Girl About Town Read online

  Frederick could find no flaw with spring.

  “Do you think that will give me time to get ready?” She counted up on her slender fingers. “Yes, I should just be able to assemble a proper trousseau in time, and as for my wedding gown, well, I’ve had the lace since I was twelve, so we won’t have to send off to the French convents. That just leaves the dress itself. Madame Grès, do you think, or Vionnet? I’ll have to go to Paris either way. So much to do!” She walked on, oblivious, content to carry on her own conversation, while Frederick lingered behind her.

  Funny how girls are, Frederick thought. When he considered their marriage, the wedding played such a small part. Instead, he looked forward to the intimacy, physical and otherwise. His dreams were more domestic. How nice it will be, he thought, to eat toast and marmalade with Violet sitting across from me at the breakfast table.

  He realized, suddenly, exactly what she was saying, and surged ahead to catch her. “This spring? Violet, dear, that’s quite impossible. I’ll be starting Harvard next fall. We can’t be married until after I graduate. I know it’s a dreadfully long wait, but time will fly, you’ll see, and I promise I won’t look at a single Radcliffe girl. . . .”

  Violet pressed her lips together for a moment. Then she said, very low but quite distinctly, “I can’t wait that long.” Another woman might have whispered it with irrepressible longing. Violet’s words were as determined and cold as a steel blade.

  THREE

  Lucille carried her parcel of impeccably washed unmentionables out of the dirt and stench of her own life and into another world. Almost magically, from one block to the next, the tenor of the city changed. The gray boxes of despairing tenements gave way to magnificent, thoughtful architecture, to stonework and brick that seemed to be designed for no other purpose than to delight the eye. She couldn’t imagine living in one of those grand Fifth Avenue hotels. They seemed to be museum pieces, to be seen and not touched . . . or perhaps huge statues, monuments to mankind’s greatness.

  Well, she amended, the greatness of some of mankind.

  She came upon the Pierre, which she thought was one of the most beautiful buildings in the city . . . from the outside at least. She’d never mustered the courage to test the benevolence of the uniformed doorman keeping close watch over the main entrance.

  Lucille instinctively cringed out of the way when a small, merry group of young men and women passed her. The men were impeccably dressed, the women almost shockingly so. Their frocks, in midnight and pale gold and eau de nil, clung so tantalizingly and draped so low down their backs that it was obvious they were wearing absolutely nothing underneath. Lucille remembered her mother telling her once (probably in reference to their scanty supply of furniture) that less is more. She rather thought in this case that more might be more. She tried to picture herself in such a gown and achieved nothing more than feeling slightly chilly.

  When the doors opened, she caught a glimpse of black and white decor, the huge squares of onyx- and alabaster-colored marble on the floor. It was startling after her own dim world of gray grime and dirty dun browns, startling in a way a field of color could not be. She realized that she’d stopped walking, and with a little embarrassed shake, she set off once more down Fifth Avenue, clutching her parcel to her chest. Why think about places like that? That wasn’t her world and would never, could never, be.

  She headed for the Sherry-Netherland, where Mrs. Fahntille shared a suite with her rarely seen husband. As Lucille left the Pierre behind her, something caught her eye. A cab was pulling up to the curb. A vagrant ray of the setting sun glazed the window golden, and she couldn’t get a clear view of whoever was inside. All she could see, darkly intense against a nebulous form, was a pair of eyes looking in her direction. For a second, no more, she met them uneasily. Then she turned abruptly away and walked with renewed vigor. It was just another rich person. What did she care about him? What did he care about her?

  The doorman at the Sherry-Netherland let her in immediately, for Lucille was there nearly every week. She rode the elevator to the eleventh floor and knocked at Mrs. Fahntille’s door.

  “Hello, darling,” drawled a theatrical voice from the bedroom after the maid had let her in. Mrs. Fahntille had been one of the lesser grande dames of the stage for twenty years now, and if directors and audiences were beginning to forget about her, she would never forget herself. She spent countless hours on her appearance. Lucille had never seen her outside of her boudoir; she peregrinated between her lavish bed and her three-mirrored vanity, always with a cut-crystal highball glass and a faint juniper perfume of gin floating around her.

