by Marlowe Benn
“Believe what?”
“You’ll see. It’s just a job, Julia. I’m part of the show, doing what I’m paid to do. That’s all. And it’s so easy.” She raised one leg off the cushion and arched her foot, turning it to admire the curve of calf and ankle. Her glass rested on her stomach. “Leonard once gave me a gold bracelet just to sit on an alderman’s knee for ten minutes, let him drool on my earring.” Champagne swayed at the memory.
“He can be a stinker sometimes, but mostly he leaves me be. I just keep tucking away those little gifts. I always figured someday I’d go home to Louisville, get married, have a few babies, sing in a church choir, join a reading society. Well, until Jerome.”
Her smiling mention of the brusque poet jarred loose a nugget of caution in Julia’s mind. She barely knew the man, but his evident displeasure at Eva’s success struck her as ominous. Julia had seen before the dangers of men who needed to feel superior to women. She asked in an even voice how the couple had met.
Eva thought for several moments. Her reply began with an easy chuckle. “It was at the library, a Sunday symposium about a year ago. Lots of people come, all dressed up, real honest-to-goodness Strivers. They talk about literature and Mr. Du Bois and politics and racial uplift. Sometimes they get going in French. I love to hear them, even if it’s too fast for me.
“So one day, there was Jerome. Logan introduced us, but every time we tried to talk, someone interrupted to declare what a fine family Jerome came from, how his father and his mother are fine teachers, how he’s sure to be a fine teacher himself.
“Well, pretty soon Jerome looked like he was going to punch the next person who said one more word about his prospects. He spouted off something in French—oh, it sounded glorious—and out the door he went, taking me with him. It was rude, but I loved it.”
She beamed. “We walked and walked, all the way to my flat, but Leonard has rules about visitors, so then I walked him home. We drank a little wine, and then we walked back to my place. We never stopped talking.”
Julia smiled. She knew those happy first hours when every word, every glance, was a marvel of discovery. A deep laugh rumbled in Eva’s lungs. “I was in love before the sun went down. We told each other everything we could think of. He has a scholarship to go to the University of Chicago and become a literature professor. And he wants to, but first he wants to be a poet.”
Eva’s smile faded. “It’s hard for him, Julia. He’s too proud to ask his parents or uncle for help with a job. He wants something respectable, but the only work a copper Negro can get is servant work. He tried that, but the other boys hate him because he’s educated. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is. So I made Leonard hire him. He didn’t like to, and Jerome isn’t keen either, but at least he gets time to write.
“His book is beautiful,” she said, watching Julia’s hands move. “It’s much more important than mine, with deep ideas.” She took a deep swallow without, Julia imagined, tasting much of it. The bottle was nearly empty. “Now I’d trade all this, oh, in a—” She snapped her fingers, a click so sharp that Julia’s head jerked up.
“For what?”
“What?”
“You’d trade your success for what?”
Pink splotches spread across Eva’s cheeks and throat. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.” Her gaze dived to her lap. “It’s a secret.”
Her finger circled the rim of her glass. In a low, defiant voice, she said, “Maybe I can tell just one person. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I can tell you.”
Julia nodded vaguely, neither encouraging an indiscretion nor resisting a confidence.
“As soon as I get this book money, we’re going to Paris.”
“Paris!”
Eva twisted upright. “Please don’t tell. You can’t tell a soul.”
“I won’t. But why on earth would you rush off to Paris?”
Eva set her glass on the floor and stood. “I’ve said too much already. Please forget I said that. I have to go. Is my frock dry yet?”
Julia looked down at Eva’s dress, dangling forgotten from the towel between her hands. She lifted it slowly. The peaty aroma was gone, and the large splotch was more or less dry. The water and rubbing had ruined the chiffon’s smooth lie, but that couldn’t be helped now.
She slid it over Eva’s bent arms and head, fastened the tiny hooks, adjusted the fit over Eva’s hips, and stepped back to look. From her lower back to her left hip, a faint island the color of tobacco juice floated in a sea of blue and violet.
