“No, but he would sing for us sometimes, after the show,” her mother said.
Brianne shook her head, eyes downcast, but Anna could practically hear her rummaging for the next tragic tale about fellow dancers or others they’d known in their Follies years. When fresh mishaps had been exhausted, there were old standbys to fall back on: Olive Thomas, who drank mercury bichloride after a fight with her ne’er-do-well husband, Jack Pickford—Mary Pickford’s brother. Allyn King, who jumped from a fifth-story window when she got too fat for her costume. Lillian Lorraine, legendary temptress and longtime mistress of Mr. Z., now a hopeless drunk who still washed up in this or that bar, making a cluck of herself. As a child, Anna had imagined these doomed beauties occupying the same magical sphere as Little Miss Muffet, Queen Guinevere, and Sleeping Beauty. A separate intelligence had revealed itself more slowly: the storied girls had been stars, whereas Brianne and her mother were ordinary chorus girls, whispering in their wakes.
“I went to a nightclub two weeks ago,” Anna said. “With a girl from the Naval Yard.” She spoke nonchalantly, although she’d been longing for a chance to discuss Dexter Styles with her aunt. “It’s called Moonshine. Have you been?”
“It’s illegal to enter a nightclub looking like I do,” Brianne said. “They’d cuff me at the door.”
“Stop it, Auntie.”
“It’s run by a racketeer, that I do know. The best ones usually are—remember Owney Madden’s club, the Silver Slipper? Or El Fay?” She was asking Anna’s mother, who had made Lydia her own cocktail of the new camphor drops in warm milk and was helping her drink it.
“With Texas Guinan emceeing the floor show?” Brianne went on. “Hello Suckers!” She hove a sigh. “Poor Texas. Dysentery, of all things.”
Anna was growing impatient. “What racketeer?”
“Dexter Styles. You ever come across him, Aggie?” her aunt asked. “He’s younger than we are.”
“I’m younger than you are,” Anna’s mother reminded her. “By eight years.”
“Fine, then. He’s your age, more or less. I’d a beau years ago who played trumpet at one of his clubs.”
“Dexter Styles,” her mother said, and shook her head.
“What does ‘racketeer’ mean, exactly?” Anna asked.
“Well, it used to mean you moved liquor,” Brianne said. “Now that’s a government racket.”
Anna’s mother rose and took the handles of Lydia’s chair. “I’ll get her to bed,” she told Anna. “You do supper.”
Her mother had made spare ribs and sauerkraut the night before and left them in the icebox under a towel. Anna turned on the oven and slipped the dish inside, then emptied two cans of green beans into a pan to warm. Speaking softly so her mother wouldn’t hear, she asked, “Did Papa know him?”
“Who—Styles? I doubt it.”
“They didn’t have business together? Something with the union?”
“The union, not a chance. They’re all micks, and Styles is a wop.”
“But his name. It’s—not Italian.” Anna felt a curious reluctance to say it.
Brianne laughed. “Styles is a wop, trust me. Or part wop. Names were made to be changed, dearie; haven’t I taught you that much? Although here’s what a dope I was: I didn’t want a mick name, and Brianne is more mick than Kerrigan. That’s the one I should have changed!”
“To what?”
“Betty. Sally. Peggy. One of those American names. Anna’s not bad, but Ann would be better—better still, Annie.”
“Ugh.”
“Say, why all these questions?”
Her aunt’s shrewd gaze gave an impression of having seen everything in the world at least once; it was purely a matter of recognizing it. Anna turned to check on the ribs. Facing the oven, she said, “I thought I’d heard of him.”
“He’s in the society columns,” Brianne said. “Styles is one of the four hundred, practically. But not really—people just want him to seat them near the picture stars.”
Anna’s mother returned, having changed into a shift without girdle or stockings. “Who’s this?”
“Careful, Aggie. Your daughter’s taken an interest in gangsters.” Anna’s mother laughed. “She does need a vice,” Brianne mused. “Beyond warmongering.”
Anna tried over dinner to reason through the ferment of her thoughts. Her father had known Dexter Styles—that was a fact. Yet neither her mother nor Brianne had been aware of the acquaintance, nor was there any obvious reason for it. That meant it must have been a secret. Why had they met?
Brianne dredged up a new tale of woe: the great Evelyn Nesbit was reduced to making clay pots in California. “What a comedown,” she groaned.
“Suppose she enjoys making clay pots,” Anna’s mother said.
“Aggie,” Brianne said, setting down her drink. “Evelyn Nesbit? The legendary beauty? The reason Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White? A potter?”
“It is a surprise.” Anna’s mother always said just enough to keep Brianne talking; she was the maypole around which Anna’s aunt braided the ribbons of her knowledge and gossip and ghoulish revelations.
“Someone must have turned out well,” Anna said. “Out of all those girls you danced with.”
“Adele Astaire is Lady Cavendish in Scotland now,” her mother said. “I imagine that’s fun.”
“I hear Scotland is cold and dark,” Brianne said, sucking a rib. “And the people are odd.”
“Well, there’s Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Doesn’t she get richer with every divorce?”
“Fat and desperate,” Brianne said happily. “Almost a prostitute.”
“Ruby Keeler married Al Jolson.”
“Divorced. Raising brats with a nobody.”
Her mother thought a moment while Brianne polished off the sauerkraut. “Say, aren’t Marion Davies and Bill Hearst still together?”
“In seclusion. Scandal hanging over them,” Brianne fairly sang.
The Lobster King, as her “special friend” was affectionately known, had allowed Brianne to give sums of money to Anna and her mother—if they were to believe her sworn promise that her beau knew and approved of these gifts. Wittingly or not, he had paid Anna’s fees at Brooklyn College and bought Lydia a new chair when she’d outgrown the last. Brianne offered more help than Anna’s mother would accept.
“Please bring him to supper,” Anna’s mother implored while they ate their canned crushed pineapple. “I’ll make spare ribs again. Weren’t these nice?”
“He’s a fisherman,” Brianne said, as if that were demurral enough.
“Doesn’t ‘wholesale’ mean he doesn’t actually fish?” her mother asked.
“He smells like fish.” Brianne had always been sly about her beaus, disappearing with them on yachts and private railway cars and introducing them, years later, as “old friends.” “I promise, it’s all very ordinary,” she said. “Not the den of iniquity this one is picturing.” She meant Anna, of course.
“I’m not, Auntie.”
“Only because you’ve no idea what to picture!”
*