CHAPTER 55
Willa
It’s not that hard to do something you’re not supposed to if nobody thinks you’d ever even contemplate doing such a thing anyway.
The first night I snuck out to the speakeasy, my heart was pounding as I climbed out Alex’s bedroom window while he slept—my window in the attic is too high—and it pounded the whole time I was on the street trying to get there, and while I was meeting with Albert, and every second that I was sneaking back home. But when I tiptoed back inside my house, all was just as I had left it—everyone fast asleep in their beds. No one missed me because no one was awake.
My heart doesn’t pound like a scared rabbit’s anymore when I go. I’ve been back to the Silver Swan—that’s the speakeasy’s name and I like the way it sounds—seven times now and haven’t had a hint of trouble. But I’ve also perfected my technique. For my bed, I make a dummy out of pillows and rolled-up pajamas, and then I sneak out onto the ledge and down the trellis outside Alex’s window after everyone else has gone to bed. You can’t see his window from the street at night because it’s too dark, so I can pop out from the little alley between ourhouse and the apartment building next door looking like I just materialized out of the bricks.
That first night I went to meet with Albert, I had to get there on my own once I was on the boulevard, which meant I had to hail a cab like a businessman. That wasn’t my favorite few minutes of the evening. But I did it, and since Albert liked my singing so much and wanted me to come back and entertain his patrons, he had a driver take me home. The driver’s name is Foster. He now collects me on the opposite corner after I’ve snuck out the window and brings me back, like I’m a Broadway starlet. Albert doesn’t want me meeting the wrong sort on the street, so he told Foster and Mr. Trout, who is like the Silver Swan’s own policeman, that I am always to have a car bring me in and take me home.
Getting back into my room after I’m done is easy, too. I have pocketed one of the spare keys to the side entrance where Papa brings in the bodies. I can slip in there at one o’clock in the morning and no one sees me or hears me. I can’t chance going out that way because sometimes Papa’s light is on. He might hear me walk past. Then I come through the kitchen, hang up my coat in the hall closet, and make my way up the stairs to my bedroom.
I always grab a glass of water on my way past the kitchen sink so that if I should see Papa or Maggie or Evie on the stairs for some odd reason, I can just say I was thirsty. I usually am thirsty after singing a dozen songs. I haven’t quite figured out what I’ll say if they ask why I have on street clothes if that should ever happen. I suppose I can say I fell asleep before I had a chance to put my nightdress on. They won’t see any rouge or lipstick or face powder because I’m always very careful to take it off before I leave the Swan. Albert doesn’t want me to wear too much paint, as he calls it, because my stage name is Sweet Polly Adler and he wants me to look innocent and childlike like Mary Pickford inPollyanna. The costumes I wear are all ribbons and lace and bows—nothing like what I would choose to wear—but Albert says everyone loves it that I sing like an angel and look like one, too, becausethe world above can be a dangerous, miserable place. At the Silver Swan, however, people can forget their troubles, drink some fine bootleg whiskey, and listen to Sweet Polly Adler sing their woes away.
I’m not the only singer at the club. There is a lady named Lila who has the reddest lips I’ve ever seen. She wears her black hair in a cute bob and smokes cigarette after cigarette from a skinny ebony holder. Her long, lacquered fingernails—the shiniest crimson—click on everything she touches. Lila’s costumes are all fringe and feathers and sequins. I’d much rather wear her dresses. Lila is the one who puts my lipstick and rouge on and curls my hair with a hot iron.
Sometimes when I’m done singing, men want to come back to where we get dressed or they want me to come sit at their tables, even on their laps. Lila always tells them she’ll kill them if they so much as touch a hair on my head. And then she always adds, “But you’ll already be dead because Albert’ll kill ya first.” Those men laugh like it’s a joke, and Lila does, too. But everyone can tell she’s not joking.
I think Lila likes me all right. It’s hard to tell. She told me a few days ago that she always wanted to have children but never did. She said if she’d had a little girl she would have named her Winnifred. But then after she told me that, she ignored me the rest of the night.
