The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [183]
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