Chicago, 1922
June brushed past the would-be revelers outside the Dil Pickle Club door. She only stopped to catch her breath in the alleyway when she had cleared the line of them.
Richard came to a halt beside her, his raccoon fur wafting in the light of a streetlamp. “I’m sorry that he upset you. What kind of numbskull treats his girl like that?”
Already she regretted blurting out to him that she’d seen John and Ruth kissing. “I don’t care. He can do what he wants.” She pulled her baggy coat closer. The damp in Chicago’s wind pierced straight to the bone. “I should be going.”
“I can’t let you wander off alone.”
“I don’t live far.” Should she have told him that? She didn’t know who this young fellow was. This was Tower Town—an expensively dressed fellow could be a mobster or a con man. She’d seen some in the club.
“No matter if you live across the street: you’re not traipsing around this part of town without me. Doctor’s orders.”
June must have had a suspicious look on her face because he took out his wallet. She peered at the card he produced: the American Medical Association.
He shrugged when she looked back up at him. “I know. I don’t look like a sawbones, do I?”
She liked him more for his modesty.
He walked her home that night, then called on her the next day at the Three Arts Club. While he seemed a little less humble perched behind the wheel of his topless roadster, with his fedora tilted across his brow and the fur of his raccoon coat rippling in the wind, he was sweet just the same. He took her driving through Lincoln Park with its naked winter trees and empty bandstand, then, as she held down her bottle-green cloche, they roared past the self-satisfied façade of the Drake Hotel. They conquered Michigan Avenue, rumbling past old churches and new offices, past the mock-medieval Water Tower, beneath the concrete gingerbread dripping from the Wrigley Building, and over the sea-green Chicago River, to the row of frilly Gilded Age skyscrapers overlooking Grant Park.
Pausing long enough to growl back at the bronze lions in front of the Art Institute, they charged into the park, zinging along the railroad lines and racing a locomotive to the modern-day temple of the Field Museum, beyond which the car came to the end of a dirt road and stopped.
The roadster vibrated in idle. Ahead of them steam shovels, their yellow paint glazed with icy snow, were parked in an earthen pit like dinosaurs frozen in the act of grazing. A broad snowy field separated them from Lake Michigan, which lolled behind blocks of ice tossed haphazardly onto the shore as if by a race of giants.
Richard raised his voice above the wind groaning off the lake. “They’re digging a new stadium.”
She could see where the big machines had bitten off chunks of the pit in which they were trapped.
“Thank you.” Her silk neck scarf snapped in the wind. “I needed this.”
“I needed this, too. Thank you.” He had taken off his hat and the wind had unstuck his pompadour, whipping his hair in his eyes, making him appear more boyish. “You’re different from other girls. Wiser. Calmer.”
“It’s all an act.” She wasn’t kidding.
“Well, don’t stop being you. You’re special.”
She looked into his light brown eyes. This was the part where men kissed her. Maybe she would not mind it so much, especially when she pictured John kissing Ruth. She leaned into him. He gave her arm a squeeze, and then let her go. He started the car.
She smiled to herself. Interesting fellow.
Richard returned to his home in St. Paul the next day, after which time he sent roses daily, and letters, until at last she agreed to come to St. Paul to visit over the summer, during which time she would stay in his mother’s house. It was his mother with whom she would fall in love, or at least the idea of being her daughter. She was engaged to Richard before the end of May.