by Lyndsay Faye
“And what does that oh-so-lively phrase mean?”
“The ‘most dreadfully miserable whore of all the world’s many unhappy whores’ comes closest.”
Blossom emits a regular pipe organ of a guffaw. Then she claps a hand over her mouth murmuring, “Honey, don’t do that to me in the hallway, it’s three o’clock in the damn morning and one of the maids will scold. Hush now till we reach headquarters.”
Travel is painful and the carpet eddies like a wind-churned lake. But I mind less than I ought to. Blossom is clearly the sort who, when inclined to pal around, can make one feel like a coconspirator in under sixty seconds. Such women are generally equally deft at freezing a gal out blizzard quick, and I feel disproportionately glad to have qualified.
Particularly after Max said he didn’t like the person you reminded him of. Not one little bit.
Letting go of Blossom as she produces a key from a jet-beaded reticule, I contemplate my bare toes. Whether or not Max is strong for the duplicitous criminal type is irrelevant. Really, who in his right mind would be? Max saved my life and brought me supper and poured me booze and is keeping my secret and what did I expect, bonus compliments?
“Welcome to my sanctuary,” Blossom trills as we enter. “Do not under threat of certain disfigurement even contemplate touching the demon in cat guise reposing on the divan. Medea, what atrocities have you been committing this evening?”
A ball of ivory fur with electric-yellow eyes glowers at me from the identical divan as in my room, though this one hosts maybe sixty or seventy tasseled pillows. Medea, having confirmed that I’m beneath her notice, stretches her front legs and returns to dreamland.
“I found her at a theater in New Orleans, meowing to raise hell in the orchestra pit. In retrospect, I think she really was attempting to contact her cohorts in Hades. She was only a kitten, and I a lonesome chorus girl far from home. A sap, in other words. I took her to my bosom, and she instantly drew blood. Literally.”
“Must’ve been a lawyer in a past life.”
“Or a producer, perhaps. Since that day, she has plagued my existence without relent.”
Blossom is practically cooing, scratching the elderly mop behind its ears. I see a young Nicolo, his sweetness with favorite warriors of the cat armies, and swallow something that sits in my belly like cement.
“Oh, Miss James, you’re looking peaky enough without added exercise. Take the bedside chair.”
“It’s Alice,” I say, adjusting yet another velvet pillow. “Thanks ever so.”
My neighbor’s room hardly resembles my own save the layout. Framed pictures of famous black singers and actresses adorn the walls—Abbie Mitchell, Evelyn Preer, Ma Rainey. The headboard and coverlet match mine, but a length of Chinese-patterned silk adorns the end of the bed. A screen printed with a pagoda and some conceited-looking herons creates a dressing room. Birds in the house are beastly luck, so I trace the sign of the cross on the chair cushion. Still, I’m terribly strong for the place. Blossom’s abode isn’t a neutral room for a stranger to wax horizontal and then depart, all trace of her vanished like footprints along the shoreline.
This room is her home.
“Where were you homesick for, way back when you were a sap?” I tuck my feet into the chair, resting my temple on my fist. The planet is still keen to buck me off.
“Chicago. I’d just left home for the first time. But I must warn you, I remain something of a sap, I’m afraid. I still miss places, just different ones.”
“Where is that, then?”
“This evening? San Francisco. I suffered like anything leaving there, exquisite suffering. It’s a marvelous place, very European, all the candy-colored houses and the salt winds and the Bohemians. I used to perform at the Palace Hotel in the Pied Piper Bar, right under that simply stunning painting, dreaming of singing so beautifully I could bewitch all the town’s children and lead them off into the mist like I did with the rats. I haven’t managed it yet, by the way. With rats or children.”
“Bad luck,” I commiserate.
Blossom winks at me. Removes her cloak and lays it over her vanity chair, turns to look in the mirror, and I can’t help myself. All telegraph lines between my brain and my face are felled. I stare.
And stare.
