The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  Daisy had the world in her hands, but she was never what you would call worldly. Her pleasures were domestic, her disasters, similar. They always had been.

  Then the war ended, everything changed, and nothing changed, and I was still, frustratingly enough, nothing more than myself.

  The judge was in a long and dignified decline. He was simply seen less and less often in town, and then less and less often at home. It drove his clerks to distraction, and at home sometimes I would enter a room and think I was quite alone until I smelled the scent of his tobacco, carried in a little embroidered pouch in his pocket, and heard his customary grumbling cough.

  He had good days and bad ones. On the good days, he was nearly solid again, rattling his silverware against the china, handing the servants their pay and venturing up the street for a bit of ham and mustard on rye, what he liked to speak of as his only indulgence. (It wasn’t. There were also the gambling slips to be paid off after he died as well as the annuity of a beautiful young girl just a few years older than me who lived on Toussaint Avenue.)

  On the bad days, there was a hollowness to his eyes, and his body took on a shapeless colorless quality. It was as if he was testing out his next role as a ghost, choosing a look that was positively medieval over his own modern appearance. On the bad days, he lurked in the corner of the eye, full of a kind of dull menace. Two servants quit when they saw him drift rapidly towards them in the upper hallway, and he broke one poor girl’s neck when he startled her and she fell down the stairs.

  He revived, briefly, for Daisy’s wedding. She married Tom nine months after Armistice, the shadow of her bad March not even touching her hems. She woke Louisville to a ringing of bells and glamour, life returned, and even the judge had to heed it.

  Before I let myself get swept away by Walter Finley, I remembered the judge seated at a table of town luminaries, nodding and looking gravely pleased, even if he was put out by the fact that Daisy had insisted on an integrated jazz band for at least a portion of the reception. The war was over, and the world was breaking down the doors even in Louisville.

  The judge left early, and I left late with Walter. Walter was from St. Louis, staying with his Fenton cousins in Louisville, and he was related to Daisy through some rather tortuous chain of blood. After the war, he lost a great deal of the tiresome dignity and restraint that he had been bred to, and so was banished from St. Louis until he could remember some of it again.

  “Who knows if I want to go back,” he said to me very late that night. “Or who knows who I might bring back with me.”

  “I’m not someone who gets brought along,” I told him, even if it was something of a lie. He laughed, his head resting on my discarded dress, which we had rolled up to make a pillow. We were stretched on the parlor floor of the mother-in-law unit behind my house, and somewhere faintly in the distance, we could hear the music from Daisy’s reception playing on, even if she had left hours ago.

  “Not even if I’m the one bringing you?” he asked, and he kept me from answering by kissing my throat just right.

  I was less careful than I should have been that night, and for the next three weeks, while being gay and lovely for Walter, I was something of a nervous wreck. I kept reminding myself that there was always Fulbright’s, that if Daisy could bear a thing I could, but it is different, isn’t it, when it’s your body, your future, your reputation, and your mistake.

  In the end, my luck held, it was nothing at all, and of course by then, Walter had worked his way through his post-war wildness. We were through. I liked him better than I had let on, even to myself, and I came home at dawn three weeks after Daisy’s wedding, my throat hoarse from arguing, and my eyes and nose aching from the tears I refused to cry.

  I crept into a house that was finally empty of guests, but it wasn’t until dead Anabeth met me on the stairs that I realized something was wrong.

  Anabeth had recognized right away that I was no real Baker. When I first came to live on Willow Street, she had kept me up and crying in terror at all hours, but as I grew, and especially when I started having my monthlies, I crossed some river in her mostly-gone mind, and she gentled, no longer waiting for me in the corner of my room or coming upon me while I was having my evening bath.

  Now, though, she stood on the stairway as she never had before, and the temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath for a brief moment. I froze, ready to run, but she pointed down towards the side hallway, where the only room was the judge’s study.

  I followed her pointing finger, aware the whole time of her eyes on the back of my neck. I opened the door, and for a moment I was actually relieved to see the judge sitting at the desk, the only light from the single lamp in the corner.

  Then he looked up at me, nothing living in his eyes, and I became aware of the pair of feet peeking out from behind the desk, all that was visible of the judge after he had fallen from a fast and fatal stroke.

  I stared to scream, but the ghost, not putting down his pen, pointed at me. His eyes, like Anabeth’s, were shaded dark, completely without light or anything like human emotion.

  “No,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from a great distance over a silver wire. “You were taught better.”

  I had been. I closed the door gently behind me, and went to the front room, turning on every light as I did so. I went to the phone, and with a voice that I was convinced would never shake again, I started to make the necessary calls, to the Coy Funeral Parlor, which had been burying Bakers since before the Civil War, and to First Grace Presbyterian, where the judge and I attended only sporadically without Mrs. Baker to force us.

  Then it was time to take Mrs. Baker’s little leather-bound book from its spot by the phone, and to call the family. I did well enough until I came to one I hardly knew. It was the judge’s aunt, listed only as Mrs. Sigourney Howard.

  I introduced myself, explained what had happened, accepted her condolences and well wishes as I had already done two dozen times that morning, and then she paused, the distance between Louisville and New York crackling along the wire.

