The Lucky Ones (7 page)

“No?” Valentine chuckled. “I suppose that doesn’t surprise me, really. You fell asleep in one of their salons sometime after eating breakfast late last night, and Hector had to carry you to the car. Must have been quite a party. Seems Sophia fell ill and had to take a room at the Ritz for the night.”

“Oh.” Letty couldn’t bring herself to look at Valentine. The image of Jack Montrose’s sneer rose up in her thoughts, and she felt a little sick.

“Yes. Must have been quite a night you girls had.”

If she heard any more details of the evening, Letty feared she might reveal what she suspected had transpired between Sophia and Montrose. There were a few seconds when she even thought she ought to. Seeing Valentine as he was now—ruffled in the morning and so kind and handsome—she knew that he deserved better. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell on the woman who had already taught her so much about how to be a New York girl, and she changed the subject in the only way she could think of: “Do you suppose they get the
Troubadour
in Ohio?”

Valentine met her eyes. “Why, do you have some fellow waiting for you back there?”

“No.” Letty shook her head emphatically, as though that would prevent her blush from lingering.

“Sophia thinks the world of you,” Valentine was saying as he turned his body toward the window. She watched the workings of his neck as he swallowed, and momentarily forgot the extraordinary fact of her name being in the paper as she gazed at the perfect line of his profile against the bright skyline. “Perhaps,” he went on quietly, “she sees something of her young self in you. Only—” He exhaled, and his eyelids sank closed, and when he spoke again it was with a tone that she’d never heard him use. “Only, don’t end up
too
much like her.”

“But isn’t that why I’m here?” Letty said before she could think how it would sound, or even what it meant.

Valentine stared at her, his eyes as deep as pools. The sunshine lancing through the window made him appear golden as he never could in the movies. “Show business is a hard business, and it has made Sophia tough; that is all I mean. You must not lose your sensitivity, and—and I would hate to see you hurt.”

The weight of his hands hovered over hers, and the room melted away. Letty felt the same way she had when she first met Valentine; his brown gaze was warm and steady in her direction, as though for the first time she was completely understood. The connection between them hung in the air, beautiful and ephemeral.

“There you go, miss,” Beryl said as she roughly slid a plate in front of Letty. The omelet was perfectly formed, on a white oval plate, garnished with a sprig of parsley and a twist of grapefruit that frowned up at her accusatorily.

“What a happy sight this is!”

Letty’s head swiveled and she saw Sophia, framed in the doorway to the living room, her hair rather limp but her lipstick freshly applied, wearing a tuxedo jacket over her turquoise evening gown. It took Letty several seconds to realize that Sophia was not being sarcastic, that she was truly pleased by the sight of her husband and her protégée cozily eating breakfast together. Then she realized that Sophia must have been out on the street like that, and a sense of scandal rippled through her.

Valentine issued a hearty “Good morning, my dear!” as his wife advanced toward him and planted a kiss on his lips.

“Well, what are they saying about us this morning?”

“A lot—isn’t that the only thing that matters?” Valentine replied lightly, and they both laughed as Sophia opened the newspaper and began to search for her name. They continued to chatter, but Letty couldn’t hear them. She could still feel the place on her hands where Valentine had touched her; the spot was vibrating with the warmth of his skin against hers.

“Coffee?” Beryl was addressing Sophia, but she was staring at Letty. Suddenly Letty was conscious of her appearance, that she was wearing her bedclothes. The way the silk slip caressed her skin made her feel only a little better than naked. Shame and confusion washed over her, and for a moment she almost wished that she had woken up in Ohio. Just a few seconds ago she had been gazing longingly at a married man—her new friend’s
husband
—and she was certain that her guilt was radiating from every point of her body. But then there was that other hideous fact, like a screw in her belly, that Sophia had cheated on that husband and that Letty had seen it.

“I ought to get dressed,” Letty said stupidly.

“But what about your breakfast?” Valentine asked.

Letty stood up, pushing back her chair. “I’m not so hungry anymore,” she lied, and backed toward the door.

“Well, hurry up.” Sophia winked at her chummily. “I have big plans for today.”

“All right.” But Letty was hurrying away from the kitchen just to avoid meeting Sophia’s eyes.

