Page 39

Story: The Briar Club

“Oh, by the way,”

Grace called. “Would you mind leaving that lipstick on my bureau? Certainly Red is my best color.”

Claire shrugged. “Mine too.”

She rummaged in her pocket, dropped the tube on the bureau, then sauntered off down the stairs.

“Where’s the fire?”

Claire arrived at Case’s Sandwich Shop on F Street out of breath. “I had to hoof it clear from the Hoover Building.”

“What on earth are you doing over there? Congress is in recess.”

Sydney looked up from her seat in the booth nearest the door, sipping a root beer in a tall glass, cool as strawberry ice cream in a dusty pink linen suit and white summer straw hat. “Don’t tell me your senator still has you on the hop in August?”

“She’s back in Maine, so I’m filling in for the month at the Department of Commerce steno pool.”

Claire slid into the seat opposite, wincing slightly at the looks they were getting. Sydney with her pearls, her spotless gloves, her heaped shopping bags from Jelleff’s and Peck said it wasn’t so bad, but...

“Nothing like that. I have something for you, that’s all.”

Rummaging among her shopping bags. “Want to order a hamburger? You may as well have one so I can stare mournfully at it.”

“I have to head back in ten minutes, Sid. I don’t have time for a hamburger.”

Claire stole a sip from Sydney’s root beer. “I’ve got about six months of backlog typing to do for Mr.Morrow—he’s the Negro adviser at the Commerce Department, and none of the other secretaries will work for him.”

Sydney’s whole face softened. “But you will.”

More because I want the money than because I’m a crusader , Claire thought . That look in Sydney’s eyes made her slightly ashamed and slightly greedy, knowing she didn’t deserve it, but still wanting more of it. “You said you had something for me?”

she asked brusquely.

Sydney pushed a bag across the table. “Merry Christmas.”

“It’s August .”

“Don’t be a crosspatch!”

Claire eyed the label on the bag. “Jelleff’s? Bit out of my league. Don’t all the First Ladies shop there?”

“Will you shut up and open it?”

Claire pushed aside the nesting tissue paper, peeking discreetly. Bright red nylon jersey, white decorative buttons... “A bathing suit?”

“A Claire McCardell halter-top two-piece.”

Sydney’s eyes sparkled. “You’ll look like a gorgeous ripe strawberry.”

Claire thought of her saggy old navy-blue Lastex suit. When was the last time she’d taken a day off from the yammer in her head, the yammer of money money money , to go swimming? “Well,”

she said at last, stuffing the tissue paper back on top of all that wickedly ruched red fabric. “Thank you.”

“I thought maybe we could go to North Beach in Maryland this weekend when my husband takes Bear on a hunting trip.”

Sydney didn’t reach across the table to take her hand, but her own hand in its white glove moved an inch closer. “It’s only an hour’s drive, and we could have a whole day—the beach, a picnic, go out somewhere for once. I know what you’re thinking, it wouldn’t be safe,”

she said, voice dropping below the shop’s lunchtime hubbub. “But two friends on the beach together, people don’t suspect that. If we’re careful—”

“What’s the point?”

Claire said it fast and hard, before she could think twice. “We’re not friends who go to the beach. We’re friends who...”

Fuck . She mouthed it silently. “We go somewhere to be alone, and scratch the itch that needs scratching, that’s all.”

She didn’t stop to see the look on Sydney’s face at that. She could already imagine it, so she didn’t need to see it, so she didn’t look. She grabbed her pocketbook, grabbed the Jelleff’s bag, mumbled “Thank you for the suit—”

and piled out of the booth, getting out of Case’s as fast as she could.

Doing a lot of that lately, aren’t you? The voice in Claire’s head sounded uncomfortably like Grace.

3900 Macomb Street, a classic brick four-bedroom between Wisconsin and Massachusetts. Open today, 12 to dark! the newspaper ad had said in the Saturday paper, so Claire turned up just before twilight. The agent looked dubious about showing the house to a woman alone, but Claire flashed the dime-store wedding band she slipped on whenever she found it convenient to pass as married and twittered something about her husband being called into the office, weren’t men just awful for working on the weekend? But he’d sent her on to look at the place, see if it was what they were looking for...

