“If any of you get ash on my new tablecloths,” Hero said from Prince’s other side, her feet propped in his lap, “I’ll pop you one.” She braced a hand around Prince’s neck and plucked the cigarette he’d stuck in his mouth free with her teeth. She turned it right way around, and Prince leaned in to strike a match between them, their faces close.
Kiss or get off the pot, Benedick thought.
Of all Hero’s competing hopefuls, Prince had never thrown in his own number. Hero liked to test him, as if she couldn’t believe any red-blooded man was truly that impervious to her charms.
Benedick gave Prince another cigarette, then turned to offer one to Beatrice. “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t smoke.”
“Of course not.”
Beatrice said, “It can’t be good for you.”
“What do you know about it? My fencing instructor at Stony Creek smoked a pack a day, and he’s healthy as a beast.”
“First, I know something about nearly everything, and second, I’m only postulating, based on hypothetical theory. If you consider a chimney stack venting smoke, the buildup needs to be regularly cleaned, but there’s no way to clean your lungs. Not to mention how nervous cigarettes make some people.”
Benedick blew smoke right at her. Beatrice, bored, fanned it away. He was disappointed, of all things.
“Does it make you feel very clever to use words like postulate in normal conversation?” asked Benedick.
“Being clever makes me feel clever,” said Beatrice. “But next time I educate you, I will be as monosyllabic as possible.”
“Goodness, you two,” Hero interrupted. Her tongue flicked the back of her two front teeth, against the gap. “It’s bad enough I only have four hours to get ready, now my brain hurts from listening to you two bicker all morning.”
“You need four hours to get ready?” asked Beatrice, amazed.
“Honey, I need five, but I’ll make do with what I have.” Hero examined her nails and, finding her manicure in a further state of disarray, frowned deeper. “Why? Doesn’t it take you time?”
Pink blossomed on Beatrice’s cheeks, darkening the freckles. “I only have one nice dress, and there’s not much I can do with my hair, so I don’t know what I’d do with extra time anyway.”
Duly horrified, Hero sat up, feet falling from Prince’s lap. “One nice dress? One? You know, I bet I’ve got something you can borrow. That artist fella from Paris sent me this frock as a gift, and it was too long and made me look like a lumpy dwarf. It might fit you. You have that waif look some girls can get away with.” Hero pressed both hands to her own gifted chest, with a sigh that was both wistful and proud. “Lord knows I can’t.”
Beatrice stared at her cousin as if she were an equation missing a key variable.
Benedick leaned over to give her a few suggestions on how to become more ladylike, but the door in the far corner, the one leading to the outside entrance, cracked open. Tommy stopped playing.
And in walked none other than John Morello.
CHAPTER 9
A CHURCH BY DAYLIGHT
Hey Nonny Nonny was not what you’d call glamorous. And it hadn’t been, even when Anna was around. It was just a little too rowdy for that, a little too come-as-you-are. The stage was a stage, but it was small, with no wings, no backstage, and no dressing rooms. Most of the time Maggie dressed in her room upstairs, but in a pinch she could shimmy down under the stage, behind a thin partition. If someone was dancing onstage, she got out of there fast, because if she didn’t, plaster came down on her head.
Not glamorous, no.
But it was home.
“Honey, I’m just saying. If a ship is sinking, it’s time to get off.” Tommy looked up at her, even as one hand played the bass notes of “April Showers.”
Maggie leaned over, plunking a few high keys to mess him up. It didn’t. Nothing could knock Tommy off his beat once he’d found it. “You rather I go back to Philly?” she asked.
“Mags. You got friends in the city. Everyone who’s been to Hey Nonny Nonny knows you have real pipes. You could stay with Jez and me.”
Maggie said nothing. Her eyes drifted over the tiny stage she knew so well. Then past it, to the table of people smoking and laughing.
Tommy sighed, noting where her attention had gone. “What’s so special about this joint anyhow?”
