Chapter 2 Nora

Dear Kitty, Apparently there’s a lair of gangsters down the street from Briarwood House! Irish mob—I sit in my window hoping to see machine guns and getaway cars. My window overlooks the whole square; the best place for people watching. Though my housemates offer plenty of diversion! Will old Mrs.Muller ever crack a smile? Who on earth is sending Nora Walsh all these sumptuous flowers?

I wish you were here. —Grace

Thanksgiving had come and gone, everyone was buzzing about the upcoming Rosenberg trial, and Nora Walsh was moving up in the world.

“You look very smart.”

Grace March, wrapped in a threadbare robe embroidered with Chinese dragons and waiting on the fourth-floor landing with her toothbrush, looked admiring as Nora hurried out of their shared bathroom. “That suit’s new, isn’t it?”

“Hecht Company, sale rack.”

Nora gave her smoke-blue gabardine jacket a pleased tug. It took a lot of scrimping and sale hunting to look expensive on a budget as limited as hers, but it was worth it. There were those at the National Archives who thought MissWalsh was entirely too gauche, too Foggy Bottom to have been promoted out of the file room to personal secretary of the Mr.Harris, executive officer of the Archives. MissWalsh had decided that even if she hadn’t been raised to be elegant, college-educated, or top-drawer, no one was ever going to know it by looking at her. Maybe she lived in a boardinghouse room the size of a soup can and waitressed at the local diner on weekends, but the moment she headed to the National Archives her lipstick was flawless, her clothes up to the minute, and her voice ironed of every Irish vowel.

“Very nice, Tipperary.”

Grace had nicknamed Nora that since hearing her family had originally made its way over from Tipperary County in the old country and it made Nora grin every time. “Quality gabardine always shows,”

Grace continued, rubbing Nora’s cuff between her fingers. For a small-town Iowa widow, she had a very sharp eye for clothes. “Coming to dinner tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Nora’s usual supper was a cup of soup heated on her hot plate; part of the aforementioned scrimping. Thursday dinners were the best meal Nora had all week, may all the saints bless Grace March and her Thursday night Briar Club. (So dubbed by Pete, with an adorable solemnity that had all the women biting their cheeks in an effort not to laugh. Well, except Arlene Hupp, who giggled out loud just to watch Pete’s face fall. “ So sorry, Pete, you’re just too funny!”

Claire Hallett had promptly dumped a cup of scalding sun tea down Arlene’s cashmere twinset, which Nora thought a bit excessive but Claire was inclined to overflex her claws at times.)

“I saw you writing a postcard yesterday, Grace,”

Nora went on, snatching up her handbag. “Want me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out, so Doilies Nilsson won’t snoop?”

Doilies was what Grace had dubbed their landlady (when Pete wasn’t in earshot) for all those horridly starched little antimacassars she was always crocheting and draping over every blessed surface.

“I’m not done writing it out yet, thank you.”

Grace smiled her sleepy half smile and disappeared into the bathroom, tousling her hair. Nora hadn’t seen Grace get any letters in the five months she’d lived at Briarwood House, or post one either, or mention a single family member back home. For a woman who had such an easy listening air as she welcomed other people’s life stories, she was remarkably unforthcoming with her own.

Nora appreciated that. She didn’t talk about her family, either.

The square was just waking up as she walked out the front door of Briarwood House, pulling on her pristine darned-at-the-fingertips gloves. The drugstore across the street was already open, clerk sweeping off the steps; Dave’s Barbershop on the opposite corner already had a fellow rushing in, barking “Neaten up the sides and leave the top!”

Next door, Mr.Rosenberg was out on the front steps of his deli, affixing a small sign in the window: no relation to julius he was always going to win if it came to a struggle. He knew it, and Nora did too.

“I’ll pay you back. Next week, I promise.”

He never did, and every dollar from her bag had already disappeared into his pocket. He leaned in and kissed Nora’s cheek, or tried—Nora took a step back. “You’re a gem. I won’t forget this.”

“I won’t either,”

said Nora, feeling her blood pound in impotent rage. “Hard to forget it when your brother steals from you.”

“Don’t be like that, deirfiúr bheag . We miss you back home, you know. Mam wishes you’d visit. So does Siobhan.”

Siobhan misses me because now there’s no one to watch the kids for her , Nora thought uncharitably and accurately of her brother’s wife. That was what an unmarried sister-in-law was for: watch the babies, tend the mother-in-law, iron the police uniforms, be grateful. Not move out to a swank job in the capital and start wearing pencil-slim suits and talking above herself.

