A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald

by Natasha Lester

  At about six o’clock Lil appeared. ‘I see you’ve been inducted into the life of a single girl in the city,’ she said, nodding at the curling iron, still dressed in its rubber raincoat. ‘I’ve just rented us the attic room.’

  A cheer erupted from Evie and the two other girls in the room, Antonia and Betty, who were kindly sharing their cigarettes and gin. The gin was making them all so loud that the dreaded Mrs Lomsky soon appeared.

  ‘I rent my rooms to quiet girls,’ she said, staring at Evie, who had moved quickly and desperately to stand in front of the curling iron.

  ‘I’m ordinarily very quiet,’ Evie said. ‘I just got a little excited about moving into this wonderful boarding house.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Mrs Lomsky gave Evie a nod of approval, ‘I like a girl who appreciates what she has. Just make sure you keep it down.’

  All of the girls were silent until the door closed and the sound of Mrs Lomsky’s footsteps had faded, and then the laughter began, muffled by hands over mouths, but no less infectious for being stifled.

  ‘“I just got a little excited about moving into this wonderful boarding house”,’ Lil mimicked, and they all began to laugh again. ‘You sure got Mrs Lomsky on side. Which will come in handy, mark my words. Shall we get all this upstairs?’

  The girls swung into action, carrying up Lil’s dresses, gramophone and the all-important liquor stash. Lil didn’t own a lot and Evie had just one suitcase, so it didn’t take long until they were all moved in.

  ‘Evie!’ Evie heard her name relayed up the stairs, from the first floor to the second, onto the third and finally up to the attic room. There was someone downstairs to see her.

  It was Mrs Whitman, with a letter in hand. ‘This came for you by special courier. I thought you’d want to see it right away.’

  Evie was both pleased and apprehensive at the sight of Mrs Whitman and the envelope, on which were embossed the words Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. The paper was creamy and thick; it even smelled important. She pushed her finger under the seal. ‘Do you know what it says?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

  Mrs Whitman shook her head.

  Evie took out the letter, her good mood vanished. What if the college still refused to admit her? She began to read.

  Dear Miss Lockhart,

  Please be advised that your application for admission to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons has been accepted, conditionally.

  The conditions of your acceptance are such: that you will not, for the time of your association with the college, behave in such a way that would bring the college into disrepute. Should such behaviour occur, your place at the college will be withdrawn immediately.

  Please send notice of your acceptance of these conditions within seven days.

  ‘They said yes! Oh God, they said yes!’ Evie’s relief was so acute she thought it might bowl her over. ‘I did it! Or, rather, you did it. I’m going to be a doctor.’

  ‘You were the only one who ever doubted it, my dear.’ Mrs Whitman smiled at her.

  ‘Thank you for everything, and for bringing the letter. I didn’t expect you to come all the way downtown.’

  ‘But then I would have missed seeing how happy you are. It’s a more than satisfactory reward for the very little effort required to have the driver bring me here.’

  Then Evie remembered why she was standing on the steps of a boarding house in Greenwich Village and not in the Whitmans’ parlour. ‘Did my parents say anything when they found my note?’

  ‘Very little to me,’ Mrs Whitman replied diplomatically. ‘I can take a letter back with me if you want to write one now.’

  Evie shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think I will. I might just enjoy this moment and celebrate.’

  ‘I’ll forward Thomas’s letters here until you write to him with your new address.’

  Evie blushed. ‘Thank you.’

  Mrs Whitman sighed. ‘All the subterfuge of the last few weeks has kept me feeling much younger and more entertained than I’ve felt in years. I’ll miss having you in the house, but coming down here is the best thing for you. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the woman you’ll become. Now, kiss me before we both end up blubbering on the steps.’

  Evie threw her arms around Mrs Whitman and hugged her as hard as she could. She waved until the car was out of sight and then she walked up to Bleecker Street, to Mandaro’s, and purchased a supper of cheeses, just as she’d promised herself she would.

