Anna continued. “I don't know why I've never supported them. No one I know goes to meetings, but why shouldn't I? Besides that father wouldn't allow it. I should be able to vote. Don't you think so?”
Miss Cooper scrunched up her face, trying to think and failing. “I'm…not sure.”
Anna assessed the scene with wide, interested eyes. Under the shade of a candy-striped awning, swirled iron chairs clustered around little tables. Anna gestured toward them. “Dear Miss Cooper, it's so very hot. Why don't you rest here and have a Coca Cola while I follow the march? I'll meet you back here as soon as…”
Miss Cooper scowled. “Do you think I'm a fool?”
Anna did, but thought it impolite to say so.
She wanted to join the parade. “Goodness me! Look over there!” Anna pointed past Miss Cooper's shoulder. The chaperone turned. Anna lifted her skirts and bolted, flying down the sidewalk, quickly putting distance between herself and Miss Cooper. She disappeared among the sweating bodies of pedestrians. Miss Cooper blundered after her. “Miss Blanc!”
Unfortunately, Anna's progress was hindered by her good breeding. The sidewalk buzzed with pedestrians that she couldn't very well shove aside. She greeted each one before darting around them. “Hello. Good day. Excuse me.” Miss Cooper, faced with the possibility of losing Anna and thus her position, had no compunction about shoving people out of her way like a fullback at the Rose Bowl. At a furious waddle, the dumpling was actually gaining on Anna, which was humiliating and disheartening in the extreme.
Anna had all but lost hope when, having reached a particularly impassible clump of old ladies, someone yanked her against a store front and hid her with a sign that declared, “We Demand Amendment!” Miss Cooper barreled past, through the babbling biddies and on down the street toward the beach.
“Is that your mother?” asked her savior, a girl with a smile that was half sympathy and half smirk. She was young, one of the masses, but pretty in a practical way. Twin boys hung off her skirts and, like most children, were whining and making gaseous smells. One pinched his sibling, who in turn, clobbered him with a lunch pail.
Anna extricated herself from behind the splintery wooden sign. “I'd rather not talk about it, thank you.”
She turned to go back the way she came, when the woman asked, “Are you marching? Because I could use a hand here.”
Anna looked at the girl with the ungainly sign and grimaced at the urchins. It was a shocking request, given the social distance between them, and Anna aspired to be so impudent. She smiled uncertainly and lifted one end of the sign. “All right.”
“You might want to take that hat off. It shouts your name. And by the way, I'm Mrs. Eve McBride.”
“Oh, yes. You're right. I'm Miss Anna Blanc.” Anna inclined her head and nodded. She removed her hat, praying she would not freckle, and pinned it against the sign with one hand. They joined the marchers in the dusty street.
A red-haired man in a boater's hat darted in front of them and snapped their photograph. He had a long, curly mustache and a pockmarked face. “Dilly of a picture! You beauties are going to make the front page!’” He jogged along backward.
“I decline to be on your front page. Ask someone else,” Anna said curtly, swishing in step.
“It isn't up to you, Cinderella.” He grinned. “I can see the headlines. Rags and riches.”
Eve rolled her eyes.
Anna bit her lip. This was very bad. She had thought that if she returned by dinner, her father would never know she'd joined the march. Miss Cooper certainly wouldn't tell. But if her transgression were plastered across the front page, she'd be in the soup.
Anna's eyebrows came together, forming little wings. “Please! If you run that photograph, I'll be disowned. Thrown out into the streets.”
The photographer tossed back his head and laughed. “We wouldn't want that, pretty thing.” He trod backward through fresh road apples, changing out his film. “I'll tell you what. I won't submit that picture if you'll wink at me. In fact, I'll send you the picture as a memento so you won't forget me.” He winked and attempted a rakish smile, but only looked ridiculous.
Anna raised one eyebrow. “And if I don't wink at you?”
“Then I'll be heartbroken and you'll be famous. You have my word. Here, give me your card.”
Anna dug in her purse for a calling card and, frowning, extended it to him pinched between two fingers. He had to tug it out of her hand.
He read it and grinned, camera tucked neatly under his arm. “That a girl, Miss Blanc. Pretend you like me as much as I like you.”
