The Girls at the Kingfisher Club

by Genevieve Valentine

  “Maybe not,” Jo said. “But it’s your answer. Make your peace with it however you like.”

  Then she closed the door.

  Even though the bed was neatly made just like every other morning, and the wardrobe door was closed, the room was still achingly empty. Every powdered circle on the dresser screamed that Lou was gone for good.

  Lou had been the first person Jo told, in this room, as if she’d known even then that dancing would be the best thing they would ever do.

  Since Jo could remember, she had fallen asleep to the sound of Lou’s breathing. It had been an intrusion when she was young, this redheaded, unwelcome addition from the nursery, a little alien noise that filled the room at night.

  Now it was the silence driving her mad; at any minute, she thought, the empty place where her worries lived was going to swallow her whole.

  She went to the library, stared at the atlas until her vision blurred.

  • • •

  In the middle of the afternoon, long after the glass of milk on the tray had stopped sweating and the soup had stopped steaming, the note came from their father.

  He had questions about Hattie and Mattie.

  She was to come alone.

  • • •

  On her way downstairs, she knocked at Doris and Ella’s door.

  “Make sure everyone’s still dressed,” Jo said. “He wants to know about Hattie and Mattie. He’ll probably ask about you, too, and after that I don’t know what’s to keep him from calling everyone else down.”

  Doris nodded. She was still dressed from the morning, and some of the others went through the motions. The rest tended to do the bare minimum until they could get dressed for dancing.

  That was out of the question. Jo couldn’t imagine what would happen if their father caught anyone in sequins.

  She went downstairs under a stony silence, feeling as though their doors had been shut to protect them from her, rather than closing them inside.

  (Fair enough. She hated jailers, too.

  Jo swallowed a pang.)

  Their father was sitting at his desk. With one hand he was idly spinning the knob of his cane, as if drilling into the carpet for oil, and with the other he was tapping out a rhythm on his blotter.

  He didn’t stand to greet her when she knocked and opened the door.

  “Sit down, Josephine. I trust the business from this morning has passed?”

  It took Jo a moment to realize he meant her crying. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Their father sat back in his chair. “I wanted to talk to you about the future of the girls.”

  She didn’t trust herself to say anything polite, so she nodded. Their father seemed on edge, coiled in on himself, as if he was waiting for something. She didn’t want to risk a wrong answer.

  “I suppose you’ve guessed by my rather—efficient agreement with Mr. Marlowe that business is not going as well as I could hope at the moment.”

  Jo had not guessed. She had assumed the agreement came as a result of some form of congenital greed.

  “I see,” she said.

  “As much as I would like to care for you all as long as you might need it, there are other factors to consider. Therefore, I am relying on you girls to make good matches, with husbands who have the means to take care of you in the style to which you are accustomed.”

  Four dollars a month, if they behaved.

  “Of course, sir.”

  He sat a little forward. “The men from good families are looking for wives with beauty, manners, virtue. Unlike your sisters, the gentlemen are in a position to choose. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why have you been disobeying me?”

  Jo blanched.

  It was as if someone had socked her in the stomach; it took her a moment to breathe.

  He had known, somehow. He had only needed to be sure. She’d been called down this morning because he wanted a good look at her red eyes and purple bags before he showed his cards.

  At last she managed, “What?”

  “You heard me,” their father said, a dark gleam in his eye. “I know you and your sisters go out when your foolish father is asleep. You think I can’t ask two questions and determine the answer to a third? You think because you’re in your stocking feet, no one hears you sneaking in at dawn, if he is awake and of a mind to?”

  She hadn’t—she couldn’t have seen that he was awake, that he was listening—

  Jo couldn’t breathe. “Sir—”

  He slammed the cane onto the desk with such force that Jo felt a breeze. When she looked at him, his face was as smooth and kind as she had ever seen it, as if he wasn’t angry at all, as if someone else was wielding the cane.

  It was terrifying.

  (She pitied her mother.)

  “I have tried to be kind—to take care of you, to protect your reputations, to give you your choice of husbands who would, in their turn, preserve the honor of the family name. But this willful display disgusts me, Josephine. What would possess you to disobey me?”

  Jo sat closer to the edge of the chair, thought fast, and tried to sound obliging.

  “You gave no order, sir, that we were never to go out. Only that we were not to disturb you.”

  “Don’t presume to answer me with jokes, Josephine!”

  “Sir, I’m only trying—”

  “I don’t want any of your lying! You know my wishes, and I expect you to honor them!”

  Wishes? He wanted to sell his daughters and wave his cane and talk about the sanctity of wishes?

  Then they would.

  She looked him flat in the eye.

  Jo said, “Honor which, exactly? I know your wish to hide us because you were ashamed of having no son. I know you wished to keep us locked up until you could marry us off to strangers, so we could be chained to a childbed like Mother was for you.”

  Her rage was building now, and the words came faster, louder. “And now I know you’re even ashamed that your daughters have managed something on their own, and you wish they had died quietly upstairs and saved you the bother of caring for them. If there’s some other wish I missed, then by all means explain!”

