The Girl Is Murder (18 page)

“To a school dance?”

“Nope. To the Savoy Ballroom.”

“In Harlem?” Her eyes threatened to fill her face. “Holy Joe! Your pop let you?”

“He didn’t know. He does now, and believe me it won’t be happening again anytime soon. I went with some girls from school. They go all the time.”

“What was it like?”

I struggled to describe the night in a way that did it justice. I didn’t hold back. Every drink, every dance, every wondrous sight I repeated, to Grace’s shock and amusement.

“I can’t believe you did all that.”

“I can’t either. I wish you’d been there, Gracie. The music was marvelous and the boys—I didn’t know men could move like that.”

“It sounds like absolute bliss.”

Something in her seemed to be breaking away. I got the feeling she was close to telling me about Tom, but I had no idea what else it would take to get her there.

“You should come with me sometime,” I said. “I just know you’d like Rhona and Suze, even if they aren’t Chapin girls.”

If she recognized either of their names, she didn’t show it. Perhaps Tom had never mentioned them to her?

“That would be luscious. And I’d love for you to meet Josephine,” said Grace. “I talk about you all the time.” Her phone extension rang. She answered it with a bubbly “Hi there, playmate,” and signaled to me that she’d be just a minute. “I was just talking about you.”

I gestured that I was going to use the powder room and left her to her conversation. She was still talking five minutes later, and rather than being rude and lingering as they chatted, I walked back toward the parlor, thinking I might say hello again to Mrs. Dunwitty. Her company was still there, though, and they were deep into a conversation that I didn’t want to interrupt.

Especially when I realized that it was about me.

“They found her mother dead in a Yorkville hotel. Suicide.”

“No!” said Mrs. Huckabee.

“Naturally, everyone assumed that she was so distraught over her husband’s injury that she couldn’t bear to go on.”

“That hardly makes sense.”

“I’m just telling you what everyone else said,” said Mrs. Dunwitty.

“But why Yorkville?”

“She was German.”

“And she had family there?”

“In Yorkville? I don’t think so, but they all stick together, don’t they? Once a German, always a German.”

A teacup rattled as it was returned to its saucer. “Perhaps she wanted to make sure the daughter didn’t find her,” said Mrs. Huckabee.

“I wish I could say she was that considerate, but I doubt it. If you ask me, she had something to feel guilty about, and rather than running the risk that her husband would come home and find out about it, she decided it would be better to die.”

“But what on earth would make her feel so guilty?”

“I think she was seeing another man.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Her husband was away. She was young and attractive. What else could she have been doing?”

I backed away from the two of them, my head growing increasingly heavy.

“There you are,” said Grace. She stood in her doorway. “That was Josephine. I was telling her all about you. She’s dying to meet you.”

“I have to go,” I said.

“Oh. I thought you were staying for lunch. Our new cook is simply marvelous. She makes the most delish desserts.”

I felt sick. If I didn’t get out of there soon, I was going to vomit all over Grace’s plush pink carpeting. “I can’t. I forgot I’m supposed to help Pop with something.”

“Buzz me tomorrow, all right? Let’s make plans to get together more often.”

I promised I would, then bade her mother a polite farewell and left the apartment just in time to get sick in a potted plant positioned just outside the elevators.

MAMA KILLED HERSELF. That’s what Uncle Adam told me after I demanded something more from him than the tired euphemisms he’d offered me as an explanation for why she wasn’t coming home. It was two days before Pop was due back in the States, almost a month to the day since he’d lost his leg at Pearl Harbor. The year 1942 was so new that Christmas decorations still sparkled from shop windows along Fifth Avenue, so new that every time I saw a newspaper I was convinced the date was a misprint.

“I’m so sorry, Iris,” said Adam. He crushed my hand in his. He was shaking with the force of his own grief.

“But why did she do it?”

“I wish I knew.”

I was staying with Uncle Adam and Aunt Miriam. Mama had to go out of town, I’d been told. She’d be home before the new semester started. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend some time with the aunt and uncle I’d always adored?

