Last Dance on the Starlight Pier: A Novel

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To Colista McCabe Bird, RN, 1920–2001,

who sang and danced her way through

the Great Depression and World War II.

Thank you, Collie Mac, for telling me about all the fun you had

watching a dance marathon.

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

—John Beecher, activist, poet, and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression, from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel

That was a time when people’s emotions were raw to begin with. Everyone knew the Depression would be endless. So laughter was hard to find. We all fought in our own way. Mine was the marathons. They helped me survive. Helped a lot of people survive. I was part of the little army that won the war of the Depression.

—June Havoc, vaudevillian, marathon dancer, and sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, in her memoir Early Havoc

GALVESTON

Dance Marathon. Galveston, Texas

Sunday, July 3, 1932

4:25 a.m.

Zave? Where is Zave?

With that question, consciousness thunders back. How long have I been out? Long enough that the wet sand of the narrow beach abutting the Starlight Pier has chilled me despite the muggy night.

I search for him in the crowd. He is not there.

I try to stand and I fail.

No one notices. Not the other dancers. Not the sloppers who’d fed us or the trainers who’d beaten the knots from our muscles or the floor judges who’d determined who stayed and who was eliminated.

They gape, wide-eyed and stricken, mesmerized by the terrible volcano beauty of the Starlight Palace as it burns in the night. A tongue of flame leaps so high into the night sky that it licks at the pale sliver of moon. The fire burns twice. Once in the inferno the dance hall at the far end of the pier has become, and again in the rippled waves lapping at the shore.

Low blue flames escape and snake along the pier, nosing their way toward us. The flames search for the ones who got away. They search for me.

I shake my head, trying to rattle the vision loose. I’ve gone squirrelly. That’s what barely sleeping for five days will do to you. The fire roars. I sit up and its heat warms me.

The few remaining windows ringing the top of the Palace explode. Firemen, leashed to the shore by their hoses, yell orders. Police shout at the crowd and shove them back. In dim, faraway voices, my marathon friends—Minnie, DeWitt, Lily, Ace, Patsy, and Lynette,—yell questions at each other.

Spectators are perched along the top of the Seawall seventeen feet above the beach. They watch just as they’d watched us dancers during the show. It is the Fourth of July holiday weekend and the Starlight Palace had been packed beyond its two-thousand-person capacity, all the way up to the rafters.

That’s where the cheap seat people perched. People who pulled mustard-and-sugar sandwiches on day-old bread out of paper bags because they couldn’t spring for a hot dog on top of the dime early-bird admission that let them stay all day. People who knew what it was to go to bed hungry and wake up hungrier.

People like me.

Just a few hours ago, we’d all been jubilant, drunk on bootleg hooch and hope, because Franklin Delano Roosevelt—our guy, the one who was going to pull us out of the goddamn Depression and give us back our jobs and our dignity—had just clinched the Democratic nomination in Chicago.

The oil execs, bootleggers, and movie stars in the high-dollar box seats up front didn’t really care who the president was. For them, the Crash of ’29 had never happened and the Depression was someone else’s bad news. As long as people were putting gas from their refineries in cars, buying hooch from their illegal stills, and going to pictures made in their studios, they would be fine.

But, whether they were worried about where their next dividend check or their next meal was coming from, they had all come for two things.

They’d come to forget.

And they’d come because they’d read the stories.

About Galveston.

About me.

About Zave.

A few seconds later, the fire defeats even the sea, and what remains of the Starlight Palace surrenders. The skeleton of the dance hall wobbles against the lava-bright flames. Its blackened bones dance their last dance.

Zave, I beg, though there is no longer any hope that a dark-haired man—hands in his pockets, light on his feet, favoring his right leg because of the injury that had brought us together—would emerge from the inferno. What materialized instead was the question I knew I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

How had I become a person who would cause the man I love to kill himself?

THREE YEARS AGO

CHAPTER 1

Galveston

June 1, 1929

The humidity that day was extreme. Shoes turned velvety green with mildew. Towels hung out to dry came in so damp they had to be cranked through the clothes wringer again. Saltines drooped limp as slices of bologna.

