A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald

by Natasha Lester

  Now Bea laughed. ‘No, I stopped at the theatre and called in a favour from Zalia. She lent me a floor-flushing number the likes of which you’ve never seen!’

  ‘With sequins and feathers to boot?’

  ‘Take a look.’ Bea unfolded a package and Evie couldn’t help but gasp. It was not at all what she was expecting. The dress had a scooped neckline, a fitted bodice and then a full skirt, gathered at the waist so that it billowed as if it had a dozen petticoats beneath it. And it was long, falling to just above Evie’s ankles. The colour was exquisite, a bold blush pink that made Evie’s cheeks glow to match.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘If that doesn’t do the trick, I don’t know what will,’ said Bea.

  Mary and Lucille pronounced her a queen and Leo whistled when he saw her. And Evie had to admit that she felt the tiniest bit excited to be going out in the evening to a party, just as she used to.

  Lil had been right about the New York Herald Tribune’s party being worth attending. It was held in a circus tent in a secret garden off Park Avenue and Sixty-Sixth. Trapeze artists flew overhead, an elephant trumpeted anxiously in one corner, and beautiful girls in sequined leotards rode horses bareback across a stage.

  Evie held onto Lil’s arm as they stepped inside. ‘Stay with me for a while. Just until I find my feet.’

  ‘Let’s have champagne,’ Lil said. ‘Look, Leo’s found some for us.’

  After a while, Evie felt settled enough that she gave Lil permission to go and dance with her husband. As she sat watching the glamorous crowd, she was asked to dance more times than was comfortable, and to save herself from giving too many refusals, she decided to walk around and see the elephant and the girls on horseback. Laughter and snippets of conversation floated past her, none of which caught her attention, until the sight of a woman’s face stopped her in her tracks. It wasn’t until the woman opened her mouth that Evie realised where she’d seen her before. The woman spoke with a haughty English accent and her earrings had been described, once upon a time, as requiring talent to look so cheap. It was Winnie, flapping her gums at a group of people gathered around her as if she belonged in New York. Winnie, the woman who’d kidnapped Thomas at the Egyptian ball.

  Evie could hear her say, ‘He asked me this morning. I was thrilled, of course. He doesn’t have the ring yet because he said he wanted the pleasure of taking me shopping for it. Tommy’s like that.’

  Evie’s heart plummeted out of her chest. Surely Winnie wasn’t talking about Thomas Whitman? And surely she wasn’t talking about an engagement?

  As if answering Evie’s unspoken question, Winnie said, ‘Mrs Thomas Whitman. Doesn’t it sound splendid?’

  Evie reeled. She felt as if she was suffocating, as if the long arm of the past had reached out and taken hold of her throat, reminding her that it wasn’t done with her yet, that it wouldn’t rest until she’d been wrung dry of every last piece of joy and affection she had left.

  Evie spun around. She had to leave. But there in her path, with his back to her but his head turned to the side in conversation, was Thomas. There was the black hair that Evie had once been able to run her hands through, the lips she knew as well as her own. Evie gasped and moved back towards Winnie. She had to get away before Thomas saw her. Without a word of apology, she pushed blindly through the middle of Winnie and her coterie.

  She heard Winnie’s horrified ‘How ill-mannered!’, but she ploughed on, unable to bear seeing Thomas’s face again or to hear Winnie repeat those words: Mrs Thomas Whitman.

  She didn’t try to find Lil and Leo and tell them she was going. Instead she hurried outside, forgetting her coat, and across town to the train. It didn’t occur to her to hail a taxi; instead she needed something familiar and unchanging, something unlikely to bring her any more shocks. For the length of the ride home, Evie stared out the window, ticking off familiar landmarks in order to avoid thinking: the Times Building looking down upon Bryant Park; the grand Hotel McAlpin near Herald Square, with the Turkish baths on the top floor, where society ladies washed off the soot of the city; the beautiful Beaux Arts Siegel-Cooper ‘Big Store’, once the largest store in the world, now another New York casualty, its dreams proving too big for its pockets; the Fourteenth Street Station with the original Macy’s store opposite, which Evie didn’t look at, because she was staring at buildings in order to forget Tommy, not to remember him; and the Jefferson Market Courthouse, which tonight looked more like Rapunzel’s prison than a fairytale palace. It was comforting, almost meditative, the snaking of the train, the blur of the commonplace.

