The Magnolia Palace
Fiona Davis
In memory of Ed Berkeley
Chapter One
New York City, 1919
Lillian Carter stood half naked, one arm held up like a ballet dancer, the other hanging lightly down at her side, and calculated how long she could avoid paying rent while her landlord was in jail. If Mr. Watkins was released right away, she’d have to avoid him until she pulled together enough money to pay for the one-bedroom apartment she leased in the crumbling, five-story tenement building on Sixty-Fifth Street. Not an easy task when Mr. Watkins and his wife lived off the lobby on the first floor. On the bright side, the Watkins couple had shouted each other to pieces in a terrible fight earlier that morning, the screeching carrying on for a good forty-five minutes before silence finally reigned. Not long after, as she left for work, Lillian had passed the police as they tramped up the front steps. Maybe they’d keep the tiresome man for a few days this time, as a lesson. Not that she felt any sympathy for his bulldog of a wife. Mrs. Watkins had hated Lillian on sight, especially after she discovered what Lillian did for a living.
“Angelica, your drapery has fallen. Again.”
Mr. Rossi waited, holding a boxwood shaper in one hand and a rag in the other. Even after six years of posing, Lillian had never quite gotten used to being called by her stage name, chosen by her mother, Kitty, to protect her family’s reputation, which was a real laugh. As if they were the Astors or something. Lillian pulled the silk up over her shoulder so only one breast was exposed. The material was slippery and refused to stay in place.
Mr. Rossi was a quick worker, and the clay figure in front of him was nearly finished. This would probably be her last day on the job, and she’d only been posing for an hour. So far today, she’d made seventy-five cents. A little over one cent a minute. She kicked herself for not charging more. Kitty, before she died in February, had told her to demand no less than a dollar an hour, one of more than a dozen pieces of instruction she’d thrown out at Lillian between coughing fits, as if she were trying to fill up a lifetime of parental guidance before she went. Lillian should have written these things down, but she had been too busy making tea and fetching blankets, calling again and again for the doctor, who was too busy with other patients stricken by the Spanish flu to come.
“Angelica. Please.”
The drapery had fallen. Again.
“It’s cold in here, I’m afraid my shivering is making it fall. Could you light the fire?”
Mr. Rossi’s bulging black eyes were punctuated by heavy brows, but any hint of menace was tempered by an unfortunately high-pitched voice. “I have nothing to light it with. It’s the first of October, not cold at all.”
“Well, you’re wearing clothes.”
“I’m sorry, Angelica. Do you need a break?”
He had been unrelentingly polite to her since she’d knocked on his studio door last week, asking if he needed a model. He’d let out a gasp, recognizing her instantly, and she’d pushed her way inside and talked nonstop until he agreed to let her pose. Since he’d only recently taken over a studio in the popular Lincoln Arcade building on the Upper West Side, he hadn’t had time to learn from the other, long-term tenants that she was, at the ripe age of twenty-one, washed up.
“No, I don’t need a break. It’s fine.” She was lucky to have this job, she reminded herself, only her second since February, a lifetime in the New York art world.
But instead of continuing, Mr. Rossi wiped his hands on his apron and approached the model stand. “Can you angle yourself a little more?” He pushed his right hip forward slightly, as an example. “And twist like this.”
Her body responded automatically, clicking into the desired position.
“Yes, that’s better.” But his face didn’t register approval. She knew why. Her hips and legs no longer resembled the earlier statues he’d seen of her. The clean lines once heralded as the classical idea of perfection were now more padded, to put it gently. Since Kitty’s death, she’d felt a consistent, gnawing hunger in her gut that would only be satiated with butterscotch candies and lemon meringue pie. Her skirts had hidden the ripples of fat at that first meeting. “Maybe let the cloth down, all the way over the legs.”
Her face burned with embarrassment. The irony that she was upset to have to cover her body, when most women would be filled with shame to have to reveal it, made her let out a nervous giggle.
Mr. Rossi regarded her. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, just a little tired. My landlords got into a rousing fight early this morning. I didn’t get much sleep.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” He blinked a couple of times, as if he wanted to say something more, before going back to the clay study. The silence of the studio, which usually lulled her into a kind of trance, instead haunted her today.
She put a hand to her head. The exhaustion of the past several months weighed down on her. “You know, I might take a break, if you don’t mind.”
Mr. Rossi dropped the tool on the table beside him with a loud clatter. “Very well.” He lit a cigarette but didn’t move from the spot, as if ready to begin again right away.
“Perhaps I could have a quick coffee?” she asked.
He didn’t answer but retreated to the small kitchenette in the back. All of the studios in the Lincoln Arcade featured the latest modern conveniences, drawing Greenwich Village artists and sculptors uptown in recent years, and creating a new Bohemia hailed as the “Sixty-Seventh Street Studio District.” Kitty had predicted the northward trend early and rented an apartment west of Broadway, which meant they were constantly running into potential employers, at the post office or the grocer’s. Lillian would have preferred a duplex at the recently constructed Hotel des Artistes building, with its high ceilings and gothic splendor, but Kitty had dismissed it as too expensive. With the way Lillian’s bank account had dropped precipitously over the past several months, she was grateful for the decision.