But nothing and no one was going to wilt me. Not today. I had already been a lot of things in my young life—vaudeville performer, dance instructor, waitress, dishwasher, pants presser, babysitter. And other things I won’t mention. Mostly, I was always what Mamie, my mother, needed me to be to earn money.

Today, though, today was the first day of the life that I chose.

By some miracle, I had won a scholarship to study at St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing located on Galveston. I sat up even straighter on my dusty maroon velvet seat aboard the Houston-Galveston Interurban Railway. Even though the island was barely more than an hour away, this was my first visit.

The cabin—sleek and modern as a rocket ship out of a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comic strip—was the perfect vehicle to launch me into my future. I was so terrified of what lay ahead and so thrilled about what lay ahead that, had I been a dog, I would have stuck my head out the window and panted and drooled from sheer excitement.

But, being a seventeen-year-old girl from Houston’s notorious Vinegar Hill neighborhood determined to hide who she really was, I sat up primly and folded my hands in my lap instead. My palms were sodden with sweat and butterflies churned through my gut. This was worse than any case of stage fright I’d ever endured back on the vaudeville circuit.

School had just let out and jolly vacationers packed the car. No one else onboard appeared to have a care in the world. Not the women in crisp white linen dresses and open-toed sandals. Or the men in straw boater hats. Or the boys in sailor suits. Or the little girls with long curls and short dresses with bloomers.

A party atmosphere pervaded the car. The men talked too loudly. Mothers let their children stand on the seats. A couple of the women, giggling behind their hands at their daring, lit up cigarettes and carefully blew the smoke out the window.

Everyone acted like naughty children playing hooky. And why not? Back on Vinegar Hill, we all knew that Galveston was a wide-open town where Prohibition was a suggestion instead of the law of the land. Where gambling wasn’t considered any worse than chewing tobacco. And the prostitutes who worked openly along Galveston’s infamous Line outnumbered spotted dogs. The island was drenched in a dark and irresistible glamour so potent that the biggest-name entertainers in the country performed in the nightclubs, casinos, and supper clubs there. Duke Ellington. Glenn Miller. Sophie Tucker. Harry James. Phil Harris. They all came.

What impressed us most, though, was that the whole operation had been created and was still run by a pair of brothers who’d emigrated from Sicily. They’d started out as poor as any of us, working as barbers, cutting hair for a quarter a head. When the island’s biggest bootlegger, looking for an inconspicuous spot to stash his hooch, offered the brothers a dollar a case to hide his haul, they snatched up the deal. But, though they didn’t know much English, they knew business. Instead of taking the payoff, they bought their way into the bootleg business. In an astonishingly short time, the brothers, and their network of family members, had created a glorious empire of vice and were running the island.

I tried to recall the family’s name but could only remember how all the small-time Vinegar Hill chiselers always spoke of the island’s ruling family with a combination of admiration and fear.

Don’t ever cross that family, they’d warned us kids who stood around, soaking up their street-corner wisdom and lies and not caring which was which. Unless you want to end up in the Gulf of Mexico. Halfway to Havana. With your throat slit. And nobody in the entire state’s gonna do a goddamn thing about it. Because that family’s got every deputy and every sheriff in the county in their pocket. Shitfire. That bunch even owns the goddamn Texas Rangers.

An empire of vice, even if it was run by a family, seemed an odd place to start a new, a decent life, but my one and only chance to leave Vinegar Hill and Mamie behind waited for me on Galveston Island. If only I could impersonate a normal girl well enough to seize it.

Gripping my hands so tightly the knuckles whitened, I forced myself to concentrate on the view. We were hurtling across the Galveston Causeway. A vast flatness of sea and sky extended as far as I could see. A flock of gulls circled in a vortex outside my window. They hovered so close and so nearly motionless that I could almost touch them.

