4
DESPITE HER FEVERISH LATE-NIGHT INTENTIONS, CORDELIA must have slept, because in one moment she was watching the suburbs go by, lulled by the stutter of the train, and in the next everyone around her was pushing forward down the aisle to exit.
“Letty,” she whispered. Her friend shifted in the seat beside her. Cordelia swallowed. “We?re here.”
Letty?s eyes opened and darted right and left. “In New York?”
At the sound of the city?s name, Cordelia?s lips sprang into a smile. “Yes.” Then she stood, tightened the belt of her coat, and reached for Letty?s hand so that they could join the mass of bodies.
It was possible that neither girl drew breath from the time they stepped down onto the platform until they ascended the metal staircase into the giant main space of the station. Space was the only word that Cordelia could think to describe it, for it did not resemble any lobby or entryway she had ever seen. The floor was of some shining stone, which hundreds of pairs of shoes crisscrossed in a single-minded rush, heads down, as though the iron and glass ceiling high above them was not strung aloft by some set of miracles.
“Oh,” Letty whispered, her petal pink mouth hanging open as she gazed up. The hands of an enormous clock, suspended over the tracks, ticked between Roman numerals. It was almost four o?clock; their first day in the city was half over.
“Here we are.” Cordelia?s voice had become soft and amazed. But they had only a moment to pause and take it in, for the crowd was pushing every which way, and the only rule seemed to be that one was not to stand still.
So they went on, through the warm concourse and out into the brisk day.
The sky was cloudless, and the sunshine forced them to squint as they came onto the grand marble portico of a building that appeared large enough that it might have squatted over all downtown Union. The clamor of voices around them was so constant they could scarcely make out a word, and the horns of automobiles blended with the screech of tires as drivers pulled their vehicles off the wide avenue in front of the station and back into the stream of traffic. The air was heady with exhaust and the smell of food frying and men?s cologne. Beyond all that rose a city like a painted set, buildings jutting up with geometric assertiveness to dissect the sky, one blocking out another, all of them festooned with turrets and Gothic spires, repeating over and over until they grew hazy in the distance.
Letty?s palm was cold against Cordelia?s; she appeared perhaps too shocked to speak, and they both slowed a little as they reached the sidewalk. This was at least in part because of the crowd that had formed there—mostly women, their feet inert despite all the movement around them, and their necks craned to look up.
“What is it?” Cordelia asked a woman in a geometric-patterned dress that hung loosely over her long frame. On the woman?s head was a soft gray felted hat shaped like a helmet.
“Don?t you know?” The woman turned to Cordelia and Letty with an air of irritated surprise. She blinked at them for a moment, but it was clear that it pained her to remove her gaze from the sky even for a moment. “It?s Max Darby, the famous aviator, performing one of his tricks …”
Who? was the question on Cordelia?s lips, but the woman had already gone back to doing what everyone else was doing, her hat tipped back and her nose pointed upward. Cordelia?s eyes traveled in the same direction, and she saw—in a field of perfect blue, higher even than the skyscrapers—a small silver capsule, twisting about and emitting a white smoke. She flattened her palm and put her index finger to her brow to soften the glare.
“Oh, no!” Letty gasped. “His plane is on fire.”
“No, it?s not,” said the woman in the gray hat impatiently. “The smoke is for skywriting.”
“Oh,” both girls replied in quiet unison, faces turned heavenward.
A glittering sensation passed through Cordelia?s body as she gazed at the daredevil spinning white letters over Manhattan. A curling P followed by an A and then an R … she hadn?t the faintest notion what it would come to spell, but the spectacle had nonetheless stolen her breath. It confirmed for her, with its breezy beauty, that she had not been wrong—that New York was more extraordinary than a girl from Ohio could possibly have imagined, that it was a place of wonders where the citizens used the sky as their tablet and airplanes for pens. And to think—the city was not yet even an hour old to her.
