The Girls at the Kingfisher Club (3 page)

They slipped into theaters inside larger groups—harder to check tickets. Sometimes, when it was slim pickings, Lou flirted their way in. For someone who'd never really met men, she was an excellent flirt.

They sat in the sweet, sticky heat of the cinema, toes tingling as the piano rattled the floor. They brought home ragtime, the grizzly bear, the waltz.

(“A new waltz?” Ella sighed. “I liked the old one.”

Doris groaned.

“That one's out of date,” said Lou. “This one's just like the old one, only with less dress.”

“And more hands,” said Jo, and Ella went pink.)

• • •

The nannies and the governess began to be dismissed. They had chosen the girls' clothes and books, and with them gone, Jo decided Father would have to be convinced, somehow, to give them a living allowance.

When Doris said, “So who do we send?” Lou said, “Not Jo. She's been in those trenches already, for all the good it did us.”

(Lou tried to sound clever; sometimes it came out bitter.)

But Jo had learned a thing or two since the first time. It was Ella who went.

Jo coached her to stand with her toes pointing inward and knock on the doorjamb with one timid fist.

It worked; Ella was a natural actress.

A year later, it was five-year-old twins Hattie and Mattie who climbed his chair and teased until he almost laughed and agreed to give them pocket money for magazines, when they went for walks.

Jo saved. “You never know what you'll need,” she said, as if they'd break out and hop a train at any moment.

But the younger girls bought candy, and most of the older girls bought rouge and lipstick. Doris bought a booklet on the canals of New York, to general bafflement.

Lou hoarded her money for weeks and then bought a cigarette holder.

“You never know what you'll need,” she said to Jo, and smiled, her mouth a little thin.

(It stung, and it must have showed; when Jo turned back to her book, Lou sat beside her, and rested her head on Jo's shoulder, and turned the pages.

How Lou knew Jo had finished reading, Jo never figured. Lou had a knack when it came to Jo.)

• • •

At last there were twelve, from Jo all the way down to Violet, who was born after Jo had already turned thirteen and who still slept in the nursery.

As soon as Violet was out of diapers, their father dismissed the remaining nanny.

“The older girls,” he said, “can watch the others.”

The decree made its way through the house before it came at last, by accident, to the girls it was about.

Jo heard it from Nanny Harris herself, who was giving the littlest girls, Rose and Lily and Violet, a last scold as she packed.

“And because you've been so bad,” Nanny Harris was saying, “I have to go away, and where will I be when you want someone to tuck you in at night?”

“You'll be lying to other children, I expect,” said Jo from the landing. “Girls, come down.”

Harris packed the rest of her things alone, with Doris standing guard in the doorway.

Back in her room, Jo put on a dress and combed her hair until she looked respectable.

She had decided to speak to their mother.

It was terrifying—it had been ten years at least since she'd seen her mother's room, and almost a year since she'd seen her mother, coming into the nursery to try to smile at the toddling Violet—but these were desperate times.

This couldn't be. The older sisters couldn't replace the nannies as overseers for the younger ones. It wasn't fair to force them into this captivity forever; surely even their mother, who saw so little, could see that.

But when Jo had summoned the courage to go down the front stairs to the second floor and knock on their mother's door, the frothy white bed was made up, and the inlaid oak wardrobes were empty.

That was how Jo found out their mother had, at last, given up on producing a son for the Hamilton patriarch.

• • •

Jo let herself cry for two minutes, to mourn a mother she'd hardly known, who could do no good for her daughters ever again.

Then she set it aside.

(She set everything aside. There was some hollow place inside her that grew and grew.)

Jo called Lou and Ella and told them, so they would have the crying over with.

Ella was tenderhearted enough to weep for their mother and not for herself. Lou dashed tears from her eyes as if ridding herself of a bad habit.

“We could tell them she ran away,” suggested Ella, after the first flood.

Jo said, “I don't want to give them impossible ideas.”

Lou said, “Then divide them. Let's get it over with.”

Jo spoke to Hattie and Mattie, and stoic Rebecca. Araminta and Doris fell to Lou; Araminta took it badly, mostly because it came from Lou, and Jo wished later that she'd known enough to give her to Ella instead.

Ella went into the nursery and gathered Sophie into her lap, and dried her tears with a threadbare cuff. Only after Sophie was sleeping did she do the same for the little twins, Rose and Lily, who had started asking when their mother would visit.

(Violet was too young to understand; she'd never ask, assuming her mother must have been Ella. Rebecca would eventually set her straight, but so late an intercession of the facts had no effect on what Violet really thought.)

When the cook delivered dinner, she mentioned their father had asked what all the noise was about.

“We can't go out any more,” Jo told Lou when the lights were out. “If he catches us now, there'll be no mercy. We're to stay inside, with the others.”

That was when Lou cried.

• • •

That Christmas, as a reward for good behavior, their father had parcels delivered.