When a chubby boy in short pants tossed the crust of his sandwich out the window, the birds responded as one. In perfect synchronization, they all angled their bodies toward the crust and pivoted as if they were one creature. The sunlight momentarily transformed the flock into solid white paper sculptures. The origami seabirds floating in the sunlight were the purest, most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

I relaxed. What was I so nervous about? A place was waiting for me at St. Mary’s. My scholarship application had already been accepted.

Under false pretenses.

My mother’s hissing reminders became the voice of all the doubts slithering through my head.

We passed under the high arc of a sign that read Welcome to Galveston. Playground of the Southwest.

Three porpoises, their sleek bodies arcs of silver, leaped from the water at that moment. They dove back under and a fizz of hope bubbled through me.

CHAPTER 2

The street approaching the school was lined with palms and hedges of oleander that dripped gaudy pink blossoms. Not the tiniest hint of a breeze blew. Ahead lay St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing. A ten-foot-high fence of black wrought iron surrounded the austere collection of two- and three-story brick buildings. It seemed like something out of Charles Dickens, too severe to belong to this free and easy city.

Young women in white uniforms crowned with white caps glided serenely about the grounds. My stomach tightened into a hard knot at the prospect of trying to pass as a normal girl among them. I would have to keep my trap shut and try to blend in as much as possible until I got the lay of the land.

A giant statue of Jesus’ mother stood atop the portico at the hospital entrance. Daddy, who’d been a Catholic, had always called her the BVM, short for Blessed Virgin Mary, just like she was his pal. I passed beneath Mary’s sorrowful gaze. Her head was tilted down and her expression was sad, as though she already knew that I was going to disappoint her.

Inside, the hospital was a serene world of silent corridors with ceiling fans quietly circulating air that smelled of floor wax, carbolic acid antiseptic, and Flit mosquito spray. It smelled like the hospital where Daddy had died. Where the nurses had been so kind and did so much to relieve his suffering.

I followed a sign marked School of Nursing and headed down a broad hallway. Almost immediately two nuns approached. They glided forward in their long black gowns and brimmed veils. Their faces floated between starched white headbands and high bibs. They seemed like sentries, guards posted to repel intruders like me. I quickly glanced away and pretended to be fascinated by a painting of a saint in a loincloth, porcupined with arrows.

Hey. A peppy voice startled me. You must be Evie Grace Devlin.

The voice belonged to a girl my age dressed in a uniform of blue chambray with puff sleeves and a Peter Pan collar covered by a crisp white Mother Hubbard apron.

How did she know my name?

Sorry to spook you. I assigned myself to meet the new probie and since you’re the only one around here who’s not either in a uniform, a habit, or a bed, I figured that had to be you.

With her masses of dark curls, thick, unplucked eyebrows, and the slightest hint of a mustache, she had the innocent but determined aspect of a curious woodland creature. A friendly chipmunk, maybe.

Probie? I asked.

Probationer, she clarified brightly. Beginning nursing student? she added when I didn’t respond.

I nodded and she gave me a once-over so obvious that the Vinegar Hill girl I was suppressing want to tell her to take a picture, that it’d last longer.

You’ll do, she announced.

I’ll do?

Though I winced at her comment, like all the smart players who kept their cards close to the vest, I said nothing.

First thing, you need to check in with the director of nurses. Let’s go.

Without another word, she throttled off down the hall, leaving me to stumble behind. Slowing down, she reached back, ordered, Here, give me that, and snatched my suitcase away. You pack light, the chipmunk observed, hefting the case up and resting it on top of her head like a safari bearer.

What an oddball. I figured her for some lonely do-gooder whose only hope at making friends was picking off newcomers like me. Fair enough, I thought. I’d take any acceptance that came my way.

I followed her through a swinging door and the world of silent serenity fell away. We entered a hive thrumming with purposeful activity. A student nurse pushing a cart clattering with dirty lunch dishes hurried past. A white-coated doctor with round glasses and a goatee dictated notes to a nun holding a clipboard. A young nurse hurried up a flight of stairs carrying a metal tray loaded with metal hypodermics that clattered with every step.

