It was not what Evie had expected him to say.
‘I wanted it to remind me of something,’ Dr Brewer continued. ‘That in obstetrics, one wrong move …’ He stopped and opened his hand and the paperweight began to drop, at speed, towards the desk. Evie found her arm moving reflexively, without thought, to grab the heart, to break its fall. ‘… can be catastrophic,’ Dr Brewer finished. ‘Two lives are at stake.’
Evie stared at the glass heart in her hand.
‘According to Dr Kingsley, you have an instinct for obstetrics. But you speak and act without thought.’ Dr Brewer held out his hand for the paperweight.
Evie held onto the crystal a moment longer. She remembered being in the delivery room and how she’d thought through the steps she’d been taught in the lectures. She’d visualised the correct angle at which to deliver the baby. She hadn’t been thinking of Thomas. She’d been thinking only of the woman on the bed, and of the baby. And she was tired, but not that tired. She would never have helped if she was so tired she couldn’t function. She hadn’t acted without thought. Dr Brewer and Dr Kingsley were wrong.
But she also saw that she should have done more to find a doctor who knew how to deliver a face presentation. She should have done anything other than follow Francis into the delivery room as if she knew what she was doing. She’d been trying to prove herself, and two people had died. Now, by telling her that Dr Kingsley thought she had an instinct for obstetrics, praise she’d always craved, Dr Brewer was delivering her final damnation. Giving her the encouragement she’d always craved right before he took everything away.
She tipped the heart into Dr Brewer’s hand.
‘Dr Kingsley has recommended that you and Francis Sumner go out on the ambulance service at Bellevue for the remainder of semester,’ he said. ‘If something goes wrong out there, you won’t be sitting your final examinations with the rest of your group next month.’
The ambulance service. The one place where things were most likely to go wrong. She’d have as much chance of surviving that as a drunk locked in a gin mill. Dr Kingsley’s chosen punishment would be a quick and effective way of ending her career before it had begun.
‘The student who achieves the highest marks in their final examinations will be able to choose from the internships on offer,’ Dr Brewer continued. ‘That student will be guaranteed their first choice of position.’
Evie understood what he was saying. Nobody would offer her an internship at the Sloane next year unless she was the student who achieved the highest grades. But she’d be working the ambulance service while she was supposed to be studying. She’d have no time to prepare for her examinations. She had to make sure that no one, in all the emergencies she’d have to deal with, died in her hands. And she had to work with Francis, who’d hate her for his demotion, who’d gladly turn her in to save his own skin. Getting the highest grades and winning the internship she coveted was about as likely, in those circumstances, as becoming a nun.
‘You should return home for the rest of the day. Report to the ambulance service tomorrow.’ Dr Brewer dismissed her.
Evie left the room. Never had the walk down the hall taken so long. Everyone watched in silence as she passed. She didn’t know what to do, other than return to the Plaza, sing and dance at Ziegfeld’s, and stay awake for as long as she could so she wouldn’t have any ghostly dreams.
‘You need to write your report on today’s incident before you leave,’ Dr Kingsley called, loud enough for everyone to hear, as she passed his desk.
Evie nodded. She sat down and wrote slowly, each word a record of disaster.
What happened next cut Evie to the quick. Mrs O’Rourke, whose infection Evie had tried to heal, was taking a turn about the wards. When she saw Evie, she stepped back and pressed herself against the wall. She pointed. ‘I heard what happened. I don’t want that one anywhere near me.’
What have I got to show for coming to New York? Evie wondered as she walked away. A dead mother. A dead baby. An attachment to a man who’d lied to her, over and over again, while pretending to always be on her side. An attachment to a foundling child she was forbidden to see, a foundling child who was the result of the man Evie loved abandoning a woman who’d done nothing but trust him.
And now Evie had a reputation as a butcher.
