'Round Midnight
Laura McBride
For my mom
JUNE
The one who fell in love
MARCH 11, 1960
In the Midnight Room
Coming in the casino’s main entry, the Midnight Room was on the right. A scantily clad ingénue waving a golden star in front of her torso—its two jeweled points artfully covering the money bits—adorned the neon marquee above the door. Below, a man in black tie greeted those lucky enough to have a ticket, and escorted the ones who slipped him enough cash to the better seats in the room.
It was a straightforward showroom: a hundred-foot stage, with a narrow apron, about four feet above the main floor. There were twenty or so small round tables, and chairs with red velvet seats. Along the back wall were a row of booths, higher even than the stage, and the velvet there was closer to maroon, and the stained glass lamps cast a warm but not revealing glow on the table where the drinks would sit. The sound system was excellent, and the lighting was standard, and there was room for a pretty good-sized band on the stage if someone wanted it.
That night, there was a man playing the piano, another playing the sax, and a third on the drums. When the curtain parted in the back, a top light rotated to catch the singer’s face. He’d been doing this awhile; he swung to the light intuitively and let it accent the plane of his cheekbone, the hollow of his eye, the curve of his lip.
He was thinking he might never play there again.
He knew what was coming later.
And when he saw her, sitting at the back, at the booth she always sat in—still he was startled, it had been a long time, she had not said she was coming—he signaled to the band to quit playing. He thought he might say something, just say it, put it out there, but in that split second in which he would have had to decide what to say, in which he would have had to find the courage to say it, he suddenly remembered the first time he’d seen her.
He’d had no idea who she was. He was new in town, didn’t know anyone at all. And of course, she was the only white woman. She’d looked up—damn, she was good-looking—and the horn player had sounded a note, and he’d swung his hip, just a little, instinctively, and her breath had caught—he’d actually seen that; he’d never forgotten it—and right that minute, maybe he’d fallen in love.
So tonight, four years later, when it was probably the last time he would ever sing for her, he lifted his finger to Jamie, who played the sax, and when the note sounded, he closed his eyes and remembered the rotten little bar, the white woman’s face, the flick of his hip, and he let his body take over, repeated the one instant of that fateful night, and as he did so, he remembered, he thought of her face, the intake of her breath. He remembered, even though, of course she would not.
1
To celebrate victory in Europe, June Stein dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
A few months earlier, she had bought an eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder on a day trip to the city—snuck into the shop while her mother was choosing a hat next door—and spent the spring flicking ashes on the track as she smoked behind the stairs of the boy’s gym. In April she wore stockings to school, and bent over the water fountain to highlight the brown seams running along the backs of her legs. Leon Kronenberg said he had touched her breast. When Mr. Sawyer came back from the summer holidays with a goatee, June Stein breathed in, licked her lips, and shuddered.
She was bad for the neighborhood.
Things happened to other girls because of June Stein.
When she married Walter Kohn at nineteen, most people figured she was pregnant. June Stein would get her due. She’d be stuck in Clinton Hill for life; Walter Kohn was going to be bald in three years, like his father and his uncle Mort.
But at twenty, June Stein disappeared.
She was gone for six months.
When she came back, Walter Kohn had become something of a catch. People thought it was wrong that his wife had left him. They said she’d gone to Reno, gotten a divorce, that she’d never been pregnant, she had just wanted to have sex, and now that she’d had it, now that she’d used Walter Kohn—who did have beautiful blond hair and the bluest eyes—she’d gone and left him, and who knows what man she might try to take up with next.
June Stein returned a pariah.
It was a role she had cherished, but at twenty-one, she found it less amusing.
She had not gone to Reno.
She had gone to Las Vegas, and the lights and the shows and the desert air, the dust and the heat and the way one felt alone in the universe, were more appealing in memory than they had been when she lived them. There had been only a handful of Jews in town, and none she found interesting, so while she was waiting for the divorce, she hung around a different crowd: locals mostly, born and raised Nevadans, and some that had come in for the gambling boon. And they rose in stature after she moved back to her parents’ house, after even her friends expressed sympathy for Walter Kohn—who had taken the newspaper into the bathroom with him each morning—and there was the way her mother looked at her in the evenings, and the way her father kept asking if she would like to take a stenography course. One day June Stein packed a suitcase, including the eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder, called a taxi, and flew all night from Newark to Las Vegas.
She didn’t even leave a note.
But that was June Stein.
Prettiest girl in Clinton Hill.
And the only one who ever dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
2
“June, you shouldn’t be on that ladder. You look like you’re going to fall right off.”
“Don’t you think I would bounce if I did?”
Del laughed.
“I mean it. Get down. What are you doing up there anyway?”
“There’s one of those atomic bomb favors in this chandelier. You can see it from that side of the room. It’s been bothering me for a week.”
“Well, tell Mack to take it down. Why would you climb on a ladder when you’re eight months pregnant?”
“I did ask Mack. Three days ago. He really doesn’t have time. And I’m bored to death. Even the baby’s bored. He’s been kicking me like a trucker.”
“A trucker? I don’t think our daughter’s going to be a trucker.”
“Well, then, our daughter’s going to be dancing with the Follies down the road.”
June jumped backward to the ground from the second rung of the ladder. She had meant it as a graceful note, but her weight was unwieldy, she landed on the side of her foot, and caught herself awkwardly before she could fall.
Del darted forward, and June grinned.
“I’m fine. Maybe it’ll get labor started.”