Anna scowled. “I don't even know your name!”
“Tilly. Bill Tilly.”
“Enchanté,” she said flatly. She winked and was blinded by a flash from the man's second camera. Her eyes widened in disbelief. She sucked in breath. “You, you, you rat! You, you cad! You cad rat!”
Tilly chortled. “You're a dandy girl, Miss Blanc. Votes for women!” He shook his fist in the air and disappeared into the crowd.
Eve slapped her thigh. “I could've told you he would do that.”
“Then why didn't you?”
She laughed. “Don't be mad, sister. Have a sense of humor.”
Anna found nothing funny in the situation but consoled herself that her cause was noble and her hole could not get any deeper—not without breaking through to China. Her father had already taken her allowance and her credit and shackled her with Miss Cooper. Though there were endless ways to be naughty, he was fast running out of punishments.
The march concluded in a grassy plaza at the midway where an all-woman brass band oom-pah-pahed from a grandstand draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A rollercoaster rattled on its tracks, and vendors sold sugary puffs of fairy floss—the good, cherry pink kind that melted on the tongue. Glistening musclemen lifted barbells along the boardwalk, turning their backs to their admirers so they could watch the ladies playing instruments. Beachgoers were being drawn by the music, abandoning plans to catch the next train back to Los Angeles. Soon the plaza was thick with people. A woman in spectacles took the podium and the music stopped. She lifted her hands. Her voice carried like that of a Baptist preacher. “This government is not a democracy…”
Many in the crowd—men and even some women—pulled sour faces or sniggered and heckled. Eve and Anna held up their heads and clapped feverishly at all the right times. As the oration progressed, the crowd along the shore-side of the midway began to simmer. Anna turned to look. Someone was throwing overripe vegetables. She saw a tomato hit “Paul Revere” in the face. “Jupiter!” Anna said, as unhappy policemen began migrating toward the conflict.
Eve tugged Anna's sleeve. “Let's go.” Anna wanted to stay for the fight, as she was good at lobbing tomatoes, but she liked Eve and let herself be led away.
Anna checked her watch. “It's five o’clock. I'm amenable to capture. Miss Cooper has my money for the train.” She plopped on her plumed hat and pinned it into place. “Do you know, marching today was the most important thing I've ever done? What could be more meaningful than championing the cause of women? After all, I am one, and I've been sorely abused.”
Eve smirked. “Hah! Tell me how you've been sorely abused.”
“Besides not getting to vote? There's involuntary old maidenhood for one, an inconstant husband, an embarrassing chaperone, a revoked allowance, hat-shop bills that remain unpaid. I'd like to give a speech about it.”
Eve grinned. “Your passion is inspirational.”
“From now on, whenever I can, I will make statements.” With a wicked smile, Anna reached into her clutch and pulled out two Lucky Strikes.
Eve raised one scandalized eyebrow and laughed. “I guess so!” Anna offered her a cigarette. Eve took it. “Thanks. I'll smoke it later.”
“Chicken,” Anna accused. She lit up and pumped her lips, blowing an impressive series of smoke rings.
Anna became aware of a shadow alongside hers. She turned around, glowerin
g, expecting Miss Cooper, or perhaps the hateful photographer.
It was an officer of the law.
The Venice police station was a multistory brick building with arched windows, a flag, and a certain modest grandeur. Anna approached on the arm of a limping man, whose face was as pretty and red as a monkey's bottom—Officer Carmine.
Anna shouldn't have talked back. But he had snatched the cigarette right out of her fingers and accused her of public indecency when no part of her was indecent—except maybe some parts, in which case all women were indecent. Anna huffed to herself. And isn't that why she'd been arrested, because she had female parts? That and because she had kicked him in the shin.
A police mount tied to a post shook its wiry mane and whinnied. Anna reached out to stroke its shiny coat, but Officer Carmine tugged her away. Anna scowled. “The chief of police won't be happy you arrested me.” Carmine scowled back.
As they passed through the station doors, Anna couldn't help but feel exhilarated. She had never been inside a police station, and her books said virtually nothing about them. She imagined criminals with close, beady eyes and large, sloping foreheads housed in rusty jail cells, and detectives with guns strapped in holsters, pacing paths in the tile.
