10
“LET ME DO THE TALKING, AND IF HE ASKS YOU ANY questions, just look pretty and try not to seem too bright, okay?” Paulette whispered as she hustled across the floor of Seventh Heaven.
“All right.” Letty was just a step behind her, but she was distracted by how different the nightclub felt before it was open, when there was still light left in the day filtering in through those high cathedral windows. There was something drab about the scuffed plank floors and the little round tabletops with no candles on them, but the scene contained an air of promise, too, of the glamour and gaiety to come after sunset.
“Oh, Mr. Cole!” Paulette singsonged, putting on a sweeter voice than she used around the apartment.
Letty recognized the small man in the tuxedo right away, from when she?d come here with Cordelia and the Washborne girls.
“Yes?” he replied crisply, glancing up from a pile of papers that were spread out at the corner of the bar.
“Mr. Cole, this is the girl I was telling you about. Letty Larkspur. Isn?t she divine?”
Mr. Cole?s eyes shifted indifferently from Paulette to the petite girl in her wake. “She?s short.”
“We?ll get her some high heels,” Paulette replied brightly.
“But I don?t need any more cigarette girls.”
“Oh, Mr. Cole, I know.” Paulette batted her long lashes, and her voice got even sweeter. “But don?t you remember how you were just complaining that us girls disappear on you soon as we get a callback? Don?t you think it would be a good idea to take a new girl on now, so you?ll be ready next time someone defects? I?ll show her how to do everything myself, and she?ll work hard, I promise.”
Mr. Cole sighed. He shifted his gaze once or twice more between the two girls, and then he turned round in his barstool, back to his papers. Letty?s heart sank, and she glanced up at Paulette, who was holding her breath. It had probably been silly of them to think that Letty was sophisticated enough to walk among all those beautiful city people night after night.
But then, with his back to the girls, Mr. Cole said, “One week. I?ll try you out for one week. If I still don?t like you at the end of it, you?ll have to go—and no complaining.”
It didn?t sound like a job offer, but after a few seconds Letty realized that it was. She beamed. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Cole!” she gushed. “I?ll work hard and be no trouble, I promise!”
Paulette gave her a wink and reached for her hand. “Come on, doll, let me show you how it?s done.”
As they headed toward the far end of the club, Letty couldn?t help tilting back her head and taking in the expanse of the room with a certain reverence. Later, music and shrieking laughter would fill that space up to the arched ceiling, and by then Letty would belong there, instead of being a shy outsider just peeking in on the scene the way she had been before. Someday she?d be even grander than that—she hoped so, anyway—but for now, a gate had opened into a new, shimmering world.
Her attention was brought back to the main floor by a few strutting notes from a cornet.
When she turned toward the sound, she realized that all the boys in the band had been watching her for some time already, and her cheeks colored. The cornet player was standing near the edge of the stage, in shirtsleeves, and he bent toward Letty and met her eyes as he played a few more bars. For a moment, she thought she might be swallowed up by her embarrassment, but when she realized that the melody was familiar to her, she felt not quite so shy of him.
“Where do I know that song from?” she asked, stepping toward the stage.
He lowered the instrument from his lips. “Just a tune we used to play in the college marching band, a lifetime ago, back in Cleveland. I doubt you?ve ever heard it, little lady.”
“No, no, I?m sure I have. I?m from Ohio—and if I hear a song even once, I never forget it. I?m a singer, you see.”
“What part of Ohio?”
“Union, Ohio, but Mother was a dancer in the Cleveland ballet, and when we were young, she used to take us to the big city whenever there was a parade.” Letty blushed again. “That seemed like the big city, then, but of course none of us had ever dreamed of going to New York yet.”
“I was born in Defiance,” he replied, grinning. “Though you must have still been a girl when I left that dusty town behind.”
They both laughed at this evidence that the world was not so vast after all. Then the man lifted his cornet and played a little more of the song. Letty closed her eyes and hummed along, her heart lifting with the music and the memory of how much her mother had loved a parade.
“Come on, Letty,” Paulette said, reaching for her hand and pulling her gently along.
“Stay late some night and sing with us, Letty,” the cornet player called as she moved along behind Paulette.
“They seemed like nice boys,” Letty whispered, still smiling at the invitation, as she and Paulette passed off the main floor and into a dressing room on the side. Racks of clothes and mirrors lined the walls, as though chorus girls and not cigarette girls dressed there. The far corner was occupied by an old daybed, where Letty supposed the girls rested on their breaks.
“Oh, sure!” Paulette laughed. “The boys in the band are always concerned about the welfare of the newest cigarette girls. But listen, honey, I have a few simple rules of comportment for while I?m at work or out on the town—and you?d be wise to follow them, too. Number one is: No going out with musicians.”
“Oh, I don?t want to go out with him! He must be at least ten years older than I am, anyway. It was only that he seemed nice … and it would be fun to practice with them.”
Paulette gave her a smile out of the corner of her mouth. “Okay,” she said. “But be careful.”
Mindful of how much she owed to Paulette, Letty softly asked, “What are the other rules?”
“Number two: Never accept a drink during your shift. That?s how you end up having to pay back all your wages to the house, on account of all the money you?ve lost. Number three: If you do accept a drink from a gentleman, after your shift or on your night off, always keep him one drink ahead of you. This one is to prevent you from waking up in strange apartments.” Paulette winked and stepped toward a rack of cream-colored outfits. “Our uniforms,” she interrupted herself. “Mr. Cole insists on white. Something about us looking like heavenly virgins—ha! Number four: If a customer gives you a big tip, don?t gush and act like it?s some giant favor. Act like you deserve it, because, honey, you do. They like that sort of thing, anyway.”
