by Lyndsay Faye
Blue ribbons to all parties. But what went so horrendously wrong? I ask again, the knot in my stomach now the size of Rooster’s fist.
“You look awful, Miss James.” Miss Christina presses my hand and releases it. “Please tell me what’s going on?”
Miss Christina is in the proverbial soup, same as Blossom, thanks to the twenty bucks. And Blossom—no matter what happened—is going to need allies, not enemies, especially not enemies who are by rights old friends. So I decide to give the full field report.
“What’s going on is that Blossom is trying to fight trouble with trouble, which I’m dreadfully afraid only leads to more trouble.”
“If you can’t talk plainer than that, don’t bother.”
My voice drops lower. “I think Mrs. Vaughan is Davy Lee’s mother. I also think that she’s being blackmailed or threatened or somehow extorted. By whom, I don’t know. And I think that Blossom would do anything—absolutely anything—to protect Evelina Vaughan. Even if it meant somehow sending Davy away.”
Miss Christina gapes at me. She’s about to protest this outrageous claim when we are interrupted by one of the most harrowing screams I have ever heard.
Top five, easily.
We fly up the stairs like bats, reach the kitchen as one and, finding it still empty, burst panting into the Paragon’s lobby.
The first thing we see is Jenny Kiona fresh out of the elevator. Two hands clapped over her mouth, her lustrous black eyes shimmering holes. Rooster is charging out from behind the desk but stops, dumbstruck. A dozen early-morning hotel patrons are all frozen into pillars of salt.
Miss Christina and I turn our heads, and I gasp for the first time in a very long while.
“Help me, please!” Lucius Grint of the Rose’s Thorn begs. His spherical face is paste white, sweat dripping from the scattered ends of his combed-over coiffure. “She refused to go to the colored hospital, she said she needed a doctor at her hotel because she has a special condition. I bribed a cabdriver outrageously and got here as quick as I could.”
He has an arm around Blossom Fontaine, who is barely standing despite that aid. Her face is a pulp—sweet lips cracked, one eye swollen shut, a split on her rectangular brow, and her posture announces at least one cracked rib enters the picture. She’s wearing a man’s overcoat I presume belongs to Mr. Grint, since it hangs ludicrously short on her. Which is the reason I can see through the gap that her ball gown has been viciously ripped on the vertical.
“Good morning, everyone,” she rasps. There’s blood caking her teeth. “Oh, don’t look like that, I beg. You should see the other fellow.”
Then she collapses into the maître d’s arms.
◆ Twenty-Three ◆
That she may serve well, the Negro woman must first learn to believe in herself and her race—ridding herself always of any false notions of racial or self-inferiority. We must admit that this is often hard to do, hampered as she is by her sex in what we sometimes term a man’s world and by her race in a white man’s world. But it can be done. . . . The time demands real women.
—BEATRICE MORROW CANNADY, “Negro Womanhood as a Power in the Development of the Race and the Nation,” speech delivered June 28, 1928
It must be for only an instant we stand there, the elegant room shrunken to the size of a single terribly thin woman. It feels like millennia. Then the lobby of the Paragon blasts back into its rightful proportions, exploding into action. Women fanning themselves, men firing off questions.
“What’s happened to the poor dear?”
“Lord have mercy!”
“Somebody call the police!”
“No calls, please, thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” Rooster booms. “We locals know which folks in the department to contact.” He darts back behind the counter, snatching up a room key. “Excuse us! Wednesday Joe, get back in that elevator and keep it running, you hear?”
Wednesday Joe, stark terror on his young face, obeys.
“Oh God, oh no,” Miss Christina moans. “I’ll boil water. And towels, I’ll get clean towels.”
She dashes back into the kitchen. The crowd’s energy crackles with unease as the guests start to mutter and exclaim. Rooster gathers Blossom up and heads for the stairs, a small but fearfully furious squadron of allies in his wake. And I see his plan—with the elevator running, the stairs will be much emptier. When we reach the second-story landing, he stops.
