Jimmy and Fay by Michael Mayo

she was one of the few women I’ve ever known that I could honestly say, “I towered over her.”
    Anyhow, she had been working as a seamstress at a dress factory when her foreman took a shine to her and asked her out. The first time they were alone together, he made a pass and she said no. Then he knocked her out and he knocked her up, and when she told him about it, the bastard fired her.
    She dug up the money to take care of her immediate problem but had a hard time finding another job, and she spent about a year living hand to mouth in a ten-dollar-a-month mouse hole down on Second Avenue. I guess it was worse for more people in the Depression, but Pearl’s year of being broke came at a time when it seemed to her like everybody else was flush with cash and that made it damned hard to take.
    Now, the night she told me most of this was several years later. We had been drinking and she probably said more than she meant to. I listened a lot.
    For her, the bad times ended in January, 1920, when a friend took her to meet a dress manufacturer who lived up on Riverside Drive. She said the place where he lived with his family was maybe the nicest apartment she’d ever seen. He didn’t have any work for her, but while she was visiting his place, she met one of his acquaintances, Kitty Robinson, a tall, blue-eyed blonde about Pearl’s age. Kitty was an actress and singer who’d just arrived in town from Chicago and had already landed a part in a new Broadway revue that was about to start rehearsals.
    Kitty and Pearl hit it off, and before long, she was inviting Pearl over to her place, which was every bit as high-toned as the dress manufacturer’s, nine rooms done to the nines. Better yet, Kitty palled around with all the beautiful, witty show business people. The two girls got along so well that Kitty invited Pearl to move in and keep her company until her mother arrived from Chicago in a few months. Pearl took her up on it and thought it was all pretty terrific until she got to know Kitty better.
    That’s when she found out that her friend liked to relax at “hop parties,” where she partook of a pill or two of opium in a nice warm pipe. At first, Pearl thought it was just something that Kitty did from time to time, and it would certainly stop when Kitty’s mother arrived. I don’t know if she really believed that or not, but she learned different.
    Kitty’s mother showed up with a young lounge lizard gigolo in tow. She called him “Dad,” and both of them dove right into the hop party whirl. Pearl tagged along.
    One of their favorite places was another vast Upper West Side spread where an older woman named Melissa Louise lived. Melissa Louise was the mistress of a Wall Street financier, and she was so well heeled that she made the rest of them look like bums. Besides the apartment, she had a car, a chauffeur, a two-­hundred-dollar-a-month allowance, and, she claimed, a hundred-­thousand-dollar trust fund that was hers whenever she decided that she wanted to leave.
    At Melissa Louise’s place, they’d close the transoms and put damp towels under the doors of the drawing room. That’s where the lady of the house would stretch out on a big fur rug while her guests reclined on the divans that surrounded her, and they’d all hit the pipe. All but Pearl.
    Both Kitty and Melissa Louise warned her against the stuff, and so she never indulged. Though Pearl never said so, I got the idea that it wasn’t so much her welfare and problems with the law that led them to keep her away from the pipe. They needed somebody who was straight to look after them. That’s how Pearl and I met.
    You see, at the same time she was moving into the world of the upper crust, I was living in a building in Hell’s Kitchen with Mother Moon. Oh Boy Oliver lived there too. Now, Mother Moon was either my aunt or my grandmother, we were never sure which exactly. Before