Siren Queen(11)

I schooled my face to the stillness it took on when my father screamed at me. He must have thought he read acceptance there because he finally let me go. Jacko reached into his wallet and counted out a short stack of bills, enough for two weeks of work and paid to my own hand rather than my mother’s.

“Good. And don’t get any bright ideas of wandering up to the studio on your own. That way’s a wracked path, and there are more dead virgins on it than there are hairs on a hog’s back.”

I took the money mutely, and I stared at Jacko so long that he finally growled and stalked back to the set.

If someone had been walking down Allen Street then, they could have just plucked the money out of my hand, a flat hundred dollars and more than I had ever held.

Finally, I tucked the money into the secret pocket my mother had sewn in my jacket and I headed back to Hungarian Hill.

Jacko promised that he would return in seven months, but I wondered what his promise was worth. All I knew was that I never got anywhere without knowing why, and now it was time to make some inquiries of my own.





VII


I went home and gave the money Jacko gave me to my mother, and when she asked me what had happened, I just walked out again. I spent the next few months sulking in a daze, helping out at the laundry with an ungrateful twist to my mouth and doing everything that was asked of me with a barely disguised disgust. My mother was so exasperated with me that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she made another doll so she could replace me again, but my sister was hopeful.

“Come on, sissy, I’m going out with some girls from Ord Street. You can come with us…”

She was easy to ignore, but she never gave up. When I finally raised my head to see her, I realized that she had grown just as I did, fifteen to my seventeen, and in matters that didn’t concern her dark home or her sulking sister, bright as a penny.

I didn’t want to go with her to whatever silly games she proposed, but it did finally sting me into doing some work of my own. There were plenty of people willing to talk about Wolfe Studios and Oberlin Wolfe himself in Los Angeles, and that’s the way he liked it. The greater the stories grew, the larger his little piece of Eden, and the more we talked, the less truth there was to be found.

I went around to the Comique, where I sat on a stool in the ticket taker’s booth while she worked. She never bothered to offer me her name, but once in a while, some sibling—recognizable only by their height and beauty and the neon light in their eyes—came by to ask for this favor or that. She offered advice on heartbreak, handed out quarters from the till, and once or twice she opened the broom closet door to give them passage on to someplace with a lowering purple sky and grass tall enough to reach over my head.

“Where can I go to learn about Oberlin Wolfe?” I asked her, opening up the broom closet door only to be confronted by brooms and the scent of lemon cleanser.

“Read Variety,” she said, not looking up from her paper, and I snorted.

“I don’t want to read Variety, I want to know.”

“Ask nicer, then.”

“Will you please tell me where I can learn about Oberlin Wolfe?”

“Ha, no.”

I was about to storm out when she looked at me over the top of her paper.

“Oberlin Wolfe is bad news. They all are, you know that, right?”

“I’m not stupid,” I said, and she sighed.

“You’re not one of mine, not even close. I don’t have any responsibility to you.”

“No one does,” I declared, and she made an exasperated face.

“I guess you really think that. You want to know about Oberlin Wolfe, why don’t you go ask Daphne Grove?”

I frowned.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You think I’m going to do your work for you? You’re lucky I talk to you at all.”

She wasn’t wrong, and I remembered to thank her before I left.

Daphne Grove wasn’t in the phone book, and no one I asked on Hungarian Hill or off it knew about her. In desperation, I went to the library. They’d won the battle against allowing Black patrons, and I had to wait for two days until the librarian who thought I was white enough was on duty.

The directions she gave me took me east, and I hitchhiked out with a milk truck heading that way before dawn. I kept the driver company as he told me about how he had been a banker in Oklahoma when times were better, before the dust devils came in and turned his money to grit, and he let me out in a suburb where the houses were farther apart than I was used to and each yard proudly bore a straggling tree.

I walked along the street slowly as the sun came up, and when I came to the address that the librarian found for me, I stopped on the cracked sidewalk. Beyond it was a cluster of short trees, their branches thin and sharp, the trunks stood so close together a dog would have a hard time twisting through.

“You’re Daphne Grove,” I said with disgust, stepping from the cement onto the bare soil.

I was, we were, came the answer from the rattling branches and the stiff knifelike leaves. You should not see me like this, all bare. Come back in spring, when I am clothed and lovely.

Chitalpa trees in spring bore frilly pink flowers, ruffled like the bottom of a dancing dress, and I reached up to touch a branch.

“Did you dance?” I asked in spite of myself, and the branches dragged against my hand, dry and sorrowful.