Chapter Eighteen
When Evie put her white dress back on and returned to the Plaza that afternoon, having been banished from her clerkship, she had an unusual two hours to herself. Ordinarily she would have studied. What was the point of that now? She could try to visit Mary. But the thought of examining Mary’s face for traces of Thomas turned her stomach. Thomas. Now that she’d thought of him once, she’d spend the whole afternoon thinking of him. Or if not him, of the mother and the baby who’d died. She closed her eyes. She needed something to do and she needed it now. She called down to William Dunning. ‘Any chance you’ll have a break soon? And is there a mahjong set around?’
‘Certainly,’ he replied.
‘How would you like to spend your break on sandwiches, tea and mahjong in my room?’
‘I’ll be there shortly.’
The bellboy soon appeared with a plate of sandwiches – cucumber and potted crab – and a glass of whiskey.
‘What happened to the tea?’ Evie enquired.
‘This seemed more suitable.’
‘You’re right.’ Evie sipped the drink. ‘Now, tell me about your sister.’
‘She’s eighteen and she’s just started working in a typing pool. She’s so proud to have money of her own.’
William’s obvious love for his sister made Evie smile a little. ‘Does she have a fella?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, fellas are overrated. And then you’d only worry about her.’
‘I do anyway.’
Evie sighed. ‘Let her make her own mistakes. But with a brother like you, I’m sure she won’t make many. Everybody needs a guardian angel.’
‘Who’s yours?’
‘Usually, it’s my friend Lil. But for now, it’s you. So let’s play.’
The bellboy played mahjong like Duke Ellington on piano – fast and with rhythm as the tiles clicked from his rack to the table in unexpected variations. The tempo of the game was quick and without pause. Evie lost three hands in a row but she was pretty sure Lil would never beat her again after all she’d just learned.
Then in the last round, William did something she’d heard of but never seen executed. ‘I caught the moon from the bottom of the sea,’ he said as he shifted his tiles to the top of his rack, exposing them; on the final tile he’d drawn from the wall was one perfect round spot. The moon. Caught as the last tile, and thus from the bottom of the sea. A moment of preciousness. Such things still existed.
Evie clapped her hands in admiration, happy to have been fairly beaten in honest combat, and happy not to have thought of Thomas or the hospital or the ambulance service for an hour.
She checked her watch. ‘Have you ever been to the Ziegfeld Follies?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Swing by the stage door after your shift. I’ll make sure they let you in.’
‘You’re a Ziegfeld Girl?’ William asked, admiringly.
‘Sure am. Sometimes I think I’m better at that than anything else. Maybe I ought to just enjoy a life of singing and dancing and the pleasures it brings and not worry about anything else.’
‘If those pleasures make you happy.’
‘They make everyone else happy. Why should I be any different?’ Evie held out her hand. ‘Thanks for a good match, William Dunning. Enjoy the show. Be sure to bring your sweetheart.’
‘Thank you, Miss Lockhart. And you see, life is all carousels and Wonder Wheels. Nobody has given me tickets to the Follies before.’
‘I hope you’re right. I could do with my Wonder Wheel making its way up the other side.’
With one happy bellboy dispatched, Evie walked down to the New Amsterdam
Theatre along the Great White Way, so called for its lights and billboards, the whiteness not a symbol of innocence but of the way it made everything shine like ambition. On one side of the street was showing A Good Bad Woman and Ladies of the Evening, a few doors down were Bachelors’ Brides and Flesh, next was The Devil Within and The Firebrand. That was all before Forty-Second Street. Perhaps life was easier as a Broadway show, Evie thought. Everyone at the hospital thought she was a firebrand. She should take up her part in it properly, be the showgirl of whom nobody expected anything other than a wink and a giggle.
She left William Dunning’s name at the stage door and made her way to the dressing rooms, which were unnaturally empty. Bob explained, ‘Flo’s bought ice-cream. Everyone’s on the balcony.’
Ice-cream. On any other day, Evie would have been struck by the unexpected treat. Maybe it was a sign. That she was in the place she belonged.
