I looked past him into the room. "Can I wait in here?"
He shrugged and stepped back. I walked past him. An office, small and bare. Nothing like the Club Tremonti. A beat-up desk and two hard-backed chairs. I sat down.
"I heard you quit," I said.
"That's right." Ozzie's hand on the door, about to leave.
"I'm glad." As soon as I said it, I realized how it must sound. But he took his hand off the doorknob.
"Thanks." He hesitated, then said, "I got the gig in Kansas City. Went down there to play and I got it."
"No more Turkey Trot," I said.
"Goddamn, I forgot about the Turkey Trot." His face eased, and he laughed his low, rolling laugh. "You know, I almost quit that night, I was so sick of that tune?"
"You and me both." He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both grinned.
High heels clacked in the doorway. Lily came in, saw me. Her mouth screwed down like she'd sucked a lemon.
"Oh, you," she said.
When she found out what I'd come for, she got right on it. She wasn't doing it to be nice. In fifteen minutes, word came from one of Horace Washington's men.
"That's that," Lily said. "You can go on home."
Ozzie was onstage, taking over for the other trumpet player. The rest of the band razzing him fierce. Calling him the "K.C. Kid." Saying, "They better watch themselves down there, now you're coming."
"I'm staying awhile," I told Lily.
He played all of it, the stomping, yowling down-dirty and the wake-up-and-kick-it. One high, sweet, sad melody made me want to cry and scratch Ophelia's eyes out at the same time. Nobody played music like that whose heart hadn't gotten sledgehammered like a steer on the killing floor. I knew about that, all right.
Ophelia never showed. Gone to sing at a fancier black and tan on Garfield, I heard people say. A heavy-set girl with a reedy voice took the stage, not nearly the powerhouse Ophelia was. Ozzie didn't look at her once.
When I got up to go to the ladies' room, Lily followed me in.
"You come here with one of your taxi-dance customers, that's one thing." Starting right in, not an Excuse me or Can I have a minute of your time. "But a girl by herself, that's not good for business. Makes the place look seedy."
The mirror was crowded, no place to shove in. "I'm not bothering anybody," I said.
Lily was shorter than even me, but the way she set her weight back on one foot, chin tipped high, she might have been tall as Ozzie. "You white girls. Coming in here looking for who knows what. You got plenty of your own men, why don't you go sniff around them?"
"Amen, sister," said someone from inside the stall.
Lily rapped the stall door. "Mind your own business!" To me, she said, "The luckiest day Ozzie ever had was when that puffed-up piece of work Ophelia dumped him over the side, though it took him long enough to see it. Girl hanging on his coattails is just going to slow him down. Especially a little white one like you." Behind me, the girls at the mirror said, mmm-hmm, nudged each other. "Now," Lily said, "do I have to throw you out?"
"I guess so," I said, and marched back to my table. Somone else had taken it. I snagged a chair. Lily told the waiters not to serve me. I didn't care. I didn't want anything anyway, except to hear Ozzie play.
Five thirty in the morning, the band wrapped up. Ozzie set his trumpet back in its case. Hardly anybody in the club except musicians: Lily's bunch, and six or eight from other joints, come to play with Ozzie a last time. Ties and jackets off, cigarettes in everyone's hands. The men still razzing Ozzie, slapping him on the back. He grinned, said something that made them shout with laughter. A numbers runner wandered in, pulled up a chair, fell into the conversation. From behind the bar, Lily gave me the stink-eye. She was the only one who seemed to know I was still there.
I'd found out about Paulie. Ozzie'd finished playing. Nothing left to stay for.
Bright outside; I squinted, shaded my eyes. A scrap of breeze blew in from the lake. By midmorning, it'd be snuffed out by the heat. People already out and around. Man carrying newspaper bundles. Milkman carrying bottles. No cabs. I started walking to the streetcar stop.
"Ruby."
I turned around. Ozzie was climbing the steps to the sidewalk. His shoes scuffed the concrete, loud in the early-morning air. He held something in his hand.
"I saw this under a table," he said. "Thought it might be yours."
It was a compact case. Silver, with a fancy monogram. C.S. I shook my head and handed it back to him. He turned it over, looked at the lid. "Oh, yeah. Guess not." He glanced up the street. Started to turn back down the stairs to the club.
