Speak Easy, Speak Love

by McKelle George

  Beatrice turned back to Sage. “Hurry. Get me two of those jugs.” She didn’t think she could carry three; otherwise she would have.

  Sage obeyed quickly, and Beatrice felt sorry to exchange such a useful companion as the shotgun for four gallons of half-poisonous hooch. “You owe us another jug,” Beatrice told Sage. “Don’t think I’ll forget either.” Gripping the handles, she hurried down the shore toward Benedick. He was on his hands and knees, coughing up brackish water. He’d managed to wrestle off his shirt and vest and wore only a soaked-through undershirt; he was also missing a shoe.

  “Are you all right?” Beatrice set down one of the jugs and knelt next to him. “If you can stand up, the sooner we can get out of here, the better.”

  “I’m fine,” he said hoarsely. The gag hung around his neck, but faint red marks indented his cheeks. She hauled him to his feet, then picked up the second jug. They entered the thick foliage, and she bent to avoid a low-swinging branch. Beech limbs leaned in and intermingled to make a choking vault over their heads. Even with four gallons of whiskey burning her shoulders, Beatrice occasionally had to wait for Benedick to catch up.

  The Model T appeared at the end of the trail like an oasis. Beatrice put the jugs in the backseat, and Benedick went to the passenger’s side without a word. The old Ford was cantankerous; all the engine fluids had pooled to one side with Benedick’s wonky parking job. Beatrice cranked in front of the grille, and it took an inordinate amount of coaxing to get Benedick focused enough to operate the choke and ignition. When at last the engine was persuaded to start, she slid behind the wheel. Eyes closed, Benedick muttered, “You can drive,” as if she weren’t already driving.

  She shot him a worried glance as they sputtered forward. Though she kept an eye on the side mirrors, just in case, she went slowly over the dirt road. Benedick’s face had gone ashen, and it wasn’t long before shivers began to jerk through him and spasm up his shoulders. He pressed his lips together, fists clenching.

  Beatrice braked slowly and pulled to the side of the road.

  “What—” he asked, or tried to before opening the door and vomiting up some of Mosquito Cove and that shot of Sage’s moonshine. The shivering returned, worse than before.

  She put a hand on his hunched, trembling shoulder. His skin was clammy and cold. “Take it easy. I think you’re experiencing a mild form of shell shock, not to mention the repercussions of exhaustion. Possibly the beginnings of dehydration, too. I need you to take off all the clothes you’re comfortable with.”

  With a small groan he shifted toward her. The glare he summoned was nothing to sneeze at, considering his condition. “N-no—”

  She slapped away his hands as he tried to stop her from tugging up his undershirt. It went over his head and landed with a glop on the car floor. “There you go,” she said. “Pants and socks, too, if you don’t mind.”

  With a look to suggest she’d be more than happy to help if he didn’t get going, she left him to manage on his own. Then she rummaged under the seat for anything that might serve as a makeshift blanket. She fished out a worn tarpaulin cloth probably used to cover the engine when the rain was bad and glanced up as Benedick fumbled out of the car and tripped free of his soaked pants.

  She felt no embarrassment at the flash of his bare skin. The instant he’d begun exhibiting symptoms, he’d become a patient, not a boy.

  She spread the cloth along the front seat of the car; it was rough and stank of mildew, but it was dry. “Lie down, please.”

  He grimaced and situated himself. Beatrice tucked the tarpaulin around him as if she were swaddling an infant. His head went near the open door on the passenger’s side; his knees bent, and his feet propped easily on the driver’s door. His eyes closed.

  After laying out his wet clothes on the engine-hot hood, she came behind him, her stomach near the top of his head, and pressed her fingers gently to his neck. “Your skin is cool. No fever at least.” She monitored his pulse against her own, kept watch on the twitch of his eyes under his lids. Her own breathing was clear; her mind, sharp. This was her element. The higher the stakes, the more her faculties calmed.

