Mrs. Houdini(25)

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I was wrong about Harry.”

Stella stroked her hair. “He’s a brute. You’ve been badly abused, Bess.”

“But I loved him—I love him.”

“I know. But you can live with me now. And Fred will give him a good thrashing if he ever sees him again.”

Stella took her home and made her drink a glass of whiskey. Then she put her to sleep in the big bedroom, with its crisp embroidered sheets, and she and Fred took the little bed. Fred was livid about Harry; Bess could hear him storming around the kitchen.

At two in the morning, she awoke to the sound of someone knocking loudly on the front door. She could hear Fred stumbling out of bed, and then she heard voices in the foyer, and Stella whispering, and she knew Harry had come back for her. Bess flew to the door in her sister’s nightgown and threw her arms around his neck. Harry kissed the top of her head over and over.

“See, darling,” he said. “I told you I would send you away, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t fly after you and bring you back.”





Chapter 4


THE FRIDAY BOYS


May 1929


Bess stood in the hall outside Gladys’s apartment, holding a blue beaded dress wrapped in paper. Gladys answered the door herself; her Irish girl, Colleen, had the night off.

She reached out to touch the fabric of the dress and then felt Bess’s own apricot crepe dress. “I don’t know about this. It seems very flimsy. Can you see through it?”

“There was always a bit of the harem in that covering up your arms and legs business, don’t you think?”

Gladys was only one size larger than Bess, and the dress slipped on her easily, even though she still wore the thick ribbed corset of the old decade. Bess zipped the dress and then lifted her sister-in-law’s hair and dropped it back onto her shoulders. “You should cut this, you know. No one wears their hair long anymore.” She had bobbed her own hair years ago, bleaching it when it started to gray, to a hue so blond it appeared almost white. “I’m not saying Eton crop or anything dramatic like that. Just a little shorter.”

Gladys shook her head. She was beautiful with her dark, draping hair and soft eyes. “My mother always loved my hair long.”

“Well, let’s get creative then. We can pin it and make it look short.” Bess gathered her sister-in-law’s hair together. “You know what I was thinking on my way over here? Do you remember how they used to arrest women on Fifth Avenue for smoking?”

Gladys smiled. “That was years ago, wasn’t it? I can’t believe they used to do that. But it’s not much different from Prohibition, I suppose. Trying to enforce morality.”

“At least they arrest both men and women now,” Bess said.

“Let’s try not to get arrested tonight. At least promise me that.”

An hour later they were made up with rouge and lipstick, stepping out of the taxicab onto Forty-Ninth Street. They entered a crowd of strangers who were weaving their way down the sidewalk.

Gladys hung on Bess’s elbow. “I can’t remember the last time I went to a party,” she said. “It’s exciting.”

Bess pushed open the door to the tearoom. “They’re much different now. Very slick. All kinds of debauchery.”

There was an illicit sort of caution about public drunkenness. But there was a thrill, too, in going into the back room of a Long Acre pharmacy for “smoke”—water with fuel alcohol—and sneaking from one tawdry speakeasy to another, their walls papered with lithographs of nude women.

She led Gladys into the lounge, where someone was playing the piano raucously at the end of the room.

Gladys tightened her grip on Bess’s arm. “Don’t leave me.”

It wasn’t late—only nine o’clock—but it was a cool evening, and that always made people want to get out of their own apartments and go somewhere else. There were at least fifty people inside already—the whole place fit only about a hundred, and tightly. Someone had brought a roulette board, and a crowd was calling out bets.

On Fridays, when the lunches and sodas and teas had been cleared away and the liquor cabinet was unlocked, Bess let Oscar, the parrot, out of his cage to play, which signaled the start of the night. She had acquired him from an exotic birds dealer in Harlem, and he was the star of the place, really. He walked with such muscular control that he was sometimes mistaken for a sophisticated automaton. Now, Oscar was strutting through the middle of the room with enviable precision, showing off his party-red feathers.

“Good day, good day, good day,” he called in his shrill voice, craning his neck to see the figures looming over him.

Stella came in, short of breath, sporting a new straight-silhouetted dress of copper crepe de chine. Fred had recently come into money after a favorable oil investment, and she had embraced her newfound wealth and status as eagerly as she had once embraced motherhood. She started when she saw Oscar gazing at her in the entryway, then laughed, dropping her purse on a table. “Do you have any booze? I’ve just come from dinner with Fred’s friends and I’m bored out of my mind.” She threw herself onto the sofa in the lounge and began flipping through the thick, glossy pages of a recent edition of McClure’s that was lying on the console table.