The Great Mrs. Elias by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Author:Barbara Chase-Riboud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

Upper East Side, Fifty-Third Street

Almost at the same time that Hannah was thinking of her, Leola was thinking of Hannah. She sat in her apartment on Fifty-Third Street, one of Hannah’s bordellos, and picked up a newspaper beside her on the sofa. She read Andrew Green’s obituary in the Times over and over again. She studied the details of the murder, looking for a mention of a second shooting—Hannah’s incredible corset story. Luckily, there was nothing.

She went over to her safe and clicked the lock until the door sprang open. She removed the pale blue copybook Hannah had given her. She hesitated and then opened it to the first page. Hannah’s elaborate and beautiful handwriting, full of scrolls and flourishes, filled page after page: accounts, magazine articles, quotations from novels, poems, and notes to herself. An undated letter from someone called JRP exclaimed, “I am highly gratified at the promptitude with which you have responded to my desire to form your acquaintance, the more so, because if I am to believe you (and as yet I have no reason to doubt your sincerity) it is a favor which has not been granted to all who have sought it.”

Poor JRP, thought Leola. The world of commercial sex was a world of playacting far more than sincerity. Women like her and Hannah faked names and faked pasts, faked emotions and pleasure, and paid debts with ill-gotten gains—money that was stolen from a grandmother’s drawer, from a wife’s purse, from a drunken man at the gambling table. A rich man and his money were soon parted. Leola couldn’t remember where she’d first heard it. But the saying was implanted on her soul, although she probably misinterpreted its meaning.

Foolish money had given Leola a home and Hannah her riches. And she wasn’t going to be foolish anymore. Hannah was a millionaire because she had given herself many lessons in the rituals of upper-class manners: to read and write love letters, poetry, and thank-you notes; of insisting on expensive gifts, gallantry, and flirtation; and of course the house on Fifty-Third Street, which she had parlayed into several more buildings. Leola read no further. It was after all none of her business beyond its safekeeping in the vault. The pale blue copybook, of which there were many, she knew, revealed someone who had made important sacrifices. Ambition in a woman, thought Leola, was always tragic.

Now she wondered whether Cornelius’s insane act would turn into a tidal wave of retribution for Hannah’s past. Maybe she wasn’t rich enough to cleanse herself, as Nanz had told her was possible. But Platt was.

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