A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald

by Natasha Lester

  Lil offered her cheek to be kissed, which made Evie feel as if she could do the same. When Thomas leaned towards her, she breathed in a scent that had been lurking in her dreams since the night at the movie theatre when she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder and inhaled him with every breath.

  ‘What a show!’ Lil said.

  ‘I feel as if I’ve been living in Cairo for the past week,’ Thomas said.

  ‘That might be fun,’ Evie said.

  ‘Only if you enjoy being hit on the head by fake pillars that fall down every time you walk past.’

  Evie laughed. ‘Tutankhamun’s curse? Perhaps it mistook you for an animal ready for sacrifice.’

  ‘Surely you’re not calling my Tommy a fatted calf?’ An English voice Evie didn’t recognise interrupted the conversation. A blonde in a backless black number that bore more resemblance to a Ziegfeld costume than an Egyptian ensemble threaded her arm through Thomas’s and spread her smile around. Even though she knew she was being unkind, Evie was pleased to see that the girl had crooked teeth.

  ‘I’m Winnie. Nice to meet you.’ Winnie’s diamond earrings were more than a match for the chandeliers in the ballroom, and as if the blinding effect of those danglers wasn’t enough, she’d strung a few spares around her neck. Evie couldn’t take her eyes off Winnie’s arm resting on Thomas’s. She was glad that Thomas hadn’t summoned up much of a smile for Winnie, but still. An unpleasant feeling sat heavily in her stomach and she knew it was jealousy.

  ‘Winnie,’ Lil repeated. She drew herself up, enunciated her vowels more clearly and became the epitome of what she used to be, the rich girl from the Upper East Side who had no time for interlopers. ‘And how do you know the Whitmans?’

  ‘I arrived in New York a few days ago. London wasn’t the same without Tommy. Now,’ Winnie actually pouted at Thomas, ‘I don’t know anyone here, so you need to make some introductions.’ With that, she and Thomas set off, arm in arm. Evie wanted to think Winnie was the one steering him away and that Thomas was too polite to make a scene, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, Thomas didn’t look back as they walked away.

  ‘What a billboard,’ Lil said. ‘It takes talent to make all those jewels look cheap.’

  Evie laughed but even to her ears it sounded false. A wealthy English lady was exactly the kind of woman Thomas would be expected to invite to a ball, not a showgirl in a frivolously short skirt who danced and sang so rich men could pay her bills. How did Thomas feel about Winnie? Was there some kind of understanding between them? Winnie had come all the way from London after all.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ she said, to get away from the place where Winnie had stood, to get away from the warm spot she still felt on her cheek where Thomas had kissed her. ‘Take Lil’s hand and move in close,’ she whispered to Leo as they joined the whirl of dancers. ‘I’ll scram.’

  ‘You think so?’ Leo whispered back.

  ‘I know so.’

  As soon as she could, Evie let herself be whisked away by a handsome man whose charleston could put the Tiller Girls to shame. Catching glimpses of her friends through the crowd, she eventually saw Leo place his hand on Lil’s face and run his thumb along her cheekbone. Lil’s unusually shy smile made Evie’s feet skip a little higher. Then Leo rested his cheek against Lil’s and they looked so happy that Evie knew it would take a firecracker to separate them. At least two people would leave the ball happier than when they arrived.

  The song ended and Evie let her heels try a few kicks with a blond-haired stranger. He turned out to be a dead hoofer, and Evie extricated herself after suffering one too many blows to her shins. She wondered if she should go straight to the bar and admit defeat. Then she felt a familiar hand at her back.

  ‘I asked the band to play the next song for you,’ Thomas said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  Evie followed him to a spot in the middle of the dance floor where they were hidden by all the other people spinning around them. The first bars of the song began to play. The band had taken out a bandoneon to add to the violin, the double bass and the piano. It took Evie a moment to place the tune, but then she remembered that night, years ago, when she was a different person and Tommy had taken her to a speakeasy he thought was the cat’s pyjamas. There in Chumley’s, Tommy and Lil had danced a majestic tango. The same music now filled the room.

