Charlie brought out a flask from the inside pocket of his coat and poured a thimbleful of brown liquid into two of the coffee cups that were lined up neatly on the desk. Both men drank and then set their glasses back down and regarded one another. Although Astrid had spent the whole day in anticipation of this part of the evening—when she would be ushered behind a curtain and get to see how things were really done—she couldn’t stop her attention from drifting now. The room was small, after all, and not very interesting, and she couldn’t stop herself from wondering, just for an instant, what was happening at the Ritz’s roof that evening. Then her gaze settled on the room’s lone decoration, a framed picture of two children wearing frilly white getups, which she supposed were meant to be fancy.
“How many cases can I order you?” Charlie was saying.
“Mr. Grey, I’m not sure we understand each other,” the man replied.
“Why, mister!” Astrid broke in. “Are those your children?”
Startled, the man followed her pointed finger. “Yes,” he said cautiously.
“Oh, they’re very darling,” she gushed.
“Thank you.” Astrid smiled at him, and he smiled back. “Those are my two oldest, Rosie and Matthew.”
Charlie pushed back his chair as he rose up. “How many cases can I order you?”
“Mr. Grey, your liquor is very good. But I can’t buy from you. I buy from Coyle Mink.” The man paused while his drooping eyes focused on Charlie. “He runs the Bronx.”
Charlie put his fists on the table and leaned forward so that when he spoke his spittle landed on the man’s nose. “I’ve heard of Coyle Mink, and I’ve even heard of the Bronx, but this isn’t the Bronx, and you’re buying from me now.”
“Mr. Grey, I—”
“How many cases?” Suddenly Charlie was yelling.
“But I—”
“How many cases?” This time Charlie’s voice was lower, but no less menacing. He’d spit a little more, and the spittle remained glistening on the man’s long, worn forehead.
“Five…,” the man ventured, as though he hoped this would do.
“Five.” Charlie brought his shoulders back and spoke the word as though savoring it. “Five cases to start. I’ll have my boys be by tomorrow with your five cases.” The flask disappeared under Charlie’s jacket, and he produced a card, which he twirled in the air between two fingers before placing it on the desk. “A pleasure doing business with you. This is my wife, Astrid, by the way. Isn’t she the prettiest wife a man can buy?”
“Yes,” the man answered, but his voice was hollow and empty of conviction. It was the opposite of the voice he had used to say “Rosie and Matthew.”
A sadness crept into Astrid’s heart when she heard in the man’s tone how little he cared whether she was pretty or not. Before she could say anything, Charlie’s arm was gripping her, pulling her out of the office. She glanced back, but the man was still staring down at his desk with that blank and weary expression of defeat.
In Charlie’s body she sensed triumph. He was springy with what he had done. When they went back through the speakeasy he was strutting, and the men and women huddled at their tables turned their faces toward him a little meekly, as villagers might look up at a Viking. He did not have to say anything to the bodyguard stationed by the door—the man just followed along as they went quickly through the pharmacy and out onto the sidewalk. Holding the car door for her, Charlie ushered Astrid in. She heard metal slam against metal, and then Charlie was beside her, pressing her against the backseat, his mouth pushing on her mouth to open it up.
He was proud of himself, and she wished she could be proud of him too, but the pathetic condition they’d left that man in—his face all slack as though he’d just absorbed another of life’s many blows—had soured her evening.
“Charlie, I just got so tired,” she said, pushing him away. “Do you think you could take me home?”
“Not a chance, doll!” His dark eyes were shot through with electricity as he pulled her toward him. “I’m not letting go of you now.”
City dwellers are people who won’t sit still. Every year they move faster and find new activities to absorb their manic energy. They parade and they cheer, they showboat and they observe, they play elaborate games of hide-and-go-seek as though the concrete canyons were some kind of buzzed-up jungle gym and, as long as they keep playing, none of them will ever grow old. Any newcomer to the great metropolis might find it strange that the first showing of a motion picture is also an excuse for a rabble of newspaper photographers to push and shove against a velvet rope, calling out names often printed in columns or referred to reverentially on the radio. But the proud owners of those names had dressed in such finery that it was perfectly obvious they expected more from their evening than to sit in the darkness watching themselves projected onscreen.