Eva peered at her backside in the mirror. “Looks li—”
The door hurtled open, bouncing against the peg in the floor, and Billie Fischer rushed in. She pulled up abruptly, her left heel wobbling. “What are you staring at? Can’t a girl pee?”
She pushed into the stall and noisily relieved herself. Julia and Eva looked away, their eyes meeting in the mirror.
“Thought you’d left ages ago,” Billie complained as she rattled out a length of tissue. “Christ, this place is a bore. Gotta be a better party somewhere. Vincent’s usually good for a laugh; guess I’ll mooch on over there.”
Her hatless head rose above the rickety wall. She yanked the chain and emerged.
Squinting at her reflection, she puckered her lips and reached for one of the lipstick applicators on the shelf below the mirror. Her lips stretched and twisted to receive the swath of scarlet. She smiled at her reflection and tossed the applicator back onto the shelf. “White Negroes,” she said, tucking a strand of black hair into place. “What a load of crap.”
With a wave over her shoulder, Billie swaggered out, her collar and hem awry.
Julia turned to Eva, unable to speak. What could she say? Billie’s banal scorn chilled her most. The critic’s impersonal cruelty.
Eva made a wry face. “I’ve known worse.” Arm raised, she twisted and looked again at her blighted dress. “How low are the lights at the Plaza?”
Julia swore softly under her breath. “I’m a dunderhead. Wait here.”
She slipped out and returned a minute later with her shawl. She fluttered it over Eva’s shoulders, blazing a salvation of purple and yellow and blue embroidery across her back. She tied the shawl into place with a loose knot, and the stain receded from view. It was still there, if one knew where to look, but Eva’s radiant face would distract any gaze. Her dress, at least, would have no trouble withstanding the Plaza’s scrutiny. Eva dipped to swish the fine silk fringe against her calves, but instead she unleashed a loud hiccup.
Two fingers flew to her throat. Then she laughed, mouth open, round as a sunflower. Ha ha ha ha. It flowed from her in low pulses, an old-fashioned, resonant laugh, nothing like the twittering arpeggios practiced in more fashionable circles.
“Thank you, thank you.” She squeezed Julia’s hand and pulled her into a close embrace, the knot of the shawl disappearing into the soft warmth of their waists. “No one will ever know.”
For the second time in as many days, Julia was struck by how unafraid Eva was of touching and being touched. Touch was both the first human bond and often the most fraught. Women could be lovers, of course, but this wasn’t that. This was trust, pure and unembarrassed. It was friendship claimed and clasped, a gesture both innocent and brave.
As she watched Eva leave, fresh admiration swept through Julia, trailed by a vague fear. Innocence and courage could be precarious partners. She looked down. This time the trembling hand was her own.
CHAPTER 6
“I wonder how Eva will fare at the Plaza tonight,” Julia said. She cradled her sidecar.
She and Austen had settled into a booth in one of the several speakeasies on West Forty-Eighth Street—an essential neighborhood amenity, according to Liveright. Austen had greeted the doorman by name, and the familiarity was returned. Now that Julia had been admitted in the company of a regular, the door would be opened for her in the future too. She must remember the fellow’s name. Benny. Benny.
Austen shru
gged. “Since Pablo dines there all the time, I doubt she’ll be questioned. Anyone who knows Eva’s colored either doesn’t go there or would get as much satisfaction in the stunt as Pablo will. I bet they’ll fidget more over Arthur. Jews aren’t welcome either.”
Two bowls of onion soup arrived, thick with croutons and bubbling gruyère. With the tip of her spoon, Julia poked the crust. “At least Pablo has the face to defy the rules.”
Austen lifted a spoonful of broth, but it was too hot, and he returned it to the bowl. “I’m not sure what Pablo’s up to half the time. He’s so besotted with Negroes right now that he claims he’d love to be one.”
“What does Pablo do, if he doesn’t actually work for Mr. Goldsmith?”
