“Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?”
“Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.”
“Evangeline Mary O’Neill!” her mother snapped.
“Your mother is secretary of the Zenith Women’s Temperance Society. Did you think about that? Did you think about how it might look if her daughter were found carousing drunk in the streets?”
Evie slid her bruised eyeballs in her mother’s direction. Her mother sat stiff-backed and thin-lipped, her long hair coiled at the nape of her neck. A pair of spectacles—“cheaters,” the flappers called them—sat at the end of her nose. The Fitzgerald women were all petite, blue-eyed, blond, and hopelessly nearsighted.
“Well?” her father thundered. “Do you have something to say?”
“Gee, I hope I won’t need cheaters someday,” Evie muttered.
Evie’s mother responded with a weary sigh. She’d grown smaller and more worn since James’s death, as if that long-ago telegram from the war office had stolen her soul the moment she had opened it.
“You young people seem to treat everything like a joke, don’t you?” Her father was off and running—responsibility, civic duty, acting your age, thinking beyond tomorrow. She knew the refrain well. What Evie needed was a little hair of the dog, but her parents had confiscated her hip flask. It was a swell flask, too—silver, with the initials of Charles Warren etched into it. Good old Charlie, the dear. She’d promised to be his girl. That lasted a week. Charlie was a darling, but also a thudding bore. His idea of petting was to place a hand stiffly on a girl’s chest like a starched doily on some maiden aunt’s side table while pecking, birdlike, at her mouth. Quelle tragédie.
“Evie, are you listening to me?” Her father’s face was grim.
She managed a smile. “Always, Daddy.”
“Why did you say those terrible things about Harold Brodie?”
For the first time, Evie frowned. “He had it coming.”
“You accused him of… of…” Her father’s face colored as he stammered.
“Of knocking up that poor girl?”
“Evangeline!” Her mother gasped.
“Pardon me. ‘Of taking advantage of her and leaving her in the family way.’ ”
“Why couldn’t you be more like…” Her mother trailed off, but Evie could finish the sentence: Why couldn’t you be more like James?
“You mean, dead?” she shot back.
Her mother’s face crumpled, and in that moment, Evie hated herself a little.
“That’s enough, Evangeline,” her father warned.
Evie bowed her throbbing head. “I’m sorry.”
“I think you should know that unless you offer a public apology, the Brodies have threatened to sue for slander.”
“What? I will not apologize!” She stood so quickly that her head doubled its pounding and she had to sit again. “I told the truth.”
“You were playing a game—”
“It wasn’t a game!”
“A game that has gotten you into trouble—”
“Harold Brodie is a louse and a lothario who cheats at cards and has a different girl in his rumble seat every week. That coupe of his is pos-i-tute-ly a petting palace. And he’s a terrible kisser to boot.”
Evie’s parents stared in stunned silence.
“Or so I’ve heard.”
“Can you prove your accusations?” her father pressed.
She couldn’t. Not without telling them her secret, and she couldn’t risk that. “I will not apologize.”
Evie’s mother cleared her throat. “There is another option.”
Evie glanced from her mother to her father and back. “I won’t breeze to military school, either.”
“No military school would have you,” her father muttered. “How would you like to go to New York for a bit, to stay with your Uncle Will?”
“I… ah… as in, Manhattan?”
“We assumed you’d say no to the apology,” her mother said, getting in her last dig. “I spoke to my brother this morning. He would take you.”
He would take you. A burden lifted. An act of charity. Uncle Will must have been defenseless against her mother’s guilt-ladling.
“Just for a few months,” her father continued. “Until this whole situation has sorted itself out.”
New York City. Speakeasies and shopping. Broadway plays and movie palaces. At night, she’d dance at the Cotton Club. Days she’d spend with Mabel Rose, dear old Mabesie, who lived in her uncle Will’s building. She and Evie had met when they were nine and Evie and her mother had gone to New York for a few days. Ever since, the girls had been pen pals. In the last year, Evie’s correspondence had dwindled to a note here and there, though Mabel continued to send letters consistently, mostly about Uncle Will’s handsome assistant, Jericho, who was alternately “painted by the brushstrokes of angels” and “a distant shore upon which I hope to land.” Yes, Mabel needed her. And Evie needed New York. In New York, she could reinvent herself. She could be somebody.