‘Thank you, I’ll find it.’ Nicole started down the stairs.
When she reached the bottom, Mrs Burnley laid a restraining hand on her shoulder. ‘Better let me call, kid. Your mom’s going to be mad as hell with me for lettin’ you go there. They might not even let you in ‒ you bein’ so young. There’s laws about things like that. Look ‒ I’ve got a pot of coffee just made. You sit awhile and have some while I hunt about for that telephone number … Then you can go to the drugstore and call. Yeah, better do it that way, kid.’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Burnley, I’ll go now.’ Nicole brushed past her and opened the front door. She managed to squeeze out ‘Thank you,’ before she shut it firmly behind her.
The standard reply ‘You’re welcome,’ died on Mrs Burnley’s lips. For a second she watched the girl’s shadow on the door, heard her steps on the stone stairs; and then the sound of the rain took over. To hell with her, she thought. Stubborn as hell, and too damned high and mighty to condescend to a night in Spike’s bed, or even a friendly cup of coffee. Well, let her take what was coming. She licked her lips a little at the thought of the confrontation. Mrs Burnley knew all about the supposed job at the law firm; she also knew a good deal about Lucky Nolan’s. She was sorry she was going to miss the row between them ‒ the mother and daughter. They were both stuck-up as all get out, only the mother had learned where it was good to keep a few friends. The kid had the looks of a fighter, but she had a lot of learning to do.
Nicole hurried along the wet sidewalk, her cold hands thrust deep into the pockets of her overcoat. The brush with Mrs Burnley had left her angry and disturbed. The place, this Lucky Nolan’s, must be something special, or else Mrs Burnley wouldn’t know so much about it. It was hard to be told about it by Mrs Burnley, instead of Anna. Nicole knew very well Anna would be annoyed when she appeared. She disliked being questioned. But it seemed to Nicole that the time had come for questions. There were too many things that had been let go, year after year, no questions asked, so no answers needed. She wondered suddenly why she had been content to allow things to drift on like this without ever asking. Because it was easier not to? Her own thoughts accused her. She and her mother spent so much time apart. They were not companions, not friends ‒ just mother and daughter. Nicole was now aware of a need to draw closer to Anna. This whole scheme she had come to discuss had this nub of need at the heart of it. She looked up at the crumbling brownstone as she walked. She had been eight years old when Anna had sent her away from here, and in the years between it had reached the stage of decay when it could rightly be called a slum. She had hardly noticed. It was just a place she came to for a few days over Christmas, and again at Easter. Every year, for two weeks, she and Anna went to the same place in Maine for a vacation.
Anna had made it easy for her, and had somehow kept her a child. She was aware that the kids who lived here year-round didn’t stay children long. Out of her memory she dredged the sounds from childhood ‒ the family fights, the crying babies, the women quarrelling, and the sometimes heartbroken sobbing in the night. She could remember all of it, the sprawling, teeming life that erupted about her, and before it could touch her too deeply, or put its mark indelibly on her, Anna had sent her away to the convent. So she was younger now than she would have been if she’d stayed, and suddenly her youth was screaming out for experience, for life. But Anna had seen to it that it would not be this sort of life. For the first time it occurred to Nicole to stand back and view her mother from this angle. Seen from here, Anna was a very strange person.
She began to run because the rain was becoming heavier. She felt the drops splashing coldly against her face. The rim of her absurd school hat was bending under the onslaught. She was very cold on this February night, the night before her sixteenth birthday, running along the frozen sidewalks in the wrong part of Brooklyn.
Head down she turned the corner and almost collided with a police officer.
He caught her by the shoulder. ‘Hey, wait a minute. Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry?’ He swung her around so that the street light shone full in her face. ‘It’s you ‒ the Rainard kid? Right?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What are you doing here? I thought you were at school this time of year. You haven’t left, have you?’
‘No ‒ not yet,’ she answered, freeing herself from his hold.
‘Lookin’ for your mom?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’ll be at work now.’
‘Yes,’ she said, making it sound as if the fact didn’t surprise her. ‘That’s where I’m going.’
