“I will?”
“Yes… But only one will do you good. The other, harm.”
“Which one? I mean, my husband or—or—the other one?”
Philomena’s eyelids fluttered shut, and she curled Astrid’s fingers back over her palm. Several seconds passed like this, with her lids rising occasionally to reveal that her irises had rolled back. Out in the main room the bass drum sounded, shaking the floorboards. Suddenly she released Astrid’s hand, and her head drooped forward.
“It has not yet been written,” Philomena pronounced wearily. She rose from the pillows and walked across the room, where she poured herself a glass of water from a pewter pitcher and drank it in one swift gulp. “Either way,” she went on in a distant voice as she gazed off at nothing, “your life will be a storm.”
“But what should I do?”
Philomena took two languorous steps toward Astrid and sank down beside her. “You’ll need money. Do you have money?”
Astrid was about to protest that she didn’t have any of her own, but then she remembered Grandmother Donal’s gift and smiled. How silly of her to have forgotten the gift, but how perfect that it should be there, waiting, for just this moment. “A little.”
“Good. For another dollar, I give you stock tip!”
Hurriedly, Astrid produced another bill. Philomena took up both her hands and closed her eyes, and Astrid did likewise. “Put everything you can in the Marietta Phonograph Company, guaranteed to triple in three months!”
“Really?”
“Yes, my dear. Philomena knows all.”
“Oh, thank you!” Astrid kissed the woman exuberantly on either cheek. “How lucky I was to find you.”
When she stepped back into the party, she was met with the same chaotic swirl. The psychic’s dark room and soothing cadence seemed like a dream, but they had lifted Astrid’s spirits. She knew what Charlie would say about psychics—that they were a lot of hokum—and she wasn’t sure she believed it herself. But the woman’s advice was like a pretty bedtime story, the moral of which was that she was not so trapped as she had felt before. Her life would be a storm, the woman had said, and there would be too much love rather than too little. Well, would she want it any other way?
Earlier in the evening the soirée on the St. Regis roof had been to celebrate the arrival from Europe of Franklin Otis, whom everyone called Junior—the youngest son of the oil-fortune Otises and, as it happened, Astrid’s second cousin—but by two A.M. the party had doubled in size, and nobody could remember why they had come in the first place. When Cordelia returned from her suite, the wrought-iron elevator stopped for a moment and she remembered that she shouldn’t have left the roof without Victor. She had been missing Max and wanted to ring White Cove to see if there had been any messages. But there hadn’t been any messages, and now she was caught in the elevator alone, with nowhere to go and a stranger about to get in with her.
The doors drew back, and her shoulders relaxed. Claude Carrion’s wasn’t the most welcome face she could imagine at that moment, but she knew he wasn’t an agent of Coyle Mink.
“Well, Miss Grey.” As he ambled into the elevator, he finished tying his tie and his crooked smile shot up to the left.
“Mr. Carrion.” Though she returned the smile, she tried to keep her voice cool and detached. “Where are you coming from?”
“Would you believe I find stories in the strangest places?” he drawled.
“Yes.” Cordelia kept her shoulders back and her eyes on the elevator doors as they slid shut. “I’ll bet you do.”
“In fact, I just heard a story that pertains to you, my dear, and I think congratulations are in order.”
“Oh?” The skin of her ears prickled. She knew right away it was going to be about Max, and though some part of her didn’t want to trust Carrion or show him what she was feeling, how much pleasure she would derive just from hearing Max’s name in any story, she couldn’t wait for him to tell her whatever it might be.
“Yes. Everyone’s talking about that li’l stunt Max pulled this morning.”
“And?”
“And it seems one of those people is rich. Somebody has agreed to be his new patron. They are putting a lot of money behind him. He resumes training at the airfield tomorrow. Seems your boy won’t be kept down, no matter what’s said of ’im.”
Cordelia sucked in breath. “It’s a lot of money, then?”
“Rumored to be quite handsome. If I told you the figure, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Who is it?”
Carrion shook his head. “Anonymous.”
