The crowd gave a boisterous cheer.
New Negro voice? Harlem angel?
A second shock joined the first as Julia tardily raised her glass. Eva Pruitt was colored?
Lanier emptied his champagne in a single gulp. “To Eva,” he muttered. “Poor fool.”
Even Austen was speechless at this sour dismissal of his friend’s triumph.
“I’m sorry,” Lanier said quickly. “I wish her well, of course. It’s just that she may be in over her head.”
At Julia’s confusion he went on. “Don’t you know? Eva’s been stoking rumors about that book for months. Pablo’s been mad to get it for Goldsmith.”
“Pablo wants Arthur to champion Negro writers,” Austen said. “You heard him. He says it’s the coming thing. Horace—Liveright, my boss—wanted Eva’s book too, though I can’t see why.”
“Why do you say that?” Julia protested. “It must be very good if both Liveright and Goldsmith are keen for it.”
“It may be terrific. I only meant we never saw more than a few pages. She floated a teaser, is all. Pablo claims he’s seen the whole thing, but I’m not sure I believe him. Everyone else got only a couple of chapters. She’s playing coy, whipping up interest and plenty of drama, but it’s a dangerous game.”
“Dangerous?” The only threat Julia could see was to Eva’s exquisite dress, being tugged and pawed in the clamor of so many trying to congratulate her at once.
Lanier took a drink from a passing tray. “She won’t say much, except that her book packs a wallop—dirty doings revealed, sleazy scandals, that sort of thing. Everyone assumes it’s about her life singing at Carlotta’s.”
“She’s a singer too?” Julia exclaimed.
“Didn’t you know? This year’s sensation.”
“I hear she’s hidden the manuscript,” said Austen.
“Hidden?” Julia wondered at this further hint of melodrama. “That seems drastic.” In her experience novel manuscripts were hardly fare for cloaks and daggers. More often the sight of one emerging from a writer’s satchel cleared a crowd, reminding editors of overdue appointments and publishers of vanishing budgets.
“No one knows where it is,” Lanier explained. “Let alone what’s in it. But it must be juicy if she’s afraid Leonard Timson, her boss at Carlotta’s, might get ugly about it. That’s why Pablo’s making such a silly whoop. It will be a bonanza for Goldsmith, if it’s as lurid and”—he pronounced the next word carefully—“colorful as she hints. A true July-jam race novel. I’m just afraid our Miss Pruitt may have lit a fuse with this one. She’d better hope it blows up in someone else’s lap.”
Through the smoky sheen of the hot room, Julia considered Eva’s turbaned head rising above the mist of embraces and kisses. What would such a lovely creature know of lurid scandals? Even more mysterious was the notion that Eva Pruitt could produce anything incendiary. No, Julia decided. Disappointment blurred Lanier’s judgment. And Hurd clearly relished gossip.
Across the room, a new fellow had settled at the piano and was teasing out syncopated tunes that made shoulders jump and dip in countertime. Only Jerome Crockett seemed impervious, still displaying no reaction to Eva’s startling triumph. With a stony countenance he deposited his untouched champagne behind a massive vase of calla lilies and pushed his way toward the hall, away from the throng squeezing forward to celebrate Eva’s success. He answered every greeting with a terse nod.
“Mr. Crockett seems to share your misgivings, Mr. Lanier,” Julia said.
Lanier considered his friend. “Jerome? He’s just curdled they went for Eva’s jazzy tootles over his string quartet. Can’t say I blame him. Goldsmith should have taken his collection of poems. It’s the best thing I’ve read all year, though difficult, heady stuff. If his name was Crockettovich or O’Crockett, something obscure and European, Goldsmith would be panting for it, but from a straight-arrow American college man, no. Much less a colored one. I tried to tell him to throw in some sonnets full of jigs and shines and rent parties, but he couldn’t take the joke. He’s been touchier than ever.”
“Maybe Eva’s good fortune will console him,” Julia said.
Lanier gave a small shrug. It seemed the kindest note on which to end their speculation. Julia excused herself before Austen could ensnare her with another rambunctious conversation. She had work to do.
Over the next two hours she met a succession of poets, actors, and novelists; a clarinetist; a sculptor; a playwright; and a pair of self-pronounced skunks too sozzled to be amusing. She penciled two or three names beneath Eva’s onto her mind’s list of possible candidates for a Capriole production, pending a closer look at their work, and noted others whose vanity or boorish grievances she’d take pains to avoid. She never got close enough to Eva to congratulate her, as the merry knot of well-wishers surrounding her remained stubbornly dense. When it finally loosened, Julia saw with a pang of disappointment that Eva was gone, likely slipped away for further rounds of private celebration. There was nothing more for Julia to do than declare her evening a success and commence the search for her shawl.
She found it amid a jumble of guests’ wraps in Duveen’s library (which she wished she’d discovered earlier) at the end of the apartment’s long central hallway. A ginger tortoiseshell cat with languid gold eyes guarded the array, nominally, from her repose on the desk’s blotting pad. Julia stroked its chin, coaxing a low purr from the regal creature. On leaving, distracted by the new Bremer Presse Iliad lying on the sofa atop its mailing wrappers—Duveen followed the German fine presses as well?—she collided with Austen Hurd.
“I’m such an ox,” he apologized as she adjusted her frock. “I no sooner meet a daffodil than I damn near squash her.” Julia rather liked this compliment—referring, she presumed, to the hue of her dress—as it was every bit as clumsy as his pursuit of her. In a rush he added, “I can’t rest without hearing more about that new Delilah. Come