  There was a moment’s quiet, except for Jo’s breathing. She was standing now; she didn’t remember when she’d gotten up.

  Their father’s face went red, then white, with rage.

  Jo was too petrified by her own outburst to move, and too sure of being right to apologize. She watched him as she would watch a tethered bear on a fraying rope.

  Slowly, he stood up from behind the desk and withdrew his cane, and with his other hand he rested the tips of his fingers on the blotter, supporting the weight of his indignation.

  “I had thought at one time,” he said, “to settle this with you rationally, and have a helpmeet. I wanted to marry the rest quietly, at first, after I discovered what loose and lawless girls you had become—before news could get out and ruin your prospects.”

  Jo’s limbs felt like coiled springs.

  “But,” he said, “since marriage is so distasteful to you, I feel I have given you ample lenience until now, and I can address the matter as I should have done from the start. I’ve asked Dr. Whitman from the Three Willows Asylum to evaluate my daughters, who are suffering from hysterical alcoholism. I had been thinking of you, at first—if they have disobeyed, it is because of you—but if this same vile temper has spread to all of them, then it will have to be addressed. He’s an old associate of mine, and very much in agreement, as it happens; he doesn’t approve of the new fashion for loose behavior . . .”

  An asylum. A mental hospital. There were stories about what happened behind those walls, stories that worried even the men who went out drinking at night.

  Those who went in rarely went out again.

 
Horror filled Jo’s mouth. Across the desk from her, their father was reaching for his newspaper, calmly; the discussion was over.

  “He’ll view me as a negligent father,” he said, as if making party conversation. “Well he should, but it’s cheaper to keep a daughter in the hospital than to keep her in style, and at least I’ll be spared anyone else knowing about the traitorous women who called themselves my children.”

  Before he had finished speaking, Jo was bolting out of the study. She prayed they weren’t angry enough to ignore her—she prayed they still trusted, that they would not disobey her now.

  “Beat it!” she shouted from the foot of the steps, her voice raw. “Get out, get out!”

  For one awful, endless second, everything froze.

  She couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t hear—everything was suspended in water. If her sisters had even heard her, they were too frightened to move, and then it would be too late, and the men from the asylum would come and run up the stairs and find them all just as they were, sitting on the edges of their beds, as still as a photograph.

  Her heart was pounding—she could swear, she could swear ten hearts upstairs were pounding in time.

  Then Doris shouted, “Damn it! Move!”

  The world started up again.

  There came an answering chaos of beds scraping and chairs crashing, of quick calls back and forth, of shoes being shoved on, of the first few bodies charging wildly down the back stairs, pausing at the back door as if wondering where to go.

  Behind her, their father was approaching.

  “He knows!” Jo screamed. “Nothing’s safe!”

  He grabbed hold of her wrist, and as he spun her he had his hand up to strike—he was holding his walking stick, the blow would be terrible.

  But she hadn’t spent eight years in dance halls for nothing, and she ducked under his grip and shook herself free in one sharp move as she skidded away from his reach.

  There was a thundering from the upper floors as the rest of the girls made a break for it, and he froze for a moment, overwhelmed by the sound.

  Then it was silent, and when Jo spoke it gave her words the gravity of a curse.

  “They’re gone,” she said, “and you’ll never see them again.”

  It took him a moment to understand what she meant, and even as it dawned on him he looked around as if there was a jailer handy who could trap them all inside until they could be given to men who would pay for the privilege.

  But it was too late—the doctor, if he came, would never find them.

  They knew how to disappear.

  Jo hoped they would never stop running.

  Their father fixed his gaze on her; his face was empty with rage, the mask of a hollowed patriarch.

  “You’ve done this,” he said, too calmly. “You drove them away from me. You’ve been up there for years, planning to ruin me, and now it’s come to nothing, and they’ll go to the ground.”

  Jo was ashamed to think how little planning she had really done for them, but she wasn’t about to fall for a game like this—she knew what was true.

  “You did this yourself, sir, and you know it.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  He swung his cane.

  She dodged for the front door and tried to pull it open; her hands were shaking so much the handle slipped out of her grasp halfway. The door was painfully slow—she’d never touched it before, and it weighed twice as much as she expected—and even as she wrenched it open, he struck a blow on her shoulder.

  She cried out and swung blindly. Her fist connected, and he howled and staggered backward, just enough to give her a few seconds’ time.

  Jo didn’t slow down—couldn’t—her heart was pounding painfully and there was no stopping. She tore through the doorway and staggered halfway down the stairs before she ran into someone—someone gripped her shoulders, someone was twisting with her impact to bring her behind him.

  “Hamilton, what’s the meaning of this?”

  It was van de Maar.

  “She’s gone hysterical!” their father said, voice shaking, the picture of a man incensed by the worst form of impudence. “She struck me!”