“Wonderful neighborhood,”

the agent said, escorting her in. “Gray slate porch, fenced backyard for summer grilling. Perfect place to raise the kids!”

But he hustled off to attend the other couple already examining the dining room, leaving Claire to wander, which was how she liked it when she went to a showing. Looking at everything, planning just how her dream house would look someday.

Well, not her dream house. Her dream house, if she was conjuring up castles in the sky, money no object, would probably look like Sydney’s beachside palace in Bermuda: a pale green wedding cake of a house, a dock leading out into a dazzling turquoise ocean and a white roof stepping up toward the sky, a woman in a bikini standing on the dock and waving... But Claire was a realist; she wasn’t going to have a beach house in Bermuda (or any of the rest of it). A three-bedroom with a white picket fence, though? Yes. So she liked to go to house showings and mentally furnish it: yes to that elegant glass-fronted sideboard; she’d have one just like that; no to those heavy velvet drapes, she’d have sheer curtains that let in every ounce of sunlight...

This place was nice. Bachelor house, you could tell—that walnut bar, the den with its deep leather armchairs, the lack of vases or decorative touches. Big, square rooms; wide windows; crown molding... Saving for a house since you were sixteen made you an expert in things like crown molding. Claire wandered into the kitchen, hoping to see one of those new General Electric ranges.

Whoever the bachelor of the house was, he clearly didn’t do much cooking. This was the domain of some daily housekeeper, from the cherry-printed curtains to the decorative flour and sugar crocks. Claire wondered if she might swipe the smallest one into her big pocketbook... And then she saw the iron trivet on the counter and went still as stone.

It’s not Mama’s , she tried to tell herself. Not Mama’s. But it looked exactly like Mama’s, a cast-iron trivet shaped like an American flag rippling in the wind. Claire could see Mama hoisting a sizzling hot pan off the burner and setting it on the trivet so the oil wouldn’t overheat before she finished grating the potatoes for the placki ziemniaczane . Mama was always impatient; she invariably got the oil heating too soon, and then ended up grumbling how blessed long it took to grate potatoes, and after that she’d usually end up grating a fingertip or two and shouting, Michael, I don’t care how much you love them, I am never making potato pancakes again! And Dad would come in with Band-Aids for her skinned fingertips and end up sitting her down with a gin and tonic while he placidly finished grating the potatoes and pressing them into little cakes for the hot oil...

And then the iron trivet would come to the middle of the dining room table, and the iron Stars and Stripes would shield the tablecloth from the hot platter of potato pancakes while they all helped themselves. Chattering, the three of them, about their day.

Claire stumbled out of the kitchen, away from that horrible flag trivet (Mama kept refusing to leave it behind; she’d insist on lugging it from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, rented room to rented room—it was like she refused to admit they were never going to have a kitchen of their own again to make potato pancakes). Out to the backyard, gulping in the evening air and the smell of evergreens from the stand of trees against the fence. Claire wasn’t smelling cooking oil and frying potatoes; she wasn’t .

A cold nose pressed itself against her hand, and she yelped. A big dark dog, pricked ears, wagging tail, nearly the size of a pony... “Duke?”

she said, before she could stop herself. It looked just like that dog Nora had kept for a while, the big friendly Great Dane. For an entire year, the Briar Club had used his long back for a footrest when they balanced their plates to eat in Grace’s room.

“Down, Duke.”

A cigarette ember flared in the shadows under the evergreen trees, and a man came forward, snapping his fingers. The dog bounded obediently back to his side. “You okay?”

he asked Claire.

She realized her cheeks were damp and scrubbed at them furiously. “Yes, I— Yes. Is this your house?”

“I came home early. Waiting out the last of the prospective buyers.”

He was burly, dark-haired, watchful, sleeves rolled up and jacket thrown over one shoulder. “You know Duke?”

“My housemate kept him for while. I guess you’d be the owner who was out of the country? Is that why you’re selling the place?”

If Claire had a house like this, she’d never let it go.

“In a manner of speaking. Some bad memories here. Turning over a new leaf.”

He looked at her as if he was flipping some mental file. “You’re one of the Briarwood ladies.”