“Jenny, fetch Mavereen and Max. Then find someone to man the front desk.” Rooster’s suave voice is jagged with anger.
Jenny pauses with one hand stretched toward Blossom.
“Jenny,” Rooster repeats. “I know, sweetheart. But go. Now.”
Sobbing in dry hitches, she rushes out of the stairwell.
We continue, surprising a respectable middle-aged woman who shrinks backward. Rooster’s pace is hard to match, and I fall behind as my belly starts to pierce. When we reach Blossom’s room on the fifth floor, Rooster unlocks the door despite his limp cargo, and we crowd behind him as he lays her on the coverlet. Medea hisses, scurrying behind the changing screen.
I sit by the singer’s head and check her pulse. “I think she’s only fainted. Rooster, why in God’s name didn’t you tell Jenny to call Dr. Pendleton first?”
“He isn’t here.” Rooster is at the window, staring out like a wolf that’s just heard a twig snap underfoot.
“You can’t be serious!” Mr. Grint squeaks. “Then I ought to have taken her to the colored clinic, special condition be damned! Where the devil is he?”
“Had a private house call from a colored patient. He gets them every so often, when the other black doctors are stuck. Always takes them.”
“Of course he does,” I lament, decidedly not panicking. But, oh, how I admire to—because I know who did this to her, and what he was after, and if he got it, then the entire population of the Paragon including myself will carve Overton apart and fricassee the pieces. “Dr. Pendleton took oaths, yes, sacred oaths. Blossom, can you hear me?”
“Could anyone have followed you?” When I glance up, I see that Rooster is checking a Beretta Model 1915, and my heart sings hallelujah.
“What?” Lucius Grint is staring at his cabaret star in open dismay. “No, no, we were in a car from the dockside and then walked through the door. She had finished her set and I thought she’d gone upstairs to have a morning pick-me-up with her friends. When I was doing final check, I found her like this.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him.
“Yes, it was. I should have been there to help her sooner.” Lucius Grint, as is the case with most speakeasy proprietors, is inured to brouhahas, fracases, and melees. So his distress means he genuinely cares. “But I think I can promise that no one followed us.”
“Good,” Rooster concludes. “Because if they did, they’ll need a wooden coat.”
Beneath my fingertips, which are skimming the few bits of her face that aren’t smashed, Blossom shivers. Her eyelids flicker, wincing.
“She’s coming ’round,” I report.
“Oh, thank God.” Mr. Grint smooths a hand over his squiggling hair follicles. “It’s Blossom’s room, so there must be—should I fetch her—”
“The spirits are in that perfume diffuser.” I point, then stroke Blossom’s cheek again. “Blossom, you’re in your room. You’re going to be just fine, the fittest of the fiddles, all right?”
Her single operative eye opens. I worry that she’ll slap me away. Instead she whispers, “Why, Alice James. You find me just . . . the tiniest bit indisposed.”
I laugh, more from strain than relief. Lucius Grint toddles over with liquid fortification. Placing it to her lips, I lift her head.
“I’d best be downstairs. I don’t like to leave you without a weapon.” Rooster tucks his gun away, addressing Blossom. “Can we give Miss James yours?”
“It was removed from my person,” Blossom reports in a tone dry enough to drain the Atlantic.
“Oh! Here, I insist. I always keep it fully loaded. One never knows, working on a saloon barge.”
Lucius Grint displays in his damp palm a 7.65 millimeter Mauser Model 14 pocket pistol. I place it on the side table.
“I like you,” I tell Mr. Grint. “I like you awfully well. I want you to consider yourself kissed on either cheek.”
“I’ll do so immediately, Miss James.”
Rooster nods. “Let’s leave the ladies to the nursing. Blossom, you need me for anything at all, I am your man.”
The gents make their exit.
“Blossom,” I say, and find myself too choked to continue.
“Oh, Alice.” Tears seep from the edges of her eyelids.
“You gave Officer Overton what for, didn’t you?”
“He looks like he met a gorilla and took its banana.”
“I told you I’d be there if he ever tried to hurt you, I—”
“Hush, honey, I stormed off in a terrible tantrum.”