“I’m working a new thing, you know,”

he went on, flicking a bit of invisible dust off his badge. “The feds are looking to wrap up the Warring brothers, the Foggy Bottom gang, the numbers racket—”

“Good luck prying the District away from the Warrings, Tim. They’ve been here longer than Prohibition. And don’t you play poker with Rags Warring every Saturday at Dailey’s?”

While he collected his weekly payoff, Nora could have added, but didn’t bother. Half the local cops were on the take.

Tim shrugged, grinning. “Doesn’t mean I won’t help the feds roll ’em up if it gets me a nice promotion.”

Cops and robbers , Nora thought. Every kid in Foggy Bottom played cops and robbers. If you were from a family like Nora’s—Mass every Sunday and First Communion photographs in the parlor, and a good amount of police blue running through the family tree—you were on the cop side in those games. If you came from a family like the notorious Warrings, where the numbers racket was passed down from father to son (and so was the backyard still and the jugged moonshine back in Prohibition days), you played on the robber side. What most people hadn’t figured out was that both sides were utter rackets. Both sides, in Nora’s experience, understood the game.

“Get lost, Timmy,”

Nora managed to say evenly and moved past her older brother into the National Archives, heels stabbing the ground like knives. By the time she was seated at her desk, sorting the mail with efficient speed, preparing her boss’s cup of coffee (“Good morning, Mr.Harris—don’t forget your ten o’clock and here’s that report you asked for on the new preservation case for the Bill of Rights—”), Nora’s inner calm almost matched her outward poise again.

So you still get the occasional family hand shoving its way into your pocketbook , she thought, taking possession of her glass-smooth desk. You’re still on the right track.

And she didn’t ever—after what had happened at eighteen—intend to get knocked off it.

The flowers were waiting for Nora on Mrs. Nilsson’s hall table by midmorning Saturday: a mass of fragrant lilies sent over from Moonlight Magnolias on the other side of Wood and Briar. No note, as usual. Just the card with its big scrawled X . “Not cheap,”

Mrs.Nilsson said, assessing the blooms.

Nora smiled. The bouquets were always expensive, and always different—he never fell back on the old tired standard of a dozen red roses. It was always something unusual: yellow sunflowers mixed with purple sea lavender; freesias in wild oranges and reds; a single enormous pink amaryllis drooping on its stem. That told Nora he picked the flowers himself, rather than telephoning a quick order in. She buried her smile in the lilies, inhaling the fragrance. Just the thing to refresh her stuffy little room; he must have remembered her ruefully complaining how the closed-up house got to smelling like cooking fat and old socks in the wintertime...

“How nice,”

Arlene Hupp cooed in her Texas drawl, eyeing the lilies as she came clicking out of the breakfast room. Her smile was big and sweet, and her eyes sharp and drilling. Anytime The Hupp got flowers from a date, she flaunted them around the house until they withered down to stems. “Just who is this mystery admirer, Nora?”

“I didn’t say he was a mystery,”

Nora said blandly, whisking the flowers upstairs. By the time she came back down in her freshly ironed uniform for her shift at the Crispy Biscuit, Arlene was gone but Mrs.Nilsson was waiting to pounce.

“I don’t like to press, dear, but the rent—”

“Is due in two days, Mrs.N.”

Nora kept her smile in place, all too aware her rent money was now residing in Timmy’s pocket, bound for the weekly precinct poker game. “I promise you’ll have it then.”

If the tips at the Crispy Biscuit were good.

“Well, then. I know you’re good for it.”

Mrs.Nilsson smiled. “A lady to her fingertips, like you! Even if you do work that waitressing job. Most office girls would think that beneath them, but not you! Saving for that hope chest, are we?”

Eyeing the flowers.

“Ah, there’s no keeping anything from you, Mrs. N!”

Nora snatched her coat and dashed before she had to dodge any more questions. Far better to be on Doilies Nilsson’s good side along with Arlene (neat, pretty) and Fliss (neater, prettier) than to be lumped with Claire (messy, no better than she should be), Mrs. Muller (foreign, unpleasant), or, replacing the widow who had been in 3A, the new black-haired woman who had her knee in a brace (thumping, loud). Being on Mrs. Nilsson’s good side meant the occasional day’s grace on the rent.

Jesus Christ on a crutch, let the tips be good today.

Nora worked noon to midnight at the Crispy Biscuit on weekends, ferrying biscuits and gravy, hamburgers and fries, root beer floats and banana splits. Keeping her eye, the entire time, on the corner booth with its red vinyl. Everyone knew to leave that booth empty after two thirty.

She was up to her elbows cleaning out the soda fountain when he came in—by the time she came out from behind the counter he was already seated, one arm stretched along the back of the banquette, calmly sipping a cup of black coffee. His eyes were steady over the rim. Nora let her smile blossom in return, wiping her hands on her apron, holding his gaze as she called his order in without bringing a menu over. He always took a bacon and tomato sandwich with sweet potato fries and a separate saucer with a single hamburger patty, and Nora was always the one to bring it to him. That was the unspoken rule.