She wears the most dramatic gown I’ve ever seen, and I am well versed in the garment trade. Its structure is vaguely Grecian, supposing Grecian means “stunning.” All depends upon a thick choker collar covered entirely in paste diamonds, from which the spill of violet silk falls over her small breasts and lean legs. In the back, the same piece of fabric’s more tightly gathered drape cascades down her spine, but the sides are entirely open—her arms, her shoulders, her whole torso from the waist up is bare. A matching crystal belt fastens the front panel to her midriff. How a single piece of cloth attached on either side of a glorified necklace could look this glamorous, I know not, but it suits Blossom’s svelte form so perfectly that I realize I’m not breathing.
“Do you like this old rag?” She preens in the mirror as she removes her earrings. “I found it in Paris many moons ago, for, oh, I’d estimate eight fortunes. No, eight and a half.”
“I think that witchcraft was employed and your dressmaker is in danger of some light roasting.”
Chuckling, Blossom deposits her hair plumage in a vanity drawer. “It is rather fine, isn’t it? What’s your preference, gin or scotch? I assume you imbibe, and you must consider that a compliment.”
“Oh. Whichever you’re having, thank you.”
My hostess unscrews the top of a perfume atomizer made of lovely yellow-green vaseline glass and pours two whiskeys into cut-glass tumblers.
“A toast!” she proclaims. “To the survival of the fittest.”
“And the terribly unfit, come to that.”
“Oh, well done. Hear, hear.”
Glasses clink. Blossom glides away, flips the lid of a record player resting on a low table, and the opening strains of Verdi’s Don Carlos reach my ears. She vanishes behind her screen. I can just make out the finial of a wardrobe behind it.
“Now, tell me every little thing that happened today, and don’t skimp on detail, gossip, or unsubstantiated rumor,” she orders. “If you don’t have any, do feel free to invent some. And if you can’t remember names, make them up.”
The scotch is, to my delight, real. None of the swill steeped in tree bark for room 523, apparently. “There’s not much to tell. Imagine a deceased beetle with its legs in the air and make it a bit less sprightly.”
“Beetle shaped, but a mere husk?”
“That’s the ticket.”
“Goodness, what an inauspicious beginning. Such luck! You can only improve from here, you see. But surely we looked in on you since I left?”
“Oh, yes. But for obvious reasons, I’m not the belle of the ball.”
“There isn’t much demand for strange white invalids at the Paragon Hotel, I’ll admit. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re terribly intriguing.”
“That’s awfully decent of you.”
“Indecent, I think you’ll find. I’m a contrary person.”
Reappearing, Blossom ties a blush-pink robe over matching silk pajamas. She lobs me a wadded ball of poison-emerald cloth that unfurls midair to become a second dressing gown of equally exquisite manufacture. As in not manufactured, but sewn. Medea eyes its flight with malicious interest and hops from the sofa to the bed.
“No, I couldn’t possibly—”
“Put it on—you’re ruining the high tone of my boudoir something tragic,” she insists happily as she lowers herself sideways into the vanity chair. “So. Who paid you court today?”
“Max, for one.” The words are carefully casual. I don’t know who palavers with whom in these parts.
“Darling man, I could simply eat him with a spoon.”
But do you? I can’t help but wonder. Given my new loyalties to the chap.
“He’s a decorated war hero, I’ll have you know, since he won’t spill a word about it otherwise,” Blossom continues breezily. “The French had no sooner dropped the Croix de Guerre round his neck than the British had mentioned him in dispatches and added a Victory medal—if not for segregation, the man would resemble a game of ring toss. Our country won’t so much as shine his shoes, naturally.”
The discomfort that has been worming its way through my innards since Max declared himself a second lieutenant gives a twisting reminder. Not that I’m any stranger to battles, of a sort. Likewise have hardship and I clasped hands and called each other cousin. But when FATS ARE FUEL FOR FIGHTERS and SAVE A LOAF A WEEK TO WIN THE WAR and FOOD IS A WEAPON: DON’T WASTE IT posters covered New York City like a second skin, I was supping on caviar washed down with champagne, or conversely champagne supplemented by nourishing caviar. Mr. Salvatici kept us all in the fine sort of fettle, and if the money before the Volstead Act happened to come from brothels, dice joints, pool parlors, craps houses, and establishments dedicated to ponies running in a circle? Well, we didn’t think twice over it. I hadn’t remotely understood anyone who put his name down to sleep in trench sewage, freeze to death, and be shot at.