“Should we see what it feels like to ride in a taxicab?” Cordelia asked after a while, once the aviator?s message—PARK ROYALE NOW OPEN, whatever that meant—became enlarged and blurry against the blue sky. Then she took several long steps toward the traffic, holding her old suitcase against her hip, and raised her arm in the air.
With a blast of its horn, a square black car careened across two lanes and toward Cordelia, coming to a halt just in front of her. For a moment Letty thought the man was going to drive right through her and onto the sidewalk, and it took several seconds for her breathing to become normal again. Then Cordelia gave a gleeful little bow, opened the cab?s back door, and with a flourish of her hand shepherded Letty into the backseat.
Impressive was one word that had been used in Union to describe her friend, because of Cordelia?s swift, impatient walk and the high, sharp planes of her face and her ability to hold a stare. And of course, there was the way she?d stolen John, the handsomest boy in town, from Reverend Wallace?s daughter, without ever seeming to lift a finger to draw his attention. That was the way Cordelia always did things—with a coolheaded stealth that never failed to catch her detractors unawares.
Letty?s hands moved from her lap to the leather seat, and she had trouble lifting her gaze much higher than her knees. What one did in a taxicab was a mystery to her, but she hoped Cordelia, who had placed the two pieces of luggage between them and was closing the door behind her, had some inkling.
“You girls actresses?”
Letty?s eyes darted up, and she saw the reflection of the driver in the rearview mirror. He might have been poking fun, she knew, but there was something likable about his weak chin and soft cap and the way his blue eyes stood out against his drab, worn face. A face like that wouldn?t make fun. Anyway, she knew she had that indescribable quality—the same one Cordelia saw, the reason they both knew they had to try their luck in a big city—and perhaps people in New York were just more adept at recognizing that kind of thing.
“I am,” Letty said brightly, leaning forward. “A singer, too, and I dance. That?s one of the reasons I moved here. My friend Cordelia Grey isn?t really anything of that kind—she?s just made for this city.”
“Well, you certainly have a nice enough face, miss.”
A blush crossed Letty?s cheeks at that, and she had to avert her eyes. She looked to her right and saw that Cordelia had taken the notebook out of her coat pocket, and was studying a page scrawled with her own handwriting:
Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a
terrible waste of a girl?s time.
—Cara Gatling
It took Letty a moment to remember why that name sounded familiar to her, and then she realized it belonged to a character in a radio play they?d listened to during the winter, but which she hadn?t thought Cordelia was interested in particularly. Below that was a list of what appeared to be addresses, some written in pencil and some in ink, as though the list had accumulated over a good stretch of time.
“Do you know the Washborne Residence for Unmarried Women?” Cordelia asked, glancing up and closing the book.
“Sure,” the driver replied, starting up the motor. “Down in Greenwich Village?”
“Oh, I don?t think we want to live in a village,” Letty cut in, trying not to sound rude but having to speak more loudly than before on account of the noise the car made. “You see, we came all this way because we want to live in the city.”
The driver?s eyes met hers again in his rearview mirror. He seemed to be assessing whether or not she was joking. When he?d made up his mind, he said, “Greenwich Village, I mean. Believe me, it is the city.” Then he winked.
Letty nodded, blushing again, and the car rumbled into motion. They watched the city pass as they traveled downtown. Men in hats thronged either side of the street, marching past store windows or perhaps strolling with women who wore artificial flowers pinned to their brims. Girls breezed by, their skirts swishing a little, the seams of their stockings straight as arrows, their pert noses pointed upward. By comparison, Letty and Cordelia appeared rather shabby, she supposed, although no one was glancing in the windows of their cab. And anyway, all really interesting girls invent themselves, or so Letty?s mother used to say.
For a long time they traveled on the broad avenue, stopping and starting, lurching forward and coming to sudden halts. The noise of the city came in waves. On every street corner something was for sale—flowers or magazines or fruit arranged in colorful pyramids. Another few blocks passed, and then they turned onto a twisting, narrow street of trees and low structures that were nonetheless taller and more tightly placed than any downtown she had ever seen.