“Your usual,”

she said, bringing the plates.

“Join me?”

he asked. He always did. She smiled, put down his sandwich, then leaned down and placed the saucer in front of the massive Great Dane reposing under the diner table with the dignity of a diplomat. Dogs weren’t allowed at the Crispy Biscuit, but Mr.Byrne’s Duke was the exception. Nora spent a while tousling his ears and asking if he was a good boy. (He was.) Then she straightened, took off her apron, and slid into the other side of the banquette.

That was the other unspoken rule: Nora took her lunch break when Mr.Byrne arrived, and Nora’s lunch break lasted as long as Mr.Byrne stayed at the table.

He pushed a cup of coffee across, already doctored with two sugars the way she liked it. “Want anything else?”

he asked as he always did.

“No, thank you, Mr.Byrne.”

“Call me Xavier.”

He always asked that, too.

She smiled. “No.”

“Miss Walsh, you’re a trial to me.”

“Mr.Byrne, you should eat before your sandwich gets cold.”

He never began eating until she’d invited him. It was a greasy spoon joint and he’d paid for his lunch, but he always behaved like it was her table and he was a guest who wouldn’t dream of beginning without a signal from his hostess. Nora sipped her coffee as he ate, slipping her foot from its flat shoe and rubbing her foot along Duke’s broad back under the table. The dog’s master finally pushed his plate back, and they regarded each other. She felt his dark eyes go over her—the stray tendrils of hair that slipped out of her ponytail, the places she nibbled at her cuticles when she was worried about money—and she let her eyes go over him. Xavier Byrne: thirty years old, broad-shouldered and stockily built, dark hair that came to a peak on a tall forehead. Sharp-planed, slightly swarthy face—black Irish, her mother would call him. Xavier Byrne in a flawless three-piece suit of gray worsted that draped like a million dollars and probably cost it. Xavier Byrne with his hawk nose and unsmiling mouth, his Great Dane and his seemingly bottomless stillness, who had been sending her flowers for four months.

“How are the National Archives?”

he asked and listened as she told him about the efforts to halt deterioration to the parchment of the Bill of Rights, the reports she’d been compiling and reading for her boss about whether helium-filled glass cases would provide the best preservative. She caught her hands starting to wave in enthusiasm and laughed. “Does this really interest you, preservative gas effects on centuries-old parchment?”

His eyes were steady. “It interests you, so it interests me.”

“You know, most people ask how someone like me”—gesturing at her waitress uniform—“landed a job at the National Archives. Local girl, no college...”

“I didn’t do college either.”

His speech wasn’t precisely rough, but it was pure Foggy Bottom. “So what?”

“I would have liked to go to college,”

Nora admitted. “But there’s something that’ll get you up the ladder faster than a college degree, and I know that because I jumped over a few Bryn Mawr girls when Mr.Harris picked me as his personal secretary.”

“And what’s that?”

Nora grinned. “Be the kind of person who only has to hear it once to learn.”

Xavier hardly ever smiled—when they’d first met, Nora thought him grim. Now she knew to look for that very faint flick at the corner of his mouth. “Give me six people like you, MissWalsh, I could own the District.”

Under the table, Duke rested his massive head on Nora’s shoe. She leaned down to tousle his ears, and Xavier rotated his coffee cup in the saucer. “What’s on the menu at the Briar Club?”

He knew all about Grace March and her Thursday night suppers. He never forgot anything Nora told him.

“It’s Joe Reiss’s turn to cook next, which means it comes out of a can. Bachelor cooking, you might call it. The kind that only tastes good when eaten very late at night with a lover, Grace says.”

The flick disappeared. “Is that what Joe is?”

“Of course.”

Nora let her eyes sparkle over the rim of the coffee cup. “Grace’s lover, that is.”

She watched the flick reappear. “And how’s the club?”

“Some drama. Also to do with Mr.Reiss.”

Xavier owned the Amber Club across the way; after he took his late lunch every day at the Crispy Biscuit, he’d cross the street and run things from six until two in the morning. “A gentleman from Mississippi objected to our jazz trio. Didn’t like seeing whites and Negroes playing the same stage.”

“And you—?”

“Told him to go to hell,”

Xavier said calmly. “I pay the best musicians I can find, black, white, brown, or green. They stay.”