“Oh, tell me.”
The columnist laughed—two big blasts of hilarity—and shook his head faintly. “No, I mean the donor is anonymous. Perhaps they don’t like the idea of sponsoring a Negro, but they certainly like the idea of sponsoring Max.”
Before she could make him tell her more, the elevator doors opened onto the roof, and the sound of a horn section in an uproar met her ears. Anyway, all her teeth were showing between her freshly painted red lips, and she wasn’t sure she was capable of saying anything very sensible. “Thank you, Mr. Carrion!” she gushed, a little stupidly, as though he had done it.
“You’re welcome,” he replied grandly, as though he, too, felt responsible for the change in Max’s fortune.
“Cordelia!” They both turned to a happily shrieking voice, rushing at the elevator. Letty was still wearing the polka-dotted dress, but her shoes had disappeared. She was already reaching out for Cordelia’s arm as she dashed toward her. “Where have you been?”
“Just placed a call to Charlie. Have I missed anything?”
“No, but it’s not as fun without you.” She covered her giggle with the back of her hand and caught her breath. “I hope you’re being nice to Claude,” she said, shifting flirtatiously on her bare feet. “We must always be nice to Claude.”
“Any complaints?” Cordelia arched an eyebrow in the columnist’s direction.
He picked up her hand and kissed her wrist. “It has been a pleasure.”
“Good-bye, then,” Cordelia said.
“Good-bye!” Letty echoed happily. The night had gotten to her, and Cordelia was almost surprised by her petite friend’s strength as she pulled her back to the dance floor, where they found Astrid in the midst of trying to teach Victor how to quickstep. His expression seemed to indicate that he wasn’t sure he ought to be dancing with his charge, but his arms and legs were following her instructions.
“Come on, darling, you’ve never shown me how to quickstep!” Cordelia quipped, cutting in.
With an apologetic nod, Victor withdrew to a nearby wall, and Astrid—who seemed to have had a good deal of champagne—laughed a bubbly little laugh and hiccupped and replied: “At least now I’ll get to teach someone who isn’t utterly hopeless!” Astrid rested her arm along Cordelia’s back and lifted her opposite hand and issued a lazy wink. “You be the boy, but I’m going to lead, all right?”
“All right.”
By the time they went gliding onto the dance floor, Letty had been taken up by Junior Otis, who’d been following her with his eyes for some hours already. He was grinning, now that he finally had her in his arms, and though Letty was answering his questions with a sweet expression on her face, Cordelia could tell, even at a distance, that she was hanging back from him. Like Cordelia, her thoughts were half-elsewhere, though she was content to spend some hours amid music and happy, shouting people. Outside there was danger and uncertainty, and Cordelia—and Letty and Astrid, too, it seemed—had learned to want things that were complicated and came at a high price. But in the meantime, before the check came due, there were far worse places to be than the St. Regis after midnight with your best friends.
18
WHEN THE CONCIERGE RANG TO TELL CORDELIA THAT she had a visitor, her friends were already snoring lightly in the big hotel bed. Even the sound of the telephone didn’t wake them. Cordelia kissed each girl on the forehead, left them a n
ote, and draped a thin, silken wrap over her shoulders as she hurried through the darkened sitting room. The elevator seemed to take forever, but she experienced its floor falling away beneath her feet like a thrilling amusement park ride. Then there was Max, waiting for her in the lobby. He reached out his hand for hers, wordlessly leading her outside. Like that, they were once again a society of two.
“That’s mine.” They were standing under the hotel awning between two great topiaries, and it took her a few moments to realize that he was talking about the gleaming white-and-tan automobile parked halfway down the block. Its headlights stood up alertly on either side of its long snout, and its flanks curved exuberantly over the gold hubcaps. “It’s a Studebaker President,” he said, and she could hear the pride in his voice. “The stock-car drivers can get it to go almost sixty-five miles an hour!”
“It’s awfully pretty.”
“Can I take you for a drive?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Darby, I think I’d like that.”