“Have we met?”

Claire was beginning to regret coming to this showing. First kitchen trinkets bringing unwelcome memories, now nosy men.

“No. I know who Nora’s neighbors are, that’s all.”

Claire suddenly remembered that game of Taboo in Grace’s room, Nora blind drunk on spiked sun tea: I am in love with a career criminal, and it’s been over for ages but I don’t seem able to entirely get past it . “I’d better be going,”

Claire said, edging toward the deck.

“Red hair,”

he said, nodding as he thumbed to the end of that mental file. “Claire Hallett. I remember because you were the only one going by a false name.”

Claire froze. Duke wandered up and pushed his nose into her hand again.

The dark-haired man looked—chagrined? Impatient? Hard to tell; he had one of those swarthy, immobile faces. “Look, I’m not trying to scare you. I keep an eye on Nora—she’s got some bad-news family, so I keep tabs who comes and goes around her, if anybody’s a threat. She doesn’t want me around so I don’t come around, but I do what I can to keep her safe. Your name flagged because it’s not your real name, but I don’t give a good goddamn why you changed it, all right? Long as you don’t mean Nora any harm.”

“I don’t,”

Claire managed to say.

“Good.”

He flicked his cigarette butt away. “So we can be friends.”

“Not sure I want that, but I definitely don’t want to be your enemy.”

He laughed, lighting another cigarette. Mr.X , Claire thought. The one who sent Nora flowers with a card marked X . “Been a while since I had a conversation like this. What’s your real name?”

“Clara,”

Claire heard herself saying. “Clara Halecki.”

Haleckis are lucky. Claire’s father had told her that when she was a little girl. My grandfather never owned a home of his own in Krakow, and look at us now! Gesturing at the walls around them, the neat little house in the suburbs of Annapolis. It’s a great country, Clara. The greatest on earth, because if you work hard here you’ll always be lucky. He believed in luck, and so did little Clara. Why wouldn’t she? She had an accountant father who was always singing over his ledgers, everything from Cole Porter to his grandmother’s ancient Polish lullabies, and a lovely mother who brushed Claire’s curls out every night and told her red hair was the prettiest so don’t listen to what people said about blondes. Of course Clara Halecki believed in luck. She was the luckiest girl in the world, living in the greatest country on earth.

Until she wasn’t.

Until ’29, when everything crashed, when the whole country broke . When everyone was suddenly tightening their belts, when the accounting firm had to reduce staff, and her father came home in the middle of the day with his briefcase, looking suddenly old.

Never mind , nine-year-old Clara remembered him telling her mother, trying to make light of it. I’ll find something else soon, don’t you worry. We live in the land of opportunity, remember!

“You okay?”

Mr.X was looking at Claire; she realized her eyes were brimming all over again.

“Your kitchen trivet.”

She looked up at the sky so her lids wouldn’t overrun. Nearly dark, fireflies beginning to dance around the lawn in bright sparks. “It looked just like my mother’s.”

Darling Mama, so house-proud. So happy to keep house because she loved that house: the rose garden, the fresh-ironed curtains at her kitchen windows, the immaculate sideboard with her grandmother’s silver. The silver had been one of the first things to go, down at the pawnshop when the bills piled up and Clara’s father hadn’t been so quick to find a new job as he thought. The family silver, then the good china, then the shiny Packard her father washed down every Sunday afternoon with such pride... Don’t worry, Clara. Something will come up any day now.

But it hadn’t, not in time to save the house. The house that Clara had assumed they owned , but somehow they didn’t, somehow the bank owned it. And then Mama was weeping as she wrapped up the iron flag trivet and a few kitchen essentials, because the rented rooms where they were moving wouldn’t accommodate even half their things, and the women who had been Mama’s friends picked their way through the house at the estate sale as if they’d never come to gossip in her kitchen and tell her she made the best lemon cake in town. I’ll just take those candlesticks off your hands , the woman next door said, as Clara had stood there with rage billowing as red as her hair, watching them strip her home bare.

“I started going by Hallett once I went to work,”

Claire heard herself saying aloud, rubbing the Great Dane’s head. “So I’d never get passed over for a job because I sounded like a dirty Polack.”