If Tommy didn’t already know, she couldn’t explain it to him. She straightened, about to dismiss the rest of the band until opening warm-up. And then John walked in.
Her heart went completely still, then picked up pace to make up for the pause.
She wasn’t the only one. At the table Prince had turned into a breathing statue.
“Hey, Johnny baby!” Tommy called, laughing.
John’s gaze ticked over to them briefly, but that was it.
John reminded Maggie, as always, of a gun. He was made of hard lines: lean, obstinate jaw, straight nose. Trouble, in other words. And like trouble, sometimes a girl found herself looking for it, wanting it, even when she knew it was a bad idea.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said in his quiet voice, but Hero had already sprung to her feet.
She looped her arms around his neck and kissed him hard on the cheek, an inch from his mouth. “John! You came! You stayed away so long I’d started to think our little establishment was too small potatoes for you.”
He extracted himself from her hold, a little pink around the edges. Prince remained the only boy on this earth who could take Hero full throttle with no side effects.
Besides, John knew what she was about. “There’s a dozen bottles of champagne in my car,” he said. “Plus half a case of white rum for cocktails.”
“Oh, you absolute gem.”
He’d paid for his ticket, and Hero ushered him to the table as if she didn’t see Prince’s darkening expression. “Any special reason you’re gracing us this year?”
He lowered himself into the chair, still without so much as a glance toward Maggie. “There’s been a few business snags recently in this area. I came to get to the bottom of it.” His posture took on a predatory angle toward Prince.
“I haven’t heard of anything.” Prince met the look. “Not anything that would concern you anyway.”
Was Maggie the only one who saw the fledgling storm crackling between the pair? Thunder and lightning. Someone needed to break it up. She told herself that was why she spoke up next, not because she wanted John to look her way.
“Excuse me,” Maggie said into her microphone. “But my band’s hungry as lions, and we’ve still got one more song to finish.”
She snapped her fingers at Tommy. After a bewildered pause Tommy sat down and tickled the keys of the piano. He knew every song, published and unpublished. Hey Nonny Nonny had warranted his time in its heyday, but now they were lucky he came back for such low pay—though it was true his salary sometimes came with a kiss or two.
He was an all right kisser. No firecracker, but Maggie had endured far worse on the sacred altar of jazz.
“‘Now listen, honey,’” she sang.
Finally John’s eyes snapped up to hers: a combination of grieved and angry, as if to say, How dare you?
Her voice was pure as a bell; you could hear it five blocks away on a clear night. The first time she met John, the crowd had been bad, and he’d told her she sang too loud. Maybe she should have taken that as a warning from fate, but fate needn’t have bothered. She had always known better than to fall in love, especially with someone like John. Letting her heart close to a white boy was problem enough, but for some people an Italian was worse. With olive Mediterranean skin and black hair that had a tendency to curl if it ever escaped his meticulous grooming, John was as far from her world as he could be, and the breadth of their separation was on the outside where everyone could see it.
At the time, she’d had no idea who he was; no one had even known Prince had a brother, estranged or otherwise.
Come to find out, John had b
een looking for Prince for a while, and Hey Nonny Nonny was a big enough racket that word got around to his associates. Maggie had been fifteen at the time and green as hay, only a few solo performances under her belt. Hey Nonny Nonny had the kind of audience that did whatever it pleased: people running around, yelling at their friends.
Still, if they liked you, they weren’t shy about it. They’d scream, stomp, and applaud until the whole building shook. Bawdy riffs were the most popular; they weren’t right for Maggie’s voice, but she sang them anyway because she was too afraid of displeasing anyone. If nobody wanted to listen to her, she’d never be a headliner.
That night she’d shout-sung the last notes, and it had made her pitchy, sharp at the end. Nobody noticed, though. Or she thought they hadn’t, with all the whistling and clapping.
Usually when she left the stage, she’d hang out at the bar for a bit or maybe schmooze at a table if they invited her. She liked the compliments. She liked hearing that she was going places.
