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For my mom
JUNE
The one who fell in love
MARCH 11, 1960
In the Midnight Room
Coming in the casino’s main entry, the Midnight Room was on the right. A scantily clad ingénue waving a golden star in front of her torso—its two jeweled points artfully covering the money bits—adorned the neon marquee above the door. Below, a man in black tie greeted those lucky enough to have a ticket, and escorted the ones who slipped him enough cash to the better seats in the room.
It was a straightforward showroom: a hundred-foot stage, with a narrow apron, about four feet above the main floor. There were twenty or so small round tables, and chairs with red velvet seats. Along the back wall were a row of booths, higher even than the stage, and the velvet there was closer to maroon, and the stained glass lamps cast a warm but not revealing glow on the table where the drinks would sit. The sound system was excellent, and the lighting was standard, and there was room for a pretty good-sized band on the stage if someone wanted it.
That night, there was a man playing the piano, another playing the sax, and a third on the drums. When the curtain parted in the back, a top light rotated to catch the singer’s face. He’d been doing this awhile; he swung to the light intuitively and let it accent the plane of his cheekbone, the hollow of his eye, the curve of his lip.
He was thinking he might never play there again.
He knew what was coming later.
And when he saw her, sitting at the back, at the booth she always sat in—still he was startled, it had been a long time, she had not said she was coming—he signaled to the band to quit playing. He thought he might say something, just say it, put it out there, but in that split second in which he would have had to decide what to say, in which he would have had to find the courage to say it, he suddenly remembered the first time he’d seen her.
He’d had no idea who she was. He was new in town, didn’t know anyone at all. And of course, she was the only white woman. She’d looked up—damn, she was good-looking—and the horn player had sounded a note, and he’d swung his hip, just a little, instinctively, and her breath had caught—he’d actually seen that; he’d never forgotten it—and right that minute, maybe he’d fallen in love.
So tonight, four years later, when it was probably the last time he would ever sing for her, he lifted his finger to Jamie, who played the sax, and when the note sounded, he closed his eyes and remembered the rotten little bar, the white woman’s face, the flick of his hip, and he let his body take over, repeated the one instant of that fateful night, and as he did so, he remembered, he thought of her face, the intake of her breath. He remembered, even though, of course she would not.
1
To celebrate victory in Europe, June Stein dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
A few months earlier, she had bought an eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder on a day trip to the city—snuck into the shop while her mother was choosing a hat next door—and spent the spring flicking ashes on the track as she smoked behind the stairs of the boy’s gym. In April she wore stockings to school, and bent over the water fountain to highlight the brown seams running along the backs of her legs. Leon Kronenberg said he had touched her breast. When Mr. Sawyer came back from the summer holidays with a goatee, June Stein breathed in, licked her lips, and shuddered.
She was bad for the neighborhood.
Things happened to other girls because of June Stein.
When she married Walter Kohn at nineteen, most people figured she was pregnant. June Stein would get her due. She’d be stuck in Clinton Hill for life; Walter Kohn was going to be bald in three years, like his father and his uncle Mort.
But at twenty, June Stein disappeared.
She was gone for six months.
When she came back, Walter Kohn had become something of a catch. People thought it was wrong that his wife had left him. They said she’d gone to Reno, gotten a divorce, that she’d never been pregnant, she had just wanted to have sex, and now that she’d had it, now that she’d used Walter Kohn—who did have beautiful blond hair and the bluest eyes—she’d gone and left him, and who knows what man she might try to take up with next.
June Stein returned a pariah.
It was a role she had cherished, but at twenty-one, she found it less amusing.
She had not gone to Reno.
She had gone to Las Vegas, and the lights and the shows and the desert air, the dust and the heat and the way one felt alone in the universe, were more appealing in memory than they had been when she lived them. There had been only a handful of Jews in town, and none she found interesting, so while she was waiting for the divorce, she hung around a different crowd: locals mostly, born and raised Nevadans, and some that had come in for the gambling boon. And they rose in stature after she moved back to her parents’ house, after even her friends expressed sympathy for Walter Kohn—who had taken the newspaper into the bathroom with him each morning—and there was the way her mother looked at her in the evenings, and the way her father kept asking if she would like to take a stenography course. One day June Stein packed a suitcase, including the eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder, called a taxi, and flew all night from Newark to Las Vegas.
She didn’t even leave a note.
But that was June Stein.
Prettiest girl in Clinton Hill.
And the only one who ever dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
2
“June, you shouldn’t be on that ladder. You look like you’re going to fall right off.”
“Don’t you think I would bounce if I did?”
Del laughed.
“I mean it. Get down. What are you doing up there anyway?”
“There’s one of those atomic bomb favors in this chandelier. You can see it from that side of the room. It’s been bothering me for a week.”
“Well, tell Mack to take it down. Why would you climb on a ladder when you’re eight months pregnant?”
