“You can’t go—”
“There’s no use trying to stop me,” she said as we walked through the Jardin des Tuileries, toward the Pont Royal bridge. “You can come with, if you want.” She looked me up and down and wrinkled her nose. “Though you look like a frump in that getup.”
I paused for a second, my heart longing for something my head knew was reckless. Irene was going, whether I liked it or not. I could either return to our hotel and pray she got back before my parents woke up, or I could go with her and try to get her back at a reasonable hour.
I had a feeling that either way, I would regret my decision.
“Wait for me,” I said.
She slowed her pace and grinned as she wrapped her arm through mine. “I knew you’d come to your senses.”
“We’re going to regret this,” I told her, feeling both excitement and guilt. I couldn’t believe I was going to a bar. Even though alcohol was legal in France, if anyone found out where I’d been, it wouldn’t bode well.
“Maybe you will—but I won’t. What can Uncle Daniel do to me? Send me back to my mother? I’m heading that way tomorrow anyway.”
She hailed a taxi just over the bridge to take us the rest of the way.
When we got into the back seat, she told the driver to take us to the American nightclub called the Dingo Bar at 10 rue Delambre in the Montparnasse Quarter.
“It’s open all night,” she told me as she pulled a tube of lipstick and a pocket mirror from her purse. With the aid of the streetlights, she began to apply it liberally to her lips. “It’s a popular gathering place for the Lost Generation. You know who they are, don’t you?”
I sighed. “Of course I do.” They were Americans disillusionedafter the Great War, the Spanish flu, and Prohibition, who saw their lives as fleeting. Too short to waste. They were grasping hold of the fragility and opining about its faults in their novels, poetry, and artwork. “I hope none of them recognize us.”
Irene offered me the lipstick, but I shook my head. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the use of lipstick, but that I would be in enough trouble with my parents already.
She applied her rouge next and rolled her eyes. “If you need to use an alias, I won’t stop you. But I’m telling you, none of them care about you or your father.”
“I can’t take any chances.”
We arrived at the Dingo Bar a few minutes later. It wasn’t remarkable or even attractive. Nothing like the Moulin Rouge, with its red windmill atop the roof. Instead, it was a simple building in a row of buildings, with an awning that said Dingo American Bar and Restaurant. The windows were covered with curtains, not allowing us to see inside without entering.
Irene paid the taxi driver as I left the vehicle. She joined me a moment later.
“Ready?” she asked, her blue eyes lighting up with excitement.
I’d never been to a nightclub—had no idea what I was doing there—but Irene didn’t give me time to think about it. She pulled open the door and sashayed into the bar as if she’d done it a dozen times—and perhaps she had.
“They say Lindbergh should have landed by now,” a man said to another in an American accent as I followed her in. “I’d lay odds that he crashed in the Atlantic and no one will remember his name a month from now.”
“I think he still has time,” said the other. “We’ll be hearing about his landing any second.”
The room was long and narrow with a dark paneled bar on one side and a small stage at the back. There were dozens of tables, some in the middle and others along the outer wall. Pillars were interspersed throughout, giving people a little privacy. Were any of these men Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
“Lindbergh, Lindbergh, Lindbergh,” Irene laughed. “That’s all I’ve heard today. We should have gone out to the airfield to watch him land.”
“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked Irene as she scanned the room.
A smile tilted her red-tinted lips. “We mingle and wait for Fitzgerald.”
Several people looked in our direction as cigarette smoke swirled over their heads. They couldn’t possibly know who I was by looking at me—and I wasn’t going to tell them. They would recognize my father’s name as part of the problem with America, but I was rarely in the newspapers. If I kept my identity to myself, my parents would never know I’d been there.
“There you are,” a man said to Irene as he approached. He was probably in his late twenties, handsome, with intelligent eyes and a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.
“Mr. Hemingway,” Irene said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. “I was hoping to see you again.”
This was Ernest Hemingway? My pulse pounded as I tried to remember to breathe.
His gaze slipped to me, and he took me in from head to toe, a curious look in his eyes. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”
