“For my, I’m looking for my—my daughter,” I stammered.
She gave me an uncomfortable smile and nodded. She was sensing something, as if she knew I was a fraud.
“For my daughter,” I tried again. “She’s two.”
“Right this way,” she said, turning to walk to another area. “You’re looking in the wrong section. Age two and up is over here.”
I followed her and glanced back in embarrassment at the clothes I’d been admiring. The shoes and dresses did seem small. My God, I didn’t even know how to buy clothes for a child.
“This is brand new.” She held up a soft knitted cream sweater with lace-trimmed cuffs and collar. “And it goes beautifully with this pinafore.” She showed me a black velvet ensemble.
“It’s very pretty,” I said. But would she like it? Did she like to wear sweaters and pinafores? Would she care about her clothes at this age? I had no idea what she liked. The only person who had truly known was Aunt May, and she was gone, and along with her, all the memories of Addie’s first years.
“Do you sell toys?” I asked.
“Toys?”
“Yes, toys, you know—the things children play with?” She was starting to get on my nerves.
“One floor up,” she said, folding the sweater and placing it back on the table and then walking away with a sigh.
Upstairs there were dolls and cars and balls and hoops. A toy train, a pull-along duck, a sheep, a bugle. A building set, wooden blocks, a Tinkertoy set and more dolls—small, medium and large—knitted, molded, with hair, without. I ran my hand along them, waiting forone to call out to me, then I stopped at a white-and-brown rocking horse. Its head was probably taller than Addie. It had real horsehair for its mane and tail, a leather bridle and a saddle, all on a sturdy wooden rocker. I imagined telling her someday about the mare and her foal at the Pines, how the little one had wobbled at first on those spindly little legs, but once she got used to the feel of them under her, she couldn’t stop prancing around. She just needed time to get used to her own strength, to know what she was capable of. I smiled at the thought of it, the thought of all the things Addie had yet to learn.
The size and shape of the thing made it awkward to carry up Fifth Avenue, and I had to stop a few times and set the bulky horse down, shake out my arms and stretch my back. I’d spent every dollar I had in my purse and was left with only a few coins to spare, but it felt good to spend it, and I had a little more that I’d saved tucked away in my trunk. I received some stares as I walked back to the club and offers of help from a few gentlemen.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said, walking on, struggling, but wanting the struggle, needing it.
I carried the horse through the front door of the club, past the doorman and back into the dressing room. I set it down next to my trunk, ripped a ribbon off one of my old costumes and tied it in a bow around her neck, then I sat back on the dressing room chair and admired her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
October 30, 1929
“Lordy, Lordy, would you take a look at this?” The dressing room door swung open, and Texas walked in with a cup of coffee in one hand, an overstuffed paper bag under her arm and a newspaper held out in front of her.
I quickly sat up, pulling the one small blanket I had around me. For the love of God, it felt early. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock on the wall: nine thirty. I’d been staying there for a week, and I hadn’t expected to actually see Texas in the mornings, or anytime during the day, but she acted as though seeing me sleeping on the sofa in the back room of her club were perfectly normal.
“‘Stocks collapse in 16,410,030-share day!’” she read off the front page ofThe New York Times. “Geez Louise. Listen to this: ‘Stock prices virtually collapsed yesterday, swept downward with gigantic losses in the most disastrous trading day in the stock market’shistory,’” she read aloud. “‘Billions of dollars in open-market values were wiped out as prices crumbled under the pressure of liquidation of securities which had to be sold at any price.’”
She sat down at the dressing table, took an orange out of the paper bag and started peeling it.
“‘Groups of men, with here and there a woman, stood about inverted glass bowls all over the city yesterday watching spools of ticker tape unwind, and as the tenuous paper with its cryptic numerals grew longer at their feet, their fortunes shrunk,’” she continued to read. “‘Others sat stolidly on tilted chairs in the customers’ rooms of brokerage houses and watched a motion picture of waning wealth as the day’s quotations moved silently across a screen.’”
She finished the orange and started on another one. “Holy smokes,” she said. “This could be bad, real bad.”
“Texas, wait,” I said as I grabbed my cardigan from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders. “Texas, slow down a minute. I heard the newspaper boys talking about this over the weekend, but what does all of it mean?”
“It means, doll face, that we’re all in the soup now. All those butter-and-egg men who come walking through our doors each night and put money in our pockets, they just lost all their fortunes.”
“All of them?” My mind immediately went to Archie and then to my father. Both of them invested heavily in the stock market, and my father… well, he’d be in the thick of it down at the exchange.
“I would think so, at least anyone who had their money in the market, which they all did,” she said grimly.
“Oh my God,” I said. The money my father had been saving hiswhole life. And Archie, he’d worked so hard, building his fortune from nothing. “Can it really just disappear like that?”
“Apparently so. That’s why I keep all my money someplace where I can grab it and run.” She slapped the paper down on the counter and started peeling yet another orange.
“But… if they’re losing all their cabbage, the last thing these fellas are gonna want to do is go home,” she said, mulling it over. “So it could play out in our favor, maybe we’ll be busier than usual.”