  When she arrived back to the grandeur of their attic room, Lil had found a bottle of wine from who knew where and they sat on the bed together eating cheese and drinking wine. When she couldn’t eat any more, Evie took a deep breath. ‘I need a job. College is five hundred dollars a year. That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘You know the average wage is twenty-five dollars a week.’

  ‘Twenty-five dollars?’ Evie was dismayed. ‘But I need to put aside at least fifteen dollars a week to cover college costs, then there’s food and board and getting around. And I can’t work during the day – I have lectures to go to. What kind of job will pay better than the average wage for skills I probably don’t possess?’

  But Lil had an answer for every problem. ‘You could get a job that pays you for skills you hadn’t considered.’

  ‘What skills?’ Evie asked warily.

  ‘Aside from the women who make work out of pleasure, there’s only one way I know to earn a whole lot of cash after hours. Can you sing?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Lil rolled her eyes. ‘Open your mouth and tweet like a canary.’

  Evie laughed and thanked God for Lil, who always made her feel better. ‘Actually, I sing quite well.’

  ‘Ever heard of the Ziegfeld Follies? Land yourself a gig as a Ziegfeld Girl and you’ll get some decent mazuma. Fifty dollars a week.’

  ‘Fifty dollars!’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Just to sing and dance? I don’t believe you.’

  It was Lil’s turn to laugh. ‘Yes, Evie. Fifty dollars a week just to sing and dance. Hell, if that’s all it took, I’d be doing it too.’

  Evie took a large swallow of wine while Lil continued. ‘Ziegfeld’s auditioning to find one hundred girls for this year’s Follies. Trouble is, two thousand blonde hopefuls from Kansas’ll turn up with a set of gams longer than any country girl’s life in show business. The fellas like a lady with Ziegfeld’s approval branded on her butt – she’s a glorious American girl. So long as you’re a perfect 36-28-38 – which you look like you are – and you don’t mind wearing fewer clothes than a visitor to Coney Island, you’ve got a chance.’

  ‘How few clothes are we talking about?’

  ‘Most of the girls get to keep their bubs and duds covered, but some of them like to give their perfect thirty-sixers an audience. But that’s only in the Midnight Frolic. We’re aiming for the Follies. The least you’ll wear is a corset.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better? No one, besides the maid, has ever seen me in just a corset.’

  ‘Evie, you’re gorgeous. Make a quick buck out of it while you can. Think of the money you need and it’ll be worth a few men ogling your chassis.’

  There were so many objections in Evie’s mind that she didn’t know which to voice first. ‘But I’m not a performer.’

  ‘You don’t have to be a performer to be in the chorus. The stars sing and dance. The chorus girls strut. The only skill you need is deportment. And fine ladies like us have that in spades. Ziegfeld chooses girls for their face and their figure. He trains them to do the rest. You’re a prop on the stage. Window dressing – or undressing as the case may be.’ Lil laughed.

  ‘I wish there was some other way …’

  ‘Besides selling yourself, I can’t think of another way to get the dollars you need from only working nights.’

  Lil was bold and brave and Evie wanted to be like that too. She wanted to stop feeling like a naughty child who’d
soon be dragged home and scolded by her mother. She wanted to believe that she was the kind of woman who could go to medical college and pay for it herself. Besides, the wine had gone to her head, as had the bugles calling from the gramophone. ‘When are the auditions?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘So me and two thousand others are heading to Broadway on Friday. There are a lot of ifs and maybes in this plan, Lil.’

  ‘Just like in life.’

  Over the next two days, Evie did her homework. She found out everything she could about the Ziegfeld Follies and the infamous girls who worked there. For the auditions, she borrowed from Lil a demure ensemble of a white silk-chiffon blouse with cap sleeves, a strand of pearls, and a white cloche hat with navy trim. She’d discovered that while a Ziegfeld Girl might put herself on show in the theatre, outside the doors Ziegfeld expected her to be a paragon of late-nineteenth-century respectability. Evie found the hypocrisy momentarily difficult to digest, but for fifty dollars a week she thought she could probably manage the dissimulation.

  On Friday morning, Lil kissed her cheeks and told her to break a leg.

