New York Nocturne Read online

  Every day I ate some new, delicious food: knishes, soft pretzels, bagels and lox, hot dogs with sauerkraut on a steamed bun, Horn & Hardart apple pie.

  I loved New York, loved everything about it. Larger and brighter than Boston, it was glib and flashy and magnificently loud. Horns honked, whistles shrieked, autos grumbled and growled, people shouted and bellowed. It was the Land of More, and sometimes, when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I could feel the concrete throbbing beneath my feet as the entire city roared, cometlike, toward the center, the wild unguessable heart, of the Roaring Twenties. It was, for a sixteen-year-old girl, really quite breathtaking.

  All that it lacked—or I lacked—was someone with whom to share it. Sometimes I would see a couple, a man and a woman not much older than I, strolling along the sidewalk, their fingers interlaced, their heads inclining toward each other, and I would feel a tart pang of envy, and then a long, slow, cheerless breath would sigh through my empty chest, and I would wonder whether someone would ever hold my hand in just that way, or incline his head at just that tilt toward mine.

  In the evenings, John and I would go out. We saw Paul Robeson in All God’s Chillun Got Wings at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. On Broadway, we saw Sophie Tucker’s stage review, and Buster Keaton’s latest movie, Sherlock Jr. We saw Fletcher Henderson and his band at Roseland, accompanied by an amazing young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong.

  So it went, all week—dinner at some charming restaurant, then a play or a review or a film, then a nightcap (Cherry Coke for me) at some club or speakeasy.

  That Friday, Friday the thirteenth, was no exception.

  But, unlike the other nights, it ended very badly.

  Chapter Three

  “So,” said John. He ran his hand back through his thick black hair. “Where to tonight?”

  It was six thirty in the evening. Both John and Albert had been in the apartment when I arrived back from my expedition about half an hour earlier, but Albert had since left for Queens. Sitting at the kitchen table, John and I were now plotting our evening.

  He wore an opened pinstripe black vest, a white shirt with its sleeves folded back along his forearm, and a gray silk tie, its knot loosened at his collar. He sat slumped in the chair, relaxed, his right ankle hooked over his left knee. His left hand, resting on his lap, lightly clasped another King’s Ransom Scotch and soda.

  “Harlem,” I said.

  “Harlem?”

  “I’ve never been there. I’d like to see the Cotton Club.”

  He smiled. “And how do we know about the Cotton Club?”

  “From Albert. He said it was a totally swank destination.”

  “Did he indeed? I shall have to speak with Albert.”

  “Is there something wrong with the Cotton Club?”

  “Wrong? Well, we’ll go there tonight, and you can tell me what you think. But it doesn’t really get interesting until later. Let’s go downtown first. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He smiled. “It’s Friday night. Shall we dress up a bit?”

  I had brought one formal evening dress—supple black silk, sleeveless—from Boston, and so far I had not worn it. “Yes!” I said.

  “In that case,” he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

  “For me?”

  He smiled again, stood up, put his glass on the table, and walked over to the icebox. He opened it, reached inside, and pulled out a small square box of shiny golden cardboard, about six by six inches, tied with glossy black ribbon. He crossed the floor and handed it to me.

  “What is it?” I asked him, taking it.

  “Open it.”

  Inside, lying amid whispering white tissue paper, was an extravagant velvety orchid corsage, creamy yellow and brilliant scarlet against a feathery spray of green.

  I looked up at him.

  He said, “Is it all right?”

  No one had ever given me an orchid before. Along the rims of my eyes I felt the faint sting of a swelling gratitude. “It’s gorgeous,” I told him. I cleared my throat, which had unaccountably gone a bit croupy. “It’s really beautiful.”

  I looked away and blinked, once, twice, three times, very quickly.

  “Good,” he said heartily. Perhaps too heartily—perhaps my gratitude had made him as self-conscious as his generosity had made me. “Good,” he said again. He picked up his drink and finished it.

  I braved a look upward. He grinned down at me, heartily. “Shall we get ready?”

  Forty-five minutes later, we were in a taxi, heading south along Fifth Avenue.

  With the dress, I wore a black silk jacket and a black velvet cloche I had bought only two days before at Wanamaker’s on lower Broadway. The orchid was pinned to the jacket’s front.

  John was, as usual, magnificent. He wore a single-breasted midnight-blue dinner jacket with peaked satin lapels, matching trousers, a softly pleated white shirt, a black silk bow tie, a red silk cummerbund, black silk socks, and black patent-leather formal pumps with grosgrain ribbon bows. He wore all this, as he wore everything, with an effortless ease and sophistication. Several years would pass before I met someone—the dancer Fred Astaire—who appeared as casually comfortable in formal wear.

  We ate dinner at a speakeasy called Chumley’s, which had a discreet entrance in a small courtyard on Barrow Street. John told me that the place also had an inconspicuous exit at 86 Bedford Street. On the rare occasions that federal agents conducted a raid, the waiters advised the customers to “eighty-six it,” and then all of them—customers and waiters alike—went merrily scrambling out that back door. The speakeasy, John said, was famous now, and so was the catch phrase—waiters in other restaurants, all over the city, were using it among themselves. Whenever a particular menu item was no longer available, that item was said to be “eighty-sixed.”

