The Property of a Lady (55 page)

The wedding breakfast at the Hotel Hollywood was so riotous with laughter and music that other guests popped their heads in to see what was going on and stayed to join in the party. O’Hara presented Azaylee with a ruby heart pendant that sent her into raptures of delight and Rosa with a diamond bracelet that stunned her into silence. He made a short speech in which he said he loved them all, and would they excuse him but he was taking his wife off to San Francisco for a week’s honeymoon.

Azaylee smiled as she watched them leave in a flurry of rice and rose petals and hugs and kisses. She patted the heart pendant at her throat and held Viktor back as he lunged howling down the steps after Missie, thinking maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad. Maybe O’Hara liked Hollywood so much he would decide to come and live at Rosemont. And maybe things would stay the same after all.

If Missie had any misgivings about the honeymoon after her experiences at the cruel hands of Eddie Arnhaldt, they were dispelled that first night. Big O’Hara, with his hard, strong, comforting body, his face alight with love and the wonder of her beauty, kissed her as reverently as a queen, holding her in his arms and stroking her hair, caressing her face, kissing her eyelids, her cheeks, her mouth. He told her how much he loved her, how very lovely she was, how he was the happiest man in the world. And when he made love to her he trembled with passion, crying out his love to her as she wrapped herself
around him, lost in the discovery of new senses and the pleasure of being with the man she loved.

The week passed in a flash and before she knew it they were back on the Pullman heading for Los Angeles.

“You’ll have to be packin your things quickly, me girl,” O’Hara said as the train slid into the station. “We’ll have to be gettin’ back to New York to see to me new business.”

“New York?” Missie blanched. “But I thought we would be staying in Hollywood. Azaylee is so happy here….” Her voice trailed off as she realized that she was being stupid. O’Hara’s business was in New York and Chicago, and as his wife he would expect her to go with him.

“Don’t worry yourself about Azaylee, I’ll make sure she’s happy,” he promised. “She’ll attend the finest girls’ school in New York. She’ll be a real little princess now with King O’Hara as her father.”

If only you knew that she is
really
a princess, Missie thought silently, but there was no way she could tell him the true story of their lives and expect him to understand. Better to keep her old secrets and fears to herself, and perhaps now, as Mr. and Mrs. O’Hara and their daughter, protected by layers of different identities, they would finally be safe from the Arnhaldts as well as the Russians.

New York

The penthouse at the Sherry Netherland proved too small for O’Hara and his new family, and he moved them atop a turret on swanky Park Avenue: four bedrooms and bathrooms, a paneled library already stocked with books, a drawing room with two marble fireplaces, and, behind the big kitchen, spacious quarters for Beulah and her two assistants.

Azaylee had refused to bring Viktor with her. “No,” she had said, pale and tearless and looking very small and thin on the morning they were to leave. Even her flaxen
hair had lost its luster. “Viktor will stay with Rosa. He’ll be happier here on his shady porch than cooped up in some stuffy New York apartment.”

Remembering Viktor sprawling on the fire escape at Rivington Street, Missie thought he could probably be happy in Manhattan again but Azaylee was firm.

“I’ll come and visit you often, Viktor,
milochka,”
she whispered, kissing his soft head, and she covered her ears against his howls as they drove away.

She tried her best to be happy in the beautiful Park Avenue apartment where she had her own luxurious room. She was back once more at the Misses Beadles’ School, only somehow now it didn’t seem so fascinating after Rosemont and the boarders and their talk of movies and stars. It just seemed to her that every time she let herself be the least bit happy in a place, she was picked up and taken somewhere else, almost like a punishment. First there had been Rivington Street with Rosa looking after her, then the apartment on West Fifty-third, then Haus Arnhaldt, then Hollywood, and now Park Avenue. And now O’Hara was talking about going to Chicago for a few months….