But this boy, this dark-haired boy not much older than she was, sitting alone at the bar, didn’t care a lick when she took the seat beside him (it was the only one open; even back then he had a way of maintaining his sphere of personal space). He’d looked as if he hadn’t smiled a day in his life, and she couldn’t help taking it personally, her insecurities bubbling to the surface.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. Whatever else she was, she was never timid. “Didn’t like my song?”
Without turning, without so much as a blink actually—he was the stillest person she’d ever met, even then—he said, “The song was fine.”
“Only fine, huh?”
He turned then. He was younger than she’d thought: a boy’s skin, an old man’s eyes. “You were sharp on the last notes.”
Well! Someone had noticed.
Admitting it was another story. “Excuse me for missing the mark of perfection,” she’d said sniffily.
He didn’t apologize. “You’re trying to sing like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, with the riffs and jams and shouting. Your voice is low, more suited to soft singing.”
Just who was this kid, with his Bessie Smith and jams and know-how? He didn’t know nothing. “Oh, yeah?” Her voice rose a notch.
“Yeah,” he said, and he’d had the nerve to sound amused. “Try ‘St. Louis Blues’ next time, and sing it like a lullaby.”
She’d marched away from the bar in a huff, cursing under her breath like a stevedore, annoyed that he knew “St. Louis Blues” at all. But she asked Anna if she could please have another spot for the next night, figuring he wouldn’t be there anyway, and she could try it at least.
She’d sung “St. Louis Blues,” and she’d sung it with a feather tongue.
And that boy, the stupid fathead, had been right. You could have heard a pin drop in Hey Nonny Nonny’s rowdy crowd.
That was how she sang now, focused as a needle point, gentle as a thread of silk:
“Someday when you grow lonely
Your heart gon’ break like mine”
Tommy and Jez knew the song, so they picked up her beat after the first stanza. She left her microphone to saunter down the steps of the stage. When the place was this empty, she didn’t need it anyway.
The next lines picked up, jaunty and playful, enough for Jez to try some of his tricks and effects.
“I can’t sleep at night
I can’t eat a bite
’Cause the man I love
He don’t treat me right”
There was no teasing John when he wouldn’t be teased, but since she could get away with it without getting shot, she played this one for the team. She got closer to the table, tapping first Benedick, then Prince lightly on the head. When she got to where John sat, she sang a line right in his face. She knew how to play her voice to inspire tears, to put a dance into people’s feet, to draw hands and mouths and hearts together, or in this case, to make someone smile.
He did try, she thought, to ignore her, but by the time she was close enough to touch him, he’d ceded a few inches to her approach, lips pressed tight as if resisting took physical effort.
Tommy peeled out the end of the song, and she popped up with a flourishing bow—and to applause! At least from the non-Italian side of the table.
“You’re so talented, Margaret,” said Beatrice. “I’ve never heard anything like it, and your voice is . . . is like . . . I don’t know.”
“Thanks, rookie.” Maggie winked at her.
Tommy hopped down from the stage. “Hey, level with me, boss man. I got bad habits to pay for, and this gig don’t pay shit. When are you going to get us in to play the Cotton Club?”
“Stop hustling, Tommy,” said Maggie, annoyed.
“Oh, shut it. John don’t mind.”
Subdued, John ran a hand along the edge of the table. “I’ve told you before,” he said. “We don’t touch the Cotton Club. Owney Madden runs it, and that’s not a fight anyone wants to start if we can help it.”
“Well, at least you could set up a meeting. We’re good, Mags and I.”
“Perhaps. Miss Hughes is too young.” John avoided Maggie’s glare by turning to Hero. “I’d like to stay a few extra days if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” said Hero, surprised. “On the house, naturally.”
“I insist on paying.” He stood, adjusting his jacket. “Pedro? Mi aiuti con lo champagne?”
Prince’s mouth pressed into a line, but he followed his brother all the same—not before grabbing Benedick’s shoulder and leaning down to whisper something in his ear.
