Rising Tides (9 page)

Nicky stopped. She wondered why she was telling this to Dawn. She turned, not knowing what she would see on Dawn’s face. Dawn lifted her hand and tentatively covered Nicky’s. “I can’t believe that she didn’t love you, Nicky. I knew her, as well as anyone in the world did. And I know that she wouldn’t ever have for gotten her own child or stopped loving you. Maybe she thought she didn’t have any choice, but she must have felt so guilty. The things she did must have stayed with her until the day she died. That’s why she couldn’t tell you herself.”

“No. I know why she couldn’t tell me.”

Dawn was silent. Nicky knew she expected her to go on, but she couldn’t. There were some words too terrible to be spoken out loud. “Thank you,” Nicky said at last. “I needed someone with answers.”

Dawn hesitated, as if she weren’t sure what to do. Then she leaned forward and kissed Nicky’s cheek.

Nicky went to the window again after Dawn left and rested her cheek against the window frame. She was a woman who looked toward the future and rarely considered her past. The future beckoned, but the past had always been a weight around her heart. And still, as hard as she had tried to forget where she had come from and who she had been, it was with her still.

Her hand went to the locket; it was warm against her skin. “I know why you didn’t tell me, Aurore,” she whispered. “How could you have told me, after everything that happened next?”

Paris, 1927

C
hez les Américains might as well have been plunked down in the center of the New World, considering how little of its ambience it owed to the Old. Shuttered windows erased all the distinctive qualities of the City of Light, most particularly light itself. Years ago someone had painted the brick interior of the rue Pigalle night club black and stained the soft wood floor. The newest owner, hoping to benefit from wealthy Americans spending cheaply purchased francs, had covered the walls with framed photographs of Valentino and Pick ford and pastoral scenes of western mountains and Indian braves. Illuminated by harsh spotlights, smoke-filled and noisy, Chez les Américains had little to offer the expatriates it so coveted.

But still, they came.

“Sure they come and keep comin’, Nickel girl,” Clarence said, chomping on the end of a huge cigar he wouldn’t light. “They comin’ to hear the best jazz in Paris. Hot jazz, not that pisspot stuff served up ‘round the corner.”

Nicky leaned on the top of the piano and watched as guests wandered from table to table. Clarence wasn’t boasting. Clarence Valentine and his band were the best in town.

Nicky adored Clarence, and had since the first time she heard him play, when she was still a young child. Since then, of course, her life had changed dramatically. She had gone from the child Nicolette Cantrelle to the woman Nicky Valentine, from Chicago to Paris, from a life with her beloved father to a very different one with Clarence. She had left everything behind when she and Clarence were forced to flee Chicago, everything except Clarence himself and her love of music.

And memories of her father’s death that still surfaced sometimes as nightmares.

“What’s you thinkin’ about, Nickel? Your face so long,” Clarence said.

She smiled fondly at him. “Is not!”

His face lit up in a grin. Clarence had made his living hauling bales of cotton on the New Orleans river front in the days before he could get jobs with his music, and he was a large man, although the years had begun to whittle away at him. He had little education, none of it in music, but he had taught himself to play the piano by listening to the music of others. His ear was so fine that he could play any song he heard, and usually a more thrilling version, at that.

Tonight he wore a shiny black suit with a scarlet vest and his signature diamond stickpin in his tie. In the harsh glare of the spotlight, his shirt was white enough to blind her.

“You gonna get to it?” she asked. “Or you gonna flex those old fingers all night?”

“We’ll get goin’ when we need to. Things’ll heat up soon enough.”

Nothing really got started at the Montmartre night clubs until
well after midnight. The Americans and British had come to Paris to escape schedules and rules. In the process, they had established a new set.

Their days were predictable, and so were their nights. After dinner at cherished little restaurants, the serious drinkers among them went on to small, intimate bars like the Dingo or Parnasse, where they were on a first-name basis with the barman. But the others drifted to Montmartre for dancing and music. Those who came to Les Américains stayed until well after the sun was up, because as the clock ticked off the hours, the music got hotter and sweeter. The tips got more extravagant, too, and the praise more abandoned, which was why Nicky was preparing to ask Clarence if she could perform at the end of the night, instead of the beginning.

“Speaking of things heating up,” Nicky said, glad that he had given her an opening, “I can sing hot. You just don’t give me a chance, Clarence.”

“What you talkin’ about? You sing every single blessed night. You get everybody in the mood to stay here and listen. Weren’t for you, they wouldn’t come ‘tall.”

