by Marlowe Benn
Julia had recognized him even before he’d mentioned their meeting eight months ago. She’d been a guest at an informal gathering of younger Colophon Club members. It had been a rare evening of pleasure during those stressful weeks. Hurd worked for Boni & Liveright, one of the most important literary publishers of the day. Liveright was the lucky bastard (Hurd’s words) who’d scooped the field in 1922 by gaining the American rights to publish Tom Eliot’s Waste Land. She’d heard a ringing earful about it at that party, the first stop in a long and splendid evening in the company of another bibliophile, an evening that had helped persuade her to return to the city of her birth. Much of her time in New York last fall remained a painful and unsettling memory, but that evening and that friend—now living in Santa Fe, alas—still glowed with the promise of the city’s new fascination.
Lanier’s eyes sparked at the words new press. Among a small circle of local book collectors, including Austen Hurd, word of Julia’s Capriole Press had leaked across the Atlantic, which gratified her enormously. A year ago her small edition (fifty-five copies on handmade Barcham Green paper) of Virginia Woolf’s Wednesday, an ethereal prose poem (or possibly only a four-page sentence), had stirred interest among London’s small but growing population of wealthy gentlemen ravenous for rare and beautiful books. Add a touch of the refined risqué—a lithesome nude line engraving by Eric Gill—and they’d gone into raptures. New York bred an equally avaricious specimen of bibliophile, the most elite (that was, wealthy and male) of whom congregated at the eminent Grolier Club. Julia’s Capriole Press would never pander to Grolier tastes, of course, but it was a glorious thing to have such devotees, and she longed to feel that pleasure again. Another minor vice.
She stuck to her resolve not to declare herself as a publisher quite yet. “Capriole’s on hiatus, I’m afraid,” she said. “At present I’m merely a collector.” The writerly shine in Lanier’s eyes dimmed at this news.
Calling herself a more garden-variety bibliophile may have deflected one man’s eager attention, but it inflamed the other’s. Austen demanded to know more about her collecting interests. His face was an appealing one: short waves of dark hair coaxed away from his forehead, eyes watchful as a playful dog’s, and skin the color of weak tea. His smile was askew—the right corner of his lower lip sagged, and only one cheek puckered—but it curled his whole face. When she mentioned a fondness for modern fine printing, he concurred with volcanic enthusiasm.
Lanier edged away as the conversation galloped off through talk of the great private presses, of Kelmscott, Ashendene, Doves, and Vale. It swooped around the Roycrofters studio of poor American Elbert Hubbard—lost on the Lusitania, his work now so painfully out of fashion. It flitted out to the brash Californian printers mining typographic gold in San Francisco and dallied over the prettily voluptuous new French editions with pochoir illustrations, of which Austen knew little but begged to hear more.
“I’m sailing to England soon,” he said, his voice furred with a slight lisp. “First time, if you can believe it. I’m going to meet Francis Meynell—do you know him?” Julia knew of Meynell and his Nonesuch Press in London but had not personally met the man. Before she could say as much, Austen’s grin blazed, alight with shoptalk. “Or how about Gibbings, that fellow who’s taken up Golden Cockerel? Gorgeous wood engravings. His Brantôme knocked my socks off.”
“Robert Gibbings, yes. He’s planning a Samson and Delilah next. And”—Julia paused, teasing his open-mouthed anticipation—“they say Eric Gill may join him.”
“In Berkshire?” Austen’s collar had escaped from his lapel, warping the knot of his tie.
The simple question, asked with his disproportionately excited lisp and crooked grin, made Julia laugh. To her astonishment, she couldn’t stop. Rocking her forehead in her palm, she laughed all the more helplessly when he echoed her with his own steady chug.
“I’m sorry,” she choked, wiping tears from her cheeks. “It’s just that look on your face.”
He offered her his handkerchief. “It’s my most devastating effect.” He leaned forward. “There was a young printer named Julia—”
He paused. “—but don’t let her elegance fool ya.
“. . . She dabbed at her eye, afraid she might cry—”
Another pause. Then a rush: “. . . at the sight of a gent so peculiah.”