  “Have you got them? Oh, do hurry. I desperately need my powder-blue lingerie set. He will be here soon!” As Mrs. Fahntille was still lounging in the downy white nest of her bed, Lucille could not at first imagine what kind of caller the woman might be expecting. Then, a second later, she could, and blushed pink.

  Mrs. Fahntille flung back the covers with a flourish and leaped to her feet, her gaunt body bare. Lucille tried to both look and not look, an endeavor that left her even more flustered. In the end she managed to unfocus her eyes and hand over the pale blue lacy set. Mrs. Fahntille, unabashed, wiggled her way into it and posed. “How do I look? Will he eat me up?”

  The lingerie seemed to echo and enhance the blue blood vessels that showed through her pale, taut skin, and her unfortunate turn of phrase made Lucille think of a veiny Roquefort cheese. But she only said, “You look lovely, ma’am,” and waited patiently for her payment.

  Mrs. Fahntille, though, loved an audience, however humble, and glided about the room, twittering about past roles and speculating about new ones. “The quality of the theater has declined since I was in my heyday,” she opined, fixing a cigarette in a long, slim mother-of-pearl holder. “Now all the talent . . . most of the talent, that is,” she amended as she peered at herself in the mirror, “has fled to Hollywood. I grieve for the future of acting if we must depend on those cheap celluloid starlets for our thespian passions. They have no life! No presence!” She snatched up a pile of movie magazines—Photoplay, Motion Picture, Film Fun—and piled them into Lucille’s arms. “Take them away, darling. I can’t stand the sight of them. Oh, all but this one.” She snatched back the topmost. “I haven’t finished reading a dishy little story about Claudette Colbert.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. But . . . my payment?”

  “Of course, of course. Here you are.” She thrust a jumble of money into Lucille’s hand, more than she was owed. Mr. Fahntille must be doing well . . . wherever he was. “Scurry along now. We don’t want my guest to run into anything as fetching as you, my dear. He might just eat you up!”

  Lucille clamped her Hollywood magazines under her arm and set off to a shabbier part of town with the packet of lace cravats. Mr. Rosen, who ran a little movie theater, was as much of a dandy as he could afford to be and had a weakness for a bit of finery around his throat. He was what her mother mysteriously referred to as an “Ethel.”

  Lucille always tried to schedule her deliveries there for the end of the day. While she waited in the projection room for her payment, she could catch a free glimpse of the movie screen, where she watched gods and goddesses in gray scale act out their impossibly interesting lives. She lived in their faraway worlds for no more than fifteen minutes at a time, so she rarely knew how a picture ended, but like the rest of America, she was completely enamored of the movies.

  That evening, Lucille watched breathlessly as the bug-eyed Peter Lorre somehow contrived to create in her the most minuscule morsel of sympathy for the role of a ruthless child killer in the movie M. How did he do it? She could tell from his face that he must be a nice man in real life, and yet he managed to become utterly reprehensible on the screen . . . save for that tiny touch of human sympathy he evoked in her against her will. What made her feel for such a terrible character? Was that the power of his acting? she wondered. Or was it some weakness in her? It left her shaken and baffled, that pe
rplexing manipulation.

  It was nearly dark by the time Lucille left Mr. Rosen’s theater. Encumbered by her stack of Hollywood magazines, she hurried as fast as she could. A girl alone as evening fell might be mistaken for a loose woman and was likely to be propositioned. As night deepened, there was the added danger that they wouldn’t care what her profession was and the propositions would be replaced by demands. With no protector, she had to be home by full dark. Should she take her usual route, much longer but safe and well lit for now, or should she slip down an alleyway and cut her journey in half?

  She chose the shortcut. The shadowy half dark of the alley made the crates and garbage bins lining the walls loom like leering ogres. But Lucille had no fear of mythic things; her vivid imagination painted far more probable dangers.