  She hungered for these hiccups of mortality, could sense, almost, when a cough was just a cough and when it signaled an oncoming head cold. The farmhands had been good to let her treat them when they got heat stroke or felt ill; plus the estate vet had allowed her to assist with livestock births when he needed a hand.

  But where she’d truly thrived was first at school, then at St. Mary’s with embarrassed girls suffering menstrual cramps or even nongendered illnesses, wanting to avoid the touch of a middle-aged man and his judgmental eye.

  Beatrice kneaded her fingertips into Benedick’s temple and above the curve of his ear. Eastern medicine believed certain pressure points, when engaged, could relieve pain. His skin was fine and soft there; her hands, by comparison, were scratched from the woods, grease in the wrinkles and scars on her knuckles. Not a lady’s hands.

  After a few minutes Benedick’s shivering subsided to an occasional tremor. His bright eyes blinked rapidly, then focused on her. A small line appeared between his brows. “Did you really throw a doctor out the window?”

  “No, I threw a clock out the window, which was admittedly near the doctor’s head, but I wasn’t aiming for him. I was just trying to get his attention.”

  “Hmm.” He wriggled inside the cloth. “I feel, ugh, warm.”

  “Slow down.” She pressed on his shoulders. “I’ll help you up. Not too fast, or you’ll get dizzy again.”

  With her arm as leverage, he shifted upright, keeping the tarpaulin around him. “What time is it?”

  “We’ve a good hour or two before the sun goes down.”

  With a vague grunt he slumped lower, the tarpaulin coming up to his ears. He stared out the windshield at nothing.

  Beatrice said, “We can rest here a minute, but you need to drink something. Water, not Sage’s moonshine.”

  “Do we have any of Sage’s moonshine?”

  “Four gallons.”

  He frowned. “You . . .”

  “You’re welcome. Given you’ve had a bit of a rough afternoon, I won’t make you admit I was right.”

  “What?”

  “About how glad you’d be to have me along.” She smiled and shut the car door. She gathered his wet clothes off the hood—a tiny bit drier—and returned to the driver’s seat. The car started much nicer this time. Half her day had been spent inside it, with Benedick. The air was close and ripe with alcohol, which had grown strangely familiar, of all the bizarre things to get attached to on her first day. “There’s no need for us to be enemies at any rate. Saving your life must count for something.”

  “That’s stretching things. They weren’t going to kill me.”

  “I take it this wasn’t your first time meeting them?”

  Benedick sighed, shuffling a hand through his damp hair. Since he was no longer vomiting or shaking, Beatrice felt the need to avert her eyes from his bare chest. He roused himself quickly, to give him credit, like someone who’d been taught not to slouch. That inner spring was the first thing about him she could relate to.

  “I suppose Conrade Minsky could be called one of my enemies. Sometimes our schools played each other in sports and the like. But it’s his mother who’s got it out for Hey Nonny Nonny. Mary Louise Minsky. Their family owns a theater house in Great Neck. After the war her husband played racy films on the weekends, then started serving beer and vodka. When he died, Mary Louise took over. She tried playing respectable films at first, but when that didn’t work, they offered more . . . daring shows. Vaudeville performers, burlesque dancers.” Benedick shrugged. “I guess Anna and Mary Louise went to school together when they were girls, and they were rivals even then. Minsky’s Ragland and Hey Nonny Nonny have always been the top joints in Nassau County, but it was never a deadly rivalry, just a constant one-upping.”

  Now Anna was dead, and the Minsky family was clearly still
at it. “That’s rotten of them to go after you like that.”

  “No honor code for bootleggers.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. Not for all of them. My uncle, for one, would be honest about it.”

  Benedick looked at her in that thoughtful, narrow-eyed way again. “How can you be sure? How long has it been since you’ve seen your uncle?”

  Beatrice blushed. “Ten years, I think. I was eight when my father died, and we visited before then. . . . But it doesn’t matter. I know he is because he took me in when he didn’t have to, even after the society warned him he shouldn’t because I was going to ruin—” She stopped, her throat tightening with agitation. “Anyway, I know what a good man is.”

