Tigers in Red Weather Read Free Page A

was pounding. She pulled off her skirt and, standing in only her brassiere and underpants, she bent over the small sink and splashed water over her breasts and around her neck. She switched off the overhead light and pushed the window down to let in some fresh air. The porter had turned down her bed while she had been in the lounge. She sat on it and lit a cigarette. When she was finished with that one, she lit another and pressed her head against the pane. The darkness went by. After a while, she lay down, the smell of the smoke lingering around her.
    It was five o’clock in the morning when they pulled into Richmond. The sound of people moving in and out of the train had woken her up. She hadn’t closed the curtains and the window was still open.
    “Goddamn it,” Nick said. She tried to inch herself up the bed, aware that she was still wearing only her underwear, for all the boarding passengers to see. The far curtain was just out of reach, so she tugged at the one nearest and got behind it. Standing there, covered only in green felt, she peered out. Nick thought she could detect the earthy traces of the James River. The air was more gentle here in the South. Not like at Tiger House, where the sea took it by force. Therewas also the smell of pine, cleaning away the last vestiges of the martinis. She pulled the other curtain shut, slipped into her robe, opened the door and called to the porter for coffee.
    She would be in St. Augustine by eleven tonight. And with Hughes. Had she dreamt of him? She tried to remember. The porter came with the steaming coffee. She drank it, watching the sleepy passengers boarding for Florida. Helena would be arriving in Hollywood soon. She wondered what Avery Lewis’s house looked like. Poor Helena. Word had come early on in the fighting that Fen was dead—it had taken him all of two months to get himself married and killed. Who knows what their life would have been like if he had survived? They were both a couple of children and neither one had any money.
    Helena’s mother, her aunt Frances, had not made a brilliant marriage either. Still, she had never seemed unhappy that she was forced to make do with less. Nick had never heard her complain about the fact that her older sister had been the one to inherit Tiger House, or marry a man who made oodles in bobbins and spools, while she had virtually nothing. It hadn’t occurred to Nick that her aunt might have wanted things to be different. But thinking now of Helena’s strange, mad dash to get married again, her need to have someone of her own, as she had put it, made Nick wonder if Aunt Frances had ever wished she’d been the one in the big house.
    Perhaps it didn’t really matter. After all, Nick couldn’t remember a summer that Aunt Frances and her mother weren’t in each other’s pockets. Even after Helena’s father died, when the Depression came. And even when her own father died and her mother was so unwell. Nick stopped herself. She didn’t want to think about that right now.
    She pulled two of the eggs out of their brown paper bag and cracked them on the windowsill, revealing the shiny, white skin. No, everything was new now, just waiting to be discovered. And she would. She and Hughes would do it together. She was hungry for it, she would stuff the world whole into her mouth and bite down.

1945: DECEMBER
    N ick was lying on the floating dock when she heard Hughes pull up in the old Buick. She tried to concentrate on the music coming from the porch across the yard, so she wouldn’t hear the coughing engine or the slap of the screen door as her husband entered the bungalow.
    Count Basie’s piano. The worn wood from the dock shed tiny splinters into the back of her yellow bathing suit. Her big toe skimmed the top of the canal. She waited.
    When Hughes didn’t come outside, Nick felt relieved. She heard the shower start inside the house as he washed away the dust and paint from mothballing the warship in Green Cove