“Good question, bean.” He tapped her forehead as if she’d said something clever. “I suppose you’d call him a writer. He’s written three or four novels, nothing great, but entertaining enough. He writes articles on art, theater, music, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t pay his bills, but I gather he has a fat bankroll on the side. Arthur publishes his novels, though they say Pablo’s better friends with Coral, Arthur’s wife. She’s the one who really sails that ship, from behind the scenes. And for all his silliness, Pablo is a shrewd reader. Arthur knows his modern Russians and Italians and other Europeans, but he scratches his head over some of the American stuff. So Pablo helps him out, and in return he gets to dispense fame and fortune, or at least fame.”
Julia watched the fragrant steam rise. “How do you know him?”
He tried another spoonful of soup with more success. “From parties, I suppose, mostly Horace’s. Pablo turns up anywhere there’s book talk and liquor. Which means everywhere.”
Book talk and liquor. Parties where writers and editors and publishers mingled almost daily. Artists and printers and binders too, possibly. Julia quelled a growing excitement. Austen’s interests dovetailed with hers, and he moved in the circles she most hoped to join. It was impossibly lucky they should have met again. “How about you?” she asked. “Russell Coates told me you started out on Wall Street. How did you make your way to publishing?”
That crooked smile. “I bet your real question is why,” he said. “Everybody knows there’s no money in books, and folks are starting to roll in it on Wall Street. Easy. I was bored. Screaming bored. I think I have a pretty good nose for books. Pop thought I was daft, but he let me cash in what my mother left me to buy a job with Horace.
“He’s always short of cash,” he explained. “He stays afloat by taking in what he calls college boys like me with more money than patience. If we put twenty grand into the coffers, voilà, we get a fancy title and an office where we can do as little as we please. The less the better. I drive him crazy because I want to do more than flirt with the secretaries, and he’d rather I didn’t muck about. So I stay out of his way but watch like a hawk to see how he does it. Old Horace really knows his onions when it comes to books.”
Julia sipped her soup. “He’d better watch his back.”
Austen laughed. “I’m not after his job. I want to start my own imprint someday, like you, only more in the trade. I think there’s a real market opening up for limited editions, but Horace won’t give it a try, except for occasional esoterica. Blue limericks in ten-dollar bindings, that’s it. Anonymous authors too. Grievously underpaid. All the money goes to the glamorous ones like Eva Pruitt.”
Julia wondered again how Eva was faring. If anyone at the Plaza detected the ruse, would they challenge her? Julia suspected Pablo’s regular patronage might be enough to forestall a scene. Yet he’d relish the stunt regardless—he had nothing to lose. Should disaster strike, he could protest in noble indignation; Eva would bear all the humiliation. Julia felt a sympathetic heat in her cheeks. “I wonder what I’d do,” she said, “if I were asked to leave a restaurant because of my race.”
“You’d live. I’ve been through it.”
Julia lowered her spoon, dumbstruck. Austen? It had not occurred to her. She had to ask. “Are you colored too?”
His face curled in pleasure. After a moment’s thought he said, “Oh, what does it mean to be dark?
“Colored mama, perhaps? Saint-Tropez on a lark?”
He lifted a palm for patience. “He might be a Negro—he don’t care a fig, though—”
She grabbed his wrist. “Stop! Julia withdraws her remark.”
He grinned, eyebrows raised appreciatively. “Colored? Next to Eva, it might seem so. But no. My mother was Jewish, Pop too, more remotely, from one of the murkier Russian provinces. We weren’t religious, though. I remember asking if I could have a bar mitzvah after some older boys said it was a great way to get gifts.”
“What happened?”
“Not a chance, when I found out about the Hebrew. Later I figured out being Jewish mostly works against you. Yale wouldn’t take me, since they already had their quota. Same with Dartmouth and Princeton.” He rolled his eyes. “But then, I was no prize. Luckily Columbia wasn’t so picky.”
Julia nodded. Life in London had taught her plenty about how Jews could be treated. Fortunately, in the more bohemian art circles she frequented, no one made any distinction. In fact, most writers and artists she knew wore their social “flaws” like badges: they were proudly Jewish or Persian or Zoroastrian and so on, and more than a few such distinctions seemed hastily acquired. Julia was merely left handed and nearsighted, minor demerits, but enough.
