“I hardly recognized you,” Nell said. “What happened? You’re gorgeous!”
Nell looked bewitching, as always, if slightly more affected. Her curls had a new reddish tint and her skin was impossibly white, as if she never went outdoors. “I’m sure you two are seated in Siberia; we’ve room at our table,” she said. “This is Hammond, my fiancé.”
Hammond gave a pinched smile, his aquiline nostrils flaring under a pair of inert green eyes. Anna supposed he was handsome. She introduced Charlie Voss, and the four of them threaded among dancing couples away from the orchestra. “We’re not really engaged,” Nell whispered. “I just say that to rattle his cage.”
“Is he . . . that one?”
“The same. He’s put me up in the most beautiful little apartment on Gramercy Park South. I’ve a key to the park! You should come visit. Number twenty-one. Say it, so I know you’ll remember. Twenty. One.”
“Twenty-one,” Anna duly repeated. Her friend seemed jumpy, possibly drunk. “Did you find a better job?”
“I haven’t any job at all,” Nell said. “Unless you count trying to look smashing all the time so Hammond doesn’t toss me out.”
They seated themselves among a group who occupied several tables near the dance floor. Anna noticed Marco and reddened when he looked in her direction. But he was watching Nell.
“Would he really throw you out?” Anna whispered.
“Hammond is a pig,” Nell said, which dumbfounded Anna, Hammond himself being inches away, his arm around Nell’s shoulders. Anna averted her gaze as if she’d been guilty of an indiscretion. “Then why do you—”
“Money,” Nell said brightly. “He’s loaded with money, and he pays for everything. He lives in an eight-bedroom mansion in Rye, New York, with his wife and four children. He’ll never leave them—I was nuts to think he would. Isn’t that right, darling,” she called to Hammond. “Anna worked with me at the Naval Yard. Hammond doesn’t like to hear about that. He thinks girls shouldn’t work at all; they should just dream up new ways to entrance him.”
She kissed the side of Hammond’s pale cheek, leaving behind a lesion of fuchsia lipstick. As though he could see it, Hammond wiped it away with his hand, going over the spot several times. He seemed unnaturally still, like a man walking stiffly to hide drunkenness. But he wasn’t drunk; there was some other dissolution Hammond was fending off.
“We’re going to the ladies’,” Nell cried, seizing Anna’s hand and tugging her onto her feet. “Grab your pocketbook, Anna, we girls must powder up!”
Anna found it difficult to keep a straight face, Nell’s act was so overdone. Who was the audience? Not Charlie Voss, with whom Anna had already exchanged a wry look across the table. That left only Hammond. But Hammond, paralyzed somewhere between rage and panic, was too preoccupied to wonder why his mistress was playacting.
“We’re not going to the powder room at all,” Nell said as soon as they were away from the table. “Everyone eavesdrops in there, and the girls are snakes. Plenty of them would like to get their hooks into Hammond.”
They paused in an eddy beside a column. A tincture of dread had begun to infect Anna’s vision of her friend. “Are you happy?” she asked. “In the apartment?”
“More or less,” Nell said. “Hammond works too hard to come around all that often.” She gave a secret smile. “I’ve someone else who visits me.”
“Marco?”
Aghast, Nell took Anna’s shoulders in her hot, trembling hands. “If someone told you that, I need to know exactly who it was,” she said.
Anna swallowed, spooked by Nell’s disjointedness. “It was a guess,” she said. “Marco sat with us before, remember? When we came last October?”
Nell gave her a long look, then released her. “I’m sorry. I get a little . . . I don’t know what.”
“You’re afraid of Hammond finding out?”
“I am. Although I shouldn’t be. If he cut me off, I would telephone his wife and tell her everything. Then he would get thrown out, too. But the question is, what would Hammond do then? That would be interesting to know.”
“You don’t seem to like Hammond much.”
“I hate him. And he hates me, too. It’s like a soiled, awful marriage, except without children—well, we might have had a child, but we won’t.”
Anna stared at Nell’s sweet face and marveled that it had come to that. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ve no regrets. I didn’t want the child of a pig—I could never love it. I’d lose my figure over nothing.”
“Oh, Nell,” Anna said. The dread was upon her, a sense of foreboding for her friend. The sad tales she’d heard all her life—Olive Thomas, Lillian Lorraine—seemed real to her for the first time. Those doomed girls had been just girls at first, like Nell. “Why not give all of it up—the apartment, Hammond, Marco? Come back to the Naval Yard! I’m a diver now. Maybe you could dive, too. In the big dress, remember? We saw them training on the barge?”
Nell let out a cry of laughter, but Anna persisted, even knowing she sounded like a sap. “What about the war, Nell? Do you think of it?”
“Mine with Hammond or the great big one?”
Anna laughed despite herself.
“What can I do about it? Hammond won’t let me work; he said he could smell the Yard on me even when I’d bathed twice and sprayed myself from head to toe with Sirocco.”
Anna smiled helplessly at her friend. Nell embraced her suddenly, their bare shoulders and arms making the gesture feel startling, intimate. Anna caught the briny tang of Nell’s armpits and the animal flux of her ribs. “You’re different,” Nell breathed into her ear. “It’s awfully nice.”
“That’s funny. I’d have said you were different.”
“That means we can be friends,” Nell said, drawing away and gazing into Anna’s eyes. “True friends, not like the serpents around this place. You work hard and come home exhausted, but I’m allergic to that sort of life. My ma says I think I’m too good for it, but it isn’t that. I’m just trying to live a different way. Even if it looks like nonsense.”
“It looks . . . dangerous.”
“I like not knowing what will happen, not waking up at any certain time, drinking champagne at ten in the morning if I’ve a mind to. And don’t think this is the end for me—I’ve big plans, make no mistake.”
Anna noticed that sped-up quality in her friend. She wanted to say, What plans? but was concerned about getting back to Charlie Voss.
“Now that we’ve settled everything, we can go to the ladies’,” Nell concluded, weaving her fingers among Anna’s and tugging her through the crowd.
The long mirror in the powder room was jammed with the faces of girls appraising their own looks of astonished delight as if they’d never expected to meet themselves in such a place. Nell traded eager greetings with several. Anna gave her friend a wink and a wave and slipped back out.
Before she’d reached her table, an elderly waiter intercepted her. “Miss Feeney?”
The name, familiar and unfamiliar, seemed to wend its way toward Anna across a tortuous expanse. “Yes . . .” she finally said.