The Girls at the Kingfisher Club

by Genevieve Valentine

  Jo was already scanning the crowd, looking for Tom, dreading it.

  He was a consummate host, at least—two breaths after she’d started looking, he was already out of the shadows and moving through the crowd to meet them, wearing a slightly awed expression at the pileup on his stairs.

  “Ladies,” he said, including them all with the word. “Welcome to the Marquee. I didn’t know you were coming”—he glanced at Jo—“so there’s nothing reserved for you tonight, but I’ll get you settled in with something that I hope will be all right, and then we’ll see about drinks. You must be thirsty. Henry at the bar will be happy to help you.”

  Hattie and Mattie moved to keep pace with him, and the others followed. Jo hung back and let them go. Rebecca called it “sheep counting,” and it wasn’t far off, but it wasn’t hard to lose one in the shuffle; best to make sure everyone was safe inside before they scattered.

  (Once the sisters hit the dance floor, all bets were off.)

  Lou was last, and she stopped next to Jo long enough to pluck her cigarette holder out of her mouth.

  “You meet the nicest people in the clink, Jo. I should have figured something was up. Were you planning to hit the road with him in your fancy frock after the party?”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’d look very good in my fancy frock,” said Jo, and moved to catch up with the rest.

  There were two empty tables on a mezzanine just off the dance floor, and with the materialization of a few extra chairs, there was enough space for them all.

  Within seconds, the younger girls had strapped on their shoes; before the older girls even had a chance to fasten their buckles, the first tray of champagne was being delivered. Henry, the young man behind the bar whom Tom had pointed out, had bleached out his hair stone-white, and when he looked over, Jo watched his pale head pause, counting them.

  The Marquee was a sharper establishment than the Kingfisher. Besides the waiters moving back and forth behind the bar, the wood floor was polished and the red curtains newly made. It was half as large as any other place they’d been, except maybe Salon Renaud.

  Jo guessed that Tom’s deal with the police meant he could afford to spread out a little.

  The space allowed for tables and chairs tucked off the dance floor, in front of the mezzanine, where a stray kick could knock a glass off the table and into someone’s waiting arms. That was another good sign; you had to trust your clientele to arrange things this way. There would be some decent dancing here.

  There were already two hundred people milling around, maybe more. Jo wondered how they ever heard of a place like this when there wasn’t even a street number to mark it, when you had to count stoops and knock on a plain red door and say “Curtain up” to the man who answered before you could go through the second door and down the stairs into the dance hall. It felt like a place she would have liked to know about a long time ago.

  From beside her, Tom said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

  She thought Tom had a bad habit of standing too close to her; she had a bad habit of letting him.

  “It’s lovely,” she said instead. “How long have you had it, did you say?”

  It was strange, thinking that he’d been so close to her for so long.

  He shrugged. “I’ve had it almost two years, but it hasn’t been open long. I had the deed, but I had to shake a lot of hands before I had the safety to open up shop, and then I had to get up the nerve to open it and declare myself a businessman.”

  Jo remembered one or two nights when Tom had shown up with his hands shaking and his face drawn, and had pulled her onto the dance floor without a word, as if he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he’d tell her what had happened and frighten them both.

  Whatever it was he’d been hiding, Jo suspected he had been paying for it for the last eight years.

  A waltz was playing, and most of the girls were out on the floor with blissful-looking men who held them as if they were porcelain.

  Sophie and Lily were dancing together, and Doris was waiting it out at the bar, laughing with the bartender and casually spinning a highball glass that had appeared in front of her.

  When Jo looked at Tom, he was watching the flow of the room, quietly satisfied, a smile flickering over his face.

  She knew that expression. It worried her.

  • • •

  The night she met him, he’d been unloading barrels into the Kingfisher’s cellar under Jake’s orders.

  He wasn’t much older than Jo, and he wasn’t carrying a gun or making a nuisance of himself to Jake, but still, Jo kept an eye on him all night. (There was something about him she didn’t understand; she couldn’t help looking over.)

  When there were no more barrels, he’d come back inside, looked around for a girl to dance with, and immediately seen Ella at the bar.

  Jo moved closer—Ella could handle herself, but you never knew when there could be trouble.

  He came up to Ella smiling, gestured at the dance floor as he spoke. Ella ran her finger around the rim of her glass, which meant she wasn’t interested.

  Jo decided to cut in before this went farther. Some men had a bad habit of staying interested in Ella long after Ella was tired of them.

  “I promise not to step on you—I only look like a clodhopper,” he was saying when Jo reached them. He winked at Ella, who glanced away and blinked, as if surprised that he’d come so close to guessing what she thought.

  Jo slid up to the bar behind her sister, planted a stiff arm on the ledge, and raised an eyebrow at him.

  He glanced up and saw her.

  She expected him to blanch, or bristle, or pretend he’d just forgotten someplace else he had to be. A lot of men did that, when they realized that the girl they thought was alone had brought friends to look out for her.

  But instead he only said, “Oh,” softly, his smile so wide and earnest that crows’-feet appeared at the edges of his eyes; he smiled as though she was an old friend, as though he had been waiting for Jo a long time and was delighted to see her at last.