Trailing behind, Eve was less exhilarated. She walked through the doors with the stoicism of Wendy Bird tied to Captain Hook's mast, two little Lost Boys at her side. If Eve was Wendy Darling, Anna was Alice in Wonderland, marveling as she stepped into a fantastical new world. It was the dingiest place she had ever seen, and she adored it. The air was smoky from an endless chain of cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays. Lights hung from wires above old desks. Their glow mixed with sunbeams to illuminate the haze. The light barely reached the line of cells along the side, so that she could not see the back wall. They looked like caverns calling out for exploration.
There were indeed prisoners—some with beady eyes and some without, including seven boisterous suffragettes from the food fight. The women rattled the bars of their cage, singing, “Boys will be boys, and boys have had their day; Boy-mischief and boy-carelessness and noise…” Anna recognized Paul Revere, who had given her the pamphlet and had bravely taken a tomato in the kisser.
Eve's escort, an Officer Glade, had a twinkle in his eye. He grabbed Anna by the elbow and guided both women toward a clerk behind a counter that shone from the oily touch of a thousand criminal hands. Officer Glade nodded toward Anna and grinned. “Watch out. She's a hellcat.” He parodied Officer Carmine's swagger. “Women don't smoke on my beat.” His voice went high in an imitation of Anna. “But Officer, I am smoking on your beat.” He threw back his head and laughed. Eve bristled.
Anna and Eve gave their names to the clerk and Glade herded his captives into a cell with the other suffragettes, who by now were beginning to smell like a compost pile. The door locked with a clink. Anna wanted to inspect every part of her prison cell—the obscenities carved in the walls, the suspicious brown stains on the cement floor, the splintery hard benches—but the cell was crowded with criminal ladies slimed with garden waste, and Anna didn't want to risk touching them. She stayed close to Eve, who looked mad. The twins took turns clanking on the cell bars with a clamshell. Anna gazed longingly through the bars at a man in plainclothes who she imagined was a detective but was probably a clerk. “I've always wanted to see the inside of a police station.”
“What do you know? Dreams do come true,” Eve said.
Her tone was snarky. Anna chose to overlook it, as she'd just gotten Eve's children arrested. “No, they don't.”
Eve cocked her head, as if curious that this privileged girl could be so disillusioned. “What's your dream, then?”
“I'd like to trap criminals, like the spinster in The Circular Staircase, but it's probably against the law, because of my female parts.”
Eve crinkled her forehead.
Anna continued. “So, since that's impossible, I'd like to get married. And that's also impossible…unless my father eats bad fish or something.”
“You know, marriage is not as blissful as people make it out to be.”
“In my experience that's positively true, but there's not much else, is there?”
“You could be a school teacher,” Eve said.
Anna didn't like children. Her greatest fear was that her prayers would get crossed with some other Catholic's. Anna would get pregnant without even asking, and some other woman would get a motorcycle or permission to play flag football. Anna never prayed if there was a married lady anywhere near her in the pews.
Anna puckered her face. “I suppose I could become a nun.”
Eve smirked. “I work at a police station.”
Anna's gray eyes widened. She blinked her feathered lashes. “That's taffy! Women can't work in police stations. It's indecent.” She wanted very much to believe they could.
“Mostly I do social work, care for any women prisoners, interview female victims or suspects that are real sensitive, things like that. Central Station's a lot bigger than this station, so there's plenty to do.”
Anna's eyes glazed dreamily. “You are so…” Her voice cracked. “Fortunate.”
Eve rubbed her temple as if she had a headache. “If you were married and had more sense…”
“Is that the requirement—to be married?”
“One of them. You're supposed to have experience working with the poor. Me, I knew somebody. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a prayer. There aren't many positions.”
Anna shook her head vigorously, as if to shake the thought right out. “I shouldn't entertain the idea. I'm not at liberty to apply. But, do you think the captain would give me a tour of the station?”
“Of course not. You're a prisoner.”