“I did ask Mack. Three days ago. He really doesn’t have time. And I’m bored to death. Even the baby’s bored. He’s been kicking me like a trucker.”
“A trucker? I don’t think our daughter’s going to be a trucker.”
“Well, then, our daughter’s going to be dancing with the Follies down the road.”
June jumped backward to the ground from the second rung of the ladder. She had meant it as a graceful note, but her weight was unwieldy, she landed on the side of her foot, and caught herself awkwardly before she could fall.
Del darted forward, and June grinned.
“I’m fine. Maybe it’ll get labor started.”
“Okay, just try to be reasonable this week? I need help. The hotel’s booked solid for the holidays, and Ronni wants to visit her dad, who’s sick. We’re short everywhere. If you feel like going through the applications in the office, maybe we could get some folks started this week.”
“Hmmm. All right. If you’re sure I can’t help Mack hammer at things. Baby and I love hammering.”
June reached up to give Del a kiss, her belly snug into his, and he distractedly returned it. He didn’t notice her puzzled gaze, or the way she walked with a slightly duller step toward the office.
Cora was already there
. She was sitting at the table where June usually did the books, with one cigarette between her lips and another smoldering in an ashtray, her long legs stretched out in front of her—an old lady who looked as if she had once been a showgirl.
“You looking for people to hire too?” June asked.
“Odell’s single-minded. How ya feeling?”
“Fat. Bored. See if I let your grandson knock me up again.”
Cora smiled at June. Her language, her sultry ways, did not bother her. These were the qualities that had left June needing Odell. And without June, Odell’s life would be different in ways that Cora did not want it to be. Cora had given up a lot for her grandson. She didn’t regret it. When her son and his no-account woman had dropped Odell off the last time—his bottom covered with neglect sores, and the marks of someone’s fingers on his thin arm—Cora didn’t waste any time making her choice. She and Nathan had picked up what they had, locked the door on the little Texas house the Dibb family had lived in for ninety years, and headed to Vegas. There was a railroad job there for Nathan, and a new world for Odell. She and Nathan had done some things well and some things poorly, but in the end, the only thing worth taking out of Texas was a two-year-old child.
June was even prettier pregnant. Everything about that girl was pretty. Her hands, her feet, her skin, her hair. When she spoke, her voice trilled as if she were about to laugh. You listened to her in the same way you couldn’t stop looking at her. Cora figured that if everything went to pieces, June might stand in as the club’s entertainer. If she could sing a note, she’d make it.
Entertainment was why the El Capitan was a success. That was why she and June were going to spend the afternoon reading through letters—pages and pages of them, some handwritten, some done up on an Underwood (with all the n’s and l’s faded to a slightly lighter gray), some folded around photos. All these people, young and old, wanting to start a new life in Vegas. Yep, the El Capitan was a hit. And it was the showroom that brought people in—or more to the point, Eddie Knox. Eddie Knox and those atomic bombs.
There had been a bomb detonation every five days all summer and fall. Operation Plumbbob. June called it Operation Plumbrich. Tourists flocked from all over the country, from Canada, from Mexico. People who wouldn’t have come to Las Vegas otherwise. But everyone wanted to see an explosion. Ever since National Geographic had described a bright pink mushroom cloud turning purple and then orange, spraying ice crystals like an ocean surf in the sky, people had been coming. They drove up the dusty road to Charleston Peak and leaned against their cars to watch the white dawn burst against the night, or they crowded into tiny Beatty and asked the locals if the air was safe.
Afterward, they returned to Vegas, to the air-conditioned hotels and crystal-clear pools, and giddy with the awesomeness of the power they had witnessed, with the strange menace of invisible rays, they gambled more than they might have, ordered another round of drinks, splurged on a second show. When the showgirls came out wearing mushroom-cloud swimsuits and headdresses that looked like explosions, they hooted with glee, and cheered when Eddie ended his set, dead silent, and then one word: Boom.
It was fun and dare and newness. If danger lurked, the Russians, a nuclear bomb, polio, distant nations and foreign religions and dark skin, then there was also the thrill of a mushroom cloud, the sound of doo-wop, Lucille Ball, the clickety-tick of dice rolling on a craps table, feather and sequin and mirror, red lips, breasts, Mae West onstage with muscled men in loincloths, anything goes, anything went, a small town in the middle of nowhere, and already, eight million people a year coming to see what was happening.
Cora herself had little to do with the El Capitan’s success. Odell and June were doing it on their own. She would help them out by going through a few applications this week, but for the most part, she stayed away from their business and their marriage. She liked her little apartment downtown, liked her habits there, and if she had learned one thing from her own son, it was that it would be better for her to leave June and Odell alone. There would be no option to rely on Cora Dibb when things got tougher.
They would get tougher.
Cora could see this already.
June didn’t seem to see it. How could someone so quick not see what was coming?