Chipmunk raced on. A cluster of girls dressed in chambray uniforms like the one my guide wore approached us. Expecting them to ignore my oddball escort, I was surprised when they all lit up like the Fourth of July, shouted excited greetings, and converged on her like they were autograph hounds and she was some kind of starlet.

Make way, probies, she said, shoving through the giddy throng. I’ve got the new probationer here and we’re late to meet the Director.

Apparently, I thought, as we pushed on, this girl wasn’t the lonely do-gooder I’d had her pegged as. In fact, she seemed distinctly popular. Then I glanced back at the girls who’d been so eager to talk to her and saw that some of them were whispering madly to each other and casting odd looks her way. Looks that I couldn’t quite interpret.

On either side of the wide hallway, doors opened to large wards. Men’s Surgical. Labor and Delivery. Bone Deformities. Women’s Surgical. Children’s.

I paused outside the children’s ward and peered in at a large room swept by radiant light beaming in from high windows that reflected off polished floors. Two long rows of beds made up with snowy white sheets were occupied by sick children.

At one bed a nurse took a child’s temperature. At another, a nurse helped a little girl sip from a straw. Several rocking chairs were in use by nurses holding limp or sleeping children. It exuded the calm efficiency of the ward my father was in near the end.

Amazing, isn’t it? my guide asked, staring at the magical assembly line of care.

Everyone knows exactly what to do, I marveled.

After three years, we will too, my new acquaintance assured me.

Maybe.

She heard the hesitant yearning in my voice and, as if I’d passed a test I hadn’t known I was taking, she stuck her hand out. Sofia. But if you call me that, I’ll clock you. It’s Sofie.

Evie Grace, but you already know that.

A white-jacketed orderly, gliding up silently behind in his rubber-soled shoes, his vision obscured by the tall, metal cart he was pushing, nearly crashed into us.

Jeezo, probies, he hissed, the steel instruments laying atop his metal cart and rattling wildly as he veered past.

Aw, go soak your head, Sofie called after him, sounding exactly like one of my tough-girl friends on Vinegar Hill. Can’t let anyone run over you, right? she asked me.

You can say that again. Sofia.

Sofie balled up her fist, pretending she was going to punch me.

I smiled, figuring that, as long as I could joke with a person, anything was possible.

CHAPTER 3

At the Director’s office, a diminutive nun who had one of those ageless, merry faces that could have belonged to either a happy old woman or a wrinkled toddler slapped both her hands on her desk, rose to her full height of maybe four ten, and burst out, There you are.

Meet Sister Theonella, Sofie said. Officially she’s the assistant director, but don’t believe it. Sister T runs the place.

Hardly, Sister T answered, taking both my hands in hers. And you must be Evelyn Grace. Oh, how we have been waiting for you. Her openhearted warmth made me suspicious. Openhearted warmth on Vinegar Hill meant that someone was going to run a con on you.

At the Director’s door, Sister Theonella stopped to gather up the long, draping sleeves that covered her hands before rapping three times.

An exceptionally peevish voice echoed out from behind the closed door demanding, "Sister T, did I not explicitly instruct you not to disturb me for any reason?"

Sister T gave Sofie a conspiratorial wink and opened the door.

Since I towered over the elfin nun, I had a clear view of the Director’s office. Everything in it was shadowed except the boss nun’s face. Or rather, the rectangle of face that pressed out between a stiff white headband and a tight, starched bib like bread dough that had risen too much. When she lifted her head to glare at me, the intruder, her rimless spectacles caught the light and hid her eyes behind two circles of silver.

Unbidden, the memories descended. Of Detroit. Of the men in the audience.

I jerked my thoughts away from a past I was determined to bury.

Shut the door, Sister, the Director commanded. And if you disturb me again, all privileges will be revoked.

Her threat was so chilling that I feared food and air might be regarded as privileges in this alien world I’d landed in. The only thing that was familiar was the Director’s imperious manner. Just like Mamie, she exuded the same cast-iron belief that the world revolved around her.

Undaunted, Sister T asked impishly, Are you sure? Because look who I have here.