‘Well, I don’t think you should.’ His voice wasn’t unkind, just firm. ‘They rightly shouldn’t let you in there. And your mom wouldn’t want you running around this time of night.’
It stung her that he, like Mrs Burnley, seemed to know so much about what should have been her business, but hadn’t been, until this night.
‘I couldn’t get in at home, Officer.’ She had remembered, from a long way back, his name. O’Neil. He had been on this beat a long time. She could remember seeing him on the steps of the church at Christmas and Easter. Not that she and Anna attended his church; they didn’t seem to have any part of any of the melding religions of this area. Suddenly, that was strange too.
‘You’re going to Nolan’s then?’
She nodded. The rain beat on O’Neil’s cap; she watched it running in little streams down his oilskins.
‘Look ‒ I finish in a half-hour. Suppose you just wait at Mrs Burnley’s and I’ll pick you up there after I leave the station. See you down into the subway ‒ make sure you get into a coach with a few decent-looking ladies in it. Your mom ‒ well, she’s a real nice lady, and she would want me to look out for you …’
Nicole broke in with cool logic. ‘But if I do that it will just be that much later ‒ and in the time while I’m waiting I could be there, almost. I think I can take care of myself. I’ll be careful.’
He peered at her closely. Suddenly his mouth widened into a grin. ‘Yes, I guess you can take care of yourself. Only just move right along. Keep well in the light. If a man comes near you ‒ scram. Well …’ He straightened himself. ‘S’long, kid. I’ll be seeing you again sometime. Easter, maybe.’
Nicole smiled, and suddenly O’Neil seemed to be looking at a different person. ‘Good night, Officer.’
He watched her as she went. ‘Good night, Officer.’ From any other kid in the neighbourhood it would have sounded like cheek, but from her it was quite natural. He felt as if he had been dismissed, but in the nicest possible way. Rainard. The mother was foreign, of course, but there was no trace of it in the way the kid spoke. But she didn’t speak much like an American, either. Her accent was clipped, almost English. He searched his memory for more facts about her, but there were surprisingly few, considering how long Anna Rainard and her child had lived here, and how little privacy was possible in this sort of neighbourhood, especially if you rented from Mrs Burnley. The kid had been sent to some school in Connecticut, he remembered. They seldom saw her after that, and saw little enough of the mother, either. Kept to themselves. Gave no one any trouble. Paid their bills. That in itself was out of the ordinary. He couldn’t even remember seeing Anna Rainard in the company of a man, and she didn’t have visitors to her flat, either. That was all he knew. His curiosity stirred, he reminded himself to ask about her at the station. Someone had to know more about the Rainards. He would bet someone even knew where the mother spent all the nights she didn’t return to Mrs Burnley’s. Someone always knew.
He kept his measured pace, automatically glancing at the shuttered store-fronts, trying a few locks, watching for the figures of drunks slumped in the doorways. The rain had driven them into the holes. The bars would soon be emptying. It didn’t occur to him that what he saw was ugly, as it had to Nicole Rainard. It was just as it always was. He didn’t think about it. He had lived with it most of his life.
But something warmed him a
s he walked. He kept remembering the smile of the girl, and the way she had looked up at him from that fringe of dark lashes. There hadn’t been much else to see ‒ just a skinny kid in a dowdy school coat and a drooping rain-soaked hat, a kid with pale, pale skin and big eyes, grey or a kind of purplish-blue ‒ he couldn’t remember. And the way that face had been transformed by her smile. There was a kind of power in the way she used those eyes and granted that smile, as if she were bestowing some kind of favour. Something else had been there in the face, the expression of the kid, something one glimpsed occasionally in the face of a woman, and if she had it, it hardly mattered whether she was beautiful or not. The kid was too young to be beautiful, but she’d got whatever it was ‒ that power to stir and arouse. Easy, O’Neil, he told himself ‒ easy. Lie down, boy. She was only a kid. He felt a vague shame that he should think of her in this way, but he continued to enjoy it. He told himself it was all right to enjoy the half-promise in that look and smile, to enjoy it only because she was no longer with him, standing beside him. But he also told himself he wouldn’t want to tangle with whatever that power was when the kid was no longer a kid.