  ‘I’ve wanted to dance a tango with you ever since Chumley’s,’ Thomas said.

  Evie had to know. ‘What about Winnie?’

  ‘Winnie came to New York for no one but herself. I’m not interested in Winnie. I want to dance with you.’ His voice sounded warm and sincere, and Evie let herself relax into his arms.

  If petting and necking and climbing into the back seat of a struggle-buggy were the aphrodisiacs of the men and women of the 1920s, Evie felt sorry for them. Dancing the tango was the most exquisite way to express desire, with hands clasped together, bodies nearer than ever a waltz would allow, knees fitted between knees, Evie’s shoulder tucked under Thomas’s right arm, her hip bone pressed against the top of his thigh. They were holding each other so close that Evie could feel that Thomas was as attracted to her as she was to him. His eyes were fixed on her face, and the intentness of his gaze was almost unbearable; it made her stomach clench and she yearned to be alone in a room with him. Each dip of her back brought his face nearer to hers, until the distance between their lips was no more than a breath. She would only have to incline her head just a little for their lips to touch. The longing that swept through her was so acute that she knew the kiss they were about to share would be anything but chaste. She closed her eyes. His lips touched hers.

  ‘Evie!’

  The music and the lights and the people crashed back into Evie’s senses, like an emergency at the hospital. She was no longer leaning back, supported by Thomas’s arms, about to dive into a kiss she’d been dreaming of for years. She was standing and so was Thomas and they were both looking, none too pleased, at Charles.

  ‘You didn’t come to say hello so I …’ Charles began.

  ‘Hunted me down,’ Evie supplied tersely.

  ‘Charlie,’ Thomas said, warningly.

  But Charles’s boorish voice carried right across his brother’s. ‘That’s right, jump in and save her again.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Evie, aware that people were beginning to stare. Mrs Whitman didn’t deserve to have her party spoiled by her younger son’s petty jealousies.

  ‘A drink? Allow me.’ Charles stepped towards Evie, tripped, and his glass of bordeaux went all over her, so that she no longer looked like a shimmering Nefertiti but a decidedly wet, annoyed and bloody victim of the Hudson Dusters.

  A look crossed Charles’s face, more like mirth than horror.

  Thomas was quick to react, pulling a folded handkerchief out of his pocket and passing it to Evie. She took it gratefully, then stood staring at it in shock.

  There in the corner of the handkerchief was an embroidered M, a crooked and imperfect M, one Evie had stitched there herself, on a gift for Mary.

  Her fist tightened around the handkerchief and she pretended to smile at Thomas. ‘I’ll be right back. I’ll clean this up in the bathroom.’

  She hurried out of the ballroom but instead of going to the bathroom, she left the house. She almost fell down the front steps. Her mind was disordered, images and words flashing through it, presenting an argument that she wanted to deny. Surely there was another explanation. She walked faster, then began to run; a past she couldn’t get away from was snapping at her heels, demanding she wake up to the reality that had been staring her in the face from the time she’d first encountered the baby by the river.

  There was only one way Thomas could have got Mary’s hanky. He had to have visited her. Which meant he was the mysterious man who’d wanted Evie to stay away from the Foundling. While he’d been taking her to the movies and holding her hand at midnight on Fifth Avenue, he’d been hiding the f
act that he was Mary’s father. Not Charles. God, it had been easy to believe it was Charles. It was almost beyond belief to think it was Thomas.

  She stopped running because she had to bend over and hold on to the wall. The force of the discovery felt like a physical blow, winding her. It was agony, to still be able to feel the touch of Thomas’s lips on hers, even as she realised that he’d lied to her all along.

  Someone walked past and knocked her sideways. She stumbled, hit the wall with her knee and her shoulder and grazed the skin. She touched the scrape and saw blood on her hand but she didn’t feel anything. The blood was the same colour as the wine on the handkerchief. How could he have done this to her? She felt a sob escape, the sound like a streak of white against the night sky. She clapped her hand over her mouth.

  A couple strolled past, arm in arm, the woman’s head tucked into the man’s shoulder. ‘What a night,’ the man said.

