I got to know Miss Starr on account of her volunteering for every soup kitchen in Portland. Woman’s lobster bisque is a dream.”
“It couldn’t possibly hold a candle to your red fish stew. Supposing she was raised au naturel, though, I’m curious—how does she come to be educated enough to teach Weekly Betterment?”
Miss Christina must be relieved at my readiness to switch topics, because the flattery goes over like a lead balloon. “Word is she went away to a girls’ school years back after her family struck it rich, a real genuine college. People sure talked. But it worked out just fine. I was one of the chefs when Evelina Starr married Tom Vaughan, and that there was a wedding to beat the band. She’s nicely settled now, I hope.”
“Can a tempest ever really settle?”
“I’m not the one to say.” Standing, the chef twists her back. “Hungry, Miss James? Clam fritters or baked veal in tomato sauce tonight.”
“Miss Christina, I don’t know that it’ll produce any cheer, but Blossom said she was sure that Davy was alive. That she could . . . sense it somehow.”
The tiny woman regards me with fathomless wells of loss in her eyes.
“Do you pay mind to that sort of thing?” she asks numbly.
“Oh, as the sun rises,” I assure her with hand over heart.
“Well, I wish I did, Miss James. And I’ll do my best to try. ’Cause the dearest boy in the world is out there, and if it helps him come on home to us? Hell, I’ll believe that Blossom Fontaine can fly.”
Disheartened, I exit. A maid passes me in the hall, slender and neat, whose lashes flicker in my direction before she sails away to dust pillowcases and tuck in soaps. Shutting myself in my room, I regard the old girl in the mirror. The corpus appears currently fraught with worry, not to mention battered by sentiment and injury and change.
This will never do.
Not for tonight. I need Nobody the infiltrator, Nobody the mannequin. Flipping my hands, I stretch the interlocking fingers.
And just as Blossom did, I open my cosmetics case and set to work becoming someone else.
* * *
—
We can’t see the moon sleeping high above the charcoal-sketched Portland streets. But her cloud-spun quilt glows diffusely. The air below is clear and full of gentle forest lullabies, and the garlands of electric lights hanging like holiday draperies along the avenues are beginning to thin. Several blocks with them, then one without. Two without, then two strung with glass fairy globes.
Three without, the next by contrast shining like the deck of a yacht.
“Oh, I see. We’re going to proverbial Brooklyn,” I mention.
Blossom laughs, the full-throated one, which makes me smile.
“Well.” She clears her throat, surprised at her own mirth. “My regular place of work isn’t precisely a conventional cabaret—actually, it’s the maddest I’ve yet warbled in, and for a San Francisco girl, you’ll agree that’s saying something.”
“It’s the whole alphabet.”
“What’s the oddest black market affair you’ve ever graced with your presence in New York?”
Torso twinging, I reflect upon the Maritime Supper Club in the glimmering lap of the East River, sipping a champagne cocktail as a fellow with waxed mustaches ranted about an ambushed rum delivery. He was dead two days later. I remember sporting tails and trousers in the basement-level Cave of the Fallen Angels, smoking a cigarette as a bruiser bragged about having cut off the hand of one of Mr. Salvatici’s faro dealers. He didn’t last the night.
“The Club Abbey,” I reply, citing a frolic with Sadie. “It was in a burned-out church with a bar set up where the pulpit had stood. Literally divine.”
We reach the waterfront, businesses giving way to greasy spoons and fading billboards for Kellogg’s and Kodak. Both of us are losing the pep in our kick step. I’m about to suggest taking a cab and damn the expense when I remind myself that it’s hard enough for a Negro waving a ten-dollar bill to get one in Harlem.
“Here we are,” Blossom announces.
“An empty dock?” I question, baffled.
“Oh, honey, it’s hardly empty.”
As we step carefully down pine planks in our dancing shoes, I realize the quay is populated with rowboats—half a dozen of them, helmed by men with nostrils illuminated by their cigars. The nearest slaps gloved hands against his knees, rising.
“Miss Fontaine!” he calls. “Give me the honor tonight—the missus is in a right snit and my bed’s been cold these four days running.”
“I fear I can do nothing about the temperature of