The Shining Girls A Novel

Harper

26 FEBRUARY 1932

Harper buys a new suit to fit at the Baer Brothers and Prodie Store (where they treated him like shit until they saw the color of his money), and takes Nurse Etta and her roommate from the woman’s boarding house out to dinner. The other girl, Molly, is a teacher from Bridgeport, a bit rough and tumble compared to her tight-wound friend. She’s going to chaperone, she says, with a wicked smile, as if he doesn’t know she is only along for the free food. Her shoes are worn and the dark wool on her coat is forming little balls, like a sheep. The piggy and the lamb. Maybe he’ll have chops for dinner.

Mostly he’s happy to be eating real food again instead of white bread soaked in milk and mashed potatoes. He’s lost a lot of weight waiting for his jaw to heal. The wire came off after three weeks, but he’s been unable to chew until recently. His shirts hang baggy, and he can count his ribs like he hasn’t been able to since he was a boy and the bruises from his father’s belt made the calculations easier.

He collects the girls from the station and they walk up La Salle in the snow, past the new soup kitchen where the line extends halfway down the block. The men are so deep in their shame they can’t raise their eyes above their shoes, stamping their feet against the cold and shuffling forward. A pity, Harper thinks. He’s hoping that miserable wretch Klayton will look up and see him, a girl on each arm, in a new suit, with a roll of money in his pocket, along with his knife. But Klayton keeps his gaze on the ground, as they walk right past him, gray and shriveled up into himself like a cock with the drip.

Harper could come back and kill him. Find him sleeping rough in a doorway. Invite him back to the house to get warm. No hard feelings. Put a glass of whiskey in his hand in front of the fire, and then beat him to death with the claw end of a hammer, like Klayton wanted to do to Harper. Start by knocking out his teeth.

‘Tsk,’ Etta clucks. ‘It’s just getting worse.’

‘You think they got it bad?’ her friend says. ‘The school board is talking about putting us all on scrips. We gotta get paid in vouchers now instead of real money?’

‘Rather be paid in booze. All that stuff they’re confiscating. No use to anyone. That would keep you warm and toasty.’ Etta squeezes Harper’s arm, distracting him from the fantasy he’s wrapped himself up in. He glances back to see Klayton staring after him, hat in his hands, mouth hanging open to catch flies.

Harper spins the girls around. ‘Give my friend a hello,’ he says. Molly complies with a flirtatious wriggle of her fingers, but Etta frowns. ‘Who is he?’

‘Someone who tried to undo me. He’s getting a taste of that remedy now.’

‘Speaking of remedies…’ Molly prods Etta, and she fumbles in her purse and pulls out a small glass bottle with a label that reads ‘rubbing alcohol’.

‘Yes, yes, I got us a nip.’ She takes a swig and hands it to Harper first, who wipes the rim on his coat before letting it touch his lips.

‘Don’t worry, it’s not actual rubbing alcohol. The factory that supplies the hospital has a side-trade.’

The booze is potent and Molly is greedy with it, so that by the time they get to Mme Galli’s on East Illinois, the lambkin is well on her way to being shit-faced.

Inside the restaurant, there is a large caricature of an Italian opera singer and photographs of various theater people from downtown hung on the walls, their signatures scrawled across beaming faces. This doesn’t mean anything to Harper, but the girls coo appreciatively and, for his part, the waiter does not comment on the shabbiness of the coats that he takes to be hung up on the hooks beside the door.

The establishment is half-full already, lawyers and bohemians and actor types. The converted double parlor is warm from the fireplaces on either side, and the hubbub of people as it starts to fill up.

The waiter shows them to a table near the window, Harper on one side and the girls roosted next to each other opposite, looking over the cheery fruit bowl that forms the centerpiece. Evidently, Mme Galli has the law in her pocket because the waiter brings them a bottle of Chianti from a bookcase especially converted into a liquor cabinet without any special fuss.

Harper orders lamb chops for the entrée and Etta follows suit, but Molly orders the filet with a defiant sparkle in her eye. Harper doesn’t care. It’s all the same to him, $1.50 per mouth for five courses, so the conniving wench can have whatever she wants.

The girls eat the spaghetti with gusto, twirling their forks like they were born to it. But Harper finds the pasta slippery to handle, and the taste of garlic is overwhelming. The curtains are grubby from smoke. At the next table, the young woman who smokes cigarettes between every course, aiming for cosmopolitan, is as vacuous as her companions, who talk too loudly. Every cocksucker in here, all putting on a show, dressed up in their clothes and manners.

