“Are we going to the beach?” Doll asked. “Let’s, please. It’s sweltering out here.”
The sun was going down behind them, but guests were still pouring onto the grounds, and the streetlamps blazed like the white eyes of ghosts. Bess recalled her mother’s shame when she’d left home, but it was worth it, wasn’t it, to be here in the summer lights in this jewel-encrusted palace, a place with more color and life than she’d ever known.
None of the performers spent much of their free time in the fairground, though. The Bowery was always crowded, the food was expensive, and they didn’t get any of it for free. But mostly, there was always the possibility that theatergoers might recognize or accost them. Even worse than that, although no one said it out loud, was the possibility that they would actually be mistaken for the theatergoers themselves, ordinary men and women who ate hot dogs or waited in line for a goat-cart ride or the Switchback dime railroad. And the idea of it—such tedious, immaculate ordinariness—was abhorrent. They had all come to Coney Island to forge extraordinary, resplendent lives under the lights. Perhaps her sister would be content to wait in line, but Bess would not be one of the onlookers anymore.
“To the beach,” Dash agreed and took Doll’s hand, and Harry fell in step behind them. Bess walked beside him, as she had nowhere else to go, but he didn’t speak to her again. She was unsettled by his silence, and slightly insulted. It seemed outside the bounds of common decency. He was young—almost as young as she—and she wondered if he had ever even been with a woman before. Doll—who was an expert in such matters—had explained to her that when men made a show of their confidence it was often to disguise some sexual insecurity.
Finally she gave in and spoke first. “Tell me something.” She lowered her voice so Dash and Doll wouldn’t hear. “You knew that man in the audience was going to challenge you tonight, didn’t you? You knew he’d never be able to get out of that trunk.”
Harry smiled. “Why would you think that?”
“Or maybe it was all made up, and you paid him to get stuck in there so you could look like a hero.” She surprised herself with this. She hadn’t meant to be so brash. But she was stewing in the insult of his silence, and it had brought out another, harsher side to her.
His smile faded. “I’ll tell you one thing—not a soul in the whole state of New York can get out of that trunk except Dash and me. And I certainly don’t need to pay anyone to try.”
“You don’t have to snap at me.” She paused. “I could get out of that trunk.”
He looked at her, amused. “Could you?”
Bess nodded. “You’re clearly very skilled with ropes—that’s the most difficult part. You had your hands untied behind your back before Dash even pulled the sack up over your head. But the rope tying the sack was tricked—I suspect you just had to pull on it from the inside for it to open the bag. Then there’s the trick panel on the rear of the trunk.”
Harry’s smirk vanished. “You’re wrong.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t take a great deal of skill and practice to do it so quickly. I do think you should bind your ankles as well though. It would make the escape seem even more miraculous.” She saw Harry’s face darken and realized she had gone too far.
“I’ll tell you my own secret,” she said, more kindly. “My real name’s much worse than Floral. It’s Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner. The Bess comes from Beatrice.”
Harry’s anger seemed to soften. “That’s your secret? It’s not that bad.”
“Of course it is. It sounds like the name of some fat headmistress.”
“Beatrice was the name of Dante’s muse,” he argued. “He wrote her into Paradise.”
Bess glanced up at the dim figures of Dash and Doll, ahead of them, growing farther and farther away. “You’ve read Dante?”
“I’ve read everything there is to do with magic. Or at least I intend to, anyway.”
“But Dante’s books are about religion.” She recalled her teacher’s lecture on the Inferno in high school. She wouldn’t classify it as a study in magic—fantasy, maybe, if you took it lightly. But to Bess, the nine circles of hell were a Catholic warning against sin, about how carefully everyone treaded in this world, and how quickly fortune could be taken away. The Italian girls flaunted their untranslated copies of the book to show up the German girls, whom they considered bland and unsophisticated. Of course, on Sundays they all went to the same church, and outside their neighborhood, in the wealthier parts of the city, all of them tried equally hard not to give away any trace of their heritages, using American nicknames to disguise Old World names and American makeup to hide ethnic imperfections.
Harry snorted. “Magic and religion are the same thing.”