  And it was. It was warm and starlit, a night made for lovers to walk clasped together over the Brooklyn Bridge, stopping to kiss, backlit by a perfect circle of moon in the sky. It wasn’t a night for heartbreak.

  Goddamnit! Evie wanted to howl, because howling was better than thinking. If she could howl then maybe she could get it all out of her, just as a scalpel let the blood flow until the vein was empty.

  She walked on, not going anywhere other than away from Thomas. City block after city block passed by until she reached Fifty-Ninth, opposite the elegant white facade of the Plaza Hotel. She saw a string of merry people make their way down the steps of the hotel and into a cab. How could they be so happy? How could they laugh and joke? How could they even breathe?

  Evie wasn’t breathing, not properly, and the world around her began to spin. She was stuck on a carousel that blurred the merrymakers in the cab with Thomas’s smiling face at the ball and the hanky stained with red until she could no longer see. Until she felt as if she had stepped outside her body. Because New York wasn’t real. Unless you were born at the right address and could buy your way out of trouble the way Thomas had, it existed only in a head-in-the-clouds, pie-in-the-sky kind of way, a city of skyscrapers built from fairytales. Fairytales that lured people like her to the lights and the jazz and the promise that, once there, you’d have the freedom to be nobody’s daughter, nobody’s intended, nobody’s mistake. But that was the great and grand myth of New York City. And Evie was the biggest sucker of them all to have believed it.

  ‘Do you need help?’ somebody asked her, taking hold of her elbow, steadying her. Evie took a deep breath, as if she’d just remembered how, and felt the dizziness recede.

  She nodded and walked forward, closer to the hotel, carried along by the people on the sidewalk. She reached the bottom of the steps and the doorman opened the door. It looked dazzling inside, too lustrous for heartache and defeat, and Evie thought, why not? She was still in her glad rags and had no place to go. When you earned fifty-five dollars a week and spent eight dollars on board, even after the College of Physicians and Surgeons had been paid you still had some money put aside for a rainy day, and here it was now, drizzling down.

  Evie walked up the red-carpeted steps as if all her life she’d been staying at hotels like the Plaza. The doorman bowed to her as if he believed it too, and she averted her red eyes and damp cheeks in case he figured her out.

  She strode to the front desk. ‘I need a room for tonight,’ she said in a voice that was loud and firm.

  The desk clerk handed her a key and she was accompanied to the elevator by the bellboy, who enquired after her luggage.

  ‘I travel light,’ she said, and he nodded as if he’d expected her to say that.

  At the tenth floor, the lift stopped. She followed the bellboy to a door, which he held open for her to walk through – into another world. She pressed a quarter into the boy’s hand and he left her alone to stand at the window. From up here all she could see was the beauty. And the tears at last began to fall.

  I’m so damn stupid, she thought. Because she knew like the way she knew her own skin that she’d been in love with Thomas. How could she not have been? What was love but a sudden jolt out of real life and into the unmapped, the possible, the strange and splendid. A place where another person became as familiar as the breath in your lungs. She’d relented on the promise she’d made at the hospital to keep her heart tucked away where it could never be hurt, and now it was shattered into pieces that could never be put back together.

  Because everything had been a lie. Their conversation in the apple tree. The letters he’d written to her from London. The encouragement he’d given her to pursue her dreams and become a doctor. His arm around her waist. Dancing a tango. The way she’d thought he felt when he held her in his arms. An album of memories that Evie wanted to wrench out of her head and drown in the fast moving waters of the Hudson River.

  Forgetting Thomas Whitman would be a lifetime’s work, and Evie doubted it could ever be done.

  She slid down the wall beside the window and onto the floor. How was it possible to cry so many tears and still find more waiting, ready to be shed? For the whole night she sat weeping in her room at the Plaza Hotel, with its marble bath and soft featherbed and views of a life she couldn’t afford, as if those things could comfort her for losing the love of her life before it had even begun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next morning, Evie’s first thought was relief. Relief that she was awake and the awful dream that had soaked her pillow in tears after she’d crawled into bed in the early hours of the morning was over. But immediately after followed the sickening realisation that it hadn’t been a dream. It had really happened. Thomas was Mary’s father and Evie had fallen in love with a liar, a deceiver of the worst kind because he’d not only told her a series of untruths, he’d made her believe that he loved her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. How could she get out of bed? How could she walk around the city, the college and the hospital when every breath brought with it a physical pain that made her want to coil herself into the smallest possible shape in an attempt to bring some solace? She opened her eyes again and stared at the windows, at the dawn brightening over Manhattan, and knew she could never see Thomas again.