  “Well, you’re right.” Benedick looked out the window. “He is a good man. And an honest bootlegger.”

  Beatrice turned on the blessedly paved road of Prospect Avenue. The coast of Hempstead Bay stayed on their right, its gray-green color flashing out at them occasionally through the trees. They’d driven by violet-studded farms and clusters of storefronts on the way here and now approached a village of huddled houses against the edge of the turnpike.

  Here and there some sprawling estate, a glittering mansion rising up above the manicured hills, would catch Beatrice by surprise. All in all, it was not the sort of setting she’d come to expect for a speakeasy. Not that she’d spent much time in the underground gin mills of Manhattan either.

  “Where is the speakeasy?” she asked. “I didn’t see a storefront or an entrance or anything.”

  “Well, that’s the point with a speakeasy. You have to know it’s there.”

  Beatrice considered the idea that she had become, by association, a person who knew. “How is it—” she started to ask.

  But Benedick spoke at the same time, with the exact same words: “How is it—”

  “Sorry,” they said again together. That annoyed Beatrice. Benedick, too, if his pursed mouth was any indication.

  “Miss Clark”—he tried once more—“how is it you knew what to do with the cloth?”

  “Oh. The swaddling mostly treats the shock, which I believe was caused more from adrenaline, though I doubt that water was warm. The point was to keep your blood—”

  “No, I mean, why do you know all of that? Why, for that matter, is your aim with a shotgun so good? I find your unlimited competence unsettling.”

  “My stepfather owned a farm. We shot cans sometimes. Or, you know, dinner.”

  “How barbaric.”

  She shot him a withering look. “Again, you’re welcome.”

  “That only explains the gun savvy. Not the cloth or the fingers.”

  “I’m studying to be a doctor.”

  “A real doctor?”

  “Of course a real doctor! I would have liked to attend the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary this fall, only—only I didn’t finish school. I had a semester left before I was sent to St. Mary’s.”

  “What did you do to get sent to St. Mary’s?”

  “I ran out of money,” she said, more viciously than she intended. She could always tell when her demeanor veered toward the dragonly because people tended to edge out of her way, as Benedick did now. “I’m sorry—no, I am not that sorry, come to think of it. I am still very angry about it. I didn’t have enough money to pay my last semester’s tuition, but I knew if I left the city, I’d never make it back, so my crime, my waywardness, if you will, was being homeless and alone.”

  “Then how did you pay for the first years of your schooling?” he asked cautiously.

  “When my mother died, she left me a small inheritance, and her will specifically said it was to be used for a school that would allow me to attend medical college, which always set my stepfather wrong. Partly because he wouldn’t trust a woman as his doctor, he told me, but mostly because not a penny of my mother’s money went to him.” Grudgingly Beatrice added, “And I suppose he misses her. He’s always seemed angry at her for dying, and I get to be punished for staying alive. I guess. I struggle with psychology. It’s all too wishy-washy to be considered properly medical, in my mind. Gosh. I’m talking too much. Anyway, you probably get to go to any college you like, don’t you?”

  “If I like,” he said, so quietly she wasn’t sure she’d heard him properly.

  “What’s that?”

  He didn’t answer, but her brain had already been set on the track, fitting in the clues of the day like a jigsaw puzzle. “You sent Mr. Blaine back to Brooklyn to take his regents exam and attend his graduation, and you said you went to the same school. But you stayed here.”

  Oh, she had his number now.

  And he knew it. His mouth had gone all thin, a battle-worn look to his eyes; she had a feeling she was about to press his dragon button.

  Not that it stopped the wave of opinion from falling out of her mouth. “Do you mean to suggest that you won’t be finishing school either, by choice?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything that pertains to you.”

  “Isn’t that typical? What’s worse is once you’ve had your good time for the summer, someone will write a check or nudge a friend, and you’ll still have your options laid out like a banquet.”

  His face darkened. “Have me all figured out, don’t you?”

  The suggestion punctured her cloud of irritation. She didn’t have him figured at all, lest she forget. But it was galling to see him so flippantly disregard something she’d have given her left arm to achieve.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “My clothes. We’re almost back.”

