City of Flickering Light Read online

  “Well, you’ll pardon me if I’m not sorry.” He got up onto his knees and searched for his rucksack. “And don’t worry, you won’t have to spend one more minute with me. I’m heading out on my own.” He located it and hiked a strap over his shoulder.

  “Well, of course you’re not. You’re coming with us!” Millie said.

  “I am not. Not after what you did.”

  Irene put her hands on her hips. “And what’s that?”

  “Left me without so much as a fare-thee-well!”

  “We couldn’t tell you, don’t you see? If even a word of it got back to Chandler—”

  Henry threw his arms into the air. “Oh, yes and I would just saunter up to that old bastard and say, ‘So I hear we’ll be bidding adieu to your two prettiest girls!’ ”

  Millie’s face went coy at the compliment. “Henry, that’s sweet.”

  “No, it is not sweet!” he said. “It’s awful!”

  “Henry,” said Irene, the bruises and cuts on her leg and hands starting to ache. “I couldn’t take the chance. I wasn’t even going to bring Millie—”

  Millie’s face fell. “You weren’t?”

  “Then why did you?”

  “She’s . . . we’re just . . .”

  “Friends,” said Millie.

  Yes, I suppose we are, thought Irene, though she hadn’t had a friend in years. She didn’t even know that much about Millie—the normal things like where she’d grown up or how she’d ended up stripping. Nevertheless they’d just jumped off a moving train together; if Irene wanted to deny there was a bond between them, that case had just gotten much harder to make.

  As for Henry, Irene wouldn’t have characterized them as friends exactly, but there was an unspoken affinity between them that mostly showed itself in the crossword puzzles they helped each other with between shows and the way their eyes seemed to find each other when Chandler was giving one of his many warnings about impertinence. They didn’t talk about anything more lofty or personal than whether they’d been to a particular town before or how lumpy the mattresses were in their rooms. But they’d laughed together—he did have a great sense of humor. She was the one he always came to when trying out a new joke.

  And he was kind. There had been far too little of that in her life these last three years.

  “I should have told you,” she said to him now. “We’re friends, too.”

  2

  I just want to live long enough to see how it all turns out.

  Adela Rogers St. Johns, writer, actress, Hollywood journalist

  The three of them straggled toward the train depot, the dry wind blowing red-brown grit that clung to their eyelashes and the cuts on their hands and shins. Irene tried not to limp, but one of her knees had begun to swell, and the pounding fear of being caught by Barney had now twisted itself into the dull dread of being nowhere, with nothing. Maybe Chandler was right. Maybe for a girl like her, the choice was between stripping and prostitution, and she had just crossed stripping off the list.

  “Gimme that.” Henry tugged her suitcase away. He was still angry, of course.

  “I love the smell of this place, don’t you, Irene?” Millie paused to spit dust out of her mouth. Irene didn’t smell anything but her own dread at having led this failing expedition.

  “It just smells like dirt,” Henry grumbled. “Dirt and pine trees.”

  “Pine,” said Millie. “That’s the part I like.”

  The Flagstaff railroad depot was a long rectangular building made of chiseled red stone blocks, not an inch bigger or a detail grander than it needed to be. The man behind the bars of the ticket window gave Irene an up-and-down look from beneath the stiff brim of his clerk’s cap.

  Irene raked her dusty fingers through the loose tendrils of her hair, and produced the two tickets she’d been grasping like the keys to her jail cell. “I’d like to turn these in please.”

  The clerk squinted at the dirty, sweat-stained tickets. “Change your mind?”

  “Yes, I want to go to Los Angeles instead.” Someone on the platform behind her let out a loud cough, and she flinched. “I’m in a hurry, so if you wouldn’t mind—”

  “Los Angeles. Got your heart set on being an actress, I expect. Wouldn’t be the first.” He gave his head a worldly shake and peered back down at the tickets. “Say, you got two here.”

  Millie nudged into view. “The other one’s for me.”

