Ella went into the nursery and gathered Sophie into her lap, and dried her tears with a threadbare cuff. Only after Sophie was sleeping did she do the same for the little twins, Rose and Lily, who had started asking when their mother would visit.
(Violet was too young to understand; she’d never ask, assuming her mother must have been Ella. Rebecca would eventually set her straight, but so late an intercession of the facts had no effect on what Violet really thought.)
When the cook delivered dinner, she mentioned their father had asked what all the noise was about.
“We can’t go out any more,” Jo told Lou when the lights were out. “If he catches us now, there’ll be no mercy. We’re to stay inside, with the others.”
That was when Lou cried.
• • • • • •
That Christmas, as a reward for good behavior, their father had parcels delivered.
It was a generous year, from their father: sewing kits and books, dolls and music boxes.
The dolls were discarded. Araminta picked up the sewing kit. Jo picked up the books.
Each room (they occupied six) received a music box; the melody was the same, not even right for dancing.
The party dresses (cruel, Jo thought) were the wrong sizes for anyone but Rebecca and Ella, and too long, but they looked almost like they should, and everyone declared it a good Christmas.
With her savings, planning for disaster that might never come, Jo ordered a handful of flimsy coats.
(Ella had chipped in enough to buy hair ribbons; the ribbons went over better.)
She handed them to six girls, one for each room. No one said they were cheap or ugly, though they were; anything that had to do with outside carried power. They cast glances out the window.
“Never wear them unless you have to,” Jo said, and they all nodded without asking why.
By then, their father was a myth; Jo was the one you worried about.
Ella was the first to ask Araminta if she could do something with the length; soon Ella’s coat had a mostly even ruffle at the collar, made from leftover hem.
The others lined up, and Araminta—barely old enough to thread a needle by herself—did what she could.
In their rooms they’d slip them on, grinning as if at the beginning of a great adventure, as if when Jo rapped on the floor to summon them for geography or history or dancing (dancing, dancing), what she really meant was that they were going somewhere, anywhere, at last.
For years they lived that way, doves in cages, peering out and shaking the feathers of their wings; with every practice they were dancing along their perches, just waiting for a door to open.
• • • • • •
One night, when Jo was nineteen, the house next door had a party.
They were frozen by the music. They had no gramophone (they’d never been good enough to earn that at Christmas), and humming and music boxes hardly counted.
To have music so close was overwhelming, and above the songs rang the laughter and voices and the scrape of three dozen pairs of shoes echoing off the walls, through the stairwells, right through to their rooms like a telegram.
When Lou realized, she laughed too sharply.
“Sounds like they can’t even dance, the clodhoppers,” she said, and then burst into angry tears.
Jo was startled into silence.
She didn’t comfort Lou—there was no comfort—but when Ella and Doris came in, Jo motioned them aside.
Doris whispered, “But what if Father hears?”
“Let her cry,” Jo said.
They sat on Jo’s bed, watching Lou grind her fists into her brows, waiting for the storm to subside.
As soon as Lou had recovered air to speak, she said, “I’ve had it. I don’t care what happens to me. I’m getting out. I’m running away and he’ll never find me.”
Doris said, at once, “Then so am I.”
(She was fourteen, then, and still shadowed Lou as if she couldn’t help it.)
“Wait a second,” said Jo, but Lou was up from her chair and pacing, her long hair twisted behind her.
“He can’t keep us prisoner,” Lou said. “It’s not right—he got Mother, he doesn’t get us, too. I don’t care if I die in a ditch, so long as it’s out of this house!”
“I’m coming with you,” said Doris, her eyes shining in a way Jo had never seen, and vanished out the door.
They meant it. Lou and Doris would walk out, the music drowning out their footsteps, and then they would be gone.
Jo went cold all over.
At least twice a year someone threatened it, natural in imprisonment (and that’s what it was—Jo had no doubt, even then).
When it happened, Jo calmed the older girls or silenced the younger, and that was the end of it until the trees changed and someone else cried to be let out.
But that night the music from the party beat against the walls, echoing in Jo’s fingertips, and she understood.
Even Ella was looking toward the window as if trying to decide whether she had the strength to walk out.
(They all had the strength to follow if one of them ever led; Jo knew that much.)
Jo watched Lou shoving dresses into a pillowcase and imagined what would happen to her, if she and Doris ran. If any of them followed suit. Separated, without money to live on, without any knowledge outside their neighborhood, or even coats that could keep them safe from the cold.
She guessed what the world would do to a few girls all alone; for a moment she despaired.
But Jo remembered enough of the movies she had seen to have some ideas. Desperate times called for grand gestures. Girls who stuck together did all right, and there were always places where a pretty girl could dance.
She knew from Lou’s magazines that there were laws about drinking, new places to dance where people would be inclined to stay quiet about who came and went.
This might be the only chance she’d have to keep them from vanishing.
After a moment, Jo told Ella, “Go get Doris. We’re going dancing.”
four
POSITIVELY, ABSOLUTELY
Years later, Ella and Doris would remember it as Lou’s idea.