  ‘At the very least, I’ll damage my pride,’ Evie replied with a nervous smile. ‘I still can’t believe I’m doing this. From not knowing what rubber goods were at the start of the week, to auditioning to be a showgirl at the end of it, I think we can safely say I’m now a New York girl.’

  Off she went to the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street, between Seventh and Eighth. The building wore a curved facade and it stood like a regimental soldier above its far shorter and less elegant neighbours. Inside, it looked like an expensive hotel. The ceiling was an Art Nouveau fairyland onto which scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been transposed in iridescent silver, pink and gold, elegant colours that made the red velvet chairs of other theatres seem tawdry by comparison. Across the proscenium, a line of peacocks preened in a relief that continued around to the cantilevered balconies, which hung seemingly without support, suspended only by applause and ovations. Each box was adorned with flower reliefs – buttercups, goldenrod, violets – garlands of glamour, outshone only by the furs and jewels of the audience ordinarily seated within. At the centre of it all was a sweeping staircase begging for a grand entrance.

  But today there were too many beauties. Blondes, brunettes, redheads with hair the colour of toffee apples, all with legs as long as skyscrapers and figures as curvaceous as the Shimmy Queen’s. Girl after girl took to the stage, most of whom quickly found out that even a gilded staircase couldn’t make exits with dashed hopes any less distressing. And there was still a long line ahead of Evie and a long line behind.

  Then, at four o’clock, before Evie had even had the chance to meet him, Ziegfeld stepped on stage and announced that it was over. He’d seen enough. He had his girls.

  If Evie had thought the room couldn’t handle any more drama, she was wrong. Hundreds of girls who, like Evie, hadn’t yet auditioned broke out in histrionics. So much wailing and desperation. So much melodrama. Their shoulders slumped and they began to leave the theatre, giving up all too easily.

  Not Evie. She needed this job. Without the Follies, she couldn’t afford to go to medical school and she’d have to suffer the mortification of returning to Concord, which she wasn’t prepared to do. She remembered the stories she’d read about Ziegfeld. Apocryphal or not, there were enough of them to make her hope they were true. According to legend, if Ziegfeld saw a girl he liked in an elevator, he chased after her. If he saw a girl he wanted crossing the street, he got her. He could always have more girls. And Evie hadn’t grown up in a Kansas cornfield. She’d been in the drawing rooms of wealthy men, the kind of men who patronised Ziegfeld’s. She could offer him something different to what he already had.

  So she shouldered her way through the sobbing girls, stepping on a few toes. She climbed the stairs to the stage, stood beside Ziegfeld and began to sing – ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’ – as if she had had any experience of having her heart broken by a man fooling around with another gal. But she pretended she did. She thought of Charles and how he’d once been her pal and how she now knew he wasn’t a good man. She was counting on the fact that, even though Lil said the chorus didn’t need to be top-class singers and dancers, Ziegfeld would recognise a good voice when he heard one. He could still take her. If he wanted her enough.

  Ziegfeld let her sing right to the end. Then he just stared at her, as did all the other girls.

  Although she was dying of embarrassment inside, Evie let him look. She kept her chin up and pretended she was at a party at the Whitmans’, surrounded by men who were made of money.

  At last Ziegfeld spoke. ‘Join the rehearsals. Keep hold of that upper-class, I’m-better-than-you thing you’ve got going on and you’ll have men feeding you gems like they’re chocolates.’

  Evie kept her excitement to herself until she left the theatre; then, unable to contain herself, she spun around on the street. She’d done it. In two weeks she’d start medical school. And to top it all off, she was now a Ziegfeld Girl.

  Chapter Eleven

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1925

  ‘Given that I possess one, I think I have a more intimate knowledge of the vagina than any man could ever lay claim to. That should make me well qualified to be an obstetrician,’ Evie said.

  It was lucky she’d been trained in resuscitation, because Dr Kingsley looked as if he was about to have a fit right before her eyes. His face was redder than a whore’s knickers and his cheeks puffed in and out, making him look like one of his birthing mothers would if only he didn’t knock them out as soon as they began to make a bit of noise. But Evie had had enough. Two and a half years of swallowing her words meant there was no room inside for any more. And now that she’d opened her mouth, even Evie couldn’t believe what came pouring out.