  His cap slid back on his head a little at the sight of her. Even scraped and dusty, with locks of black hair sticking to her dirt-speckled cheeks, Millie had that effect on people. He shook his head again. “You girls oughtn’t to travel alone, now. There’s an awful lot of—”

  “I’m going, too.” Henry stepped up and snaked his arm between them to deposit his own ticket on the counter.

  Irene felt the pulsing edges of her anxiety begin to thrum a little slower. When she’d first considered leaving, she had planned to go alone, but then there’d been Millie, and she’d felt responsible for her somehow, as if she were a flighty sister who required a guiding hand instead of a girl Irene had met only a couple of months ago. There was no real logic to it, since Irene’s own sister had been anything but flighty, but Millie had a way of growing on you.

  Like a barnacle, Irene thought ruefully.

  Henry, though. With his agile mind, he could be a real help.

  “Yes, it’s the three of us,” she said, “all going to Los Angeles.”

  “What’s in Los Angeles?” Henry asked as they headed across Railroad Avenue to the row of storefronts that comprised the majority of Flagstaff. The westbound train wasn’t due until eight-forty-two that evening, and Irene had decided it was best to stay out of sight until then.

  “Hollywood!” said Millie with a grin. “Irene says there are lots of opportunities for girls there, and you don’t have to be a nurse or a teacher or just marry any old fella who’ll have you. We’re going to try and make it as actresses. It’s going to be so much fun!”

  Fun? thought Irene. She wasn’t so sure about that. It would be a lot of scraping by until they could get a toe in a studio door somewhere. It would be a huge improvement over stripping for Chandler, but it wasn’t likely to be cocktails and caviar anytime soon.

  Henry’s gaze was still trained on Irene. “Do you know anyone there?”

  “Not really.” There were people she’d known from her days in vaudeville who’d gone out there—or said they were going—but she had no idea if she could find them, and if she did, whether they could be of any help.

  “So, not at all,” muttered Henry.

  She turned on him then. “I made a plan and carried it out, which is more than I can say for you. If you don’t like it, you can march right down to that depot and head for Albuquerque. Maybe Chandler’ll take you back, and you can go on telling stale jokes and earning no money and looking over your shoulder every minute of the day and night.”

  He stared at her, dumbstruck. Millie leaned a hip into him and slid her hand into the crook of his arm. “Be nice, Irene,” she murmured.

  “That’s just it,” Irene hissed. “I’m not nice!”

  Millie gave that coy little smile of hers. “Are, too. Isn’t she, Henry?”

  “She is when she feels like it,” he muttered.

  “A person can ask a question, Irene,” said Millie gently. “You’re still the boss.”

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s boss! I just want to get to California!” Irene turned and stalked up the uneven boards of the sidewalk. Sweat trickled through the dust on her neck, and her knee felt like it might explode at any moment. She needed to get out of the July sun, off that knee, away from Henry’s questions—and out of sight.

  “Oh, now,” Millie murmured and slid an arm around Irene’s waist. “Put your weight on me instead of that leg.” She held out her suitcase to Henry. “Can you carry this one, too?”

  Henry groaned as he took it from her. “What’s in here?”

  “Never you mind.
Let’s just go on back to the Weatherford and get a glass of something cool to drink.”

  Chandler’s Follies had stayed at the Weatherford Hotel while they’d played the Orpheum Theatre next door. “Won’t the Weatherford be the first place he’ll look?” Irene asked.

  “Honestly, Irene, I don’t know why you think he’s coming for us. He can find two more dancers in Albuquerque, easy as you please. Girls on hard times are a dime a dozen.”

  That was true enough. Chandler would be furious, no doubt, but he was not a man to run a fool’s errand. Yes, they had absconded with their train tickets, and rightly they should have been returned to him. But it was only a few dollars, not worth the time and money it would cost to send Barney back to get them.

  They ordered sarsaparillas at the hotel restaurant, and Irene put her sore leg up on a chair. It was one o’clock, so they had almost eight hours to wait.