On the way into the Loews theater on Forty-Fifth Street and Broadway, Letty had not seemed at all out of place on the arms of her two patrons. She had paused and smiled for the cameras, wearing a dress of rippling persimmon that highlighted the luminescence of her shoulders. A narrow silver ribbon went around her bobbed and shiny helmet of hair, fixing a magnolia in full bloom over her left ear. That afternoon, Sophia had given Letty her lessons in how to be a star, which were different from Valentine’s lessons. Sophia had taught Letty how to pose for a picture, how to smile for the public, how to radiate an aura of importance and glamour. And perhaps this was more valuable information, all things considered, because she was following all of Sophia’s rules, and the cameramen were calling out to her as though she, too, were in the pictures.
Even so, when the lights went down in the theater, she was transported to the world of Minetta Carrington, a witty and passionate socialite, married to a vapid playboy but still attracted to the tennis champion she had been in love with as a girl. As the heroine traveled to the South Seas and Europe in search of meaning, Letty’s heart got tender over her story and all its beautiful impossibility.
“Did you like it?” she whispered, still a little awestruck, when the lights went up.
“Like what?” Sophia was draped over the back of her seat, her attention focused, as it had been for the last ten minutes or so, on the two bow-tied gentlemen behind them, both of whom were vaguely familiar to Letty, although whether from the whirligig of her recent nights or from some movie she’d seen once, she couldn’t be certain. “Oh,” she went on in a changed tone, dropping her wrist—which was heavy with a cuff of diamonds—over Letty’s hand. “The movie. Delightful, didn’t you think so?”
“In the beginning, maybe. But after that it was so much more! It was so sad, and I almost can’t believe that…” Letty trailed off, thinking of how it had ended for the heroine, alone on a boat going back to a New York that had nothing left to offer her.
“I thought it was exquisite,” Valentine, leaning around his wife’s back, told Letty in a low voice. Then he grinned, and she realized that he had been watching just as reverently as she had.
All around them, well-heeled men and women were rising, smoothing out silk dresses and straightening jacket cuffs. Their eyes were on the door, as though the next thing might start without them and that knowledge was making their skin crawl. Even though she knew she shouldn’t be, Letty was a little surprised that they were able to break so quickly from the world of the movie. It bothered her, almost. But it bothered her less when she remembered that Valentine had been watching rapturously, too.
“Shall we, my dear?” he was saying now, to Sophia.
“Yes, darling,” she replied. “Save me before I bore these two to death!”
“No! How could you possibly ever?” the two gentlemen exclaimed, almost in tandem, as though they were twins. After that there was a great deal of blowing kisses and exchanging of promises, and Sophia begged them to send all her love and best wishes to their pugs.
“Are those men brothers?” Letty whispered, once they began making their way down the grand curved s
taircase to the lobby.
“Brothers!” Sophia hooted and leaned in conspiratorially. “I suppose they might be more or less like brothers now, but for a long time they were more akin to Mr. and Mrs.”
Letty’s eyes got wide, and her mouth made a circle around her confusion. How could that be, she wanted to ask, when they were two men and everyone could see it? But Sophia gave her a wink, and Letty understood. To be let in on this gossip triggered a small spasm of satisfaction within her, and as they swept down toward the lobby she was reminded of Sophia’s earlier prediction that they would be fast friends. A great chandelier hung over the crowd on the first floor, dappling their faces, many of which were turned up in expectation at the descending movie stars. She was feeling so important that it only surprised her a little when the first person to approach their group of three thrust his hand in her direction.
“Why, you must be Letty Larkspur! I’ve been dying to meet you.”