  She walked home from the station in the same state, mesmerised by the everyday, the mundane. She could almost believe she’d heard nothing. When she arrived home, she thanked Bea and said nothing about what had happened. She checked on the girls and found them sleeping soundly, smiling a little as if their dreams were the sweetest. Then she took off the magnificent dress and laid it carefully over a chair. She dropped the wedding ring from her left hand into a dish on the dressing table.

  She stared at it as if seeing it for the first time. It was a plain gold band that she wore to keep herself safe, to keep her daughters safe. She tried to picture Thomas’s hand wearing such a ring, and couldn’t: hands like his deserved something finer, a special commission from Tiffany perhaps. Which Winnie could afford.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered, leaning her head against the door of her wardrobe. She knew the question was unfair. Of course Thomas would get married. But it had taken so long that she’d half hoped he was, inexplicably, still waiting for her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  She could tell from Lil and Leo’s faces when she dropped all the girls off the next morning that they’d heard about Thomas’s engagement.

  ‘I tried to talk to him,’ Lil said. ‘But he had so many people around him that I didn’t even have a chance to say hello.’

  Mary interrupted. ‘When can we go to a party, Mama?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling,’ Evie equivocated.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Lil asked.

  Evie looked at her friend. ‘There’s nothing I can do. He’s getting married.’

  Lil met Evie’s stare. ‘He’s not married yet.’

  ‘I have to go.’ Evie kissed the girls and left.

  But once she was on the train she could no longer equivocate. Mary’s question echoed in her mind. It was a fair one. When would Evie take her children out into the world? No matter how much the realisation hurt her, it was as clear as the shriek of the wheels on the El as it took the sharp corner at Fifty-Third that it was time to put Thomas behind her. To stop simply pretending she had. To live a real life, not one where she was always tiptoeing around, staying close to Greenwich Village, avoiding half the city in case she ran into Thomas. He was getting married, he had moved on. Despite what Lil said, there was nothing Evie could do about it.

  After a year and a half of secrets and stories and lies, maybe it was time to let go.

  When Evie left the hospital that afternoon, she decided to test her nerve. It was only four o’clock. She could take the girls to Central Park, somewhere Lucille had never been.

  She picked them up from Lil’s and they caught the train to the park. Mary threw the ball for Lucille, who tried to run, but tumbled and rolled after it, like a little ball herself. Evie sat on a bench and watched, then she joined in the fun, chasing the girls and catching and tickling them until they were giggling and gasping for air. Soon it was time to pick up the ball, pick up Lucille, hold Mary’s hand and walk back to the station. On a whim, Evie decided to exit the park at the Arsenal and walk down Fifth to the corner opposite the Plaza Hotel. When she saw its elegant facade, she touched her lips and could almost feel, across the years, Thomas’s lips on hers the first time they’d kissed, inside the Plaza.

  Why was she doing this to herself, picking the scabs off unhealed wounds and watching them bleed like the tears that were dripping unchecked down her cheeks
?

  ‘Evie?’

  Evie wiped her face, whirled around and blanched. ‘Mrs Whitman.’ Oh God.

  ‘How are you?’ Mrs Whitman asked politely, the way she used to speak to Evie’s parents, as if the conversation would be tolerated, but was not welcome.

  ‘Well. And you?’ Evie stammered, feeling so guilty for the way she’d cut Mrs Whitman out of her life, knowing she didn’t even deserve the formalities they were exchanging.

  ‘I’m well also.’

  Mrs Whitman’s eyes swept over Lucille in Evie’s arms and Mary at her side, and Evie began to babble, anything to fend off the questions that would be sure to come. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your letters. And sorry not to have made time to see you. The internship and then the residency took up all of my time and by evening I’m exhausted …’

  ‘Who are these delightful children?’ Mrs Whitman’s question came at the same time as Mary said, ‘Mama, I’m tired,’ leaving Evie no option to pass them off as Lil’s, whether she wanted to or not.