(Lou, who knew it had been Jo, never corrected them. Some stories worked better if they weren’t true.)
They remembered fastening their dresses with shaking fingers, gone down the back stairs with their shoes in one hand and into the cab the General hailed by magic.
(The long and terrible wait in the alley behind the house, as Jo waited, they don’t recall.)
They don’t remember that it had been the General (“Don’t call me Jo—no names, for God’s sake!”) who told them to dress, who handed Lou some ugly catalog shoes, who asked the cabbie the best place for a dance and a drink, and as far from here as they could get.
(Once or twice, Doris says, “Don’t you think it might have been Jo? She’s bossy enough about everything else.”
But Ella says, “That would make it a terrible story,” and Doris is still young enough that she thinks you should try to be like the sister you’re living with, so she never argues.
By the time she understands otherwise, the story’s been told so many times it might as well be true.)
They remember the blaze of lights along Fifth Avenue—for Doris a blur of too many streets before they reached any place worth having; for Ella a constellation of delight in every window with a lamp behind it, every streetlight that illuminated a storefront long enough for her to get a glimpse of all the things inside that a lady could choose to buy, with money of her own.
(Of that first night, Jo remembered slipping free of the park and into the sudden open square, and seeing a palace, a block wide and ablaze with light, and holding her breath as if they’d taken flight.
But no one asks her, so she never says.)
It was Jo who guided them into that first club, Salon Renaud, where the air made a dim, smoky wall.
They were young and shouldn’t have been within a
block of the place (which was just what the cabbie told them, before he took off ).
But girls who looked like boys in lipstick were coming into fashion, and the doorman hesitated.
“You looking for your old man, girlies?”
“We’re meeting a friend,” Jo said.
The doorman raised an eyebrow. “That so?”
He must have expected a smart answer, or a flirt, or for them to lose their nerve and bolt, but Jo (in a drab navy day suit, like their chaperone) smiled and looked him coolly in the eyes until he stepped aside with a shrug.
(The nightlife chewed up plenty of girls; if these four wanted their turn, it hardly mattered to him.
It had occurred to him in his time at the door that girls who could bully their way in could probably fight their way out; it was only that so few girls worked together that the theory had never been tested.
After Salon Renaud got run out by the cops, he moved to the Kingfisher. When the girls found it, he was more pleased than he’d admit. He guessed it was that oldest’s doing—she looked like someone in charge—and every night, it was she for whom he opened the door.)
• • • • • •
The answer was always, “Lou took us.”
It didn’t seem, later, like something Jo would have done. She ran the operation, sure, but she didn’t like it. She owned hardly any dresses and wore them nearly to her ankles, so out of fashion it was embarrassing.
Jo rarely drank, and she never danced.
All of them but Lou thought Jo came only to be stern and snap her hand at them when it was time to go.
(Lou knew better, but if Jo didn’t want to say, Lou would keep her confidence.)
Ella and Doris remembered the burn of champagne, the music under their shoes like a heartbeat.
They never thought of the general who shepherded them back and forth, her eyes narrowed across the crowd, the tether that kept them from getting swept away.
• • • • • •
Lou’s biggest memory of that night was coming home.
She’d smoked; she’d stolen drinks; she’d danced whenever she could get a man, not that she had trouble. An hour in, Lou figured she must be good-looking. (She took it the way she’d taken the thick-heeled shoes Jo gave her—it was better than the alternative.)
And all night—dancing or sitting, drinking or flirting—Lou could feel Jo keeping an eye on her across the room. It was spiteful. Lou wasn’t Ella; she had two thoughts to rub together. Jo could keep her rotten eyes.
As the taxi pulled up two blocks from the house, Jo was still barking orders. “Doris, the money. Ella, go last, and don’t make any noise with the door!”
Lou remembered hating Jo that night.
But Lou also remembered looking down at her shoes, seeing she’d worn the sole down almost to nothing.
She thought about what she’d tell Araminta, who had begged for a report as soon as Jo had explained where they were going, and the twins, who’d stolen her lipstick as revenge for not being invited.
It struck her suddenly how close she’d really been to running away and never seeing her sisters again. She’d have done it, in her anger—she’d have disappeared and been lost; she’d been desperate to the breaking point.
But Jo had seen it and done the only thing she could think of, and it had been enough.
Lou clutched her worn-out shoes to her chest all the way up the back stairs, like she was preparing for the grave and bringing them along.
• • • • • •
In less than two years, Jo ran such a smooth operation that the girls were able to sneak out three or four nights a week with no one the wiser.
It was an operation of absolutes, and the rules never changed, no matter how many of them went out.
1. You dressed when she gave the word. (If she never gave the word, God help you if you dressed.)
2. You were ready to go when she called, you were ready to leave when she called, and if you drank too much you’d be left behind. (No one drank too much.)
3. If you were unlucky enough to get sick, you stayed home. If you were heartsick, it was worse.
“I can’t worry about you,” Jo said. “Be quiet or be ready at midnight.”