“They sure don’t come to hear me.” Nicky picked at a nail.

Clarence ran his fingers down the keyboard and started to play in earnest. She recognized the beginning of a bluesy medley, songs Clarence would consider too provocative for her.

She pouted—something she knew he hated. “They don’t come to hear me, because I never get to show them what I can do.”

“You better go show them now, else Mr. Yernaux’s gonna find himself somebody new for hostess.”

She made a face at him, crossing her eyes à la Josephine Baker, but he only shook his head. She straightened and
shimmied to be sure her beaded dress fell into a perfect line; then she pasted a wide smile on her face and started for the door.

Some of the people who came to Les Américains were famous. From the moment Nicky and Clarence set foot on French shores, Clarence had been determined that she would have the kind of education and life her father had wanted for her. He had gone to work in a series of nightclubs, playing piano with one jazz band, then another, to fund school tuition and a comfortable apartment the two of them could call home. She had studied literature and art, language and deportment. Her French was perfect; her English was, too—just in case perfect English was ever called for. Best of all, the sisters had encouraged her love of reading, and Nicky knew, from all she had devoured, that people like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, men who had danced and drunk at Les Américains, were men to reckon with.

Now she greeted a new group of guests. Two of the men were familiar, American journalists from some where in the Midwest who were in Europe on assignment for the next several months. They looked exactly alike to her, clean-cut, brown-haired youths wearing Sears and Roebuck worsted suits and friendly white smiles. The last time they’d appeared, they had talked endlessly about Lindbergh and given her stock-market tips she couldn’t use. She thought of them as Siamese twins, Bob One and Bob Two, but she called them “honey” and “sugar” to their faces. They ate it up.

“Honey, so glad to have you.” She kissed Bob One on the cheeks and turned to Bob Two. She had mastered the friendly kiss, the insubstantial but much appreciated greeting that made the guests at Les Américains feel welcomed. “Sugar.” She stepped back, extending her hand to those in the party she didn’t know.

She knew exactly who to touch and who to avoid. It was a sixth sense she had acquired, an intuition honed by subtle rejection and rib-crushing response. She had been the hostess for a year now, and she had learned which part of herself to share and which to hoard. Her livelihood was balanced somewhere in between—along with her self-esteem.

She seated the Bobs and their party, darting back and forth in her weighty green-and-rose dress like a ruby-throated hummingbird. By the time she left them, she knew they were comfortable and well on their way to finishing the first of many bottles of champagne.

Clarence’s piano grew louder, backed up now by the thumping of a bass and the mellow moaning of horns and a clarinet. Voices grew louder in response, and laughter rang through the room. She started toward a new group that had just arrived, a casual mélange of colored and white.

She had lived in Paris for eight years, and she had seen and shrugged off a world of experience. But she still wasn’t used to the coal black hand of a man on the chalk white arm of a woman. Black and white in public together still startled her, just as the lack of racism among the French did. She continued to be haunted by childhood experiences. When she shopped in Les Halles, she expected to be ordered to the end of every line. Once, not long ago, she had awakened screaming when car horns blared in the street below.

She greeted three of the men, jazz musicians who often played in a rival nightclub. She smiled at the women and watched them assess her. Their gowns were straight off the pages of
L’Art et la Mode,
carelessly worn and supremely designed. All the women slouched in the current fashion, their boyishly bound breasts nudging their bodices. Nicky’s dress
wasn’t worth the hem of a Poiret or Patou, but she was satisfied that her longer legs made up for the difference.

One of the men, a drummer named Tadpole Harris, embraced her, and she remained in his arms. She recognized Julia St. Cloud, known to her friends as Cloudy. A short woman with shingled blond hair and a long, narrow face, she was an heiress who sometimes served as a patron for promising Negro talent.

“Nicky Valentine’s the only reason we’d come to this joint,” Tadpole told them. “She can dance. Can this little gal dance!”

“And sing,” she reminded him. “I sing, don’t forget. Besides, you come to hear Clarence. You know you do.”

“Clarence’s her granddaddy,” Tadpole explained. “Watches over her like an old papa lion. And he can stomp those ivories, New Orleans style. Oughta be here sometime for a real grand splaz with Clarence. Best there is.”

Nicky glowed, as she always did when Clarence was praised. Much of the jazz in Paris was stale, the hashed-over sounds of a more fertile time and place. Cut off from their roots, some musicians had lost touch with their heritage and its soaring potential. Not Clarence. He jammed with every horn player and drummer just off the boat from America and learned the innovations going on at home.