  ‘I adopted them,’ Evie said. That was true of Mary, but what of Lucille? She floundered on. ‘Their mother was one of my patients. She died in childbirth. I wanted to help.’

  Mrs Whitman frowned. ‘I thought one had to be married in order to adopt a child.’

  Evie looked away. She was ashamed, more ashamed than she’d ever felt at Ziegfeld’s when most of her body was on show but everything about her was honest. She couldn’t tell her story of a dead husband to Mrs Whitman, couldn’t tell that last terrible lie to someone who’d been like a mother to Evie when she’d most needed it. Then she remembered. ‘Congratulations,’ she said.

  ‘Congratulations?’

  ‘For Thomas and Winnie.’ She forced out the words. ‘I understand congratulations are in order.’

  ‘Perhaps they are.’ Mrs Whitman reached out a hand slowly, as if she was afraid of how it might feel, to tuck one of Lucille’s spirited blonde curls behind her ear. ‘It’s astonishing how much an adopted child can look like you,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s just because we both have blonde hair. That’s all. If she was dark –’ Evie could have bitten off her tongue. Why did she say that? Thomas was dark. ‘People see what they want to see,’ she added formally, hating herself for the way she sounded.

  ‘Or what they’re forced to see. I won’t keep you any longer.’ Mrs Whitman’s eyes glimmered suspiciously but she kept her gaze fixed on Lucille.

  Evie almost ran, she was so eager to get away. But she could only go as fast as Mary’s short legs would allow. She didn’t even know what she was running from, other than the thought: would Mrs Whitman tell Thomas about the children? And what would he think of Evie if she did?

  When they got home, Evie lit the fire. She let the girls sit on the hearthrug and watch the flames while they ate steaming bowls of soup. Then they asked for a story and Evie began to recite ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’. But as she neared the end, she remembered that both the soldier and the ballerina were burned in a fire, dying together, with only a spangle and a tin heart left behind in the ashes. She decided that the girls were too young to learn that love always ended in disaster, so instead she told them that the soldier and ballerina were eventually found by a little girl, who took them home.

  After the story, Evie scooped up both girls and jumped in the bathtub with them; Lucille usually splashed around so much water that Evie ended up soaked anyway. The two girls raced their rubber ducks up and down until it was time to be rubbed dry, cuddled into warm pyjamas and tucked into bed.

  Mary always liked to stroke Lucille’s hand between the bars of the cot before she hopped into her own bed right beside it. Evie watched the little ritual, smiling at the fierce affection Mary always showed for her baby sister. She kissed them both. ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too, Mama,’ said Mary.

  ‘Ma-ma-bub-bub-mar-mar,’ came from Lucille.

  Evie turned off their bedroom light. She tidied away the remains of dinner, ensuring every crumb was swept from the hearthrug, every speck of chicken broth scrubbed from the bowls, that the glasses were dry and sparkling. She ironed the girls’ dresses for the morning, got out everything she’d need for breakfast, and brushed the dirt off Mary and Lucille’s matching black patent Mary Janes. She swept up the mud from the step in the hallway. She took out her clothes for the next day. She peeked into the girls’ bedroom to make sure they were asleep.

  There were no more jobs to do. Evie poured herself a brandy, in the one glass she had that was up to the task. It was from a Karl Palda set that Mr Childers had given her as a congratulatory gift at her commencement ceremony, and it had striking black triangles of enamel etched into the glass. As she drank, it no longer seemed possible that she was old enough to have two children or that she was alone and raising them by herself; instead she dreamed that she was wearing a backless black dress of silk jersey and one long strand of jet beads, holding her glass and dancing with Tommy, lips nearly touching, united in the erotic delight of the tango. But one look in the mirror told her otherwise.

  She telephoned Bea. ‘I need somebody to drink with.’

  ‘Gimme ten.’