“Here we are: the Washborne Residence for Unmarried Women.” The driver indicated a four-story redbrick building set a little farther back from the street than those on either side.
Carefully, Cordelia removed a bill from the envelope in her book and paid the man. Then she and Letty heaved their luggage up the steps and entered the spare, clean lobby of the Washborne. Their heels clicked on floors made of old planks. Through a large doorway on their right they spied six or so women of varying ages in a sitting room, drinking coffee from mismatched cups and speaking in low voices.
The housemother wore her gray hair in a Victorian pincushion of a bun, and though she was situated behind the desk, Letty felt it was fair to assume that her dress was long enough to protect even her ankles from lascivious eyes. Cordelia strode up to her, and asked how much a room cost.
“Twelve dollars a week for a room with two beds,” replied the old woman matter-of-factly.
“Twelve dollars a week?” Cordelia repeated, closing her eyes.
Letty had stepped up behind Cordelia, and glanced over at the open page of her notebook where she had written THE WASHBORNE RESIDENCE, 2 BEDS PER ROOM, CLEAN, $7 A WEEK. Letty had barely any savings, because her father kept all his daughters’ earnings to give to their husbands when they got married. She felt badly that it was all up to Cordelia to pay their expenses, at least for a short while. But they would have jobs soon, which would pay them much more than they could have made back home—or perhaps Letty really would get famous overnight, and then they would have nothing to worry about.
“The room comes with a washbasin and a chest of drawers. The rest of the facilities are at the end of the hall, shared.” The lady cast her eyes down her own long nose at the newspaper she had been reading before the girls walked in. After a moment she folded the front page back, closing the newspaper as though to say the matter was already settled, before continuing. “You won?t find anything cheaper anywhere close by, my dears, not without risking your necks—or your reputations.”
For a moment, Letty wondered if Cordelia would want to leave—after all, she never had taken well to that kind of sermonizing—but by then something else had stolen her friend?s attention: Cordelia was staring fixedly at the old woman?s newspaper.
“May I read that?” Cordelia said as she reached for the paper, and turned it around so that she and Letty could read the headline. Sprawled in large letters across the top of the page was FROM HIS LONG ISLAND RETREAT, BOOTLEGGER GREY
DENOUNCES ACTS OF VIOLENCE.
“How funny! He has the same name as you!” Letty gasped, taking hold of her friend?s arm.
“Isn?t it strange?” Cordelia replied a little faintly.
Meanwhile, Darius Grey continues to throw lavish parties at Dogwood, his White Cove property, and to laugh off any accusations of nefarious doings. “My business is legitimate,” he insisted, during an unusual lull in his guests’ demands, as he lit this reporter?s cigarette. “My business is good times, and the people of Long Island and New York and indeed the whole country love me for it.”
There was more, but Letty didn?t get to read any because Cordelia handed the paper back to the housemother rather suddenly.
“Our first day in New York, and your name is on the front page of the newspaper,” Letty said excitedly. It felt to her like a sign that leaving Union had been the right thing to do—that this was their destiny. “Ma?am, when you?re finished, do you think we could have that paper?” She smiled at the housemother. “Then we?ll have it forever, as a keepsake of our arrival!”
Behind them, a redhead smothered a laugh in her palm.
For a moment, both girls’ attention flickered toward the sitting room. Letty?s spirits flagged, and the triumph of the previous moment dimmed, when she realized that she had been too eager and too simple. The girls in the next room were wearing smart clothes and were posed languidly over their magazines, and they certainly did not have any dirt on their shoes—which Cordelia and Letty still did, from their dash through the woods.
If Cordelia had heard the slight, she did not acknowledge it. She turned sharply, with all the confidence of a girl who has the means to pay for what she wants, and began counting out the twelve dollars from the envelope in her notebook. “We?ll take it,” she said as she placed the money on the desk.
The housemother took the bills, slowly recounted them, and tucked them away in her skirt. Without smiling, she rose and beckoned for them to follow her up the flight of stairs. She picked up her long skirts as she walked to avoid tripping.
