Angel of Brooklyn

by Jenkins, Janette

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said.

  ‘It didn’t cross my mind for a second that you would. You really don’t have to. Mr Cooper employed you to work in his everyday booth, and you’re good at your job, and he’s happy.’

  A group of men passed, tipping their new spring boaters. One of them, tall, with an elaborately waxed moustache, gave a little bow before catching up with the others.

  ‘Do you ever get recognised?’ asked Beatrice.

  ‘I have done, once or twice. It’s a peculiar feeling. One day I was buying apricots and a man came in with his wife, they were buying a bag of cherries, and she was chiding him for choosing the ones that weren’t ripe, and I caught his eye, and he smiled and I knew that I’d seen him before.’

  ‘You didn’t mind?’

  ‘How could I? And to tell you the truth, I kinda liked it!’

  Midnight in her room, and she undressed slowly, draping a sheet across her shoulder, then she stood on the soda crate she’d been using as a table, wishing she had a larger mirror. There was a small light from her oil lamp. The shutters were closed and she could hear the woman next door talking to her cat. She smiled, licked her lips and pouted a little, but it didn’t feel right. She shook out the sheet until it covered most of her front, imagining a man sitting before her, his hat on his lap, his warm perspiring forehead, the tremble in his hands, and she suddenly felt powerful, her body tingling as she stepped down from the crate and went to find her crumpled nightdress. Lying on her bed she began to feel aroused, picturing the men staring at Nancy, Marnie and Celina, and she could see herself stepping up onto the podium, her clothes hanging behind the screen, every last stitch, the gauze barely scraping at her breast. She pressed herself into her pillow.

  Mr Cooper had arranged to meet them at Franny’s. He arrived fifteen minutes late, pushing and panting, elbowing the waiting customers and the waitresses with their precarious-looking trays.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he said, fanning his face with his hat. ‘I got talking, and one thing led to another, and I’ve arranged for Maurice to do a couple more pictures based on a different theme.’

  ‘What theme?’ Nancy looked sceptical. She was sitting with Beatrice. Celina and Marnie were still at the booth, selling panoramas and the usual pictures of Coney.

  ‘I need a lemonade,’ he said. ‘Spring weather? It’s like walking through hell out there. Get me a lemonade, Franny, a tall lemonade with a straw and plenty of ice.’

  When he’d got his breath back, he wiped his face with a paper napkin and smiled at them. ‘Japan,’ he beamed. ‘Japan is all the rage. Fans. Cherry blossom. Those white-faced little geisha girls.’

  Nancy swished a chunk of smashed ice around her glass. ‘I don’t look Japanese,’ she said. ‘Look at me, Jesmond. I come from Milwaukee.’

  Beatrice took a sidelong glance at her and smiled.

  ‘Don’t matter one jot,’ said Cooper. ‘Maurice has a trunk full of jet-black wigs and those kimono things they wear. Straight from a production of Madam Butterfly. Real authentic stuff. Production had to close early, due to technical difficulties.’

  ‘And the twist is?’

  ‘Twist? What twist?’

  ‘Oh, come now, we always have a twist. Will the kimono be undone, sheer gauze, or will I be carrying it over my arm and protecting what’s left of my modesty with a large paper fan?’

  Cooper took a long sip from his drink. ‘I leave all those details up to Maurice,’ he said. ‘He’s the one with all the artistic know-how, and the eye for detail. I’m just a postcard seller.’

  Nancy laughed. ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Cooper. ‘Royalty.’

  Maurice Beckmann’s studio was a large open room at the top of a dusty warehouse. Below him, Abel Singer had his clothing business, his machines running twenty-four hours, and you could hear them day and night, humming like wasps through the loose knotty floorboards.

  ‘He won’t mind my being here?’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Of course not, why on earth should he?’

  Nancy pushed at the door with her shoulder. The room was light and long. It smelled of wood and face powder. Scenery was propped against a wall, painted backdrops, plaster columns, drapes of plum-coloured velvet.

  Maurice appeared; he was twirling a paper umbrella and walking towards them with tiny mincing steps. ‘Welcome to Tokyo,’ he bowed.

  ‘Sayonara,’ said Nancy. ‘This is Beatrice, by the way; she’s come to watch me being debauched.’

  ‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘it’s all completely civilised. We drink tea. I play a little piano –’

  ‘And then I take off all my clothes.’

  ‘So ends a perfect day.’

  The tea was already in the pot. Maurice went to find another cup as Beatrice walked around. Across screens there were hundreds of pictures of girls, dimple-cheeked, holding ostrich feathers, open newspapers, naked, dressed in men’s suits, holding fat fluffy cats, bamboo canes, lollipops, puppy dogs, bottles of champagne, a pair of white doves.

  ‘Are you in the postcard-selling business?’ asked Maurice.

  ‘Oh, she’s strictly legit,’ said Nancy, taking a sugar cube and pushing it through her lips.

  ‘That’s right,’ Beatrice told him. ‘I sell the sorts of cards you can send back home to Mother.’

  ‘How very nice for Mother.’

  The sun came through the high windows in straight blocks of light. She could see the specks of dust; a small brown spider hanging from a thread.

  ‘And where does Mother live?’ he asked.

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said Beatrice. ‘But I come from Illinois.’

  ‘You have a wonderful face.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Nancy. ‘Just pour the girl some tea.’

  Beatrice knew he was looking at her. She could feel it when she was staring through the window at the crumbling brick wall, into her flowery china teacup, or at the scenery, with the corner of the desert showing, a blue sky, sand, the sharp green leaf of a palm tree.

  ‘Do you think it’ll work?’ asked Nancy. ‘“The Pleasures of the East”?’

  ‘Japan’s everywhere,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of getting some bits of bamboo furniture, what do you think?’

  ‘For the picture?’

  ‘For my rooms.’

  ‘Bamboo?’ said Nancy. ‘I wouldn’t like to sit on it.’

  ‘There’s a wonderful shop in town, it sells the lot, lotus-patterned wallpaper, teapots and bowls, tatami mats, hand-painted shoji screens. Everything is beautiful.’

  ‘Sounds expensive.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maurice, ‘but it’s travelled.’

  ‘So have I,’ said Nancy. ‘Didn’t you know? I came all the way from Milwaukee.’

  ‘And then you landed in paradise.’

  Maurice pulled out the folded kimonos. They had labels saying Authentically Made in Kyoto. ‘Kyoto, New Jersey,’ he said. But they were beautiful, pale and embroidered with cranes, blossoms, tiny foam-capped waves.

  ‘I thought tastefully suggestive,’ said Maurice. ‘What do you think? It seems to be your forte.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll see what I can do.’

  Nancy sat in a dressing gown, painting her face with the sticks of ivory greasepaint; Beatrice sat at the window while Maurice found a gramophone record, Enrico Caruso singing ‘Mi par d’udir ancora’ from The Pearl Fishers.

  ‘I would love to take your photograph,’ he said. Nancy looked up from her piece of mirror, but she didn’t say anything.

  Beatrice folded her arms. ‘I’m neither brave nor bold,’ she told him.

  ‘Your face, that’s all I need, your face. What do you say now? Can I?’

  He pushed his camera towards her. He walked around with his arms folded, while she played with her lips, looking at the ceiling.

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘You don’t even have to smile.’

  She tried not to thin
k that she was going to be a picture as the flash lit up the room, the thin sulphur smell wafting over her face.

  ‘See,’ he said. ‘All done. That didn’t hurt now, did it?’

  Nancy’s face was a white oval mask. Her lips shaped into a small scarlet heart. She had a wig in her hands. ‘This hair weighs a ton. Feel it. It’s full of clips and slides.’

  ‘That’s why they’re all small in the East,’ Maurice told her. ‘The decorations weigh them down.’

  He dressed a set with a plain sky backdrop. ‘Forget Mount Fuji, we’ll let the costume do the work,’ he said. ‘A sky is a sky is a sky.’

  With the wig and the kimono, Nancy was transformed. She held a paper fan. Maurice pushed the kimono down over her shoulders; you could see her creamy skin, the curve of her breasts, her leg pushing out through the sea-patterned silk.

  ‘You’ll sell out in a week,’ said Maurice. ‘The real Madam Butterfly. The one that sailor saw when he got her home at night.’