But she didn’t come home. If her sudden trip seemed unusual, her failure to return was even more so.
Where had she gone?
I asked Adam and Miriam. Each time I was told it was a family matter, nothing to concern myself with. She’d explain everything when she returned. Nobody made allowances for what would happen if she didn’t come back. Just like nobody prepared me for what would happen when Pop did.

When Pop joined the military I was only ten years old. From that point on in my life, he became an infrequent visitor: holidays, birthdays, and a surprise now and again that I greeted with less and less enthusiasm. After all, he was a stranger now—why all this fuss because he decided to disrupt what was starting to become a normal life without him? Mama, of course, didn’t see it that way. Each return was a gift, each visit’s end a tragedy that sent her to her bedroom for days on end. She wrote to him constantly and cherished each letter in return, reading and rereading them until the paper began to tear apart at its folds.

In Pop’s absence, I became her focus. It’s funny how much someone can annoy and smother us in the name of love and how much you miss those very same things when they’re gone. Mama insisted on brushing my hair every night, no matter how late she came home, no matter how much I groused about how old I was and how stupid this little ritual of hers was to me. Her mother had done it for her, she explained, and someday I’d do it for my own daughter. She quizzed me every day about what I had eaten, comparing my recited lists with the USDA food charts we’d been given at school. “More milk,” she’d say. “You are a growing girl.” Over dinner I was interrogated about my friends. What did they wear? How much spending money were they given? Did they all walk to school, or did some take a hired car? Were any of them going with boys yet? Always she wanted me to be in the same league as everyone else. What they got, I got. I used to hate the way she measured my life against theirs like slices of pie, but eventually I learned to play the system, increasing their allowances when I wanted more money, inventing permissive parents when it better suited my purposes. But it didn’t happen very often. At some point I began to realize that what Mama wanted for me wasn’t what everyone else had so much as everything she hadn’t been provided with when she was a girl. I was to live the life she’d been denied.

How had she felt about the war? I never asked her. Until that December, it wasn’t something I thought about, beyond wishing she did a better job hiding her accent. And after that fateful day, when a tiny island in the Pacific became the focus of so much rage, when someone else’s war became our war, there were too many things to think about to worry how she was feeling. Pop had lost his leg, resigned his post, and was coming home for good. Our lives were about to change forever. A father in the house meant less freedom. And a war … well, I had no idea what that meant.

I didn’t have time to worry about what Mama was going through. And in fact until she disappeared, and all I had was time to worry, I didn’t notice the dark circles that had appeared under her eyes in the days following December 7, the shaking hands with bitten nails, the late-night phone calls—always in German. These things came to me later, when I asked myself why she had done it, when I wondered what I had missed.

The biggest question of all was how I had gone from being her everything to not even being reason enough for her to stay alive.

CHAPTER

13

I HAVE NO IDEA how I made it back to the Lower East Side. Habit must’ve led me, or sheer luck. I wandered the streets for a while, unwilling to go back to Orchard Street until the sickness that threatened to return had passed. Could Mrs. Dunwitty be right—had Mama been having an affair? Pop didn’t act like a man who’d been betrayed by his wife. But then Pop didn’t necessarily know.

Mama loved Pop, though. I was certain of that. Every visit, every letter, was something she cherished. Maybe it was possible to desperately love someone and yet be so consumed by loneliness that you were willing to betray him with someone who was around more often. It happened all the time in the movies.

I paused and found myself standing before Normandie’s Pharmacy. Through the window Suze was wiping down a table with a cloth. She looked up in time to see me watching her and offered me a wisp of a smile. Then she waved me in.

I didn’t want to go home. Not yet.

The bell tinkled its welcome as I passed through the doors. A few customers lingered in the booths, but it was hardly crowded.

“How’d you know I was working?” said Suze.

“I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even realize where I was until I looked up and saw the sign.”

“You’re pale as a sheet. How ’bout a milk shake? It’s on me—it’s the least I can do after you sprung for all that cab fare last night.”