Chapter Two
Nicole did as Mrs Burnley had directed, and found her own way to Lucky Nolan’s. She didn’t want another encounter with a policeman who might tell her to go home. The marquee of the Arthur Keenan Theatre was visible from Seventh Avenue, and just beyond it was the neon that heralded Lucky Nolan’s. It was discreet enough, and it looked expensive. She waited some time, judging the type of people who went in. They were in evening dress, and several came in chauffeured cars. It was the kind of sight you could still see in a country in the midst of a depression. There was still money about, and people wanted to spend it. She didn’t think she wanted to present herself, as she was now dressed, to the uniformed doorman. There was, however, a smaller door farther along, with a tiny sign which indicated it also was Lucky Nolan’s ‒ Trade Deliveries. She rang there. After a while a small grilled space in the door was opened, and she found herself under scrutiny. ‘Well,’ a man’s voice said, ‘What do you want?’
‘Could I … could I speak to Anna Rainard?’
‘No one of that name here. Beat it, kid.’
She suddenly remembered the name she had seen, in very small letters, under the banner of the big-name band, at the doorway. ‘Well … er, Anna Nicholas.’ Nicholas had been her mother’s maiden name.
There was a much longer, silent scrutiny this time. ‘She expectin’ you?’
‘Yes.’ She lied without blinking. ‘Yes.’
‘Can’t let minors in. Against the law.’
‘I’m her daughter.’
‘Her daughter …?’ The small grille snapped closed, and the door itself was partially opened. What the man saw outside was the dripping, huddled figure of a young girl. He saw an embroidered crest on her hatband, a dark tie slipped about the collar of a white blouse. He saw the identical crest on the pocket of the streaming raincoat.
‘Hey, you could be a trap from …’ He had been about to say ‘from the vice squad’, but the words died on his lips. If the vice squad had ever employed anyone like this, he had yet to hear about it. Besides, the upturned face, in the glare of the spotlight above the door, with the rain pelting past it, was remarkably like the woman she claimed as her mother.
The door opened grudgingly, farther. ‘I guess you can come in. But make yourself small, will you, kid? You can’t see her now. She’s about to go on … And listen, if you see a cop, beat it!’
She squeezed past him, out of the rain, into the warm and dimly-lit corridor. He was a very tall man, dressed in evening clothes that seemed too small for his frame, and worn uneasily. ‘Band’s just ready for a break,’ he said, prodding her forward ahead of him. ‘Anna’s going on.’ As he spoke the final bars of a popular number went into their crescendo. There was a burst of applause, and then the clatter of heels as about six scantily-dressed chorus girls rushed past them, heading for dressing-rooms down the passage. There were curious glances at Nicole, the strange figure she cut in the drooping hat; but the fact that the tall man stood with her seemed to make them hurry past. ‘Hi, Danny,’ one offered with a touch of bravado. Danny’s popularity didn’t seem to be his strongest asset.
‘You want to hear her?’ the man said. Nicole nodded. ‘Over here.’ He led her along the passage to where a space opened up and she could see the men of the band leaving their positions behind their music stands. For a moment while they passed, Danny stood in front of her so that she was hardly seen. Then when they were gone, he moved aside. She smelled whisky and brilliantine from his closeness. She wished he would go away. ‘You can listen, kid, but don’t let anyone see you. You don’t exactly look like something from the chorus line. Well … there’s Anna now.’
In trying to move away from him she had missed the moment when Anna had emerged from the other side of the small stage. Her arrival caused no great stir in the crowd. Anna seated herself at the piano. By moving just a little bit sideways, Nicole could now see part of the closely packed room. Smoke swirled in the lights. The people gave orders to waiters and went on talking. There was a smell stronger than Danny’s brilliantine and whisky; it was the smell of the rich out to enjoy themselves. It was the first time Nicole had ever smelled it, and she was never to forget it. At that moment it was hard to believe there was not only a depression in America, but there was a Prohibition law too. In this gathering, neither seemed to exist.
