Benedick stretched out his back, wincing. “I passed the Latin exam same as you, sweetheart.”
“‘In this, conquer!’” she said. “It’s going to be my motto, too, so get used to it. In hoc signo vinces! In hoc signo vinces!”
He looked annoyed. “How long does it take to get to Ithaca anyway?”
“Five hours and twelve minutes, roughly,” she answered.
Benedick wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug. “Manus in mano,” he said, and kissed her soundly on the mouth.
“People can see,” she mumbled, blushing to her ears. “And stop showing off!”
“You two are worse than I ever was,” Hero said. She’d overcome her most recent crying spell but was still a bit red around the eyes. “Here, I made this scarf for you, even though it’s not quite cold enough yet. You wrap it around like this, see; it’s how they do it in Europe.”
“It’s beautiful.” Beatrice touched the embroidered fabric.
“I made it to match your eyes.” Hero’s bottom lip quivered again, but she held it back, mostly because Prince came up behind her and gently touched her shoulder. “You write every day. I mean it, every damn day or else. And a phone call each Sunday.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, and I have one more present. Maggie sent one of her new records, and she signed it for you. So tell all your new doctor friends that you’ve got other friends back home, and one is a famous blues singer, and the other designs fashion scarves.”
Only after Hero moved on to say good-bye to Benedick did Uncle Leo come forward. He was thinner, his mustache grayer. He’d been trying hard to drink less. His hands trembled like train tracks as he held out a small case to Beatrice, but his eyes had the warmth of two suns.
“I’m not sure if you know, but some of your father’s things were sent to us after his death. Little things. Not much, but I thought maybe you could use that.”
Her father’s name was engraved on the side of the slender case. ANTHONY STAHR. Inside was a dark green fountain pen.
“Not the newest model the kids are using, but it was his.”
“Thank you, Uncle Leo.” She hugged him and kissed his cheek.
They stumbled through more teary good-byes until finally Benedick said, “Criminy, who are all you people anyway? Get out of here.” Hero pinched his cheek.
Beatrice and Benedick boarded the train together and waved out the window the entire way until the train was out of sight. Only then did Benedick give her another wrapped present. “I don’t know if I can handle any more,” said Beatrice.
“Just open it.”
She removed the wrapping slowly; it was nice and red, and she wanted to save it. Underneath was a brand-new copy of Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Applied. That and a curt note: “Don’t expect anything at Christmas.”
“I picked it out,” said Benedick, “but Dad paid for it.”
“Neither of you had to get me a gift at all,” she said.
“I only did it for the kiss.”
“Who says you’re getting one?”
“I knew we should have gotten the stethoscope.”
“Ben, I’ve never had this much help before.”
“You’ve never been to college before either.” He kissed her temple. Touched the parting of her hair. Added, quietly, “I love you.”
She closed her eyes and tucked his fingers close, right where they belonged. “Against your will.”
“With so much of my heart, none of it is left to protest.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The real challenge in writing about the 1920s is narrowing down what to include. Sandwiched between two world wars, it was a decade of breakneck, glamorous, hold-onto-your-hat-kid changes. Even its nicknames were exciting: the “Jazz Age” and the “Roaring Twenties.” But a full cast of characters allowed me to explore a number of aspects of the era. Through Maggie, I touched on jazz music and the blues; through John, I brushed up against the advent of organized crime and the Italian Mafia; through Hero and Beatrice, I showed the surge of new feminism after women won the vote in 1920, and the rise of the “flapper”; through Benedick, the influx of literary genius that emerged after World War I. And, of course, the speakeasy itself is rooted in that great noble experiment of the Eighteenth Amendment, otherwise known as Prohibition. I could set ten more books in this era and still not cover every interesting piece of history.
Yet, for the sake of aligning history with the heart of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, I also had to take some liberties with history.
HEY NONNY NONNY:
As far as I know, there was no speakeasy operating in an estate mansion’s basement in the heart of Flower Hill. Long Island was by no means a dry area during Prohibition, but generally speaking, its parties rarely charged people for the booze. (The most famous rendering of this culture appears, of course, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.) Most speakeasies were in Manhattan and Brooklyn. However, Long Island saw a lot of bootlegging action because of its coastline. Long Island’s South Shore was the initial hot spot for rum-runners, but activity shifted to the North Shore in the early 1920s because there were only two Coast Guard boats patrolling the entire North Shore, and the coves and terrain made it difficult to be detected. This is essentially the business proposition Prince gives to John, though technically, this shift had already taken place by 1927.
THE COTTON CLUB AND DUKE ELLINGTON:
The Cotton Club was a real New York City nightclub located first in Harlem and then briefly in the Theater District. It closed for good in 1940. Like a lot of nightclubs at the time, it was managed by an underworld gangster named Owney Madden (“the Killer”); John’s world and Maggie’s world rubbed elbows more often than not.
In September 1927, King Oliver, a jazz bandleader of the time, turned down a booking contract as the house band, and so the offer passed to Duke Ellington. As John tells Maggie, Ellington had to increase from a six- to an eleven-piece group to meet the requirements of the Cotton Club’s management. I moved these events up several months in order to accommodate the novel’s timeline.
