Siren Queen(15)

She smiled at me with her perfect teeth, and I knew with a shiver that they had been magicked into her mouth from someone who lived where I lived now, and had nothing but two lines of inflamed gums and a pocketful of cash.

“How did you get away?” I asked, because of course she wanted me to.

“As I said, Elgin Aegis owned me, but the studios are strange and hungry things. Sometimes, I think they’re more than the men who own them, or that those men are just the faces and the lures. No, I gave him something he could never have if I stayed with the studio.”

She drew up the edge of her caftan, and now I could see her legs ended at the ankle. The skin there was shiny and pink with old scar tissue that had been lovingly nourished with soothing creams, and it was so unexpected that I nearly started to cry. I swallowed it back, meeting her eye again stonily, and she nodded at a shelf immediately behind us inside the glass doors. From where I stood, I could make out a pair of wooden feet, beautiful, carved by a master’s hand and polished until they shone. A series of leather straps showed that they were meant to be fastened to the wearer’s legs, but even I could see that they were not for dancing.

“Do you think they keep yours on a shelf as well?” I said without thinking, and my hand went up to my mouth. Cold as the Atlantic, but that was monstrous even for me.

There must have been something of the monster in Mrs. Wiley too, however, because she leveled a look at me that was tolerant and amused.

“Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised if Elgin Aegis fed them to that marble lion he keeps at his house in Big Sur. He didn’t want a pair of feet that had been so calloused and scarred that you could barely tell they were feet, after all. Ugly things, even before I turned forty.”

“Then what?” I asked. I was still reeling. I would see worse things at Wolfe, but at seventeen, this made me ache.

“Aegis got my ability to dance like Eleanor Bloom, one more thing that no one else had. It was worth letting Eleanor Bloom die for that. Eleanor Bloom is dead.”

“Long live Hezibah Wiley?” I hazarded, and she smiled, triumphant.

“Yes. Perhaps you’ll do all right. I lost the mansion, the apartments, the horses I never wanted, the husband the studio made for me, but I have money at least, a pension that will last as long as I do. I clip a little here and there—people still love Biloxi Belle—and that might be a lot longer than anyone dreamed. Aegis didn’t scoop me hollow and set me to nodding like he did to poor Pearl Winston and the Kardov sisters. Do you know, I read in the paper they trotted the Kardovs out for that one thing last year, The Lights Over whatever? What a sight they must have been, batting those big black eyes and nodding along so easy.”

This could be you, an ominous voice whispered in my head. This could be you if you were lucky.

I ignored it, because some needs have always been stronger than dread or sense.

“All right then,” I said. “How do I get in?”

“There are the auditions, of course,” Mrs. Wiley said, smiling like an angel. “They come around and give every girl in America her chance at the limelight, the starlight, and the stars.”

That was the line they said on the radio whenever the studios went on their big talent hunts. I gritted my teeth, because they weren’t for me or Maya Vos Santé or Su Tong Lin. Su Tong Lin was discovered in vaudeville, and Maya Vos Santé had had herself delivered to Oberlin Wolfe rolled in a carpet like Cleopatra.

“Dear, I have told you how things are. Now I can tell you what you should do.”

There were a dozen plans in my head, but they would all take time. I knew that if Jacko Dewalt got wind of any of them, he would shut me down as quickly as a man would step on an ant. If I tried to believe in any kindness he might have shown me, all I had to do was to think about the girls crying around the edges of the set, sent on their way firmly with some cash in hand.

“All right,” I said, bracing myself. “What do you want?”

“Twenty years,” she said immediately, and I stared at her.

“Oh, I’m not a lawyer,” Mrs. Wiley said at my startled look. “I’m not going to take twenty years now and leave you at forty, and I won’t pop into your life when things are doing well and live twenty years of your best moments. I’ll take twenty at the end. That’s enough for me.”

She had said she clipped a little here and there, and with her stories and her wits, I could see how she could get by for quite some time.

When it looked like I might balk, she smiled slyly.

“You’re already betting on a small piece of forever,” she said. “No one goes into the studios expecting to be out in five years with a nice paycheck and some good stories.”

Twenty years against forever. I had been told that you needed to believe in yourself, believe in your wits, your looks, and your luck against the titan’s weight of the world. I decided in that moment that I did, and I nodded.

“Done. Twenty years for a plan that will get me in to see Oberlin Wolfe.”

Mrs. Wiley smiled almost proudly, and she directed me to push her back inside the apartment she had earned by wanting to be free more than she wanted anything else.

“Put a kettle on, will you, I’ll be making a cup of tea.”

I rummaged in her small kitchen and returned to find her busying herself at her desk. She pulled out a pale peach notecard and she wrote my name and twenty years on it. Her handwriting was a rolling, elegant script, one beaten into her, I later learned, at parochial school. My own writing was chicken scratches, and the calligraphy I learned had been left behind like Chinese school years ago.