“Max has been so good to me,” I confess. “What sort of stationery does one use to say, ‘Smashing that I continue to exist, you are hereby thanked for it liberally’?”
“Oh, ecru, I think.”
Another smile bubbles to the surface. “Are you very close friends?”
Blossom’s eyes pucker charmingly. “He isn’t my sort, honey. But yes, we’re thick as thieves. Most of the permanent residents at the Paragon are.”
If Max isn’t your sort, who on the earth’s surface is? I wonder. Then I picture an older black gentleman—taller than she, richer than Solomon, with a cinder-brush mustache and a shirt with French cuffs. There aren’t many. But they do exist, and they probably lodge at the Paragon. And enjoy genuine scotch.
“Two medals,” I muse. “So that’s why Davy Lee wants his own pair. A touch of Max worship. He’s willing to trade them in for cookies, of course. Awfully sensible.”
A grin mounts an offensive and soon conquers Blossom’s entire face. “Christ no, he’s the very least sensible child ever born. Tell him half a story and he’ll make a world to live in. Truth and fiction are blurred where that one’s concerned. However did you meet Davy?” Her expression shifts. “Please don’t tell me he was running loose again. We all take turns keeping the beautiful scatterbrain intact.”
“Davy admired to either watch me die or save my life, it was dreadfully muddled. Either way, it made a roaring smashup for the esteemed youth. I suppose he’s seen Max’s medals?”
The glad look Blossom adopted has staying power. It’s making her eyes jig above the steep planes of her cheekbones. “Oh, rather. Only about six times a day does he show an interest—when Max is here, you understand. He’s all too often on trains, or back in Brooklyn. How was Davy faring today?”
“Very jazzed over drawing in a class with, um . . . sorry, my mind isn’t quite—”
“My dear friend, Mrs. Evelina Vaughan. Weekly Betterment? Yes, she collects causes like they’re postage stamps. Evy tutors a pack of colored youth thirsting for knowledge—teaches toddlers clay molding and aspiring teens proper French, that sort of thing. She’s mad as a hatter. And what did Davy make of you?”
“I’m the wrong color. Apparently I look ill. Quelque shock. Who does the kid belong to?”
Swiveling round to face her mirror, Blossom samples the spirits and then dips a cloth in a porcelain pot of cream, which she applies to her kohl. “Not a soul.”
“Come again?”
“I mean simply no one, honey, he’s a foundling. A foundling I found, not unlike this terrible animal before you but with a much better disposition.”
Medea is kneading at a pillow, pricking tufts into the fabric with sadistic glee.
“However did that come about? They aren’t like pennies you can just pick up wherever you happen upon them.”
“Gracious no, but I’ve a certain yen for lost things. You’re as lost as can be, Alice James, just terribly misplaced, and look where you find yourself,” she adds with a warm glance. “And come to mention it, he was rather like a penny. Davy was left in a bassinet in Seattle, Washington, adjacent to the trash behind the nightclub where I was ending a two-month headlining contract. Simply horrific screams led me outside after curtain call.”
Since she knows I’m from Harlem, I decide shock would be overacting. “How old?”
“Two months.”
“Healthy?”
“In full voice, anyhow.”
“Was his name in a note?”
“No note, the poor dear mite. I named him Davy, and he was in the lee of the bin, you understand. It has a ring, doesn’t it?”
“It has the whole jewelry box. What about accommodations? He said he lives here in a real fortress.”