In her room, Letty wasted no time in undoing the kimono and pulling the slip over her head. As quickly as possible she secured her plain cotton underclothes, and over that, a pleated skirt that covered her knees and a boxy sailor-style shirt. She sat at her vanity again, taking in short breaths. Now she recognized herself; here was the small-town girl she had briefly misplaced. It was all very well for movie stars to wait until dusk to dress properly, but she had grown up among simpler folks.

The day she had spent with Sophia had felt so fancy and fun, and Letty knew that a movie star of her caliber could teach her things she’d never learn elsewhere. But the price was so heavy. The secret she was being asked to keep, disgusting to her. She remembered now that she had learned to adore Valentine O’Dell on her weekly sojourns to the movie house—she had loved him a long time really, from afar, and she hated the idea of him being mistreated. Of course, that love had been the silly fantasy of a little girl; she had understood that after a few days in his company. But now, thinking again of his touch, and the magnitude of Sophia’s betrayal, she wondered if her kind of affection wasn’t what he needed after all.

When Cordelia got to the airfield and saw how Max was flying, all of the color drained from her face. Even the roar of his airplane sounded angry. When he turned sideways or upside down or did flips in the air, the effect was just as furious. She had seen him do these tricks before, and though they always made her frightened for him, they had seemed playful then, and artful, a perfectly executed imitation of danger. The way he was flying now, it looked like a direct challenge to Death himself.

Relief washed over her when he finally brought the plane down and she could run toward him across the ruined grass. Their eyes met, and Cordelia briefly saw the storm in his. Then he turned away from her and stalked toward the hangar.

“Max, wait!”

She had to run to catch up to him. When she did, she grabbed his hand. It was slight, but she could feel his rage ebb a tiny bit with the touch.

“Max,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

They stood like that a while, an arm’s distance apart, holding hands. He stared off into the distance, and she stared at the back of his head.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said eventually. But the words were so full of bitterness that she knew he wanted everyone he had ever met to be sorry.

“Come. Just come on. Come with me. All right?”

Her hands went up his forearm, gently pulling. Eventually he turned and she saw how twisted up his face had gotten with all the nasty things being said about him. At first he came reluctantly, but by the time they reached the car they were both moving quickly. They didn’t discuss where they were going, or talk at all, until they had driven a good ways and were close enough to the Sound that they could smell it.

Out on the water, birds went up and down with the small, soft waves, which emanated from some unseen source and were continually lapping against the pebble shore. She thought if Max looked up and saw that, something inside him might settle and perhaps he wouldn’t feel so hopeless.

“You know, I think everything is going to be all right,” she began in as sure and soothing a tone as she could muster. “It’ll blow over. Everything always does. It’ll blow over, and everything will be the same. Or maybe even better. Why, I was reading in the newspaper just the other day how they formed the first Negro Aviation Club, in Los Angeles, and—”

“I don’t live in Los Angeles. I live in New York.”

“Of course, yes, I only meant—”

“And I don’t want to be part of any club. I don’t want to be an exotic sideshow. What I do—I’m the best at it.”

“All right, but—”

“Cordelia.”

She took her eyes off the road to glance at him. They had reached an uneven patch of road and she had to hold the steering wheel firmly with both hands to keep from veering. Max was staring at his hands, as though trying to think of what to say. Then he made a fist and punched the dashboard.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” she whispered.

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“You have no idea.” He put his hands over his face. “You have no idea how bad this is. It’s not just that I’m black. I’m a black boy with a white girl. You know what they do to boys like me? Not just in the South, either. Here in Queens County they put sheets over their heads and…”

He didn’t finish, and Cordelia winced at what he had started to say. She wanted to reply with something sweet and uplifting, but nothing came to her, and she stared out at the road in front of them, the grand houses on the bluffs, the dense clouds lurking overhead.

“Just take me home,” he told her.

“Home?”

There was an extended silence and then Max said, “Back to the Laurels’, I guess, is what I meant.”

They didn’t speak again, except Max’s mumbled directions, until they were at the hedgerow that separated his patrons’ property from the road. She recognized the stately white building, although she had only seen it from above, when they had been flying. From this perspective, down at the bottom of a hill, the house seemed more imposing, as though it were regarding her with skeptical eyes situated at the top of a long, proud nose.