  “My dear, you needn’t be so strong. We’re family. Tell me how you are.”

  It wouldn’t have hit with any force on a regular day, but that morning, the rain coming down hard, my heart more broken than I wanted to admit, and a new ghost in the house, it pried something open in me that had always been shut before. The tears escaped, and I gasped at the pain of it before I started sobbing, sitting on the ground with the telephone cord stretched to its full extent.

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” I cried, and I meant Louisville, the house on Willow Street, my own tattered reputation, with the dead and without Daisy.

  “Why, then you must come stay with me,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and I sobbed harder. She made it sound easy, and for a miracle, just that once, it was.

  The judge’s funeral, respectable but sparsely attended, was held five days later, and two days after that, I was on my way home to New York with Mrs. Sigourney Howard, who graciously permitted me to call her my own Aunt Justine.

  We departed from St. Louis, her in the black she had kept on after her husband died, and me in the fashionable black frock that was part of my new mourning set.

  “Six months at the outside,” she told me sternly. “It isn’t appropriate for a young thing like you to be stuck in mourning too long.”

  On the train, in our private compartment, she gave me my first drop of real demoniac, making my eyes water and my throat ache. All I had had before were fakes made from cherry liqueur mixed with a queasy amount of goat blood, only good for making young debs sick off of hayrides and at church socials. Demoniac was still legal then, and something of an old man’s tipple still, a remnant from an age more alchemical than mustard gas.

  When I had gotten over the discomfort of those first few moments, a sense of peace spilled over me, warm like I had never been warm before and more easy in the world and in my skin than
I had ever been. I glanced out the train window to see a shimmer of bright gold traveling over the flat blue Middle Western sky.

  Out my window, for just a moment, I saw a pair of Black farmers on either end of a broad fallow field. One lifted his hand and a burn line spread out to the right and left of him, glowing red, moving fast and leaving black rich earth behind it. The line of fire raced towards the other man, the one closer to the tracks, and I glimpsed a smile on his face as he held up his hands and the fire went suddenly cold and white in front of him. It was land magic, earth magic of a kind you never saw in the city, and with the demoniac whispering in my belly and my blood, I lost all of my city reserve and educated pretension to stare in awe and pleasure and wonder at the sight of it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As it turned out, Nick and I were possessed of a basic incompatibility that we both gamely ignored in order to spend time with one another. He did well in New York, where charming ex-soldiers were de rigueur, and where his Middle Western good looks contrasted nicely with mine. He liked being shocked by the extravagances of the city, but he was not ready for the people that came with the wonder, who lived shoulder to shoulder with wonder and thus grew immune to it.

  Also, Daisy’s cousin or not, he was of another class entirely, unable to comprehend how very little money meant once you had a certain amount of it. I brought him one weekend up to Warwick, where the Dancy siblings, Margaret and Highland, were throwing their annual midsummer crush. I borrowed Max Peabody’s car for the weekend because Nick’s wasn’t fit to be seen, and I drove us up on Friday so we’d have the full two nights.

  It was a good weekend, with Nick and me stealing off quick moments on the hidden beach, before breakfast in one of the dining alcoves, and yes, just once, in a little closet that smelled of fresh detergent and pallid violets. I saw a bit less of him than I might have preferred, because he took up with some men he recognized from his time in the city. He turned out to be popular with them, sitting up late on the veranda and talking business, politics, and women late into the night. I was slightly put out, but I could hardly blame him for making the most of things.

  It rained on Friday night, and as it happened I had forgotten to put the top up on Max’s car. He arrived with Carol Linney on his arm, crossing the crowded breakfast room to playfully scold me for my mistake. Max was a big bluff thing, avuncular even at the age of twenty-one, and he told me that he would have to put me to work drying off the seats and polishing the chrome to say sorry.

  “Well, someone’s going to have to do that, but it certainly won’t be me,” I told him. “I had someone else do the parking for me, and they must have left the top down. I am dreadfully sorry for it, Max, and of course I’ll pay to have it taken care of, if you like…”

  He didn’t care at all, of course, more interested in telling us all about his recent trip to Thessaloniki than anything like cleaning a car. Nick’s gaze roved between us as if he was watching a tennis match, and before bed, he caught up with me in the greenhouse, where I had gone to catch my breath from the events of the day.

  “You lied to him,” he said, and for a moment, I had no idea who he was talking about.

  “Who, Max? What does it matter?”

  “You should have told him the truth,” Nick said doggedly, and I snorted.

  “Why? I offered to have it cleaned up. What more should I have done?”

  Nick frowned, brows drawing together in disapproval.

  “It was dishonest.”

  “Show me someone who cares, and I’ll come clean,” I offered. We both knew that Max and Carol had disappeared with the Timberly twins and Prescott Lind to smoke hashish on the upper veranda. They wouldn’t be caring about anything for hours.

  Nick shook his head.

  “It’s still not right.”

  “Probably not. Are you going to let it bother you all weekend?”

  He watched me pluck a velvety white flower from its stalk and tuck it behind my ear. He was keeping some distance between us as if slightly wary of me.