She broke free from Tadpole’s hug, ready to lead his party to a table near the piano, when another man came through the door to join them. She was tall, and he was only a little taller, a broad-shouldered, large-boned man in his early thirties, with smooth dark skin and eyes that seemed to bore right through her.

“You haven’t met Gerard,” Tadpole said. “Gerard Benedict. Cloudy’s friend.”

Nicky smiled and murmured her greeting. Then she realized why the name seemed familiar. “Gerard Ben edict, the poet?”

He raised a brow. “You know my work?” he asked, in a voice accented with southern nights and disbelief.

She stood a little straighter. “Can you imagine that, sugar?” she said, softly slurring her own response. “Once ‘pon a time a nigger boy from Alabam’ learned to write a word or two, and a nigger gal from Looziana learned to read ‘em. Whatever’s this ol’ world comin’ to?”

Tadpole roared his approval. She made a graceful dancer’s turn and started across the floor. At the table, she turned on the charm, fussing over everyone, but she kept her back to Gerard. She had endured the occasional slight from white Americans who, even in the tolerant atmosphere of Paris, hadn’t quite buried their prejudices. But she couldn’t remember being treated this way by one of her own.

She was everybody’s darling, the sassy, rambunctious granddaughter of the revered Clarence Valentine. She had sung and danced for the Prince of Wales and the Princese de Polignac. Artists, writers and poets were as common in her world as busboys and horn players. She couldn’t imagine what she had done to one Gerard Benedict to deserve his derision.

She felt a hand at her wrist and fingers encircling it to keep her in place. “Then you’ve read my work?” a deep voice rumbled in her ear.

“Sure have.” She turned her head a little, so that she could see his face. “Can’t say I liked it much. All those folks swinging from trees and getting buried alive.”

“Maybe you’re just out of touch with life in America the beautiful. You look more white than colored.”

“Oh, I’m the best of everything. A real snappy piece of work.”

“Maybe you are.”

She met his eyes and gave him a lazy smile. She decided to forgive him. “You better believe it.”

She left the table, heading straight for Clarence. He swung into a peppy introduction without missing a beat. The rest of the band took it up. Les Américains was too small for the jazz orchestras of nightspots like the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs in the avenue Gabriel, which had once imported a sixty-three-member troupe from Harlem’s Cotton Club. But what Clarence’s band lacked in size, it made up for in moxie and bare-knuckle talent.

She clapped her hands to the rhythm, which was growing progressively bouncier. Someone flashed the spotlight right on her, and the din softened.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said after Clarence played a splashy finale. “And welcome to Les Américains, which tonight is proud to feature Clarence Valentine and the Valentine Sweethearts.” She stepped forward and folded her hands demurely. At Clarence’s cue, she began to sing a poignant ballad about a man in love. Her voice was halting. The room grew quieter. She ended the intro with one finger to her lips in sad contemplation. Then a breath, a pause, and she was off.

“Yes sir, that’s my baby!” Clarence and the band cut loose, and so did she. She wiggled and swung, her arms akimbo as she shouted the lyrics and began to Charles ton. Her feet flew, her hands flew, her short, dark curls whipped against her cheeks.

The room broke into applause as she shimmied her hips and a thousand glass beads on her dress sparkled in the spotlight. She smiled her naughtiest smile as she hammered out the words. She touched her hips and turned for a backside view. Her feet flew in double time, her hands and knees crossed with rubbery grace; then she locked her fingers behind her head and started
all over again. By the time she was finished, the dance floor, which she’d had to herself, was filled with hot-blooded sheiks and shebas.

She accepted compliments before she retreated to Clarence’s side. She would sing and dance again when there was a lull.

“You’re a hit, Nickel.”

She waited until her breathing slowed to nearly nor mal. “You sure make me earn my keep.”

He chuckled, and she kissed his grizzled cheek.

“I saw you making eyes at that man.”

“Making eyes my foot!”

His hands flew over the keyboard. “I’m not gonna be here forever to watch out for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t go doin’ nothin’ foolish.”

“I’m nearly twenty. I’ve outgrown foolishness.”

“You’re smack in the middle of it. Wish your father was here to make you behave.”

He almost never mentioned Rafe. “You’ve been like a father. Sometimes I forget you’re not.”

“You never forget.” He looked up. “Things would have been different if your daddy’d lived.”

“Miss Valentine?”

She swung around to find Gerard Benedict behind her. She moved away from the piano. The music slowed to fox-trot tempo. More dancers crowded the floor. A successful night at Les Américains was truly under way.