“Max, I love you,” she heard herself say. Those weren’t the words she had intended, but when she heard them come out of her mouth she was almost overwhelmed by how much she meant them.

He sat there long enough that she knew he’d heard her, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Thank you for the ride” was all he said, and then he got out of the car and started up the hill at a steady pace.

She waited to see if he would glance back or wave at her. She wondered too if he might change his mind, if the prospect of going into that house where he had once been celebrated, only to be treated cruelly when his secret was revealed, would prove too much for him. But he didn’t. He kept moving in that determined way toward the grand white house where he had once been groomed to be a hero. Her heart struggled and gasped. She wanted to call out to him and tell him she would wait, but she knew that would do no good. He was too far gone from her now.

7

DOGWOOD WAS LOUSY WITH MEN, A SPECIES IN WHICH Astrid had shown great interest before she was married. As a debutante she had been unembarrassed by her reputation as a flirt, and she had collected the affections of the old and young, the gallant and erudite and shy, like so many postage stamps. But men were abhorrent to her now. Their voices emanated from the remote corners of the house, and they crossed the lawn in pairs with rifles rested arrogantly against their shoulders. Even at a great distance she knew the way sweat clung to their skin, fouling the air around them, and the cruelty they were capable of.

In silent protest of men and all the messes they caused, Astrid had spent as much of the day as possible in a bubble bath and only emerged from the confines of the suite she shared with her husband when she ran out of reading material. She had let her hair dry naturally in the warm summer air and had used none of the usual feminine tricks to make it less fluffy afterward. She had selected a dress that Charlie had given her, a white pinafore-style thing, not because it was his gift but because she had never bothered to have it taken in—Charlie always bought dresses two sizes too big for her, and this one was so large it concealed her slender frame. Despite these efforts, her reflection, as she glimpsed it on the second-floor landing, didn’t appear undesirable, only winningly careless in a way that fit the hot season and the voluminous styles girls were wearing that year.

Oh, well—she took the latest magazines from the library and shut herself up with Good Egg in the glass-enclosed porch where nobody liked to go anymore, because it was where Darius had been shot. She put Rudy Vallée on the phonograph, which all the toughs playing pool on the second floor would surely deride as music for silly women. Then she rang for Len, the cook, and asked him for chicken salad and potato chips and lemonade, in order to ruin her appetite, just in case Charlie had any designs on dining with her. She couldn’t stand the idea of sitting across from him while he thoughtlessly digested food that he had earned by pushing around nice old men who wanted nothing more than a better life for their children. With exquisite carelessness, she lay herself down on the faded rose velvet daybed in between the potted palms and crossed her ankles and lost herself in a
Fame
story about Eloise Aligash, the lady who did the voice of Cara Gatling for the radio.

These small triumphs carried her a while, until she heard the heavy footsteps sounding above her. Good Egg raised her head from the ground and yipped at the ceiling. Someone was putting their full weight onto those old floorboards, and she was sure it was Charlie. She scowled and muttered out loud and even considered going upstairs to tell him he ought to be considerate of the people below, except that would mean seeing his big face, and she didn’t want that. Instead she rang for more potato chips, and turned her attentions to
Vanity Fair
magazine.

The
Vanity Fair
was full of high-tone musings about plays she hadn’t seen and probably never would, but she was grateful to it when the hall door creaked open and Charlie’s heavy footfalls headed toward her. Her shoulders stiffened, but she issued an order to her ankles that they would remain as still and careless as before.

“Wake up, kitten, it’s time to go to work!”

Charlie’s body went down on the other end of the couch, jostling Astrid. Her ankles held firm, and she raised the magazine so that it would continue to shield her from his brutish features. The sound of his linen pants against the velvet daybed was among the most grating she had ever heard—but it was put to shame by the whisper of his fingers among the potato chips, and then again by the horror of his molars as he munched them.

“Kitten?” Charlie rested a hand on Astrid’s ankle, but she ordered it to remain frozen, impervious to his touch. “I’m going out, and I need my girl by my side.”

“I don’t much feel like it tonight,” she said, after a long pause, mostly hoping this would get his hand off her ankle.

