Ten Cents a Dance (27 page)
Authors: Christine Fletcher
I bent to the paper again. Humming a scrap of something I remembered Ozzie playing. I'd been there when he wrote it. Developing his sound, he'd said.
Like me, here, bucking rivets.
Love to Chester and Betty. Tell Betty I haven't seen any tomatoes out here yet that could beat the ones in her garden. Don't worry about me. I like it and I'm doing good and I have a place to stay, which is more than some, so many people are pouring into town and not enough room for everyone. I'll write more in a few days. I'll tell you about the lead man on our ship, he thinks he's pretty tough but he's not met a Yards girl yet. He'll learn. I miss you.
Your loving daughter,
Ruby
If I'd never found out about Aunt Sofia, I never would have written
Ten Cents a Dance.
Sofia was my mother's aunt, my grandmother's baby sister. For most of my life, that was all I knew. When I asked my grandmother about her, she'd act as though I hadn't spoken. She wasn't pretending to be deaf; it was as though I'd ceased to exist. Which, let me tell you, is a pretty effective way to convince a kid to leave a topic alone. It wasn't until years later, after my grandmother passed away, that my mother finally told me the story.
Sofia was the youngest of five children growing up in a small town in Sicily. When she was about fifteen, the family emigrated to New York. We don't know what happened, but we know that within a year of arriving, Sofia's father had kicked her out and declared her dead to the family. Any contact with her was forbidden. To my mother's knowledge, her grandfather—Sofia's father—never spoke Sofia's name again, to the day he died.
Fast-forward to 1939. My mother was eleven. One afternoon, a beautiful, tiny, elegantly dressed woman walked into the candy store my grandparents owned in the Bronx. She and my grandmother threw their arms around each other, sobbing. To my mother's astonishment, she was introduced to an aunt she never knew she had. Sofia had returned.
After her father disowned her, Sofia had supported herself as a taxi dancer. Many taxi dancers married and went on to lead perfectly respectable lives. Others slid into prostitution. Sofia was one of the lucky ones: she married a Jewish cabdriver and lived in a lovely apartment in the north Bronx. Over the next several years, she and my mother became very close. My mother's family was poor, but somehow Sofia never had to worry about money. She took Mom to the horse races and out shopping; she bought Mom her first high heels, her first fur coat. My mother and grandmother visited Sofia at her apartment. Once, they even went to her mother-in-law's apartment for coffee. All this time, however, the rest of the family not only refused to meet with Sofia, they refused even to acknowledge her existence.
One day, when my mother was seventeen, Sofia's husband came to see them with devastating news: Sofia was dead. She was only thirty-six years old.
My mother and grandmother—alone, again, out of the entire family—went to the funeral. There, they discovered that nothing Sofia had told them about herself was true. Sofia wasn't married, and she didn't live in that lovely apartment. In reality, Sofia was the longtime mistress of a prominent Jewish gangster. She lived in the Hotel Taft, in Manhattan. Her cabdriver "husband" was one of the men who worked for her lover.
A taxi dancer and mob mistress, a woman who for years led a double life—in
our
family?
"How come we never heard any of this before?" I asked my mother. Surely, a cousin . . .
But none of the cousins knew about her. My greatgrandfather's word was law, and none of his children— Sofia's brother and sisters—ever mentioned her name. And my grandmother? She never stopped grieving for her baby sister, my mother said, and she never could bear to talk about it. When my grandmother passed away, the only person in our family who knew Sofia had ever existed was my mother. And then, me.
Why had Sofia gone to such extremes of deceit? My mother's theory—which I believe—was that she was most likely driven by loneliness. With the apparent backing of her gangster lover, she arranged the trappings of a respectable married life—including, bizarrely enough, even a mother-in-law—in order to reconnect with her family.
After hearing Sofia's story, I had to research her life. Along the way, I became fascinated with the world of taxi dancing. I'd been vaguely aware of "dime-a-dance" girls, but I really didn't know who they were or what they did. I was surprised to find out that taxi-dance halls were enormously popular in the United States from the 1920s until after World War II. Sometime in the 1950s they began to decline, although they've never entirely gone away; to this day, taxi-dance halls can be found in most major cities.
Taxi dancers inhabited a kind of gray area: they weren't prostitutes, but the profession certainly wasn't respectable, either. Men paid, not for sex, but to be able to hold a pretty girl close for the length of a dance, a girl who would listen to them and pay attention to them. Girls (and they often were girls) chose it because it seemed fun, and because they could earn easily twice as much money as they might in a factory or other socially acceptable job.
It must have been difficult enough for Sofia, with all her resources, to maintain a double life as long as she did. How, I wondered, might a teenager manage—and why might she have to? As I started imagining the kind of girl who could pull it off, Ruby Jacinski, from Chicago's Back of the Yards, was born. Her story is not my aunt Sofia's; it's not as dire, and it certainly has a happier ending. Writing it, though, I got the chance to explore what fascinated me most about my aunt. Here she'd climbed up from the street, to a life with furs and money and everything she could possibly want—yet none of it was enough to fill the hole where her family used to be. I study her photographs and wonder: what choices might Sofia have made differently if she'd had the chance?
My sincere thanks to all who helped throughout the writing of this book: Dr. Mary Meckel, for her knowledge of the taxi-dance industry and her warm encouragement; Kathleen Headley, for patiently answering all my questions about Chicago neighborhoods in the 1940s; Karen Karbo, Dan Berne, Charlotte Dixon, Debbie Guyol, Connie McDowell, and Laura Wood, for their thoughtful critique and unflagging support; Choi Marquardt, whose astute insights inspired me to dig deeper, think harder, and write better; Ketzel Levine, for her enthusiastic reading of multiple drafts; Margot Monti, for vetting my music references; Andrea Carlisle, for never failing to ask how the writing was going and allowing me to vent; and the members of the Fedora Lounge (
www.fedoralounge.com
), who helped me get period details right. My thanks also to Don and Melinda McCoy and the staff of North Portland Veterinary Hospital, for being the best at what they do, and for making my day job more fun than should be strictly legal.
My deepest gratitude to my family, and to Barbara Newman, who started me laughing on a ninth-grade field trip to see King Tut and who has kept me laughing ever since; her sharp wit and steadfast friendship have stood me through many a rough patch.
Many affectionate thanks to my agent, Dorian Karch-mar, for her help and wise counsel, and to my editor, Melanie Cecka, who gives the lie to the common plaint that editors no longer edit. She does, and brilliantly. Thanks also to Deb Shapiro, Stacy Cantor, and everyone at Bloomsbury Children's Books, for their enthusiasm and dedication.
A full bibliography would take pages, but I want to mention the following outstanding resources: Paul G. Cressey,
The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life
(1932); Mary V. Meckel, Ph D.,
A Sociological Analysis of the California Taxi-Dancer: The Hidden Halls
(1995); Robert A. Slayton,
Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy
(1986); Thomas J. Jablonsky,
Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago
(1992); Edith Abbot,
The Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935
(1936); Dominic A. Pacyga and Charles Shanabruch,
The Chicago Bungalow
(2003); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(1945); Dempsey J. Travis,
An Autobiography of Black Jazz
(1983); Nathan Thompson,
Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers (An Informal History)
(2003); Emily Yellin,
Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II
(2004); and Constance Bowman Reid and Clara Marie Allen,
Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory
(1944). I have strived to portray the era and its events accurately, and any errors are mine alone. For more information on the topics explored in this book, please visit
www.christinefletcherbooks.com
.