  It was a cozy bohemian place: sawdust and peanut shells on the floor, wooden walls lined with framed photographs and drawings, banners of blue cigarette smoke slowly streaming beneath the low wooden ceiling. Like most of the bars and cafés in the Village, it held a mixed crowd: intense young students in rumpled suits and wire-rimmed Lenin glasses; bearded men in long conspiratorial overcoats; handsome young couples, fingers locked together as they huddled over the tiny tables and inhaled from the same two cubic inches of air.

  John ordered the sautéed filet of sole, and I ordered the grilled steak.

  We were halfway through dinner when a woman suddenly appeared at our table. John stood up, laying his napkin on the table. Several times during the past week, while we were eating, people had approached him and asked for a moment of his time. But until now, all of these had been men and, so he told me, clients.

  “Daphne,” he said. It seemed to me that he was deliberately keeping his voice neutral.

  She was one of those beautiful women absolutely certain of the effects she had on the people around her. (It is the certainty, of course, as much as the beauty that creates the effect.) She looked to be perhaps thirty-five years old, and although only five feet and two or three inches tall, she was slender and perfectly proportioned.

  Until she arrived, I had been extremely pleased with my silk dress. It draped well; it shivered and shone. But now I realized that I had clearly been out-silked. There was a fringed black silk shawl on her angular smooth shoulders below a tumble of bright blonde ringlets. There was a short, shimmering silver-gray dress, cut on the bias, that clung to the elegant curves and hollows of her small, perfect body. There was still more silk, sleek and sheer, in the black stockings that sheathed her thin legs and glistened from the top of her cunning round knees to the glossy silver-gray leather of her high-heeled shoes.

  A moment before, I had been as unaware of her existence as she had been of mine. Now a small part of me, flickering away at the back of my thoughts, wondered whether she wanted to stamp min
e out.

  She smiled at John. “Johnny,” she said in a sulky southern drawl. She raised her right hand and lightly placed the tips of her splayed fingers on his chest. “How are you? It’s been ever so long.”

  Johnny?

  She turned to me, a half smile on her scarlet Cupid’s bow of a mouth. Inquisitively, she arched her sculpted eyebrows and batted her long eyelashes, signaling that I should explain myself.

  “Daphne,” said John, “this is my niece, Amanda. Amanda, this is Daphne Dale.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  Ignoring me, she turned back to him, her mouth pursed now into a mock half pout. “Why, Johnny, you devil. You never told me you had a niece.”

  He smiled faintly. “You never asked.”

  Ignoring him, she turned back to me. “Such a pretty little thing. Aren’t you just darling.”

  I was four or five inches taller than she. And considerably less irritating.

  “Daphne’s a writer,” John said to me, as though that explained something. Perhaps, to those who knew more about writers than I, it did.

  She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth, leaned slightly forward, and spoke to me in a stage whisper that was audible across the room and probably in the building next door: “You do know,” she said, “that you’re the envy of just about every girl in the room.” She looked back at John and flashed a sweet smile up at him. “Including me, of course.”

  He smiled bleakly. “Is there something I can do for you, Daphne?”

  She cocked her small, perfect head. Her ringlets trembled. She leaned toward him, as though his gravity was drawing her closer. “Could we talk for just a little bit, sugar? In private?”

  He looked at her for a moment, neutrally, and then looked down at me and smiled. “Excuse me for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  Sugar?

  Daphne swung the right end of her shawl up over her left shoulder, regally turned, and then swished off toward the bar, her hips swinging. I could almost hear them ticking, click-clack, like a metronome. John followed her.

  I picked at my food as I watched them. She sat down on a stool and ordered a drink, something pink and frothy. She sipped at it daintily while she talked. John stood beside her, facing forward across the bar, not looking at her, his elbows on the top of the bar, his hands clasped, his lowered head nodding from time to time. She chattered away.

  Then John turned to her and said something.

  Daphne slammed her drink down onto the bar. Some pink swirled out and spattered onto the counter. Along the bar, on either side of them, heads swiveled in their direction. She swung herself around, away from John, stepped down off her stool, flipped the shawl up over her shoulder again, and marched across the room, her head raised. She disappeared into the entryway.

  John had turned and watched her as she stomped off. Now he glanced over at me. I lowered my head and became extremely industrious, sawing away at my steak.

  A moment later, he sat down opposite me. “Sorry for the interruption,” he said.

  I looked up from my steak. “No, that’s okay.” In my most cheerful voice, I asked, “What does she write, Miss Dale?”

  He had ordered white wine to go with his fish, and his glass was still half-full. He reached out, lifted it to his mouth, and drained it. He set down the glass, stared into it for a moment, then looked up and smiled. “She wrote a book. A novel. Seekers of the Flesh.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “I don’t think so.” The smile turned wry. “But then I’m biased, I suppose. I’m in it.”

  “Really? She put you in a book?”

  “Yes. Disguised, but not terribly well.”

  “Is that legal? Couldn’t you sue her?”

