Vera by Carol Edgarian (year 7 reading list TXT) 📕

Thieves, I thought. Schmitz, you ought to write what you know: cathouses and con men and singers and thieves.

Voile

Here in the home, in what they call the common room, there are sheer voile curtains in the windows. I can’t see out, just the vague outline of green and cars. And no one can see in, but for a nurse’s passing shadow across the halo of the lamp. My memory is like that now. I can see my hand. I can see the sheers. They lead me to the sheers in the parlor windows of the gold house.

All day the nurses come and go. They speak of me, over me. They are kind and unkind, as humans always are, no two exactly alike.

I can’t recall the faces of my children, not as they are in recent years, but I can see them small. I can smell their sweetness as babies; each of the three had a unique, delicious scent. Then I was always in a hurry. Then they played Chopin, badly. In the parlor of that grand gold house, they ran up and down the staircases hollering.

Pie and Bobby made their new life, and so I made mine.

Years later, when I did marry Hutchinson, he would ask me some nights to wear a bit of silk. And I would. I’d put on a little flirty something so he could peel it off me. Ah, Hutch and I had some good, good times. He was bawdy, not tender like Bobby, and that’s exactly what I needed. To laugh ha-ha-ha. Hutch died too young. Leaving me with three kids under the age of seven. In that gold house.

My three husbands were all good men, though none I was so crazy in love with as Bobby. Hutch died in a car wreck. Walt had a heart attack. I divorced Joe. Each time, even when I was the one doing the leaving, the sorrow nearly broke me. Each time, my heart was a boodle box with a lock. But there is something in surviving, I can say that, and in knowing one can.

I’ve always found it to be a compelling mystery when two unlikely souls collide. What did Bobby Del Monte see in that wild-haired girl with the furious scowl? I do not wonder what he saw in Pie.

I never wished to be a squirrel with that money. Money from then on was just a tool—no more, no less. There was enough to share. That didn’t make the money clean, but it made what passed from me to mine something more.

I had to be very careful, should the police come calling. Tan was the only person I trusted—Tan, after all. The rest of them believed what they saw: I sold the three parcels of The Rose and bought two cheaper plots—one nearby and the other in Chinatown. Both bordered the trolleys.

I paid the taxes and the mortgage, and I took care of the Haj.

Then, at my urging, Tan approached Look Tin Eli, a Chinese banker who was much in the news those days. Tin Eli had a vision for a new Chinatown that would be a tourist destination. Tan asked him for a loan to build a restaurant on our parcel on Clay Street. Tan’s China Empress with its pagoda and a thirty-foot stone dragon guarding the entrance and a menu of spicy, deliciously prepared meats became an instant hit.

In the beginning, Tan and I shared the expenses and profits on the place in Chinatown, as was our custom, but over time, he took over the whole thing. He did more with it than anyone could have done. He stuck, ol’ Tan. He stuck with me, and I with him. The birth records in Chinatown burned in the fire, and no one could prove Tan wasn’t American-born; he could own property and no one could stop him. He became a very rich man. His one sorrow was Lifang. Like Rose, Lifang left and never looked back.

Cap and Valentine ran the jazz hall on what became known as Terrific Street. They were my partners, but didn’t turn tricks. That was my firm rule. No tricks. I’m not opposed to a woman doing what she will with her body, but until the world views men and women as true equals—something I won’t live to see—the money exchanged isn’t fine with me, not if I’m the second- or thirdhand party benefiting. It isn’t fine with me.

We called our new place the Rogue and we offered dancing—the Texas Tommy and the Turkey Trot were big hits—and jazz. Sophie Tucker and Jelly Roll Morton were regulars.

As for Bobby and Pie? Pie didn’t get a rich man, but she got Bobby, and a place where she mattered, at the Ladies’ Protection. She and Bobby had the grace to elope. Bobby took them south to Carmel, to the mission down there, where they said their vows. They stayed for two weeks and I had to hear them in my mind’s eye walking by the sea, laughing. I had to imagine what they were doing in bed at night. I had to feel them doing it. When they came back, I had it so bad I had to disappear. I walked downtown and looked over my dirt. I counted my money, took it in stacks to the office of an architect, and to the surveyor, and to the bank and the tax man. Every day I started work early and kept at it long after dark.

In bed I closed my eyes and imagined Bobby brushing Pie’s hair and I thought, Oh God, oh God, why?

But I’d missed my chance. When you’re young, you think time is like water—you can put your hand in at will and swirl it around. But time isn’t like water. Time is like a quake: irrevocable and crushing. At best you can hope to ride it till it stops.

At my lowest ebb, Alma asked AB to