  She heard footsteps from up ahead and shrank back, chiding herself as she did. Her mother always told her that she should walk straight and tall and confident through any situation on the street, past any vice or crime the bad neighborhoods would throw at her. Look like a good girl who doesn’t have anything to fear, and they’ll never think to mess with you, she’d told her daughter. Look like a victim, and you’ll become one.

  Instinct, though, told Lucille something entirely different. Alone in a dim, isolated place, faced with an approaching stranger, she had the prey’s impulse to hide and freeze.

  Leaning against the bricks behind a stack of crates, she couldn’t see the interloper, but he had heavy footfalls and panted as if he’d run a long way. He’s just resting to catch his breath, she thought, relaxing against the wall. He’ll go away soon. She decided to wait him out. By now it would be awkward for her to emerge.

  Then she heard another set of feet, soft and slow.

  Lucille felt her heart begin to race. How could there be such menace in footsteps? Their steady deliberateness chilled her.

  “You bastard.” The voice was as soft as the step, quiet and dangerous as the whisper of a snake’s belly on dry leaves.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid mug,” said the other man, still gulping for air. “Go home and take care of your mama.”

  Lucille peeked around the crates and saw a paunchy man in his forties holding himself up against the wall, his face contorted in angry contempt.

  “My mother is a widow tonight,” the quiet man said. He was a little older than Lucille, in his early twenties perhaps, well dressed, tall, broad shouldered. His mouth was full, and his brilliantined, slicked-back black hair gleamed faintly in the dim light.

  The older man hissed something about the handsome young man’s mother that Lucille suspected was not the wisest thing to say.

  The younger man laughed. “Right about now I’m supposed to tell you that if you utter one more word about my mother, I’ll fill your dirty brain full of lead. But really, we both know that isn’t necessary. You’re getting yours no matter what you say.”

  The other man sneered and said, “You don’t have the coglioni.”

  Maybe if he’d trembled it would have gone otherwise, but even from her quick glance, Lucille knew that the young man in the beautiful suit would never, ever let anyone defy him. From inside his pin-striped jacket he pulled a gun and pointed it at the other man’s head.

  “Because of you, I have everything that was once my father’s. The business. The money. And the coglioni to blow your ugly head off.”

  He squeezed the trigger. And he smiled while he did it.

  Lucille’s Hollywood magazines slid from her numbed arms, and the gunman turned, finally noticing the pale wraith in the shadows. Slowly, he raised the gun until the barrel’s dark and deadly eye locked her in its gaze. Her eyes widened and her mouth parted in a soft gasp. A little voice whispered that she should run, scream, do anything other than look pleadingly at a killer. But all she could do was watch him and hope.

  He watched her, too, his head cocked to the side. His eyes traced her lingeringly up and down, the gun following his eyes. She swallowed hard, and her lips moved to form a single, almost soundless word: “Please.”

  The shrill whine of a police siren from a few blocks away pierced the stillness. He raised the gun higher, holding it level with her head.

  “Damn,” he whispered a long moment later, and lowered the gun. Then he knelt by the gory corpse and put the gun in its hand, curling a dead finger around the trigger.

  “You didn’t see anything,” he told her, standing and brushing his hands on his trousers.

  She nodded, and that might have been the end, but the patrol car cruised by the alley at that moment, passed, then stopped with a screech of brakes. In the time it took for the car to back up, the young man had crossed the distance between them in a few quick steps and gripped her arm.

  “He shot himself,” he told Lucille, low and savage, as the police car backed to the mouth of the alleyway and two officers shone lights into their faces. “Stick to that story and I’ll make you rich. Say anything else, and I’ll make you dead. You and all your family. My boys will kill them slowly in front of your eyes.” His grip tightened. “Then they’ll carve that pretty face off with a bowie knife.”

  When the two policemen approached them, the young man raised his arms and said, perfectly calmly, “I am Salvatore Benedetto. This poor man has just confessed to murdering my father, Cosimo Benedetto. In the madness of guilt, he has shot himself after begging for my forgiveness.”

