“That’s not the half of it,” Alva said. With one eye on the cars, Alva gave a quick lesson in the life of a brown-bag domestic. She started with the basics—settle on the wage before you get in the car, along with time for lunch and carfare home—but there was so much more. Watch out for madams who set their clocks back to cheat you out of an hour. Watch out for madams who offered you lunch—leftovers, always leftovers—and then deducted it from your pay. Watch out for madams who saw phantom smudges on the windows and refused to pay at all, or paid less, or else made you do it all over again, off the clock. And watch out for the men who drove up after the early rush; they had work for you, but it sure wasn’t mopping and scrubbing.
Lorena nodded with each item on Alva’s list. She saw how this worked: you fought the other ladies for the privilege of making pennies and then you fought the madam to get paid for what you did. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that song. As she listened, she prepared herself for the days to come. Tomorrow she would arrive even earlier, and she would bring a clock of her own—an old watch, or the bedside alarm clock. But more than thinking of the lessons she would need to master in the weeks or months or—God help her—years ahead, she was wondering what Aunt Hessie would make of all this. Aunt Hessie had taught her to scrub a floor until it shone like the truth, but she couldn’t have imagined that this was what she was preparing Lorena for when she took her into her home.
Lorena’s parents had exited the scene long ago. For a time, her daddy ran one of the hottest speakeasies in the District of Columbia. He was a cardsharp and a pool player, he wore flashy suits and conked his hair, and anywhere he went, that’s where the party was. To keep the good times going he borrowed money wherever he could get it. Even when the club was so crowded that he had to turn away business, money was always tight. Lorena’s mama was a minor celebrity herself, in her beaded dresses that stopped above the knee and her hair as shiny and marcel-waved as Josephine Baker’s. Daddy had once told Lorena that she got her voice from her mother, but just as much as she heard Mama singing, she heard her yelling at Daddy. Hot-tempered, some people called her. A drinker, said the others. Lorena had a narrow bed in a room that was no more than a closet, and from that room she listened to her parents rage at each other. Who had he been dancing with? Who had she been talking to? Where had all the money gone? And how could he be so bad at cheating at cards when he was so good at cheating on her? She knew that Mama and Daddy loved her—she was Lolo, their honey girl—and for weeks in a row, sometimes months, she knew they loved each other, too. Despite the slammed doors, their fights always ended with them cooing in each other’s arms, promising never again to take a match to love and turn it into ashes.
It was just after Lorena turned eleven that Daddy disappeared. All those men to whom he owed money came collecting, and they wanted more than his cash and his nightclub. He’d been putting them off for too long, they said, trying to play them for fools. They had decided that his was a debt payable only in blood. The grief and the bottle made quick work of Mama. On that morning when she couldn’t get out of bed—when she could barely put two words together—Lorena had run to the upstairs neighbors first, but they had heard too much from Mama, and too late at night, to lift a finger for her now. Lorena raced next door to find a widow who had always been kind to her, and once that woman saw the state of the apartment, and then got an eyeful of Mama, she shooed Lorena out the door. That glimpse of Mama, her satin skin swollen and those bright, dark eyes sinking into her skull, was the last one Lorena ever got.
Late that same night, an aunt she barely knew claimed Lorena and took her up to Baltimore. Within a week, word came that Mama had died, and the hurt of it almost swallowed Lorena whole. She hadn’t even said a proper good-bye. She hadn’t said any kind of good-bye at all. In the years that followed, she worked hard to un-remember that last moment; to preserve Mama in her memory as the woman with the lilac perfume dabbed behind each ear, the skin that glowed like bronze in the sunlight, and the voice that rang out high and then dove down low—like an angel, her daddy had once said, who’s down to her last dollar.
Aunt Hessie had pitied Lorena and felt obliged to care for her, and that was more than some girls got. Lorena could have easily found herself with far less. Perhaps Aunt Hessie even loved that part of Lorena that reminded her of the baby sister she had raised, but then hadn’t she let Lorena’s mother slip away to a life no honest woman should lead? She wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Lorena, whose life in Baltimore was school and chores and church and little else. Only in the choir could she raise her voice. Only with the pack of Hooper children could she play like she had back at home.
What would Aunt Hessie, dead these past three years, think of her now? Married to Reverend Hooper’s oldest son—that would have been a surprise. But with barely two dimes to rub together, and singing till all hours in smoky clubs? That was just what Hessie had feared.
Still Lorena sang, hoping to turn a song into a set into a regular gig. There had to be a thousand other girl singers like her—coal-scuttle canaries—and who needs you when Ella is at the Savoy and Billie is at Café Society and most of the ballrooms, clubs, and lounges in between have a blondes-only policy for the sole lady on the bandstand? But that was the dream anyway, and some nights it was so close that she could feel it like a spotlight on her face. Then came a morning like this: standing on the curb, paper bag in hand, hoping for the chance to clean some white woman’s bathroom, to dust and mop and scrub and bleach until her fingers ached and her knees went raw and ashy. All for a few cents and the chance to do it again tomorrow.
A new car, its chrome grille sparkling like a crown, swept into a spot only a few feet from Lorena. A woman who had been standing in the shade of the awning moved toward it, but Lorena froze her with a look. This one’s mine. She tightened her grip on the paper bag and smiled her biggest smile, ready for what came next.
LITTLE ITALY
WHERE AMONG THE FRUIT vendors and the barber colleges and the stores selling suits for ten cents, the taverns and the cheap cinemas and the tenements and the sweatshops, had Lilly seen signs for palm readers? She headed west, away from the Bowery, toward the Italian and Chinese neighborhoods, where there was sure to be a fortune-teller wedged between the shrines to weeping saints or ancestors buried thousands of miles away in a land that had once been home. In Prague, there had been a Hungarian woman to whom her mother turned in times of turmoil, and Madame Bloch had always been doubly pleased when voices from beyond seconded an opinion she held. You see, Lilliana! she would say. Even the spirits agree with me!