If she tried, she could remember all the way back to when she was very small. She knew she had lived in Russia, and some nights when she was lying in bed she tried to recall it. She remembered that the houses had felt very big and she had felt very small, and that everyone had been very beautiful. She had never talked about it with Missie but she could remember how her real Papa’s bristly early-morning chin had felt next to her cheek when she had rushed in to give him a kiss, and she remembered the way her mother smelled so deliciously of flowers and how soft her skin had felt and how cool her lips as she kissed her. And she remembered Alexei’s vivid face as if it were a photograph, his dark-gray eyes laughing at her as she followed him around and his young, strong legs preceding her up the tall stairs that she had labored over one
at a time while he flew to the top like a pony over a jump. She remembered the way his voice had sounded and that he had spoken French to her in the mornings and English in the afternoons and that Nyanya had always sung them Russian lullabies.

These were the memories she retreated to in her dreams, her own personal, private world where she was a tiny child again and the center of everyone’s love and attention, and all the world was a safe place where everyone adored her. One day she hoped to find that world again.

Meanwhile, she attended Misses Beadles’ and brought home report cards that said she was a dreamer and inattentive, and she telephoned Rosa and the girls all the time to find out what was new with the boarders and if they had all played their parts in
Scheherazade
yet and if her darling Viktor was missing her too much.

And she always promised to visit them soon, but now a year had passed and they never had.

She was having supper at the kitchen table and Missie was talking to Beulah about the menus for the following week when O’Hara wandered in, a big grin on his face.

“Pack your fanciest dresses, me girls,” he said, bestowing a smacking kiss on Azaylee’s blond head, “we’re off to Chicago tomorrow.”

“Chicago?” they exclaimed.

“The Pink Orchid is just about finished,” he announced proudly. “I’m planning the opening next week. I thought we’d all go along, have a little holiday together.” He grabbed Missie and swung her around, laughing. “King O’Hara’s third club,” he boasted proudly. “How’s that for an alehouse-keeper from Delancey?”

“I wish I knew,” Missie replied, “but since you have never allowed me to see inside either one of your clubs, I’ve no way of passing an opinion.”

He frowned. “Well, you know how I feel about you going to nightclubs. They are no place for a respectable
woman….” He blushed, embarrassed, as she burst out laughing.

“King O’Hara, do you mean to say that you run a business that’s not fit for ‘respectable’ women?” she teased. “I wonder what our Park Avenue neighbors would say to that. And the fact that most of their sons and daughters are your customers.”

“That’s different,” he said briskly, “that’s business. ?’jaysus, Missie, aren’t I asking you to the opening of the Pink Orchid next week? I’ve hand-picked the guests meself. The cream of society will be coming to see me club and meet me wife.”

“And will you be selling them bathtub gin?” she teased again.

“O’Hara’s gin is niver made in a bathtub. It’s genuine hooch from Bermuda.”

She looked at him, surprised. “I thought you bought your liquor from your friends, the Oriconne brothers.”

“The Oriconnes?” He coughed and shuffled his feet. “Yeah, well, me and the brothers had a slight disagreement about price so now I only give them half me business—for old times’ sake. But what are we doing standing here talking about the Oriconnes when you should both be packing? We’re catching the Twentieth Century tomorrow morning.”

He glanced at Azaylee, sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, a glass of milk beside her plate. Her eyes looked round and sad and he went and sat beside her. “And as a special surprise for me littlest love, I thought we’d go on from Chicago to Hollywood and pay a visit to your Aunt Rosa.”

Azaylee’s small heart-shaped face turned pink with pleasure and her pansy eyes grew rounder as she thought of seeing Viktor and Rosa and the girls again. “Oh, King O’Hara”—she laughed, throwing her arms delightedly around his big neck—“thank you, thank you.”

“Just want me girls to be happy,” he replied gruffly, smiling at Missie over the top of her head.

“Don’t hold with a child not calling her pa ‘Daddy. ’” Beulah sniffed. “Same as every other child.”

But Missie shook her head. She knew why Azaylee couldn’t call her beloved O’Hara “daddy.” It was because somewhere in the deep recesses of the past, she knew she had a real papa of her own and that one day she was hoping he would come back and find her, just the way they always did in storybooks.

Chicago

Chicago’s old Palmer House Hotel featured a twenty-five-foot-high rotunda and an Egyptian Parlor as well as imported French furnishings and Italian frescoes.

“Nothing but the best for me girls,” O’Hara said, puffing on his cigar and glancing at his little family as they made their way to the dining room the next evening. Enormous marble columns flanked the room and heavy crystal chandeliers hung down the center of the ornately painted ceiling. A bevy of waiters awaited their command, and O’Hara winked at Missie.

