Julia heard anxiety beneath the usual protest. It was easy to forget that Christophine was nearly forty. The prospect of a clean slate, the fresh horizons that so energized Julia, might loom as a frightening uncertainty to her. Christophine had always been one to avoid surprises, reduce risks. She was the one who made careful arrangements, ensured the larder was stocked, watched the clock when appointments loomed. She valued stability, even predictability. Her sewing came out only when the household was in order. No wonder the idea of forgoing her easy and familiar job to instead take in work, especially work that depended on taste and fashion, seemed a mad, unnecessary plunge.
Julia jiggled her ankle. “Of course you’ll have a home with me—forever, I hope. Always. But we both made this move to see if something new and wonderful could happen. You might just try it, like I’m trying to make something of Capriole. It could be better, Fee. You could take only as much work as you’d like, and for good money. I’d insist you charge not a penny less than what I paid Lila.”
As she spoke, a rare thing happened. Christophine’s busy hands slowed, then lay lax in her lap. Fingers stalled inside the forgotten hat, her gaze softened to a smudge. It meant she was far away in her mind, thinking hard, but whether she was looking back or looking forward, Julia could not tell.
CHAPTER 7
“Swish it like there’s no tomorrow, Mrs. Clark!” Standing well clear of his guest’s flying heels, Pablo Duveen assessed the whisk of her backside. “All elbows and feet. Those knees will take care of themselves. That’s it. Now you’ve got it. Faster! Let’s hear those tassels hum.” Jacket off, cuffs dangling loose, Duveen stood panting as his pupil pumped her arms and legs in a commotion of crepe de chine and swirling strands of twisted silk.
A week had passed since the party in Liveright’s offices. Julia gripped her drink and leaned away from the Charleston lesson gathering force on the oriental rug in Duveen’s apartment. She and Austen sat on a narrow green velvet sofa pushed to one edge of the large rug, across from Max Clark, the other half of the tourist couple from San Francisco. Short and muscular, with gray temples and eyes the color of stone, Max looked at least twenty years older than his wife, Dolly. He’d waved off Duveen’s fulsome introduction and said he was in forest products.
“Let’s go.” Duveen grabbed Dolly’s hand, spun her around, and matched her pace, eight limbs akimbo. They pounded and flailed, too intent to speak, until the phonograph record ended in a scratchy whine. Duveen collapsed into a smoking chair.
Dolly fell onto the Chesterfield sofa, bouncing against her husband. Her mauve dress was an expensive confection of beads and tiered fringe, cut low in both front and back. Without a flattening bandeau, her plump cleavage jiggled about with unfashionable freedom. Alerted by the dip of Julia’s eyes, she tugged her bodice back into place. “Just wait’ll my friends see this. They’ll think I picked up a touch of something colored, like measles, only fun.” She flopped back, heels sprawled out across the rug, fanny in danger of following them with a thud onto the floor.
Duveen mopped at his forehead, gasps hissing through his teeth. “Your turn next, Miss Kydd? I’m an excellent teacher. Learned it straight from a Negro myself.”
Julia thanked him but declined. Six years of ballet study—indifferently pursued and happily abandoned—had ruined her taste for anything so riotous. She liked the more vigorous dance steps but seldom entered the sweaty fray herself.
Duveen placed a different record on the phonograph, releasing the mournful wails of a blues ballad. He refreshed the Clarks’ drinks while the eerie keening filled the room.
“Mamie Smith,” he said. “‘Crazy Blues,’ the first big race record. I’m learning everything I can about Negroes these days—I’ll be a professor of all things Ethiop soon, and even then it won’t be enough.” He took a gulp of his gin. “I’m quite addicted.”
Julia imagined Eva’s beautiful eyes rolling heavenward. Dolly’s remark was ludicrous enough, but Pablo’s zeal reminded Julia of the most extreme bibliophiles who loved books so much they called their favorite volumes mistresses and their libraries seraglios. Such outsize obsession was skin crawling enough for inanimate objects, but Duveen was extolling the supposed attributes of an entire swath of humanity. In idolizing all Negroes, he seemed not to truly know a single one.
Dolly asked, “What got you so interested in coloreds, Mr. Duveen?”
“Pablo,” he reminded her. He rose and searched along the lower shelves of the bookcase. “I’ve known them all my life, naturally, but I never gave them much thought until last fall, when I read the most extraordinary book. Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint. Do you know it?”
He pulled out a book bound in purple cloth with orange-and-turquoise artwork stamped on its front board and spine. Its bumped corners were badly frayed. “I’ve badgered so many friends about it that my copy doesn’t look like much anymore,” he said with a wink at Julia as he handed it to Dolly, “but this book showed me a new kind of Negro. It’s about a colored physician in the South, facing affreux obstacles and injustices. Sensational stuff—you must read it.”
Dolly turned it front to back. She stared at its title page as if it were in Greek.
“Turns out the author lives up in Harlem, so I had to meet him straightaway. To my amazement the man can chat as easily about Proust or Debussy as any Yale man. He and his wife gave the most elegant tea party for me, where I met a crowd of Negroes every bit as intelligent and cultured as you or I. All the talk about natural Nordic superiority is sheer horsefeathers—as anyone would see if they spent an hour with these people.
“But here’s the remarkable thing. I also rediscovered Harlem. Just