I’m dripping something indecorous on Blossom’s ruined dress. “I’ll kill him personally, without middlemen.”
“You’ll probably have to get in line.”
“What’s the worst of the damage? Miss Christina is boiling water. But for now, I could—”
“No, it’s just some bumps and scrapes. I’ve had worse.”
I regard her, eyes brimming, and she tries to smile.
“No, Alice, he did not,” she states firmly. “He tried. He failed in his efforts.”
“Are you telling me the truth?” My voice breaks badly.
“Why, what a complimentary fallacy, to think I’d be good enough to spare your feelings on the subject.”
“You are good,” I insist senselessly, despite the still nebulous dark deeds I know she’s been about.
“Of all the lunatics in all the world, you may be my favorite. Second favorite,” she amends. “But, no, I am decidedly not good, and, yes, I am telling the truth.”
“What happened?”
“He made use of that gun you mentioned. Oh, I was so miffed at you I couldn’t see straight, Alice, and then I wasn’t thinking about anything save patching it up. I was that sick over us. He snuck into the club and went straight to my dressing room. Pointed that shooter, made me give him my gun, frog-marched me upstairs, and told me it was death or dishonor. Well. Turned out he wanted both hands free, and he set the gun down, and I simply flew at him. I’m stronger than I look, and there was a tussle. After I’d caught him in the undercarriage, I grabbed his sidearm, and I really ought to have put a hole in the creature, but stopped short of actual murder and told him never to set foot in the Rose’s Thorn again or I’d tell everyone in Portland a nigger woman beat him in a fight. That seemed to open sesame. He slunk off. But he’d knocked me halfway to China, and Lucius found me, and the rest you know.”
I’m sniffling something awful. “I’m sorry you had to do any of that alone.”
“What, kick the ever-loving shit out of Overton? I wanted the privilege entirely to myself, honey.”
A soft knock sounds, and I pick up the gun.
“Come in.”
Miss Christina enters first, her arms full of towels and a steaming bowl. Mavereen follows, pulling a miniature ice cart. She raises her head. When she spies Blossom, she makes a sound as if struck in the gut.
“Mav, honey, it looks terrible, but it isn’t.” Blossom, struggling mightily, sits up. “Now, I am going behind that screen to attire myself in something other than what now only qualifies as a very pretty dishrag.”
“Land’s sake, sugar, we’ll fix you up right here,” Mavereen protests, stricken.
“Nonsense. I’m a heinously proud person, and—”
“Blossom Fontaine, you lay yourself back down this instant. Where’s your nightdress, sugar? We can just slip—”
“No.”
Everyone stops. Including Mavereen, who sets her hands on her hips with a look equal parts motherly and horrified.
“Bless you, I deserved that. Blossom, sweet precious girl, being hurt this way ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a thing to be survived.” Tears spill down her broad cheeks. “Now, you lie back down and—”
“I wasn’t raped,” Blossom says testily.
Oh, I realize.
It’s a tumor.
The cancer is a tumor, and we’ll see it, and everyone at the Paragon will treat her like the walking dead for the rest of her ever-so-brief life. They won’t let her sing or drink or carouse or do anything she loves ever again.
She’ll be in hell until the day she dies.
“Not that word, now. We don’t need to talk about that kind of iniquity in here, in our home.” Mavereen makes prayer hands, convinced Blossom is lying.
“Mavereen, he wasn’t trying to hurt me or ruin me or seduce me or take advantage of me. Officer Overton was trying to rape me.” Blossom staggers to her feet, using the hand I throw out to catch her as a crutch. “But I prevented him.”
“Blossom,” Miss Christina pleads despite the ugliness between them, “you’ve got to let us help you.”
Blossom’s face, or the fraction that’s capable, melts. “Christina, I’m warmed to the very cockles of my soul that you admire to, but let’s get down to brass tacks. Where in holy hell is my beloved uncle?”
We exchange the sort of looks one probably found in the trenches whenever a loud whistling sound streaked across the sky.