  Lucille looked up into Salvatore’s dark eyes and saw absolute honesty there.

  It was the first time she truly understood the power of acting. It could alter reality.

  “Is that right, miss?” one of the officers asked.

  She squinted into the glare of his flashlight. Unlike so many girls in this downtrodden neighborhood, her mother had raised her to a high moral code. But she was sick of running laundry around town all day, sick of seeing her beautiful, smart mother work her fingers to nubbins washing rich ladies’ underthings when she should be teaching, sick of seeing her sisters dressed in rags, her brothers turn into number-running hoodlums. . . .

  Lucille widened her luminous eyes guilelessly and looked at the police officers. But even when she opened her mouth, she didn’t quite know what would come out.

  FOUR

  With the love of his life on his arm, Frederick strolled into the Pierre’s spacious black and white lobby. It was rarely very crowded—usually only a few graying gentlemen lounging in obscure club chairs, perusing the Financial Times; perhaps a woman not as young as she’d like people to think, just underdressed and overly made-up enough to be conspicuous, hoping to snag a customer who was out of her league before security hustled her out. Today, though, in honor of the lavish van der Waals affair, it was much more lively.

  Frederick heard laughter and the scuff and slide of soft-shoe tap. He looked around, delighted, for the young man he knew to be its source. There he was, Frederick’s best friend since the summer they were quarantined together in an Adirondacks cabin with severe cases of the mumps. Over misery, cold compresses, and chicken soup, they had bonded, and when they’d left camp, it had never occurred to them that the fact they were from different social strata meant they shouldn’t really be friends.

  It wasn’t that Duncan Shaw’s family was poor, exactly. The father was a midlevel banker, the mother an artist who occasionally exhibited at the smaller galleries. They were well educated and amusingly worldly; in all respects they were a decent, upper-middle-class family. Still, as Frederick once heard his father remark to his mother in the year before she died, “Duncan’s people are ordinary.” That was one of the things that Frederick liked about them. He didn’t know why that word in his father’s mouth sounded somehow foul. Still, the two men had developed something of a rapport. The elder van der Waals guided Mr. Shaw in his investments, raising him a notch financially.

  “What ho, old chap!” Duncan called, affecting an English accent. He caught his friend in an exuberant bear hug. “M’lady.” He kissed Violet’s litt
le paw reverently, then broke into a huge grin and tapped out a few more dance steps. “As you see, I’m all limbered up and ready to tango.” He dipped an imaginary partner and bestowed a smacking kiss midair. “Or maybe just shimmy like that little Joan Crawford in Dance, Fools, Dance. Did you see it? Trash, but that Joanie will go far, if you ask me. Anyone who can wiggle that much and not fall out of her . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Violet. What a lout I am.”

  He didn’t look at all contrite, but Frederick didn’t mind. Duncan was the ham of the gang, and, like a playful puppy, could do no wrong. Violet gave her fiancé a slightly pained look but linked arms with both of them, and the trio jostled through the light crowd, nodding and smiling, until they reached the elevator.

  “What a gleesome threesome!” said the elevator operator in greeting. Frederick winced slightly, then checked himself. His first thought—ungovernable and unwelcome—was that an elevator operator should never make such a personal comment in such a conversational tone. Following closely upon the heels of this came the thought that this cheerful young man’s well-meaning impudence was bound to get him fired within the week.

  Frederick wanted to warn the young man against such familiarity. I don’t mind, he could say, but there’s some that would. But he said nothing as they rose smoothly up the center of the Pierre’s towering height. To refer to it would be to admit that he had the same class distinctions as the older generation. He felt it, true, but suddenly he felt ashamed to feel it.

  The heavy ebony door to their apartment gave no hint of the jollity within. But it swung open to reveal a world of champagne bubbles and tinkling ice, of glittering jewels and sequins and slinky gold lamé. All of New York’s high society had turned out to honor the scion of one of its brightest stars. Jacob van der Waals was one of the few men in the country who had not only not lost money in the great stock market crash of 1929, but had tripled his already considerable fortune.