his ambition to become a magician. He could drink with the best of them, and he got crazy doing it—they’d once spent a half hour going round and round in the Commodore Hotel’s revolving door.
Bess greeted Niall in the lounge. “Darling, how are you? I was hoping I’d see you.” She stepped back. “This is Harry’s sister Gladys.”
“You don’t say. It’s a real pleasure.” Niall pumped Gladys’s hand. “But I should be asking how you are,” he called to Bess over the noise. He beckoned a server with a tray of cocktails. There were more than two dozen people crammed into the lobby alone now, and more pouring through the door. Zingoni, one of New York’s most popular magicians, had just come from a performance, and his crew was raucous. One of them was pounding out “Bambalina” on the piano.
Bess shrugged. “It’ll be out of the news tomorrow.”
“Listen,” Niall said, “I’ve told you, it’s not going to happen the way you’re imagining it. There has never yet been a séance that has produced any actual results.”
Bess was beginning to agree with him. Surely all the hours she had sat in those large, smoky rooms with women spewing their disgusting ectoplasm and claiming they were holy had been a grave mistake. The hundreds of mediums she had encountered worked only in the dark and adopted false voices—just as she had done during her circus days, touting falsehoods to small-town folks. Harry would never come back to her in that way. It was degrading. But what if she herself really did possess the clarity of vision, the gift of sight that Harry had always believed in? She had tried to access it after his death, but perhaps she had been going about it all wrong.
She had always prided herself on understanding Harry when no one else could, on being able to solve the mysteries and riddles he presented her with during their marriage—just as she had seen through his Metamorphosis trick when she first saw him onstage. She needed to channel his spirit—not his ghost, but his being, wherever he was. Her search, she realized, should be guided not by the conventional methods of the time—the endless séances and prayer vigils—but by following Harry’s rejection of convention. She only had to figure out what that meant.
A friend of Stella’s came up behind Bess and grabbed her arm, swaying to the music. “Is it true Lou Gehrig was here the other day? I was hoping he would come in tonight! Do you think he might?”
“He only came for lunch.” Bess shrugged. “I don’t think he stays out late.”
“Stella says you’re friends with dozens of celebrities.”
Bess smiled. “A lady never tells.”
Niall rolled his eyes. “You’re a right old pontificator.” He turned to the woman. “She knows them all, and they know her—Josephine Baker, Al Jolson, Jack Dempsey. They’ve all
been in here at one time or another.”
The woman shrieked and wandered off in search of anyone famous who might be lingering among the crowd.
When she left, Bess shook her head. “I do know them, but it’s not true they’ve all come in here. Josephine Baker and Al Jolson live in California.”
“Oops.” Niall threw up his hands. “So it’ll bring a little more business your way. How else do you think places become popular? Rumors. That’s how. I’ll tell you, if this was my place, I’d do whatever I had to do to keep it strong. Did you ever consider dating someone else famous? At least for the papers? I heard that’s how it’s done in Hollywood. One person’s fame boosts the fame of the other, and vice versa. You get a few photographs taken together, and you don’t even have to go out on a real date. Of course, you can sleep with the good-looking ones.”
“I’ve been on dates. Just not ones I flaunt in the papers.” Bess turned to survey the antics in the dining room. A small cigarette fire had started on one of the tables but appeared to have been extinguished.
“Why not? Do you really think Harry would blame you? What was it you said to that reporter last month? ‘I’ll practice temperance when I’m old’?”
“Oh, come on. That was just publicity for the tearoom. I’ve got to make this place seem like someplace where anything could happen.”
Niall followed Bess’s gaze to a young redhead who had stripped down to her pink checkered stockings and wrapped herself in a tablecloth. “Well, it certainly is that.”
The woman saw them and stumbled over. Niall held out his hand to help her stand.
“This is Marlene,” he told Bess and Gladys. “I brought her with me.” She was beautiful, and very young—only twenty or so—with coiffed auburn hair and black eyelashes. “Marlene’s husband went away to prison, you see. But he managed to hide away enough of their money to get her a little apartment near the park.”
Marlene noted Gladys’s surprise and added, “It’s all right. Everyone knows about my husband. We used to give fabulous dinners.”
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