Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
E VELYN WOULDN’T CHARACTERIZE WHAT SHE DID NEXT AS FLEEING from The Empire . Nor would she describe it as avoiding returning to the boarding house in abject shame after failing to keep her promise to land the hottest job in town. She would simply describe it as arriving, red-faced and justly enraged, to her appointment with Jules—several hours early .
Make no mistake: Evelyn was righteously and thoroughly pissed off, and, though she’d never admit it to anyone, emotionally injured by the whole spectacle. They wanted her to be a hippo. Not even a beautiful one, either—Evelyn believed any creature could be beautiful. She was living proof of that truism—but one to be laughed at.
She’d arranged to meet Jules at their favorite little Tin Pan Alley drinking spot that evening, and so made her way downtown.
This evening was originally meant to celebrate her successful negotiations with The Empire. But now she’d have to tell Jules of her failure. She didn’t mind. Of all the people in the world, she knew she could trust him with her disasters.
At least, she believed she could … until she threw open the door to Jules’s Tin Pan Alley studio to discover that not only was Jules also early to their quiet tête-à-tête, but he’d expanded the guest list as well.
“What in the devil is this, Jules?”
She wasn’t surprised to find Jules with company. Nearly anywhere he went, his loyal companion and costume designer, Akio, was sure to be close at hand. Ever since he’d picked him up on tour in San Francisco, the two had been inseparable, to the extent that Evelyn counted the second-generation Japanese American alongside Jules as one of her closest confidantes. And indeed, that afternoon, when Evelyn opened the door to the small room where they’d often meet for coffees and rehearsals between gigs, Akio was there, hand-sewing away on a length of extravagant silk.
However, Akio was not Jules’s only companion.
“Ah, Evelyn,” Jules said. “How kind of you to finally join us.”
“Finally? We weren’t supposed to meet for hours yet.” She paused, remembering her manners, “Hello, Akio.”
Akio nodded in acknowledgment, his gaze never leaving his intricate stitchwork, as Jules waved vaguely, as though to brush her question away. “I had some extra time on my hands this afternoon. And who should arrive at my door today, looking for my counsel, but this handsome young gentleman?”
Evelyn turned, resigned, to the final member of their happy little quartet.
Dr. Andrew Samson.
Friends with Jules or not, this was not the sort of place a man like Dr. Andrew Samson—one of Manhattan’s wealthiest sons—belonged. It was odd for him to look so at home here, sitting on a chair-height pile of sheet music and smiling up at her.
“Hello, Miss Cross—” he said.
“Akio,” Evelyn said, cutting off the doctor and turning her attention to her deliberately oblivious friend. “Would you like to join me for cocktails? Dinner, perhaps? I fear the air in here has been soured by the stench of a traitor .”
“Now, Miss, if you’ll allow me—”
“I will not.”
Jules tossed his hands up, exasperated. “He only wanted to check and see if you were alright, Evelyn. Gracious, always with the dramatics.”
This notion stopped Evelyn in her tracks. She blinked.
“You did?”
Dr. Samson nodded. “That display back at The Empire was ghastly. I wanted to talk to you. See if you were well.”
A fine and lofty goal. Or it would have been if Evelyn believed it. Which she didn’t.
“And?” she prompted.
“Well,” the doctor replied, removing his spectacles and cleaning them on a handkerchief—a nervous habit if Evelyn ever saw one. “I tell you this in confidence, but Thomas does not come from the same world that I do. It’s given him a chip on his shoulder. A boulder, really. He’s desperate for the real elite of this city to take him seriously, to finally show him some respect. I do not know the details, and even if I did, they wouldn’t be mine to tell. But one thing I can say is that you have awakened something in him, something good, something that I’ve never seen in him before. And as his friend, I should hate to see him lose that so soon after its discovery. So, really, I am here to beg you to give Thomas another chance.”