"I'm sorry about the other night," I said. He stopped. Shot me a quick, doubtful look. "When I asked you to dance. I didn't know it would make Ophelia so mad. Not that I care about her, but if. . ."
Ozzie ran a hand over the back of his head. He kept his hair short. Not straightened, like some colored men's. "You might know girls," he said, "but you don't know colored girls."
I thought back to what Lily had said in the ladies' room. "Oh. Oh." Baby sees the light.
"She was playing games. You know, trying to make me jealous. So I thought, Let's see how she likes it."
"I guess she didn't."
Ozzie stuck his hands into his pockets, blew air through his lips. "You could say."
We stood a moment, not talking. Then he said, "Just as well." I thought he meant, Just as well since I'm going to Kansas City. But he went on, "Turn eighteen in November. After that . . . bunch of musicians gone already. Not just the sidemen. Bandleaders, too." Gazing up the street, not looking at anything. "I figured I ought to get in as much playing as I can get. Before they send all of us to fight the Jerries."
Paulie shanghaied. Manny and Alonso and half the boys in the Yards signed up or drafted. A gold star in the Majewskis' window. A few more months, Ozzie might be slogging through mud in Europe, or on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Or dead. I swallowed hard.
"So when Hamp starts up that Turkey Trot," Ozzie said, "you think about me. Okay?"
"I can't." His face knotted like I'd jabbed him with a fist. "I mean, I would, but . . . I quit, too. Well—I was fired. Both, sort of."
"Got tired of Del, huh?" He smiled, his eyes still somewhere else. "So, where to now, another dance hall? Plenty of'em around."
Where would you go, if you could go anywhere you wanted?
"I don't know," I said. I remembered Peggy. The tip from that fellow she'd talked to, at the Daily News. Slowly, as if to hear how it sounded, I said, "I think maybe I'll go build ships."
His eyebrows arched. His smile grew into a grin. "Little different from what you been doing."
"A little bit." Different felt good. I was ready for different. I tried to imagine what it might be like, but I couldn't. Find out when I got there, I supposed.
A jitney cab came up the street. I waved, and the driver cut over and swept up to the curb. I reached for the door, but Ozzie's hand was on the latch before mine.
But he didn't open the door. We stood so close that if either of us turned, we'd bump the other. The hollow of his throat a few inches away. I saw a tiny fluttering under his skin. He smelled like the club, like cigarettes and booze and Lindy Hopping.
"You happen to drop by Kansas City the next six months or so," he said, "I'll be playing the Century Room. Jay McShann's band."
I raised my eyes to his face. My own, without a stitch of makeup on. Eyes too deep. Lips too pale. I didn't care.
"Take care of yourself." He dropped his gaze. Held out his hand. I took it. His palm wide and warm. Fingers strong from the trumpet. I popped up on tiptoe, quick. Kissed his cheek. Tickly with stubble. Him up all night. Me, too.
"I'll listen for you on the radio," I said.
. . .
Why San Diego? Ma had wanted to know. It was one of the few times we'd talked before I left. Once I'd made up my mind, I hadn't seen what there was to wait for.
"If you want to do war work
, you could stay right here in Chicago," she said.
"They said San Diego on the radio," I explained. "That story about women taking men's jobs. Remember?"
She didn't. "I just don't see why you have to go so far away."
"Because it is far away, that's why."
All I'd meant was, if I was going to go someplace and start over new, across the country seemed like a good place to do it. I tried to explain, but I'd hurt her feelings. After that, we hardly spoke. When Chester drove me to the bus station, she stayed home.
I wrote my first letter to her before the bus was out of Chicago. The next, as soon as I had an address for her to write back. I wasn't sure she would. But a week later, she did. Her letter short, a little stiff. Not saying anything important. Mine didn't, either. It didn't matter.
Once I was here, I'd thought of how to explain better. It was like how Ozzie's music made me feel. Not just like dancing, although at the beginning that had been most of it. But then his music changed, or I did, and the scream and soar of his trumpet made me feel bigger than the Starlight. Bigger than all Chicago. No one to say, You can't. Like what I'd imagined it might be like to go somewhere new, nobody knowing what you'd done or who you'd been. To see who you could become next.