But home was awfully quiet when you were alone, and it was just as easy to lick one’s wounds in the arms of a handsome young man.
Araminta stayed home half a dozen times with an imagined broken heart, for one boy or another, but the rest got coldhearted. Young men were always proposing to Ella, and to Hattie or Mattie (men could never be sure which), and the sisters thought it was sad stuff proposing to a girl whose name you didn’t know, but it was nothing to miss dancing over.
Jo, of course, had never missed a night.
“No heart in there to break,” Ella said, and no one argued.
five
THE BALTIMORE
Salon Renaud had been a decent venue, as first dances went.
It was a dance hall well-enough known for the taxi driver to think of it; it was well-enough known to have a photographer at the door to catch starlets who had paid for a little publicity.
(Jo never knew about the photographer. There were only four—not enough to draw attention, yet.)
Inside, Salon Renaud was bright and had a bandstand big enough for a philharmonic.
They made a shabby picture in day dresses and catalog shoes amid the silk and velvet.
(“Very Bohemian,” one woman said, giving them the benefit of the doubt.)
The murmurs stopped once they started dancing.
Jo spent the night asking her partners where else they danced. It was something to talk about that didn’t require flirting, and she already knew this wasn’t going to be any kind of home. It was too gleaming to be real, and it worried her.
“Is that other place smaller?” she asked, frowning at the electric lights. “Less conspicuous than here?”
Halfway through the evening she wised up and switched from “less conspicuous” to “more romantic,” which got her a lot more answers than the first round had. After the first night, they never went back. Big and bright were the last things they needed.
(Two months later, Doris got word that Salon Renaud had been shuttered.
“He told me they practically burned the place down,” Doris said, tightening the straps on her shoes. “Now the owner’s in jail, and they’ve locked it up tight as a tomb.”
Ella said, “I don’t know how you can get so much talking done during such a fast dance.”
Doris grinned. “I’m a lady of talent.”
They were at the Kingfisher by then, and feeling safe as houses.)
• • • • • •
The next morning, the young maid brought up the breakfast trays.
When she reached Jo and Lou’s room, she hesitated a moment, then said, “If you have any clothes that need washing, just let me know directly.”
Lou blanched and looked at Jo.
Jo managed a reasonably calm, “I see. Does anyone think we need laundry done?”
The maid shook her head. “You’re very quiet. It’s just that sometimes I have trouble sleeping. And if anyone else has heard, I’m sure no one thinks the worse of you for getting some fresh air, even at a strange hour.”
There was a little silence.
Then Jo said, “You’re very kind,” and paused.
“It’s Mary,” the maid said, wrinkling her nose like she shouldn’t have spoken.
But Lou grinned and said, “Mary, you’re a peach.”
• • • • • •
After that, Jo insisted they stay at the edge of the stairs, to avoid creaking, and anyone with beads had to coil her skirt in her hands so it didn’t make a sound.
One maid might be sympathetic. You couldn’t risk more.
• • • • • •
The second place they went was some supper club so far downtown that even if Jo had known her way around the city, she’d probably have been lost in the maze.
It was darker than the Salon, which suited Jo; it had a cramped band and whiskey that tasted like dust, which didn’t suit anyone; and it had a name that was doomed to obscurity the moment Doris stepped inside and said, “God, it’s like someone died in here.”
They lasted two weeks at the Funeral Parlor Supper Club.
Jo and Lou got another name from a bartender with sleek, dark hair and high cheekbones that made him look like the star on a movie marquee. He was young and impatient, and apparently just traitorous enough to go other places on his nights off.
“It’s nothing much,” he warned, “but if they ever get some decent drink I might consider it.”
“See you there, then,” said Jo, and the bartender smiled at Lou with dark eyes and said, “I should be so lucky.”
The flirting didn’t do much to endear him to Jo (they weren’t there for men), but Lou didn’t seem to mind it; she took her time coming back with her drink, and she was glancing over at the bar again long before the champagne was gone.
“Just scouting for partners,” she said when Jo caught her eye, and Jo said, “Good,” already knowing better.
• • • • • •
The place was the Kingfisher, and almost from the first moment Jo could tell it was going to be home.
By the end of the night, she was sure.
(Partly, it was that the Kingfisher was small enough to be out of mind and dark enough to slip into; there were faces of all colors on the dance floor and sometimes two men cheek to cheek, and she wanted a place that could keep secrets.
Partly, it was that Jo had a moment of weakness with someone she shouldn’t have.)
There was a table near the back door that was big enough for all of them, with a few seats to spare. The spare seats filled with young men trying to trade drinks for dances, with varying degrees of success.
Even Lou approved of the place, which was saying something, and the next night when they scrambled into a taxi, Jo didn’t hesitate.
They’d been going there only six weeks before the bartender from the Funeral Parlor appeared before the rows of bottles.
Jo pushed through the crowd to thank him.
When he saw Jo, he grinned and waved, already looking ten years younger than the last time she’d seen him, and she felt disconcertingly welcome, as if for a moment the nightlife had opened its arms to her in earnest.
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club: A Novel Page 3