Letty gave the tall, blond gentleman—whose blandly handsome face was somehow familiar to her—a goofy smile but managed to simply nod in a vague way instead of saying anything in reply. Saying little created mystery—that was the advice Sophia had echoed earlier, while they’d gotten dressed.
“I’m Laurence Peters,” he went on. “I played the part of the tennis champion’s rival, remember, in the middle of the picture? The one who throws his racket down in a huff?”
“Yes, of course. I didn’t recognize you without the visor.”
“You look stunning!” he gushed.
Sophia cleared her throat, and Laurence’s eyes darted from Letty to her patrons, who were drawn up quite impressively and regarding him with skeptical eyes.
“Well, uh—” Laurence faltered, as though he were embarrassed by the sudden realization of his true place in the firmament. “Will you be going on to Jack Montrose’s party, I hope?”
This time Letty didn’t respond immediately because she had no idea who Jack Montrose was, or why she would be going to his party. But Sophia answered for her. “Of course we’re going to Jack’s party,” she said haughtily. Then she put her arm around Letty and drew her toward the exit.
“What kind of a party is it?” Letty asked, as they stepped out and the cameras began to flash again.
“The kind of party people like us go to.” Sophia laughed and shook her hair out.
“In order that we might be bored stiff,” Valentine put in, less enthusiastically.
“Darling, don’t say that!” Sophia’s smile grew bright and her grip on Letty tightened. “Someone might overhear you and think you mean it.”
Valentine gave an apologetic half-smile to Letty. “I want to go over my lines for The Good Lieutenant, and anyway, my costume screen test is tomorrow and I want to be well-rested.”
“You see, my dear, he’s vainer than I am!” Sophia was signaling to their driver and did not see the fretfulness her comment caused in Valentine’s brow.
“But don’t leave us!” Letty blurted without thinking.
“You ladies will have much more fun without me.” Valentine’s smile returned now, and he bowed gallantly in Letty’s direction.
“Darling, don’t be ridiculous, we will miss you every second.” Sophia turned and kissed her husband as her cream-colored limousine approached. Then she removed her glove so she could use her thumb to wipe the lipstick off his lips. “That is too dark a shade for you,” she laughed. “Better now. But listen, lover, will you take a taxi home? Suddenly I am in such a hurry to get to the party…”
Letty wasn’t sure if this suggestion pained Valentine, or if she felt pained for him, or if what she was really feeling was disappointment. She wanted to talk to someone about the movie, and Valentine was the only person, as far as she could tell, who had been watching it.
“Of course, my dearest,” he replied. He kissed Sophia, and then Letty, on the cheek before striding off along the sidewalk, in the direction of Park Avenue, as though he were just any ordinary person. For a moment Letty watched him disappear into the crush of bodies, but then she heard Sophia calling her, and she followed the turquoise train of her dress into the limousine, and, like that, they were on to the next attraction.
Astrid didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when Charlie came in, waking her. The turret room that had once belonged to Darius Grey, but was now theirs, was strewn with clothes not yet put away from their travels. Light from the guard tower slanted in through the high windows. She turned away from the door so that he would not know she was wide-eyed, and she stared at the window wishing she could sleep as she normally did—the happy, solid sleep of girls who are just the right amount selfish and do not have to begin their days at any particular hour. The light was already in the sky, and on the other side of the room she could hear Charlie careening back and forth.
The evening came back to her, a series of ugly scenes. How Charlie had dragged her all over Manhattan, bragging about her looks and family and his bootlegging prowess, how he was going to be bigger than Coyle Mink. When she’d finally prevailed upon him to take her back to Dogwood, they had been intercepted at the door by Jones, and when Astrid went up to bed ahead of him, she heard Charlie shouting from the second floor. The fight must have gone on all this time.
Now Astrid listened to Charlie wrestling with his jacket and with his shoes, and she knew that he was even drunker than before. Finally he got himself undressed and fell, hard, against the mattress beside her. Immediately he began to snore. Snoring was not something she had minded particularly while they were on their honeymoon—she had not wanted to sleep while they were away, and anyway, snoring seemed like something that men did, and for that reason it had delighted instead of tortured her. But now she knew that it was torture.