I agreed and slid into a booth while she told the soda jerk that I’d be having a chocolate milk shake. I realized that the only thing in my stomach was oatmeal and the remnants of Rhona’s flask. No wonder I was shaking.

“You’re not going to believe who showed up at my bedroom window during early bright,” she said.

“Who?”

“Benny.”

I’d forgotten about the night before’s humiliation. What had seemed so important to me just a few hours ago had faded in significance. So Benny got humiliated—so what? His mother was alive. She hadn’t possibly betrayed her entire family.

“Why’d he do that?” I asked.

“He couldn’t take going home with a bloody nose. His pop’s got a temper, would’ve blown his top if Benny had shown up wearing someone else’s bruises. So he slept on my bedroom floor.”

I wondered how I would have responded to this story if she’d told it to me an hour before. Jealousy? Curiosity? Right now all I felt was numb.

“Anyway, neither of us could sleep, we were so wired from the Savoy, and once he got done telling me all the things he would do to those soldiers if he ran into them again, he started talking about you.”

I felt like I was listening to this conversation over the radio. “Me?”

“Don’t look so sad, baby girl. Our Benny thinks you’re murder.”

“Murder?” I asked.

“You know—marvelous. As a matter of fact, he was talking about taking you out sometime, just you and him.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

It clearly wasn’t the response she was expecting. “Are you all right?”

“Just beat to the socks, I guess. You were right about that.”

“Sorry I didn’t walk you home. You made it okay, though, right?”

“I got an earful for getting in so late, but otherwise it was fine.”

“Your aunt was mad?”

I nodded. That’s right, my aunt. Not Pop, or my lying, secretive mother, but my imaginary aunt who’d told me I had no curfew only to yell at me when I failed to return at a reasonable hour.

Apparently, I was just another liar in a family of many.

“You should’ve seen how angry my ma was,” said Suze. “I didn’t get it until this morning after Benny had left and her shift ended, but I swear people on Houston could hear her.” She had another mark on her face, poorly covered by the heavy makeup she’d obviously applied that morning. “Is that how come you’re upset? Because you got in trouble?”

If only it were something that simple. I shook my head. The milk shake arrived and I focused on stirring the thick liquid until it was thin enough to make it up the straw.

“Is it Benny? Have you changed your mind about being seen with a boy like him?”

That pulled me back. I wasn’t Grace. Not even a little bit. “No. Of course not.”

“Then what is it?”

Should I tell her? I needed to talk to someone. I couldn’t imagine telling Pearl, not after the way she’d reacted to Mama’s suicide. And it’s not like I could talk to Pop about it. “I heard some things about my mother today. About why she killed herself.”

Suze frowned. She’d forgotten I was the girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders. “What did you hear?”

“That she might’ve been having an affair.”

“Ouch, baby.” She put her hand on mine and squeezed. “Who told you that?”

“I overheard some women talking about her.”

“What was your mama like?”

I was surprised by the question. What was she like? So often it was her death I thought of rather than who she’d been before it. “Beautiful. Generous. Smart. Stubborn. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Chapin had turned me down when we first applied, though I never knew why. Mama was the one who convinced them to change their minds. She’d marched into the headmaster’s office, while I was left to wait with his secretary, and ten minutes later she emerged with the good news that they had made a mistake and I would be going there after all.

That was Mama. If she thought something wasn’t fair, she’d fight to the death to make it right.

Suze smiled. “She loved your pop?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then what those women said was just gravel. You can’t go thinking something’s true just because you heard it out loud. Maybe they were jealous of her. Or maybe they were trying to make sense of why she did what she did.”

“She was a German,” I said. I’m not sure why I told her. Maybe to prove that she was the last person anyone would be jealous of. Or maybe because I felt like I needed to be honest with Suze about something.

“That must’ve been hard for her,” said Suze.

“And for me,” I said.

“How so?”

“You know. Being an immigrant’s kid is embarrassing enough, but being a German Jew? Nobody thinks that’s a good thing.”