CHAPTER 59
Willa
Lila enters her dressing room wearing a silky black robe trimmed with glittering gold lace. Her ever-present cigarette holder is in one hand, and a cocktail glass is in the other. A man wearing a pin-striped suit, with gelled hair and a pencil mustache, is laughing behind her, spilling his own drink on his polished shoes.
When she sees me, Lila puts up a hand to the man’s chest. “We’ll have to do this later, Frankie.”
“What?” the man says as he stumbles against her raised arm.
“You heard me. Later.” She is looking only at me.
The man named Frankie unloads a string of curses.
She turns to him and tells him to shut the hell up or there won’t be a later. He sighs and ambles off, his shoulder hugging the wall as he disappears down the hall. Lila shuts the door and pivots to face me.
“What are you doing here, love?” she says.
It’s a Sunday. I don’t sing on Sundays. “I want to work tonight.”
She crosses the room to stand by me, folding her arms and leaning her backside against her dressing table. The top of the table is coveredwith lipsticks and pots of rouge and eye color, bottles of perfume and tins of scented talcum. One of the tubes of lipstick falls over. “Does Albert know you’re in my dressing room?”
“No.”
“How’d you get here?”
“I took a taxi.”
“A taxi dropped you off here?” she says, her perfectly painted eyebrows raised.
“A block away. I’m not stupid.”
She cocks her head, and her perky bob falls away from the left side of her face like fringe on a curtain.
“What are you doing here, Willa?” She never uses my real name even though I told her what it is. She always calls me Polly, or love, or doll.
“I told you. I want to work tonight.”
“That’s not going to happen. Look, Albert likes you, but he doesn’t like surprises. You here right now is a surprise. You say you’re not stupid. I’m telling you, the smartest thing you can do is go back home and come back on Friday like you’re supposed to.”
I want to sweep my hand across her table. I can feel the muscles in my arm tensing with the desire to send everything clattering to the floor.
“Like I’m supposed to.” I echo her words, but she said them gently and they come out of my mouth hard and angry. I’m tired of people telling me what they’re going to do no matter how I feel about it.
“Hey, we all have to live by someone’s rules,” Lila says, as if reading my thoughts. “You work here, you live by Albert’s rules. I don’t know who at home you’re mad at, but you can’t be here right now. Every time you come to the club, Albert takes a risk. You know that, don’t you? He takes extra precautions on the nights you’re here.”
I don’t know what she means and she can see that I don’t.
“You’re young,” she says by way of explanation. “You’re still a child.”
“I’m eighteen.”
“You’re fourteen. You live at home with your father. You still go to school. You—”
“How do you know all that?” I hadn’t told Albert my real name or anything else about me.
“Albert knows everything about the people he hires. He knows you want to be here and that you can be trusted to keep your mouth shut. But other people can be idiots. Other people can cause trouble. He makes special arrangements on nights you sing. Financial arrangements. You’re good for business, kid. People like you. They’re coming special to hear you. So don’t mess it up, okay? Go home.”
“I don’t want to go home.” I don’t. I don’t want to hear any more of Maggie’s plans to leave Philadelphia and take Alex. I can’t believe Papa is letting her do it. She has no right to take Alex from him. And he’s just letting her. Maggie knows how much Alex means to Papa. After all the losses he’s suffered, how can she take that boy from him? She’s only thinking of herself. I don’t want to go home. I want to wear the bows and lace and sing like there are only good things in this world.