  “He’s trying to send us to an asylum,” Jo gasped out. “He struck me with the cane.” She yanked at the neck of her dress, pulling it to one side to show the red mark blooming on her skin.

  (Van de Maar hesitated a moment before he glanced down—he was so used to not looking at her.)

  “Asylum?” Van de Maar held her a little farther away from him. “What for?”

  “They go out at night,” their father said, fighting for control of his voice. “You know what that does to a man’s reputation, van de Maar, if he can’t even keep hold of his own daughters?”

  Van de Maar half-cleared his throat. “Hamilton, perhaps we could discuss this inside.”

  “No,” said Jo, and carefully pulled her arm out of van de Maar’s. “I won’t go back in that house.”

  “You see what I mean, van de Maar,” their father said. He was already calmer, resting on his cane, trying to pull his breathing together. “She won’t listen to reason.”

  Van de Maar seemed unconvinced, but he turned to Jo. “Josephine, perhaps we had best all go inside and discuss this civilly. I’m sure there’s something that can be arranged.”

  “No, sir,” she said, as steadily as she could. She took another step down. “I have no reason to go into the house. None of my family lives there any more.”

  Every time she spoke, van de Maar looked less certain of things. As if against his will, he held out his arm and caught the cuff of her dress. “But your father said we had business to discuss, about the marriage.”

  (Jo could feel his fingers as if they were a metal glove, she was so on edge, so ready to run.)

  Jo smiled thinly. “I’m sure he did. You’ll find when you talk to him that Lou has married, and I’m guessing that Father was going to suggest that if you liked them younger, he had other daughters who were amenable.”

  Van de Maar had the grace to pull an expression.

  She went on. “Or maybe he would say that I was willing, if the doctor wouldn’t take me, and if you liked the look of me.”

  Van de Maar looked up the stairs to the threshold, where their father was standing.

  “Be fair, van de Maar,” said their father. “I would never suggest you liked the look of her.”

  Van de Maar glanced at Jo, frowning.

  After a moment, without agreeing with her, he let her sleeve go, pulled back his hand.

  Jo summoned a smile that felt more frightening than anything so far.

  “Thank you very much for stopping by, Mr. van de Maar.”

  She took the stairs without looking behind her, and, afraid to hesitate, she turned south and kept walking. She kept an eye out for her sisters, but the street was quiet as the grave, and Jo knew that they had scattered as far and as fast as they could.

  She wondered where they would go—Tom was gone from the Marquee, and the Kingfisher wasn’t safe.

  Had they managed to stay together? Would they split and make a run for it?

  Would any of them try to get word to her? How could they, if she didn’t know where to look?

  Had any of them taken a penny?

  (She could see her own breath; had she sent them to the streets without even enough to keep them from freezing?)

  As she turned the corner, a white police truck drove idly past her, painted on its side with a sketch of a landscape and a trio of willow trees. As it passed her, it slowed.

  Her heart jumped into her throat.

  The driver winked at her.

  Through her sour stomach, she smiled back, blew him a kiss like Lou would have.

  After he had turned the corner, she cut across the avenue and walked faster in a n
ew direction.

  She walked east until the houses gave way to the shops on Lexington, on Third, that she remembered from her last solitary walk. When Second Avenue seemed too loud, she walked south until the shops gave way to grocers and tenements. She walked long after her feet went numb, aimlessly, letting the city wash over her.

  (She was so lost that Union Square startled her when she came upon it, as if the buildings had collapsed just a moment before. She skirted the north edge and headed east.)

  At last, she stood in a grassy park in the shadow of the bridge and looked out at the river, which she had never seen during the day.

  It was deep blue, pockmarked with gulls and bits of paper. Farther out were a few little boats skidding past on the breeze, and the distant, low silhouette of Brooklyn across the water.

  The air was sharp and cold, the late afternoon sun was bright, and Jo was all alone.

  nineteen

  What'll I Do

  Jo sat on a bench for ten minutes, shivering, before the cop found her.

  She had a moment of blank relief (police had a different meaning when she wasn’t in a dance hall, as though maybe she was being looked after by someone). Then she realized that her father might well have put the word out on them—a pack of hysterical women who had gotten free and needed rounding up.

  “Everything all right, miss?”

  She gave him her practiced dance-hall smile. “Yes, Officer. Just had a dustup with my fella. Cooling off for a minute before I head home.”

  He half-smiled. “In this weather that’ll be no trouble. But you’d better get moving before the sun goes down—this is a bad neighborhood after dark.”

  “Oh,” she said, “thank you.”

  She stood, and looked wistfully out at the water, and smoothed her skirt, until the cop had finally turned and walked out of sight.

  Then she walked the other way—slowly, not a care in the world—heading north, back uptown through the shops and the noise of Greenwich Village and the far-off skyscrapers she was getting a good look at for the first time in her life.

  (The city was such a stranger in daylight.)

  Washington Square Park was still a cram of people, and Jo didn’t have the energy to check every face for recognition. After only a few blocks, she turned south and ducked down a side street where there were fewer prying eyes.