  “Or I can dance with you,” he said to Jo, “if you’d rather. This is too nice a foxtrot to waste, is all.”

  It was a joke they were sharing, somehow, and she smiled without meaning to.

  (She could have told him he was wasting his time with Ella. Ella liked matinee idols, and he was too lived-in; there was a little stubborn sawdust still clinging to his jacket, a little distinction lacking in the line of his jaw.)

  “I promise I’m not as dull as I look,” he told Jo, half-laughing. He ran a hand through his sandy hair; when he smiled, his eyes turned into crescents.

  Jo gave Ella the go sign. Ella flashed a grateful smile and disappeared into the crowd.

  He didn’t turn to watch her go.

  Jo wanted to tell him he was wasting his time. They came out to dance, not to make goofy eyes at young men. If he was looking for a girl like that among them, he could hit the road.

  But he was still smiling, soft eyed, like she was a welcome friend.

  (It made her feel as though she was really his choice; it was the first time she’d felt that way.)

  And what Jo said instead was, “So let’s dance.”

  He smiled wider, and it was just like the first time she had seen people dancing when she was a girl, just like the first time she and Lou had crept into the movies, and her heart turned over.

  They danced almost every dance, all night; turned out he wasn’t very good at the breakaway, so they sat those out at the bar.

  (It was the only time they sat at the bar. She felt too exposed, she could hardly see the dance floor, and she worried about her sisters seeing them together. That was her first hint, later, that things had gone too far.)

  “You can dance it with someone else if you’d rather,” he said. “Not fair to make you sit just because I can’t figu
re out how to do it.”

  She didn’t know how to explain that it was all wonderful even if she was sitting out, that she had as much happiness watching her sisters dance as she did dancing herself. There was no point, anyway, even if she’d had the words. It wasn’t as though she could tell him a thing. She had sisters to think about.

  “It’s all right,” she said, “I never figured out how to do this one without losing a shoe,” and he laughed.

  She caught him looking at her a lot that night, in a way she wasn’t used to seeing. A lot of gents looked at you a certain way when they were guessing their chances for a kiss (zero), but this wasn’t it.

  He watched her like he had come home after a long absence and had missed her most of all.

  • • •

  “You made a good trade from Chicago,” she said. “This place is really something.”

  Tom nodded without demurring or boasting. After a moment, his gaze dropped to her shoes, and he frowned.

  “The next dance is a foxtrot, if you’d like to?”

  Jo was a little ashamed that the question could still surprise her.

  It was the Charleston now, and in the middle of the floor Hattie and Mattie were holding court, their silver shoes a blur moving in time to the trumpets, bracelets sparkling as they threw their hands into the air.

  “We’ll see,” she said. Then, “What brought you back from Chicago?”

  He shrugged, tried a smile. “There’s only so much you can do in a city like that. I did it all. I wanted something a little quieter in my dotage.”

  “And that’s New York?”

  He laughed. “You ever been to Chicago?”

  “No.”

  Something about the way she said it must have struck him, because he didn’t ask why not.

  They stood side by side looking out at the dance floor, the only people in the place standing still.

  Doris and her partner were pressed cheek to cheek, popping up and down on their toes. Lou was tapping a rhythm on the floor with her free foot, her arm curled around her partner’s back; Hattie and Mattie skipped side by side, laughing brightly, white teeth behind red lips.

  Dancing was the only time any of them ever really smiled. They were never alive until the music was shaking the floor under their feet.

  She wondered, sometimes, if they would still have been this way if they’d had a world of freedoms, or if she had sculpted them as surely as their father had.

  The first, she hoped; she hoped desperately.

  The band finished with a last bright chord, and the place applauded (either for the band or for the twins), and laughter swelled up in pockets from the dance floor, the buzz of a satisfied crowd.

  The next dance was a foxtrot after all. Tom had the band well trained.

  Jo knew better than to say yes; she knew how bad an idea it was to dance with him after so long. She had stopped dancing because it so easily overwhelmed her. What would happen to her if she agreed now, and danced with him after eight years? Did she even remember how, or had her feet rusted over?

  What would the others think, to see her dancing after so long?

  The singer stepped up to the microphone and sang the first bars of “Forgetting You.” There was scattered applause, and then the shuffle of finding pairs. Doris was in a corner begging off, but Ella and Violet and Sophie and Rose were being scooped up by ecstatic young men and being absorbed into the crowd.

  A gentleman at a table on the floor smothered a yawn. It was getting late. Soon the night would be gone.

  When Jo looked over, Tom was watching her. She got the feeling he’d been watching her for a long time, and she tried not to flush. She was too old for it.

  “So let’s dance,” she said.

  twelve

  If You Hadn't Gone Away

  On the dance floor, Jo had a heart-stopping moment of worry that she really had forgotten how to dance.

  Her shoes didn’t quite fit (catalog shoes never did). Her dress was too long and too old. She had put on some perfume without examining why, but it had gone sharp in the bottle in the last year or two, and now she smelled too much of bergamot.

