The Girls at the Kingfisher Club: A Novel

by Genevieve Valentine

  Hattie and Mattie, when they aren’t dancing, still feel that way, despite themselves.

  • • • • • •

  Rebecca is precise.

  When the music boxes come that Christmas, Rebecca opens each one, sitting through the same song six times, just in case.

  Even at five years old and barely reading, she picks up dances the first time Jo demonstrates—they roll out ahead of her as if Jo’s left a map.

  When Jo finagles a library out of their father, she appoints Rebecca the librarian, and she places orders twice a year with their father. They don’t get all they ask for—“Father says money is getting tighter,” Jo reports back every once in a while, in a tone that says she doesn’t quite believe it—but they get enough.

  (Once their father sends the message “I expected worse from your book choices, but you seem to be handling it.” It’s the highest praise any of them has ever gotten.

  She replies with a request for reading glasses.)

  Rebecca’s first night out, she takes pains not to look overwhelmed by it all, and makes up in the mirror the way she’s practiced for months, red sliding over her lips with a practiced flick so that the others will be impressed by how prepared and mature she is.

  (Araminta’s shaking hands embarrass Rebecca more than she can ever say. The day after their first night out, she makes Araminta rouge her face beforehand, so no one will see her.

  “Someone has to keep you from looking like a silly fool in front of Jo,” Rebecca says. “She’ll keep you at home if she thinks you don’t have the nerve.”

  Araminta raises her eyebrows. “I didn’t realize you were my keeper.”

  “I’m not,” says Rebecca; she’s never stopped wondering if it’s true.)

  Rebecca doesn’t think of herself as romantic—she’ll leave that to Araminta, thank you—but still it disappoints her when the first man she dances with doesn’t know what he’s doing. He holds her too tight, and falls behind the beat, and steps on her toes.

  She gets back to the table and cries.

  Jo allows it for half a song. Then she says, “Enough, it makes your eyes red,” and hands her a hankie.

  (Never a lot of comfort in Jo, but it was hard to deny she gave practical advice.)

  The little burn of disappointment never goes away, and Rebecca gets picky, fast.

  (She brings out the reading glasses, sometimes, so she can peer over the rims like a contest judge.)

  For a while, she doesn’t do much dancing. Then the men start to take it as a challenge.

  The results, by and large, haven’t impressed her; it’s a pile of boys fighting for a spinning top. She still hasn’t found a man she’s willing to kiss. Sophie’s starting to ask if Rebecca’s turning into Rose.

  Whenever pocket money comes, Rebecca makes note of how much has come in. (Nothing goes out. She’s saving all she can, because you never know.)

  She has two dresses: one gold, one blue. The blue one she inherited from Lou.

  (“You should have something that doesn’t make you look like a pauper,” Lou says. “Do us all a favor.”)

  Rebecca’s favorite dance is the quickstep; she looks too serious for it until she takes the floor, but then her smile is blinding, and it’s all a man can do to keep up.

  Rebecca has the fastest feet of the sisters; of all twelve she’s the only one who’s never misstepped, not once.

  • • • • • •

  Araminta’s eighteen and hates it, and acts like a dowager countess because she thinks it makes her seem older. None of them can bring themselves to tell her it just makes her young and sweet as a fairy tale.

  (Doris blames Araminta for the “Princess” nickname sticking so hard.)

  There’s nothing Araminta can do to shake the idea, with her long lashes and big eyes and the dark hair she refuses to cut. She pins it with gold nets and thin wound scarves, and fixes it all night.

  “You’ll never find them, it’s like a pincushion back there,” Hattie sometimes says, and Araminta tilts her chin and says, “Thank you for your concern, Hattie.” Teasing is juvenile. They should know better.

  They don’t tease her too badly, though—she can sew.

  She wishes Rebecca wanted more, since they’re in the same room, but it’s hopeless. Rebecca has always been hopeless, really. Doris is nearly as bad. Araminta would be out of a job if it weren’t for the twins.

