Julia followed little of the melodic drawl. A small effervescence tickled her pulse. She’d met few strangers of interest since returning to New York last month. Here was a woman who intrigued her, not only a writer but a woman apparently blessed with that rarest of combinations: natural elegance, sensuous beauty, and artistic talent.
At the prospect of such an acquaintance, Julia’s spirits began to stretch, her muscles to hum. She felt a shift in her bones, a turning forward toward the new and unknown, toward what mattered. She had work to do yet that evening—she’d come to explore the literary landscape—but to make a new friend too would be a jolly sweet bonus.
A squeal turned their heads. A small man stood on a nearby chair, bouncing on flexed knees as he chanted a poem in a sunlit Jamaican accent. Black curls frothed about his ears, and rouge blazed on his cheeks and lips. His feet were enormous, clad without socks in dusty Cuban sandals. He reminded Julia of the more entertaining bohemians who occasionally held court at the London gallery she’d once known well. With a second squeal Duveen folded the fellow into a one-armed bear hug. He set him on the floor and two-stepped with him off toward the piano, his martini trailing gin across the carpet.
Before Julia could ask Eva more about her novel, a black sleeve, taut and swift as an arrow, thrust abruptly into view between them. Two Negro men in evening clothes joined them. Eva went quiet. She introduced them as Jerome Crockett and Logan Lanier. Poets, she said. Fine poets both. “Very fine.”
Lanier, who looked no older than a schoolboy with smooth, plump cheeks, shook Julia’s hand with polite church manners. His friend, however, fixed her with a wary eye. Crockett was as tall as Eva, but alert posture and a crisp white collar propelled his chin an inch above hers. Close-cut hair covered his head like sculpted black lather. From his lapel smirked a small gold pin bearing three Greek letters: Phi Beta Kappa. A scholar, then. When he dipped his head in mute greeting, Julia stole a peek at his shoes: the room’s lights sparkled back at her in their impeccable shine. She’d half expected to see spats. Had a silver-tipped cane been checked at the door?
Lanier demurred at Eva’s praise. He confessed he was as yet only a humble student of poetry. “Jerome is the true talent in the room,” he said of his older and more somber friend. “Have you heard what they say, Miss Kydd? That one of his poems is like a semester at Yale?”
“No more than a week,” Crockett said. “Even at NYU.”
Lanier clutched his heart in mock injury.
“Jerome won the Gardiner Prize last month,” Eva said.
Crockett’s mouth trembled on the brink of a smile before regaining its gravitas.
“Miss Kydd has a friend who writes detective stories,” Eva told the men. “You know, puzzlers. Like Conan Doyle.”
Crockett’s jaw twitched.
“You know. Sherlock Holmes.” Eva’s face bloomed in a wide smile. “You know!” She straightened his tie with an affectionate cluck and, her profile gleaming like a bright cameo against his dark cheek, kissed him warmly on the mouth.
He breathed something into her ear, slid an arm around her waist, and solemnly asked Julia to excuse them. Eva brushed Julia’s hand and murmured something as they moved away, but Julia was too stunned to catch her words. Watching the couple recede into the party, she felt another jolt of shock travel her spine.
Were Eva Pruitt and Jerome Crockett lovers?
A white woman and a Negro man?
As she watched Crockett’s dark thumb idly circle the nub of Eva’s hip, Julia’s shock changed to fear. Were they mad? To share a dance floor or mingle over martinis was bold enough, but open intimacy? This was America. Negroes were swung from trees for less.
CHAPTER 2
“Are you a book fancier, Miss Kydd?” Logan Lanier asked. He nodded to the Salome still pressed into the folds of Julia’s skirt.
Julia reshelved the book and latched the case’s door. In truth she was a keen lover of books, though as with many bibliophiles, her enthusiasm exceeded a simple pleasure in reading. The clandestine childhood hours she’d spent in her father’s library—his collections of Aldines, printed Horae, the daunting Baskervilles, the anvil-like Kelmscotts, with pages as ornate as Persian rugs—had kindled in her a passion for the textures, colors, and heft of books’ bodies, a love quite unrelated to their contents.
Not waiting for an answer, Lanier’s round face bobbed above his prim white collar. He said he longed to own books, beautiful ones, as much as to write them. Especially modern poetry firsts, when he could afford them. Did she know of Cuala? Julia didn’t much care for the rustic design nostalgia of the Cuala Press—a small handcraft operation run by Yeats’s sisters in Ireland—but yes, she said, she knew it. As a young bookbinding student at Camberwell, she’d once made a portfolio to house a friend’s collection of Cuala broadsides.
Another fellow materialized out of the party. He greeted Lanier and turned to Julia. “I know you,” he said. “The girl with the new press! Julia, right? We met at a Colophon chili-and-poker night. Russell Coates brought you. I thought you went back to London.” He extended a hand and introduced himself as Austen Hurd. “Just Austen. No mister for me.”
Julia
