Lilly had been looking for signs, and here was one worthy of her own mother. Mediums were one of Madame Bloch’s great affectations; no grand decisions were made without their consulting the tarot, or tea leaves, or the lines of her own hand. And now, just when Lilly had a choice to make—California, Prague, Paris—here was this strange boy suggesting a visit to her mother’s preferred method of guidance.
But why was it even a choice? Josef was in Prague. Despite what he himself had written, wasn’t that reason enough to return? Wasn’t he essential to her? Her daydreams this past week had flashed through visions of California—a California imagined by one who had just for the first time seen beyond the Hudson River. She knew what California meant for her: a place of escape, of safety. But it was also a repudiation of home and of any pretense that she was capable of love.
Lilly had passed palm readers’ studios throughout the city, had even photographed men and women pondering what their hands might reveal about the future, but now she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember where a single medium could be found. She took her hand from the boy’s chest and scanned the street from end to end. This did not seem the place for a psychic to set up shop: the men here already knew their fate. Somewhere she had seen a row of gypsy storefronts where dark-eyed women in head scarves smoked blunt cigars. Broome, was it? Or Prince? And then there was Chinatown. Lilly had a mysterious stranger asking to be taken to a psychic, along with an unchecked item on the New York List that read Tea in Chinatown, so perhaps they could do both. Two birds, the Americans said, one stone. She took the boy’s arm in hers and they began to stroll.
HIGHBRIDGE
LORENA STOOD IN FRONT of a five-and-dime on 170th Street, surveying the cars moving up and down Walton Avenue. All around her, other women in groups of two or three watched the same cars. The paper-bag brigade, some called them, on account of the bags that held their work clothes and their lunches. The Bronx slave market, others said, because it was along this strip of stores that white women in cars—the madams—hired black women by the hour as maids, housekeepers, domestics. Lorena had come out last week, her first time on this corner, but she was new to this part of the city and she had arrived too late. The early-morning rush of hiring had already come and gone, and the cluster of women still waiting made it clear that this skinny little girl would be last in line for any of the madams looking for a few hours of afternoon housekeeping.
Hooper didn’t know she was here, but she knew what he would say, she knew how he would feel. That his wife had been reduced to this? If there was anything that would get him to pack up his trumpet in shame and head back to Baltimore, it was this: proof that his plan to be the next Louis Armstrong had failed, and failed so mightily that it had put Lorena on the street begging for work. That was why she wouldn’t tell him, and when he asked her what she did all day long, she would keep alive the lie that she was still tending to an old woman who lived on Sugar Hill. It had been true, right up until last week, when the woman died and Lorena found herself out of a job. Already she was learning that there were things a wife need not tell her husband.
No, Lorena wasn’t going to let Hooper quit on her behalf, and if he tried to quit for his own reasons—well, she might not let him quit then, either. Two years of trying was a long time, but it wasn’t long enough to give up on the dream they had hatched in his father’s church. If he blanched at the thought of his wife bargaining to clean someone else’s toilet, then those were the notions of a man who had grown up in a comfortable house, the son of a minister and a minister’s wife. He could afford those notions, but she could not. Work was work, and there was no shame in it. Half the women in Reverend Hooper’s choir were domestics, though Lorena wondered now if any of them had to get their work like this.
Was this the price of living? Or just the price of living in Harlem? They had come north, heedless as children—she was just twenty when they arrived, and Hooper only twenty-one. Most days she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. She could feel the energy coming up through the pavement, and all around her was a Black Metropolis. Ladies from Sugar Hill, looking like they’d stepped out of a fashion magazine, walked like royalty to the beauty parlors on Amsterdam Avenue. Up and down Strivers Row, men in sharp suits—the kind she wished she could buy for Hooper—leaned on the fenders of Bible-black sedans. On the streets, children raced fruit-crate go-carts; on the stoops, the West Indian girls chanted and hand-clapped songs that had no end. Boys in caps and baggy pants and girls in hand-me-down frocks called out to the fruit vendors and to the shaved-ice man. Down the block, older men played checkers and gave stern looks to any child fool enough to offer advice. Older women leaned from windows and paused on the sidewalks to carry on conversations about the heat, about the city, about the old men and their checkers. And at night! Night was when Lorena’s Harlem really came to life, in endless loops of neon, and in music spilling from the doors of the Apollo, and in the breakfast dance at Smalls Paradise, and in the single spotlight that hushed a crowd and gave a singer her chance to shine.
It was all too easy to get caught up in the dream, but life was no dream. Even if you could find a job, in Harlem the wages were lower and the rents higher than anywhere else in the city. Lorena and Hooper’s apartment was two rooms—a cold-water flat, three stories up, with a shared bathroom down the hall. All winter long, the wind seeped through the windows until ice formed on the inside of the glass, and in the summertime the apartment was hotter than a two-dollar pistol. There had been nights these past weeks when they slept on the fire escape. It was all part of the adventure during their first year in New York, but now, as their second year drew to a close, it was starting to feel like the best they could do—and maybe the best they could ever expect.