Lilly knew she was raving like some kind of lunatic. She balled her fist in front of her mouth like a stopper in a bottle, unsure of what would come out next: a word, a scream, a sob. How had she been so stupid, to place her faith in Mr. Musgrove? Here in the Tower with its polished floors and bronze doors, its bird’s-eye views and cocktails in the clouds, everything seemed possible. But Lilly knew better—she knew that the world was not so easy. Though it defied logic and everything she had seen in Berlin, Munich, and Barcelona, she had let herself believe that she could escape the inevitable, and that she could rescue Josef as well. Only now did she see what a fool she had been.
Ruby looked away, trying to be polite, trying to offer a little privacy in this suddenly cramped room. She shifted the position of the stapler, moving it away from the box of paper clips. There was a kind of pleasure in bringing order to all this mess, and before this woman made her appearance, Ruby had experienced a mote of satisfaction, a light thrill, each time she ratcheted down the head of the stapler and bound together what had been a sheaf of loose, badly shuffled sheets of paper. But this woman had put a stop to that. She stood in front of Ruby’s desk, hand over her mouth and her eyes burning a hole through the door that still bore Mr. Musgrove’s name.
Ruby wasn’t trying to be difficult—really, she wasn’t—but she had been given a job that would take five girls to sort through, plus one of the other program officers to decode, and then that wiseacre from accounting would have to run the numbers to see if they all added up. Maybe this lady had been promised help and maybe she really did need it. But you know who else needed help? Ruby Kadetsky, that’s who. And yet here was this woman, not three feet away, and Ruby wouldn’t even look at her—wouldn’t exercise the common decency of recognizing the pain of another human being. She was a regular Carole Turner. No, worse. She was a dime-store version who wasn’t even getting love in return for satisfying her blind, selfish heart.
Ruby returned the stapler to its resting place and closed the jacket on the file.
“Ma’am,” she said, and leaned over the desk, as if someone might be eavesdropping or she was about to share a secret. “Can you tell me your name?”
The sound of the girl’s voice helped in some small way. Lilly nodded and cleared her throat. “Lilly Bloch,” she said.
“I have to tell you, Miss Bloch, things around here are nutty today, all thanks to your Mr. Musgrove. Frankly I wouldn’t know who to send you to—it’s that bad.”
Lilly opened her mouth, as if about to speak, but what was there to say?
“I’ll tell you what,” Ruby said. “You come back Monday morning and I’ll have figured out a thing or two. Somewhere in all this mess is your file, and once I find it, I’ll get it into the right hands. And then we’ll just go from there. How does that sound?”
Lilly could only nod. She managed a whispered “Thank you,” then a real one, louder than she had intended, which led to a round of nervous laughter—first from her, then echoed by the girl behind the desk. Lilly reached across the desk and touched the girl’s wrist once, lightly. “You are very kind,” she said.
Ruby smiled. Was that really all it took? She hadn’t promised the woman anything more than a few questions around the office, along with whatever it took for her to dredge her file out of this clerical landfill. She wrote Lilly’s name on a slip of paper and held it up for Lilly to inspect. “Did I get it right?” she asked.
Lilly had always considered her last name to be blunt and inelegant, but this girl’s B was a swirl of liquid curls that formed a four-chambered heart, and the L on her first name was looped like a bow around a finger, a promise not to forget. Josef would laugh at her for being so superstitious, but she needed a sign, and this one would do. “It’s lovely,” Lilly said, her fate now in the hands of this girl who could take a stranger’s name and make it into something beautiful.
FORDHAM HEIGHTS
MARTIN DEMPSEY HAD DONE it. He had really done it this time. And he had told the story a dozen times or more, in bars from Fifty-Second to 140th Street, to men who were drawn to his madman’s glow—his flashing eyes! his jet-black hair!—and who stood him round after round of drinks to hear every detail. Martin had just walked out on Chester Kingsley. He had taken his spot in a big band that was heard weekly on the National Broadcasting Company and tossed it right back in Chester’s jowly roast beef of a face.
The final straw was a new addition to the band’s set list—Chester’s own arrangement of Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” cleaned up and toned down for the geriatric crowd that filled the lounge at the Kensington Hotel, where the Chester Kingsley Orchestra was the reigning house band. Martin had heard the song from Basie himself last summer at the Famous Door, and he had immediately broken his promise to Rosemary—no more record albums until next month’s payday—and snatched up a fresh pressing of the single. “One O’Clock Jump” was a shiny locomotive powered by piano, brass, and drums, but in Chester’s hands it had all the glamour of an uptown bus. Martin stopped playing his clarinet before the band was even four bars into the number, and when Chester shot him a look, Martin took his instrument and walked off the bandstand. Not only mid-set, but midsong.
Now it was six o’clock in the morning and Martin’s head buzzed with gin and cigarettes and the hot jazz he had used to flush the last traces of sweet dance music out of his head. Sweet—that’s what they called the music that Chester played, but there was no truth in that. The music was stale, lifeless; it had the sweetness of a rose that had wilted and begun to molder. He couldn’t blame the twilight-years crowd, but what baffled him were the younger people who hadn’t gotten the message that sweet had gone the way of the Charleston. They lived in the world capital of hot jazz, the kingdom of the Lindy Hop! It had been more than a year since Benny Goodman had brought jazz to Carnegie Hall. Chick Webb had been demolishing all comers at the Savoy Ballroom for almost five years; band to band with Goodman, Ellington, and Basie—and Webb had always come out on top.
This was the music everyone was screaming for; everyone, it seemed, except the fresh-faced squares and the gout-riddled couples who flocked to hear Chester Kingsley’s band make good on its motto: The Sweetest Sounds You Ever Did Hear. Through every number, Chester smiled and waved his baton like a hypnotist, further somnambulizing a crowd that was already sleepwalking through the golden age of swing.