“Curfew is at ten,” she admonished. “There is no drinking, no smoking, and no men allowed at the Washborne.” Then she turned on the stairs and focused her gaze on Letty?s blue eyes. “No exceptions.”
“Oh, we don?t do any of that,” Letty replied quickly.
For a moment they lingered on the second-floor landing in silence, until the housemother cleared her throat and continued. “You say that now, but I know girls like you—you come here pretending one thing, and then you do another.”
The harshness of the housemother?s tone, and the intensity with which she continued leading them down the hall, made Letty tremble. She supposed all the Washborne girls had impeccable manners and followed the house rules scrupulously—but of course, she only believed that because she was new.
At just that moment, though she could not have known it, a young divorcee named Lilly whispered to her parrot, Lulu (whose presence in her room was absolutely prohibited by the rules of the Washborne), while her artificially black hair sat in curlers. On the third floor, two girls who had spent their day in the typing pool of an advertising firm made themselves pretty in anticipation of being taken out by two gentlemen from the accounting department. One wore a lemon yellow beaded dress, and the other wore black satin; they were going to a far-off land called Harlem and intended to dance the Charleston, and if they returned home by curfew, it would not be by choice.
“Here we are,” the housemother announced, opening a door onto a small room with one window, two wire-frame beds, and a single bureau with an old cracked mirror hanging over it. The walls had once been pink, but they had since faded and chipped to a shade less identifiable.
Cordelia went in first and looked around. She twirled back toward the housemother, raised her chin as though she had been expecting better, and made her voice rather neutral and cool. “It will do,” she announced.
“I should think so.” The housemother regarded them haughtily.
Letty slipped past her into the room and sat down on the nearest bed. When she put her weight on the mattress, it let out a croak that almost made her jump up in fright. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice.
The housemother did not acknowledge her thanks. She only puffed her chest a little, and said, “Remember, curfew at ten. And don?t try anything funny. I can smell bad behavior a mile away.”
As the housemother withdrew, Letty gulped and nodded. The door clicked closed, and Cordelia stuck her tongue out at the place where the old lady had been. Her eyes popped, theatrical and silly. Once Letty saw that her friend could make fun of the situation, she began to feel not quite as intimidated by her new surroundings. Then Cordelia threw herself down, next to her friend on the first bed, and they both let their laughter out.
Eventually Cordelia and Letty?s giggles subsided, and they put their clothes away, shook out the blankets on the bed, and opened the window, which looked down into a dismal airshaft. On the floor above them, someone walked across the room in high heels.
Just as they were beginning to wonder what else they could do with themselves, there came a knock at the door, and before either Letty or Cordelia could say anything, a girl with bobbed brass-colored hair popped her head in the room.
“Oh, hello, new girls,” she said. Her lips were painted with cardinal red lipstick, and her eyes shone as she assessed them. She looked like a magazine illustration of what they called “flappers.”
“Hello,” the new girls replied in unison, although Letty?s voice was quieter than her friend?s.
“Well.” The girl rested her hand on her hip and issued a saucy wink. “Are you coming out with us or not?”
So Cordelia and Letty used what they had to do what girls on all four floors of the Washborne Residence for Young Women were doing—blackening eyelashes and winnowing brows—with fewer resources, but also with that anticipation of a first night in the big city that always brings a special hue to feminine cheeks. They had each brought two pairs of stockings and all the dresses and skirts they owned—which is to say, not many. But when they paused in front of the warped old mirror on the second-floor hall, Letty saw what she had often seen before the country dances in Union: two girls who were unlike the others. The taller one, with her wide lips and strong, sun-touched face, setting off the best features of her petite friend: those large blue eyes which overwhelmed her dot of a nose and button of a mouth, and the pale skin made dramatic by her nearly black hair.
When it was time to go, Letty still felt flutters of trepidation over what it meant to go out into a city at night. But she could not be so nervous—for after all she had Cordelia, whose every gesture was full of ready excitement, to follow.