Though the party had been about to break up, Phillip’s arrival had given it new life. Corinne stopped trying to appear engaged and started fantasizing about giving a poetry recital and making everyone think that the house had been overrun with badgers. She couldn’t, of course. Without Ada here to lay down a fog on their memories, they would realize she was a wordsmith immediately. The scandal of the Wells girl being a hemopath would hit the papers by morning, and by the next evening there would be no place left on the Eastern Seaboard for her to live in peace.
When a maid slipped into the room to tell her she had a phone call, Corinne leapt off the ottoman so fast that she almost tripped and landed face-first on the Persian rug. She took the call in the hallway and was surprised to hear Ada’s voice on the other end. No one from the Cast Iron ever contacted her at home.
“You’d better get back here fast” was all Ada said. She hung up.
Corinne stood dumbly for a few seconds before dropping the receiver in the cradle and sprinting toward the chauffeur’s cottage behind of the house. He answered the banging on the door after a couple of minutes and promised to have the car around front in ten minutes.
Corinne didn’t know what she was supposed to tell her parents. There was a sick feeling in her gut that she couldn’t shake. In the end she cornered her father, who was less apt to ask questions, and told him that her friend in the city was grieving the loss of a dear cousin and needed her support. He was confused but didn’t try to stop her from leaving. She didn’t bother saying good-bye to anyone, even though Madeline was eyeing her suspiciously, and she slipped out the door before her mother noticed.
Ada’s mother was baking p?o, filling the apartment with the warm aroma that reminded Ada of the birthdays and holidays of her childhood. Ada liked sitting at the table, kneading dough while her mother kept an eye on the bread in the oven and told stories about Mozambique. Her mother was tall and graceful, with high smooth cheekbones and lips made for softly whispered bedtime stories. When Ada was young, she would sleep on the sofa in their tiny one-bedroom apartment. She loved her mother’s stories, but what she loved most was looking past her mother into the darkness of the bedroom doorway, where her father would stand, his face pale in the moonlight as he swayed gently to the cadence of her voice.
The day her father was convicted for a crime he didn’t commit, Ada had gone to Johnny Dervish and asked to join Corinne on one of her cons. Even though she’d been living in the Cast Iron and playing shows for two years, she’d always refused to be a part of the club’s less-than-legal side operations. But when she and Corinne worked together, it was magic, and it took her only six months to move her mother to a nice flat and fill it with stylish furniture and colorful drapes and ornamental figurines. None of it could make her mother happy, but that didn’t stop Ada from trying. Even with Johnny’s connections, she couldn’t free her father from prison, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave the Cast Iron.
So instead she visited her mother once a week, sometimes more, and helped bake and listened to stories about a beautiful African queen named Nyah and the scrawny prince named António who sailed to her lands from a faraway country. She told how the prince was afraid of snakes, though he pretended he wasn’t, and how he would sing to her, though he couldn’t carry a tune. She told how he fell in love with her, and she with him, and how they decided to run away together to a new country, full of promises.
Sometimes she told about the beautiful princess they had in this new country, a princess who could evoke purest joy or deepest sorrow with just her violin, a princess who could crumble kingdoms with a song.
The stories always stopped there. Ada never asked her to go on. She knew how the real story ended.
“And how is Corinne?” her mother asked, leaning over her shoulder to prod the dough.
“Still getting me into trouble every chance she gets,” Ada said.
Her mother smiled. She liked Corinne, who always devoured her bread and stories alike.
“She is a very strange girl,” said Nyah. “Strange and clever.”
It was the same epithet she always gave Corinne. Ada had relayed that to Corinne once, and Corinne had laughed so hard she fell off the bed. That night she had introduced herself onstage as Corinne the Strange and Clever, Master of Illusory Delights. Johnny had snorted his drink out his nose.
When the phone rang, Ada was on her second hot p?o roll, which she ate by itself despite her mother’s insistence that it wasn’t a proper meal. Her mother was elbow-deep in suds, washing dishes, so Ada reluctantly abandoned her food and snatched the phone off the cradle on the fifth ring.
“Ada, I need you and Corinne. Get here as soon as you can.”
“Johnny? Johnny, what’s wrong?”
“As soon as you can,” he repeated. “Be careful.” He hung up. Ada grabbed her coat and hugged her mother good-bye.
“Wait—I wanted to talk to you about something,” Nyah said, grabbing her wrist with a soapy hand.
“I can’t, Mama. I have to go.”
“You have time for your mother.” Her voice was sharp, which was distinct enough that Ada hesitated. The rare times when Nyah was angry, she bellowed Swahili and threw dish towels across the room. The rest of the time she was all grace and tenderness. There was no in-between.