“Aw, don’t be sour.” Charlie stood up, jostling the daybed again, and strode across the room. The way he spoke—rather breezier than the situation called for—Astrid knew he thought he was going to get his way. She peeked beyond the pages of her magazine and saw Charlie still putting potato chips in his mouth with one hand as he fiddled with an ornate cigarette box on a rosewood end table. From behind, she had to admit, he still had something about him. Maybe the way his shoulders stretched out his beige linen jacket. But she tried to remind herself how rank his kisses were just after he smoked. “I know it probably wasn’t the funnest joint I took you to last night,” he went on, as he got the cigarette lit. “But tonight’ll be different. More the way you like it. More class.”

He was turning back around, so Astrid quickly drew the magazine up to cover her eyes. “I’m really not in the mood, darling,” she answered aridly.

“Oh, come off it!” Charlie snapped, grabbing the magazine and ripping it from Astrid’s hands. For a moment they stared at each other—his face pulled down in irritation, hers wide open with surprise, her hands slightly raised, holding their position from before the magazine was snatched away. She blinked, and he averted his gaze, as though embarrassed by what he had done. “I’m sorry, Astrid. I just don’t get what’s come over you. I just wanna show you off.”

Astrid folded her arms over her chest and gave him her profile. “Show me off?”

Charlie sighed and made an attempt to smooth the crumpled magazine, before tossing it aside and sitting down next to Astrid on the daybed. “Come on, don’t be like this. You’ll like the place we’re going tonight—the Saxton Hotel on the East Side, old clients of Dad’s. They say they just got a new delivery of wine and champagne, classy stuff, down from Canada, so they don’t need us anymore. Well, we got plenty of class, and I aim to convince them they need us, damned as they ever did. Then I’m taking you for dinner, kitten.”

Astrid took her time in answering. She flattened the bodice of her dress over her stomach and examined her nails, which were due for some pampering. It occurred to her that Rudy Vallée was no longer crooning to her from the phonograph, and she lamented this lack of background music in her thoughts. She cast her eyes about the room before letting them roll back to meet Charlie’s with exquisite languor. “I’m not hungry.”

“But—”

“I’m not
going
to be hungry.”

Charlie regarded her, his head thrust back on his neck and his eyes burning. “All right, stay here. Stay here all night. But don’t think you’re leaving this property.” He turned away from her quickly, as though already his attention had moved on to other matters. “I’ll tell Victor he’s watching you tonight, and this time, there’ll be no little forays into the city…”

He was still issuing commands when the door swung shut behind him, and Astrid began to think of all the things she might have said to put him in his place.

“Evening, Cordelia.” Paulette, the hostess of The Vault, had greeted her boss at the door of the club with a pleasant smile, but there was a telltale sign of surprise in her eyes. Perhaps she knew it was obvious, because she added, “We weren’t expecting you.”

“I know.” Cordelia tucked a few wayward strands into her low bun and surveyed the tables, which were half-full on a hot night when the humidity was so oppressive that nobody seemed to want to move if they didn’t have to. “But I had an intuition it might be busy.”

The truth was she only
hoped
it would be busy, or at least busy enough to take her mind off Max—how his feelings for her had ruined his career, and how he’d walked away from her declaration of love without a single backward glance.

“Might be,” Paulette said doubtfully.

“You’ll find me in the office if you need me.” Cordelia kept her voice formal and aloof, trying to sound like Paulette’s superior instead of a girl searching for distractions. Even when she’d thought of something happy or amusing that day, it had led her back to Max, because then she had longed to tell him about it, and after that came the realization that she might never be able to tell him about anything again.

As she strode toward the back of the club she made little nods of acknowledgment to the men behind the bar and patrons that she recognized. A few cigarette girls were leaning against the rear wall, near the big brass doors that led to the old bank president’s office, and though they began to move when they saw Cordelia coming, their eyes searched her a few seconds longer than they ordinarily would have.

“Go on.” Cordelia shooed them as she went through the brass doors and into the hallway, not glancing back to see if they obeyed. She knew what they had been thinking, of course. They were thinking that she had been going with a black man and were wondering if she had known all along or found out with everybody else.

