pretty girls with most of their clothes off. There were sequins and beads, little satin shorts, and matching hats, and countless feather boas and huge headdresses. It was a cheap imitation of what the Ziegfeld girls wore, and more than once she silently bemoaned her fate at having been too short to be hired by the kindly Florenz Ziegfeld. Zoya gave her costumes back to the girl who had lent them to her, and she walked slowly home, with her stage makeup still on. She was even more shocked when a man scurrying past, offered her a nickel for “the best she could do for him,” in a nearby doorway. She ran the rest of the way home, with tears streaming down her face, thinking of the awful life that lay ahead of her at Fitzhugh's Dance Hall.
Nicholas was sound asleep when she got back and she kissed him gently, her lipstick smearing his cheek as she cried, thinking how sweet he looked as he slept, and how much like his father. It wasn't possible that he was gone … that he had left her to this … if only he had known … if only … but it was too late for that. She tiptoed back into the living room where she slept, took her makeup off and changed into her nightgown. Gone the silks and satins and laces. She had to wear heavy flannel gowns against the bitter cold of the barely heated apartment.
And in the morning, she made Nicholas breakfast before he left for school. There was a glass of milk, a slice of bread, and a single orange she had bought the day before, but he never complained. He only smiled at her and patted her hand, and hurried off to school, after kissing Sasha.
And that night she went back to the theater again, as she did for the next weeks until the dancers returned from their measles. But when they did, Charlie gruffly told her they'd keep her on, she had good legs, and she didn't give him any trouble. Jimmy bought her a beer to celebrate, purloined from his favorite speakeasy nearby. She thanked him and took a sip not to hurt his feelings. She didn't tell him that it was her thirty-first birthday.
He was always kind to her, the only friend she had there. The others had sensed instantly that she was “different.” They never shared their jokes with her, in fact they barely talked to her, as they told tales of their boyfriends, and the men who followed them backstage. More than one of them ran off with men who offered them a little money. It was what Charlie liked about her. She wasn't much fun to have around, but at least she was steady. They gave her a raise after the first year. She couldn't believe herself that she had stayed that long, but there was no way out, nowhere else to go, and no one who would pay her. She told Nicholas that she danced with a small ballet and she left the theater number with him in case anything happened. But she thanked God he never called her. And sensing that she was ashamed of what she did, he never asked to go to a performance. And for that, and all his little tendernesses toward her, she was always grateful. One night Sasha had woken up with a cough, and a fever, and Nicholas was waiting up for her, but he hadn't wanted to call her at the theater and worry her. In every way, he was a help to her and an enormous comfort.
“Will we ever see our old friends again?” he asked her quietly one afternoon, as she cut his hair, and Sasha played with Sava.
“I don't know, sweetheart.” She'd had a letter from their nurse months before. She was happy with the Van Alens, and she had been full of tales of Barbara Hutton's debut the summer before, and Doris Duke's in Newport. It seemed ironic that she was still part of that world, and Zoya wasn't. But just as they had shunned her when she first arrived, convinced that she had been a dancer at the Folies-Bergdre, now she shunned them, knowing that she was at last what they had first thought, a chorus girl. She knew also that, having lost everything like so many others of their milieu, she was no longer of interest to them. The countess she had been, who had so