“Remember the first time I took you out to dinner in New Jersey? And you said you weren’t grand enough?” She nodded. “I told you then you were grand enough for anywhere, but now you are even grander than all this.” His greenish eyes shone with love as he handed her a box across the table. “And one for me littlest girl too,” he said, passing an identical box to Azaylee.

Missie opened hers and said, awed, “Oh, look! A perfect orchid in pink diamonds. It’s beautiful, Shamus, just beautiful.”

He grinned bashfully. “Why’re you callin’ me Shamus, then? You’ve always called me O’Hara.”

“Because I love you,” she said softly. “Shamus
or
O’Hara, I just love you. Thank you.”

Blushing, he said quickly to Azaylee, “So open it, me darlin’. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Her golden eyes were like saucers as she opened her box and peered inside. “Mine’s an orchid too,” she said proudly.

“Just like your mother’s, but little-girl style,” he said as they exclaimed over the carved rose quartz orchid with its pink diamond center.

O’Hara beamed at them. Holding his hands out to them suddenly across the table, he said, “This may just be one of the happiest nights of me life.”

The Pink Orchid was located between State Street and Calumet Avenue close by a dozen other popular speakeasies, the Sunset Café, Dreamland, the Panama, and New Orleans Babes, as well as the Big Grand Theater, the Monogram, and the Vendóme, where hot jazz bands were featured. O’Hara had chosen the location because it was more exciting than the upper-crust North Side and because he knew his classy customers would get an extra kick out of coming down to the sleazier South Side.

Searchlights raked the sky, a man with a movie camera filmed the arrival of the glamorous guests, and the French champagne was on the house. Missie looked sensational in a deep-pink chiffon dress and a corsage of pink orchids at her shoulder held by her new pink diamond brooch, and O’Hara thought he looked pretty snazzy himself in white tie and tails with his pink orchid boutonnière. And Azaylee looked so slender and vulnerable and devastatingly lovely in the palest pink organdy, her beautiful hair brushed into a shining aura of curls around her sweet young face, that O’Hara just had to hug her and tell her he was proud to be her daddy and that he would look after her forever.

She smiled, touching his face tenderly with her fingers
as she said, “I’m glad you are my daddy now, O’Hara,” and he roared with laughter and kissed her again.

They inspected the domed night-blue ceiling studded with shiny pink stars, the pink star-scattered dance floor, the tiers of tables with crisp pink cloths, the silver goblets and pink candelabra; the waiters in hunting-pink jackets and the cigarette girls and waitresses showing their legs and more in pink tights and brief pink net tutus. Each table had a vase with a single perfect pink orchid, and besides the resident jazz band, there was a line-up of guest celebrity stars and dancers that Azaylee was dying to see.

The South Side was jumping that night. Those who were not invited watched enviously as the guests spilled out of their smart automobiles and hurried, laughing, beneath the flashing Pink Orchid marquee into the promised land of luxury, gaiety, jazz, and hooch that was King O’Hara’s special recipe for success. He introduced Missie and Azaylee to everyone and much later, when the place was crowded and the festivities in full swing, he suggested that it was time she took Azaylee home.

“See my littlest girl goes to bed as soon as she gets to the hotel,” he instructed as they waited under the bright marquee for the limousine. The driver was taking his time, and O’Hara glanced impatiently up and down the street, barely noticing the closed black car driving slowly past on the opposite side. It swerved suddenly, veering fast across the empty street toward them. They stared, astonished, for a second or two as the rear window rolled down and the pink lights from the marquee glinted from the metal barrel of a snub-nosed machine gun, then with a fierce bellow O’Hara flung his big body in front of Missie and Azaylee. The hail of bullets ripped right through him, sending him spinning and leaving him a twitching, bloody heap on the sidewalk.

Azaylee knew she was screaming, just the way she remembered someone screaming in her dreams, years and
years ago in the forest at Varishnya. She could hear Missie moaning and the squeal of tires as the black car pulled away and then the sound of running feet. And herself, just screaming and screaming as if all the screams had been locked inside her for years and years, and now she knew they would never stop.