“Your pearls,” I ventured. “Do you take them off at night?”
“What’s this? My bijoux?” Her hands touched the strands of beads that covered her from her throat to her lap. “The dress didn’t excite you, but these you want?”
How to say it wasn’t the pearls but her?
“Pearls are awful expensive,” Morie chimed in.
I knew they were expensive. I didn’t care.
Rose understood. Leave it to a madam to comprehend the algebra of a young girl’s desires. Rose raised her arms and grunted as she fished among the clasps at the back of her neck. I noticed that the great Callot of Paris had finished the armholes of my mother’s bespoke sleeves with a darker shade of silk to hide her sweat.
The shortest strand, a choker, dropped with a pleasant sigh into her lap.
“Here now,” she said, bunching the pearls in her fist. “Here’s how this goes. My price for these pearls is for you, Vera, to tell me something I don’t know. That will be hard to do. Still, I think maybe, just maybe, you can. I want to know your mind, girl.”
My first thought, of course, was to tell on Morie. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, to tell of the aquavit and my suffering via the boar-bristle brush. To spill all regarding the Haj. What a good, diverting tale it would make.
Well, I didn’t have it in me. All evening, I’d watched Morie being reduced to an embarrassment and it hurt my heart to see a weak thing made weaker. Even now, suspecting that I would give her up, Morie looked for mercy from the marble goddesses that perched on Rose’s mantel.
“Tell Rose about school,” Pie urged. “Tell her about the Spanish conquistadors.”
“Not school.” Rose chopped the air with her hand. “School we leave to the nuns. No, something else.” Her eyes flashed with anticipation.
I’d been collecting facts and secrets for a moment such as this, to prove how smart and canny I was—how like her. Then she’d have to love me, wouldn’t she? For I was indeed a student of human nature, as every orphan and hooker and unwanted kid must be.
But as I looked around that room, my mind went blank—except for another bit of madam wisdom Rose once told me: Show the devil the devil and he’ll say, How d’ do.
“Tan steals from you,” I said. “Every week he adds an extra sum to the kitchen tally. He keeps that, plus extra he orders from the grocer and butcher, at our house. Every week, after he leaves us, he drops off a sack in Chinatown.”
“How do you know this?” Rose asked.
“There’s a box he keeps under the flour barrel in our larder,” I said. “On Monday it’s full, on Tuesday it’s empty. Tuesdays are Tan’s afternoon off.”
“You go digging on a regular basis?”
“Tuesdays,” I said, “are not my day off.”
Morie gasped but Rose beamed with pride. “I knew the first part,” she said. “What I didn’t figure was you. Yes, you. I am surprised.” She dropped the strand of pearls, warm as roasted chestnuts, into my hand.
What happened next, I will put here, though it shames me. I lifted those pearls to my nose like a too-eager dog. They smelled of her jasmine perfume; they smelled of Rose. It brought me back, far back—to, it must have been, when I was just a baby.
Then I caught Pie’s look of distaste.
Just like that, the spell broke. “I’ll say this for you ladies, you pack a good deal into an hour,” said Rose. She tapped her pipe in the ashtray, a clear sign that she was moving on. At The Rose, the evening was just getting started.
Tan returned with our coats.
“Tan,” Rose said. “I’d like a word with you, after.”
Tan, thinking he was about to be praised, bowed and left the room.
We watched him go, and I thought: What have I done? Tan had been part of the scenery for as long as I could remember. He was never sick. He ran Rose’s house and ours. Whenever Morie’s ladies paid a call, he baked a cake, which she claimed as her own. He tended to Rose’s horse, General, washing and brushing him, picking the muck out of his hooves, and shining the brass on the buggy. His English was serviceable except when speaking to someone he considered beneath him. He haggled and shamed shopkeepers into lowering their prices for a poor widow saddled with two gluttonous daughters; he fixed our lamps and gutters; he roasted and steamed and peeled and scoured; when so inspired, he could carve a face out of a radish; he polished our shoes. And for this he lived in a cramped cell in Rose’s basement without a pot or cup of his own. He worked for scant wages. He stole. He was a liar and a cheat and none of that bothered me except that he took pains to prove his superiority over me, and to demonstrate his keen dislike. That was his crime. In a house of so little kindness, that to me was unforgivable.
With a heavy sigh, Rose watched Tan go.
“Right. The night of Caruso,” she said, “Hank will collect you birds at six sharp. Be ready. Hank will arrive in the Ford,” Rose added. “No need to stir talk.”
“Oh, the Ford,” Morie said, disappointed that it wouldn’t be the fancy car after all.
Rose grunted as she stood on her sore knee. She walked to the small inlaid desk set in the parlor window, scratched something on a piece of paper, folded it, and sealed it in an envelope.
“Listen carefully,” she said, coming to stand by me. And with a shock of recognition I saw that I’d grown taller than Rose.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “Miss giraffe. You didn’t get that height from me.” She chuckled. “Very serious, eh?” She was looking into my eyes.
