“A sandwich? That your idea of a home-cooked meal?” Roy shouted.
She’d chosen poorly. It wouldn’t matter if she cried out or screamed. She’d done that plenty of times. No one had come to see about it. Shades were drawn and windows closed against her misery. That was the way of the town. She’d learned to bear it in silence. It made the beatings shorter, she’d discovered. His hand had threaded through her hair, as a lover’s might, but there was nothing loving in the hard yank that made her eyes water, that bent her neck toward him, crooked her body so that she could only follow like a dog at its master’s heel. The first slap was a warning. Her cheek stung with it.
“You want to dance? Huh?” Slap. “I like dancing.” Slap. “Let’s dance, then. I want to dance with my girl.”
He’d pushed her onto the bed and pinned her arms above her head with one huge hand. She suppressed a cry when she felt him rip away the flimsy protection of her underwear, and again when that same hand rained down blows till her lips bled and her ear rang. Then his thighs were parting hers roughly, and she could only swallow her fear down with the metallic taste of her blood.
Her panic stoked some strange new feeling inside her, something she couldn’t control. She remembered her hands growing warmer and warmer, her body getting hot. She remembered the expression on Roy’s face: the whites of his eyes getting bigger, his mouth hanging open in surprise just before the scream was torn from him.
Theta shut her eyes tightly. Her mind always went blank after that part, like a motion picture with a reel missing. All she remembered was the train to another train and then New York City, where she’d arrived dirty, broke, and half-starved, then survived by sleeping on a series of park benches, taking refuge in the ladies’ room at Grand Central Terminal, and stealing into the picture houses to sleep all day, leaving only when she was chased out. Stealing milk bottles delivered to stoops in the anonymous night. Narrowly avoiding the rough men eyeing her from alleys and slow-moving motorcars. She might have gone on that way far longer if she hadn’t seen Henry sitting at a table near the front windows of the Horn & Hardart Automat on Sixth Avenue, scribbling away on thin white paper, uninterested in his food. Theta was close to fainting with hunger. She’d ventured inside and was hovering near his table, hoping to steal his scraps, when, without a word, Henry pushed the other half of his sandwich toward her. She hesitated at first—Theta had street smarts, and street smarts said don’t take anything from a stranger. But this sort of hunger was an animal that could eat you up from inside. The hunger beast won out, and she ate so fast she nearly vomited the sandwich back up. Still silent, Henry walked to the gleaming, lighted machines, plunked in two nickels, waited for the tray to revolve, opened the small glass door, and retrieved first a square of rice pudding and then a carton of milk. These he brought back to the crumb-strewn lacquer table, placing them before Theta and then watching her spoon the pudding into her mouth with machinelike precision and wash it down with four quick swallows of milk, not caring when it dribbled down her chin in two white streams. Afterward, she sat, glassy-eyed, in an almost drugged stupor, feeling both full and sick.
“How do you do? I’m Henry Bartholomew DuBois IV,” Henry had said in a slow taffy pull of syllables, extending a hand. He had the longest, most elegant fingers Theta had ever seen. Everything about him was fair: His thick, dun-colored hair, kept long. The soft brows and heavy fringe of pale lashes that made the heavy-lidded gaze of his narrow hazel eyes seem permanently sleepy. Faint constellations of freckles on his arms, cheeks, and nose, which only showed themselves in sunlight. Even his mouth, set in a perpetual smirk of amusement, was only a shade darker than his skin. You might look past him completely, except for his eccentric style of dress: a pair of tweed trousers held up by suspenders splayed across a stiff white tuxedo shirt worn under an open vest, and a jaunty straw boater hat with a red-and-blue striped ribbon around it perched on his head at an angle that hinted at mischief—or at least impertinence.
“Betty,” she’d managed to say, giving his fingers a quick shake.
Henry tilted his chin and looked down at her, appraising. “That’s an awfully dull name for such an interesting girl.”
She struggled to keep her eyes open.
“Do you need a place to stay?” Henry had asked quietly.
Theta’s eyes snapped open. She palmed the knife. “Try anything funny, fella, and you’ll be sorry.”
“Well, after everything, I would hate to meet my end with a simple butter knife,” Henry said as if he might be saying hello. “I can assure you, Betty, I’m a gentleman, and a man of my word.”
Theta was so tired. It was as if the hunger had been the plug holding back her emotions. Now it had been removed, and she sat weeping softly in her seat.
“It’s copacetic, darlin’. Come on.” Henry told her later that he’d never seen anyone so beautiful cry so ugly.
Theta followed Henry home to his one-room apartment with the leaky roof on St. Mark’s Place, where he offered her a pillow and a blanket. While she cradled them both to her middle, still distrustful, he dragged an old cane chair to a battered piano beside an airshaft window. He hummed softly and made notes on those same sheets of paper filled with scratchings and blots of ink. “You’re welcome to stay,” he said without looking up. “There’s no cleaning lady. The pipes leak. The bathroom down the hall is shared with ten very eccentric neighbors. It’s cold in the winter and hot as the devil in summer. All in all, it’s not much better than the street. But you’re welcome all the same.”
She figured he’d want something in exchange, but he never tried a thing. Theta slept through the night and well into the next day. When she woke, she found a doughnut on a chipped plate, and beside that, a wobbly daisy stuck into an empty milk bottle, which propped up a note:
Hope you slept well. I’d ask you not to steal anything, but there’s nothing to steal. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.
Sincerely, Henry DuBois IV
She had nowhere else to go, so she ate the doughnut and washed the plate. Then she washed the other dishes and put them away. Henry came home to a room so clean he had to leave and come back in to be sure he’d entered the right apartment. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Snow White, would it?” he asked wryly. They shared a bowl of noodles from a shop downstairs and talked until very late.
It was Henry who had convinced her to bob her hair. Arm in arm, they’d walked to the barbershop on Bleecker Street, Theta dressed in Henry’s clothes. She sat perfectly still, eyes forward, as the shears bit through her thick ringlets. Hair fell in feathery piles around the barber’s chair. Theta felt her head growing lighter, as if she were being shorn of the weight of memory, the ghosts of her past. When the barber swiveled the chair around so she faced the mirror, Theta’s mouth opened in an astonished O. Gently, she petted the smooth skin of her neck, reveling in the shock of stubble high up her nape, where her shingle cut formed a provocative V. In the mirror, she caught sight of Henry biting his lip.
“What are you gawking at, Piano Man? You never seen a flapper before?” she said with a wink.