Letty nodded and peered over Paulette?s shoulder as she pushed one outfit and then the next aside.
“Number five: Say as little as possible. Men find that mysterious, and then they want to learn more about you, and they?ll keep tipping you excessively trying to do exactly that. Or buy you more drinks, or bring you more presents. Whatever it is you happen to be fishing for. Here! Isn?t this perfect?”
With a wide smile on her face, Paulette pulled a tiny jumper off the rack and held it up in the air. In the end, Letty chose a more girlish, conservative style, with flounces at the neckline and hem, cinched at the natural waist. Except for the fact that it showed a good deal of her legs, which were covered in mahogany fishnets, even Father might have approved. As they dressed and made up their faces, other girls trickled in, shouting out the latest gossip and waving half-lit cigarettes as they took the curlers out of their hair.
Paulette shared a few more tips with Letty, though if her new friend had been more honest, she might have included this lesson in her list of survival tips: That it is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life?s blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called “hoodoo” alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.
In the dressing room of Seventh Heaven, just as Letty was beginning to grow comfortable with the banter, Paulette announced, “It?s time.”
Letty gulped.
“Go get ‘em,” said Colleen, the girl she?d just been discussing the club?s female singer with. Apparently her name was Alice Grenadine, and she was Mr. Cole?s special lady friend, and couldn?t carry a tune to save her life.
“Don?t worry, you?ll be great,” Paulette said, as she strapped a tray neatly packed with cigarettes and candies and other treats to Letty?s middle. With a reassuring smile, Paulette turned toward the noise and the light. Letty took a deep breath and followed her friend as she strode onto the main floor of the club. In the time it had taken them to dress and go over the particulars of the job, Seventh Heaven had been transformed. The light was low and warm, and the tables were filling up. The buzzing of excitable voices hung in the air.
“Oh!” Letty suddenly shouted, pain shooting out from the spot on her elbow where she had collided with a barstool. But the pain was not as bad as the embarrassment over her klutziness. She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped she wouldn?t cry. She?d been concentrating on all the potential customers out there, and had collided with the tall wooden chair hard. “I?m so sorry. I—”
“Don?t worry.” It was a man?s voice, sincere and kind. “In fact, I came here hoping I might run into you, but now I find that it?s you who has run into me.”
Letty opened her eyes. It took her another moment before she recognized the man who had yesterday applauded her singing from a streetcar. Letty was so relieved to see a kind face that she smiled back. This seemed to please him and cause the color of his skin to change, too. He was sweet on her, she realized, or at least he found her pretty, and the nature of her embarrassment changed. Then it occurred to her that he had made a joke.
“That?s a good one, Mr.—”
“Mr. Lodge. But my first name is Grady.”
The edges of her mouth flickered upward, and her eyes became bright. He had a nice name and a nice face, and he was wearing the same herringbone knickerbocker suit as the day before, although his boater had been removed from his head to reveal fair hair parted down the center.
“What?s yours?” he asked.
“Letty Larkspur.”
“Letty Larkspur,” he repeated, and for a moment she thought he might enjoy the sound of that name almost as much as she did. “What a pretty name. You must be from New York, with a name like that.”
“I?m from Ohio,” she said, noticing Paulette watching her from among the tables out on the nightclub?s floor. “But this is home now.”
“Well, welcome, Miss Larkspur. You look like a city girl to me.”
She glanced down nervously at her outfit, which she certainly would never have dared wear in Union.
“Thank you, Mr. Lodge. And where are you from?”
“I?m a rare native-born New Yorker, so I should know. I?m a writer, also, thus I spend a great deal of time observing people, and I see it when a person has something about them particularly worth watching—and you have that, Miss Larkspur.”
Before she could wonder what he meant, Mr. Cole approached from around the bar.
“Larkspur, you?re not here to flirt. Move along.”
Shame washed over her, when she remembered that she was only trying out, and that she didn?t have time to act shy. She could not bear to look at either man as she stepped back onto the floor—although, once she had, she discovered a strange new confidence. Anyway, Paulette had warned her to say little, and perhaps it was for the best that she?d moved on right when she did. She tried to appear busy—which she very quickly was—and tell herself that her exit had seemed smooth and purposeful.
Despite her embarrassment, she couldn?t help but feel excited by the attention. No one had ever seemed interested in her that way in Union, except a few bucktoothed farm boys with unclean hands. Cordelia had always said it was just that, in their backward part of the world, men were only interested in a thick girl who could stand up to years of hard living and childbearing, and that someone delicate and sparkling like Letty confused them. And though everything Cordelia had ever said was now shadowed with doubt, Letty wanted to believe that maybe, in that one instance, she might have been speaking the truth.
After she managed a few sales—somewhat blushingly and bumblingly, but nonetheless—she got up the courage to glance back in Grady?s direction. He was still there, watching her from the same barstool as she ferried her tray of wares between tables crowded with patrons. It was almost as though he was clapping for her like he?d done the other day, although privately.
A lithe woman wearing what looked like a beaded bathing cap bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, and once Letty had counted out her change, she heard Paulette at her ear.
“One night on the job,” she whispered, with a wise grin, “and Letty Larkspur already has a fan!”
Letty smiled and said nothing. But after that she began to believe that she would last through the week and have a job for herself as long as she needed one. Then she would know for sure that she could make it here on her own, and that she hadn?t needed Cordelia to survive at all.