Ma was right. I hadn't wanted us out of the Yards for her sake. I'd wanted it for mine.
Where would you go, if you could go anywhere you wanted?
Listening to Ozzie play, that last night, I knew it wasn't to a club. No matter how swanky, no matter how many sequined gowns I could wear. Pretending to be in love for a commission, while the love of my life might be standing a few feet away and I'd never know it.
I frowned and chewed my pen cap. Even if I could write all this on paper, Ma had never heard Ozzie's music. She thought even Benny Goodman was too wild. The Lindy Hopping at Lily's would've sent her into a conniption. I grinned, imagining what she'd say.
The breeze gusted, riffling the curtains. I lifted my face to it, closed my eyes. I loved listening to the rustle of the palms. Smelling the ocean. If the beginning of the world had a scent, it would be ocean. Sharp and strong and new. It had surprised me, how different it smelled from Lake Michigan, back home.
I bent to the paper again. Humming a scrap of something I remembered Ozzie playing. I'd been there when he wrote it. Developing his sound, he'd said.
Like me, here, bucking rivets.
Love to Chester and Betty. Tell Betty I haven't seen any tomatoes out here yet that could beat the ones in her garden. Don't worry about me. I like it and I'm doing good and I have a place to stay, which is more than some, so many people are pouring into town and not enough room for everyone. I'll write more in a few days. I'll tell you about the lead man on our ship, he thinks he's pretty tough but he's not met a Yards girl yet. He'll learn. I miss you.
Your loving daughter,
Ruby
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
If I'd never found out about Aunt Sofia, I never would have written Ten Cents a Dance.
Sofia was my mother's aunt, my grandmother's baby sister. For most of my life, that was all I knew. When I asked my grandmother about her, she'd act as though I hadn't spoken. She wasn't pretending to be deaf; it was as though I'd ceased to exist. Which, let me tell you, is a pretty effective way to convince a kid to leave a topic alone. It wasn't until years later, after my grandmother passed away, that my mother finally told me the story.
Sofia was the youngest of five children growing up in a small town in Sicily. When she was about fifteen, the family emigrated to New York. We don't know what happened, but we know that within a year of arriving, Sofia's father had kicked her out and declared her dead to the family. Any contact with her was forbidden. To my mother's knowledge, her grandfather—Sofia's father—never spoke Sofia's name again, to the day he died.
Fast-forward to 1939. My mother was eleven. One afternoon, a beautiful, tiny, elegantly dressed woman walked into the candy store my grandparents owned in the Bronx. She and my grandmother threw their arms around each other, sobbing. To my mother's astonishment, she was introduced to an aunt she never knew she had. Sofia had returned.
After her father disowned her, Sofia had supported herself as a taxi dancer. Many taxi dancers married and went on to lead perfectly respectable lives. Others slid into prostitution. Sofia was one of the lucky ones: she married a Jewish cabdriver and lived in a lovely apartment in the north Bronx. Over the next several years, she and my mother became very close. My mother's family was poor, but somehow Sofia never had to worry about money. She took Mom to the horse races and out shopping; she bought Mom her first high heels, her first fur coat. My mother and grandmother visited Sofia at her apartment. Once, they even went to her mother-in-law's apartment for coffee. All this time, however, the rest of the family not only refused to meet with Sofia, they refused even to acknowledge her existence.
One day, when my mother was seventeen, Sofia's husband came to see them with devastating news: Sofia was dead. She was only thirty-six years old.
My mother and grandmother—alone, again, out of the entire family—went to the funeral. There, they discovered that nothing Sofia had told them about herself was true. Sofia wasn't married, and she didn't live in that lovely apartment. In reality, Sofia was the longtime mistress of a prominent Jewish gangster. She lived in the Hotel Taft, in Manhattan. Her cabdriver "husband" was one of the men who worked for her lover.
A taxi dancer and mob mistress, a woman who for years led a double life—in our family?
"How come we never heard any of this before?" I asked my mother. Surely, a cousin . . .