Evelyn let the silence in the wake of Dr. Samson’s little speech settle for a moment, trying not to dwell on just what kinds of feeling she might have made Thomas feel. Finally, she determined she had let the good doctor fidget long enough and threw back her head with a not-very-ladylike scoff. “Of course I’m going to give him another chance.”
It was Dr. Samson’s turn to blink. “Beg pardon?”
“He’s the biggest vaudeville promoter in the world at present and his money is going to make me a star again. I am enraged and insulted, Dr. Samson, but I am an enraged and insulted woman of business. I’ll have to reserve judgment on the man himself, but I have every intention of at least giving his theater and his money another chance.”
What manner of woman did he take her for? One who would run away weeping the first time her pride was insulted? Especially when her dreams were on the line? No. Absolutely not. Her dramatic exit today was one thing. A punishment for her mistreatment. But she would be back tomorrow—her career depended on it.
Still, Dr. Samson’s face twisted.
“Please, Miss Cross. Thomas is a dear friend of mine. I believe in this wild dream of his. I want him to succeed. But I also want him to remember that he’s more than a money-minting, publicity-chasing machine. Help me—help Thomas. Give the man another chance too.”
Help Thomas . Help the most powerful man in all of show business, one of the richest men on this entire island. Help a man who could buy, sell, and buy her again with the loose change jingling, discarded and forgotten, across the floor of his motorcar?
Not likely , the hardened, cursed part of her resolved.
But … she’d always had a marshmallow where her heart should have been. It was her greatest flaw. She knew the world was a cruel, unkind, unfeeling place full of people who would never give her the time of day if she couldn’t do something for them in exchange.
But still, she loved those people. Especially the forgotten, the grown crooked, the abandoned, the lost.
She addressed Akio and Jules. “How do you know this clown?”
The couple shared a glance, as if coming to a silent agreement. Then, they both looked at Dr. Samson, who nodded once, his face soft and understanding. At length, Jules answered:
“The good doctor runs a gratis and discreet service for certain members of the community for whom medical care may not be immediately possible.”
And then it hit Evelyn: that’s why the man had looked familiar.
Jules Moreau was no stranger to illness and misfortune—some of his own making, some of pure rotten luck. On the occasions when he’d arrived at the back door of the boarding house with black eyes and split lips, Evelyn had been the one to stitch him up.
But there had been a time last winter, a time when Jules had turned away all visitors and canceled his bookings. It took Evelyn a week of built-up annoyance and worry to finally climb through Jules’s window, where she caught a glimpse of a man with a doctor’s bag leaving in a hurry through the bedroom door … and Jules lying limp in the bed.
In that moment, crouched in his window, Evelyn had been so certain she’d never see her friend again. Death embraced him like a very familiar lover.
Now, searching his eyes, she realized that he was only sitting there, alive and pink and happy, because of Dr. Andrew Samson.
“So he’s a good man?” she asked, as though he weren’t in the room.
“One of the best,” Jules assured her.
During a lifetime of friendship, Jules had never once led Evelyn astray. She trusted him with her very soul. And if he vouched for Dr. Samson, and that man vouched for Thomas …
“Fine, then. But I’ll warn you, Dr. Samson. He lost much of my respect today. If he wants it back, he’s going to have to earn it.”
“How?”
Finally—he was asking the right sorts of questions. Evelyn chewed it over, her fingers running idly through a discarded pile of sheet music, until an idea struck her with the force of a moving streetcar.
She had a boarding house full of friends with no work. Jules had no work. Thomas needed a bill of performers …
“Tell me. How badly does Thomas want me for The Empire?” Evelyn asked, addressing the doctor.
“Desperately,” Andrew said.
Excellent. Because she would probably need a bit of desperation to get what she wanted.
“What do you think he would give me? If I said I could give him the greatest show in Manhattan?”
A warm smile stretched across Andrew Samson’s face. And for a moment, she glimpsed the first hints of mischief in his gaze, too. “Everything.”