The air was dense with mist as they ambled down the indigo sidewalk with their arms loosely attached. She could see the white drops hanging above the road when a car sailed by. There weren’t many cars or many people out at that hour—just silhouettes keeping close to the wall of buildings, in and out of the orange light of the street lamps, figures as wrapped up in themselves as Cordelia and Max were in each other. The skin of her arms was almost sleek with the moisture, but neither of them was in any particular hurry to get out of the weather.
“Where did it come from?” Cordelia asked as Max opened the passenger-side door for her.
“I have a new patron—”
“I heard,” Cordelia interrupted with a smile.
Max grinned and closed the door. His eyes shone at her through the open car window. “You see? I knew you knew everything. Anyway, he gave it to me.”
“He?” she asked, once he’d come around the front of the car and started up the motor.
“I guess I don’t know that. I just assumed. He—or she—can’t tell me their name. So far, they’ve only dealt with me through a lawyer.”
“They must have a lot of money, to give you this.”
“Yes,” Max acknowledged.
“I’m glad.”
“Wait till you see my new apartment. They’ve set it all up for me, Cordelia. I’m going to be able to fly every day again.”
She didn’t know how to congratulate him for this good fortune, so she just leaned across the front seat and placed a kiss on his cheek.
“I just couldn’t wait to tell you. Are you hungry? Can I take you for a bite?”
“I’m starving.”
They continued to the all-night diner on the corner of Fifty-first and Broadway, where the glass windows curved and all those seated inside had a view of the whole intersection. The place was so illuminated from within that Cordelia could already see the pies in the pie case on the counter and the dyed red hair of the woman making change at the register. They crossed Broadway arm in arm. Only about half the booths were occupied at that early stage of the morning; girls in evening gowns were awaiting stacks of pancakes with gleaming eyes, while a few less-well-dressed souls gratefully accepted plates heaped with pastrami on rye.
A waitress wearing a yellow uniform and a placid face led them to a table. If she recognized either of her customers she didn’t let on. She took their order—apple pie with cheese for Cordelia, eggs and bacon for Max—as though she were listening to a husband she no longer loved reading aloud from the sports page.
Cordelia pulled a few pins from the back of her head and let waves of honey- and bark-colored hair fall around her shoulders. Propping her elbow against the table, she put the heel of her palm against her temple and pushed her fingers through the thick strands.
“Where I come from,” she murmured, “you can’t order breakfast past nine or dinner past six, and if you go out at night past ten you would think the whole town had died. They might actually have arrested you if you were out this late. They certainly wouldn’t make you eggs.”
Shrugging at the wonder of it all, she closed her eyes. Being here, with Max, felt like a confirmation of the dim suspicion she’d held since way back in Union, on nights when the lights had been shut off but she could not yet sleep: that she was destined to be remarkable.
When she opened her eyes, he was still there. The brave and expert character the papers wrote about, with his pale blue eyes and taut, sure posture.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said simply, meaning the scene and him and being there together and the fact that he was getting another chance, all of it. “Tonight I think I could go almost anywhere and no one would stop me.”
“I know just what you mean.”
Cordelia put the mug down and fixed him with an amused gaze. “But you always could go anywhere! You know how to fly.”
“Me?” He shook his head as he stirred his coffee. “That was nothing, just what I did before. This is a whole new beginning. I don’t want to spend my life entertaining people with silly tricks, you know.”
“No? What then?”
“I want to fly solo to Alaska. Or Patagonia. I want to be the first person under twenty to fly from New York to Paris.”
“New York to Paris?” She smiled at the way the two silky syllables that represented a city across the big ocean flowed into each other. There was a time when that place would have sounded impossibly distant to her, but now it seemed just within her grasp.
“Yes—I’ll need the right plane, of course.” His brow gathered over his broad, flat nose, and his fingers tensed around his coffee cup as he stared off into some vague, future place. He didn’t even notice when the waitress arrived at their table and let their plates clatter down against the tabletop.