  “I’m awful hungry,” said Millie. “I want a sandwich.”

  “How much money do you have?” asked Irene.

  “Eight dollars and fourteen cents.”

  “That can’t be right—you told me you’d saved almost twelve dollars just two days ago.”

  “Oh, I did,” said Millie. “But then I bought a few things, so now it’s about eight.”

  “Millie, what on earth could have cost you four whole dollars?”

  Millie unbuckled the straps on her suitcase and tugged out a misshapen black hat, then quickly closed up the suitcase again. “Well, I couldn’t go to Hollywood and be a movie star without a new hat, now could I?” she said, reshaping the crushed felt. “It’s 1921, and all my hats are from 1920. There was another item . . . but that doesn’t matter now. It was just something I needed to get what I wanted.”

  It took every ounce of restraint Irene had not to say something distinctly unfriendly.

  Henry pushed his chair back and stood up. “Okay, Millie, let’s take a walk and see if we can find you something to nosh on that’s cheaper than this place. Irene, you keep an eye on the bags, and we’ll be back in a little while.”

  It was a relief to be alone, and not merely for the absence of Millie’s nonsensical yammering. Irene didn’t like being seen like this. Desperate. At the mercy of the strange twists of fate that had dragged her so far down in the world. Not that she had ever lived high on the hog. She’d grown up in a two-bedroom house in a little town in Ohio, with her twin sister, aunt, and uncle. They’d often struggled to make ends meet. But they’d had each other.

  And she’d had ideas. Dreams really, if she allowed herself to be so fanciful as to call them that. She’d hoped to work as a reporter for a local newspaper, as she’d done for her high school gazette. Or maybe even one of the movie magazines she loved to thumb through.

  She wished she had a book or a magazine now. In burlesque reading had become a drug of sorts, a magic elixir to transport her from the self-disgust of peeling off her undergarments in public night after night and pretending to enjoy it.

  A gust of wind blew Millie’s hat off the table and onto the floor—the 1921 hat, which was so terribly important that the little ninny had spent four whole dollars on it, but couldn’t remember to actually put it on her head. And look at it. Black felt with black silk netting for the brim, which of course was useless for keeping the sun off your nose.

  “What am I going to do with her,” Irene muttered as she bent over to retrieve it. It was just out of reach, and as she stretched her hand out farther to try to grasp it, a shadow fell across the floor. Irene looked up from her precarious position down by the table leg and saw him through the window.

  Barney.

  3

  The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

  Helen Hayes, actress

  “Don’t pay her any attention,” Millie said, slipping her hand into Henry’s as they made their way down the street. “She’s just worried, and her knee hurts.”

  Henry glanced down at Millie’s small white fingers now encased in his large tan ones, and Millie slipped them out again. She had only meant to reassure him, to put something soft between him and Irene’s sharpness. Well, she had to admit that wasn’t the only reason. She liked his hands—strong and well cared for. No jagged nails or bitten cuticles. Not that she minded that either. Gus, the assistant stable master back home, had so many calluses it looked like they belonged to someone on a prison chain gang. She liked his hands, too.

  She liked hands, period. Or just touching, really. Once, years ago when her mother had found her curled up in only her slip with one of the housemaids like kittens in a basket, the two of them having gotten a little silly with Father’s brandy, and then fallen asleep in each other’s arms. “There’s nothing bad in it!” she had yelled at her mother. “I just like being close!”

  Mother had fired the housemaid, a lonely girl with no home to go back to, who’d been eager for the uncomplicated affection Millie was happy to provide. Millie had slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her hand and whispered, “You’re lovable. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Her mother’s disgust hadn’t really surprised her. Mother had never been the type to caress a cheek or pat a hand, much less wrap her in an embrace, even when Millie was terrified by a nightmare or bleeding from a bad scrape. Mother didn’t touch. Millie wondered if she’d ever been held by either of her parents, even as a baby.