The instant Sister T pushed Sofie forward, the Director’s bullying manner vanished. Sofia, she said, rising slightly from her seat. Come in, please.

The three of us entered.

Sister, Sofie said, I just stopped in to bring you the new girl so that you can sign off on her admission.

New girl? the Director asked, her tone sharpening. But the probationer class has already assembled.

Sister T gestured at the Director’s desk. I put the application that we approved right there alongside her admission form. If you’ll simply sign, we’ll get her settled in.

My pulse thudded as the Director scrutinized my application. Surely I would be found out now.

Clearly displeased, the Director asked, Is this the charity position that was confirmed during the time I was away in St. Louis at the Motherhouse?

That’s right, Sofie answered. All you have to do is add your signature and we’ll get out of your hair.

With a thin smile that appeared to cause her pain, the Director said, Sofia, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps I could have a moment alone with… She searched the form.

Evie Grace, Sofie supplied.

The Director dropped her imitation of a smile the instant the door closed. Tapping my answers with the point of a needle-sharp pencil, she asked, Your father and mother are both dead?

Yes, I replied, only half lying. My father had died when I was young and Mamie, besides never wanting to be a mother to begin with, had told me I was dead to her if I stopped paying her bills and went to nursing school. So, if I was dead to her, how alive could she be to me?

You graduated from Sam Houston High School?

Yes, I answered brightly, since that was one hundred percent true.

With a grade point average of B minus? she added, more disapproving than curious.

I had to work two jobs to support myself and my mother. When she was alive, that is.

I see that you worked in the school lunchroom and taught at a dance school. What sort of dance school? she said, as if she were asking What sort of prostitution ring?

The Bennett Academy of Dance. My uncle Jake owns it. Mostly I helped him teach cotillion and debutante classes.

Another half-truth. It had been years since I’d taught with Uncle Jake. Not since all the Houston swells had fled downtown for the new suburbs, like River Oaks, leaving Jake with barely enough customers to keep the school open. But dance instructor looked better than my other part-time job, babysitting for the women who turned tricks at the nearby train depot.

And I see that the rest of your schooling was out of state.

Yes, Sister.

That was completely true if you considered schooling to be learning math from watching the all-night poker games played on the vaudeville circuit and being taught to read backstage by Marvin the Man of Marvels.

Marvin had enthralled audiences by tying his shoelaces, brushing his teeth, and buttoning his shirt. All by himself. And they were all marvels because Marvin had been born without any arms. Marvin could have read without my help, but after four or five shows a day, he was tired of being marvelous, so I held his books and turned the pages, and he helped me sound out words.

Evie Grace Devlin, Marvin used to tell me when I was sad or tired or in pain. A person can do anything they put their mind to. Why, look at you? Two arms! Kid, the world is your oyster.

The Director stopped reading, speared a question, peered at me above her glasses, and asked with sharp alarm, "You are not a Catholic?"

If there was one question I wished I could have lied about, it was that one. But if you marked that you were Catholic, you had to get a form signed by your parish priest swearing that you were a regular communicant at his parish. And I wasn’t a regular anything. Anywhere.

Not technically, I hedged.

Not technically, she repeated, staring at me coldly.

I hadn’t fooled her. She saw who I really was. She saw the half-moons of sweat beneath the arms of my too-short dress. She smelled the stink of a girl who bathed using a pot of tepid water warmed on a hot plate and shared an outhouse in the alley with four other families. A girl whose last meal had been a cup of coffee and a doughnut eaten too long ago to keep her stomach from growling during the most important interview of her life.

The Director wrinkled her nose at the growling that marked me as the pitiable, half-starved beggar I was.

No, no, no, she said, putting the pencil down. "This will not do at all. We have never had a girl who was not Catholic at St. Mary’s. And we have certainly never had a girl who frequents dance halls."

Just as I had never corrected Mamie, I didn’t correct the Director. Because there had never been any point.

Sister T and Sofia, she continued, have gotten caught up in some dangerous ideas of ‘reaching out.’ Of seeking out a ‘broader’ range of students.