“Anybody home?” Cordelia singsonged when she realized that he still hadn’t noticed the food right in front of him.
“I’m sorry. I’m boring you.” Max drew his knife through the fried eggs, and the yolk spilled out over the hash brown potatoes. “I just—I can’t wait.”
“Boring me!” Cordelia smiled over the rim of her coffee cup. “You think boys where I come from use words like Patagonia?”
“I don’t want to know about boys where you’re from,” Max said quickly without looking up from his plate as he put a bite of egg and potato in his mouth.
“Oh.” The spell that had been over them broke, and Cordelia’s eyes went down to her pie and she found she didn’t want it as much as she had before. There was only one boy where she was from to speak of, and she had left him as surely and irrevocably as she’d left the town. Until that moment she hadn’t thought that there was anything to tell Max about him. But ever since she’d learned Max’s secret, she must have half thought he would eventually come to know hers, which was that the day she left Union she had promised to be John Field’s wife forever, in the church on Main Street, with her aunt and uncle and his whole family watching. But it wasn’t really John she was worried about. She thought of the way Thom had kissed her on the boat, and hoped that Max never learned of it. She wanted nothing but to be in Max’s company, but now she knew how easily her desire for Thom could be stirred up, and she hoped that it would stay away forever.
While Max went on cleaning his plate of eggs, Cordelia’s attention drifted to the window. Outside the mists had intensified to true rain. A downpour gusted across the wide intersection, and a rogue wind brought the onslaught against the glass as loud as pebbles.
The door opened, and a mixed group came through the door screaming with laughter. Although the air that followed them was not remotely cold, Cordelia shivered and put her hands around her coffee cup. The newcomers were abuzz over the state of their clothes and the torrent they’d been caught in. The girls’ dresses were drenched and clinging to their skin, and Cordelia could see the boys’ undershirts through their wet dress shirts. They were holding newspapers over their heads, which had done little to protect them.
Outside the rain
continued, so loud and beautiful that Cordelia couldn’t help but smile. As the drenched group went past their booth, a petite girl with a muddied hem dropped her newspaper on the ground. Her slicker must have protected it from the rain, because it was dry, unlike the others, which had been abandoned in gray wet clumps by the door, and Cordelia was perfectly able to read the type on the far right corner, which proclaimed it Monday morning, the 19th of August, 1929. Max must have noticed the paper, too, because he reached to pick it up, but when he moved as though to return it to the girl, Cordelia gave him a quick, subtle shake of the head and flashed her eyes so that he would know to keep it. “It’s the morning edition,” she whispered.
Max handed it over and went back to his eggs.
But her good mood was replaced with a quickening dread when she saw the headline. LARAMIE SAYS NO NEGRO COULD BEST HIM, it read, CHALLENGES DARBY TO RACE.
In a few seconds, her eyes had absorbed the rest of the article—a young pilot from Queens had said that Max must be chicken because of his color, and all kinds of other nasty things, and though he wanted to prove it by racing Max from one tip of Long Island to the other, he doubted that Max would have the courage to accept.
“Eddie. He’s a big jock,” Max explained. “Hangs around the airfield but he’s got no discipline. Nativist type. Thinks because his granddad was born there, that makes him more righteous than somebody who just got off the boat. Or somebody whose people were forced over on boats. I guess he doesn’t like me very much anymore.”
“He sounds like a moron.” Cordelia was trying to be reassuring, but she couldn’t really tell what Max was feeling. He was gazing off as he had been before. If Eddie Laramie’s words had hurt him, she couldn’t tell.
“He is. And not much of a flyer, either, though he can get off the ground.”
The wedge of pie sat between them, the orange slice of cheese hardened and shiny on top, a few brown crumbs scattered around the table. The silence lasted until Max cracked his knuckles. He cast a worried glance around the diner as though the world’s benevolence toward him was slipping then and there, and he might be able to prevent its fall, if only he were quick enough. Cordelia reached out for his hand, but before she had a chance to squeeze it, a grin broke across his face.
The Lucky Ones Page 17
