Evie laughed in spite of herself. “All right, then. You with your keen observations—what, exactly, do you find special about me?” she asked coyly, glancing up at him through her lashes the way she’d seen Colleen Moore do in We Moderns.
“There’s just something about you,” he said without really saying anything at all, which disappointed her. Sam rested his hand on the wall above her head, leaning closer. Evie’s stomach fluttered. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her way around the fellas, but this was a New York City fella. She didn’t want to make a scene and come off as a complete rube. She was a girl who could take care of herself. Besides, if her parents heard about this, they’d yank her straight back to Ohio.
Instead, Evie looped under the handsome Sam Lloyd’s arm and snatched her valise back. “I’m afraid I have to go now. I believe I see the, um, top nun going into the ladies’ lounge.”
“Top nun? Do you mean the Mother Superior?”
“And how! Sister… Sister, um…”
“Sister Benito Mussolini Fascisti?”
“Exactly!”
Sam Lloyd smirked. “Benito Mussolini is prime minister of Italy. And a fascist.”
“I knew that,” Evie said, her cheeks flushing.
“Of course you did.”
“Well…” Evie stood uncertainly for a few seconds. She stuck out her hand for a shake. With a smirk, Sam Lloyd drew her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. She heard the shoe-shine men chuckling as she pulled away, red-faced and disoriented. Should she slap him? He deserved a slap. But was that what sophisticated Manhattan moderns did? Or did they shrug it off like an old joke they were too tired to laugh at?
“You can’t blame a fella for kissing the prettiest girl in New York, can you, sister?” Sam’s grin was anything but apologetic.
Evie brought up her knee quickly and decisively, and he dropped to the floor like a grain sack. “You can’t blame a girl for her quick reflexes now, can you, pal?”
She turned and hurried toward the exit. In a pained voice, Sam Lloyd called after her: “Best of luck to the nuns. The good sisters of St. Mary’s don’t know what they’re in for!”
Evie wiped the kiss from her mouth with the back of her hand and pushed her way out onto Eighth Avenue, but when she saw the majesty of the city, all thoughts of Sam Lloyd were forgotten. A trolley jostled down the center of the avenue on steel tracks. Motorcars swerved around the throngs of people and one another with the furious grace of a corps de ballet. She craned her neck to take in the full view. Far above the busy streets, men balanced daringly on beams of steel, erecting new buildings like the ones whose tops already pierced the clouds, as if even the sky couldn’t hold back the ambition of their spires. A sleek dirigible sailed past, a smear of silver in the blue. It was like a dreamscape that could change in the blink of an eye. A taxi careened to the corner and Evie got inside.
“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asked, flipping his meter on.
“The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, please.”
“Oh. The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies.” The cabbie chuckled. “Good thing you’re goin’ to see it while you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say the place is in arrears on its taxes. The city’s had its sights set on that spot for years. They want to put some apartment buildings there.”
“Oh, dear.” Evie examined the photograph her mother had given her. It was a picture of Uncle Will—tall, lanky, fair-haired—standing in front of the museum, a grand Victorian mansion complete with turrets and stained-glass windows and bordered by a wrought-iron fence.
“Can’t happen soon enough, if you ask me. That place makes people uncomfortable—all those crazy objects s’posed to be fulla hocus-pocus.”
Objects. Magic. Evie drummed her fingers against the door.
“You know about the fella that runs the place, don’t ya?”
Evie stopped drumming. “What do you mean?”
“Odd fella. He was a conscie.”
“A what?”
“Conscientious objector,” the cabbie said, spitting the words out like poison. “During the war. Refused to fight.” He shook his head. “I hear he might be one of them Bolsheviks, too.”
“Well, if so, he never mentioned it to me,” Evie said, pulling the wrinkles from her glove.
The cabbie caught her eye in the mirror. “You know him? What’s a nice girl like you doing with a fella like that?”