  Without her realizing it, the winding lane to Hey Nonny Nonny had appeared ahead of them. She handed him his undershirt and pants. He wriggled into them beneath the tarpaulin, cursing under his breath, bumping into her. At last his head poked out, and he blew his hair off his forehead. “Let me do the talking,” he said.

  They approached the house, which looked a bit sinister in the fading light. Hero stood on the porch, Prince sitting on the steps in front of her. Uncle Leo was in the same chair he’d occupied this morning. All three perked up at their arrival.

  Beatrice parked the Model T beside Uncle Leo’s Lambda.

  Hero was off the porch first, but Prince was right behind her like a tall echo. “Where have you been?” Hero asked. “Prince was back hours ago. We thought you’d broken down and we searched every road to the train station but couldn’t find you.”

  Benedick opened his door and stood up, keeping one elbow on the doorframe, the other on the Ford’s roof, shedding his exhaustion like a winter coat. His eyes brightened, and his pale, clammy skin managed to defy medicine and glow. “Have I got a story for you!”

  And it was a story—in that it was not quite the truth.

  But it wasn’t a lie either.

  Listening to him, Beatrice experienced the afternoon all over again, but this time there was no real danger. There was a boy who’d had a terrific idea that went a little off the rails and a girl who was a good sport and just the kind of sidekick you’d like to have along. Beatrice heard herself laugh when Benedick described her shooting off a man’s hat, but it hadn’t seemed that funny when it actually happened.

  There was a sunniness in his words that somehow even disguised his appearance, erasing the boy shaking with exhaustion, flattening all his mercurial layers into one outfit of razzle-dazzle. But the razzle-dazzle was also real. That was the most baffling part of all. He was this, too.

  She let him do it, not only because she came out looking all right in his story, not a clock-throwing ruin of a girl, but also because Benedick’s talking about her as if she were already one of them made her one of them.

  Words.

  What a tricky, tangled science.

  Uncle Leo’s booming laugh rang out. He slapped Benedick on the back so hard the latter nearly fell over. Only Beatrice saw his white-knuckled grip on the side of the car, the tremor through his arm.

  Unc
le Leo came to Beatrice’s side. “Hullo, sweetheart. Welcome to Hey Nonny Nonny, eh? Ha.”

  Beatrice liked being called sweetheart. She liked it when Prince asked her how the car had run and if she’d had any problems with it. She even liked how Hero called Benedick a dickens’ worth of trouble but kissed him as though she’d wanted trouble as an early birthday present.

  Then Benedick glanced back at her and their eyes met and Beatrice realized the un-storied truth bound them in a private way she didn’t care for at all.

  CHAPTER 7

  NOT TILL A HOT JANUARY

  Crickets. Their loud chirping through Beatrice’s cracked window made her think for a moment that she’d gone back to the farm. But this room was different; bigger, for one. She shook off the tremulous feeling she sometimes got when she relaxed.

  Her more delicate tools now sat along the dresser top and window seat. She’d stripped off her coveralls and changed into a cotton nightgown. She sat in front of the vanity, which she intended to turn into a desk, timidly touching a brush to the ends of her hair. She’d pinned it earlier, but the coils had slid off her head and were now a big snarled knot hanging down her neck. Her arms were reddish tan but white at the shoulders. Her eyes were big and round and green. “Like a fairy’s,” her mother used to say, and her stepfather would correct her, in a mutter under his breath: “Like a witch’s.”

  Beatrice gritted her teeth and went after the first tangle.

  “What a pity,” her etiquette teacher had remarked, “that you’re so plain and not sweet.” How unfortunate to be smart and spirited and not handy with a teakettle. Otherwise she might have made an acceptable wife.

  There was a knock at the door. For an illogical instant, she thought it was Benedick; even more mysteriously, her body quantifiably reacted to the idea. Like an allergy. Increased heart rate, a slight rise in skin temperature.

  “It’s me,” called Hero.