“Dr. Pendleton isn’t here,” Miss Christina says.
“Of course he’s here, he’s always here.” Blossom is walking toward her dressing screen and, since it’s terribly difficult to wriggle out of a tornado, I’m helping her along.
“Blossom, you’ve every right to hysterics right now, but that don’t mean it’s the time for them.” Mavereen stands before us, immovable, with her bulk like an empress and her spiraling slate hair like a crown. “Doddridge had a house call.”
“He what?” Blossom exclaims.
“So you need to be a good strong girl and let us tend to your—”
“Get out,” Blossom hisses.
Mavereen’s hand flies to her breast and Miss Christina drops the cloth she’s holding.
“All right,” Mavereen answers, low yet loving. “I need you to heed me, Blossom Fontaine. Your mamma ain’t here, rest her, but we are here. We’re your family now, sugar. Ain’t nohow we’re leaving with you in this sorry state.”
“Please, I’ll give you anything you ask. Just—”
“Ladies, I can be of help here,” I find myself announcing.
They regard me with befuddlement—save Blossom, who wears a look of such forlorn hope that it sears my skin.
“It’s . . . it’s ever so awkward, but I know what’s going on, and Blossom is right. When I was waiting in her dressing room the other day, I needed something to wipe a spill, and like a ninny I opened one of her drawers and saw a pamphlet there.”
Blossom’s eyes blow sky wide. Instantly, they narrow to furious points, so I whip up the pace.
“And it seems—well, we all know that Blossom’s been ailing lately, but—it seems that Dr. Pendleton is performing some dreadfully experimental measures. She’ll be entirely herself again soon! The halest horse in the paddock, Mrs. Meader, but the treatment is, how shall I put this—”
“Modern,” Miss Christina pipes in out of the blue.
I regard the woman with adoration. Blossom, meanwhile, marvels at us as if we’ve stockings on our ears and chopsticks up our nostrils.
Miss Christina retrieves the dropped cloth. “Dr. Pendleton was three sheets to the wind one night, talking funny, sketching it out on a page so he could do better by Blossom. Looked just plain terrible to me.”
“
Embarrassing as anything,” I add.
“Painful!” Blossom chirps at last. “God, ever so painful.”
“And supposing I had to take that cure,” Miss Christina continues.
“Heaven forbid,” I insert.
“Then you’d never want anyone save your physician—and a family physician at that—to see the Frankenstein’s patchwork he has made of you,” Blossom finishes, her free hand over her heart.
Mavereen seems not to know where to look any longer—back, left, or upside down.
Miss Christina places the soaked cloth in my grip. “Mav, let’s go and wait for Dr. Pendleton. Blossom just faced the unspeakable, and it wouldn’t be Christian to humiliate her twice in one day.”
A tearful Mavereen brushes her hand over Blossom’s finger curls. “You want me to send your friend Jenny over? She was that worked up, poor lamb, I told her to keep to her room, but would she be any comfort?”
“Ah, no. That was, as ever, wisdom,” Blossom manages.
“I’ll be praying all this while for you, you hear me?”
“Like angels’ trumps.” Blossom wilts in relief. “I’ll be quite myself again after Alice and Dr. Pendleton have worked their charms.”
Slow with grief, Mavereen exits. As Miss Christina follows, glancing behind, I fling her a silent thank you.
She nods as she closes the door.
“Oh my God,” Blossom groans.
“Lie down before you break that swan’s neck of yours,” I command, backing her onto the bed.
“But I need to—”
“I’m not going on an Easter egg hunt for your cancer, Blossom.”
Bringing the washing materials, I sit on the bed, pressing a damp cloth to the cut on her brow. She hisses.
“Hello, you,” I greet her.
“Hello, you,” she whispers.
Cleaning her face seems necessary, since everyone is strung dreadfully high. Dab, rinse, wring. I’m of two minds just now. Do I care about Davy Lee? Well, naturally. But in this particular tableau, she is my friend Blossom, and I am her friend Alice. After a while, she’s breathing evenly, and she’s staring at me.