It was a generous year, from their father: sewing kits and books, dolls and music boxes.

The dolls were discarded. Araminta picked up the sewing kit. Jo picked up the books.

Each room (they occupied six) received a music box; the melody was the same, not even right for dancing.

The party dresses (cruel, Jo thought) were the wrong sizes for anyone but Rebecca and Ella, and too long, but they looked almost like they should, and everyone declared it a good Christmas.

With her savings, planning for disaster that might never come, Jo ordered a handful of flimsy coats.

(Ella had chipped in enough to buy hair ribbons; the ribbons went over better.)

She handed them to six girls, one for each room. No one said they were cheap or ugly, though they were; anything that had to do with outside carried power. They cast glances out the window.

“Never wear them unless you have to,” Jo said, and they all nodded without asking why.

By then, their father was a myth; Jo was the one you worried about.

Ella was the first to ask Araminta if she could do something with the length; soon Ella's coat had a mostly even ruffle at the collar, made from leftover hem.

The others lined up, and Araminta—barely old enough to thread a needle by herself—did what she could.

In their rooms they'd slip them on, grinning as if at the beginning of a great adventure, as if when Jo rapped on the floor to summon them for geography or history or dancing (dancing, dancing), what she really meant was that they were going somewhere, anywhere, at last.

For years they lived that way, doves in cages, peering out and shaking the feathers of their wings; with every practice they were dancing along their perches, just waiting for a door to open.

• • •

One night, when Jo was nineteen, the house next door had a party.

They were frozen by the music. They had no gramophone (they'd never been good enough to earn that at Christmas), and humming and music boxes hardly counted.

To have music so close was overwhelming, and above the songs rang the laughter and voices and the scrape of three dozen pairs of shoes echoing off the walls, through the stairwells, right through to their rooms like a telegram.

When Lou realized, she laughed too sharply.

“Sounds like they can't even dance, the clodhoppers,” she said, and then burst into angry tears.

Jo was startled into silence.

She didn't comfort Lou—there was no comfort—but when Ella and Doris came in, Jo motioned them aside.

Doris whispered, “But what if Father hears?”

“Let her cry,” Jo said.

They sat on Jo's bed, watching Lou grind her fists into her brows, waiting for the storm to subside.

As soon as Lou had recovered air to speak, she said, “I've had it. I don't care what happens to me. I'm getting out. I'm running away and he'll never find me.”

Doris said, at once, “Then so am I.”

(She was fourteen, then, and still shadowed Lou as if she couldn't help it.)

“Wait a second,” said Jo, but Lou was up from her chair and pacing, her long hair twisted behind her.

“He can't keep us prisoner,” Lou said. “It's not right—he got Mother, he doesn't get us, too. I don't care if I die in a ditch, so long as it's out of this house!”

“I'm coming with you,” said Doris, her eyes shining in a way Jo had never seen, and vanished out the door.

They meant it. Lou and Doris would walk out, the music drowning out their footsteps, and then they would be gone.

Jo went cold all over.

At least twice a year someone threatened it, natural in imprisonment (and that's what it was—Jo had no doubt, even then).

When it happened, Jo calmed the older girls or silenced the younger, and that was the end of it until the trees changed and someone else cried to be let out.

But that night the music from the party beat against the walls, echoing in Jo's fingertips, and she understood.

Even Ella was looking toward the window as if trying to decide whether she had the strength to walk out.

(They all had the strength to follow if one of them ever led; Jo knew that much.)

Jo watched Lou shoving dresses into a pillowcase and imagined what would happen to her, if she and Doris ran. If any of them followed suit. Separated, without money to live on, without any knowledge outside their neighborhood, or even coats that could keep them safe from the cold.

She guessed what the world would do to a few girls all alone; for a moment she despaired.

But Jo remembered enough of the movies she had seen to have some ideas. Desperate times called for grand gestures. Girls who stuck together did all right, and there were always places where a pretty girl could dance.

She knew from Lou's magazines that there were laws about drinking, new places to dance where people would be inclined to stay quiet about who came and went.

This might be the only chance she'd have to keep them from vanishing.

After a moment, Jo told Ella, “Go get Doris. We're going dancing.”

four

Positively, Absolutely

Years later, Ella and Doris would remember it as Lou's idea.

(Lou, who knew it had been Jo, never corrected them. Some stories worked better if they weren't true.)

They remembered fastening their dresses with shaking fingers, gone down the back stairs with their shoes in one hand and into the cab the General hailed by magic.

(The long and terrible wait in the alley behind the house, as Jo waited, they don't recall.)

They don't remember that it had been the General (“Don't call me Jo—no names, for God's sake!”) who told them to dress, who handed Lou some ugly catalog shoes, who asked the cabbie the best place for a dance and a drink, and as far from here as they could get.