  (Araminta thinks of Hattie and Mattie as “the twins” and never remembers Rose and Lily; most of the others do the same.)

  Araminta only ever dances the waltz. The rest of the dances are undignified. They muss her dresses.

  The men don’t seem to mind the wait; they say it’s romantic, and they’ll wait an hour, sitting quietly one table over or bringing champagne from the bar.

  She can ignore them, she’s found, and talk only to her sisters all night, and the men still listen as though every word is meant for them.

  It’s made her careful.

  She waits, talking to her sisters and ignoring the men, their gazes on the long column of her neck, where she wears a string of green glass beads wrapped tightly round, like the high collar of a captive queen.

  • • • • • •

  Sophie doesn’t remember their mother. (Ella’s become her mother, in any way that matters.) She’s never seen their father. She floats through childhood, into her dresses, into the dance halls.

  She never pressed to go; she was just as happy to stand in Jo and Lou’s room (against the wall—she’s afraid of Jo) and watch her sisters getting ready.

  When Araminta took up sewing and needed a set of hands, Sophie was happy to learn the needle. Sophie has a talent for smoothing fabric through tricky seams.

  Sophie is Lily’s favorite partner—“You know just how to follow,” Lily says, as if it’s something Sophie thinks about.

  Sophie likes dancing with Lily; why not? Better Lily than some of the men. Sophie gets nervous around men who are too young or too handsome, and hates to sit out. Lily’s perfect until the right men ask.

  The right men do, eventually, and there’s nothing Sophie likes more than an older man, less handsome than refined, coming to the table and holding out his hand.

  Jo glares, but if they don’t mind, Sophie doesn’t.

  Sophie knows from the way Jo studies the atlas and Lou practically claws the drapes that she should feel like a prisoner, but she doesn’t. At night they go dancing, and Sophie doesn’t worry for more. She’s happy just to be happy. Sophie dances like a dream; she does just what you ask her to do.

  • • • • • •

  Lily and Rose dance tango.

  The Argentine style is a scandal at first, even underground, where the ballroom style’s already known. A couple from Paris is brought in for an exhibition. The sisters watch, calculating; by the time the couple is taking their bows, they already know how it goes.

  They bring it home.

  “And you dance this with strange men?” asks Violet, the youngest, in a doubtful voice.

  In Doris’s arms, Ella is grinning and swooning like the performer did at the last moment, one arm flung out like a swan’s wing.

  It’s two nights before the Kingfisher plays one. Rose and Lily tap their fingers on the table and sigh.

  “Please, can we?” Lily asks, finally.

  “Not with men,” says Jo. “It’s trouble we don’t need.”

  They don’t argue. (Jo’s never made anyone sit home from spite, but she could, and they aren’t taking chances.)

  But it isn’t disobeying Jo to dance with each other like at home, faces pressed cheek to cheek, arms outstretched, making fish faces at the sisters who are sitting.

  (They act like twins whenever they can, even though they don’t often feel like it. Sometimes they hate Hattie and Mattie for their ease; they’d never say it, even to each other.)

  “When are you going to get a fella?” Lily asks Rose after a year or two of dancing. “I have one who wants to take
me kissing, but I think I should wait for you to have one.”

  Rose flushes. “I don’t think I’ll ever have a fella.”

  “Why not?” Lily bristles. “We’re plenty pretty.”

  “I don’t like the look of them,” Rose says.

  Lily purses her lips at the dance floor, appraising.

  After a moment longer, Rose says, “Any of them.”

  Lily looks at her a long time, as Rose tries not to hyperventilate.

  Then Lily shrugs and says, “Well, then it’s you who should have learned to lead, isn’t it?” and when Rose clasps Lily’s hand, she clasps it back.

  It’s the closest they’ve ever been.

  Rose is happy to dance tango with men as soon as Jo gives permission. Rose is happy to dance anything with men; it’s perfectly safe, and most men are perfectly nice, and the music is perfectly nice.

  If, between songs, she looks too long at bob-haired girls smoking at the bar, that’s nobody’s business.