  This was a terrible idea.

  She opened her mouth to say she’d changed her mind, but he was already standing in front of her, and his arm was already around her, and he was looking at her with the same smile she remembered.

  She slid her hand into his waiting one, and they were dancing.

  He was a careful dancer; without falling behind the beat, he still took his time. It was a rare thing. More often than you could bear, you raced around the floor trying to keep up with a leader who forgot a dance required a partner.

  Not Tom. Tom moved around the line of dance with measured steps, never bumping another couple even on the packed floor, and though he kept an eye on the crowd, she still felt his gaze every now and then.

  When she’d first met him, that night he was giving Ella the eye, she’d tried to dismiss him as fickle, as reckless. Then she’d danced with him.

  That was her first mistake.

  This was a close second.

  Tonight he smelled faintly of smoke. She closed her eyes and fought the urge to rest her forehead on his cheek, or lower her head to his shoulder, where his lapel trapped the remnants of his cologne. (He’d never worn cologne on his neck; it was aggressive to a partner’s nose. He wore it on the skin under the right side of his collar. Jo remembered just where. She could have rested her fingertip over the spot.)

  She wondered if everyone was so marked by what they did. Maybe, despite any perfume she’d ever put on, she smelled like a dusty book locked up too long.

  “Your friends are looking,” Tom said.

  She didn’t open her eyes. If she thought about them, the dance was over. She’d deal with it after the song.

  “I don’t dance much,” she said, half an explanation.

  He made a wondering noise that hummed through her hand on his shoulder. “That’s surprising. You really cut a rug, back when I knew you.”

  When he’d known her, she was younger, and barely taking charge. When he’d known her, only four of them were going out to dance.

  When he’d known her, her fawn and purple dress was just coming into style.

  (Then, Tom had smelled like sawdust and asked her to leave everything, and she might have. No telling.

  She tried not to think about it.)

  “People change,” she said.

  She must have sounded sad, because he didn’t answer; he only curled his fingers around her fingers, wrapped his arm tighter around her.

  She must have been sad, because when he pulled her closer she sighed into his neck, tilted her forehead until it rested on his jaw.

  The hem of her dress swung gently against her ankles as they danced, a feeling she’d forgotten. Every so often, when the trumpet trilled, his fingers tapped against her ribs as he kept time.

  When the song ended, and the crowd clapped, Jo startled. For a moment she’d been nineteen again.

  It was a feeling she couldn’t afford.

  He was still a stranger, and she was no longer a stupid girl whose lapses were forgivable.

  When the waltz began, she dropped his hand and pushed away, gently. He frowned and let her go without a fight, though his fingers brushed her waist as she stepped back.

  “You don’t like the waltz anymore?”

  She smiled tightly. “I just want to sit down awhile.”

  “I could keep you company?”

  It was a question but didn’t sound like it; he’d already guessed something was wrong, and that he was probably it.

  “I brought company,” she said.

  As she turned to go she added, “Thanks anyway,” and winced at how it sounded.

  She didn’t look behind her again; she picked up her
hem and pressed her way through the crowd to the safe darkness of the mezzanine.

  She stayed in a little alcove, her eyes closed, until the waltz was over.

  Back at the table, Doris was already parked, drinking from Ella’s champagne (you could tell by the lipstick) and bumming a smoke off one of Araminta’s men.

  “Wait one dance and I promise I will,” she was saying as Jo climbed the stairs. “I just can’t stand these droners. Got a light?”

  Jo sat. The others were all dancing—even Rebecca had found a man she liked the look of—and Jo sat as far back in the shadows as she could and tried to get hold of herself.

  It was foolish, this whole business. Her dress, the dance, the whole night. The plaintive notes of the waltz sank into her skin, and she folded her arms like she was fighting a chill in the sweltering, smoky room.

  “You still look good on the dance floor,” said Doris, exhaling smoke when she smiled. “Nice to see you come out of retirement.”

  “Thanks,” Jo said.

  She wondered how much Doris remembered of Tom. Doris had been a baby, and caught up in the thrill, but maybe Doris had seen more than Jo had guessed, sitting out the slow dances, sizing up the room.

  Doris took a sip of something new, set it down. “Lord, that’s strong. One of us is a lush, you watch and see.”

  “That’s mine.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to it, you big lush,” Doris said. She took a puff of her cigarette and a sip of champagne, which seemed a bit much just to get a taste of whiskey out of your throat.

  Doris sat back and sighed contentedly. “Not a bad night. How’d you find this place?”

  “He paid my bail,” said Jo. “He’s a friend of Jake’s. He’s in good with the cops, so I figured we’re safer here than the Kingfisher, for now.”

  Doris nodded. “He looks familiar.”

  “He was around for a while when we were first going out,” said Jo. “Then he disappeared.”

  Doris dropped her eyes to her drink. “That happened a lot with boys back then,” she said.

  That struck Jo. Doris wasn’t moony, and Jo had kept a sharp eye on them all for a long time now, but that first year she hadn’t seen what she might have seen. Had Doris’s heart been broken?