(Once or twice, Doris says, “Don't you think it might have been Jo? She's bossy enough about everything else.”

But Ella says, “That would make it a terrible story,” and Doris is still young enough that she thinks you should try to be like the sister you're living with, so she never argues.

By the time she understands otherwise, the story's been told so many times it might as well be true.)

They remember the blaze of lights along Fifth Avenue—for Doris a blur of too many streets before they reached any place worth having; for Ella a constellation of delight in every window with a lamp behind it, every streetlight that illuminated a storefront long enough for her to get a glimpse of all the things inside that a lady could choose to buy, with money of her own.

(Of that first night, Jo remembered slipping free of the park and into the sudden open square, and seeing a palace, a block wide and ablaze with light, and holding her breath as if they'd taken flight.

But no one asks her, so she never says.)

It was Jo who guided them into that first club, Salon Renaud, where the air made a dim, smoky wall.

They were young and shouldn't have been within a block of the place (which was just what the cabbie told them, before he took off).

But girls who looked like boys in lipstick were coming into fashion, and the doorman hesitated.

“You looking for your old man, girlies?”

“We're meeting a friend,” Jo said.

The doorman raised an eyebrow. “That so?”

He must have expected a smart answer, or a flirt, or for them to lose their nerve and bolt, but Jo (in a drab navy day suit, like their chaperone) smiled and looked him coolly in the eye until he stepped aside with a shrug.

(The nightlife chewed up plenty of girls; if these four wanted their turn, it hardly mattered to him.

It had occurred to him in his time at the door that girls who could bully their way in could probably fight their way out; it was only that so few girls worked together that the theory had never been tested.

After Salon Renaud got run out by the cops, he moved to the Kingfisher. When the girls found it, he was more pleased than he'd admit. He guessed it was that oldest's doing—she looked like someone in charge—and every night, it was she for whom he opened the door.)

• • •

The answer was always, “Lou took us.”

It didn't seem, later, like something Jo would have done. She ran the operation, sure, but she didn't like it. She owned hardly any dresses and wore them nearly to her ankles, so out of fashion it was embarrassing.

Jo rarely drank, and she never danced.

All of them but Lou thought Jo came only to be stern and snap her hand at them when it was time to go.

(Lou knew better, but if Jo didn't want to say, Lou would keep her confidence.)

Ella and Doris remembered the burn of champagne, the music under their shoes like a heartbeat.

They never thought of the general who shepherded them back and forth, her eyes narrowed across the crowd, the tether that kept them from getting swept away.

• • •

Lou's biggest memory of that night was coming home.

She'd smoked; she'd stolen drinks; she'd danced whenever she could get a man, not that she had trouble. An hour in, Lou figured she must be good-looking. (She took it the way she'd taken the thick-heeled shoes Jo gave her—it was better than the alternative.)

And all night—dancing or sitting, drinking or flirting—Lou could feel Jo keeping an eye on her across the room. It was spiteful. Lou wasn't Ella; she had two thoughts to rub together. Jo could keep her rotten eyes.

As the taxi pulled up two blocks from the house, Jo was still barking orders. “Doris, the money. Ella, go last, and don't make any noise with the door!”

Lou remembered hating Jo that night.

But Lou also remembered looking down at her shoes, seeing she'd worn the sole down almost to nothing.

She thought about what she'd tell Araminta, who had begged for a report as soon as Jo had explained where they were going, and the twins, who'd stolen her lipstick as revenge for not being invited.

It struck her suddenly how close she'd really been to running away and never seeing her sisters again. She'd have done it, in her anger—she'd have disappeared and been lost; she'd been desperate to the breaking point.

But Jo had seen it and done the only thing she could think of, and it had been enough.

Lou clutched her worn-out shoes to her chest all the way up the back stairs, like she was preparing for the grave and bringing them along.

• • •

In less than two years, Jo ran such a smooth operation that the girls were able to sneak out three or four nights a week with no one the wiser.

It was an operation of absolutes, and the rules never changed, no matter how many of them went out.

1. You dressed when she gave the word. (If she never gave the word, God help you if you dressed.)

2. You were ready to go when she called, you were ready to leave when she called, and if you drank too much you'd be left behind. (No one drank too much.)

3. If you were unlucky enough to get sick, you stayed home. If you were heartsick, it was worse.

“I can't worry about you,” Jo said. “Be quiet or be ready at midnight.”

But home was awfully quiet when you were alone, and it was just as easy to lick one's wounds in the arms of a handsome young man.

Araminta stayed home half a dozen times with an imagined broken heart, for one boy or another, but the rest got coldhearted. Young men were always proposing to Ella, and to Hattie or Mattie (men could never be sure which), and the sisters thought it was sad stuff proposing to a girl whose name you didn't know, but it was nothing to miss dancing over.

Jo, of course, had never missed a night.

“No heart in there to break,” Ella said, and no one argued.