FOR A LONG WHILE AFTER THE CROSS-COUNTRY WIRES had ceased to crackle with remorse, Letty remained upstairs, prostrate on the bed. Nobody came to disturb her, which was a sure sign that Cordelia was giving her a wide berth. Letty felt blue and emptied out, and she longed, however idiotically, for a friend as old and close as Cordelia upon whom she could unburden her miseries.
It was only one of the many injustices of that afternoon that the only person who might sympathize with her sad and sorry situation was also the person who had taken from her the thing she’d been most looking forward to. Singing at the nightclub had been more than that, even—it had been the event her every second was building toward. The sense of belonging she’d felt that morning had evaporated in seconds, and the dull pain that follows drinking had returned to her forehead. Once she had managed to stop crying she went into the dressing room and situated herself in front of the vanity, but she no longer liked what she saw in the mirror.
The brightness had been sapped from her eyes by the previous night and it was impossible for her to smile, much less mug. She knew she would feel better if she danced and practiced—but what good was that anymore? What good was anything? She had probably been a fool to believe that she could be somebody. None of the people who occupied the rooms below could understand what it was she’d dreamed of, or what Cordelia had cost her by taking away the gig.
But of course she did know a person who understood, and she laughed out loud to think that it had taken this long for her mind to come back around to him. Her view had grown so desperately narrow—she had been so broken up over losing her chance to perform at the club, drowning in that lousy, worthless feeling, that she had forgotten the world outside Dogwood. Grady would listen to her. He was the one who had encouraged her in the first place, and he would surely encourage her now, at this nadir of suffering.
Letty was still a little teary when she boarded a subway car for the Village. But she managed to hold her head up by clinging to the memory of the way Grady had made her feel, like a girl in the pictures, a girl who was at the very beginning of something wonderful; and as she came around the corner onto Barrow Street, she almost managed to smile with the notion that everything was about to be made all right.
Then she did see him, and broke out into a run. “Grady!” she cried. “Oh, Grady, I’m so glad to see you!”
It was not until she reached him that she realized he was wearing a tuxedo, and that his hair was pomaded with extra care into two high, fair ridges over his brow. An older gentleman, also wearing a tuxedo, and a woman draped with an embroidered and tasseled wrap, lingered just behind him as though he were escorting them somewhere. Though ordinarily Letty would have been stunned into a shy silence by the presence of such well-dressed people, at this particular moment she could not help but rush straight to him, already spilling her tale of woe.
“Oh, Grady, the most terrible thing has happened. Cordelia told me this morning that I can’t be the singer at their club. I’m back to having nothing again, and I feel so alone out there at Dogwood . . .” She would have gone on—indeed, she still wanted desperately to catalog all the indignities of the day—but she had noticed that neither Grady nor the two people behind him seemed in the least moved by her story.
“Letty Larkspur,” Grady said finally, in a stiff and formal manner that indicated a great distance had opened up between them, “these are my parents, Lewis and Roberta Lodge.”
“Oh, well,” Letty stuttered, “I’m awfully—I mean very pleased to meet you!” She tried to put aside her misery for a moment to give them a pleasant impression of her, but she could see that everything had already gone terribly awry. No one budged to shake her hand—his mother only glared at her from the other end of a long, pointed nose and made a disapproving sound from the back of her throat before turning away. Her husband followed quickly behind her. Grady’s brow crumpled over his gray eyes and he looked at the sidewalk and then back at Letty as though wishing she would do something different. What that thing would have been she couldn’t imagine. Her mouth opened, but before she could think of what to say, he went to follow his parents. He reached the car before they did and opened the door so that they could climb inside.
“I’ll be right back,” she heard him say, and then the car door slammed.
“I’ve been awful somehow, haven’t I?” she asked when he returned to her.
“Didn’t you get any of my telegrams? Didn’t they tell you that I’d called?”
“Your telegrams?” she said, but by then realization was upon her. The dot of her mouth quivered and her eyes got big. “We were supposed to have dinner.”
“Yes. Tonight. We were supposed to have dinner tonight. My parents loathe this part of the city, but they came tonight because I told them how important it was to me, what a special girl you were. My place is filled with twenty dollars’ worth of flowers. I kept calling you to see if I could pick you up, but there was no answer. I tried to tell myself it was only that you were getting yourself ready for tonight.” He shook his head, and put his hand in the pocket of his jacket, as though he was rummaging for something. “What an idiot I am. When you didn’t show, Mother and Father kept saying that we ought to forget about it and just go have dinner, but I made them wait two hours, insisting you were on your way and worth every minute, even though it meant missing our reservation at the Colony.”
There were many things that Letty wanted to say, but somehow, “Oh, no,” was the only thing she could manage to give breath to. The setbacks of the afternoon seemed another lifetime away already.
“It’s my fault, I suppose, for wanting to make it all happen so quickly—” Grady began to say, but he was interrupted by his mother. She had rolled down the window of her limousine and was staring out at the boy and girl standing awkwardly on the walk.
