33
After spending the morning in the bathroom relieving herself of her dinner from the night before, Samantha spent the rest of the day of the performance with the other women in a brownstone hair salon in the East Eighties getting her hair set in a Marcel wave and a lesson in 1920s cosmetic application. Vicky had arranged everything. The women, who were to play gangsters’ girlfriends, cigarette girls, and waitresses were happy and giggly and excited. Only Sam was subdued as she sat under a dryer and flipped through the latest issue of New York Woman.
Back at Mike’s house there was no peace to be found, no quiet corner where she could sit and think about the approaching evening, for the house was the headquarters for everything that had to be done. It had come about naturally that Pat Taggert would become the crew boss, as she called herself. “You raise a dozen kids and see if you ever think anything else in life is difficult,” she said to Sam.
One bedroom was a last-minute fitting room, another the makeup room, where Vicky had a couple of experts helping the women apply the cosmetics. Two other rooms were briefing rooms, one headed by Mike’s father as he informed his players what they were to do. When Ian saw Sam standing in the doorway, without a smile, he shut the door in her face.
In the late afternoon, Samantha escaped to a corner of the garden to try to be by herself. She couldn’t explain how she felt: calm but agitated, excited but tranquil. She wished Mike were with her, but he was away from
the house, doing things he wouldn’t tell her about.
When Kane’s boys suddenly appeared before her, storybooks in their hands, she looked up and smiled at their father in gratitude. Pulling the heavy boys onto her lap, she began to read to them about Curious George.
It was evening when Vicky told her it was time to go to Jubilee’s Place and get ready for the show. Kissing the boys goodnight, wishing she didn’t have to leave them, Samantha went outside to the waiting car and started the drive north to Harlem.
In the previous weeks when everyone had been working, while Sam had been rehearsing with Ornette, no one had allowed her to see the renovation of Jubilee’s club. Now, slipping in the back door of the stage entrance, she silently moved away from Vicky and walked to the front, where she stepped into a shadow, hidden from view so she could watch what was going on.
Jeanne had done a breathtaking job on the club. It looked like something straight out of the Art Deco period, which was the hottest, latest way of decorating in 1928. Everything was turquoise and silver, the dance floor in front of the band looking as though it had been appliqued with silver leaf. Behind the dance floor were tiny tables, what looked to be a hundred of them, each covered with long turquoise cloths and a little lamp in the center of each table.
On a dais was the band, with Ornette looking fiercely handsome in his tuxedo as he talked to his musicians, his beloved trumpet in his hand, and the sight of him made Sam smile. Under Ornette’s façade of anger, he was a sweetheart, a perfectionist who loved music more than life, but a man who was afraid to show his soft inner parts. Now he was warming up his orchestra with a jazzy little number, and Sam knew he’d soon start on the blues. In 1928, during the very happy, rich time before the stock market crash, the country was wild for the blues, but after the crash, people only wanted cheerful songs, such as “Happy Days Are Here Again.” As a result, singers such as Bessie Smith went out of favor.
As Samantha watched from her shadowy hiding place, she saw people begin to enter the club, laughing, the women beautifully, exquisitely dressed in long gowns. The 1920s fashions today might look shapeless, but there was so little to them that they showed off everything a woman had. When a woman walked, the draping fabrics swayed and clung to her in a very sexy way.
Two pretty young women came in together, their gangster men behind them, the men looking tough and complacent, smug even.
Watching them, Samantha moved farther back into the shadows so they wouldn’t see her, for she was beginning to feel as though she were an anachronism in her slacks and casual blouse. Gradually, the club was beginning to fill up, and the more people who entered, the more Samantha felt as though she had stumbled into a time warp, for all the people and their surroundings were part of 1928.
When Mike entered the room, Sam pressed herself back against the wall as she watched him move about the club, obviously very familiar with it. Maybe she should have been jealous, for Mike flirted with every female in the place, but she wasn’t, because this man didn’t seem like her Mike; this man was Michael Ransome. This Mike walked differently in his beautifully cut tuxedo, and he used his good looks to advantage.
Samantha watched Mike go to one tootsie—the name perfectly suited the woman: too much makeup, movements too silly, a giggle that could be heard in Peoria, and, frankly, to Samantha’s eye, too much breast—and ask her to dance. With a squeal of delight, the woman stood, actually, she wiggled into an upright stance, managing to make all the excessive parts of her jiggle. Before Mike took the hand she was offering to him, he looked to the man sitting across the little table for permission. The man had a fat belly that he’d encased in a spectacularly tasteless vest of black and yellow plaid. Looking over his belly, he gave a superior nod to Mike, as though he were a king granting a request to a subject. It always amazed Samantha that a person could feel superior because he or she was a criminal, as though the person had accomplished something that had meaning in life.
Escorting the woman to the silver dance floor, under lights so soft they would make the Wicked Witch look good, Mike took the woman in his arms and led her in a tango. Startled, for a moment Samantha held her breath, for she’d just discovered another of Mike’s lies. He’d said he wasn’t any good on a dance floor, at least not for anything except holding a girl tight and rubbing together, but as Sam watched him, she saw that he was a dream of a dancer. With as much muscle as he had at his disposal, he could lead a woman who was a less than perfect dancer in a dip; he could turn her when she was supposed to turn. Mike was even able to make the bimbo in his arms look as though she could dance.
When the tango was over, Mike led the floozy back to her gangster. After looking at him for permission, Mike kissed the back of the woman’s hand.
“Hey, kid!” the gangster said as he imperiously motioned for Mike to come to him.
With no sign of what he must be feeling at such an autocratic command, Mike went to the man who then stuffed a ten-dollar bill in Mike’s jacket pocket.
Samantha had to catch herself, for she was about to step forward into the light. How dare that two-bit nobody whose only claim to fame was that he’d engaged in illegal activities treat Mike like that!
“Are you ready?”
Startled, Samantha turned to see Vicky, who was wearing a lovely, slinky dress of blue satin, white feathers sticking up at the back of her head, a triple band of what Samantha had no doubt were real diamonds about her forehead. “Yes, I’m ready,” Sam answered softly.
Following Vicky back to the dressing room, Samantha knew that with each passing minute, she was beginning to lose touch with reality. When Vicky opened the door, Sam was sure she was no longer in the nineties. Daphne and the other women were in various stages of undress; there were clothes strewn everywhere in front of a long, garishly lit, mirror-backed counter that held countless dirty bottles and pots of makeup.
“Lila?” Samantha whispered.
“Yeah, honey?” Daphne/Lila said, then turned to look Sam up and down. “You better get ready. You’re on in no time flat.” Bending forward, Lila whispered. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint Mike on the last night.”
As though she’d been kicked in the stomach, Samantha drew in her breath. Lila wasn’t supposed to know that this was Maxie’s last night to sing in Jubilee’s club.
Looking over her shoulder at the other girls, Lila whispered, “Don’t worry, not one of them is going to tell.”
Maxie—no, Samantha—nodded.
“Your dress,” Vicky said, and when Sam turned, across Vicky’s arms was Maxie’s dress. It wasn’t a reproduction as first planned, but the original dress. Mike had explained that it would have cost too much to reproduce the dress, so Jilly had contacted the Costume Society of America and through them had found a conservator who could clean the dress properly.