The Shining Girls A Novel

‘Or you have concerned patrons willing to sponsor your convalescence, like our radium girl.’ The doctor winks. ‘We can put you in a cast, send you off with a crutch. But a ruptured tendon isn’t going to heal itself. You should stay off your feet for at least six weeks. I can recommend a shoe-maker who specializes in medical footwear to raise the heel, which will help it along some.’

‘How am I supposed to do that? I gotta work.’ Harper is pissed at the whine that creeps into his voice.

‘We’re all facing financial difficulties, Mr Harper. Just ask the hospital administrators. I suggest you do what you can.’ He adds, wistfully, ‘I don’t suppose you have syphilis, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Pity. There’s a study starting in Alabama that would have paid for all your medical care if you did. Although you’d have to be a Negro.’

‘I’m not that, either.’

‘Too bad.’ The doctor shrugs.

‘Will I be able to walk?’

‘Oh yes,’ the doctor says. ‘But I wouldn’t count on being able to audition for Mr Gershwin.’

Harper hobbles out of the hospital, his ribs bound, his foot in a cast, his blood full of morphine. He reaches into his pocket to feel how much money he has left. Two dollars and change. But then his fingers brush the jagged teeth of the key and something opens in his head like a receiver. Maybe it’s the drugs. Or maybe it was always waiting for him.

He never noticed before that the streetlights hum, a low frequency that burrows in behind his eyeballs. And even though it is afternoon and the lights are off, they seem to flare as he steps under them. The hum skips ahead to the next light, as if beckoning him. This way. And he’d swear he can hear a crackling music, a faraway voice calling to him like a radio that needs to be tuned in. He follows the path of the humming streetlights, going as fast as he can manage, but the crutch is unwieldy.

He turns down State and it leads him through the West Loop into the canyons of Madison Street, with skyscrapers looming forty stories high on either side. He passes through Skid Row, where two dollars might buy him a bed for a while, but the humming and the lights lead him on, into the Black Belt where the shabby jazz joints and cafés give way to cheap houses stacked on top of each other, with ragged children playing on the street and old men with hand-rolled cigarettes sitting on the steps, watching him balefully.

The street narrows and the buildings crowd in on one another, casting chill shadows over the sidewalk. A woman laughs from one of the upstairs apartments, the sound abrupt and ugly. There are signs everywhere he looks. Broken windows in the tenements, handwritten notices in the empty shop windows below: ‘Closed for business’, ‘Closed until further notice’, and once, just ‘Sorry’.

A briny clamminess comes in from the lake on the wind that cuts through the bleak afternoon and under his coat. As he gets deeper into the warehouse district, the people thin out, and then vanish altogether, and in their absence, the music swells, sweet and plaintive. And now he can make out the tune. ‘Somebody from Somewhere’. And the voice whispers, urgently, Keep on, keep on, Harper Curtis.

The music carries him over the railroad tracks, deep into the West Side and up the stairs of a worker’s lodging house, indistinguishable from the other wooden tenements in the row, shouldering in on each other, with peeling paint and boarded-up bay windows and a notice that reads ‘Condemned by the City of Chicago’ pasted up on the planks that have been nailed across the front doors in Xs. Make your mark for President Hoover right here, you hopeful men. The music is coming from behind the door of 1818. An invitation.

He reaches under the crossed planks and tries the door, but it’s locked. Harper stands on the step, full of the sense of a terrible inevitability. The street is utterly abandoned. The other houses are boarded up or their curtains are drawn tight. He can hear traffic a block over, a hawker selling peanuts. ‘Get ’em hot! Eat ’em on the trot!’, but it sounds dulled, as if coming through blankets wrapped around his head. Whereas the music is a sharp splinter that drives right through his skull: The key.

He sticks his hand in the pocket of the coat, suddenly terrified that he has lost it. He is relieved to find that it is still there. Bronze; printed with the mark Yale & Towne. The lock on the door matches up. Trembling, he slides it home. It catches.

The door swings open into darkness, and for a long, terrible moment, he stands paralyzed by possibilities. And then he ducks under the boards, negotiating his crutch, awkwardly, through the gap, and into the House.

Kirby

9 SEPTEMBER 1980