“Young lady, you have already ruined my dinner. Would you kindly allow me to enjoy the rest of my evening?”
“I ought to be going.” Grady sighed and put both hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth. “Mother is awfully upset, and now she’ll be very scandalized by the knowledge that the first girl I’ve wanted them to meet since prep school is not only very rude, but also the kind to sing in nightclubs.”
“I’m so sorry, I can explain everything that happened!” She opened her palms up to him hopefully. Had she meant to grab his collar, touch his face? In any event, he stepped back, and she had no choice but to lower them, slowly and pathetically, to her sides. “I’m sorry,” she repeated in a smaller and more chastened voice.
“At times, you and I have seemed to be the perfect company.” Grady’s gaze went to the treetops, and then to the pavement—but never to a place where he might accidentally see the sorrow in her face. “And other times you seem not to care about seeing me at all. That’s fine, I suppose, only—only I don’t much like the way it makes me feel.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
Now his eyes did meet hers, and she found that being looked at in such a situation is infinitely worse than not being looked at. “In fact, I’m rather sick of the game, and I don’t know that I care to see you anymore.”
“Oh, Grady, please don’t say that,” she whispered. Too quickly he was in the car, and the car had sped down the street, and she was alone in the hot, still night.
Or not completely alone, for as soon as she’d scrunched up her eyes—as though that might take the sting away—she heard footsteps on the stoop behind her and a low whistle. She kept her eyes tight and her hands balled up with fistfuls of skirt and hoped this unwanted presence would dissolve back into the city. But no such luck.
“Those Lodges sure do travel in style.”
It was a male voice, neither young nor old. She prayed that he was talking to someone else, but apparently he was alone, because when he went on, he addressed her.
“You look classy enough, but not of their ilk. The sort to drive around in limousines, lunching at the Ritz, flying down to Florida whenever the weather round here gets so they don’t like it. Must be a nice way to live, don’t you think?” When she didn’t say anything, he repeated himself. “Don’t you think it would be nice?”
“I think it would be nice.” Her voice sounded hollowed out.
“Me, too. That’s why I can’t figure the Grady fellow. Wants to be a writer, wants to make his own way in the world. If I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I wouldn’t care if I knew how to read. I’d have daiquiris by the pool and pay someone to read to me. Takes a strange man to work when he doesn’t have to, and stranger yet to turn down money that could be his for nothing.”
“The Lodges are pretty fine, are they?” Her shoulders went slack. Suddenly she felt sore and fatigued from her practicing the day before.
The man whistled again. “They are pretty fine. Haven’t you ever heard of Dorian Dog Food? That’s where her money came from, piles of it, and he’s from one of those nice old families that send their sons away to school. I’d say they are pretty fine.”
Another car passed on the street, but it was not Grady coming back to see if she was going to be all right.
Turning, she tried to smile, but it was a weak attempt. “Everything that goes down must come up, right?” She had once heard a girl say this in a radio play, and it had sounded irreverent and brave in her lyrical radio voice. But the words were like lead when Letty heard them coming out of her own mouth.
The man, who had a five o’clock shadow but otherwise didn’t look much older than Grady, put his cigarette to his lips, considering what she’d said. “I think it’s the other way around,” he replied after a while.
This, for some reason, was the thing she finally could not bear. She covered her face and hurried down the street, hoping that she could make it around the corner before the tears started and she embarrassed herself again.
“Don’t go.” Cordelia sprawled across Astrid’s bed and watched her friend imploringly. She’d spent most of the afternoon walking the grounds and brooding, and had come indoors just in time to see Letty advancing toward the gates, a tiny figure clad in white amid a field of green. Angry at herself, she’d pulled her sweat-dampened tunic over her head and thrown it across the room. Even after she knew Letty was gone, her guilt had thrummed on unabated, and for a while she stewed in her suite, wondering how everything in her life had turned to rot so quickly. She continued in a similar state of mind until she heard an unusual amount of traffic on the main stairs, and had drifted into Astrid’s room. “Please, don’t go.”
“Can’t be helped, darling.” Astrid bent over the chair of the vanity, turning her face this way and that to best assess whether or not the wide-brimmed black hat she was wearing should come with her or not. “I might have to murder your handsome brother if I stay, and prison garb simply won’t do justice to my figure.”
“But couldn’t you talk again in the light of day?” asked Cordelia, for whom a dramatic departure had always signaled an intention not to return. “Maybe you were both just overheated last night.”
Astrid straightened and caught Cordelia’s eye in the mirror. “There’s been plenty of time this morning for him to apologize, if indeed he was merely ‘overheated.’” With nimble fingers, she removed the hat, and then walked across the floor and handed it to Milly, who was struggling with one of the several pieces of luggage that had reappeared in the hallway that morning. “But he has more important things to see to, I suppose, and it won’t be me groveling to him saying I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sorry.”
The strap of Cordelia’s slip fell away from her shoulder and she put it back in place. “He didn’t really say that he has more important things to see to than you, did he?”