Julia doubled over in fresh laughter, catching her frock’s shoulder strap just as, mercifully, Duveen’s voice boomed above the party’s commotion.
“Everyone! Lovelies!” Duveen stood near the piano, waving his arms. The sleeves of his dressing gown billowed like nautical flags. The room quieted. Julia and Austen recovered their dignity, more or less, and moved to join Lanier at the front of the crowd.
“I promised a surprise, and you shall have it,” Duveen shouted as two maids passed through with trays of champagne glasses. “Time to announce the next Goldsmith great!”
He glanced about, greeting late arrivals with a wave of his left pinkie. Hope and anxiety jostled on every expression. Suspense grew as he affected hesitation, dithering with fluttery hands. The drama was more cruel than entertaining, and a few brusque voices called out for him to stop farting around.
Duveen laughed, spun, and lifted the back hem of his dressing gown in rude reply. “That’s for you hyenas.” He cued a trill of piano keys to quell the answering barks and howls. “All right, all right, settle down.
“To the century’s next great literary sensation.” His outstretched glass sailed wide as his voice sailed high. “To the next great New Negro voice!”
The crowd seconded his toast, champagne sloshing, but uncertainty shadowed most faces. Who? Which of them was to be lifted into eminence by the coveted Goldsmith imprint? Negro narrowed the field considerably. Standing beside Julia, Logan Lanier had stiffened, alert and unbreathing, all modest charm forgotten. Across the room, Jerome Crockett’s face was a study in dignity, eyes downcast. To hide his gleaming hope?
“To Harlem Angel!” Duveen shouted. “To our very own Eva Pruitt—as brilliant as she is luscious!” He pulled Eva to his side and mimed an ecstatic slurp of her shoulder.
The crowd gave a boisterous cheer.
New Negro voice? Harlem angel?
A second shock joined the first as Julia tardily raised her glass. Eva Pruitt was colored?
Lanier emptied his champagne in a single gulp. “To Eva,” he muttered. “Poor fool.”
Even Austen was speechless at this sour dismissal of his friend’s triumph.
“I’m sorry,” Lanier said quickly. “I wish her well, of course. It’s just that she may be in over her head.”
At Julia’s confusion he went on. “Don’t you know? Eva’s been stoking rumors about that book for months. Pablo’s been mad to get it for Goldsmith.”
“Pablo wants Arthur to champion Negro writers,” Austen said. “You heard him. He says it’s the coming thing. Horace—Liveright, my boss—wanted Eva’s book too, though I can’t see why.”
“Why do you say that?” Julia protested. “It must be very good if both Liveright and Goldsmith are keen for it.”
“It may be terrific. I only meant we never saw more than a few pages. She floated a teaser, is all. Pablo claims he’s seen the whole thing, but I’m not sure I believe him. Everyone else got only a couple of chapters. She’s playing coy, whipping up interest and plenty of drama, but it’s a dangerous game.”
“Dangerous?” The only threat Julia could see was to Eva’s exquisite dress, being tugged and pawed in the clamor of so many trying to congratulate her at once.
Lanier took a drink from a passing tray. “She won’t say much, except that her book packs a wallop—dirty doings revealed, sleazy scandals, that sort of thing. Everyone assumes it’s about her life singing at Carlotta’s.”
“She’s a singer too?” Julia exclaimed.
“Didn’t you know? This year’s sensation.”
“I hear she’s hidden the manuscript,” said Austen.
“No one knows where it is,” Lanier explained. “Let alone what’s in it. But it must be juicy if she’s afraid Leonard Timson, her boss at Carlotta’s, might get ugly about it. That’s why Pablo’s making such a silly whoop. It will be a bonanza for Goldsmith, if it’s as lurid and”—he pronounced the next word carefully—“colorful as she hints. A true July-jam race novel. I’m just afraid our Miss Pruitt may have lit a fuse with this one. She’d better hope it blows up in someone else’s lap.”
