CHAPTER 49
Willa
Piano music drifts up from the grate in the sidewalk, faint and airy, as if in a dream. Someone down there below the concrete is practicing. I know the song being played. It’s “What’ll I Do” by Irving Berlin. The grate where the music is coming from leads to a speakeasy far under the city street. A vent has been left open. I crouch on the metal slats and tilt my head toward the darkness while the city’s pace at three thirty in the afternoon swirls about me. Autos, trucks, carts, walkers, strollers, cyclists, and peddlers dash and scurry past. I doubt anyone else hears the music but me.
“What are you doing?” Howie says.
He is a classmate of mine at the academy that Evie and Maggie attended and that Papa has insisted I must also go to. He and I ride the same streetcar to get to class every day, but Howie is lucky. He doesn’t have brilliant older siblings who have gone to the school before him. All right, so only Evie is truly brilliant. But Maggie was no slouch. What she lacked in outright genius, she made up for in determination, or so I hear. My teachers, when they aren’t telling me to hush and payattention, are probably still trying to figure out how to motivate me to study.
Howie is my age, freckled and pudgy, and he adores me. He moved to Philadelphia after the flu. Several years after.
I have no idea if my voice will carry into the shadows beyond the grate the same way the notes of the piano are floating up to me. But I open my mouth to sing, and I jump right in where the lyrics speak of there being only a photograph to tell my troubles to.
The piano stops. Whoever is playing it can hear me. I look up at Howie standing next to me, and I laugh.
“Willa! Come on,” Howie implores. “We shouldn’t be here!”
He looks about, half-panicked. There are dozens of people up and down the sidewalks, some in suits and fine dresses, some in weatherworn work clothes, and some—the beggars—in rags. Most haven’t given us a second glance. The vegetable vendor across the narrow street is scowling, however—she is big and red-faced and her disdain at my bending over the grate of a speakeasy that no one is supposed to know about but everyone does is as clear as glass. A man leaning up against the brick wall of the building next to the grate and puffing on a cigar is staring down at me, too. But he looks surprised, not disgusted.
The music starts up again, slow and tentative, inviting me to join in like a hopeful partner at a dance. It pauses, waits for me. So I sing the words about being alone with dreams that won’t come true. The man with the cigar takes a step toward us and Howie grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet and we dash off, the music of the piano falling away.
We run for several blocks before we stop, breathless, holding our sides. Howie looks behind to see if we’re being chased by the police or gangsters with machine guns or the woman with the cabbages. But no one is coming after us.
“What’d you do that for?” Howie says.
I flick back a curl. What a ridiculous question. Why does anyone do anything?
“Did you hear how that piano player waited for me to keep singing?” I reply instead.
“If my parents find out I was hanging around the door to that place...”
Howie doesn’t finish. I don’t know what his mother and father do to dole out punishments, but Howie just shakes his head back and forth like it’s just too terrible to contemplate. If Papa found out I was singing into the grate of a speakeasy, he’d give me a stern look and tell me that’s not acceptable behavior. He might extract a promise that I never do that again even though I’m not so good at keeping promises, even to him. And anyway, I could easily make a vow never to sing at the grate of that speakeasy again and uphold it. If I wanted to try my luck at another grate of another speakeasy, I wouldn’t have much trouble finding one. This is Philadelphia. Worse than New York and Chicago, if you ask Dora Sutcliff. I didn’t, by the way; she is just always ready to tell people that.
“But how would your parents find out?” I ask as we start to walk again, and the air in our lungs is now going in and out at the regular speed.
“What if someone saw us?”
“We were just listening at a grate.”
“You weresingingdown a grate! And not just any grate.” He leans in close to me. “Those places are illegal.”
He says the wordillegallike it’s illegal to say it.
“It’s just what they sell that it is illegal,” I offer back.
“That’s what I mean.”
“No, you said the place is illegal.”
“It’s all illegal.”
“So your father doesn’t have any whiskey in your house?” I loop my arm through his, knowing my question will make him gasp. Howie’s father is a deacon at his church and a prominent businessman. It’s unthinkable that an upstanding, law-abiding gentleman such as he would have bootleg liquor in his house, except that it happens all the time. I bet even Papa has some in his back office.
“Of course not,” Howie sputters, turning about to see if anyone on the street is close enough to hear our conversation.
“I bet he does.”
“He does not,” he growls. “And I’ll kindly thank you not to suggest that he does.”