In the month following her father’s death she had been so full of self-recrimination and nervous agitation, and she had gotten in a bad way, lurking around the house and lying in the bath long after the water had gone cold, smoking one cigarette after another. She hadn’t stopped until she met Max’s mother, and Mrs. Darby had made it obvious what she thought of girls who smoked. It had been easy to give up, once Cordelia saw what it meant to Mrs. Darby, and she hadn’t really wanted one till now.

But she was still Max’s girl. At least, she wanted to be. Just because he seemed far away didn’t mean she could go back to her old ways. So she straightened her dress, a loose-fitting flowered chiffon that fell away from her shoulders in tiers, and went to find the distractions she’d come all the way to the city for.

Someone, it seemed, had been listening to her prayers. A pack of young men in bow ties celebrating the coming wedding of one of their members had taken up noisy residence at the bar, and a flock of chorus girls still in their feathered getups had filled the remaining tables surrounding the dance floor. An alliance between the two groups was in the early stages of negotiation, still as acrimonious as it was flirtatious, and the electricity of the exchange was spreading through the room, and even the music was speedier now. It was no longer an evening for quiet, languid drinking. The bar was low on supplies, and Cordelia was needed downstairs immediately to determine what should be opened next.

After that there was a rush on drinks and a shortage of ice, and she had to send Anthony out for more. Cordelia joined the men behind what were once the teller windows of the bank to keep up with the demand, shaking and stirring drinks and then passing them to the uniformed bartenders on the other side. When she stepped back onto the club floor, she saw that every seat was full now and two of the chorus girls had climbed onto the bar and were doing an old-fashioned cancan with the enthusiastic support of the band.

She sent one of Charlie’s men to help Anthony with the ice and the other two to stand under the chorus girls in case they slipped.

“Don’t ruin anyone’s fun,” she instructed, “but I won’t have either of those girls breaking their necks in my place.”

“But then there’s nobody at the door,” one of the men protested.

“Never mind that. Anthony will be back in a minute, and anyway, from what I can see, all the troublemakers are already in here. Let them dance a little longer, and then get them down safe and buy them a bottle of champagne.”

There was a lot of shouting, customers in bright colors moving excitedly back and forth, and her frenetic labors continued until she went to the front of the place to check on the ice and saw someone who stalled her forward motion. The stillness with which he regarded her was so disquieting that she did not realize for several seconds to whom those eyes belonged.

“Thom Hale,” she said flatly, as though hearing the name out loud might tell her what his presence there portended. He was standing at the bar twirling a drink like any other customer; the fit of his white linen suit was urbane and roomy, and she remembered with irritation how comfortable he made himself everywhere. The last time she had seen him, it had been in someone else’s speakeasy, where he had been just as free of care, so that it came of something of a surprise when she heard how he had presided over Astrid’s kidnapping some days later.

“Cordelia Grey,” he replied, and the corners of his mouth shot upward like a schoolboy’s. His face was as handsome as always, although more suntanned—almost as dark as Darius used to get—and his coppery hair was combed neatly to one side. Although his father was a gangster, his mother was from the society family that owned the White Cove Country Club, and his features had an aristocratic and knowing aspect. He always seemed a few steps ahead of everyone else.

“What are you doing in my place?”

“I thought I might have a cocktail, see what the competition was doing.” He let his eyes scan the room as he sipped his drink, as if to demonstrate to her the innocence of his mission. “That’s not against the law, is it?”

Cordelia let the tension in her chest dissolve and stepped toward the place he occupied by the bar, in between two groups becoming joyously oblivious to everything around them. She cocked her head and regarded him, and when she spoke again, her voice was light. “No more than anything else we do.”

He laughed, too quickly, and twirled his drink in the other direction.

Cordelia gave him a cool stare. “It wasn’t that funny.”

“No, I suppose it wasn’t.” Thom shrugged and looked away. The bones of his face were strong and fine, and he had the slender height and careless manner that Cordelia had come to recognize in the privileged—in people who had never been deprived of anything. He was gorgeous; even after everything, she was not blind to that. “Actually, I came to talk to you about business.”

Cordelia’s eyebrows floated upward in surprise. “Why would you want to talk to me?”

“Because I know you,” he said quietly. He coughed into a closed fist and cast his eyes about the room before continuing. “You know your brother hijacked a shipment of ours the other night?”

“Is that why he’s so full of bluster these days?”