It wasn’t Evie’s job to worry about Ugo. But she did. Folks said they’d kill that fink Cypriot if they found him. There was a bounty at stake. These were maniacal people who said these things. If they thought Ugo was valuable, or dangerous, they’d do bad things to him. Evie knew Ugo wasn’t the Cypriot, if there was such a thing. Ugo wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was a silly man.
Still, she worried. He might go missing if someone got the wrong idea. Some days she watched out the window and imagined he wouldn’t come back. She wondered, would it be up to her to go looking for him?
She didn’t really know what Ugo did when he wasn’t in her rooms. She just knew he was prissy and self-conniving and tended to think of himself as a rougher man than he was. He liked to come at her from behind, her lying flat, he pushing her face into the pillows until down seeped into her mouth. She felt small when he did it like that. His body compacting hers. At least she didn’t have to look in his eyes when he did it that way. He’d sleep soon enough, curled into himself. He preferred that Evie sleep naked. But once he was asleep, she rose in the dark to find her pajamas folded on the dresser, or she’d be cold.
He didn’t touch her when she was sleeping. With some of the others she’d had to stay awake all night and not disturb the covers, so nothing happened she wasn’t ready for.
In the morning she helped Ugo dress if he let her. He mostly liked to do it himself, especially the final stages of his costume, the collar, the jacket with the pink silk lining, an ivory comb he scratched through his beard. He flattened his brow with a tip of his pinky finger, flashed eyes at her in the mirror, a threatening motion, maybe not. He straightened his eyelashes, blinking rapidly along an extent of pointer finger. Evie along, ready with his coat.
He placed her in the window when he left. He liked to stop and look back and have her stare down, half-undressed, like she craved him. He liked to have people on the street see that.
Then she could close the shades and forget. It was a long night’s work. Not the easiest way to get by, but she didn’t know of any easy way. This beat dancing for dimes in some crummy hall to a two-bit band bored by its own miserable sound. At least Evie had her cutting table to go back to. Her own two hands warmed the slab when she spread fabric over and marked chalk where chalk should be marked.
Some of those days Evie dreamed about what it would be like to own a garment shop, to make a living selling clothes to other women and not be beholden to wicked men to get by. In some ways her mother, a seamstress from Topeka, had lived this life already. Her mother doing business out of that shabby front room, inching along on the pennies and nickels she earned by darning socks and patching trousers. Evie wondered, if she tried to break out on her own, could she do any better than her mother had done? These were the kinds of unanswerable questions she considered when alone at the sewing table with only her wine and her tools and the memory of her mother.
One evening Maria pointed out a girl to Jake. Tall, slender, with a small, well-shaped face. Her name was Doreen, and she’d have looked dignified, except she was unwell. Her hair thin, her face discolored by clouds of yellow and green. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off her. He tracked the red of her dress as foot traffic washed around her on Clandish. The dress was old-fashioned and out of season, too heavy for the weather. She was bundled up, and everyone knew why.
She clutched a man’s elbow to inch along the walkway. “That’s her betrothed.” Maria’s breath came over the sill, sweet with tobacco. “What a shame. The wedding’s been put off. That’s what they always do when the scandal’s in the papers.”
She and another girl had been raped that month. Black men were the ones who did it.
Jake had never seen anything like the Fourth of July in 1917. There wasn’t anything like this before, as a matter of fact, celebrating Independence Day while fighting a world war. Flags flew over all Omaha, the reds, whites, and blues of the US, France, and Britain. Every neighborhood helped move the celebration along. Even if there was disagreement, if President Wilson should have got them roped into the European war or not, the River Ward wasn’t going to miss out on a party like this. The tunnelers got the day off, despite it being a Wednesday, and they were in Mecklenburg’s early that morning to drop dimes on the bar and bicker before heading to the parade, where spectators packed both sides of Farnam on the sidewalks and lawns that fronted the courthouse and city hall. The parade was to honor the military. This went without saying. Every civic event was obsessed with patriotism that summer. They called this one the Kick the Kaiser Parade.
When the tunnelers got to the parade, Red Cross nurses in white-winged hats marched along the streetcar tracks. Contingents from army and navy brass bands followed, then a handful of blimp pilots from the academy at Fort Omaha. Bunting draped from the windows of city hall. Flags flew from atop the Bee newspaper and Omaha National Bank buildings. Businessmen held pickets painted with slogans against the Kaiser, making fun of his wooden arm, warning that America was coming. Novelty Old Glories were sold, noisemakers and popguns too, paper hats, fireworks and hot dogs, lemonade. The pavement was littered with debris, the walkways packed with people caught up in a fanfare. Merchants in fruit-sticky aprons, office girls in blue dresses, primped schoolkids and frazzled teachers, Civil War veterans with bronze service tokens pinned to their lapels. There were drums and bugles, full brass sections. A group of frumpy girl stenographers near Jake sang the national anthem, impromptu, a cappella, in an ecstatic patriotic joy.