why, they’d piss themselves over the licking they were in for.”
“Blossom, language, I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“Have you any idea how difficult it is to forget words once you know them?” her friend teases.
“Gracious, what am I doing? Blubbering over some cast-off white girl’s sickbed when there must be a dozen or more rooms to check, and my maids running wild. Don’t tell anyone you saw your Mavereen in this state.”
“Oh, death first,” Blossom vows.
“Stay with her until Dr. Pendleton gets back? I’m tired witless, and I just know the linens for the dinner service need ironing. The new downstairs girl has been plenty distracted over . . . well. All this nonsense.”
“Don’t say another word. I’m not due at the club till eight tonight, and the getup is as easy as rolling over in bed. Go on—I can handle the likes of Miss James.”
You really can’t, I think, though the brag endears her to me.
The door shutting behind Mavereen provides me with the perfect opportunity to awaken. Twitching, I fuss with the coverlet, set free a tiny moan.
Because I want to see what Blossom is like about as much as I want to see what she makes of Nobody.
The Nobody I am around Blossom will be a slightly jaded version of the sweet flapper Max knows. More like the desperate woman Mavereen and Dr. Pendleton met last night. Doesn’t do dope but doesn’t mind when someone else does, may have been kept as a banker’s baby doll but thought she was in love, cut her bare foot on broken glass in the street once when her dancing shoes had pinched her. Never pays for her own cigarettes. That sort.
“Miss James? Are you all right?”
The curtain rises.
Whatever I expected Blossom to look like, I’ve fallen short.
She smiles. She’s dark, dark as any African. These things matter in places where we’ve dumped pink, white, yellow, red, black people into the same paint can. Her skin is burnished, as if she’s aglow. Blossom’s lips and eyes are delicate, pretty watercolor strokes of peach and umber. But her cheekbones and her brow prove positively architectural. If you left a Grecian temple alone for around thirty-five years, a bit older than they’d mentioned Max was, and then you lacquered it, that would be Blossom. She wears artful cosmetics and loose fabrics in dragonfly hues, a gold-threaded scarf draped at her neck.
I cough. “If there’s water, please . . .”
Blossom sweeps away and returns with the substance, which never tasted quite so much like pure, icy gin. A side effect of either the morphine or the pine forests hereabouts, doubtless. She resettles herself in the bedside chair.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Oh heavens, that sounded so coarse. I mean, thank you. I’m all in shreds.”
“You certainly are, honey.” Blossom tilts her stone-carved chin, evaluating. “Now, let me see. Some might say that I ought to send you straight back to dreamland, and some might say I should ask you every little thing about yourself. But I think presently—your being in God’s lap and all, and thinking terribly lengthy thoughts—you must want to ask me a few things. Well, I am always disposed to talk to interesting people, and you, Miss James, interest me unnaturally. Who am I, you inquired? My name is Miss Blossom Fontaine, I live down the hall, and I am a cabaret singer. Next?”
My answering smile gushes like a spill of blood. Oh, I know how one gets into the knack of reading people well. A few hard years, some harder knocks, and human beings come into clearer focus. And Blossom just read me like a front-page headline.
“I was always dreadfully fond of the W questions,” I rasp.
She laughs, a musical sound. “Yes, because how can be too complex to even contemplate. As to when, you are Tuesday, April the nineteenth, of nineteen twenty-one.”
A quick calculation tells me that means I’ve spent seven days shooting myself cross-country like a rocket with a pair of festering bullet wounds in my side. No wonder Max was forced to hoist sleeve and mop me up.
“What happened to me after Dr. Pendleton knocked me for six?”
“Nothing you could call very active on your part, honey. Dr. Pendleton worked his medical magic, how I am not aware, but he’s terribly thorough. Cranky as an elderly weasel, but never mind that. Then we found this nightdress for you and changed your bandaging once. That shaft someone drilled through your person already looks much better. You continued to