  Lily keeps leading, dragging this sister or that one onto the floor. (Sophie is the first to offer her hand, after Rose stops dancing with her.)

  In her second year, she gets up the courage to hold out her hand to a girl at the bar.

  “It worked,” she pants, back at their table, flushed from the thrill and smiling wide.

  She tries more often, chatting up girls by the bar until they sigh and agree to just one Charleston—just one—and spend a dance laughing and kicking up their heels. Then they spend another, and another.

  “Why won’t you dance with men?” Araminta asks, just short of pique. The men crane their necks, waiting.

  “None of them have the nerve to ask,” says Lily. “Rebecca, quickstep or not? If not, I’m asking the blond.”

  “Stop it,” murmurs Araminta. “You’ll get a reputation.”

  “Too late,” Lily says over her shoulder, and picks up the blond on her way to the floor.

  Rose doesn’t know if Lily does it to cover Rose’s secret for her, or to spite her for it.

  Rose doesn’t know much about Lily at all.

  • • • • • •

  Violet thinks sometimes about being a boy.

  It would’ve made their father happy, that’s for sure, and would have spared them a bunch of this junk.

  (She’s never seen the front door of their house. Whenever she thinks about it, she itches everywhere.)

  She’s thirteen when they start taking her along.

  “Remember,” Jo says in the cab, “don’t tell anyone your name. If any man gets fresh, push—some of us will see you.”

  She never says what they would do, but somehow Violet never doubts the man in question would be sorry.

  (Violet doesn’t doubt much that Jo tells her. It doesn’t seem wise.)

  Jo says, “I’ll be at our table. Make sure you can see me, wherever you are.”

  Behind Jo, the streets are flying past them, a tangle of lights and cars and storefronts lined with evening gowns and the roar of a city that’s alive in every corner. For a moment Violet struggles to pay attention.

  “Watch out for men without a cigarette in their hand,” says Doris. “They’re looking to pinch your rear.”

  “I’ll crack them,” snaps Violet, and Doris says, “Good girl.”

  “We’re here,” says Jo.

  Violet’s night is a blur of sound and noise and smoke and champagne, men like catalog cutouts, and Violet in the center in a green dress, feeling like she’s shouting so the world can hear, like she’s one of them at last.

  A man tries to pinch her on her way back to the table. She slaps him hard enough to leave a mark, and when she turns, she runs into Jo, who’s appeared as if by magic.

  “Beat it,” says Jo to the man, and the hair on Violet’s neck stands up.

  The man backs into the crowd. All night, he stares like a whipped dog from the bar, where the bartender Jake (who Araminta says is soft on Lou) looks like he wouldn’t mind making the fella disappear for good.

  Hattie and Mattie laugh at him, and Violet laughs, too, shrill, because didn’t she hold her own?

  Violet’s still laughing (and dancing with a handsome young man with dark skin—Charleston or Baltimore, she doesn’t remember, something fast and wonderful) when Jo raises her arm and snaps her hand like she’s snatching a key from the air.

  It sucks all the sound out of the room until Violet can’t even hear her own breathing, and even as she weaves her way back to the table, she moves like someone in a dream, because now it’s over.

  Violet realizes for the first time that she’s never hated anyone before, that she can’t imagine hating anyone as much as she hates Jo tonight.

  The anger fades in the quiet cab ride home, Violet watching Jo’s face across the dark seat. Jo’s looking out the car window; her head never moves.

  Violet pities Jo, who can’t ever have felt anything wonderful, to pull them home so heartlessly; poor Jo, who’s never felt anything at all.

  seven

  SOMETIMES I’M HAPPY

  (SOMETIMES I’M BLUE)

  Jo was standing in the fourth-floor hall at five of midnight, at the back landing of the servants’ stair.

  She had a bathrobe over her frock, just in case her father came up, and she tied and untied the belt for something to do with her hands.

  As the clock in the front hall struck midnight, Lou and Ella and Doris stepped out of their rooms.

