“Betty,” she’d managed to say, giving his fingers a quick shake.
Henry tilted his chin and looked down at her, appraising. “That’s an awfully dull name for such an interesting girl.”
She struggled to keep her eyes open.
“Do you need a place to stay?” Henry had asked quietly.
Theta’s eyes snapped open. She palmed the knife. “Try anything funny, fella, and you’ll be sorry.”
“Well, after everything, I would hate to meet my end with a simple butter knife,” Henry said as if he might be saying hello. “I can assure you, Betty, I’m a gentleman, and a man of my word.”
Theta was so tired. It was as if the hunger had been the plug holding back her emotions. Now it had been removed, and she sat weeping softly in her seat.
“It’s copacetic, darlin’. Come on.” Henry told her later that he’d never seen anyone so beautiful cry so ugly.
Theta followed Henry home to his one-room apartment with the leaky roof on St. Mark’s Place, where he offered her a pillow and a blanket. While she cradled them both to her middle, still distrustful, he dragged an old cane chair to a battered piano beside an airshaft window. He hummed softly and made notes on those same sheets of paper filled with scratchings and blots of ink. “You’re welcome to stay,” he said without looking up. “There’s no cleaning lady. The pipes leak. The bathroom down the hall is shared with ten very eccentric neighbors. It’s cold in the winter and hot as the devil in summer. All in all, it’s not much better than the street. But you’re welcome all the same.”
She figured he’d want something in exchange, but he never tried a thing. Theta slept through the night and well into the next day. When she woke, she found a doughnut on a chipped plate, and beside that, a wobbly daisy stuck into an empty milk bottle, which propped up a note:
Hope you slept well. I’d ask you not to steal anything, but there’s nothing to steal. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.
Sincerely, Henry DuBois IV
She had nowhere else to go, so she ate the doughnut and washed the plate. Then she washed the other dishes and put them away. Henry came home to a room so clean he had to leave and come back in to be sure he’d entered the right apartment. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Snow White, would it?” he asked wryly. They shared a bowl of noodles from a shop downstairs and talked until very late.
It was Henry who had convinced her to bob her hair. Arm in arm, they’d walked to the barbershop on Bleecker Street, Theta dressed in Henry’s clothes. She sat perfectly still, eyes forward, as the shears bit through her thick ringlets. Hair fell in feathery piles around the barber’s chair. Theta felt her head growing lighter, as if she were being shorn of the weight of memory, the ghosts of her past. When the barber swiveled the chair around so she faced the mirror, Theta’s mouth opened in an astonished O. Gently, she petted the smooth skin of her neck, reveling in the shock of stubble high up her nape, where her shingle cut formed a provocative V. In the mirror, she caught sight of Henry biting his lip.
“What are you gawking at, Piano Man? You never seen a flapper before?” she said with a wink.
“You are the most beautiful girl on this street,” Henry said, and Theta waited for him to kiss her. When he didn’t, she felt a strange mix of disappointment and relief.
They’d celebrated with champagne at a bohemian nightclub in Greenwich Village off MacDougal Street where, away from judging eyes, beautiful boys danced elegantly together, chest to chest, holding one another up, exchanging longing looks across tables decorated with decorative men. Theta had heard that such places existed, and she’d known men who favored other men—“sissies,” Mrs. Bowers called them with a sneer, and Theta could feel the shame of the word coil around her heart—but she’d never actually been to such a nightclub. She was afraid she wouldn’t be welcome there, but she found that she was.
In the dark of the club, Henry leaned back in his chair and watched the scene, his gaze coming to rest again and again on a handsome, dark-haired young man who looked back shyly from time to time. In that moment, Theta understood at last. “I’m on the trolley, kiddo,” she’d said. Then, with a performer’s flair, she’d sauntered over to the dark-haired young man, pulled up a chair, and said, “My pal, Henry, is going to be the next George Gershwin. You should ask him to dance before he gets rich and famous.”
Much later, they all sat in a heap on a velvet sofa, Theta on one side of Henry, the handsome boy on the other, along with two boys from a college in New Jersey and a sailor originally from Kentucky, laughing and drinking, singing songs and trying on one another’s ties. They tried to come up with a new name for Theta, who, Henry announced, simply was not a Betty. They’d run through all sorts of names, from the glamorous—Gloria, Hedwig, Natalia, Carlotta—to the silly—Mah Jong, Merry Christmas, Ruby Valentino, Mary Pickaxe.