Even though some of the most popular and most talented black entertainers of the 1920s graced the Cotton Club’s stage, its patrons were exclusively white, and its shows often reproduced racist imagery of the time. Still, I imagine Maggie using it as a launching pad to an unapologetic, brilliant career of pushing down barriers, á la Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Adelaide Hall.
Here are the songs Maggie talks about or sings in the book:
“My Blue Heaven” (here) was composed by Walter Donaldson, with lyrics by George A. Whiting, in 1923. My favorite cover, and there are many, is by Norah Jones.
“After You’ve Gone” (here) was composed by Turner Layton, with lyrics by Henry Creamer, in 1918. My favorite cover is by Nina Simone, but you’ve got your choice between Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra, among others.
“St. Louis Blues” (here) was composed by W. C. Handy in 1914. The jazzman’s Hamlet. I’m not telling you what to do, but the 1925 version sung by Bessie Smith, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
“Crazy Blues” (also here) was composed by Perry Bradford in 1920. The recording of this song by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds is often considered the first blues record.
“Always” (here) was written by Irving Berlin in 1925, as a wedding gift for his wife Ellin Mackay. Go for the Billie Holiday cover.
“Downhearted Blues” (here) was composed by Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin in 1922, and made famous by Bessie Smith in 1923.
“I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” often simply “Sister Kate” (here), was written by Clarence Williams and Armand Piron in 1919. This is the song Maggie uses to tease John in Hero’s room. The song I originally wanted to use was “Come On In (Ain’t Nobody Here But Me),” which contains the delightful lyric “I’m drunk and disorderly, I don’t care / If you want to you can pull off your
underwear,” but it was written in 1931.
THE MORELLO GANG AND GENOVESE FAMILY:
One of the biggest questions I’ve always had about Much Ado About Nothing, second only to why in God’s name Hero would take Claudio back, was why Don John was such a jerk to everyone. This guy basically tries to ruin everybody’s life, and his excuse is (and I quote): “I am a plain-dealing villain.” He’s like a test run for Shakespeare’s later villain Iago, in Othello. He’s just a rotten person.
For me, Don John needed a little more motivation for sticking his nose in things. Because Much Ado About Nothing is set in Italy, it only seemed fitting to tip my hat to the Italian presence during Prohibition.
In history, the Genovese family is the oldest of the Five Families, with roots going back to the Morello gang. With the onset of Prohibition in 1919, the Morello family built a lucrative bootlegging operation in Manhattan and eventually gained dominance in the Italian underworld by defeating the rival Neapolitan Camorra of Brooklyn.
In 1920, Giuseppe Morello was released from prison and Brooklyn Mafia boss Salvatore D’Aquila ordered his murder. A lot of blood and death later, a man named Joe “the Boss” Masseria came out on top and essentially took over the Morello family; Giuseppe Morello (who had escaped the murder contract) became his underboss. Masseria continued to expand his bootlegging, extortion, loan-sharking, and gambling rackets throughout New York. He recruited a lot of ambitious young mobsters, including Vito Genovese. In Speak Easy, Speak Love, Vito Genovese is the man John reports to. However, the Genovese family would not be officially established until a few years later.
In 1928, the Castellammarese War gets under way, a bloody power struggle between Joe “The Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. By 1931, Maranzano’s gang had won, and he declared himself capo di tutti capi (“boss of all bosses”), but was promptly murdered by a group of young upstarts led by Lucky Luciano, who then established a power-sharing arrangement called “The Commission,” a group of five Mafia families of equal stature.
To my mind, John is among these “young upstarts.” But holding my story directly up to history, the lines get a little blurry.
There’s no factual evidence that Vito Genovese commanded a bootlegging unit in Nassau County, though it’s certainly plausible that any Mafia racket had at least a finger on the pulse of rum-running. If the timelines were kept in perfect historical alignment, there would probably be no kerfuffles in Flower Hill over some stolen crates, because they had bigger fish to fry. They were on the verge of war. But it does help illuminate why John is so desperate to keep his brother away from what’s right on the horizon.
IZZY EINSTEIN AND MOE SMITH:
When I was originally drafting Speak Easy, Speak Love, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fit Dogberry and Verges in. Like many of Shakespeare’s comedic acts, they exist nearly on their own (probably to give stage actors time to set up new scenes and change costumes), except for one crucial illuminating contribution.
And then, I stumbled upon the true-life figures of Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith. History could not have crafted a more perfect Dogberry and Verges. In the play, Dogberry is a man of the law, but he’s kind of an idiot. In life, Izzy Einstein was a man of the law, and he pretended to be an idiot so people wouldn’t take him seriously, which was actually genius.
Dogberry and his men are the ones to discover Don John’s plot, the only ones, and Borachio and Conrade more or less confess just to get him to shut up. Actually genius?
The real Izzy and Moe were Prohibition agents who achieved more arrests than anyone else in the first half of the decade, rarely used guns, never accepted bribes, and were, naturally, fired before Prohibition ended. Izzy and Moe relied mainly on disguises, and Izzy called his methods “Einstein’s Theory of Rum Snooping.”