“Oh, yes. He said it was a dumb idea, my coming to live here, and that he couldn’t really think about me, what with the business and the Hales and how the situation with them changes every minute.”
“Every minute? That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” Astrid waved her hands in the air dismissively. As though this reminded her of something, she went over to the nightstand and picked up her engagement ring. “Something about the Hales vandalizing the club.”
Cordelia had been lounging before but now she bolted upright. “My club?”
Astrid blinked at her. “Yes, I suppose.”
Was that what Thom was threatening last night? Had he left The Bedroom and gone to the Greys’ place to oversee the damage himself? Cordelia’s jaw got tight and her teeth clenched together. Only when Astrid’s green eyes sailed from Cordelia’s face to her hands did she realize how overwhelmed with fury she was.
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia whispered.
“Don’t be sorry, darling. I know you want to talk to Charlie about what’s happened.” A fragile smile played on her face. “Well, go!”
Cordelia went to Astrid and put her arms around her neck. “Come back soon, all right?”
“All right.” Astrid winked sadly and released Cordelia from her embrace. “Don’t think I’d miss your club opening for anything in the world.”
“I’ll ring you.”
She found Charlie in the poolroom on the second floor, playing billiards in a worn undershirt and tailored slacks. He was with Danny and some of the other boys, and when she came in, he glanced up from the table but did not speak. He seemed reluctant to acknowledge her at all, but after a moment of glancing from her slip to her face, he handed her the collared shirt he had been wearing earlier. With a faint nod of understanding she pulled it on and rolled the sleeves up. Once she was more covered he bent to take his shot.
“Astrid’s leaving,” she said in a soft voice.
“I know,” he replied.
The ceiling fan went on whirring, and the boys in the corner stopped staring at her. “What happened to the club last night?” she asked when it was obvious he didn’t want to talk about Astrid anymore.
“Not much. It’s not the damage that they did—it was just a message.”
“We can still open as planned?”
Charlie regarded her. “Yes, we can still open.”
“What does the message mean?”
He shrugged. “Means something worse is coming. Maybe on opening night. There wasn’t a lot of subtlety to the message.”
“What did they do?”
“It was too disgusting to tell a lady.”
Over his shoulder, she saw the boys trying not to laugh, and this made her angry, and wish that she wasn’t wearing a slip and that her hair wasn’t undone. “Well, can’t we hit them back first?”
“With what? Already took most of their speakeasy customers in the city. The country club won’t budge for obvious reasons. Hard to know who they supply privately. I’d like to hit them the way they hit us, but Jones keeps saying we’re a business, and we can’t waste resources on violence, except when necessary. Wish he were wrong, but—he’s usually right.”
Outside, the sun was shining, and Cordelia went to the window seat and sat down. It would have been a good day to be by the pool, but she had no desire to swim. “I had so many ideas last night, Charlie. I watched and figured out what makes all these different places special, and I know just what we’ll use for our place and what we won’t.”
Charlie sunk the eight ball and handed off the pool cue. “Yeah? Good,” he said, sitting down next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know.”
She closed her eyes and wished that from the first moment she’d walked into the bank, she had thought of nothing but how to open a speakeasy. That she had stayed at Charlie’s side and learned everything there was to learn and personally chosen every chair and glass and uniform. That she had not grown weak and distracted by matters of the heart, which were in any event fleeting. Her mind went to Max, with his fancy airplane, how he looked down on a miniature landscape, acting so superior, as though he knew anything about life and the choices people had to make. She felt disgusted, remembering how impressed she was by him, how godlike he had acted as he piloted over the heads of little people everywhere.
She might have tried to say all this, but Charlie didn’t seem to need to hear it, and by then her mind had moved onto something else. “Charlie,” she began. Her mouth had gone dry and her brain began to tick. “Did you know that the Hales have a submarine?”
“What?” His brows drew together.
“I saw it when Max took me up in the airplane. Apparently Duluth Hale got it in the Great War. They use it for deliveries.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but Max says he’s seen it leave every day at dawn. It was later in the day when I saw it—a great big thing rising out of the water.”
Charlie shook his head and looked over his shoulder at the other boys, who were going about their business, focused on the pool game or involved in low conversation. When he turned back to Cordelia there was a burning light in his eyes. “Hot damn!” He jumped up and slapped his hands together, loudly enough to catch the attention of everyone else in the room. “Well, hot damn.”
“Did I do right finally?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“You did right, sister.” He slapped his hands together again. “God damn, it’s going to be a good day.”
Grabbing both her hands, he pulled her to her feet. Cordelia beamed at him and he beamed back. “Come on, Cord,” he said, throwing his arm over her shoulder and steering her toward the door. “We got some work to do.”
“We?” She was so pleased to be back in Charlie’s good graces, and she wanted to bring attention to it, just once.
“Yeah, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. I have this friend in the Coast Guard—not a friend exactly, more like someone who I pay to act friendly. What do you say we call him up and tell him a story?”