“I’m late to meet Papa Charles,” Memphis lied.
Madame Seraphina’s lips curled into an easy smile that didn’t match the flintiness of her eyes. “Papa Charles is sleepy. If he doesn’t wake soon, the white man will come in and take all that he has built. Rabbits in the garden,” she said, and Memphis didn’t know what she meant.
“I just run the numbers.”
“You just run the numbers,” she mocked and took a sucking breath in through her teeth. “You grew up handsome, I see,” she said, laughing at Memphis’s embarrassment. Then: “I bet you miss your manman. She came to see me once before she passed.”
Memphis’s head shot up. He’d have to be crazy to take on a real Haitian mambo, but he’d had enough taunting. “Don’t talk about my mother. You didn’t know her.”
Madame Seraphina’s shoulders moved just slightly, as if she could barely be bothered to shrug. “There is a weight on your soul. I know. I can see.” Her smile was gone. “Come and let me help you while I can.”
But Memphis was already backing away.
“You’ll come to me one day,” Madame Seraphina called after Memphis as the crow squawked and squawked.
The New Amsterdam Theatre dressing room was a delightful chaos of feathers, sequins, and half-dressed Follies girls pressed close to the mirrors, mouths open in awkward positions as they glued an eyelash into place or lined their peepers with kohl.
When Theta arrived, she found a single red rose on her dressing table. Smiling, she inhaled its spicy sweetness. “Is this for me?”
“Yeah. Special delivery. Oh, you owe me fifty cents. I tipped the boy for you.”
“Thanks, Gloria,” Theta said, handing over the change. Had Memphis sent it? “Where’s the card?”
“Huh. There was one,” Gloria said. “There it is! It fell on the floor.”
Theta spied the small envelope under the makeup table. She picked it up. Miss Theta Knight, it read in neat, curlicued script.
“Who’s your fancy man?” Sally Mae teased. There was a stripe of mean in it.
“Your boyfriend,” Theta shot back, making the other girls laugh.
Theta bit her lip to try to hide her smile as she slid the small card from its cream-colored envelope. In the next second, she uttered a cry.
“Theta? Whatsa matter, honey?” Gloria asked. They were all looking at her.
“Who left this?” Theta whispered.
“I told you, a delivery boy. Kid barely out of short pants. Why?”
Theta didn’t hear the end of it. Nearly upending a stagehand wheeling a rack of Follies finery, she bolted down the hall and burst through the stage door, where her breath escaped in staccato puffs in the icy cold. To her left, cars ambled down the street. To her right was the empty alley. No sign of a delivery boy. The buildings dwarfed her but offered no protection. She felt small and alone. Her hands grew hot. She plunged them into the puddle of rainwater atop a garbage can, melting a bit of the metal.
There had been only four words on the card.
Four words that could tear it all down.
Four words that terrified her.
For Betty—found you.
The country awakens with the dawn.
The citizens rise and wash, shave and brush. They don stockings and dresses, pants, shirts, and suspenders. They button up their need. Affix their aspirations. Tuck histories neatly inside drawers, creating themselves as they go, a rhapsody of reinvention.
In the West, mountains rise like myths. Morning breezes rustle the frost-stiff edges of grass and wheat across the prairies. Cows huff clouds of steam from flaring nostrils and wait for the relief of the farmer’s pail. Rivers bubble with the occasional surprise of a surfacing fish.
Shadow-painted hills play warden to the miners as they trudge toward the shaft’s yawning maw, metal pails clanking against their protective charms—the small cross, the rabbit’s foot, the lock of hair given by a wife—nestled beside company scrip deep in coverall pockets. Lamps stretch on bands around their heads, an illuminated third eye to calm their fears. They load the platform like sailors setting out for a new world, the breaker boys in front, already coughing in anticipation of the dust that fills their small lungs eight hours a day, six days a week. Wives and mothers, their faces sober in the first pink of morning, wave to them with kerchiefs, prayers on their lips in case the charms don’t work, while company guards patrol with clubs to prod the workers and guns to keep the union men at a distance.
From its perch in an iron cage, the canary watches, wary.