Julia had always supposed this stemmed from their differing tastes. Christophine would rather chew nails than compose a colophon in ten-point type, just as Julia would slump in clumsy confusion at one of Christophine’s daylong quilting parties. Christophine relished Sundays with her West Indian church friends, while Julia preferred to play at the typecases with drop caps and letterspacing and new combinations of fleurons. These differences seemed straightforward, as natural and benign as those between Methodists and Anglicans or cat fanciers and dog owners. She and Christophine simply chose their separate pleasures. Or so Julia had always thought.
Eva watched as Julia explored her naivete with growing chagrin. “It is tempting to pass, and terribly convenient,” she said, with a note of weary patience. Julia wondered how often she’d tried to explain these things to other oblivious Nordics. “But it’s lonely too. You have to leave your colored friends behind, yet you don’t dare cross over until you’ve thought up a new past and family for yourself. That’s risky and exhausting. I’m not clever or careful enough for it. When I pass, it’s only to fool a waiter or clerk, just to buy a pair of stockings and use a clean toilet. My fay friends”—she hesitated before continuing quietly—“like you, all know what I am.”
Friends. There was the rub. Friends. By every measure of taste and style, she and Eva Pruitt were naturally suited to be good friends. She had no doubt they would enjoy talking for hours over lunch at Sherry’s, visiting the salons, or strolling the shops along Fifth Avenue. Julia would relish Eva’s company at a gala evening at the Met or poetry recital in the back rooms of the Swetnam Galleries.
But none of that was possible unless Eva passed. Negroes were not welcome at any of those places. Most of Julia’s public life (How did she not think of this every day?) transpired in places and events where the only Negroes were usually silent, deferential employees. No matter how knowledgeable, talented, cultured, or wealthy Eva was, race limited her movements.
As a woman Julia knew something of such bitter exclusion, barred as she was from attending Harvard or Yale, from lunching weekdays at the Plaza, and from a myriad of other activities. Worst of all, she could never hope to join the Grolier Club. To its members and other serious bibliophiles she dared to consider her peers, she was a lady fine printer, a female book collector—and as such barred by definition from their inner sanctum. These policies were justified as self-evident: women lacked the capacity to appreciate, much less achieve, the loftiest reaches of culture and commerce, and their presence would disrupt the established order of things. The same reasons—and worse—were used to bar Negroes. But Julia’s frustrations were, yet again, nothing compared to all that was closed to Eva on double the grounds.
If Eva noticed the turmoil beneath the blue georgette frock bent over the basin, she gave no sign of it. She savored a mouthful of champagne. “I can pass, easily,” she reflected, “but I’d rather not. I always feel a bit disloyal to the race.”
“What do you mean?” Julia said, grateful to refocus. “Other Negroes are offended?”
“Mmmm,” Eva murmured into her glass. “It’s more than that. I’m not ashamed of my family or my friends. Just because I can walk away from them doesn’t mean I ever would.” Her tone shifted. “Never. Especially now. It’s Jerome I think about now.”
Julia glanced in the mirror. Eva had leaned a shoulder into the cushion and was studying the bubbles in her glass as she spun it.
“I’m sorry he was rude last night,” she said. “He wasn’t comfortable. People think he’s snooty, but he deserves to be proud. He doesn’t like Pablo’s parties. He doesn’t like it when Negroes are paraded about. That’s what he calls it.”
Julia looked down at her stilled hands, pressed into a meager froth of soap. Had it been a parade? Was her pleasure last evening merely the thrill of a spectacle? Was the party no more than some kind of human zoo, where if you ventured close enough, the bars seemed to disappear but of course remained? The idea shamed her. She stared at the dress in her hands. What on earth was she doing? She’d never laundered a garment in her life. She knew nothing of the chemistry of fabric and water and soap. Perhaps this was futile or, worse, destructive.
“How did you come to New York, Eva?” It was the first benign thing she could think of. She might not know how to clean Eva’s frock, but she could try to get it dry again. She refolded the towel to a dry patch.
Eva’s swirling slowed. A clamor of horns and shouting drivers over on Broadway drifted into the room while she drew in her cheeks, pensive, silent. The interval grew so long that Julia was startled at her abrupt words: “Mother and Ella died after the war, from the influenza. This seemed as good a place to go as any.”
She stifled a cough with a long swallow. “I’d done well in school. I thought I could work in a library or an office, someplace clean, respectable. Naturally I knew no colored girl, no matter how light she is, can work with white girls unless she’s passing. But colored bosses wouldn’t hire me either—the darker girls would call me hincty, think I’d get special favors, that sort of thing. Finally someone told me about a job for light girls like me—in one of the new nightclubs. I was desperate. I couldn’t afford to be proud, so I went to see about it.”
She coughed again. “And that’s how I
