Such a Dance by Kate McMurray

Author:Kate McMurray [McMurray, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2015-10-26T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“There’ll Be Some Changes Made”

Eddie came to in a bedroom he didn’t recognize, but, funnily enough, it smelled familiar. It smelled like Lane.

Suddenly, the last day flashed through his mind, and he remembered horrific patches of what had happened: Blanchard telling him that he and Marian were no longer a duo, that Marian was his star, and that Eddie’s song-and-dance skills would no longer be needed. He remembered leaving the theater and the emptiness he’d felt as he realized he was not only out of a job but that he was out of doing something he loved. He’d walked around downtown for a while until he’d found that speakeasy, the one he knew would be open in the middle of the afternoon, and he’d put all that completely awful juice into his body until the pain started to ease.

Exactly where the gun had come from, he couldn’t quite remember. There was some business with a man in a threadbare suit at the speakeasy who said he had the easy solution for Eddie’s problems. Eddie had forked over a hundred dollars, and twenty minutes later, he’d gotten the shiny gun out of the deal. The gun, he remembered now, that he hadn’t fired, that now lay on an elevated train platform. It had been a sad waste of money, especially now that Eddie’s source of income had dried up.

He wondered how he would pay for his room at the Knickerbocker, the place he’d been calling home for the last two years. Now that Blanchard had let him go, he knew he couldn’t compete with the upper echelon of performers for space in the bigger productions, and he knew he couldn’t stomach the embarrassment of auditioning for a lesser show. Sure, there were burlesques that might take a song-and-dance man, but Eddie would be competing with beautiful, scantily-clad women for the attention of the audience, and then he’d be back in the same situation. No, that would be unacceptable, too.

For a brief moment as he’d stumbled out of the speakeasy, it had seemed like a good idea to go see his father. Why this was the case, Eddie wasn’t sure; he hadn’t spoken to his father in more than a dozen years, not since the day Eddie had been thrown out of the house. Eddie had felt for years that he had no family, even though his blood relations were right there on the same island. He hadn’t seen them since he’d left, though, and they hadn’t come after him and had never attended his show, to his knowledge. He’d reasoned that if they couldn’t support him doing something he loved, he had no need for them. But then he’d seen the Sixth Avenue El in the distance after he’d stumbled out of the speakeasy and he’d considered taking it downtown and going back home with his tail between his legs and telling his father that of course he was right, that Elijah Cohen had no business dancing on Broadway, and

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