The scene in the novel where Dogberry argues with the bartender did happen—at least according to an account in Articulating Biographical Sketches of Diminutive Luminaries. Izzy told the bartender he was Izzy Epstein, the famous Prohibition agent, and when the bartender argued that it was Izzy Einstein, Izzy bet him double the price for two drinks, and that was that.
The jar of pickles is true, too. In Izzy’s own words, “Who’d ever think a fat man with pickles was an agent?”
OTHER RELATED FACTS:
Scofflaw, as a word, really was invented during Prohibition as part of a contest sponsored by banker Delcevare King in 1923. Two separate entrants, Henry Irving Dale and Kate L. Butler, submitted the word and split the $200 prize.
The character of Payne Chutney was based on a real historical figure, Payne Whitney, a wealthy businessman who died on May 25, 1927, in Manhasset—five days after Charles Lindbergh’s flight. (I gave my version of his character slightly longer to live, so he’d have time to set up a scholarship fund.) His will bequeathed more than $20 million to hospitals and other educational and medical institutions. His estate funds contributed hugely to the medical school at Cornell University, which was indeed the first coeducational institution among the Ivy Leagues, even though it took them a while longer to treat their female students equally.
I was lucky (pun intended) that Lucky Lindy’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean lined up with the timeline I set for my characters. When I learned that he took off from Long Island, it seemed like a shame not to include him. Lindbergh was a young airmail pilot when he ordered a small monoplane built to his own design. He christened it the Spirit of St. Louis and then, taking off from a rainy airstrip on Roosevelt Field, Long Island, on the early morning of Friday, May 20, 1927, he flew it nonstop to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. It was a feat that electrified the world and changed commercial aviation.
Minsky’s Ragland was based loosely on Minsky’s Burlesque, a vaudeville performance venue that thrived during Prohibition, after showing respectable films at their theater failed to take off.
SOURCES
Alfasa, Josef. Articulating Biographical Sketches of Diminutive Luminaries. Pittsburgh: Rose Dog Books, 2012.
Blumenthal, Karen. Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2011.
Burns, Ken & Lynn Novick, directors. Prohibition. 3-part miniseries; 5 ½ hours. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/.
Critchley, David. The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931 (Routledge Advances in American History). London: Taylor & Francis, 2008.
Dash, Mike. The First Family: Terror, Extortion and the Birth of the American Mafia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Kobler, John. Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Putnam, 1973.
Lawson, Ellen NicKenzie. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013.
Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner (Simon & Schuster), 2010.
Steinke, Gord. Mobsters & Rumrunners of Canada: Crossing the Line. Edmonton, Alberta: Folklore Publishing, 2004.
Waters, Ethel (with Charles Samuel). His Eye Is on the Sparrow: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1951.
Williams, Iain Cameron. Underneath a Harlem Moon: The Harlem to Paris Years of Adelaide Hall (Bayou Jazz Lives). New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.
Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.
And, of course, William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The chapter titles and the speakeasy’s name (and its password and rally song, taken from a song in the play called “Sigh no more”) are all from Shakespeare’s most romantic comedy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing acknowledgments for
your first book feels like trying to thank the entire universe for helping you become a writer.
Thank you, first, to my tireless agent, Katie Grimm, for carrying this book even when I was done with it, and for making me laugh (even though most of the time I don’t think you’re trying to). And a huge thank you to the whole team at Don Congdon Associates, especially Annie Nichol and Cara Bellucci, for all your work, and for being the ones to read my first drafts (sorry).
Speak Easy, Speak Love couldn’t have found a better home than Greenwillow. Thank you to my wonderful editor, Martha Mihalick, for getting my book right from the start and for taking a chance on Hey Nonny Nonny. Huge thanks also to Katie Heit and the rest of the team at Greenwillow and HarperCollins, including but not limited to: Lois Adams, Sylvie Le Floc’h, Gina Rizzo, and the Epic Reads and marketing teams.
To early readers and support: Ryan Brown and Daniel Friend, for editing help; and to Victoria Candland, for your suggestions and for your confidence and sanity during our internship. Mackenzi Lee, thank you for reading an early version of this book, and being a support as I navigated Authorland. Ashley Finley, for keeping an eye on my white girl mistakes and being a badass. Patrice Caldwell, thank you for your incisive feedback and sharp eye; the book is so much better for your help.
To my teachers: Jeff Carney, for not telling a brand-new writer how far she still had to go—thank you; Cheri Pray Earl, for being hilarious and telling me I had that something extra; Lance Larsen, for letting me work on this book in your class instead of writing short fiction; Pat Madden, for unexpected wisdom; and finally, Lara Burton, who said things that will never leave me and I don’t think you even know.
To my friends: Molly Cluff and Sara Butler, the best writing crew a girl could ask for. You guys are my people. Thank you for cheering me on, for reading countless pages and countless reiterations of this book. I love you. Julia Barclay, for always being there, and for making me feel brilliant even when I’m not. To all my other friends who have supported me, thank you. I remember you, even if you’re too numerous to name here.
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