She folded her hands. I’m sorry that they decided to use you as the poster child in their little campaign to change this school, but I am the guardian of St. Mary’s and I take my responsibility to uphold spotless moral standards very seriously. Galveston’s finest families entrust their daughters to me and I shall never betray that trust by allowing unsuitable girls in. I cannot approve an admission that was made behind my back. You are not suitable.

Already absorbed in another document, she held out the application I had poured all my dreams into without so much as a glance in my direction. Gutted, unable to move or even speak, I simply stood there frozen until she rustled the application impatiently.

I took it from her and left.

CHAPTER 4

What’s wrong? Sofie asked when I stumbled out of the Director’s office. You look like you just swallowed a bug.

I am unsuitable.

What? Is that what she said? What a pill.

Problems? Sister T asked, joining us.

She told Evie she’s ‘unsuitable.’

The little sister rushed to reassure me. Don’t pay any attention whatsoever. You have been selected. Sofie and I want you.

Apparently she doesn’t.

Sister T exchanged eye rolls with Sofie and told her, I told you she hates Protestants.

Yeah, I know, Sofie said, shaking her head in amazement. It’s like something out of the Middle Ages. What she hates even more than Protestants, though, is poor people. No offense, she said to me.

None taken.

This simply isn’t right, Sister T said with a fierceness I wouldn’t have suspected of the little nun. "Thirty years ago, I stood beside that woman at the Motherhouse in St. Louis when our class took the pledge to care for all our patients without regard to race, creed, color, politics, or social standing. How can we do that if we only train girls who are white, Catholic, and well-off?"

We can’t, Sofie said with an almost offhanded determination. Stay here, she told me before marching back into the Director’s office and shutting the door.

I didn’t realize how desolate I looked until Sister T said, Don’t fret, little one, all will be well.

Any other time, I would have hooted at being called little one by a pixie runt a foot shorter than me, but all I could manage was a sad nod.

Peering up, she observed, I don’t like your color. You’ve gone quite pale. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll go and find a snack for you from the ward kitchen.

Embarrassed, I answered quickly, Don’t bother. I’m fine.

I couldn’t think about eating. If I did, the light-headed wobblies that came with hunger, real hunger, would overtake me, and I refused to wobble. Not in front of all these do-gooders. Not in front of anyone. Not when I already knew how this story was going to end. How it always ended when the one in charge made up her mind.

Thanks a bunch for trying to get me in, I told Sister T as I gathered my things.

You’re not leaving, are you? You should at least wait for Sofie to come out.

Why? I wanted to ask. So she could keep pretending that she had the pull to get me in? I didn’t know what the Chipmunk’s game was, but I was done playing. Plus, if I stayed another second, I might have started crying. And I didn’t cry in front of anyone. Ever.

I have to get back to Houston, I lied. Not only didn’t I have anyone or anything to get back to Houston for, I didn’t even have the fifty-five cents fare for the train. I’d have to hitch.

I was already out the door when a voice called after me, Hang on. Where are you going?

It was Sofie. What’s it to you? I asked, mad that I’d let myself be used.

A lot, she shot back. Since you’re going to be my roommate.

I squinted at her. Hard.

You’re in.

Oh, I am, am I? I asked, letting my acid tone communicate that I was not the chump she’d played me for.

Yep, she responded cheerfully. You’re a full-fledged probationer. Signed, sealed, and delivered.

I didn’t believe her until she handed me my application. Which now had the Director’s signature on it.

Too baffled to be either jubilant or relieved, my only thought was, How the hell did she pull that off? And is it a con?

With a thumbs-up and a wave to Sister T, Sofie grabbed my arm. Come on, we’re getting out of here. I need to show you Galveston.

The light-headedness returned as she rushed me through the polished corridors, dodging orderlies pushing gurneys and white-coated doctors leading coveys of students. Though the familiar headache and exhaustion that came when it had been too long between meals clouded my thinking, I tried desperately to figure out if all this was for real, because I couldn’t see any way that this ditzy girl had managed to change the steely director’s mind.

