The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “He’s not quite all there, is he, dear?” she asked after he left. “Something missing in the eyes.”

  “What he’s got is fine for me. It’s probably just for summer, anyway.”

  “Are you sure?”

  No, I wasn’t. I was different, as Walter Finley and Louisville had so emphatically pointed out, but Nick was too. I wasn’t really interested in making a go of it with anyone, no matter what Tom and Daisy were pushing, but part of that disinterest came from the place of a rather arrogant person realizing that she couldn’t. There was nothing as uninteresting as something I couldn’t have.

  Nick, however. Nick was saying that I might have him, and I could see something in the tricky mess of that, somewhere where we might meet and pass a summer or a year or five years or fifty. That was a tricky kind of ground, especially with the miscegenation laws that were applied like uneven powder all over the country, but there was talk that even that might change. White women had only gotten the vote two years ago, and no one knew what might happen in the time to come.

  Of course I only thought about this in a vague and daylight way. I hadn’t gotten as far as I had by looking ahead to any kind of future. I was grounded firmly in the present, never looking much further than the next two weeks or so. I would show my sky-blue planner to people who wanted to make plans further out, shaking my head mournfully.

  “Can’t do it, I’m afraid. I can’t see that far.”

  The future had never looked further away that summer. There was too much of the present built up in front of it, the entire city and its surrounding tributaries reaching up towards the hot blue sky. Who had time for the future in a summer like that one?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  One rainy night in late summer of 1917, Judge Baker caught me sneaking in through the back door. The lights were off, and he was drinking alone in the kitchen. I think he meant to catch me and scold me, but by then he was too far gone to do much besides shake a thick finger at me. Finally, he shook his head, rising unsteadily from the kitchen chair and retreating up to his room. He paused in the doorway, the hanging judge who would never give a Black man ten when he could give him twenty.

  “I forgive you,” he said, his words thick. “For Eliza. I forgive you. I don’t blame you.”

  He nodded magnanimously, and I wondered what he would make of the fact that I never blamed myself for Eliza Baker’s death, nor felt as if I needed one moment of forgiveness for it. I attended church every Sunday, and when I was meant to be thinking of pious things, I sat in our front pew and pretended I was balancing teacups on my chin, head up and uncaring about the eyes that bored into the back of my skull. That kind of defensive pride left very little room for guilt, so I didn’t trouble myself with it.

  There were eight pictures of Eliza Baker secreted through the house, hidden from view in places like Mrs. Baker’s vanity and under the judge’s desk blotter. In those pictures, she was a round-faced girl with enormous dark eyes and an Edwardian pompadour of gracious height. She had the tensile strength of spun steel, hard enough to bear her parents’ fury when she converted, sharp enough to make her way to the exotic shores she had always dreamed of, and she didn’t return to Louisville until the French and Chinese made living in Tonkin a misery. Unlike most, she could leave, and when she did, she took me with her all the way back to her home on Willow Street.

  “You were my very favorite,” she told me in my earliest memories. “Just the very best baby. I could not leave you, I could not bear it.”

  Favorite among what, I should have asked, but I never did.

  She died less than a year after her return, and I stood between her parents at the funeral. It was a grim and Presbyterian thing, my first outing in Louisville society. The heavens poured rain from a leaden sky, and through the deluge, Mrs. Baker grasped my hand tight in hers, her black plumed hat drooping to either side of her tightly closed face.

  The relief of having her only daughter home from foreign shores crystallized into despair when Eliza fell ill, and then after Eliza died, something shattered in Mrs. Baker. She went on until she couldn’t any longer, and then she died, all broken-hearted after failing to fashion me into any kind of satisfying echo of Eliza.

  The judge stood by Mrs. Baker’s gravestone for long hours after the funeral while I sat anxiously in the car. I saw his shape, like a gravestone itself on the hill, and it wasn’t until the shadows grew long and deep that he finally came to the car and we were allowed to go home.

  What a broken, brittle people, I thought, discreetly studying his face out of the corner of my eye, and I promised myself I would never be so easy to shatter.

  It was like a set of dominoes that Eliza had set into motion with her thin and graceful hand. Anabeth Baker, the hallway ghost with her bruised throat and her desperate angry mouth, spoke of a chain of disaster going back even further, and I decided to be grateful for the most recent generation of Bakers, who seemed inclined to die of broken hearts, worn-out souls, and pleurisy.

  With Mrs. Baker gone, I was allowed to attend the local high school, and it was a relief from the oppressive dolor of the house where I lived. Whenever I came home to a stillness in the house that absorbed sound and air like a sponge, I knew to pack up a bag and make my way to a friend’s house.

  I at last had friends, and that was, whether she meant it or not, Daisy’s doing. I had a hint of it the night we met, but she needed to talk like other people needed to eat or to breathe. At some point, she realized that it didn’t matter at all what she said, and so she turned into a bubble of fashionable bon mots, non sequiturs, and giddy dizzy excitement. She could drown a delta city with her words, and I was swept up in it, tossed like a broken stalk of flowers into her tide and carried along so neatly that her friends seemed to think that I had always been there.