Through the smoky sheen of the hot room, Julia considered Eva’s turbaned head rising above the mist of embraces and kisses. What would such a lovely creature know of lurid scandals? Even more mysterious was the notion that Eva Pruitt could produce anything incendiary. No, Julia decided. Disappointment blurred Lanier’s judgment. And Hurd clearly relished gossip.
Across the room, a new fellow had settled at the piano and was teasing out syncopated tunes that made shoulders jump and dip in countertime. Only Jerome Crockett seemed impervious, still displaying no reaction to Eva’s startling triumph. With a stony countenance he deposited his untouched champagne behind a massive vase of calla lilies and pushed his way toward the hall, away from the throng squeezing forward to celebrate Eva’s success. He answered every greeting with a terse nod.
“Mr. Crockett seems to share your misgivings, Mr. Lanier,” Julia said.
Lanier considered his friend. “Jerome? He’s just curdled they went for Eva’s jazzy tootles over his string quartet. Can’t say I blame him. Goldsmith should have taken his collection of poems. It’s the best thing I’ve read all year, though difficult, heady stuff. If his name was Crockettovich or O’Crockett, something obscure and European, Goldsmith would be panting for it, but from a straight-arrow American college man, no. Much less a colored one. I tried to tell him to throw in some sonnets full of jigs and shines and rent parties, but he couldn’t take the joke. He’s been touchier than ever.”
“Maybe Eva’s good fortune will console him,” Julia said.
Lanier gave a small shrug. It seemed the kindest note on which to end their speculation. Julia excused herself before Austen could ensnare her with another rambunctious conversation. She had work to do.
Over the next two hours she met a succession of poets, actors, and novelists; a clarinetist; a sculptor; a playwright; and a pair of self-pronounced skunks too sozzled to be amusing. She penciled two or three names beneath Eva’s onto her mind’s list of possible candidates for a Capriole production, pending a closer look at their work, and noted others whose vanity or boorish grievances she’d take pains to avoid. She never got close enough to Eva to congratulate her, as the merry knot of well-wishers surrounding her remained stubbornly dense. When it finally loosened, Julia saw with a pang of disappointment that Eva was gone, likely slipped away for further rounds of private celebration. There was nothing more for Julia to do than declare her evening a success and commence the search for her shawl.
She found it amid a jumble of guests’ wraps in Duveen’s library (which she wished she’d discovered earlier) at the end of the apartment’s long central hallway. A ginger tortoiseshell cat with languid gold eyes guarded the array, nominally, from her repose on the desk’s blotting pad. Julia stroked its chin, coaxing a low purr from the regal creature. On leaving, distracted by the new Bremer Presse Iliad lying on the sofa atop its mailing wrappers—Duveen followed the German fine presses as well?—she collided with Austen Hurd.
“I’m such an ox,” he apologized as she adjusted her frock. “I no sooner meet a daffodil than I damn near squash her.” Julia rather liked this compliment—referring, she presumed, to the hue of her dress—as it was every bit as clumsy as his pursuit of her. In a rush he added, “I can’t rest without hearing more about that new Delilah. Come with me to a party tomorrow night?”
Julia was not one to feign or inflate a social schedule. The past months of financial uncertainty and a difficult transatlantic move had brought her to the brink of exhaustion and ill temper, but she was ready now. She’d finally ventured forth on her own into her new city, and the party had rekindled her social energies. She felt refreshed, restless to entangle herself again. Soon, if possible. Even if New York was not yet firmly under her feet, London was at last behind her. Her years there had been glorious but also shadowed—with memories of poor Gerald, her doomed first love, and the other false starts and disappointments by which she now hoped to steer more happily forward.
Before she could reply, Austen hurried on with needless enticements. Horace was always throwing parties, he said. Tuesdays and Fridays, at least. This week was to welcome a new author in from the provinces—Nebraska, he thought. Pablo and Arthur Goldsmith would certainly be there, taking a victory lap as Eva Pruitt’s new publisher. “You’ll like Goldsmith, Julia. He loves books more than women. Maybe O’Neill will come, maybe little Vincent Millay, leading poor Bunny Wilson on his lovesick tether. You never know who—”
Thwack! A sharp slap of palm on flesh sounded from the hallway.
