Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
A T SIX O’CLOCK ON THE EVENING E VELYN C ROSS’S ENTIRE LIFE changed, she wasn’t opening fan mail or getting a costume fitted or sampling San Franciscan chocolates from one of her gentleman admirers. She wasn’t doing anything remarkably sensational, glamorous, or otherwise befitting the woman who, at least until quite recently, had been the toast of the Manhattan vaudeville scene. Instead, she was doing one of the most unremarkable activities one could think of.
She was staring at a billboard.
The damn thing had gone up overnight a few weeks back, just around the time that her early-afternoon shows had been canceled and she’d suddenly found herself with ever-lengthening stretches of free time. Every day, she would perform her act, retire out of most of her costume, and then immediately sojourn to the fire escape outside her dressing room, where she would sit with a warm cup of tea and once more enter an unwinnable staring contest with her new, fifty-foot-tall neighbor.
In lurid color on the wall outside, a scandalously thin woman held out a corset in one disdainfully curled hand.
“I don’t need this any longer,” the lady-shaped image cried. “All thanks to slimming Banting’s!”
Evelyn knew there was no point to this obsession of hers. Her most imperious gaze might have worked wonders on any stage manager, doorman, or chorus girl this side of 42nd Street, but it wasn’t going to do much to a woman who was, in actuality, nothing more than a bit of paint on a brick wall.
And yet, she couldn’t help it. As though she was compelled, she found herself going back, every day, to her elegant purveyor of gilt-edged, corset-free self-hatred.
There were two reasons for this, both of them perfectly reasonable if she didn’t examine them too closely. For one thing, the woman in the advertisement didn’t look so unlike Evelyn. They shared the stage-ready features of unruly blonde curls and blue eyes that could easily be spotted by the poor saps in the second balcony. Beyond that, the almost-Evelyn’s image warped, as if she had been painted just to taunt her not-quite-doppelganger. The small waist. The flat stomach. The slender, dainty fingers and the figure designed to barely fill out the depressed groove in some man’s mattress.
She was like Evelyn. But …
It was that but that proved Evelyn’s second reason for staring.
“Here you are again,” a familiar voice said from the open window behind her. “Has the old girl moved yet? The way you’re watching her, I could swear she’s about to charge. Thank God we have you keeping watch. I can’t imagine the damage a woman like that could do to a poor, unsuspecting populace.”
Jules Moreau. Even if they hadn’t come up together on the vaudeville circuit, Evelyn would recognize that voice anywhere. The city’s most famous female impersonator, despite wearing what he called his offstage “masculine costume,” was unable to ever fully divorce himself from Julia, his alter ego.
Evelyn rested her head against the cool bars of the fire escape, listening to the sounds of Jules’s balletic footfall as he settled his warm body beside her own.
“You won’t be laughing when I’m the only one here to save the city from that monstrosity,” Evelyn replied, her lips curling up in a weak attempt at a smile.
“You think I’m frightened of that skinny little nit? Oh, heavens, no. No matter how tall she is, smart money is on you, my dear … which explains my confusion at this repeat performance you keep giving out here between shows.”
“She’s mocking me.”
“She’s a painting on a wall.”
Evelyn bit the inside of her lip. Now, they’d come to the second reason for her Miss Banting’s obsession.
“I lost a booking today,” she admitted.
“Another one?”
“Things are changing. Little Miss Waistline over there is only a symbol of it. We’re a dying breed, you and me. People used to love us for being so delightfully scandalous. Now, they think we’re unfashionable or dangerous or both. The moralists are coming after you with pitchforks. The slender snobs are coming after me with diet food. The conservatives are calling for Natia’s arrest after she spoke with that Emma Goldman woman, the racists are going after Nathaniel because he has the gall to be ten times more talented than any white man on the circuit, and the eugenicists would rather push Annie’s wheelchair off the Brooklyn Bridge than see her onstage. I talked to Lillian Russell and Eva Tanguay last week, and even they’re feeling the strain. You know it’s bad if those two are complaining. We’re all getting boxed in from every angle. Our days are numbered. Hate to admit it, but you can’t deny something staring you in the face.”
“There’s one across from my window, too. Not Banting’s, of course, but cologne. Four rugged men in Yale football uniforms, all beaten up and muddy from their sporting. Dainty women dripping from each arm. DeVeer’s Cologne—What the Real Man Wears in 1897. And look at this. ”
He flicked something in Evelyn’s direction. It was a newspaper. The Manhattan Daily.
“Jules, you know better than to read this trash,” Evelyn admonished, even as she took it in hand. The Daily had always been regressive nonsense, but over the last few months, it had taken its pointed disdain for anything and anyone not like its wealthy owner—one Nehemiah Alban—to new heights of cruelty. From page-long screeds advocating forced “sanitization” of “infirmed” circus performers and vaudevillians to type-faced pearl-clutching about the dangers of “ethnic comedy” to “God-fearing Christian audiences,” it and its opinions were barely even fit to wrap fish down at the docks.
For years, she and Jules had ignored it when they could and laughed at it when they couldn’t. But tonight’s evening edition blared a headline that was too dangerous to bear either response.
NEW ROCHESTER LAW FORBIDS VAUDEVILLE ACTS OF MORAL DISREPUTE—IS MANHATTAN NEXT?
A brief scan of the article treated Evelyn to a screed about female impersonators, left-wing agitators, and scantily clad contortionists. The paper listed Julia Moreau as one of the acts whose tour had been canceled as an immediate result of the ban, and while she herself was not mentioned by name, judging from the author’s disdain for “inhumanly large songstresses,” Evelyn could only imagine that her own time was coming.
“Oh, Jules—”
“Don’t Oh, Jules me. Not yet, anyway. The pity party hasn’t even begun.”