When they were gone, Beatrice asked, “Who was that?”
“John Morello,” said Hero. “Prince’s half brother. He looks like he’d slit your throat for a laugh, but he’s a peach underneath all that.”
“So, staying longer this time?”
Maggie hovered in the doorway of John’s room. His suitcase was open on the bed. He took a folded shirt out and lifted his eyes to look at her.
“Business,” he said, as if she might need reminding.
“It always is.” She came into the room and plopped onto his bed.
“Please, come in,” he said dryly.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
His visits were mostly about keeping an eye on Prince, but she liked to think he was around a little more often than was necessary to hear her sing.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not too young for the Cotton Club.”
“You’re seventeen. And have been”—he hung the shirt and set it inside the closet—“since March.”
“And here I’d thought you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget.”
For someone who said he didn’t care, he sure put a lot of effort into not caring. Sometimes she could trick him into admitting she was as charming as she thought she was, but most of the time, it was like dancing around a cinder block.
“I look twenty-one,” she said. This time she wasn’t here to coax out one of his slipups.
Maybe he heard it in her tone because at last he turned and met her eyes. He frowned. She liked his frown—which was good, since that was what she saw most. It suited him more than a smile, brought to mind his concentration, his refusal to be hurried, the dangerous edge of his judgment.
“And I’m plenty old enough,” she said. “I wasn’t a child even when I was one. Nobody’d ask anyway, and if they did, I’d get Leo to sign one of those papers. He’d do it.” Lord knew her mother wouldn’t.
“What are you saying?”
“Not the Cotton Club. I know that’s not your beat. But your family owns some of the clubs in the city. I thought maybe you could ask if one of the managers would audition me.”
“Are you leaving Hey Nonny Nonny?” A faint line appeared between John’s brows. “The speakeasy is down that bad?”
This was why she was here: She didn’t have to explain jazz to him, and she didn’t have to explain Hey Nonny Nonny either. Right before Christmas last ye
ar, John had taken her to see Dance Mania with Duke Ellington and Adelaide Hall at the Lafayette Theater. She sat side by side with him in an orchestra seat, not the balcony. He was good (if stoic) company. The boy wouldn’t know a fun time if it kissed him in the kisser, but he had one of the most natural ears for music she’d ever encountered. When the song was so perfect he couldn’t help himself, his usually barred eyes opened up like clear lakes. She could see the music in him. She aimed for that look every time she sang in front of him, because then she knew she’d struck gold.
Anna had passed away the beginning of October, and the show had not only soothed Maggie’s grief, it had served as a reminder that she had dreams and talent, that she loved Hey Nonny Nonny, but her world didn’t have to fall with it. John hadn’t said a word, but he’d known what she needed. Maggie had felt it standing under the lit-up awning, flashy posters pasted to the door windows. Don’t forget, Margaret Hughes.
Was she leaving Hey Nonny Nonny?
“Not if I don’t have to,” Maggie said. “Maybe it could turn around. Hero’s trying. And I’m gonna sing every Saturday to help her. But we barely kept ourselves fed last winter, let alone making a wage. If it goes under, I’ll be starting over in Harlem with only my pianist to vouch for me.”
John crossed his arms. “Margaret . . .” His stern-and-concerned expression reminded Maggie so much of her mother she instantly scowled.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Maggie had grown up listening to her father play their beat-up piano alongside the radio, inventing riffs that always made the song better. And a mother who insisted he turn that “troublemaking” music down. All Maggie had ever wanted to do was sing, and all her mother had ever wanted was for her to find safe, respectable, decent work and keep away from boys. When her parents had discovered her plans to hitchhike her way to New York rather than help fold some white lady’s laundry another day, her father had made a compromise and sent her to live with friends on Long Island. Good work, better pay, and far enough from Harlem that her mother allowed it. But close enough, her father said, to see the lights, to soak up those radio songs in the flesh, if she didn’t mind taking the train.
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