  She had to get up. Some part of her brain was telling her that she was on rotation at the Vanderbilt Clinic. She was supposed to spend her day lancing boils and peering into infected throats. All she needed to do was stand up, get dressed, go to the clinic, and then she would be so busy that she wouldn’t have time to think or feel or remember. Her legs felt so heavy when she lowered them over the side of the bed that she thought they might not hold her weight, but she steadied herself and shook her stupefied head. Coffee. That would help. She would start there, with the most basic of things.

  She put on her wine-stained dress from the night before, not even caring how it would look in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel at half past seven in the morning. She caught the elevator downstairs and sat with her coffee, watching people come and go through the doors of the hotel. Her thoughts began to centre around one thing: the necessity of avoiding Thomas. He knew she spent her days at the college and at the hospital or clinic, he knew she spent her nights at the theatre, and he knew where she went to lay down her head. He could find her easily, if he wanted to. Would he come looking? She shuddered. She couldn’t imagine looking at his face, hearing his voice, seeing his hand that had once held hers.

  She sipped her coffee, which was better than anything Mrs Lomsky had ever served for breakfast. In fact, compared to the cramped boarding house on Minetta, the Plaza Hotel was as luxurious as a palace. She didn’t want to leave. And Thomas would never look for her here. Right now, Evie felt that she could lie in the feather bed and sit in the chair by the windows and soak in the tub in her room forever. But forever would have to be paid for. And she couldn’t afford more than a night of this kind of fantasy.

  Just then there was a crash and an exclamation beside her, and a half-empty pot of cold tea landed in her
lap. The waiter had tripped over a suitcase left in the thoroughfare and doused her for the second time in twelve hours. He began to apologise profusely.

  The manager came hurrying over, as did the other staff in the vicinity. Taking in the scene, the manager turned on the bellboy – the same boy who’d shown Evie to her room the evening before, the one who hadn’t raised an eyebrow at her lack of luggage, who hadn’t commented on her grazed shoulder and knee, her tear-stained face.

  ‘Mr Dunning!’ the manager barked at the bellboy. ‘It is your job to place suitcases in storage.’ The manager turned to Evie and his voice softened. ‘Madam, I am terribly sorry.’

  Young Mr Dunning was stammering apologies at Evie too, and he really did look so contrite that it made her feel like crying all over again. She didn’t know why she said what she did next; it was a kind of reflex action to be kind to another person in pain, a person on the verge of losing something he held dear – his job – all because of a little spilled tea.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘Not Mr Dunning’s. I insisted on putting the case there. Mr Dunning tried very hard to dissuade me.’

  ‘Well,’ the manager said, looking taken aback. ‘Well. It is still not right.’

  ‘Mr Dunning has been very helpful,’ Evie insisted. ‘I’d be so upset if he found himself in trouble over this. I’ll never wear this dress again anyway.’

  ‘I shall organise a new dress for Miss Lockhart immediately,’ the bellboy said.

  ‘Very well,’ said the manager. And then, to Evie, ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I am,’ she said and was almost grateful for the spilled tea because it meant she hadn’t thought of Thomas for five whole minutes.

  She returned to her room, bathed and, shortly after, the bellboy, who was so endearingly young and baby-faced, appeared with a dress. ‘I telephoned Bergdorf’s, explained your requirements and told them this would be your size,’ he said – and it was.

  Evie stepped behind a screen, shrugged off the Plaza’s black silk robe and slipped on the dress. It was pure white silk and made her feel, for an instant, like the girl in her early twenties she actually was, not the cynical woman for whom the world had become unsurprising in its constant repetition of the same old stories.