No one had called them dirty Polacks when they had silver in the sideboard, but when you were on the breadlines, the names came out. No daughter of mine will have to leave school for a job , her father had said, but Claire was sweeping out movie theaters for change by the time she was twelve, and that was when his red hair started to go gray. From movie theaters to offices by thirteen; it wasn’t legal but she already had tits and an ass so she could pass for fifteen, and that meant people would wink and pretend she was sixteen if that meant they could pay her less. She’d clerked at stores, she’d stocked shelves, she’d done anything that brought a little money home, even if it meant getting felt up by the manager. And it still wasn’t enough, the whole damn country limping along hungry and cold, Clara’s tiny family limping along with it. Limping from boardinghouse to rented room, each a little shabbier than the last. Our luck’s about to turn , her father said. It’s still the land of opportunity! Only now Clara and her mother turned their faces away when they heard it.

“You want the trivet?”

Nora’s Mr.X asked. “You can have it if you want. I don’t even know what a trivet is.”

“No, thank you.”

Claire’s mother had loaded it into the big pocket of her overcoat when Clara was fifteen, loaded the other pocket with cobbles, then jumped off a bridge. Claire wondered why she’d even bothered to weigh herself down—she was so thin by then, so worn-out, she’d have slipped motionless under the water without a struggle. You’ll manage better without me was the only note she’d left for Clara and her father, in the cupboard-size rented kitchen that smelled like grease where they had to shoo rats out of the pantry.

Her father had gone a year later, on July Fourth. Dock accident, because the only job he could get in Hoover’s America—her gentle, educated father with his college degree and his accountant’s license and his lovingly shined shoes—was as janitor for a dockside office, working even on a federal holiday, and a swinging crate had come loose and crushed him flat. The man who believed they lived in the land of opportunity had died on the Fourth of July.

And Clara Halecki had buried her father in a pauper’s grave, cleared her things out of their rented room because she was going to be evicted in two days, and then she’d gone to the thirty-five-year-old manager of the store where she clerked and told him she’d fuck him for a steak dinner and a place to sleep. And as soon as he was snoring, she’d stolen his wallet and his watch and a silver paperweight off his desk and every silver spoon in his cutlery drawer, and took off for Washington, D.C., where she introduced herself as Claire Hallett. Claire Hallett, who would do anything, steal anything, screw anything if it meant food in the pantry and money in her hand. Claire Hallett, who knew she was not living in the land of opportunity, who knew that love was for suckers, luck was an illusion, and nothing on earth mattered but security.

Claire Hallett, who was going to have a house someday—a house like this, foursquare and picket-fenced, just like her mother’s, only she’d buy it cash in hand so that no one could ever, ever take it away from her. And she was almost there! Almost twenty years of scrimping, and she was almost there: eight thousand dollars, the magic number.

If she didn’t throw it all away, getting soft over things that didn’t matter. Friends who poured you glasses of sun tea. Dark-haired women with wounded eyes.

“Tell Nora I said hello,”

said Mr.X, seeing Claire start buttoning up her overcoat.

“No,”

said Claire, “don’t think I will.”

And she walked out dry-eyed, with a face like stone.

“Hey, MissClaire! Mr.Huckstop said he took your picture recently.”

Claire stopped dead on her way down the stairs, looking up at Pete on the landing above. “What’d he say?”

The thing she’d worried about, that someone might recognize her from those cheesecake photos. Huckstop swore he didn’t sell to locals—

But Pete wasn’t toeing the carpet or blushing, like he certainly would if he’d seen her with her tits hanging out over a fake warhead. “I went in to pick up prints for Mrs.Fliss—her latest ones of Angela—and Mr.Huckstop asked if I’d ever considered getting my picture taken. I could use some photos of a young fella , he said, and he asked me to come by some evening. He said you did sometimes, to get your picture taken for your boyfriend?”

Pete’s freckled face was just shining with sincerity, in that way that made Claire’s stomach squirm guiltily. How old was he now, sixteen? Too young to be dealing with an under-the-counter photographer without many scruples. “Pete—”

“He said I could make some money,”

Pete went on, sounding a little puzzled.