Well, life was hard. For pretty much everyone. June Stein had made her bed long before she married Odell Dibb. And in the long run, marrying her grandson was going to be the best decision June ever made. Though it might be awhile before she understood that.
“I’m going to find Del. I need a backrub.”
Cora thought it unlikely that her grandson would stop what he was doing to rub June’s back, but he might. She hoped he would.
June left the office and headed upstairs to the casino floor. Del might be there, but she wasn’t really looking for him anyway. She liked to spend time in the casino, watching the players, listening to the dealers calling for chips in, tracing the pattern of lights that swirled against the hard surfaces as the machine wheels spun dizzily. She could wander around there for hours, her stomach wobbling in front of her—a little startling to the patrons that did not know who she was—and it was good for business, her wandering. She noticed which dealers got the best action, or when a customer headed off to the bathroom at an odd moment, and whether or not the girls were getting drinks to the right gamblers.
From time to time, surrounded by the swirl and stir and smoke of this new life, June’s former life would come back to her: the look of low-slung clouds as she walked down the block to school; her mother singing the blessing on Friday night, her father’s hands over her head; later, the way her body had melted into Walter’s, and how for a while they would couple over and over, and she would wonder if everyone could see this, in her gingerly walk if nothing else.
When she moved to Las Vegas, she was free of her marriage, free of certain expectations (not just those of others, but also her own)—free of a past she had never fully shouldered. And it was Vegas in the fifties, when it was a small town and a big town, when no one she had ever known would be likely to visit, when a young woman who enjoyed men and adventure and the casual breaking of conventions was something of a community treasure. For a while, this life had been entertaining—entertainment was high on June’s list of values—and when it had become less so, when June started to notice the long, slow slide that some of the older women had embarked on, Del was there waiting. Persistent, loyal, unlikely Del, someone you wouldn’t notice on your first pass through a room, but who lingered in the mind later—who showed up at unlikely moments, and always with the right drink, the right idea, the right equipment for the task—his charms grew on her.
Also, Del had a plan. He was hell-bent on running his own casino, and he knew how to make it happen, and for some reason, June was part of his vision. They would revamp one of the old casinos, right at the center of the Strip. They wouldn’t try to compete with the new places, but their games would be fast; he had a way to run some tables without limits. Certain gamblers looked for these joints. He would talk to June about it, a bit flushed, excited, exposed in a way she never saw him exposed to anyone else. It caught her attention.
Little by little, Del’s dreams became her own. Perhaps Del was right that they could make one of these joints go, perhaps she would be good at it. She knew what people liked, she knew the atmosphere they wanted, she knew what they were trying to escape and what they wanted Vegas to be. This desert, this odd town; maybe they were June’s future too. It wasn’t what she had imagined for herself, but then, what had she imagined? Did lives look sensible if you were outside them, and startling if you were in? Or was it that some people stayed in the groove in which they were born, while others skittered and skipped and slid unexpectedly into a new groove? She, June, was one of those.
June and Del gave the El Capitan everything they had, and by the second year, it was growing faster than their wildest early hopes. Not every tourist was hot on the new carpet joints: the Dunes and the Flami
ngo and the Sands. Some liked the old-time feel of the El Capitan, especially now that she and Del were cleaning it up, now that Eddie Knox was as good as it got when it came to nightclub entertainment. Yes, Eddie. Eddie had made the difference.
She and Del had known what good entertainment would mean—how a really great act could draw people in, create the right buzz—so they had gone to Jackson Street to see who was singing in the clubs. At the Town Tavern, a pretty good singer named Earl Thurman had invited his friend Eddie, just in from Alabama, to join him onstage. And Eddie had come up, soft-shoeing across the floor, and before he had opened his mouth, before a single note came out, he had swung his hip, a small move, in perfect erotic time to the horn behind him, and June’s private parts had clenched, and she had known. Known that Eddie Knox would make them all rich. She grabbed Del’s hand and squeezed. This was it.
And then, the voice.
People started whooping, calling out, a woman stood and lifted her arms above her head; he wasn’t even through the first verse.
After he finished singing, June and Del waited while he was introduced around. June saw the women watching Eddie, noticed that he had his arm around one and was keeping her with him even before he had stopped meeting folks, even while Earl the pretty good singer was back at another tune, and nobody was listening to him, because all the energy in the room—all the hope and buzz and sex—was already around Eddie Knox. That’s the kind of impact he had.
But June and Del were there first. The only white folks in the place. The first in town to hear him. Del said he would like to talk to Eddie. They had a nightclub at El Capitan, they were looking for a regular act; could he stop by the next day? And Eddie said, “Sure, that sounds good,” but June knew he might not come, because he was brand-new to town, he didn’t know the lay of the land, and how could someone like Eddie Knox not know that plenty of offers would come his way, of one sort or another?
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