What do you think, Clyde? Would it work? I think you could get an audience really worked up, thinking about all of the moral angles of the thing. I might try to put it on at the Pelican next year, if I can find a writer. But I’ve just got one problem: I can’t think of how it should end. What choice should the hero make? Does the mobster deserve grace? Does the hero deserve heaven?
Love,
Tammy
P.S. I wrote and tore up about a dozen replies to your last letter, and you should be damn grateful, because I really wanted to tell you exactly where to stick it. If you are really planning on leaving me behind, don’t you dare respond to this letter. I’ll be damned if I let you play me for a fool again.
If you make it back, we are going to write plays together and raise a little army of actors and singers and dancers and, sure, if one of them wants to be a doctor or an engineer, well, there’s no accounting for taste, and don’t you dare die over there, do you hear me, Clyde? I’m here waiting for you, so don’t you dare.
She was drunk when she wrote it, and drunk when she sent it, and spent the next day brutally sober, nursing a hangover and the shakes and a bad case of regret. Mrs. Grundy diagnosed her tactfully with a cold and sent her to bed with mint tea and honey and a heavy bone broth. Pea came in and kept her company. Tammy wanted to resent it, but she held on to her hand like a sick child and breathed.
“Stopped the laudanum, did you?”
“Been sleeping … too much. The cards don’t like it.”
Phyllis nodded thoughtfully, though always before she had treated the cards and Tamara’s role as the oracle as an amusing personal quirk. “And what do they do when they don’t like something?”
“Jokers and suicide kings. They tell me so, Pea. And then I see Victor.”
“I can see why you’d want to avoid that.” Pea lifted the cooling bowl of broth from the sideboard and held a spoon in front of Tammy’s mouth.
“Oh, leave me be.”
“Just drink a little more. You look like Victor’s been sucking the life out of you.”
Tamara took a sip and then another. It felt nicer than she would ever admit out loud. She’d always wanted to be taken care of, and could never trust anyone enough to let them.
“Pea,” she said, “why haven’t you asked me about what happened that night?”
“With Victor and Dev?”
Tamara nodded.
Phyllis put the bowl back on the sideboard and sank down into the pillows beside her. “I thought I already had.”
“But you knew I was lying.”
Phyllis shrugged. “You’ll get around to it when you’re ready. Don’t forget I know you, Tammy.”
“Don’t look at me like that!”
“How am I looking at you?”
“That sly little smile! You think you’re wise just because you’ve seen more than I have? You think that you have the right to judge me? Sure, I’m not perfect, maybe I’m not the girl I always wanted you and Dev to see, but I’m not—I’m not bad.”
She’d tore that smile out of Pea’s eyes, at least. It didn’t make her feel any better.
“But I am, is that what you mean, Tammy?”
She wanted to say yes as emphatically as the ferryman, she wanted to send her best friend all the way down the river. But her heart wouldn’t cooperate. “No—not you … but we’re not the same! I never killed anyone, I never spent decades living on someone else’s blood … I’m not still ordering goddamned hits! We’re not the same, Phyllis.”
“Did I ever say we were?”
Tamara turned away. The cards were beating a tattoo against her temples, a tenderizing mallet on raw meat. They said, Choose, Oracle, or we make the choice for you.
The shakes had mostly gone after two days, but nightmares plagued her. Tamara felt cards bouncing and pinching her in her dreams, demanding her attention like a willful child. She didn’t want to open up that yellowed ivory handkerchief. She didn’t want to read the numbers and feel them inside her head, arranging themselves into patterns that she had intuited from the first moment Aunt Winnie made her cut the deck and lay down a simple set of three. But the cards had to speak and it was her duty to listen, hadn’t it always been?
Aunt Winnie always spoke of responsibility, of the sacred role of the oracle. Tamara had rolled her eyes at the time. She hadn’t wanted to take the cards, or the force behind them, seriously. She had just wanted to be a regular Lawrenceville girl, going to the theater on weekends to see the double feature from the balcony with her friends, ogling the St. Paul’s boys who seemed to her at the time as sophisticated as Parisians. She hadn’t wanted to be marked like Little Sammy, whose life after the dream came down to him had been short and firefly bright. But she couldn’t resist the numbers, even when she tried. The world they opened up was hers, as uncomfortable as it felt sometimes. The more she had accepted the life of the cards, the more she had found what moved her—French philosophers, Irish poets, British dancers, Harlem playwrights, Shakespearean St. Paul’s actors with more ambition than sense—until she found herself no kind of Lawrenceville girl at all, a philosophical exile in her own home. She