Anna began to play. It wasn’t what Nicole expected ‒ but then she hardly knew what to expect any more. Remembering Anna’s insistence on her studying classical music from the time she had been four, to hear Anna herself take up a steady jazz beat was a shock. She couldn’t tell if Anna was good ‒ she didn’t know enough about it, and the people gathered at their tables seemed to pay no attention. She risked a further, longer look out into the room, trying to judge better the reaction of the audience, but they weren’t really an audience, and Anna’s music was just a background to their talk. Then she felt Danny’s hand on her shoulder. ‘OK kid. That’s far enough.’
She turned and looked up at him, while obediently moving back. ‘Do they like her?’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘They don’t have to. Anna just fills in while the band takes a break. Got to give them time to order more drinks, get a bit of food into them. Well …’ he was studying her face, and perhaps saw that it registered disappointment. ‘Anna’s OK. Duke Ellington she ain’t, but she’s OK. Keeps them happy enough. Top-class entertainer would want them all nice and quiet and that ain’t good for business. She does well enough. Now look, kid, I don’t have all night to stand here yakkin’ with you. Got to keep my eye on a few things. You’ll have to wait while Anna finishes. I’ll see she gets the message that she’s got a visitor. And you’d better wait in Lucky’s room. Any cop sticks his big nose in here, he’d better not see you. We don’t pay off to the cops and the rackets for havin’ minors on the premises. You’d better come with me …’
He led her to a smoothly carpeted, windowless room, where the sound of the piano and the crowd hardly penetrated. It was a curiously impersonal room, with a large desk, armchairs, panelling, a decorator’s room which the occupant had never disturbed. ‘Wait here,’ Danny said. ‘She’ll be about fifteen minutes.’
In that time Nicole had a chance to recover herself. The room was warm; she took off her dripping hat and wet coat. She didn’t want to lay them on any of the upholstered chairs, so she folded them neatly and put them on the floor. It was a schoolgirl’s gesture, which she recognized, but was powerless to change. It was enough for one night to be sitting here, a very long way from the school she had left that afternoon, trying to bring into focus a mother who wore a totally different aspect from the one she had adopted through the years. Nicole had a resentful feeling of having been tricked, and yet she had to acknowledge that she had only been tricked because she had been a willing dupe. She hadn’t wanted to ask questions. Now she cou
ldn’t avoid them.
Anna came at last. Nicole had heard the applause, rather perfunctory, and had braced herself. Anna came in and closed the door quickly behind her. There was no greeting except the tense words, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I had to see you.’
‘Something’s wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong. I just wanted to talk to you.’
‘It couldn’t be that important. You could have written. I’ve told you always to write.’
‘This time I didn’t. Perhaps it’s just as well …’
Anna came closer, and her face loosened a little. ‘Yes, perhaps just as well. It makes it easier if you see it all at once. Saves a lot of explainin’.’
‘Was it necessary? I mean ‒ couldn’t I have known a long time ago? I felt a fool tonight. I went to Mrs Burnley’s. She told me where to come. And then I ran into Officer O’Neil. He knew where you worked.’
Anna managed a tight smile. ‘Well, it looked better on the books of your school. I went to the Reverend Mother. I gave her the story. A respectable but not highly-paid job with a law firm. A tiny widow’s pension ‒ which I really didn’t have, but it sounded good and I used it to explain the school fees. What could I tell her? A nightclub entertainer? She would have understood, of course. They’re women of the world. But it mightn’t have sounded nice to the parents of the other girls. That’s what polite lies are all about, Nicole. And,’ she added, ‘it’s your sixteenth birthday tomorrow.’
‘You remembered?’
‘Don’t I always?’
It was true. She always did. She remembered meticulously. There was always a birthday gift, something serviceable, like clothing, always of good quality, and something unexpected, but always in the same vein, like the beautifully bound folio of the Beethoven sonatas which had arrived last year, and which the nuns had exclaimed over. No one else in the school had anything like that. Nicole had seen it, though, as something she was expected to measure up to. It was a hard measure.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 2