“Yes, that would be in Christina’s suite across the way. Max made a castle out of scrap wood and installed a bed inside after she complained the child was perennially building battlements out of her sheets. As head chef, she’s hardly ever in her rooms, you see, so he’s less bother there. But she dotes on him, we all do. At the time of his discovery, the hotel was already to be my permanent sanctuary, and when I waltzed in with Davy, we all decided he was ours for the keeping. Dr. Pendleton tutors him and the other boy who works here, Wednesday Joe. Mavereen instills morals, Max shows them how to throw a punch or a baseball, as you please, Christina feeds them, and I spoil them senseless. It’s grand.”
Blossom ducks into her bathroom, wets a towel, and scrubs her face clean of lotion. Either the hard stuff is making me dizzy or she’s even more striking when the brazen planes of her skull are uninterrupted by lip stain and eye glitter.
“But it must have been difficult, when he was a baby,” I argue. “A local orphanage didn’t occur?”
“Honey, as bad as you’ll find the weather here is, Seattle is worse. I’m indecent, I’m not cruel.”
“You’re a regular saint,” I marvel.
“Well, aren’t you the sweetest thing, but no, I’m a sap. I told you. A mere ninety-five percent of the Paragon’s tenancy would agree, and the rest have just now checked in.”
“Saps lose their wallets to pickpockets and leave safes open for yeggmen. You gave Davy a new life.”
Blossom angles the edge of her drink at me meaningfully. “I’ve needed those myself, you see. So I collect spares and pass them out whenever—Medea, honestly!”
Medea, with a half-chewed tassel hanging out of her mouth, slinks back to the divan.
“Why did you leave San Francisco?” As soon as they’re past my teeth, I want the words back. “Please don’t answer that if you’re vexed by it. You mentioned suffering.”
Perching on the edge of the bed, Blossom rests her glass in her lap. “It was a very old story. The one that causes all these endless reams of song lyrics and sonnet penning. My true love left. My heart was broken. And what in the wide world was I to do?”
I will my eyes to stay dry. This is Blossom’s tale. Or it’s everyone’s, and therefore still not mine to wallow in.
“Were you always a performer?”
“All my life. Lives, I suppose. And what did you do when you were in Harlem?”
Not wanting to contradict what I told Max, I answer, “This and that. It was always changing.”
Correction: who you were targeting was always changing, and Nobody changed with them.
“Honey, even if your career was to take ten-dollar bills so you could go to the powder room, I promise you that I find no fault with the choice. If you were a choir girl, you wouldn’t have been shot at. If I were a choir girl, I wouldn’t be in Portlan
d.”
Pausing, I consider.
Surviving through loyalty to your rescuer is not enough.
Particularly when Max seems likely to be gone the lion’s share of each month. Mrs. Meader appears not to like the idea of me, while Miss Christina and Dr. Pendleton take exception to the corporeal me, and Davy is a mere sprout.
Blossom, though—I could be loyal to her too, and that would be like family a little, and I wouldn’t feel as if I’m the last woman in the wide, cold world.
I clear my throat. “When you said I was lost . . . you saw the other bullet scar, didn’t you?”
My hostess peers at her glass as if it’s a scrying ball. “If you want to know how observant a sap I am, the answer is exceedingly.”
“Do you enjoy cautionary tales? Shilly-shallying children eaten by wolves, that stuff?”
“Alice, I am gone on them,” Blossom breathes.
Repeating what I told Max takes less than two minutes. Blossom listens with rapt attention. I’ve never met anyone with a more manufactured accent matched to artless sincerity. She must be a simply smashing actress. If she told me head colds cured heartache, I’d sleep with the window open. When I’m through, she whistles.
“My word. It’s too tragic. You were faced with certain death and forced into exile.”
“Like the very dickens.”
“And have been delivered into an ever-so-strange land.”
“The old bird is in the market for fresh feathers.”
“Oh, the agony of displacement. I know just how it feels. How can I help?”
“When I’m grateful to people, I’m loyal to them. It’s—I need that, need the, um, purpose. So whatever you want from me, in thanks for your kindness? Just ask. I’ll see it through.”
Her tongue touches her upper lip in puzzlement. “Why do I sense that you’re entirely in earnest?”
“Possibly because I’m half Italian. We’re the sort who either throw ourselves weeping upon your grave or help you into it.”