  “Let me guess, your girl in Jersey City wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  He jumped, and my estimation of him lowered a bit. I didn’t mind the girl much, but I did mind his assumption that I didn’t know.

  “What do you know about—”

  “Not her name, and I don’t care to,” I lied. Of course I did. Mrs. Crenshaw’s imp was a fifteenth century antique and incredibly reliable.

  “All I know, Nick, is that if you want honest and impeccable, you ought to go back to your girl in Jersey City, though maybe you should tell her about me and Miss Minnesota and let her make her own judgment.”

  “Jordan…”

  He sounded like he wanted to keep talking about this, but I shook my head. I took the flower from my ear and tucked it behind his. With his complexion, it looked better on him anyway.

  “I don’t care,” I said impatiently. “And if you do, fine. But if you want someone to talk to about morality it isn’t going to be me. I was rather hoping to go walking down by the willows.”

  We had a room, but the Dancys had had some summer mage whisk up will-o-wisps to light the bowers created by the drooping willow branches, and there was really only one reason to go down there. Nick wavered, and I decided I was pleased when he offered me his arm and we slipped out of the greenhouse.

  He was a perfect gentleman, stopping and going like the most well-mannered Tennessee walking horse. I laid him out under the willow and we had gotten each other half-undressed before I stopped, mostly to see what he would do.

  “I’m not easy,” I warned him. “I may be exactly this stubborn forever, or I might change my mind at any moment. What do you think of that?”

  “I hope you change your mind, but I like it when you’re stubborn,” he replied, and I laughed at him, kissing him because while I wasn’t easy, I realized he was.

  “Jordan,” he said, half-desperate, and I laughed again, got back to it.

  By the time we drove home, questions of dishonesty were forgotten, and we never bothered to speak of it again, not when there were so many other exciting things to speak of.

  I lured him to my favorite dance clubs and speakeasies, introduced him to actors and radicals and gin babies. It was a pleasure to see everything through his wide eyes, and unlike so many other men, he never turned around and gave that instruction back to me as if I should be grateful. He was the grateful one, and he followed where I led; it was one of my favorite things about him. But I couldn’t take Nick everywhere.

  Even when he showed up wearing a cologne that I didn’t recognize and with an extremely livid bite mark that I only found when opening his shirt, he was lukewarm on going to the Cendrillon.

  Of course I could have just dragged him along as I had to the Lyric, but doing the same at the Cendrillon had been disastrous for me a time or two. Instead I described it to him, and watched with fascination as a cloud of confusion, fear, and longing came across his face. It settled into a kind of stony wariness, and he sat back from me, shaking his head.

  “I don’t know why—I’m not like that.”

  I tilted my head to one side, examining him with a careful eye. We were having a nightcap at my place just past four in the morning. He was getting used to late nights, and making himself presentable in other people’s bathrooms, but now he looked more nervous than he had in a few weeks.

  “You’re not?” I asked, and he shook his head hard.

  “No. Absolutely not. I don’t go to that kind of place.”

  “I am, and I do,” I offered, and Nick gave me a little smile that understood more than he let on.

  “I know you are and that you do. You’re different. It’s different for women.”

  “Not at the Cendrillon,” I said, but he took my hand, not looking at me.

  “I’m not like that,” he said, his voice shaking just a little. “Please?”

  “I’m not the one who decides that,” I said as gently as I knew how. I cupped my hand ove
r the back of his head, ruffling his hair slightly with my fingertips. I kissed him on the ear.

  “All right. Never mind. But that’s where I’m going on Saturday.”

  * * *

  There were a dozen and one ways that the Cendrillon got away with being what it was. It was on the border between Cathedral Heights and Harlem, it paid off everyone from the local patrolmen up to the commissioner, and the owners, a pair of spare older men whose suits were worth more than most of my closet put together, were easily three times as paranoid as any place like the Lyric or Roberson’s.

  At the Lyric, only the method for getting there was hidden. At the Cendrillon, unless you wore the right flower on your person, unless you knew the password, and unless you had a look the doorman liked, you would simply be at a rather shabby theater that rotated through a complement of dull comedians, inexpert tumblers, and bad tenors. I once passed a sulky night at one of their shows when I’d forgotten that I should have been wearing a white gardenia instead of a spray of baby’s breath on my lapel. There were apparently some people from the neighborhood who honestly thought it was just a sad little theater.

  Some serious magic—some infernal, some subterranean French, some American swamp medicine—made it so that the Cendrillon was overlaid by the ramshackle theater. You didn’t go up into a loft or down into a basement. It was the same space, and when the magic ebbed just a little bit, sometimes you could see one from the other, quickly and more like déjà vu than anything as solid as a mirage.

  I found out about the Cendrillon when I first came to New York, and it had taken me four months to get up the courage to go. I had to find Margot Van Der Veen, and then I had to go into that cautious dance of hints, looks, and shared references that told her I was the right kind of safe. In Louisville, I had crashed through the world like a cannonball, but here, I could see that that wouldn’t serve. There would be a time for crashing through the veils and birch wood screens, but it couldn’t happen when I was seventeen and so achingly new and strange.