At the back of the cell, two old vegetables held up a curtain for Paul Revere, who was peeing into a potty. Anna crossed her legs. “I have to go, but I'd burst before peeing in the cell. Do think there's a privy in the back?”
“Yep, but it's not for you.”
Anna scanned the station. Next to a windowed office, she saw a door that led to the back of the building.
A clerk strode up to the cell and straightened his tie. He addressed Eve through the bars. “Mrs. McBride, who do we call to collect your children? Can your husband care for them until your legal issues are resolved?”
“My husband's dead.” Eve pressed her lips together. “At least he better be.”
Carmine slunk up to the cell and positioned himself before Anna. He cleared his throat and recited. “I'm very sorry, Miss Blanc. It was all my fault. Why don't you wait in the captain's office while we call your father.” He gritted his teeth and grimaced. The captain watched, frowning from the station floor. It seemed that Carmine was in as much trouble as she was.
Anna flashed a victory smile at Eve, but Eve didn't notice. She had her back turned to Anna and was speaking to the clerk in whispers. “We have no living relations.”
Anna's smile dimmed. She spoke to Eve's shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”
Eve turned and looked blankly at Anna, then turned back to the clerk. The cell creaked open and Anna took her freedom. Surely someone would come for Eve.
Carmine locked the door with one of the keys from a large brass ring. “Please follow me, Miss Blanc.”
As she glided across the main room, Anna smiled sweetly. “May I have a tour of the station, Officer?”
Carmine's nostrils flared, but he didn't speak. He ushered Anna into the captain's office, left without a bon voyage, and forced the door closed behind him. It stuck on the frame and slammed into place with a whack.
While a guided tour of the station was not possible at that time, a self-guided tour of the captain's office seemed a satisfying alternative. Anna rifled through the papers on the desktop, which proved to be dull and bureaucratic—a petition signed by dozens of officers protesting wool uniforms in summer; a grocery list in a woman's hand—manteca, bistec, tomate; and an anonymous note about who had stolen a certain goat. Anna
rattled each drawer in turn, finding them all to be locked. She tried to pick the locks with her hat-pin, but the tip broke off.
She flipped through books on a shelf behind the desk and found a police procedural manual. Turning her back to the door and undoing her blouse, she sucked in her stomach and squeezed it down her corset. She stuffed two more small law enforcement books down her bodice and draped her shawl around the bulges.
Anna heard squabbling on the station floor. She cracked open the door and stuck out her head in time to see Paul Revere pitch the potty at Carmine. A tense hush fell over the station. Tinkle trickled down his uniform. The faces of prisoners and staff alike shone with silent glee at the dripping man who couldn't believe just how bad his day had become.
Glade laughed into the silence—a booming, “Ho, ho, ho.”
To Anna, the potty fight was a coup. She slipped out of the captain's office and through an adjacent door. She would take her own tour, perhaps find the bathroom, and be back in the office before her father came to bail her out. He wasn't due home from his trip until tonight. It could be morning before he collected her; at least she hoped so. She preferred to delay what would certainly be a fierce overreaction.
She found herself in a corridor with several doors and no indication where any of them led. There was a horrible sewage stench, which didn't bode well for the toilet. She heard the captain's voice, sharp in the main room of the station, making reference to her whereabouts and how being covered in piss was not an excuse for letting a prisoner wander away, and he had a mind to put Anna back in the cell and Carmine with her. Angry boots stomped toward the door, no doubt attached to Carmine.
Anna rattled a doorknob, hoping for a place to hide. It was locked. She hustled down the corridor to the next door. To her relief, the handle gave. Stepping through, she edged it closed, just as the door to the corridor opened and Carmine shouted, “Miss Blanc?” His voice trembled.
The room reeked worse than the hall. It was white walled with a cold cement floor and a curtain that divided the chamber. Behind the curtain, a light cast shadows onto the cloth—shadows of a man and a woman and a lump on a slab. Anna covered her mouth with a perfumed handkerchief and tried not to gag. The man's shadow was long and overly thin, made more so by the angle of the light. He pulled a sheet away from the lump—a lump shaped like a body. Anna perked up. A body in a police morgue could mean just one thing…
The Secret Life of Anna Blanc Page 3