Evelyn dropped the paper and glanced at her friend, who somehow still managed to smile even as their careers lay in rubble at their feet. Tall, dark-haired, and slight of stature, Jules was a beautiful creature whose inner self was nearly as flawless as his outer. He still wore his full face of stage makeup but had removed his wig and exchanged the first few layers of his elaborate Lady Rebecca Crawley costume for a thick robe that covered his decidedly female underclothes.
Even on a trash heap day like today, just seeing him made her feel better.
It didn’t hurt that he’d brought her a bottle of champagne.
“I thought we might celebrate my imminent forced retirement. Will you do the honors?”
Evelyn reached for the bottle, shot the cork off onto the street below, and raised it between them.
Evelyn’s mother said time was like a grandfather clock, with a pendulum that swung back and forth. She’d pat Evelyn’s hand and say, Not to worry, mein kürbis, that old clock is always ticking. You only have to wait for your chime .
But Evelyn and Jules had caught the highest point of the pendulum’s arc. For a few years, Jules hadn’t had to hide himself. He’d won over the public, delighting them with his chameleonic displays of womanly virtue and beauty. Likewise, Evelyn’s fashionably fat figure and superlative singing voice were the toast of the vaudeville circuit. She was the epitome of immigrant success—the daughter of someone who came to this country with the clothes on her back and worked until her daughter could be a healthy, round, well-fed picture of the American dream.
Two months ago, neither of them could get a day off to sell their souls. Sold-out shows. Packed houses. The plaudits of an entire island constantly ringing in their ears. Now … the culture was leaving them behind.
“To changing times,” she toasted.
Jules jerked his chin defiantly. “And the ones they leave behind.”
Evelyn drank first, and drank deeply, letting the fizz of the champagne bubble carelessly past her lips. She then handed the bottle over to Jules, who followed suit.
Neither of them was defeatists by nature. Their level of success would have been impossible to achieve for anyone who easily succumbed to gloom and doom. Still, it was difficult to look defeat in the face—in Evelyn’s case, literally—and stand tall. Sometimes, drowning the fear in warm champagne was all the world could ask of you.
Eventually, they had emptied half the bottle and Jules’s cheeks flushed. His usual slightly biting, slightly warm tone cut over the hum of the carriages, crowds, and cops on the streets below.
“So. What will you do now that you’re no longer de rigeur? ”
“ Moi? ” Evelyn asked. “Oh, you know. Same old story for women like me. I’ll find some fabulously wealthy man to take care of me for a few years, make some wise investments, and then live out my days as a mysterious and unconscionably scandalous toff.”
“And who will be your companions?”
“Besides my endless string of lovers?”
“Naturally.”
“An old dog, I imagine.”
Jules nudged her shoulder with the blunt end of the champagne bottle. “That’s some way to talk about me!”
“Sorry, an old spaniel. And you.”
“Sounds like a darling little life.”
“Yes.”
And Evelyn knew that. To most in this wonderful misery of a city, where she watched thousands of the forgotten fight futilely for a better life, the future laid out before her seemed rather nice. Safety. Security.
Glamorous, no. But certainly lucky.
So why was it that every time she considered it, her forehead began to sweat and her throat closed up? Why, at such a young age, couldn’t she look on a happy retirement as a reward for years of hard work and relentless hustling?
As if reading her thoughts, Jules said, “But we both know that’s not how you’ll end up.”
“And why do we know that?”
“Because you’ve done everything you could to escape having a little life. You won’t give up on that dream now.”
He said it with such an air of finality that she didn’t even bother to protest. Jules knew her, after all, better than just about anybody. And wasn’t the beauty of having a friend never having to lie to them?
“What about you?” she asked. “What will you do when they finally manage to take everything you have?”
He shook his head, his pale skin catching the last pinks of sunset and glowing from their touch. “There’s nothing worth anything that they can take away from us. You would do well to remember that.”
More silence, at least between them. Down below, audiences with their two-bit tickets rushed the theater’s entrances, elbowing each other for the best seats in the house. Clearly not everyone read the Manhattan Daily, at least not in this less desirable quarter of town. A familiar knot of excitement tightened right at the place where Evelyn’s heart met her stomach.
They were here, those strangers out in the cheap seats, and they were here to see her. Her fame might be fleeting, but for now, she would hold on to it with both hands.
Inside, the company bell rang. Jules shook out the champagne bottle a few times, hoping for any last droplets.
“Back to the mines,” he said, though he made no move to stand.
Evelyn didn’t budge either. “Should we just ride off into the sunset together? Rob a train? Start a new life out west?”
“West? I thought you always wanted to go to Paris one day.”
“The manager at the Moulin Rouge did write me again recently.”
“And you said?”
“That I was grateful for the offer, but what lies between my legs has terrible stage fright, therefore becoming a can-can dancer and putting it all on display is simply not for me.”
“Shame. You’d look quite at home in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.”
Another gallows laugh.
“What do you say, hm?” she asked, only half joking. “Let’s go on the run.”
“No. We should make them sad to see us go. Give them a great swan song. Remind them of what they’re missing.”
“You’re right. As usual.”
In a sweep of skirts and feathers, the two of them started back for the theater. Evelyn made a point of stepping on Nehemiah Alban’s Manhattan Daily as she went—a small protest.
“Evelyn?” Jules asked as they slipped through the open window.
“Yes, sweet?”
“What is it that you want? Really want?”
The answer to that question was a simple but impassable roadblock. The reason she couldn’t just wander off into the green pastures of a nice, safe future. The reason she had spilled years of sweat and glitter and tears into this career, this life she’d built herself. The reason she’d left her tenement childhood behind. The reason she’d never go back.
“I want to be undeniable.”