I could see my future if I chose to remain at the Step Right Inn. Ten percent of this sack of organs would be of value to anyone.
The rest? So much garbage. The older, the rottener.
◆ Seven ◆
NOW
As soon as one nigger is allowed to stay in these parts, this community ceases to be a white man’s country, and in as much as it doesn’t take very long for a family of niggers to increase into a “buck town” of large population, the coming of one nigger is the beginning of future trouble.
—WILLIAM H. GREEN, “Let’s Keep Grant’s Pass a White Man’s Town,” Southern Oregon Spokesman, Grant’s Pass, Oregon, May 24, 1924
By Thursday, the day before Max returns to life at sixty miles per hour, I’m recovered enough to tour the Paragon Hotel.
This ought to elicit sturdy cheers. But tension hereabouts crackles like late-March ice over a pond. When Davy barrel-rolls—the boy’s unstoppably curious—into my sanctuary to find me scouring the New York newspapers for familiar names, it’s to deliver wild tales of monsters in the sewers and snakes in the vegetable patch, and to ask why I’m still here. As if I’m a countdown to an awfully grim foray into No Man’s Land.
“It’s ’cause of the ghosts who are after us,” he tells me gravely. “The ones haunting the woods. Miss Christina says they’ll sure get us good if you stay on much longer.”
“Miss Christina ought to eat more cookies,” I inform him, puzzled.
But it lacks all conviction.
Mavereen drops by once daily, gracious and stern, gladdened my color is now offending pinkish rather than offending death-white. Frowning whenever I compliment the fineness of the china, the softness of the linens, the marvelous flatness of the walls. By now I’ve paid her in full, same as Dr. Pendleton, which only amplifies their enthusiasm over becoming less acquainted.
As for my new friend, we sit on her bed gabbing like sisters, poring over fashion rags and listening to opera and jazz records. Blossom doesn’t seem to give a Bronx cheer in a moratorium that I’m a hoodlum. But while she bestows easy smiles and peat-smoke whiskey, she refuses to discuss the film of worry clouding her eyes.
“When you’re well again, honey,” she soothes. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. I did from day one—I’m a sap, remember?”
But her attention wanders to empty corners and her buffed nails drift between her teeth. And I can no more force a confidence than I can repeal Prohibition.
Mornings are endless, a sea of broken clocks. Everyone I love is lost to me. I haven’t a clue whether half of them are dead or alive and it’s maddening, not knowing if their names are being called from across a crowded nightclub or etched in unrelenting stone.
Max stays away, and I force myself not to notice.
The knock at the door still sends a pulse through me, but I recover when my eyes flick to the clock. Four thirty on a lush, wet afternoon. My escort is punctual to the minute.
“Do come in!”
Blossom steps through, wearing a voile handkerchief tunic frock ending in four dramatic points, the pattern on the georgette overblouse done in cobalt and dull gold. The woman is a veritable ode to triangles. She laughs at my own costume, fanning her fingertips over her cheek.
“Honey, what in the name of Sam Hill can you possibly be wearing?”
“Perfect, isn’t it?” I demonstrate my newly recovered ability to pivot without plummeting like a Sopwith Camel. “Mrs. Meader is apt to stick a bulb in my mug and a lampshade on my head to help me blend in downstairs otherwise. This’ll prove how smashing I am at disappearance.”
“Yes, I need to talk with you about Mavereen.” Blossom makes a dainty fish face. “Christ almighty, you’re a beauty of a bluestocking.”
“I told you—I’m not always tearing around blocking lead pellets.”
“Naturally, such a life would be exhausting. But I never pictured the transformation would be quite this complete.”
The Nobody I am to explore the hotel wears a slipover crêpe de chine blouse in a grey like our mornings, with a black wool skirt. The accessories are the corker: a businesslike silver head scarf erases every wisp of blond, powder dulls my lips, and I’ve both a notebook and an unapologetically spinsterish pair of reading glasses. Studied classics but likes the library’s solitude better than its stories, reluctant suffragette disgusted by actual politics, idolizes Nellie Bly. Believes in cold baths and strong coffee. Never quite grew into her elbows. That sort.
“What