It’s been too long, he realizes. He hasn’t killed anyone in almost a month. Not since Willie. The world becomes washed out in the gaps. He can feel the tug of the House like string tied between each vertebrae. He’s been trying to avoid the room, sleeping downstairs on the couch, but lately he’s found himself going up the stairs as if dreaming, to stand in the doorway and watch the objects. He will need to go again soon.

And in the meantime the livestock across the table from him are batting their eyelashes and trying to out-simper each other.

Etta excuses herself to ‘touch up her lipstick’, and the Irish girl slides round the table to sit beside him. She presses her knee against his.

‘You’re quite a find, Mr Curtis. I want to hear all about you.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Where you grew up. Your family. Were you ever married or engaged? How you made your money. The usual.’

He can’t deny that he’s intrigued by how bald her enquiry is. ‘I have a House.’ He’s feeling reckless, and she is so deep in her cups, she’ll be lucky if she can remember her own name tomorrow, never mind his strange declarations.

‘A property owner,’ she trills.

‘It opens on to other times.’

She looks confused. ‘What does?’

‘The House, sweetheart. It means I know the future.’

‘Fascinating,’ she purrs, not believing him in the slightest, but letting him know she’s willing to play along. With much more than a story, if he’s inclined. ‘So, tell me something amazing.’

‘There’s another big war coming.’

‘Oh really? Should I be worried? Can you tell my future?’

‘Only if I open you up.’

She takes it the wrong way, as he knew she would, slightly flustered, but excited too. It is so predictable. She brushes her finger back and forth over her lower lip and the half-smile dwelling there. ‘Well, Mr Curtis, I might be amenable to that. Or can I call you Harper?’

‘What are you doing?’ Etta interrupts, blotchy with anger.

‘We’re just talking, sweetie,’ Molly smirks. ‘About the war.’

‘You hussy,’ Etta says, and dumps her bowl of spaghetti over the lady teacher’s head. It glops down into her eyes, chunks of tomato and ground beef congealed in her hair with damp strands of spaghetti. Harper laughs in surprise at the slapstick violence.

The waiter rushes over with napkins and helps wipe Molly off. ‘Caspita! Is everything all right?’

The girl is shaking in rage and humiliation. ‘Are you going to let her do that?’

‘Looks to me like it’s already done,’ Harper says. He tosses the linen napkin at her. ‘Go clean yourself up. You’re a joke.’ He presses a five-dollar bill into the waiter’s hand before he can ask them to leave, tipping because his mood is brightened. He holds out his arm for Etta to take. She smiles with smug triumph, and Molly bursts into tears, as Harper and Etta breeze out of the restaurant into the night.

The streetlamps form greasy spotlights along the street, and it seems natural to walk down to the lake, despite the cold. The pavements are thick with snow, the bare branches of the trees like lace against the sky. The low buildings shoulder together along the shore in a brace against the water. The tiers of Buckingham Fountain are white-crusted, the huge bronze seahorses striving against the ice, going nowhere.

‘It’s like icing,’ Etta says. ‘Looks like a wedding cake.’

‘You’re just sour that we skipped out before dessert,’ Harper replies, trying for banter.

Her face darkens at the reminder of Molly. ‘She had it coming.’

‘Of course she did. I could kill her for you.’ He is testing her.

‘I’d like to kill her myself. Hussy.’ She rubs her bare hands together and blows on her chapped fingers. Then she reaches out to take his hand. Harper startles, but she’s only using him for leverage to climb onto the fountain.

‘Come with me,’ she says. And after a moment’s hesitation, he clambers up after her. She picks her way across the snow, skidding on the ice, to one of the verdigris seahorses and leans against it, posing. ‘Want a ride?’ she says, girlishly, and he sees that she is even more devious than her friend. But she intrigues him. There’s something marvelous about her greed. A woman of selfish appetites who sets herself above the rest of miserable humanity, deservedly or not.

He kisses her then, surprising himself. Her tongue is quick and slippery in his mouth, a warm little amphibian. He pushes her back against the horse, one hand groping up under her skirt.

‘We can’t go back to my apartment,’ she pulls back. ‘There are rules. And Molly.’

‘Here?’ he says, trying to turn her round, fumbling with his flies.

‘No! It’s freezing. Take me home with you.’

His erection caves in and he lets her go abruptly.

‘Impossible.’

‘What is it?’ she calls after him, hurt, as he jumps down off the fountain, hobbling back towards Michigan Avenue. ‘What did I do? Hey! Don’t you walk away! I’m not some whore, you know! Screw you, buddy!’

He doesn’t respond, not even when she takes off her shoe and throws it at his back. It falls woefully short. She will have to go hopping across the snow to retrieve it. The idea of her humiliation pleases him.

‘Screw you!’ she screams again.