Had she forged the signature she’d shown me?

I was bracing myself for the next ugly surprise when we reached the street and Sofie flagged down a trolley. Oddly, it ground to a halt even though we weren’t at an official stop.

Sofie started to put some coins into the fare box, but the streetcar operator covered the opening, saying, Your money’s no good on my car. Miss Amadeo.

Amadeo.

Though Sofie told the driver, Thanks, Charley. Appreciate it, her bubbly mood darkened. It darkened further when a ripple of whispers followed us down the aisle.

Amadeo, I thought, bracing myself against the sway of the trolley as I followed Sofie to a seat at the back. I noticed how the local passengers in work clothes, but not the sun-hatted tourists, swiveled their heads to watch Sofie pass.

I slid onto the seat next to her.

Amadeo.

Amadeo.

Amadeo!

Amadeo was the name that the Vinegar Hill chiselers spoke with such fear and respect. The name of the family that ran Galveston. The one that kept this peculiarly enchanted island floating happily on a sea of illegal booze and gambling. The one that owned the law and settled scores the hard way. The one whose daughter I was sitting next to right now.

Sofia Amadeo.

I cut a sidelong glance her way. She was holding her froth of dark curls off her neck and, eyes closed, she let the breeze that rushed in the open window cool her.

It was clear then how this island princess had managed to get me admitted to St. Mary’s, but an even bigger question remained:

Why?

Why did Sofia Amadeo care about me?

CHAPTER 5

Sparks popped from the overhead line and the smell of scorched metal filled my head as the trolley made a sharp turn. I caught the name on a street sign: Seawall Boulevard. Metal shrieked against metal as the trolley rumbled to a stop.

Welcome to tourist Galveston, Sofie announced, hopping out of her seat. Locals tend to avoid it. Which is exactly why I love it.

Dodging beach umbrellas and picnic baskets, we joined the holiday visitors making their way off the trolley and onto the broad promenade that ran along the shore.

A dizzying burst of sounds and activity greeted me. The shouts and laughter of the tourists competed with the cries of hungry gulls circling overhead. A barker standing beside cutouts of a fat lady in bloomers and a thin man in an old-timey swimsuit yelled, Step right up. Send the folks back home a funny picture. They’ll get a laugh and you’ll get a souvenir of your time on Treasure Island.

Saliva rushed into my mouth when the heavenly aroma of grilling hamburgers wafted our way from a nearby stand.

Hey, should we grab a couple? Sofie asked.

Just as I’d done with Sister T, I told her that I was not hungry. I might have been a charity student, but nothing on earth was ever going to get me to admit that I didn’t have a dime for a burger.

Are you sure? she probed.

My nerves were so on edge from the headache crushing down on my eyeballs that I snapped, I said I’m not hungry.

Oh well. She shrugged, stepping up to the order window. Maybe we’ll need a little snack later on.

I tried not to stare as her order was bagged up, along with a couple of pale green bottles of Dr Pepper, some paper straws, and even an opener to pop the tops.

Just as the trolley operator had, the vendor refused to take Sofie’s money. Just, please, he asked, his voice quavering a bit, "tell your father and your uncle JuJu how very, very, very happy Constantine Stavros is."

Though Sofie withdrew her coins and said, Sure, Connie. Will do, her smile had tightened.

Expensive motorcars—a Duesenberg convertible, a Jaguar roadster—purred along the boulevard as sleek and exotic as the jungle cats the last was named for. I imagined their drivers and glamorous passengers to be playboys, debutantes, heirs and heiresses to vast oil or cotton fortunes.

This was my first real-life glimpse of the gilded princes and princesses of the Roaring Twenties that I’d read so much about. Far from roaring, though, the ’20s had reached the shotgun shacks and abandoned factories of Vinegar Hill only as the most distant of echoes. A party that none of us had been invited to. But here in Galveston, thanks apparently to Sofie’s family, that party was in full swing.

On the other side of the street a gaggle of