The first day she’d met Xavier Byrne, he’d been saying nearly the same thing—specifically, to Nora’s boss here at the diner. She’d been the new waitress, still learning the ropes; when she went to fill the coffee cup of the very silent gentleman with the Great Dane ( Mr.Byrne , the whisper had been, he always leaves a dollar tip on an eighty-five-cent lunch! ), the rushing manager had jostled her from behind, sending scalding hot coffee all over Nora’s wrist. Mr. Byrne’s broad hand had shot out with surprising speed, caught the coffeepot before it could upend over the table, then caught Nora’s arm. He was calling for ice before she’d even finished her first gasp of pain. Nora’s manager had ignored the ice, rushing up with apologies for the coffee that had splashed Mr. Byrne’s expensive suit and hissing under his breath to Nora, “Any girl this clumsy on her first day is fired.”

“She stays,”

Mr.Byrne had said, not raising his voice in the slightest, but somehow everyone in the diner heard it. “Your coffee is too hot, and she’s lucky she doesn’t have second-degree burns. Get the goddamn ice.”

Nora had finished her shift at Mr.Byrne’s banquette with a dish towel of ice pressed to her wrist and a fifty-cent raise in hourly wages. He’d asked for her the next day, because he apparently came in every day at three for lunch, and when she sat down he said without preamble: “Have lunch with me. Tomorrow, Martin’s Tavern.”

The restaurant in Georgetown where senators and presidents and visiting ballplayers routinely ate. Nora smiled. “Can’t, sir. I’m always working through lunch—here on the weekends, the Archives Monday through Friday.”

“I can’t take you out for dinner; I work nights.”

That was when she’d found out he owned the Amber Club and inwardly raised an eyebrow. Somehow he saw that. “What, it’s not respectable to own a bottle club?”

“I’m not sure I know exactly what a bottle club is.”

All she knew about the Amber Club was that people came from all over the District—sometimes in sequins and black tie, in very swank cars—for the music, and that Doilies Nilsson was tight-lipped about the noise that sometimes drifted through the square when things closed up at two in the morning.

“No liquor license at a bottle club,”

Xavier answered Nora’s question. “Guests bring their own drink, if they like—we provide ice, glasses, the mixings, the best jazz in town, and tables to sit and listen to it. But anyone gets drunk, hassles my people, they’re out on their ear. That’s the advantage of a bottle club: the music, the company, the dancing, but not the drunks. More interesting than a restaurant, less trouble than a bar.”

“And you never take a night off from your bottle club?”

“No. I support a lot of people; that means long hours. You never take a day off from the Archives?”

“No. I only support myself, but I’ve got no one to help with that. Means even longer hours.”

“Too bad. I’d like to buy you a mink and take you out on the town.”

“Would you, now.”

He’d been examining her still-bandaged wrist; through the gauze, Nora felt the pressure of a ring on his left hand. “I think there might be a Mrs.Byrne who would object.”

He raised his hand. She saw the ring was on his little finger rather than the ring finger, and he twisted the band around to show a big round stone. Definitely not a wedding ring—it looked almost like a woman’s solitaire. “My mother’s,”

he said. “She made me promise to wear it till I found a girl to give it to.”

“And you wear the stone on the inside?”

That was four or five carats’ worth of diamond, if Nora was any judge. Arlene Hupp would have sized it immediately to the quarter-carat.

“Only a Vegas street pimp flashes a diamond on his little finger,”

Xavier had said calmly, twisting the ring back around so the stone was hidden. “If I can’t take you to dinner, and you aren’t available for lunch, can I have your address to send you flowers?”

And the first bouquet had arrived the next day, sunny yellow roses with the card scrawled simply X .

More than fifteen bouquets later, here they were. He’d never touched more than her hand, never tried to cop a feel. Just looked at her the way he was looking now, quiet, absorbing everything.

“Come away with me for a weekend,”

he said. “I got a cottage on Colonial Beach. A dock, a boat. Come see it.”

Nora felt her heart thump. “What do you need a cottage for, when you’re always working?”

“I got the cottage, but I don’t have a girl to take there. If I did, I’d go more often.”

“Ah, but do I look like the kind of girl who goes away for the weekend to a man’s cottage?”

“I know the kind of girl you are. Class, top to bottom. Doesn’t matter where you spend your weekends.”

Jesus Christ on a crutch , Nora thought. What she’d give to say yes. Her room on the fourth floor of Briarwood House could be so dingy, so ringingly silent. “Four months, and I still hardly know you,”

she said instead, trailing a fingertip around her coffee cup. “You know nearly everything there is to know about me—you remember the names of all my nieces and nephews when I only mentioned them once; you could list all my boardinghouse neighbors, you know all the projects I’m working on at the Archives. But you hardly say anything about yourself.”

He shrugged. “Not much to say.”

“There you go, deflecting. Makes a girl wonder if there really might be a wife somewhere...”

“There isn’t. I don’t lie. Not to you.”