“After college,” Austen went on, “it’s mostly been little things, like clubs I can’t join. Some high-hat restaurants won’t have me—but I can’t afford them anyway. Nothing too painful. My story’s nothing compared to the race rules and nonsense Negroes face.”
Nonsense was hardly the word. Julia shook her head in protest. “That Billie tonight—what a vicious creature. Imagine hurling such abuse at another person. Literally.”
“Inexcusable,” Austen agreed with a grimace. “Writing is like giving birth for Billie—she screams and curses the whole time. She can’t stand for anyone else to suffer less than she does. Eventually she sweats out a story and passes round cigars, but then someone else’s work is smarter or funnier or more successful, and she hates them for it. Same in the romance department. She’s always going on about what louses men are, or they’re married or swishes. That’s good for a daily pint right there.”
He chased down the last spoonful of soup. “How about you? What’s your story, bean?”
Julia thought for a moment to distill the old narrative. “I’m on my own and have been for years. I have only a vague sense of my father—he owned a shipping line, mostly in South America, but it was sold before I knew anything about it. He died when I was six.”
She frowned at Austen’s consoling murmur. Her father had receded early from her life, well before his death. Even in her earliest memories, Milo had been perennially out, taking meals and passing hours at his clubs. At the rare times when he’d been home, he’d withdrawn to his library and other distant quarters of the old house, far from the rooms where she and Christophine had played. “I hardly knew him,” she said. “My mother died too, when I was thirteen. Struck down by a motorcar in Stockholm.”
Her gaze strayed as she thought of the thunderclap that had dispelled her childhood in one sentence. She could still hear Christophine’s voice splinter at the calamitous news. “She was much younger than my father and infinitely more interesting. I wish I could have known her longer.”
At the look on Austen’s face, she added, “But I had my old nursery maid, Christophine, who still lives with me. And I have a half brother, Philip, who’s ten years older. He lives here in New York, but I don’t know him well.”
How much more she might have said. Philip had been packed off to boarding school before she had even been born. For years they’d rarely seen each other, and then across a gulf of grievances. Appointed her guardian after Lena’s death, because there had been no one else, he’d dispatched her to her own exile of schools, travels, and so on. For the next tw
elve years they’d exchanged only the most intermittent and efficient courtesies, in the end from separate continents.
“I’m temporarily staying with him, but I’ll have my own place as soon as I find an apartment that will accommodate Capriole.”
Austen pushed away his empty bowl. Leaning an elbow on the table, he propped up his head. “I have to ask. Fraternizing with a Jew would be verboten to some girls. It doesn’t seem to bother you, but would your brother object?”
The question disheartened her. She answered to no one, particularly in respect to whom she could or could not befriend. Surely they were both well past the age of family approval. She shook her head, as much to dismiss the question as to answer it.
Her dismay deepened to see Austen’s dark eyes swim with a new warmth. “Russell Coates was squiring you about last fall. Is he still in the picture? I mean, are you free?”
Oh dear. Julia felt her cheeks cloud. While it was true she’d enjoyed a few lovely outings with Russell, their pleasure in each other’s company stemmed mostly from a shared love of books. As Julia was often the only woman in bibliophilic circles, her book friends were invariably men—but not de facto prospective lovers. Why would people always hobble friendship between the sexes with romantic expectations?
Much as she liked Austen, whatever romantic feelings she might have harbored for him—mild to weak, she realized in that instant—withered in the glare of what his question assumed. Austen was, perhaps unknowingly, in search of a wife. As far as Julia could tell, marriage was a bargain in which the woman paid dearly for dubious benefits. Ready as she was to again enjoy a man’s company, Julia would never relinquish her freedom for it. She must be as free within love as without it.
“He’s in New Mexico, I believe. I’m not attached, if that’s what you’re asking. And I have no wish to be. I much prefer life without corsets of any kind.”