I usually do two shows. One at eleven and one at midnight. And I get three silver dollars every night that I sing. I must hide my money, of course, and I can’t buy anything with it because there would be questions. But someday, when I’m older and on my own, I am going to buy Papa something wonderful with all the money I’m making right now. I don’t know just what I will buy, but something amazing. Like maybe a solid gold watch or a horse that he can board in the country, or passage to England so that he can see Big Ben and the Tower of London and the lions in Trafalgar Square. He told me once he’d like to see London someday. Maybe I’ll have enough money to go with him. And we could take Alex. Maggie will probably be married to Palmer by then and who knows where Evie will be. But I can see Papa and me and Alex sailing on a ship as beautiful as theTitanichad been and thenriding around London in a horse-drawn carriage like we haven’t a care in the world.
This is what I am thinking about as Foster brings me home tonight, what I might buy for Papa with all my silver dollars. It was a good night, Albert said. Standing room only. Everyone seemed to enjoy my show. There’s a four-piece band that plays and there’s Lila, of course, and there’s a man who tells jokes, and there’s me. I can tell when the customers enjoy a show by how quiet the room gets. It’s never completely quiet; there’s always a group of people laughing or talking. But sometimes when I’m singing, a hush falls over the room, and it’s as if I’m not a girl pretending she’s Sweet Polly Adler, and all the people aren’t stuck underground drinking illegal liquor, and above us isn’t some broken, tired old city run by mobsters. It’s as if I am just me and they are just them and the world is still a lovely place. That’s the way it was tonight when I sang “Look for the Silver Lining.” When I sang the line that somewhere the sun is shining, it was like everyone in the smoke-filled room wanted to believe it.
The moment ended, of course. When my show was done, the band came on to join Albert, who always plays for me, and the people started to dance, and it got noisy again.
Still, I have three new silver dollars in my coat pocket, and for a second there, everything seemed right.
Foster lets me out on the corner so that I can make my way quietly and slip unnoticed into the house. I go to the back stoop like usual and I fish the key out of my handbag, and all the while I am wondering how I can somehow trap this lovely lingering feeling inside me. When I step up on the stoop, I nearly trip over a body in the dark.
How dare someone drop off a corpse in the middle of the night?I’m thinking, but then the body moves and my breath catches in my throat.
“Who’s there?” I sound braver than I feel. The last thing I want to do is fight my way past a drunkard or a hobo sleeping on our stoop. Or worse, have to yell for help and wake up the house.
“Willa? Is that you?”
I do not recognize this man’s voice. He raises himself to his knees and then stands. As he does, the sallow light cast by a gas streetlamp a few yards away falls across the top half of his body. The man’s face is vaguely familiar, but I cannot place him.
“Who are you?” I demand.
The man takes a step toward me and is now fully visible. “Willa. It’s me. Jamie Sutcliff.”
For a couple seconds, I just stand there in wordless shock. The last time I saw Jamie Sutcliff, I was eight years old. He had just come home from the war. His brother, Charlie, had died of the flu a few months back and then Jamie had crept off in the half-light of dawn with a duffel over his back without telling anyone—not even his parents—where he was going. He looks the same now, but different. His hair is longer, he seems a mite taller, and he looks more like a man who’s been places. I suppose that’s exactly what he is.
“Willa, what are you doing out here?” he says, worry splashed all over his face.
“What amIdoing out here?” I answer. “What areyoudoing out here?”
“I hitched a ride into town,” he says. “It’s late. My parents’ place is dark, and I didn’t want to wake them by pounding on the door. They don’t know I’m coming. I thought I’d just sleep here on your back stoop until daylight.”
If I hitched my way home after being gone six years, I’d pound on the door ofmyhouse—that’s for sure. “You really think your parents would be upset if you woke them up to let you in?” I ask.
He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t want to come home that way. Pounding on the door in the middle of the night.”
“So you’re coming home?”
“Maybe.”
