Love and Other Consolation Prizes(37)
“I had breakfast with Rich and Hanny this morning. Interesting fellow. I get it. Hanny’s not the youngest girl on the block anymore, and her clock is ticking.” Juju rolled her eyes. “Then Han came over for a while by herself. Mom recognized her right away, which was amazing…and surprising…and wonderful. Plus Mom keeps talking to me more and more—bits of real, salient conversation. She hasn’t been this engaged in—forever. She even suggested we go out for dinner tonight, if you can believe that.”
Ernest was as delighted as he was terrified.
“So, I was thinking,” Juju said. “We could introduce her to Rich at Ruby Chow’s, which was always Mom’s hangout of choice—order all her favorite dishes. We can go a few hours early, before the dinner rush. We can sit near the exit in one of those private booths in the back. She hasn’t been there in years, but Ruby’s staff has known Mom forever, they know all about her condition.”
Not exactly, Ernest thought. “Are you sure that’s not too much for her?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Juju said as she opened a notebook and licked the lead of her pencil. “It’s more of a baby step—like you telling me what I need for my article.”
“I suppose,” Ernest said as the drizzle turned to heavier rain. “Do you know what they’d say back in my day? That it wasn’t just raining…it was raining pitchforks and mud turtles. Things were so different then…”
“That’s the understatement of the year! Especially considering they thought it was okay to raffle off a little boy.” Juju found a blank page in her notebook. “I want all the details that you can recall—no matter how small or insignificant you think they might be. Because, face it, you’re about to become the biggest story of the Century 21 Expo—no one is going to believe this actually happened. Plus my editor bet me a hundred bucks that I couldn’t get you to talk, so there’s that too.”
“Do I get half if I’m a willing participant?” Ernest asked.
“Absolutely,” Juju said. “Though we might have to split it three ways if Mom opens up tonight and starts talking as well.”
Ernest nodded. He thought about Hanny and Rich. About Maisie and the Tenderloin. “Should be a night to remember.”
PRECIOUS JEWEL
(1909)
Jewel’s coming-out party was indeed a grand affair. Ernest had experienced nothing so spectacular during his first month. Not on the normal, frolic-filled weekends, not when Madam Flora had a man from the Seattle Astronomical Society place telescopes on the roof so the girls could watch shooting stars, and not even when she’d hired a seven-piece chamber orchestra to play Vivaldi in the grand parlor to celebrate the autumnal equinox. Ernest supposed that the closest he’d come to such extravagance was reading Great Expectations, in which the wealthy and eccentric Miss Havisham had hosted such lavish parties.
Madam Flora had arranged to have out-of-town guests stay at the newly built Sorrento Hotel, where welcome baskets awaited them and a perfumed note from Jewel rested on each of their pillows. She then had the gentlemen picked up in style and delivered to the Tenderloin by 8:00 P.M. Ernest manned the door, politely greeting dozens of men who arrived in carriages and limousines dressed in their evening finery. Ernest took their top hats, made of gossamer and fur, and their polished canes and silver-handled walking sticks, and waited for the final name on the guest list, Hiram Gill, president of the Third Ward, patron of the First, and charismatic head of the Seattle City Council. He was the last to arrive, and everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know who he was as they called out his name and offered to buy him a drink or a cigar when he stepped out of a chauffeured sedan. Ladies working the street corners shouted, “Looking good, Mr. Councilman, if you run for mayor you got my vote, darling!” Though they couldn’t vote—not anymore.
Ernest held the door as Hiram Gill smiled and waved, then sauntered inside and loudly proclaimed, “The esteemed Clara Laughlin likes to say that ‘well-regulated work is the best kind of fun.’ Well, ladies and gentlemen of Seattle, I’m afraid dear Clara got it backwards. I say that well-regulated fun is the best kind of work!”
Everyone cheered. Professor True pushed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose and began a ragtime version of “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!”
Ernest looked at the guest list, checked all of the names, then helped put coats away as the men gathered in the parlor, where they were served Canadian whiskey and sweetwater oysters from nearby Fanny Bay, steamed in the finest French wine. The elegant ladies from upstairs flitted from guest to guest. Before he’d come to the Tenderloin, in his mind’s eye—based on Mrs. Irvine’s stark admonitions—Ernest would have expected the women to be perched on the men’s laps in their underthings, stockings rolled down to their bare ankles, or at least sporting knee-duster skirts. He’d imagined them lighting cigars, drinking to excess, and flouncing about. Instead they all wore floor-length princess dresses of raja silk and smoked machine-rolled tobacco from long, gold-tipped cigarette holders. The women sang along with Professor True, solo, in duets, or in the occasional harmonic trio. And whenever the piano player took a break, the ladies would hold court, putting their elocution lessons to the test. One young woman gave a brief drawing room lecture on Turkish girls and life in a harem. Several took turns elegantly reciting romantic poetry by Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and Oscar Wilde, from memory.