  ‘If you continue to speak in that manner, Miss Lockhart, you’ll no longer have a place at this college,’ Dr Kingsley huffed.

  ‘All the other students have assisted with a delivery. I’m the only one who isn’t allowed to do anything more than watch from the side of the room. You’re supposed to be teaching me.’

  ‘I’m teaching the students who show the most skill.’

  ‘At what? It can’t be at being a doctor, because my grades are better than theirs.’

  ‘They’re better at being a doctor in a hospital setting,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Oh, you mean being a man. The only obvious difference between the other students and me, apart from their inferior grades, is what they’re carrying between their legs.’ Evie snapped her mouth shut. The years of study, hard work, daily abuse and no sleep would end right there if she said another word.

  The clash had begun as a whispered exchange across the main desk of the Sloane Hospital for Women, where Dr Kingsley had been seated, alternating between sucking on a cigarette and slurping the second of his five-a-day Coca-Cola habit. He’d been smiling, pleased at the joke he’d made to the students about a patient who was so modest it was a miracle she’d opened her legs long enough to let a baby inside in the first place. Where would they be without scopolamine? he’d laughed. Still prising the lady’s legs open with a vice. And then Dr Kingsley had had the gall to blame the woman’s modesty for the fact that he’d overlooked the size of her pelvis. The baby’s head had been too large and the patient’s pelvis had snapped in two. Evie had told Dr Kingsley that it certainly wasn’t the woman’s fault. He’d replied that Evie wasn’t qualified to have an opinion. And so it went on, louder and louder, until Dr Kingsley stood and shouted at her, ‘Start doing rounds immediately!’

  Now the other students, the interns and the residents were all watching, parties to a tactic that Evie had thought would end after her first year of studies. When it didn’t, she’d accepted that it might continue into her second year. But for everyone to still be trying so hard to keep her away from the obstetrics patients in her final year of studies was disgraceful. And she felt her damned mo
uth open again before she could stop it.

  ‘Besides,’ Evie said, ‘most men have never even seen a vagina. Their only experience of one is via their penis, which, according to Gray’s Anatomy, doesn’t have eyes. They go about the business of lovemaking with their eyes closed so they can thrust away and pretend their wife is the blonde who sold them a bottle of perfume at Saks.’

  One of the interns snorted back a laugh, and that did it. Dr Kingsley slammed his fist on the desk, making his cola bottle tip and land on the floor, spilling brown syrup all over his shoe. He kicked the bottle against the wall. The echo of smashing glass rang on and on, the only sound in the now-silent ward.

  Evie knew nobody would defend her. The nurses didn’t speak to her unless they had to; they thought she should have been one of them. She had no friends at college; of the two other women in her year group, one had quit because of the constant browbeating, and the other thought Evie should take her medical degree to the peace and quiet of the decorous-in-comparison-to-obstetrics pathology lab.

  Dr Kingsley leaned right in to Evie, using that typical trick of a man at his wits’ end – threatening her with his physical size and strength. ‘I’m reporting you to Dr Brewer,’ and off he waddled, his overindulged bulk bouncing furiously.

  Evie walked away to the wards, hoping to God she wasn’t about to be shipped off to Bellevue Hospital to assist with the bruises and lacerations of the alcoholic homeless. She’d learned a lot in the past couple of years, including how to tame her mouth, so why the hell had she let it run off like a virgin at a petting party? Her behaviour for the rest of the morning would be faultless, she vowed. She’d keep her eyes down, her mouth shut, stay out of Kingsley’s way and hope Dr Brewer, the hospital director, was in a benevolent mood.

  The first room she came to was private. It was occupied by the woman whose legs hadn’t opened to Dr Kingsley’s satisfaction until she’d been sedated. Evie had been sitting with the woman and encouraging her to relax and to breathe through her labour until Dr Kingsley appeared and reassigned Evie to a space along the wall to view yet another birth, while a student on his first obstetrics rotation was asked to step up and assist.