She turned over so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, and then she turned back over again. The beginning of the dawn was on his high slab cheekbones and the curve of his closed eyelids. For hours, it seemed, she stared at that face, wondering what went on behind it, until she had the idea to disentangle herself from the white bedclothes and go to the sofa, where she lay herself down and closed her eyes.
5
“WHAT DID I TELL YOU? SOMETIMES IT’S MORE FUN just us girls.”
To punctuate her point, Sophia flagged down a passing waiter and took two champagne flutes off his brass tray, although Letty was pretty well convinced already. By then she’d realized how disappointing it would have been to go home and talk about the movies when she had a real party like this one to go to that was as grand as anything she’d ever seen on screen.
“Val’s a romantic, you know. He’s absolutely in love with the pictures, worries himself sick about his lines and all that. But it’s just as important to leave the house now and then, especially on nights like these, when the important people are out and in a good mood, and there are so many people to see you looking your best!”
“Oh, yes, I can see that.”
Glancing around the great expanse of Jack Montrose’s living room, Letty thought how the gentlemen in tuxedoes and women in the latest styles did practically glow with importance. Although she was also pretty sure that just about anyone would feel important in such a setting. The dimensions of the room were almost improbable—it seemed to go on forever in two directions. Behind them was a wall of gold-flecked mirrors, and in front of them a series of glass doors were thrown open onto a terrace that floated above the soft topography of Central Park treetops. Clustered seating areas were scattered throughout the room, low white sofas and chaises separated from each other by potted rosebushes. At their feet lay a bearskin rug.
“You never know who you’ll meet at a party—if you remember nothing else I tell you, honey, remember that. Get yourself invited to as many parties as possible, and when you’re there, practice picking out the most important man in the room. When I was coming up, I used to time myself—I got so good I could pick out the heavy before the boy had even taken my coat.” Sophia fixed a cigarette into her cigarette holder and
paused her monologue long enough to let a man materialize and light it for her. “Thank you,” she said dismissively. “Now,” she went on, when the man was gone, “you try it.”
Letty sat up straight and brushed her hands across the bright lap of her dress. Her blue eyes went right and left, taking in the faces of the guests. They were interesting, proud faces, wily and shining and gay, and for a moment Letty couldn’t see how any one of them might be singled out as special. Almost every one of them looked as though they had been to Europe twice and kept their own chauffeur and a charge account at Bendel’s. The columnist Claude Carrion, whom she recognized from The Vault, was walking across the floor with his shoulders thrown back, and Letty, who had heard Sophia mention his name several times while they were getting ready, wondered if this were a kind of test and he might be the most important man in the room.
Then she caught sight of a face that made her smile involuntarily, and she forgot what she had been searching for in the previous moment.
“Oh… Will you excuse me? I see someone I know.”
“I don’t think you found the heavy, doll.” Sophia gave Letty’s shoulder a light slap as her red lips parted in a beneficent smile. “But if you must. A man who is not important today may be important tomorrow, and one can’t always tell who happens to be the second cousin of a king.”
“Thank you,” Letty said gratefully, as though she needed special permission to walk over to the man leaning on the marble balustrade outside on the porch. When he noticed her, he stepped in her direction with his hand lifted in greeting.
The way it had been the last time she had spoken to Grady Lodge did not fully occur to her until she was beside him. The memory turned her cheeks pink. It was the night he had been planning to introduce her to his parents, but she had behaved badly and forgotten, and by the time she had turned up he hadn’t wanted to anymore. That was the night she learned that he chose to live on the pennies he made as a writer, even though the Lodges were millionaires. She’d seen him only once since, and they hadn’t spoken. He had been escorting a girl named Peachy Whitburn, who was from the same world as Astrid Donal and already knew how to walk across a room like she owned it.