She walked up the stairs and out onto the balcony and sat down next to Bea, who handed her a tub of strawberry ice-cream. Evie gave the spoon a long lick and then let her legs slip down over the edge, like the other girls. They were a row of half-made-up beauties in silk robes, like spring birds arranged in the branch of a tree, stockinged feet kicking the breeze.
‘You look like you’ve had better days,’ Bea said.
‘I have.’ Evie had to blink hard when Bea put an arm around her and brought Evie’s head down to rest on her shoulder. A tear trickled down Evie’s cheek. Bea used the tip of her finger to wipe it away and Evie was so glad that she didn’t ask any more.
All the girls were quiet, watching the sky transform from late afternoon to dusk, which it seemed to do in an instant, as if Florenz Ziegfeld himself had dictated that the scene be changed and on with the show. The lights of the city and of the cars on the street turned on, frightening the shadows away, promising that not only would it be all right on the night, it would be all right forever and always. Evie wished she could believe it.
A few pedestrians looked up and exclaimed at the sight of the showgirls in a rare moment off-show. They looked girlish and vulnerable without their lipstick and feathers, some as young as sixteen, their dreams plain for all to see as they sat above the city they wished to make their mark on.
Below their feet was New York’s spine, the width of Broadway leading through the theatre district and on to Madison Square, down to the triangular Flatiron Building and then Union Square, through Canal and finally out of grime and poverty and onto the yellow brick road of Wall Street, before terminating at the docks, where so many of New York’s immigrant population had their first physical contact with the city. One street could tell the whole story of New York, Evie thought, and she noticed how many of the girls had their eyes turned uptown, towards riches and glory.
Then Bob arrived with a telegram from Ziegfeld, sent, as was his way, from the office at the back of the theatre to the girls on the roof. Back to work, it said. It continued on for another nine hundred words, as was also his way, with a pre-show chin-up spiel about how adored they all were, telling them that Ziegfeld wanted nothing more than to glorify the American girl.
Oh, they were glorified all right, thought Evie, looking around at the fresh, hopeful faces. Right up until they died young from too much opium and too little love, or they jumped out of a hotel window, or their livers failed from the drinking, or they simply got too old and spent their money too quick and died on a street corner from destitution. All the girls on the roof thought they’d be different from the ones who came before. But Evie suspected they wouldn’t be any different at all. Perhaps neither would she.
One by one the girls stood up. They were chatting and laughing now, back to being sassy chorus girls, discarding their childish selves along with their ice-cream buckets and regaining their ambition to be the one driving away after the show in a Bentley to a party in Great Neck with a Wall Street businessman.
‘Attagirl,’ Bea said as Evie pulled herself up and they headed back down to the dressing room. ‘Get your headdress on, the curtain up, the lights picking you out and you’ll be the phoenix’s feather.’
Evie was saved from replying by another girl hollering her name. ‘Evie! Your fella’s here again!’
Evie wanted nothing more than to hide. She hustled in to the dressing room, needing to get away from the stage door, away from Thomas.
Bea stopped her and raised her eyebrows. ‘At this rate, I’ll be expecting handcuffs.’
Evie shook her head, unable to interpret this one of Bea’s many colourful expressions.
‘You know, a ring on your left hand.’
‘Can you tell him to leave?’
‘You sure? His shoes looked like they were lined with hundred-dollar bills.’
‘Please?’
‘Is that what the tears were about up there?’ Viv gestured to the roof.
Evie nodded.
‘You won’t mind if I flip up my skirt and show him my gams?’
‘Show him whatever you like.’ The words hurt to say but Evie tried her hardest to look as though she meant them.
With that, Bea was off to try her luck, but she came back looking disappointed. ‘It was all about you. Could’ve taken off my robe and he wouldn’t have noticed. He’s going to wait at the stage door until after the show.’
‘Then I’d better leave by the front door.’