  ‘This kimono,’ she grimaced, ‘it smells of Doctor Porter’s Liniment.’

  ‘All the more reason to get out of it.’

  From the booth Beatrice could see the railings where people leaned, pushing their heads together, an arm loosely curled around a waist. Here, children rattled the metal with sticks and spades while their fathers looked for the ferry, and their mothers worried about change, or the streaks of sweet ice cream that sat around their lips – but by now the children were wise to the great white handkerchief that came out of the mouth of the bag, damp on the end and smelling of powder and peppermint.

  Standing against the counter with the cards in her hand, she pictured herself on another kind of postcard, hand-tinted gentlemen’s relish, her face being thumbed, pored over by men in sweaty jackets, magnifying monocles, slavering, inside pockets, the card eventually hidden in a desk drawer, a diary, a shooting magazine, or added to a collection, brought out with the cigars, heads in a circle; that one last glass of brandy.

  ‘He only took your face.’ Nancy was behind her. She was putting cards of painted kittens on a small revolving stand. ‘Anyway, he’s supposedly an artist,’ she said. ‘He’s had his pictures used as illustrations in all sorts of fancy magazines. He’s acquainted with the English aristocracy; they’re very open-minded over there.’

  ‘You mean they’re all filthy devils?’

  ‘I don’t care. I hope they are. Happen I quite like the idea of some lord or other getting hot under the collar over one of my pictures.’

  ‘Perhaps the King keeps you tucked inside his wallet?’

  ‘Now wouldn’t that be grand?’

  Cooper appeared at closing time. He was in what passed as his Sunday best with a wilting white gardenia in his buttonhole.

  ‘Who’s the lucky lady?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘You are,’ he said. ‘You and Miss Lyle.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I thought you had your eye on Violet Murphy? She was at Mitzy’s last night, and she was asking after you.’

  ‘She was?’ He touched the gardenia. His ears were turning pink.

  ‘Sure. It was Jesmond this, and Jesmond that. I really think you should ask the poor demented woman out to supper.’

  ‘That I might,’ he said. ‘But tonight, it’s your turn.’

  ‘Why us?’ asked Beatrice, locking the door. ‘Did you hear about the man from Boston who bought forty-five pictures of Brighton Beach and twenty-one pictures of Dreamland?’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Yes, apparently, he cuts them up and makes them into art.’

  ‘Now I’ve heard everything.’

  They each took an arm and strolled past the booths and rides, the Ferris wheel with the gold-coloured lanterns, and boys loosening their collars outside the Hall of Many Dreams where girls with lace-edged dresses danced barefoot, swooping over the stage in cartwheels, hollering and winking their large lazy eyes at the audience.

  ‘I’m taking you to Falco’s,’ he said. ‘You can have anything you like off the menu – the world, as they say, is your oyster.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ said Nancy.

  ‘I hear there’s an opium den at the back of Steeplechase Park,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Well, if there is,’ said Cooper, ‘I haven’t found it.’

  Falco, in his expensive-looking suit and swinging gold fob watch, greeted Mr Cooper like an old, long-lost friend, showing them to a table near the window with a view of the ocean.

  ‘Two very beautiful ladies,’ he said, offering them a menu. ‘What a lucky man you are.’

  ‘I like to think so,’ said Cooper, wondering if it was the kind of restaurant where you could take off your jacket without it looking impolite. How did the other men who were dining, and all in their jackets and waistcoats, manage to look so comfortable in this heat?

  ‘So what goes?’ asked Nancy. She’d already made up her mind to have the lobster à la crème. ‘You can’t fool us. You want something.’ Then her face fell. ‘Are we losing our jobs? Is this your polite and very generous way of saying, get lost?’

  He coughed, knocking over the salt cellar, immediately taking a pinch of the salt and throwing it over his shoulder. ‘Of course not,’ he said, wiping his fingers on his pants. ‘I just need a little time to talk, to mull over some things that have been sitting in my mind.’ He smiled expansively at Beatrice. ‘I have seen your photograph,’ he said. ‘Maurice couldn’t wait.’