  “She makes me out to be fairly disreputable. If I sued her, I’d be admitting that I was fairly disreputable, wouldn’t I?”

  I realized that somehow, as soon as possible, I must obtain a copy of that book. “She seemed pretty upset—when she left, I mean.”

  “Daphne gets upset with a certain frequency. The world seldom lives up to her expectations.”

  “What was it you said to her?”

  He smiled faintly.

  I said, “Am I being too nosy?”

  He grinned. “Not too nosy, I suppose.”

  I frowned and looked away. “That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  John laughed. “And you don’t have to game me, Amanda.”

  I turned to him. He was still grinning.

  I startled myself by giggling, and then I looked away, blinking very quickly.

  He laughed again.

  (Some time later I realized that, despite the giggles and the blinks, this was actually the first adult conversation with a man I had ever been a part of.)

  “I told her,” said John, leaning toward me, “that she should lower her expectations. She clearly disagreed.” He nodded toward my plate. “You’re not eating. Are you finished?”

  I looked down. What remained of the meat lay pink and tattered in a congealing pool of streaky red.

  “I think I am,” I said.

  “Shall we go to a nightclub?”

  “The Cotton Club?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s still too early. Let’s go to El Fay. They’ve got a dancer there who’s supposed to be good.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  He nodded his head once toward the front door, where Daphne had disappeared. “I’m sorry about the scene with Daphne.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Maybe not. But I want you to have a good time.”

  “This is great,” I told him. “Honestly. The best time ever.”

  He smiled. “Okay. Good. Let’s hit the road.”

  During the rest of that evening, two more people asked to speak with John. I mention this now because later it seemed possible that these conversations had a bearing on what happened.

  The first approached him at El Fay, an enormous glittering dance hall on West Forty-Fifth Street.

  We were sitting at a table opposite the bandstand at the very edge of the dance floor. The “Mistress of Ceremonies” was an opulent blonde woman named Texas Guinan, big and bold, slung with pearls, sparkly with sequins. She wore a colossal hat, very belle epoque, which she ripped off at random moments and waved in the air, as a cowgirl might. She was pleased as punch to be there, and so was the audience, despite her addressing them, collectively, as “suckers.”

  She introduced the next act, a fellow named George Raft. She waved her hat again. “Give a big hand,” she bellowed, “to the dancing man!”

  The audience applauded wildly. From a side door, a short, slender form darted out onto the shiny wooden floor, legs and arms pumping. But just as the orchestra struck up “The Charleston,” a heavyset man stepped up to our table, put his hand on John’s shoulder, leaned down toward him, and whispered in his ear.

  John nodded, then turned to the man. “Larry,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the band, “this is my niece, Amanda. Amanda, this is Larry Fay. He owns the place.” With his raised hand, he made a small circle, indicating the whole room.

  “Hello,” I said to the man.

  “Hey,” he said. “How ya doin’?” Beneath thinning black hair, his broad face was gray, as though it had seldom seen the sun. His mouth was wide and thin. He wore a black suit, a black shirt, a purple tie skewered with a stickpin of diamond and gold. The diamond was the size of a tangerine.

  John told me, “I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay.”

  As he and Mr. Fay walked back through the tables, I watched the other customers watching them—or watching John, rather, because it was upon him that everyone’s stare was focused. Perhaps I imagined it, but the men seemed e
ither resentful or envious; the women seemed speculative, or simply lost in yearning.

  But perhaps I was projecting.

  When I turned back to look at the stage, the dancer was in the midst of his routine.

  He was extraordinary. Wearing a tight black suit, black shoes, and bright white spats, with his shiny black hair slicked back over his skull, he was slim, nimble, and remarkably fast. Swinging his arms to the right, he kicked his right leg wildly to the left; swinging his arms to the left, he kicked his left leg wildly to the right. Effortlessly, he twirled across the floor, kicking and swinging. As the music sped up, he spun more swiftly, swirling down into a crouch, legs flailing out, one after the other—left, right, left, like a Cossack dance, without any pause between kicks. Sometimes, impossibly, it seemed that both feet were off the ground at the same time. It was inevitable that he fall.

  But he did not fall. He spun and he twirled and then, as the band finished off the music with a triumphant clash of cymbals and a brassy blare of horns, he leaped into the air, spinning still, flung out his arms and swung out his legs—right leg in front, left leg behind, both legs parallel to the floor. He plunged earthward and landed in a perfect split, his arms upraised now, his head back, his face broadly smiling, ecstatic.

  The audience went wild. They applauded, they whistled, they hooted and whooped and stamped their feet against the floor.

  With infinite grace, his arms held out lightly, parallel to the floor, using only the strength of his legs, the dancer rose magically from the split. Dropping his arms to his sides, he suddenly gave us a huge, toothy smile. He bowed to the center of the room, then to the left, and then the right.

  Miss Guinan stormed up, grabbed his right hand in hers, and raised both their hands overhead, like a referee hoisting the fist of a victorious boxer. She bellowed: “Howzabout that, you suckers?”

  As the crowd exploded again, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was John. He bent toward me. “Ready for the Cotton Club?” he asked.