The door to the opposite bedroom was ajar. Eva Pruitt, shoulders heaving, stood nose to nose with Jerome Crockett. Both held their hands away from their bodies, clenching in and out of fists. Julia’s first instinct was to defend her. To a proud man like Crockett whose lover had outshone him, and in such a public way, Eva’s success would scald. Julia drew breath to protest, but Austen shushed into her ear.
He was right. It was impossible to know who had struck whom.
Eva grabbed her lover’s wrist. Crockett jerked free with a force that squeezed a soft ooof from her lungs. She seized it again and pulled him to her side, spinning them both toward the door.
Austen drew Julia back into the library’s shadows.
“Leave them be,” he whispered as the couple moved down the hall to rejoin the party, arms curved stiffly around each other’s waists. “Some lives are complicated. Especially writers’.”
CHAPTER 3
More from habit than hope, Julia glanced down the broad hall of Philip’s apartment. He was likely out, but occasionally light beneath the library doors announced a rare evening at home. It had been two days since she’d seen him. For most of her childhood he’d been little more than a name to her, the absent half brother ten years her senior. At her mother’s death twelve years ago, Philip had suddenly loomed large in Julia’s life, though still remote, first as her guardian and then as trustee of her estate until last fall, when she’d turned twenty-five.
Although she still barely knew the man, in a few scant weeks she’d learned that he seldom rose before noon, took most meals out, and generally frequented the city’s many theaters and concert halls and galleries before lingering at one club or another well into the wee hours. Yet he also had an uncanny way of surprising her, of upsetting each basketful of smug judgments just as she managed to assemble it. Whatever his misgivings about her return to New York, Philip kept them to himself. But then, he owed her no less.
For the hundredth time she rued this imposition on his hospitality. At one point eight months ago she’d vowed never again to darken his door, after he’d nearly usurped her inheritance. Worse, he’d done so in jest, claiming he’d never dreamed the panel of arbiters would accept his specious claims about their father’s will. Afterward he’d begged her forgiveness, insisting he’d never have cut her off. But Julia needed time to recover. Once glimpsed from its brink, the maw of poverty was not easily forgotten.
The pocket doors to the library had not been fully closed. Through the gap she saw Philip slouched wearily in his favorite wing chair beside the hearth, legs stretched out across the carpet and fingers knit at his waist to enfold a crystal snifter. He looked half-asleep.
Sh
e hesitated. Was he alone? Should she interrupt? She’d like to simply invoke a guest’s prerogative—the cheerful claim of a brandy before bed—but their relationship was still tenuous. Lifelong ambivalence (no, call it the wariness it was) and the monstrous scare he’d given her last fall lingered. Growing up, she’d never mourned the absence of his affection, having never had it. But in recent months she’d felt a few pangs of empathy with the man she was finally learning not to fear, if not yet to fully trust.
At the sound of a voice too muffled for Julia to recognize, Philip stirred. He set aside his drink and lit a cigarette. His long fingers moved lazily. Julia held her breath, alert for what came next. Philip’s most careless gestures were often his most deliberate. The more idle the movement—the languid heave of a shoulder, a bored sigh—the more he often simmered with some deep annoyance or even anger.
“Don’t be an ass,” the visitor whined. “You’re such a bloody orchid, Kydd.”
“So you’ve mentioned.” Philip flicked ash into a saucer.
Oho! Whatever simmered might soon boil. This she would not miss for anything. Julia pushed apart the doors. He had murmured something about making herself at home.
“Ma petite soeur,” Philip said in an abruptly velvet voice. “You remember Wright?”
Ah. Too clearly. His guest was Willard Huntington Wright, the purported author. A dismal superstition crossed her mind: Had her recollection of his name earlier that evening somehow, genie-like, summoned him? It had been a flippant remark, and she rued it all the more if it had now conjured the odious fellow.
Wright half lay across the sofa, too ill or dissipated to rise at her entrance. He had aged a decade since September. His skin was sallow, his cheeks cavernous, and an odor of stale cigarettes rose from his clothing. Whatever had possessed the man to come calling at this hour, especially in such wretched condition?
