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TEN

F irst Eddie tries the sidewalk outside Jefferson Market, dark and quiet at this hour. He snaps a photo of the spire, with the moon peeking out from behind it. Nothing happens. No change in scenery, no bright-eyed boy. He trudges uptown in the dark to the hydrant on Fourteenth Street. Snap. No boy. Nothing. He stands across the street from the Algonquin. Snap. Nothing. He winds back downtown to the shoe repair. Snap. Nothing.

So none of it is real? Not the camera, not the boy? Nothing at all?

This is the question that steers Eddie, whether he knows it or not, to Cornelia Street, to something real, to Theo. From the sidewalk he can see straight through the window of Patisserie Gaston, past the counter and into the back kitchen, where Theo, under a flickering fluorescent light, putters around in the workspace, tying on his apron, taking down mixing bowls and ingredients from the shelves, lining baking sheets with parchment, heating the ovens.

Eddie watches as Theo dips his hand into a steel bowl to retrieve a half-handful of flour, which he tosses across the countertop in a cloud. He watches him push into a ball of dough with his palms, pressing down and across, then turning it, folding it, and pressing into it again, leaning the weight of his body into the motions, head tilted in concentration. Eddie counts four turns, eight, sixteen. Every movement is precise, confident, rhythmic, and it soothes Eddie to watch. Theo is real. His hands, his voice, his body, his breath, the way he presses into the dough, the way he pressed against Eddie as they stood at the counter. Theo is real.

Eddie raises the camera, frames the window perfectly in the viewer, and snaps a photograph. He retrieves the little plastic card and holds it out in front of him, watching, waiting. But it’s another dud. No image at all.

He tosses it aside carelessly and walks on.

He won’t even remember taking the picture. He won’t know that the image that emerges, long after he leaves Cornelia Street, isn’t one of Theo working in the bakery, but of a young woman in ballet flats, standing on tiptoe, straightening shelves of books—beat poetry and experimental fiction and political manifestos. Eddie won’t ever see this image. It will be swept into a trash bin and sent to the landfill.

But her story will come to him one day, the story of when she was little, five or six or seven years old, packed with her parents and two brothers and a dozen other families into a row house up on Tenth Avenue. Kids were always outside then, growing up, playing, working. You never knew exactly where they lived or who they belonged to. Except for her. She was different. Everyone knew her.

The basement of their building was a nightclub, it’s hard to remember the name, Hell’s Bells or the Roger Room or something silly. A speakeasy, a dark and dusty bar with a stage at one end and a wind-up Victrola for when the band didn’t come. They hosted vaudeville acts at first, then pansy parades and drag shows. You never asked who owned it, but they were kind to her father, when he worked behind the bar. Her mother sewed all the costumes—the corsets, the stoles, the gowns, the hats. Sometimes even the big names would perform: Bert Savoy, Gene Malin, the real queens. They fascinated that little girl. The way they moved, sang, talked. The way they transformed. She would sit in the dressing room, at the end of the wall of mirrors, to watch them get ready. The foundation. The kohl. The rouge. The stained lips. The pinched cheeks and spit curls and Gibson girl hats, which always made her laugh, they were so funny and old-fashioned. The queens were superstitious before their shows, kissing a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt or Libby Holman for good luck on their way to the stage.

She’d watch the stage through a crack in the wall, rapt, mesmerized, marveling at the way they’d swish through the crowd, flirting with patrons and singing those silly old songs we all loved, “I’d Rather Be Spanish than Mannish” and “I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana.” She’d be asleep by the time they finished their performances, curled up right there on the dressing room divan, and they’d lay a coat over her to keep her warm, and they’d keep their voices low as they cleaned their eyelids with cold cream and shared cigarettes. The last to leave would always carry her upstairs, where her mother was waiting at her sewing table. “Until tomorrow,” they’d say to each other. And tomorrow always came.

Of course, all that was before her father and two brothers died in that terrible car accident on that beautiful summer day, coming home from the beach. She and her mother survived, but her mother was never the same after that. Her grief was so great. She rarely came downstairs. But the little girl had more mothers than ever. Even after the Crash, when she and her mother were destitute like everyone and lost the upstairs apartment, she came to the nightclub every night. They fed her supper, trimmed her hair, made sure she had books for school. She was never alone. Not once. Not until the coppers finally came to close the place down. But she was older then. She knew who she was then.

Maybe one day Eddie will know, too.