  I was the youngest girl of the set, the baby. When we posed for the society photographers, before those photographers went off to the war, at least, they pushed me to the front with their hands over my shoulders or their arms slung around my waist. The older girls cooed over me, telling me I must remain exactly that small and that sweet.

  I smiled wide with my white sharp teeth, and I learned to laugh like the clink of champagne flutes, but even then I never had much interest in sweetness. Eliza Baker was as sweet as candied almonds, and see where it got her. Daisy, as pretty as she was, was never sweet either, though she sparkled so bright it was easy to think she was. It was easy to think that Daisy was many things.

  Helen Archer never cared much for sweetness either, and that was why I ended up in the back of the closet with her at the Botleys’ smash in the summer of 1917. The two Botley boys were going to war and Louisville society turned out to see them off. They left, Thomas and Sandy, but it was only Thomas who came back. I saw him years later in New York, and I knew at once that whoever it was who came back with Thomas’s face, it was not him. It came to me that it must be Sandy instead, and I crossed to the other side of the street so there would be no awkwardness when he saw that I knew.

  That day in July, there were still two bold Botley boys, however, and they looked very fine in their uniforms and their officer’s bars. The girls were mad for both of them, and they seemed a little mad themselves, sneaking behind the pool house with every girl who would go as the adults pretended not to see.

  Curious, I went behind the pool house with Thomas, older, kinder, and more thoughtful than Sandy. He was dashing, with hair like pale gold, and there was an excitement in kissing him, though it came more from his nervy fear about being sent overseas than for his good looks. I kissed some of that fear off of him, and I thought there was a kind of pleasant bitterness to it, like dark chocolate or good tea. It was interesting, but I could never develop a taste for sorrow, so when he started to slide his hand under my lilac frock I pushed him away and ran back into the house.

  My cheeks were flushed, and my eyes too bright, like I had bitten an electric wire and now it lit me up. I thought I had better go inside
and hide for a little while until I was more composed. The party was on the back lawn, and the Botley house, even with all the windows thrown open, was humid and still. Looking for a quiet place to lie down for a quarter hour, I instead found Botley Sr.’s treasured map room, and there, paging through the maps in their enormous racks, was Helen.

  She was two years older than me, unfashionable, but the Archers were so wealthy that she became a kind of fashion all on her own. She pulled her spectacles out of their tortoiseshell case, and when I came in still overwarm from the kisses and the sticky weather outside, she slid them down her nose to peer at me.

  “Come here,” she said at last. “Mr. Botley has a very fine map of Tonkin.”

  Helen had a fortune and a kind of roundness to her that made me think of Christmas ornaments and buns dusted with large sugar crystals. Her dark thick brows were as straight as the trolley rail, and I saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick where she traced the rivers of Tonkin, hovering but too respectful to touch.

  I didn’t care much about the map, but I suddenly wanted very much to stand by her as she spoke of mountains and city centers. It was as if kissing Thomas had laid me open to a world where anyone might be kissed, and standing next to Helen as she recited the names of those foreign cities, I became aware that she had a mouth as well.

  At some point, she realized I was looking at her instead of the map, and her words trailed off. With a confidence I had never had before, I reached up to cup the side of her warm neck with my hand. For just a moment, it was enough to feel her pulse under my palm and to feel the way my touch made her swallow hard.

  It might have come to no more than that, but then we both heard the door slam somewhere, and a bubble of unwelcome voices echoing through the halls of the house. The voices were young and light, tumbling like a tide towards us, and I acted without thinking.

  I seized Helen’s hand and pulled her with me into the narrow closet close by. We fought for space with the mop and broom and with each other as well until we got the door closed behind us. Then her hand clasped mine hard, and we didn’t even have to lean towards one another before we were kissing.

  We didn’t fit each other, but the small space made it seem as if we did, and there was enough room at least to touch each other’s faces, to make an utter ruin of our carefully set hair. Her fingers ended up in my mouth somehow, and she half-shrieked, half-giggled when I bit. It was hellishly hot and sodden in the closet, and I felt as if I would surely melt when I pressed my cheek to hers or when my hands slid up her bare wrists.

  Somehow, we were not caught, and eventually, we came out of the closet holding hands and with our eyes gleaming. We just looked like girls who had taken a turn with the Botley boys behind the pool house, so that was all right, and when the party adjourned for the night, I went home to the Archers’ house with Helen.

  After that, I became the most elegant kind of vagabond. I stayed almost three weeks with the Archers, who thought I was the most clever thing. Then when Helen and I fell out, I was only a few days at home before I finagled an invitation for a visit with the Featherstones, where Alicia Featherstone and I enjoyed almost a month together before I decided I could not stand her snoring. Under the auspice of his sister Paulette, I passed some time with Victor Reed before he was old enough to enlist, and he was a better kisser than Thomas, though less thoughtful than Alicia had been.

  Being a guest suited me. I ate with the family and slept in the same beds with the girls I liked best, and as I went along, I was turning into a marvelous mimic. I copied the Featherstones’ polished manners, the Banners’ Mid-Atlantic accent, and the Wilkins’ easy command of those they deemed their social inferiors, which was to say, everyone.