  She’d gotten better at hiding her need for affection—but not that much better. When she and Willis Carrington were caught hugging behind the buggy shed, she thought her father might beat them both with his crop. The fact that Willis was shirtless, and Millie had wiggled her arms out of the top of her dress might have played some role in his fury.

  “If we have to move away because of you, I’ll lose all my customers!” he’d hissed as he’d marched her back to the house. “I’d marry you off tomorrow if you weren’t fourteen!”

  Millie’s parents didn’t seem to particularly like each other, either, though they were so much alike, she thought it a wonder they didn’t recognize the cold kindred-ness of their souls and band together. Her father spent all day and most evenings at his equestrian supplies business, and her mother rarely left the house. At night they didn’t sleep in the same room, much less the same bed.

  Her parents never touched each other or anyone else as far as Millie could tell. Mother had had a dog she liked well enough in her own way, quietly chastising it for any small infringement while holding it on her lap. It snapped its tiny teeth at Millie when she came near, and she thought of it as a rat dressed up in a mink coat. She couldn’t remember its name. Anyway, it didn’t matter. That dog was dead now.

  As they searched for someplace to eat cheaply, Henry grumbled about Irene’s temper and that she should learn to hold it a little better when she had only two friends in the world, and no prospects, and . . .

  “Oh, now,” Millie chided teasingly, patting his arm, “Irene’s just . . . Irene. That’s how she is. But she’s a good person, we both know that.”

  “How exactly do we know that?”

  “Well, we followed her to the middle of nowhere, didn’t we? Are we foolish?”

  Henry conceded her point with a little chuckle. “Maybe we are.”

  Millie laughed and took his hand again. “We just might be!”

  The clerk at Cicero’s Drugstore agreed to throw in a bag of day-old biscuits for the price of their minced ham sandwiches, and their spirits rose with the fullness of their bellies. As they passed the Orpheum Theatre, where they’d performed the night before, a man and a woman in stage makeup straggled out of the stage door. The man wore a long white cotton jacket and a little round mirror attached to a band around his head. It reflected light in jagged flashes as he rushed toward them down the alley. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform, her oversize starched cap askew, followed him at a trot. The top buttons of her uniform were undone, and her fleshy bosoms jounced upward, as if trying to leap to freedom.

  “Where we going?” asked the wom
an breathily as they hustled by Millie and Henry.

  “Where’d you think? The train station, dumb Dora.” He grabbed her by the arm to hurry her, and she tripped, barely catching herself from falling.

  The stage door opened again and Millie recognized Clarence, the assistant stage manager. “Miss!” he called after the bouncing nurse. “Your purse!”

  She turned, but the doctor yanked her back toward him. She twisted free and hissed, “I need that!” She took the purse and paused for only a second to smile wearily at Clarence. “Sweet of you,” she murmured and then was off at a clip to catch up as he gazed after her.

  “What happened?” Henry asked.

  “Ah, their bit was too blue,” said Clarence. “Manager gave them a warning first show, but next show it was all the same. Her with her costume open like that, arching her back to strain the buttons. The guy making ungentlemanly comments.” Clarence grinned and cut his eyes toward Henry. “You know what I mean.”

  Henry chuckled. “Sure I do.”

  “Manager’s fit to be tied because now we’re down an act, and the bill will run short. Hard to get a disappointment act—you know, a replacement—at this late hour.”

  “What’s the pay?” asked Millie.

  “Those two were getting four hundred for the week.”

  Millie smiled sweetly and widened her blue eyes slightly, shining them like incandescent lights in a dim room. It was her utility expression, the one she employed until she could figure out what to do next. It never failed to buy her a few moments. “Well, we can certainly sympathize with the pickle you’re in.”

  Clarence grinned back at her like a baby looking at his first balloon. Henry’s smile was more of the what-are-you-up-to variety. Millie slid her hand into his and squeezed.

  “I suppose my sister and I could help out for the next show till you can get a disappointment act in here. We’re actresses. There’s a short play we do, a really adorable skit that everyone just loves, and we’d only charge . . . fifty dollars.”