  True to her word, Bea arrived ten minutes later, bearing more brandy and a package for Evie. ‘Thought that might cheer you up. It’s from the store,’ Bea said, nodding at the parcel, which contained a pair of black silk chiffon knickers trimmed with alternating bands of ivory lace, and a matching slip.

  Evie couldn’t help laughing as she sank into a chair. ‘What am I going to do with these?’

  ‘See, that’s a question someone as young and pretty as you shouldn’t be asking.’ Bea lit a cigarette and offered one to Evie, who shook her head.

  ‘I saw in the paper that your fella’s going to be taking a stroll down the middle aisle,’ Bea said, filling up Evie’s glass, as if brandy was the only way to medicate a broken heart.

  ‘He’s not my fella. He’s Winnie’s fella, apparently.’ Evie’s voice was wooden.

  ‘You know, the worst is over. You got away with it. Half the shopkeepers in the Village could probably describe your make-believe dead husband because they think they met him sometime. That’s how stories work. People hear them and they become real. All you are now is another Village eccentric. You’re the crazy obstetrician lady who the fella at Zito’s gives an extra loaf of bread to because your poor children must miss their father.’

  Evie shook her head. ‘So?’

  ‘So if Thomas still loves you and you still love him you could just about make it work. You’re not pregnant. You’re a saint for adopting Mary. Maybe Lucille’s adopted too. You’re a widow. Okay, so you’re still a crazy obstetrician, but that’s the worst of it. Maybe he could weather that.’

  ‘I could never lie to him about Lucille.’

  ‘So tell him the goddamn truth,’ Bea said with irritation. ‘Doesn’t he deserve to know, before he marries someone else, that he has a child?’

  ‘He told me once that he would never abandon a mother and child. I don’t want him to be with me just because we have a daughter. I want him to be with me because he loves me. And I don’t know if he does. He never came looking for me when he got back from London.’

  ‘You can’t expect him to chase after you every time you decide to run away,’ Bea chastised. ‘You took off after the ball with no explanation but he didn’t stop searching until he found you. Maybe he wanted to see how hard you were willing to fight to make it work this time. And you’ll never know how he feels unless you go see him. Are you brave enough?’

  Evie stared down at her glass. ‘I don’t know. I used to be. But now –’

  ‘This is it, kiddo. Last chance. Once he’s married it’s finished. Isn’t the chance to be with him worth the risk?’

  Evie finally looked up at her friend. ‘But if he turned me away, I don’t think I could survive losing him all over again.’

  Evie’s dreams that night were more vivid than usual
, as if every memory was lit up in Broadway neon. Thomas and Evie sipping whiskey in an apple tree while he helped her to see that she could do more than fritter her life away on embroidery. Thomas and Evie walking arm in arm into the Vanderbilt mansion to see a woman wearing a chandelier. Thomas and Evie eating pretzels one night, running hand in hand to catch the late show at the movies, kissing for the first time at the Plaza Hotel. Evie undoing the buttons of his shirt so she could place her palms on his chest. Thomas drying her hair after a bath in Newport, Thomas saying those words that hadn’t come true: I’ll marry you when I get back, Evie Lockhart. Then Lucille’s face, so like Thomas’s, pressed against his, cheek to cheek, the child held in her father’s arms. A memory that hadn’t happened. A memory that might never happen unless she did something, now.

  Evie woke with a start. The images fell away but the urgency she’d felt in her dream stayed with her, forcing her to get out of bed even though it was only five o’clock in the morning. She bathed and dressed as quietly as she could so as not to wake the children. Then she drank three cups of coffee while she waited for Mary and Lucille to stir.

  It seemed to take forever to feed them breakfast and help them dress, but Evie smiled and chatted throughout, telling herself to remain patient; it wasn’t their fault she was so jittery. Finally they were ready and they walked to Lil’s, with the inevitable stop outside Grove Court, even though she tried to hurry them along.

  When they reached Lil’s at last, Evie raced through the door and kissed Lil on both cheeks. ‘I might be a bit later tonight. I’m going to see Thomas after work,’ she blurted. ‘I can’t talk about it, because I can hardly dare to even think about it. So don’t ask me any questions. I have to go.’ She kissed the girls and fled for the train.