That crooked smile. “I bet your real question is why,” he said. “Everybody knows there’s no money in books, and folks are starting to roll in it on Wall Street. Easy. I was bored. Screaming bored. I think I have a pretty good nose for books. Pop thought I was daft, but he let me cash in what my mother left me to buy a job with Horace.
“He’s always short of cash,” he explained. “He stays afloat by taking in what he calls college boys like me with more money than patience. If we put twenty grand into the coffers, voilà, we get a fancy title and an office where we can do as little as we please. The less the better. I drive him crazy because I want to do more than flirt with the secretaries, and he’d rather I didn’t muck about. So I stay out of his way but watch like a hawk to see how he does it. Old Horace really knows his onions when it comes to books.”
Julia sipped her soup. “He’d better watch his back.”
Austen laughed. “I’m not after his job. I want to start my own imprint someday, like you, only more in the trade. I think there’s a real market opening up for limited editions, but Horace won’t give it a try, except for occasional esoterica. Blue limericks in ten-dollar bindings, that’s it. Anonymous authors too. Grievously underpaid. All the money goes to the glamorous ones like Eva Pruitt.”
Julia wondered again how Eva was faring. If anyone at the Plaza detected the ruse, would they challenge her? Julia suspected Pablo’s regular patronage might be enough to forestall a scene. Yet he’d relish the stunt regardless—he had nothing to lose. Should disaster strike, he could protest in noble indignation; Eva would bear all the humiliation. Julia felt a sympathetic heat in her cheeks. “I wonder what I’d do,” she said, “if I were asked to leave a restaurant because of my race.”
“You’d live. I’ve been through it.”
Julia lowered her spoon, dumbstruck. Austen? It had not occurred to her. She had to ask. “Are you colored too?”
His face curled in pleasure. After a moment’s thought he said, “Oh, what does it mean to be dark?
“Colored mama, perhaps? Saint-Tropez on a lark?”
He lifted a palm for patience. “He might be a Negro—he don’t care a fig, though—”
She grabbed his wrist. “Stop! Julia withdraws her remark.”
He grinned, eyebrows raised appreciatively. “Colored? Next to Eva, it might seem so. But no. My mother was Jewish, Pop too, more remotely, from one of the murkier Russian provinces. We weren’t religious, though. I remember asking if I could have a bar mitzvah after some older boys said it was a great way to get gifts.”
“What happened?”
“Not a chance, when I found out about the Hebrew. Later I figured out being Jewish mostly works against you. Yale wouldn’t take me, since they already had their quota. Same with Dartmouth and Princeton.” He rolled his eyes. “But then, I was no prize. Luckily Columbia wasn’t so picky.”
Julia nodded. Life in London had taught her plenty about how Jews could be treated. Fortunately, in the more bohemian art circles she frequented, no one made any distinction. In fact, most writers and artists she knew wore their social “flaws” like badges: they were proudly Jewish or Persian or Zoroastrian and so on, and more than a few such distinctions seemed hastily acquired. Julia was merely left handed and nearsighted, minor demerits, but enough.
“After college,” Austen went on, “it’s mostly been little things, like clubs I can’t join. Some high-hat restaurants won’t have me—but I can’t afford them anyway. Nothing too painful. My story’s nothing compared to the race rules and nonsense Negroes face.”
Nonsense was hardly the word. Julia shook her head in protest. “That Billie tonight—what a vicious creature. Imagine hurling such abuse at another person. Literally.”
“Inexcusable,” Austen agreed with a grimace. “Writing is like giving birth for Billie—she screams and curses the whole time. She can’t stand for anyone else to suffer less than she does. Eventually she sweats out a story and passes round cigars, but then someone else’s work is smarter or funnier or more successful, and she hates them for it. Same in the romance department. She’s always going on about what louses men are, or they’re married or swishes. That’s good for a daily pint right there.”
He chased down the last spoonful of soup. “How about you? What’s your story, bean?”
Julia thought for a moment to distill the old narrative. “I’m on my own and have been for years. I have only a vague sense of my father—he owned a shipping line, mostly in South America, but it was sold before I knew anything about it. He died when I was six.”
She frowned at Austen’s consoling murmur. Her father had receded early from her life, well before his death. Even in her earliest memories, Milo had been perennially out, taking meals and passing hours at his clubs. At the rare times when he’d been home, he’d withdrawn to his library and other distant quarters of the old house, far from the rooms where she and Christophine had played. “I hardly knew him,” she said. “My mother died too, when I was thirteen. Struck down by a motorcar in Stockholm.”
Her gaze strayed as she thought of the thunderclap that had dispelled her childhood in one sentence. She could still hear Christophine’s voice splinter at the calamitous news. “She was much younger than my father and infinitely more interesting. I wish I could have known her longer.”
At the look on Austen’s face, she added, “But I had my old nursery maid, Christophine, who still lives