  I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity, and I was not yet clever enough to mind when they prodded at my differences for a conversation piece at dinner.

  I was staying with the Fays for the week when Daisy was set to meet with a few dashing young officers from Camp Taylor. By that point, we were all well and tired of doing that, but her father was old friends with the commandant there, so of course she had to, and since she was, I had to as well.

  She dressed me in a soft cream dress that smelled faintly of lavender, and she put on a rather dreamy blue thing that floated around her like mist from the Ohio River.

  “Should I have the headache or should you?” I asked her as she pinned her dark hair back, and she smiled at me in the mirror.

  “Oh, I will, certainly,” she drawled. “You can put me to bed, and after it gets dark, we can run off to see about Barbara Blake and that cousin of hers from Virginia.”

  I descended in Daisy’s wake into a parlor full of officers and we set about the surprisingly difficult and tedious work of being just the right kind of charmed without giving out the impression that we wanted to do more than sit and converse. Mrs. Fay told us that the right kind of welcoming was “parlor and no farther,” and that was occasionally a fine line to tread.

  Daisy had to be as bubbly as champagne, and I was allowed to be quieter and mysterious, and that was how I knew that I saw Jay Gatsby first. He hung back from the others, stood up by the window like a toy soldier while the others scattered around the Fays’ formal parlor. He looked, I thought from my hard straight-backed chair, a bit like a man awed in church, gazing around at the Persian carpets that were meant to be walked on, the brass table that came all the way from Turkey, the lofting windows that recalled the Fays’ French ancestors. His quick eyes darted over me as well, and I thought with some wry distaste of him cataloging me as some Oriental handmaiden, brought to beautify the place like the stained glass rose window and the elephant foot umbrella stand.

  He didn’t even dare look at Daisy until she called out to him, saying something silly about not being shy.

  Then he looked at her, and everything in the room just … stopped.

  “Oh,” Daisy said, her voice small, and I could almost feel the breath catch in her throat as her hands fell into her lap. She looked dazed, and when I followed her gaze to the young lieutenant at the window, I could see why.

  You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.

  In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby’s heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to get it back.

  “Oh, ha, my—my goodness,” she stammered with a charming laugh. “Aren’t you just the thing. Why, you make me think of that song, what was it, Jordan, ‘Poor Butterfly’? Why, I could not get that song out of my head, isn’t that silly, everyone, why don’t we just have a chorus now…”

  Somehow, she got the whole room obediently singing the song with her, and the strange moment passed, though somehow, I think it never did.

  She did fabricate a headache after that, but she pushed a slip of paper into Lieutenant Gatsby’s hand on his way out, and that night, she didn’t go out to meet Barbara Blake’s cousin at all, even if he was educated in Paris and heir to a steel mill.

  I did, however, and I was having my first taste of absinthe on the hidden dock on Twelve Mile Island when someone cried out to look out over the river.

  It was like the moon had settled on the water, casting shards of light on the broken waves. A man and a woman sat in a rowboat, no lantern on the prow, but a white glow charting their figures, the shape of the man’s profile, the softness of the woman’s arms as she reached for him. The darkness and the distance made it impossible to see who it was, even when they stood and kissed like something out of the old Shawnee stories about doomed lovers and descended stars, and all along the shore, the mischie
vous girls and dangerous boys of Louisville were silenced.

  Someone tried to call to them, breaking the spell, and the man turned slightly, pulling the woman’s face against his shoulder to comfort her or to hide her. A shadow passed over the face of the moon, and they were gone, another strange night before the war came.

  In the morning, Daisy and I were both decently back in her bed, and I thought I could still detect a shimmer of starlight in the corner of her mouth, tangled in the hair at her nape.

  Daisy and her lieutenant were the great secret of the summer, one that I was thrilled to be included in. I covered for Daisy, I watched them with bated breath because it was all terribly romantic, wasn’t it, and when he finally left for Europe with the others, Daisy wasn’t seen for days, locked in her bedroom and refusing food and comfort.

  She had come out in fall, when there was Red Cross and relief work to do, and then not long after that, her aunt in Baltimore grew sickly, and she went with her mother to look after her and to see Baltimore. Daisy and I drifted apart, somewhat, after that, and we would have drifted even further if it wasn’t for the thing I helped her with a few years later. That year, however, enshrined her in my heart as something gleaming and shining, something whose touch was almost holy and whose heart could call down light.

  I was a little bereft after Daisy went to Baltimore, but I found my feet quickly when I realized that the excuse of war work could keep me out for long hours rolling bandages and preparing care packages. I spent the war years hopping houses and hopping beds, restless in my own way and strangely comforted by the unease that soaked into everything we did. The world was on fire, but we could only smell the smoke.

  Daisy wouldn’t have come to some of the places I wanted to go then, anyway, and as the war hung over everything and my position in Louisville became stranger and even less sure, there were a lot of places I wanted to go and things I wanted to do.