But none of the cousins knew about her. My greatgrandfather's word was law, and none of his children— Sofia's brother and sisters—ever mentioned her name. And my grandmother? She never stopped grieving for her baby sister, my mother said, and she never could bear to talk about it. When my grandmother passed away, the only person in our family who knew Sofia had ever existed was my mother. And then, me.
Why had Sofia gone to such extremes of deceit? My mother's theory—which I believe—was that she was most likely driven by loneliness. With the apparent backing of her gangster lover, she arranged the trappings of a respectable married life—including, bizarrely enough, even a mother-in-law—in order to reconnect with her family.
After hearing Sofia's story, I had to research her life. Along the way, I became fascinated with the world of taxi dancing. I'd been vaguely aware of "dime-a-dance" girls, but I really didn't know who they were or what they did. I was surprised to find out that taxi-dance halls were enormously popular in the United States from the 1920s until after World War II. Sometime in the 1950s they began to decline, although they've never entirely gone away; to this day, taxi-dance halls can be found in most major cities.
Taxi dancers inhabited a kind of gray area: they weren't prostitutes, but the profession certainly wasn't respectable, either. Men paid, not for sex, but to be able to hold a pretty girl close for the length of a dance, a girl who would listen to them and pay attention to them. Girls (and they often were girls) chose it because it seemed fun, and because they could earn easily twice as much money as they might in a factory or other socially acceptable job.
It must have been difficult enough for Sofia, with all her resources, to maintain a double life as long as she did. How, I wondered, might a teenager manage—and why might she have to? As I started imagining the kind of girl who could pull it off, Ruby Jacinski, from Chicago's Back of the Yards, was born. Her story is not my aunt Sofia's; it's not as dire, and it certainly has a happier ending. Writing it, though, I got the chance to explore what fascinated me most about my aunt. Here she'd climbed up from the street, to a life with furs and money and everything she could possibly want—yet none of it was enough to fill the hole where her family used to be. I study her photographs and wonder: what choices might Sofia have made differently if she'd had the chance?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere thanks to all who helped througho
ut the writing of this book: Dr. Mary Meckel, for her knowledge of the taxi-dance industry and her warm encouragement; Kathleen Headley, for patiently answering all my questions about Chicago neighborhoods in the 1940s; Karen Karbo, Dan Berne, Charlotte Dixon, Debbie Guyol, Connie McDowell, and Laura Wood, for their thoughtful critique and unflagging support; Choi Marquardt, whose astute insights inspired me to dig deeper, think harder, and write better; Ketzel Levine, for her enthusiastic reading of multiple drafts; Margot Monti, for vetting my music references; Andrea Carlisle, for never failing to ask how the writing was going and allowing me to vent; and the members of the Fedora Lounge (www.fedoralounge.com), who helped me get period details right. My thanks also to Don and Melinda McCoy and the staff of North Portland Veterinary Hospital, for being the best at what they do, and for making my day job more fun than should be strictly legal.
My deepest gratitude to my family, and to Barbara Newman, who started me laughing on a ninth-grade field trip to see King Tut and who has kept me laughing ever since; her sharp wit and steadfast friendship have stood me through many a rough patch.
Many affectionate thanks to my agent, Dorian Karch-mar, for her help and wise counsel, and to my editor, Melanie Cecka, who gives the lie to the common plaint that editors no longer edit. She does, and brilliantly. Thanks also to Deb Shapiro, Stacy Cantor, and everyone at Bloomsbury Children's Books, for their enthusiasm and dedication.
A full bibliography would take pages, but I want to mention the following outstanding resources: Paul G. Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (1932); Mary V. Meckel, Ph D., A Sociological Analysis of the California Taxi-Dancer: The Hidden Halls (1995); Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (1986); Thomas J. Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (1992); Edith Abbot, The Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935 (1936); Dominic A. Pacyga and Charles Shanabruch, The Chicago Bungalow (2003); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945); Dempsey J. Travis, An Autobiography of Black Jazz (1983); Nathan Thompson, Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers (An Informal History) (2003); Emily Yellin, Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II (2004); and Constance Bowman Reid and Clara Marie Allen, Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory (1944). I have strived to portray the era and its events accurately, and any errors are mine alone. For more information on the topics explored in this book, please visit www.christinefletcherbooks.com.
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