  Beatrice blushed, still looking at the words printed on the menu. She wasn’t used to seeing pictures of herself. In Illinois the couple of photographs that had stood in dust-caked silver frames had shown her as a wide-eyed child with ringlets and nervous-looking hands. In her room, tacked above the fireplace, there was the picture of her with the monkey, but she was laughing, her face was somewhat blurred, and the monkey was all you really looked at.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Oh, don’t sound so worried, I bet you look like a doll,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Wine? Food?’ Falco beamed. ‘My chef recommends the paprika pork. I myself like the salmon.’

  They ordered. Mr Cooper looked nervous. As soon as he’d seen one of the other men in the room pulling off his jacket, he did the same, then immediately regretted it, picturing the pools of sweat that must be spreading from his armpits. He poured wine. The bottle was beaded with cold. He felt better straight away.

  ‘Do I look all right?’ Beatrice asked. ‘On the picture?’

  ‘Stunning.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Nancy.

  ‘Maurice is an artist,’ said Cooper slowly.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ said Nancy. ‘But if he really is an artist, why does he have to keep reminding us all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘But you must have heard? He has a friend in Manhattan, a successful publisher of books. He’s a very rich man, and his books are sent all over America, from east to west, and north to south.’

  ‘So?’ said Nancy, who didn’t like books, they made her feel uncomfortable, and they were always so weighty, sitting in your hands like dry musty stones.

  ‘So, Maurice tells me that we could be part of them.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I don’t write,’ said Nancy. ‘I mean, I can write, only I’m not much of an author is what I’m trying to say.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Beatrice. ‘Just think of all those words …’

  ‘Girls,’ said Mr Cooper, who was suddenly feeling hotter. ‘I am not talking about the words. I am talking about the pictures.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Nancy. ‘Now I don’t feel so guilty for ordering the most expensive thing on the menu. You want to use us. You want to put us into his book.’

  Cooper looked more than a little embarrassed. He drained his glass of wine and poured himself another one. Above him, a small wooden fan started twitching.

  ‘Your kimono pictures are selling like hot cakes,’ he said.
‘Even Marnie and her snake in a basket can’t outdo Japan, but it’s Beatrice the man wants, only Beatrice.’

  ‘Beatrice doesn’t do pictures,’ said Nancy, feeling like she ought to speak up for her friend. ‘You know she doesn’t. You can’t make her and you can’t buy her off with a plate of fancy fish and salad.’

  ‘I have no intention of doing so,’ he said, as their meals appeared from over their shoulders, the waiter setting down the plates in silence, his hair so damp and shining it looked like it had been painted onto his head. Beatrice was disappointed. Why had she ordered the salmon? It was sure to be full of those fine hairy bones that you were supposed to crunch your way through, only she never could. She suddenly lost her appetite.

  ‘What kind of pictures?’ she managed.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Nancy, tucking into her lobster. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been plotting, Jesmond,’ she said, ‘but it has to be a no.’

  ‘Your name is Beatrice Lyle?’ Cooper asked Nancy.

  ‘I feel responsible,’ she said. ‘I found her. You employed her to sell your holiday cards, nothing else. I don’t want Beatrice thinking that she’ll lose one job if she doesn’t take up the other.’

  ‘What kind of pictures?’ Beatrice repeated. Was no one listening to her?

  ‘Well …’ Cooper said, finding the whole thing very difficult. Why did Beatrice make him feel nervous? ‘Maurice showed your picture to his Manhattan friend, who got terribly excited. He has an idea.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll bet he has,’ said Nancy.

  ‘It has something to do with wings.’

  ‘Wings?’

  Beatrice turned her head towards the ocean where the gulls were circling; tonight the waves looked brittle, like they could snap right off and cut you.

  ‘Angel wings,’ he said, cutting into his steak, which he saw was a little too rare for his liking. ‘The kind that sweep down to the floor.’

  ‘And that’s all I’d be wearing?’

  ‘Need you ask?’ said Nancy.

  ‘Of course,’ Cooper went on, ‘it will be extremely artistic and tasteful. The wings would be made by a top theatrical costumier. There will be no … how can I put this?’ He coughed into the wide chubby cuff of his hand. ‘There will be no explicit, suggestive or, dare I say, vulgar positioning. Nothing sleazy,’ he whispered, turning beetroot, wishing he’d ordered a jug of iced water.