Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [113]
“Oh, honestly!” came Mary’s voice from the other side.
She left the house a short while later. “Good luck tonight,” she said, pinching Alice’s cheek.
Alice spent the afternoon primping on her own, which was nowhere near as fun as doing it with someone else. But by the time she was ready, she felt like a million bucks. The silver silk dress she had picked out fell perfectly over her hips, pooling on the floor and covering the scuffed toes of her shoes. The dress belonged to Mary and was too big for Alice on its own—she had tied a blue ribbon tightly around her waist to give it some shape. She was wearing Mary’s favorite gray suede gloves, lined with mink, and her mink coat too. The coat had been a present from Henry, but Mary hardly ever put it on. Finders keepers, Alice thought. It was wintertime. Someone ought to be getting some wear out of it.
She herself didn’t have a single dress nice enough to wear to the Cocoanut Grove. Everyone would be in formal evening attire, and she wasn’t about to try to dress up a convertible suit with pearls, as her mother had suggested. But her brothers had invited her to come. A shipmate of Tim’s had an older brother named Daniel who’d gone to Holy Cross and was now home on leave from the Pacific for a week. Timmy had gotten it into his head that this older brother ought to marry one of his sisters.
For months he had been writing Alice about how wonderful Daniel was, even though he wasn’t a Boston College grad. He was sweet and funny and smart as heck, Timmy said. He had been born smack in the middle of ten kids and had the patience of a saint. (Perfect for a pain in the neck like you, ha-ha! he had written.)
Alice wrote back: If you like the man so much, why don’t you marry him?
Ha. Ha, Timmy responded. Just come out with us to the BC game at the end of the month, and afterward we’ll go somewhere special for dancing.
Having no intention of meeting a date in the freezing cold and wind of a football game, she had arranged to get together with the boys afterward at the Cocoanut Grove. Really, she had agreed to the setup only because she wanted an excuse to go.
Alice had been there twice before, once to see Joe Frisco perform, and the other time, Helen Morgan. She loved the place—the long oval bar beside the stage, the wide dance floor surrounded by tables covered in white linen cloths. The room was lined with palm trees and dripping with lights. In summertime, the roof could be rolled back for dancing under the stars.
She arrived at seven thirty, right on time, gliding through the revolving door, feeling like a movie star. She wore a bright red lipstick that her aunt Rose had sent from New York the previous Christmas. She had styled her hair in a soft wave, like Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels.
Inside the club, hundreds of people stood shoulder to shoulder: handsome men in uniform by the dozens, glamorous women in their finest gowns. Every corner was full, every table taken up. Alice scanned the room for her brothers, pushing through the crowd. She looked out over the packed dance floor, but she didn’t see them anywhere. She lingered over small talk with the redheaded coat-check girl for far too long, just to have something to do: Yes, it was a chilly one out there. Pity about Boston College, and did Alice know that the entire team was meant to be there tonight for their victory party, but had canceled, and it was a shame, really, because the redhead had been pining after the BC fullback for positively ages.
When she went back toward the dance floor, the boys still hadn’t arrived. And so she stood alone by the bar, feeling like an absolute fool and vowing to murder her brothers as soon as they showed their faces. She held Mary’s gloves in one hand, swinging them back and forth a few times, before realizing that she looked like a nervous Nellie. She set them down on the oak bar, running her fingers over the suede, counting the minutes.
It was ten to eight when they finally rolled in, drunk as skunks