“I mean—”
“Good-bye, Healey!”
She walks briskly away. Two other waitresses are giggling, and when Millie reaches them, she starts telling the story. The coffee shop is again filled with the sound of murmuring voices and clattering china. Cormac sees the waitresses in dumbshow.
“You ever notice,” Healey says, “that Millie’s got a beautiful ass?” “A BLOW JOB!”
Millie’s voice.
Reaching the punch line.
Healey’s eyes widen.
“PUT IT ON MY CHECK!” he instantly bellows down the full length of the coffee shop.
Shouts. Applause. Fists pounding on counters.
Cormac doesn’t care if Healey ever writes another word.
91.
The telephone keeps her present in his life as he waits for their night at the theater. Sometimes they speak twice in a day, at noon and at night. She talks about how she hates working at the drugstore, and he says she must find another job where she can use her brains, just look in the Times and go for the interviews and fill out the forms. She says she has no references, except Rite Aid. He says just be straight. Tell them you were raising a baby. Silence for a beat. Then more talk about where she’d want to work and how she could use Spanish and how bilingual secretaries are in demand. Then she tells him she is taking a day off from Rite Aid to apply for three jobs. One in a bank on Forty-eighth Street. Another at a dotcom outfit on Greene Street. Another in a law firm in the World Trade Center. He wishes her luck but says she should be careful about the dot-commers, there is a collapse under way.
“Hey,” she says, “are you what they call a mentor?”
On Saturday morning, she calls and her voice is bubbling and high-pitched.
“I got it,” she says. “I got the job! The one at the World Trade Center! An outfit named Reynoso and Ryan—they hired me. I got home last night and the message was on my machine and… I start Monday, can you believe it? Can you fucking believe it?”
She comes downtown and they celebrate in Chinatown at a place called Oriental Gardens on Elizabeth Street. They order leek soup and dim sum and rice with vegetables and separate mounds of cool shrimp and hot chicken. Her mood shifts from girlish excitement to nervousness to determination, each shift reflected in the way she uses her chopsticks. When Cormac can eat no more, she continues. Her eyes sparkle. Her breasts move under her black T-shirt. She is like a prisoner released from jail.
“Thank you, Cormac,” she says, and reaches across the table and squeezes his right hand. “If it wasn’t for you…”
“Stop,” he says. “This is all you. You did it. I didn’t.”
She sips green tea. He wants to ask her to come home with him, to plunge with him into the dark nest of Duane Street. To begin. She senses this too. But then glances at her wristwatch.
“I’d better run,” she says. “I’ve got to buy some clothes. Or at least clothes for Monday morning.”
She asks the waiter to wrap what is left of the food. He pays the bill with cash. They go out together into bright sunshine. They walk together toward Canal Street, passing the old police station marked 1881. The year of the gunfight at the OK Corral and the year Henry James published Portrait of a Lady. He thinks: What a marvelous country.
“I’ll see you at the theater,” she says, getting into a taxi. “And Cormac? Thanks again.”
92.
Cormac waits for Delfina under the marquee of the Royale Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, searching the crowds for her face. The wind off the river is raw for May, and there are gusts of rain driving most people into the shallow lobby or directly to their seats. Cormac wonders how many times he has walked under this marquee since the theater opened on New Year’s Day in 1927. He was at the opening, sent there by a features editor from the Daily News. The architect’s name was Krapp. Herbert J. Krapp. “I got a real crappy assignment for you,” the editor said. “Irresistible.” And off Cormac went. He remembers the name of the architect but can’t retrieve the name of the play. The theater was handsome and the street was busy all night with theater people and whiskey joints, and if you stayed up late enough and watched the entrances to the speakeasies, you might even get to see Babe Ruth.
For three months that year of Ruth’s sixty glorious home runs, Cormac had a secret affair with a glorious dancer named Ginger Everett. She was in an Earl Carroll show up the block toward Times Square, and he met her under this marquee where she was sheltering from a rainstorm. She had the Jean Harlow white-blond look before anyone ever heard of Jean Harlow, and like most dancers in those days she was short and a bit chubby, with a bosom that moved when she did, which was most of the time. Ginger Everett seemed to move when she was sitting down. Or sleeping.
She had come to New York on a train from Lorain, Ohio, in 1926, seventeen years old, brown-haired and zaftig and desperate to be a star, and somehow found her way to the arms of a bootlegger named Sonny Rivington. He made her a blonde and found her a gig in a chorus line and a suite at the Dixie Hotel. His suite. Cormac had seen him around the speakeasies: a small dapper man with shiny black hair combed straight back in the Valentino style. His face was so closely shaved that it glistened. He had eyes like a rattlesnake’s.
Sonny Rivington was only about twenty-five but seemed older than the other bootleggers, except when he was dancing. He loved to dance. And watching him from the bar or a corner table, Cormac was always envious. Sonny could do the Charleston without looking ridiculous. He was the best tango dancer in town until George Raft showed up. And every night after the show, he and Ginger Everett bounced from speak to speak. Dancing and drinking and dancing some more, until she could barely move. In the Rivington suite at the Dixie Hotel, she would usually go right to sleep. Poor Sonny: Though his eyes were as old as the lairs of rattlesnakes, he was still too young to know that dancers work so hard at night they can only make love in the morning. This annoyed him, because he never woke up until noon and therefore had no mornings. So he threw her out. She came back. He gave up on her a week later. They got back together. But Cormac’s mornings were always free, and sometimes before noon, she would slip away for a late breakfast in his studio, racing downtown on the subway, and make love to him as if working out in a gym. He was certain that the thing about him she most admired was that he could not dance. One other thing was absolutely clear: She was never in love with Cormac Samuel O’Connor. She was mad for Sonny Rivington.
Finally, one night in 1928 (around the time Mae West was doing Diamond Lil at the Royale, a show he does not remember), Cormac was sitting at the bar in Billy LaHiff’s saloon when Sonny and Ginger came in together. She glanced at Cormac in a nervous way, but then Sonny Rivington started hauling her around the dance floor. She left after two lindy hops to go to the ladies’ room, probably to steal five minutes’ sleep standing up. Then two gunsels walked in wearing gray hats and black overcoats, went straight to Sonny’s table, shot him twelve times, and walked out. In the uproar, Cormac went to the ladies’ room and told Ginger Everett to get the hell out of there, and she dashed out the back door, while he called in the details to the Daily News city desk without mentioning her. She showed up at his studio three hours later, cried for five minutes for poor Sonny Rivington, and then slept for eighteen hours. Two days later she left by train for Hollywood, where she got two small parts in Harold Lloyd movies, married a real estate operator, and disappeared forever.