  They were soundless, dresses gleaming in the feeble moonlight that turned them all to ghosts.

  Lou went down first. After Doris vanished, Jo saw a brief flash of gold that meant Rebecca was following, and then came the rest of the girls from the third floor, dots of white and green and purple that took their places on consecutive stairs.

  (This was a dance all its own; Jo had trained them for this, too.)

  Jo waited, so she could make sure they were safely in the stairwell without anything crashing down. If there was any sound, it would be Jo running down into the kitchen to make some excuse about being hungry, tugging her robe around herself as if she’d caught a cold.

  (Mary had, once or twice, left a ribbon tied to the banister when she knew Mrs. Reardon, the housekeeper, would be up late in the kitchen.

  Mary had been dismissed a few years back, when the household had retrenched. Violet, who called her Aunt Mary by then, had cried.

  Jo was surprised she’d been allowed to stay as long as she had.)

  All the years they’d been going out, Jo had only had to make that lie once; the girls were quiet when they had to be.

  Lou was waiting by the door that opened to the alley. When Jo was down the stairs, Lou disappeared into the dark. Ella and the twins followed—they made up the first cab.

  The other eight waited for the rumble of an engine.

  A few minutes later, it came and went. A moment later, Doris motioned to Sophie, Rose, and Lily, and they slid into the alley.

  Fifteen minutes passed. Violet sighed softly, once, and shifted. This wait scraped at her patience.

  A car came and went, at last. Then it was Jo’s turn to slip into the alley, slip on her shoes (not bothering with straps), walk down the block, and look quietly fetching until a cab pulled over.

  Often it was quick, but she’d waited an hour, sometimes, for a taxi to take them.

  The last three girls were in the alley, a tight and terrifying wait. Violet was at the door, holding it not quite shut—if something happened and they had to run inside, they couldn’t risk being locked out.

  After less than ten minutes, a cab appeared.

  Jo waved him over and gestured behind her until the girls appeared, their stocking feet damp from the grass.

  In the cab the younger girls talked to each other—Jo was chaperone, and they knew better than to gossip with her. Jo caught Rebecca telling Violet, “Keep talking like that and I’ll marry you to someone myself,” but didn’t intervene. Let them tease, if it helped.

  Once, Araminta said, “J
o, I wish you’d let me take up your hem. It would look so pretty at your knees.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Jo.

  • • • • • •

  Though Jo had started everything, though she had given her sisters the hunger, Jo didn’t dance any more.

  Dancing made Jo nervous. She knew what it could do.

  Jo had almost run off with the first man who danced a good foxtrot with her.

  • • • • • •

  She was nineteen, too old and too young for her age, and still getting used to going out at night.

  He was a deliveryman, sneaking barrels into the Kingfisher’s basement; then he was staying to dance with her, and staying, and staying.

  His name was Tom, and he was just shy of handsome, and when he smiled she felt like an only child.

  She’d never told him (thank God she’d never told him), but he’d talked about being the only living person on the road at night like he knew she wanted to hear about being alone.

  Then he’d said, “Come with me.”

  “Where do you go?”

  He smiled, drew her closer in. “Everywhere.”

  Jo rested her forehead on his cheek and imagined sitting in the car beside him, driving down a road that had no end.

  She thought about what would happen to her sisters (a reflex), but in her daydream she was free—she had served her time as overseer, and the world was wide and waiting.

  (It was only a dream, she thought; what was the harm?)

  • • • • • •

  She danced with him for months, caught up in the music, the sharp smell of sawdust and bourbon that lingered on her hands where she touched him, the tips of her fingers tucked under his collar as they danced.

  “When I’m finished here,” he murmured into her hair, “won’t we have a time!”

  One night, he didn’t come.

  She waited three weeks for any sign before she got up the nerve to ask Jake.

  “Is this the same stuff you always have?” she asked as she picked up a round of champagne.

  “New stuff,” he said. “Our alderman changed, and suggested a new distributor. Just as well—that other one was a racket.” He paused, as if she had her ear to the ground and he hoped she’d approve.