With shaking fingers I tried to feel for a pulse. I looked up at Jamie. Billy’s eyes were wide with horror.
“Get Billy out of here!” I screamed.
They stood frozen for a minute. Then Jamie half carried, half dragged Billy to his car. Billy kept staring back at Jeff. Jamie pushed him into the car and went around to the driver’s side. I heard the engine start and the car pull away.
“Jeff!” I yelled the word into his face. “Please. Wake up. Please, please don’t be dead.” I started to cry, and I tried to shield the rain from his face while I talked to him.
The rain was washing away the blood on his mouth. I looked around frantically. I couldn’t leave him like this, but I had to get help. I ran inside. Sammy was at the end of the bar, and I plucked at his sleeve with wet fingers.
“Jeff Toland is outside, passed out….”
He took one look at me and hurried away, back toward the rear door. I walked unsteadily to the phone behind the bar. I willed my shaking fingers to dial Billy’s number. It rang only three times and I heard Nate’s voice, sounding alert and awake.
“I need you to fix something,” I said.
Six
New York City
October 1950
“Dancing in a nightclub? Da will blow his stack!” Muddie said. “Oh, Kit, are you sure?”
“It’s not just a nightclub — it’s the Lido!” I was already starting to regret splurging on a long-distance call. I could feel my money draining with every exclamation Muddie made, from her first squeal “Kit!” to her “Isn’t this expensive?” and her “Where are you calling from?”
Walking home, all I could think of was telling someone my news. I hadn’t been lonesome until that moment, when I had nobody to tell. I’d been dying to brag, to let my family know that not only did I have a job, it was a real job, a job to envy, something glamorous, exactly the kind of job a girl from Providence would dream of getting in New York City. And who else to call but my sister? Every Sunday night we’d listened to Manhattan Merry-Go-Round when we were kids, listening to “all the big night spots of New York town.”
I sat on the couch, wedged into a corner. The telephone cord stretched just far enough. Sitting here one day, I’d realized that the mirror on the far wall was hung high for a reason. If the curtains were open, you could catch a flash of the East River.
“He’ll only know if you tell him,” I added.
“I can’t lie to him, Kitty.”
I sighed. “I’m not saying lie. Can’t you stretch a commandment once in a while? You can say you talked to me. Say I’m fine, I have an apartment now and a job. You don’t have to tell him what it is. Oh, hell, I don’t care if you tell him. Let him blow.”
“You said hell.”
“Damn right I did.”
“Kit!” I could hear Muddie try to stifle her giggle. “You’re a caution. It’s so quiet here without you and Jamie.”
We were both silent for a moment.
I looked at the sliver of river in the mirror. Home. It came back to me then, the apartment on Transit Street. Cramped and damp, street noise coming through the window, along with the smells of Portuguese stew and someone playing the radio. Kids down the block playing a game on the street, yelling out instructions for One Flies Up. And me, grabbing for privacy in the bathroom, tapping out shuffle ball change and time steps on the tiles while I looked in the full-length mirror Da had hung on the back of the door so I could practice. Over the years, my taps had pitted the tiles, but he’d never cared. Would he really blow his stack if he knew I was dancing in a nightclub? Probably … but then wouldn’t he in the next breath twist it around and be proudly proclaiming to the neighborhood that I was a Lido Doll?
“You’re still mad at him?” Muddie asked.
I thought of that morning when Jamie came home, of the thin line of Da’s mouth, of the way disgust had made my handsome father look ugly.
“He hasn’t done a thing since I left, has he?”
“No,” Muddie said, drawing out the word. “But, Kit, he feels it. Do you know, he stopped drinking. Not even a slug of whiskey from the bottle when he gets home. He’s here every night on that couch, just sitting.