Evie went through the motions that night, singing and moving about the stage as she was required to, but without any extra flair. She cast her eye over the audience and couldn’t see Thomas. She saw William Dunning holding hands with his girl and she flicked him a smile. She saw Charles too. Whispering intimately into the ear of the woman beside him, who was definitely not Viola. He grinned at Evie and put his hand on the woman’s leg, resting his fingers at the top of her thigh.
So many men wasting so much energy on keeping Evie in her place. Wouldn’t it be easier if they let her do what she wanted? What did they honestly think would happen if they relinquished their control of her? As Charles continued to paw the woman beside him, eyes fixed on Evie, she understood that while it might be easy being a Ziegfeld Girl, it wasn’t the forever she wanted. Because then every waking and sleeping minute of her life would be owned by somebody else.
As soon as the show was finished, she slipped back into her white dress and left with a crowd of people through the front doors. She sighed with relief when she made it to Fifth without anyone tapping her on the shoulder.
Once safely inside her room at the Plaza, she poured herself a whiskey from the flask William had left with her, finished it in one swallow and then lay on the floor, sinking into the plushness, cushioned like putti on a fresco cloud. She turned onto her side and looked through the window at the thousands of stars in the sky until she fell soundly and dreamlessly into an exhausted sleep.
The ringing of the telephone woke her and she had to lie still for a few moments, moving only her eyes, to work out where she was. Still on the floor where she had lain last night to feel the comfort of the silk rug against her skin, so tired and possibly drunk that she hadn’t roused at all. Now it was morning and her neck felt as if it had been craning all night for a view of Rudolph Valentino on a film set.
Evie reached up her arm to the telephone. ‘Hello?’ she managed.
‘A Miss Lillian Delancey for you,’ said the desk clerk.
‘Thank you.’
Lil’s voice came down the line. ‘So you really are at the Plaza. I’ll have to come by for a drink.’
‘You’d love the view. And the mahjong.’
Lil burst out laughing. ‘You’re the only girl I know who goes to the Plaza for the mahjong.’
‘One of its many charms.’ Evie didn’t bother to sit up as she talked. The effort required was too great.
‘Tommy was here last night and again this morning. You slipped through his fingers at the theatre.’
‘Intentionally so.’
‘I’ve never seen him like this, Evie. He’s had girls chasin
g him all over New York and London since forever and he’s always thought it was a bit of fun. He’s never looked this sad before.’
Evie swallowed. Her mouth was dry from the whiskey, her eyes were damp from what Lil had said, and she wished it was the other way around.
‘Tell him what’s wrong,’ said Lil. ‘Don’t see him again if you don’t want to, but at least let him know why.’
‘How’s Leo?’
‘Swell. But you’re changing the subject.’
‘Swell as in you’ve seen him every minute since the ball?’
‘Yes, that kind of swell.’
Evie could hear the joy in Lil’s voice, joy she was trying but failing to hide. ‘Let’s celebrate,’ Evie said. ‘I’ll see you in the lobby at half past five. I’ll be the one with whiskey and you’ll be the one with champagne.’
It was hopeless. Evie watched as Francis performed a balletic tiptoe around the puddles of slop on the pavement outside the tenement in the East Village where the ambulance had been called. They’d be lucky to last an entire day without killing anyone. And where would that leave her?
Once inside, Francis stood in a corner of the room, careful not to touch anything, lest the dog excrement, or the buckets of diapers, or the scabs from the children’s numerous scrapes and sores somehow leapt from their moorings and infected him with the trappings of poverty and filth. Evie did everything while he yelled instructions at her, some of which she followed and some of which she ignored, because he couldn’t see what she was doing and he didn’t appear to care. She spent the whole morning at each and every call-out inside her head, sorting through the lecture notes she’d committed to memory and the diagrams from Gray’s Anatomy she’d revised, as well as recalling everything she could of the dissections she’d practised. She felt as if she’d learned more in one morning than she had in the last year of physiology. And she hadn’t made a mistake, yet.
‘If you’d been a man we’d have been sent to gynaecology rather than here,’ said Francis grumpily as they left one block of apartments early in the morning.
A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald Page 24