Gladys shook her head. She was beautiful with her dark, draping hair and soft eyes. “My mother always loved my hair long.”
“Well, let’s get creative then. We can pin it and make it look short.” Bess gathered her sister-in-law’s hair together. “You know what I was thinking on my way over here? Do you remember how they used to arrest women on Fifth Avenue for smoking?”
Gladys smiled. “That was years ago, wasn’t it? I can’t believe they used to do that. But it’s not much different from Prohibition, I suppose. Trying to enforce morality.”
“At least they arrest both men and women now,” Bess said.
“Let’s try not to get arrested tonight. At least promise me that.”
An hour later they were made up with rouge and lipstick, stepping out of the taxicab onto Forty-Ninth Street. They entered a crowd of strangers who were weaving their way down the sidewalk.
Gladys hung on Bess’s elbow. “I can’t remember the last time I went to a party,” she said. “It’s exciting.”
Bess pushed open the door to the tearoom. “They’re much different now. Very slick. All kinds of debauchery.”
There was an illicit sort of caution about public drunkenness. But there was a thrill, too, in going into the back room of a Long Acre pharmacy for “smoke”—water with fuel alcohol—and sneaking from one tawdry speakeasy to another, their walls papered with lithographs of nude women.
She led Gladys into the lounge, where someone was playing the piano raucously at the end of the room.
Gladys tightened her grip on Bess’s arm. “Don’t leave me.”
It wasn’t late—only nine o’clock—but it was a cool evening, and that always made people want to get out of their own apartments and go somewhere else. There were at least fifty people inside already—the whole place fit only about a hundred, and tightly. Someone had brought a roulette board, and a crowd was calling out bets.
On Fridays, when the lunches and sodas and teas had been cleared away and the liquor cabinet was unlocked, Bess let Oscar, the parrot, out of his cage to play, which signaled the start of the night. She had acquired him from an exotic birds dealer in Harlem, and he was the star of the place, really. He walked with such muscular control that he was sometimes mistaken for a sophisticated automaton. Now, Oscar was strutting through the middle of the room with enviable precision, showing off his party-red feathers.
“Good day, good day, good day,” he called in his shrill voice, craning his neck to see the figures looming over him.
Stella came in, short of breath, sporting a new straight-silhouetted dress of copper crepe de chine. Fred had recently come into money after a favorable oil investment, and she had embraced her newfound wealth and status as eagerly as she had once embraced motherhood. She started when she saw Oscar gazing at her in the entryway, then laughed, dropping her purse on a table. “Do you have any booze? I’ve just come from dinner with Fred’s friends and I’m bored out of my mind.” She threw herself onto the sofa in the lounge and began flipping through the thick, glossy pages of a recent edition of McClure’s that was lying on the console table.
Bess loved Stella’s briskness, and she embraced the chaos her sister brought. They were their best selves at parties. She thought about all the lonely Sunday hours she had spent meditating on Harry’s photograph, wishing he would appear. Sometimes she thought she heard voices, but they turned out to be only men shouting on the street below. Once, when she was especially exhausted, she thought she had seen her name written in steam on the bathroom mirror. But when she woke up it was no longer there, and she couldn’t remember if she had dreamed it or imagined it, and it never appeared again. Something similar had happened to her years before, when she and Harry had been trying to contact Mrs. Weiss’s spirit. She had stumbled, blurry-eyed, into the bathroom in the middle of the night to find a bloom of thin white lines feathered across the mirror. She wasn’t sure what it meant, and when she’d turned on the light they had gone.
“I have something to confess to you,” Stella said, pulling Bess away from Gladys and onto the couch with her. “But you can’t be cross with me. Do you promise?”
“What is it?”
Stella hesitated. “Please don’t be upset.”
“For God’s sake, I won’t—now tell me!”
She took a breath. “Fred and I—we’re having another baby.”
Bess looked at her, confused; Stella was four years older than she was. She had three children, already grown. “But—that’s impossible.”
Stella pressed her hands together in her lap. “Of course I’m not pregnant. But Abby—she’s gotten herself into a situation, you see. And she was supposed to go off to Europe in the fall. She doesn’t want the baby.”
Abby was Stella’s youngest daughter; she was seventeen, and unmarried. She’d thrown herself into the Broadway scene, recklessly, and gotten lost in the lights.